Actor Radhika Apte made a strong closing statement at her fireside chat at the MAKERSIndia launch in New Delhi on Friday.
“I will take a pledge to at least try to fight my fears and not succumb to it,” the actor said with conviction and courage.
There was no hesitation in her pledge, for it was also a reflection of her experience, of a decade’s journey that began with the Bengali social drama, Antaheen in 2009. Today, she has several critically acclaimed movies in mainstream cinema and digital platforms, especially Netflix to her credit.
Her perfect deliverance aside, it is essentially the characters she has played that has attracted the audience. Recently she essayed diverse and unconventional roles like Sophie in Andhadun and Kalindi in Lust Stories.
Picture courtesy: Facebook fan account Radhika Apte
Radhika, however, is of the opinion that her roles are not as bold as people believe they are. She said, “My roles reflect the women around me, people like you and me... what you see in commercial cinema, I don't find those kind of women anywhere. I don't know who they are and where they exist. So, actually, that is not conventional.”
The actor looks for two things while picking up a role - excitement and challenge.
Freedom of the web
Radhika also spoke about how the rising popularity of OTT platforms has impacted the entertainment industry in a big way.
She said, “When they came, they came with a bang. They had freedom and picked really different content and they were taking on challenges by making content that can compete with the world.”
A major portion of her own work belongs to this platform which is still in a nascent and experimental stage. The actor expressed her hope that it will continue to draw people with its content and capacity.
In fact, her association with Netflix is popular meme content on social media.
Bollywood and women
Radhika also expressed concern for what she calls ‘conveniently progressive’ films. She referred to certain work that embodied a progressive idea but lacks when it comes to portrayal. According to her, these movies keep few elements in the comfort zone, not fully giving a clear picture of women’s capacity or the absolute freedom that they need.
At the end of the day, the essence, she believes, is that stories be told with utter honesty and no compromise.
Last year, when the global MeToo movement caught momentum in Bollywood, Radhika openly advocated for an ‘equal and genderless’ work culture.
She acknowledged that the movement uncovered many stories and did a lot of good. “I knew many who came out but it could have become a much bigger movement and have a big effect. I think there is a lot that can come out and that can be done as well.”
Radhika was also part of Bollywood’s Dark Secret, a 20-minute BBC documentary on the challenges of calling out the big names in Bollywood.
One thing the actor has learnt over time is not to take rejections personally and understand that the film industry is business as much as it is an art. More recently, she was part of Nandita Das’s campaign India’s Got Colour.
Actor Radhika Apte talking to YourStory's Ramarko Sengupta during a fireside chat at MAKERSIndia launch in New Delhi.
Having faced the bias of colourism in the industry, she remarked, “I was only a village girl for the longest time. I could never be an urban girl because I wasn't fair enough. They used to say I look a little bit like Aishwarya Rai but a little dusky.”
She also pointed out that the bias still persist. One doesn’t have to think deep to understand why lead roles don’t go to “dusky” actors.
At the same time, what has changed for her, she said, is letting go of the desperation, and doing things her way without compromising on her beliefs. Hence, to be able to communicate those beliefs and have a certain impact through acting, the actor has gradually come around to accepting the importance of commercial success.
An economics graduate, she said she has retained her love for mathematics and has the option of going back to it anytime.
“It’s a people’s city, where people are the charm. When I came, I didn’t know anybody in the industry or the city itself. Slowly, I started going to theatres, and at the backstsage asking, if I can part of the rehearsals, workshops, then finding out there are these ways, these casting directors and auditions. And now, it’s home."
The HR tech industry has seen a rapid growth in the last five years. The technology in this space continues to evolve, so much so, that employers today are looking for better technological solutions that will address every need of the employees.
Almost every company has an appraisal cycle or salary increment. However, the process is tiresome. For an employee, a performance cycle begins with setting their goals for the year, updating the managers on their achievements and finally closing with an annual appraisal.
