Maharajas of Scale is a Podcast focused on Indian Entrepreneurs. It is hosted by Krishna Jonnakadla, Co-founder of Mango Mobile TV and Flit. Over the years, India has been home to many stellar startups. These startups have scaled, have travelled the world and created a pathway for others to follow. We, at Maharajas of Scale, celebrate the creative mind. We will take you on a journey to understand, to dissect and to learn from the masters who have scaled it Big.
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S2 E11 Jag Chima of iPlix: Hitting Business Hatrick
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Jag Chima is a second-generation businessman of a different kind. He has built multiple businesses, from mobile retailing to real estate to celebrity fitness companies. The interesting thing about each of these companies is that he has timed them well and made a success out of them Jag has scaled them to meaningful heights within the confines of th…
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Sharmin Ali Season 2 Episode 10 : Bringing Emotion and Empathy into content
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Emotion is at the heart of everything that we do as humans. As the adage goes and what we are witnessing with modern day Twitter wars, the pen is mightier than the sword. However, using the right words to evoke the right emotions seems more like an art than science. Can technology help us write as well as Kalidasa or the Bard? This is the place whe…
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S2 E9: Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame is back with a bang!
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Mention the name Sabeer Bhatia and it evokes memories of startups, the excitement and frenzy of the dot-com era and more. Sabeer Bhatia is a well known name for pre-millenial Indians who all grew up on the dreams of having a startup and exit like Sabeer did with Hotmail. Sabeer and his co-founder arguably kicked off the dot-com boom. The $400+ Mill…
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S2 E8: Gaurav Mathur of SafeGold : Channeling India's Gold Addiction
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Gaurav Mathur had a life similar to Hrithik Roshan's life in the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. He was on the trading floor of the London Stock Exchange and thought his life was set. He could not believe that someone like him who roamed around in chappals (Indian for flip flops) was doing that kind of work, rubbing shoulders with amazing people an…
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Winning with a D2C Brand : Pilgrim Cosmetics' Anurag Kedia: Season 2 Episode 7
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What does it take to build a D2C brand? How can we become successful at it? We live in the age of individual and local brands. Not a day passes without us discovering a brand in cosmetics or food or another consumer product introduced to us. The advances made by industries make it possible for anyone to launch brands and products with a bit of work…
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S2E6 - Bringing health insurance access to millions at scale affordably- Plum's Abhishek Poddar
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Insurance is a very interesting business. Nobody thinks they need one until they face a certain situation. For a country with chronic illnesses and perennial under penetration of healthcare facilities, systemic solutions have not necessarily kept pace with the needs of the people. People in MSMEs or in the unorganized sector don't have access, let …
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LoanTap's Satyam Kumar enjoyed a cushy life as a senior banking executive. By the mid-2010s, he experienced a glass ceiling and felt that he had plateaued. In addition, the growing Indian vocal and connected millennials, the black swan event of demonetization, and the startup wave pushed the market in a new direction. Users who wanted better produc…
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Anshoo Sharma joined Bain Consulting in Boston and cut his teeth in the world of management consulting. Anshoo moved to India when Bain opened an office and soon moved to the emerging world of Venture Capital. After watching startups rise and fall, he was itching to start one himself. He teamed up with one of his buddies and soon they launched Magi…
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S2 E3 : Jumbotail's Karthik Venkateswaran
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Jumbotail's Karthik Venkateswaran is an interesting man. He came from a middle class background and rose to the rank of a major in the Indian Army. After a decade of serving in the army, his heart bled for something else. That something else was a larger goal - a goal of makings people's lives better. Making people's lives better is a common thread…
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S2 E2: Viraj Bahl of Veeba Foods and Sauces
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Viraj Bahl of Veeba sauces is an interesting man. Upon graduation, his father told him that he would have to earn his way into a life of prosperity. His father told him that he would have to earn outside the family business. He would have to establish a basic lifestyle before participating in the family business. Once he established a basic lifesty…