(L to R) Sanjeev and Samarth Co-founders , Dockabl
To make the process more user-friendly, two human resources management professionals, Samarth Masson (36), and Sanjeev Grover (37), started a SaaS-based HR tech startup, Dockabl.
Started in 2017, Dockabl is an employee experience platform that enables organisations to do continuous performance management with tech-based tools like structured goals, tracking progress, real-time feedback and peer recognition. The app is built for the benefit of employees, managers, HRs and leaders equally.
Casual chat turning into business idea
A casual conversation about the HR industry between the duo led to the idea of launching Dockabl. Having worked as HR consultants for years, Samarth and Sanjeev agreed that there is one problem they must go after.
“We realised that there is no interconnected system for people to manage their work, performance, reputation, and development in an organisation,” Samarth says.
A serial entrepreneur and the Founder of Cogitohub, , Samarth exited it in early 2017, to start Dockabl. Prior to this, he worked with consulting firms that included Right Management, PwC and Aon Hewitt.
Similarly, Sanjeev worked as a Director at Deloitte and managed business development and client delivery for Human Capital Consulting Practice, where he focused on organisation design and effectiveness, performance management, leadership development, change and transformation, etc.
“We realised that most organisations have their processes either broken or extremely siloed, which means there are different sets of people looking at your performance, engagements, development, rewards, compensation, and recognition, etc. These silos do not have a good interrelation and employees sometimes get destroyed by this experience,” he adds.
A report published by People Matters TechHR said that, while adoption of technology in HR is increasing among the Indian companies, levels of automation in crucial HR functions like identifying high potential individuals, succession planning and strategic workforce management, remains considerably low.
The study also found that, while tech adoption is prevalent and, on the rise, with 70 percent companies having some level of automation in the HR processes, it remained low in critical areas like identifying and incentivising High Potential Employees (HiPos). In HiPo management, only 23 percent of Indian companies have automated more than half the HR functions.
While digging up the market, the duo realised that there is no tech-based market solution or enterprise resource planning (ERPs), that can solve the issue.
“There were mostly glorified workflows, none catering to overall employee experience. Managing performances, recognition and career progression is the role of team leaders and managers. This must be done in the flow of work. It’s currently done ceremonially by HR,” he adds.
“Organisations today are seeking a point solution which can deliver continuous performance management, on-going feedback and recognition for the employees. They are desperately wanting to move away from legacy tools that bog them down. These end-to-end tools suffer from complex and inflexible processes, which often fail to translate the actual processes that are defined by the organisational modus operandi and culture,” Samarth continues.
The duo raised a seed capital of $160k from friends and family, established the product roadmap, created tech architecture and coded the first modules, to start Dockabl.
App for all
Speaking about the offering, Samarth says, . “For the employees, we are an easy-to-use platform that manages the daily work, development plans and conversations around performance. For managers, we are a handy app that manages team productivity and motivation. And, for HR and leadership, we provide a digital interface to the key people practices, which not only helps deliver but, also gives back insights on the process and people.”
“Dockabl enables users to track their progress on a real time basis. It also enables peers to recognise each other for the good work done. Dockabl also ensures that all reviews, ranging from quick pulse surveys to monthly catch-ups and even annual appraisals, can be done with ease,” he adds.
Growth story
Initially in 2016, the Delhi-based startup took time to get its product fit for the market. Once they got it correct, in 2017, the founders never looked back.
The startup runs on a subscription-based business model with a per user per month fee structure. “It ensures repeat revenue year-on-year,” Samarth says.
From one client in March 2018 to currently serving 25 clients, that includes Flipkart, Becton Dickinson, Tata Realty, Clix Capital among others, the company’s monthly run-rate is at $14.4K.
“We have a projected ARR of $0.5 million for FY20,” Samarth says. Dockabl, which is yet to turn profitable, is expecting to close revenue of $9.41 million for FY21.
Future Plans
Currently, Dockabl is working to enhance its platform for a global market. It is planning to launch Dockabl 2.0 early next year, for India and the US markets.
“We will also be enhancing the platform by including machine learning and AI capabilities. In the latter half of 2020, we will be building a data analytics engine and enter the south-east Asia and Middle-East markets,” Samarth says.
The startup is also developing a plug & play version of Dockabl, which will be available off-the shelf for employees and managers, to indulge in and enhance their productivity.
The company has raised a total of $1.26 million in funding till date from various sources. It is now exploring Series-A funding round in the next six months to build Dockabl 2.0 and Dockabl Plug & Play.
When Delhi startup Yaantra set up shop in 2013, its three co-founders Jayant Jha, Ankit Saraf, and Anmol Gupta were barely into their mid-20s (23, 24, and 25 years respectively). Six years since inception, the trio has managed to convert their mobile repair, refurbishing, and reselling services into a Rs 200 crore business.
A business that started with the co-founders putting in Rs 5 lakh each, turned profitable in six months and has seen 240 percent growth (compound annual growth rate) in the last six years, having raised over $12 million till date.
So, how did these young men script this impressive growth story?
Jayant, the youngest of the co-founders who turns 30 years old this November, says, “Most companies were into ecommerce when we started. The reason why people shop online is the discount; that is a large driver. We decided that we are a services company and offering discounts is something we will not do.”
Instead, the company decided to focus on targeting a niche segment that would be ready to pay a premium for services. Thus Yaantra started with a plain vanilla repair service model for smartphones, where they would pick up, repair, and deliver.
Yaantra Co-founder Jayant Jha
When they started, the minimum delivery fee for Android was Rs 300 and for iPhones, Rs 1,000 . Today, however, thanks to increased volume and economies of scale, that fee has come down to Rs 199 (Android) and Rs 300 (iPhones).
Until 2016-17, the company focused on just repair and service. “After-sales service with most smartphones companies was messed up at that time. We, on the other hand, guaranteed you the time. If you break your screen, our guy will fix it there and then; we would be at your doorstep within two hours. On-site repairs would be done in 30-40 minutes, and, in case of factory repairs, the job would be completed in 2-3 days,” Jayant says.
Convenience, guaranteed data security, and post-repair warranty were part of the company’s pitch. Affordability was the other hook, he adds.
“If the PCB (printed circuit board) has a problem, the company will change the entire circuit board for Rs 10,000. But we have the ability to repair it for Rs 2,000,” Jayant points out.
Yaantra’s service centre in Delhi’s Kirti Nagar is powered by a technical team that is adept at rebuilding circuits, changing chips, and high-end engineering.
When the company extended its business by selling refurbished phones in 2016-17, it was a natural progression. Starting to sell refurbished phones was “plug and play,'” Jayant says.
Today, this part of the business is the major contributor to the company’s revenues, contributing as much as 80 percent. While margins are higher in the servicing and repair business, the ticket size and volumes in selling refurbished phones are much more in comparison.
“Nobody did the leg work of creating quality in the used products market. We don’t claim to be the cheapest in the market but our quality is definitely way higher,” Jayant says.
About 80 percent of the company’s sales happen through its offline retail network. The rest of the sales pie comprises yaantra.com, Amazon, and customers who come in for repair and end up buying.
Yaantra claims to be the leader in the refurbished smartphones market. It works with 35,000 retailers across 600 towns and cities in India.
Speaking of the experience of buying a phone from Yaantra, Jayant says, “The consumer gets the experience of buying a new phone when they open the packaging. And it comes with a 12-month warranty card, where we manage the after-sales.”
A Yaantra certified refurbished phone
One of company’s differentiators is the fact that it offers a warranty and after-sales service, something that is rare in the used smartphone market.
The refurbished smartphone market in India is pegged at around $7 billion and expected to grow to $10-12 billion by 2022.
Commenting on competition from the likes of PreLoved Device, a recent entrant in the refurbished smartphone market, Jayant says, “It is a good thing if multiple people are doing it. It means there is big consumer interest.”