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Welcome to Season 2. After a rocking Season 1, we are back yet again with amazing speakers. In this Episode 1 of Season 2, we feature Amit Gupta of Yulu Bikes. Remember those cute small little bikes that we see in the central business districts of cities such as Bangalore, that's Yulu for you. Amit has seen a startup or two in his life. Amit was a …
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Ep.50: Anupendra Sharma of SLP - Enabling thousands of entrepreneurs across the globe scale their ventures from the shadows
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Our Season Finale - Grand 50th Episode features Anupendra Sharma of the Startup Leadership Program. Today, Startup Leadership Program has grown to enable 4000 entrepreneurs who have raised $3.5 Billion in funding for 2000 ventures spread across 28 cities in 14 countries. Around the year 2006, two different types of people embarked on creating an or…
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Episode 49: Knorish's Kinner Sachdev - Helping 1000s of Content Creators Launch and Scale Academies
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Kinner is an unlikely entrepreneur from the likes of it. With a master’s in molecular biology, he jumped into management consulting. Along the way, he discovered that one of the challenges that enterprises and companies grappled with was making knowledge and learning available to their employees and team members. In the process of helping companies…
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Episode 48: An IITian Who Solved A Common Everyday Problem: Signing Documents Easy And Hassle Free: Story Of Sunil Patro Of SignEasy
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While on a vacation in Mexico, Sunil Patro, an IIT grad and a software engineer at Microsoft, got a call informing him about a job that he had been offered. All he needed to do was sign the acceptance letter and send it back. Simple right? Well not so much. It was like as if he was like stuck in a government office! The struggle in finding a printe…
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Episode 47 - Millions of Jobs thru Entrepreneurship Education - Monica Mehta of The Wadhwani Foundation
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Every year, Monica watches about 10,000 startups go thru the motions, highs and lows. She watches it from close quarters and gets to see varied practices from across the globe. She sees myths being broken and new models formed. She heads up the Wadhwani Foundation's NEN Program that focuses on teaching entrepreneurship to students. Monica is an ent…
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Episode 46: The Art Of Scaling With Creativity-How Issac Wesley Has Built And Scaled Inkmonk
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From dreaming of being an engineer to then being an entrepreneur, the story of Issac Wesley from Inkmonk is truly remarkable. Low scores in mathematics led this young tech enthusiast to take up a design course rather than engineering. Yet, it was Issac's father, an artist first and a printing guy second, who inspired him to start Inkmonk and the re…
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Episode 45: Woovly and a Million Bucketlists - How Neha Suyal scaled a bucketlist platform to a million
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An engineer who had the desire to build something after attending the Stanford Insight Programme on entrepreneurship and leadership and here, she also met her Co-Founder Venkat, that is Neha Suyal for you. Her humble beginnings and what she has built, go hand in hand. Checking off entrepreneurship from her own bucketlist despite her simple backgrou…
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Episode 44: Head winds and Tail Winds founding and Scaling OnSurity
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Yogesh and Kulin can be called the Jai-Veeru of the Insurtech start-up space. The two met at ACKO, a private sector general insurance company. And since then, the two have a strong entrepreneurial bond which led them to start Onsurity in early 2020, with the primary goal being enable to allow SME’s to provide their employees with proper healthcare …
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Episode 43: From Trading To Scaling An EdTech Platform To Millions Of Users-Prateek Singh's Journey To Building LearnApp
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Born in Abu Dhabi, then moving to Singapore, then to Malaysia and then back to India, Prateek Singh spent most of his childhood travelling. Prateek credits his dad for getting him into trading. This trading experience led him to write a blog called Market Scientists. Here he taught people how to trade. Post Market Scientists came an investing and s…
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Episode 42: From an HR Executive to Founder of a Multi Million $ Pet Care Company
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Many pet parents have faced trouble finding the right product for their beloved pet, for example one might not be able to find a comfortable blanket, bed, toys etc for their pets, as each of them are very different from each other. One such pet parent is Rashi Narang who, not only solved this problem for her own pet only but found Heads Up For Tail…
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Episode 41: How to succeed again and again in a world of Failure - GoIbibo's Ashish Kashyap and Amrita Sirohia of IndWealth
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The World of Start-ups is fraught with failure. It is estimated that only 1% of Start-ups succeed which means millions of start-ups fail. Yet, Ashish Kashyap's Story is an interesting one. From being Google India's First Country Head to Growing and Selling GoIbibo for a whopping $2 Billion, making it India's 2nd largest startup exit, Ashish's resum…