He is, nevertheless, clear that Yaantra has an edge over the others, since it has its own refurbishing and after-sales centre. The company processes (including repairing and selling) nearly 65,000 smartphones daily, and has served 1.6 million customers.
Yaantra also has a platform called Phone Cash, which is available on both Android’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store, where customers can sell or upgrade their smartphones. The platform also offers real-time diagnosis of phones and quotes a price to the customer.
Yaantra aims to start selling new phones in the next six months through its retail network, utilising the Phone Cash platform for retailers. With a vision to expand its refurbished portfolio, the company is currently doing pilots to sell refurbished Apple watches and Samsung Gear.
It wants to create a connected device ecosystem, bringing on its platform the likes of Google Home and Amazon Echo devices by the next fiscal year. In the same period, the company also aims to expand its retail network from the current 600 cities to 800.
Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous post here). Share these 45 gems and insights from the week of September 30 – October 6 with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights. See also our compilation of Top 50 Quotes from 2018here.
The good thing with entrepreneurship is that sense of creating something from scratch and that joy of working hard to take it to newer heights. - Shalini Gupta
Problems will come and go, but the journey of creating something of your own and helping your spouse in co-creating it is an immensely gratifying one. - Priyanka Gupta
In our society, where steady income is a benchmark of success, living with uncertainty demands a strong belief in oneself. - Yogita Bhalla
If we stopped worrying about other people’s expectations of us, our lives would be so much more meaningful. - Raga Olga D’silva, ‘Untold Lies’
Keeping your commitments and delivering on time is one single most important difference-maker. - Romil Dhakar, Casa Arte
We have to jump into the competition and prove ourselves every moment. - Taapsee Pannu
To take control of anything, you need an action plan, lest you flit and float through life, and become a bystander to your story. - Apurva Purohit, ‘Lady, You’re the Boss’
Passion is one of the key ingredients to make a good trainer. - Shruthi Jain
Blockchain will ensure that the ecosystem knows how the assets are working. - Sanjay Kuberkar, Schrocken
Intelligent and automated systems will empower businesses to be more efficient in the coming decade. - Ravi Mehta, Steadview Capital
IoT analytics can unearth new revenue avenues, better customer service, cost reduction and also improved competitive advantage. - Dhaval Sarvaiya, Intelivita
This is a truly exciting time for the legal technology sector - we are at the cusp of the legal sector's very own industrial revolution. - Sarvarth Misra, ContractPodAi
Get your basic mathematics and logic right. Then you can apply any engineering language for any given problem statement with experience and practice. - STS Prasad, Freshworks
The spending for cybersecurity in India is less than 10 percent of the overall enterprise spending, a number that is way below the international standards. - Sanjay Sahebrao Katkar, Quick Heal Technologies
We expect to see positive momentum around IPOs in the first half of 2020. - Sandip Khetan, EY India
Indian banking and financial services will be driven to balance credit risk while increasing penetration. - Arun Raghavan, Arali Ventures
Quality and scale will determine success in financial services in the future. - Parth Gandhi, AION Capital
Empowering tens of millions of small businesses to more effectively procure and sell goods is not only a massive business opportunity but will help transform the economy. - Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Capital
The dining scene in India has changed massively. We have evolved from heavily upholstered interiors and Mughlai cuisines to a minimalistic décor and light flavourful cuisines. - Priyanka Gupta, Hops n’ Grains
India’s education market is huge. The engineering and skillset problems are bigger than what most people think and know. - Austen Allred, Lambda School
Veganism as a way of life is deeply rooted in the Indian ethos. - Kangana Ranaut
Equal opportunity at the workplace is still a big challenge in the country. - Aruna Newton, Infosys
If the authorities have not been doing enough, as responsible citizens, we have to shoulder the responsibility and start the repair of these potholes. - Gurbaksh Singh, traffic constable
WhatsApp is the most penetrated social network in small-town India with maximum amount of time spent by a user on this platform. - Divij Goyal, CityMall
Metro startups are mostly concerned about valuation. Non-metro startups, on the other hand, are more about profit. - Saji Gopinath, Kerala Startup Mission
Given that the average person sleeps for a third of their life, the sleep solutions segment has seen little disruption or innovation in India. - Deepak Shahdadpuri, DSG Consumer Partners
It's important to believe in your model in spite of giants and large investors coming in and pumping money. - Hari Menon, Bigbasket
Finance is the most seductive mistress and several startups have been seduced by it. It is like a drug and its addiction destroys the patient. - Sridhar Vembu, Zoho
No diet exists that will work for all weight problems. The underlying reasons vary, as also the approach should. - Deepa Kannan, PFNR
Whether we like it or not, Bollywood influences a lot of people in our country. Hence, they need to represent something that we want our society to be like. - Radhika Apte
The arts bridge cultures; they're good for the economy, and they're good for fostering empathy and decency. - Julie Andrews
Art is not just about exploration or creativity but is meant to serve a purpose. - Vyshali Acharya
Life is not about making money. It is about making a difference to someone, somewhere. - Saurabh Narang, Create4Cause
Either people should recycle plastic in the mountains or take back the plastic waste generated by them. - Deepti Sharma
From deliberate to instinctive, our actions should control our needs and wants, and sustainably work for the good of the environment. - Gomathi Suresh, Gallery Manora
At the end of the day, people who execute well will be the ones to survive. There will be periods of hyper competition. - Mridul Arora, SAIF Partners
Recruit for culture. The culture of the company is what you have to protect through thick and thin. - Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple,Android).
In early 2018, 42-year-old Amit Vyas stumbled upon a very unusual problem in San Jose, South Bay, California, USA.
Every time he went to the doctor, he noticed that the insurance and the payment were handled by the secretary. The secretary would also handle the supplies for the doctor. This observation was the germ for an idea: why not build a technology interface for doctors that would track supplies?
Amit went on to build just such a solution while working in a large tech company. In pitching the software to a couple of doctors in the Bay Area, he was intrigued when he was told that they did not want a software to track inventory, instead, they wanted a platform to track their cash.
It is a well-known fact that every clinic across the world faces the threat of monetary embezzlement, which doctors generally turn a blind eye to. In the US, embezzlement is considered nothing short of fraud as it is the loss of insurance money for the customer, a loss of the doctor's image, and also a loss to the insurance company in paying out.
AIHealth Founder of Amit Vyas
For addressing a global concern
“The scene is sometimes straight out of a movie: individual employees in clinics effortlessly embezzle the money. The question is how do they succeed at doing it and how can it be stopped. It was to address these concerns and solve a huge and common problem for doctors that AIHealth was born in November 2018,” says Amit, a graduate of the University of Mumbai and the business school in Berkeley.
Amit met his co-founder Sailesh Davuluri through a mutual contact in late 2018. Sailesh had worked in the Bay Area for 25 years in a technology corporate, and both of them connected over this need to develop a SaaS product that would address embezzlement.
The entrepreneur briefly explains the process of insurance processing as it unfolds in most clinics and other doctor outfits. After the treatment is completed, the doctor designates their secretary to take the insurance details of the client and then bill the insurance company for the treatment.
Herein lies a common issue: the details of the insurance are with the secretary, who can effectively use the insurance policy number to create fake visits of patients and can then encash all the cheques that reach the clinic.
In most cases, doctors empower their secretaries to collect and deposit cheques on behalf of the clinic. Clinic employees have also been found to write false cheques for supplies by forging the doctor’s signature.
According to a 2017 Hiscox Embezzlement Study, 5.1 percent of all embezzlement cases in the US were in the healthcare industry, with a median loss of $437,106 per incident.
Practices are projected to lose between five and 10 percent of revenue to fraud every year, and 85 percent of perpetrators are first-time offenders. Incidents of embezzlement, on an average, are discovered between eight and 24 months after they are committed. Additionally, 17 percent of thefts go undetected for more than two years.