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Episode 40: From being Jobless to building a Rs.500 Crore Revenues Brand - How Ankit Garg is building Wakefit
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An IIT Rourkee Graduate, Ankit Garg found initial funding success with a product he created out of his laboratory. But having funding and a good product did not mean success. He realized that managing financial side of the startup had a role to play. He soon shut shop and was out of a job. This meant sleepless nights and sleep walking. Today, Ankit…
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Episode 39: How Ajay Kumar is Scaling TheHouseMonk in India's messy real estate Industry
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Ajay was a newly mined graduate at MuSigma, one of India's premier Unicorns in the data analytics space. On a fine day, while house hunting, he is bewildered by the commission the broker makes for the little value that he added. Unlike most renters, he feels that he is getting compensated disproportinately compared to the value he added. He takes a…
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Episode 38: Ashish Singhal of CoinSwitch - From Amazon Dream Team to Making Crypto Buying super simple
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Ashish Singhal is a lifelong problem solver. Most people are consider working for a high powered Jeff Bezos team as their end "dream scenario". Not Ashish. Amazon was just his starting point. Having cut his teeth with Bezos Teams at Amazon, he went on to found Urban Tailor and eventually CoinSwitch with a vision to make Crypto Buying as simple as b…
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Episode 37: Raghu Bharat of CrewScale - Doing the impossible of scaling an elite FREELANCER platform
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Raghu was a network engineer working for a telecommunications networking firm. Network engineering can be exciting and yet boring at the same time depending upon which part of the industry you worked in. It was in this boring industry that Raghu had an epiphany to start a consumer oriented business and thus the business of home improvement was born…
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Episode 36: Scaling in the Graveyard of Event Based Startups
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Some professions and roles evoke a feeling of exoticness in us. One such profession is that of a Marine Biologist. Aman was fascinated by it and became a Marine Engineer and even worked for the Merchant Navy but stagnated. He broke out and tried his hand at selling T-Shirts which kind of worked out but didn't scale. He tried his hand at propelling …
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Episode 35: The Giant Leap from Slums to a Multi Million $ SAAS Business
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Amit Mishra comes from the town of Amravathi in Maharashtra. Originally from a family of teachers, Amit grew up in the Slums of Amravati in whose schools generations of his ancestors as well as his parents taught. Forever taunted by his mother to do something vocational, Amit decides that he would do something that would outstrip everyone around hi…
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Episode 34: Engaging Users with Billions of Notifications - Vivek Khandelwal of iZooto
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While still in College, Vivek Khandelwal embarked on a journey of discovery with Jagriti a train journey unlike any other that takes young minds to see the best of entrepreneurship and innovation across India. This inspired him to become a creator and an entrepreneur. He shares how he and his co-founders have built a multi million $ SAAS business w…
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Episode 33_Scaling a Content Tech Startup_Rahul Prasad of Bobble.AI
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Rahul Prasad joined Brother Ankit and built Bobble, a keyboard company that helps Indian users express themselves in Indic languages using their key board. Bobble today has millions of users and thru their recent partnership with Xiaomi, will be loaded onto 30 Million Xiaomi devices but that is not how it all began. Rahul and Ankit want to make it …
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Episode 32: Scaling a News Startup in India in the Age of Sensationalism: Anuradha Kedia of The Better India
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If you are an entrepreneur wanting to make a difference, the question is - what are the challenges in scaling a News Startup in India in the age of Sensationalism. Anu and Dhimanth began The Better India as a blog, they have stayed true to their roots of bringing a balanced perspective and news about what is right about India. More than a decade la…
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Episode 31: Working with Ronnie Screwvala and Scaling Healthcare :Abhishek Shah of Wellthy Therapeutics
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Abhishek Shah of Wellthy had an interesting upbringing. He was an engineer and had a scientific bent of mind. Having parents who were successful entrepreneurs, he had seen them run their ventures but existing care not catching up with their lifestyles. Working with Ronnie Screwvala and investing in startups gave him an outside in perspective on ven…
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Episode 30: Jharkand to Japan and Entrepreneurship: Sanjeev Barnwal of Meesho
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Sanjeev Barnwal can come across our typical IIT Grad. Coming from the small town Jharkand where the dream is to crack IIT, he did not just that but went on to work for Sony in Japan. But a chance discussion with his old buddy led him to pursue entrepreneurship and found Meesho. And he has never looked back. Listen to this small town boy who is goin…
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Ep.29: From Boy Next door to failed Restaurateur to successful IOT Startup : The Unlikely Story of Gotama Gowda of Openapp
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Gotama is a very unlikely entrepreneur. His father's career inspired him to tread a different path - one of Journalism, only to be later smitten by entrepreneurship early on. Gotama had a very different start. He tried his hand at a Quick Service Restaurants and a bakery. One failed to launch and the other succeeded but with a series of twists and …
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Episode 28: PC Mushtafa of ID Fresh : Being unable to have 3 meals a day to breakfast to millions
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PC Mustafa or PC as he prefers to be called had to walk miles to go to school. At a certain point, he considered dropping out as he was a below average student. He continued this streak of being a below average student into adulthood. Smitten by the IIM Campus in Bangalore and being unable to summon the courage to request the security guard to let …
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Ep. 27: Akshay of Leverage Edu: Giving Flight to Thousands of student's dreams of Studying Abroad
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Akshay Chaturvedi's entrepreneurial journey is a story of humility and persistence. An entrepreneur at heart, Akshay is excited about the impact a startup can have. He begins a venture putting students and mentors together. A few thousand downloads and a few months later, he realizes that he needs something much bigger. Something that will bring in…
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Ep.26: Deep Bajaj of PeeBuddy: Toilet - A Love Story - Of a different kind
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Toilet - A Love story - but of a different kind. In the movie Toilet - Ek Prem Katha, Akshay Kumar builds a toilet for his wife who refuses to live with him because his home lacks a toilet. Deep Bajaj went a step further and helped millions of women. Deep realised on a road trip with pregnant wife the complications women face with personal hygiene …
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Ep.25: Nischal Shetty of Wazirx: How we used a simple formula called ETC to scale two startups to millions of users
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An inventive young entrepreneur breaking the conventional myths of start-ups with his zealous attitude. On a journey to finding solutions and emerging trends, Nischal self-taught organic growth hack and founded start-ups that are today lashing definitions in the ecosystem. A passionate coder, realised his IT corporate job did not let him understand…
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Ep.24: Shrijay Sheth of Legalwiz: An Entrepreneur who helps entrepreneurs avoid heavy lifting on legal matters
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Shrijay Seth came from a reputed business family that was into the business of offset printing for generations. He followed the trodden family path of acquiring a management degree from the US. However, working in the US for Legalzoom and his own inner entrepreneurial spirit prompted him to jump headlong into entrepreneurship. Most of us work at a …
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Ep.23: Out-Innovating Silicon Valley: Scale Stories from Delhi to Detroit
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Alex Lazarow comes from the small city of Winnipeg in Canada. Coming from this small town, having a first hand view of m-pesa's growth and working in Venture Capital with the likes of Omdiyar network gave him a perspective about startup playbooks. The strategies and tactics and playbooks that entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley employed fascinated…
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Ep. 22: Anindita of YogaBars - Delivering Healthy Breakfast at Scale to millions
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Anindita is a pragmatic entrepreneur. She loves to trek and travel and it was during her jaunt in the US that she thought about delivering Tasty and Healthy Breakfast options to Indians. When she looked around, she realized that there were hardly any Tasty and Healthy eating choices and she decided to jump head long into entrepreneurship along with…
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Ep. 21: Prasanna of Upekkha - SAAS: Startup Success as a Service
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Is one exit of $17 Billion (Flipkart) good or 300 exits of $50 Million good? In case you are wondering if this is a trick question, the answer is no. If you think it's the one $17 Billion exit, you're wrong! We think that it should be both. We need both . Now, let us ask a different question. What do you think about SaaS? If you thought SaaS is bor…
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Ep. 20: Sonal Verma of GlowRoad - From Accidental Entrepreneurship to Scaling Twice in different domains.
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Dr. Sonal Verma, a Medical Doctor by profession found herself become an entrepreneur, courtesy of her marriage with Kunal. She channeled her medical background and her analytical ability into building and scaling their first successful venture - Healthcare Magic which was acquired by a US based Health Insurance company - Ebix. Back on the success o…
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Ep. 19: Varun Sheth of Ketto - The Boy Who Harnessed The Internet to solve people's problems
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Varun Sheth had a normal childhood. Growing up in Mumbai, he spent his younger years as any boy about town would. When he grew up, he worked in investment banking, the hallowed career option for many. Yet, he felt a hollowness. He saw the internet and e-commerce grow in India exponentially and decided that this would apply to crowd funding as well.…
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Ep. 18: Jimit Bagadia of Social Pilot - Making the scary switch from IT services to Product and Scaling in Ahmedabad
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There are dreamers, there are doers and then there are some who are dreamers who are also doers. Jimit Bagadiya of Social Pilot falls into the third category. Jimit had built a fairly successful IT services business which involved developing and maintaining programs, platforms, products and tools for Clients. Yet, he was hankering for more. Sooner …
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Ep. 17 - Meghna of Indiqube - Starting from a small town in Rajasthan to Scaling IndiQube
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Meghna Agarwal graduated as a Company Secretary and a CFA around the same time 9/11 happened. It was not a great time for jobs or starting up. Yet, coming from a business family, she dug into her entrepreneurial instincts and teamed up with her soon-to-be husband Rishi. Together, they started a company in recruitment that has eventually led them to…
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Ep. 16: Mahesh Murthy of Seedfund - From Copywriting to leading Channel V, India's Best seed Fund and the Space Race
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Mahesh Murthy is a name that most entrepreneurs who started up in India between 2000 and 2012 know. Mahesh went from being a copy writer in Silicon Valley who helped Jeff Bezos with the "Everything store" campaign to leading Channel V and founding Seed Fund, one of India's best known seed funds that funded storied names such as Red Bus, Chumbak, Ca…
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Ep.15: Abhishek Desai of CricHeroes - Unlikely Cricket Success story, Creative mind, Failed attempts, Scored Digitally at Scale
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A creative techie, a fount of ideas goes from IT services to Social Tech Product success. Abhishek Desai filled the gap for cricketers and came up with CricHeroes to keep tabs on their neighbourhood and local league matches. It also became a platform to showcase the talent of young aspirants. He started with "Gully" cricket and Digital Scoring. Cri…
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Ep.14 KNM Rao of Quick Ride : Farming to a Tech Entrepreneur and putting a dent in India's Urban mobility problem
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A farmer by genes became a programmer by accident. K N M Rao observed his colleagues facing problems with their commute and believed carpooling was a way to solve that problem. It is a thought that has perhaps crossed our minds but he went a step ahead and took action. Since several startups had already attempted and failed, Rao not only had a chan…
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Ep.13: Pratik Shah of Specs Makers - Expanding with House Maid's Loan, Scaling with Chakra Management style and loving Retail
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An educated MBA working in corporate world US, accidentally jumped into his family business. Pratik Shah’s determined thinking to get into his family's retail business caused conflict between father and son. He started enjoying retail along with his equity research. Together with his wife, they planned to give SpecsMakers a shot and raised funding …
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Ep.12: Aditi Balbir of V Resorts - Pivoting, Scaling, Creating Impact and Profitability in Local India
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Passion for traveling turned Aditi, a professional, into an entrepreneur. ‘V’ stands for lush green ‘view’ in V resorts. Aditi gave life to small properties. They hired local talent, trained them hospitality and got women to work to make gift packs like squashes and licensed it. Initially they started with 5 resorts and scaled through contacts by w…
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