Due to embezzlement, the US medical practices lose more than $25 billion annually, according to estimates by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). In an MGMA survey of 946 medical practices, 83 percent reported being victims of embezzlement at some point in their operations. On an average, doctors lose $120000-$425000 in a year to embezzlement.
A SaaS solution to stay alert
To address this global issue, AIHealth has been built as a cloud-based software that enables doctors to track all forms of payments. The doctors download the AIHealth app which integrates all the billing software and gives them live updates on how many patients have visited the clinic and how many have used their insurance.
Essentially, the system figures out financial anomalies when the same insurance number is used multiple times. Whenever there is a payment trigger from the insurance company, the software is enabled to alert the doctor that the same insurance number had been charged, say, a year ago and is being triggered again. It thus alerts the doctor to check if the same patient has indeed visited the clinic multiple times.
“This allows the doctor to effectively stop embezzlement. They are able to keep completely informed of daily treatments and payments. This system essentially acts as a check by tracking all forms of payments made by patients and insurance companies," explains Amit.
This has proved to be a big business opportunity across the world. The platform has been successfully pitched to 600 clinics in California. The company was able to reach out to a large number of medical practitioners through Armaghan Onsori, a friend of Amit and a supply channel partner for doctors.
Way forward
Today, AIHealth is focused on reaching dentists and their clinics. “We have a huge market of doctors in the country that we can address. Dentists alone comprise a 200,000 market in the US,” says Sailesh.
AIHealth competes with the likes of EasyClinic, Clinicea, Practo, and Visual Doctor.
The startup did not wish to disclose its revenues and personal investments since it's the first year of its operations. It definitely looks set on the path to success, with two large POCs worth $100K. If successful, these will go to countries and regions, including India.
“We see this business as a major disruptor in the healthcare industry in the US as it is able to pinpoint actual and potential incidences of embezzlement,” says Murali Chirala, CEO of FalconX, which has selected AIHealth for its incubator-cum-accelerator initiative.
Studies have shown that it costs around $11-$15 to enable the complete processing of a single invoice, putting tremendous pressure on the finance department of any organisation.
A Bengaluru and Singapore-based blockchain startup, Param Network aims to address this issue by bringing down this cost by over 60 percent through its technology platform.
Param Network founded by Vaideeswaran Sethuraman has been in a stealth mode for the last two years developing its blockchain-based technology platform focused on the invoice segment and is now confident to take it to the broader market.
While doing a study on digital receipts at Stanford University, Vaideeswaran understood the opportunity of using blockchain technology for a commercial transaction like invoices.
“Large enterprises which manage their invoices do about 90 percent of this work manually. This leads to higher cost for any organisation and the situation turns complex when it has to engage with third party organisations. For example, a large enterprise that gets invoices from 30 different partners or vendors is difficult to manage,” says Vaideeswaran.
Handling complexity
The problem is not just with processing the invoice but obtaining multiple approvals from various departments within the organisation, while also dealing with other organisations outside.
“There is no technology today where three to four companies can collaborate together. We have built a platform based on blockchain technology where one can exchange invoices simultaneously without using the manual scan,” he explains.
Sharing of invoices is just one part of the problem as the larger issue is how to verify the authenticity of the document. In a conventional organisation, any invoice will have to get approvals from various departments like logistics, operations, quality control, etc even as it communicates with the third-party vendor.
The Param founder claims that existing technologies are built for a single workflow process but a blockchain platform allows for heterogenous activity. The startup also spent considerable time over the last two years to build a certain standard in their platform to provide that comfort for everybody that the invoice document shared is genuine and most importantly, the entire transaction is secure.
Multiple benefits
According to Vaideeswaran, Param’s blockchain technology platform brings in multiple advantages: eliminates the use of paper and also allows sharing of invoices electronically on a real time basis with a digital signature. Digital signature is very critical as it enables the entire transaction to be secure while sharing the document.
“Blockchain creates a very secure environment despite being a peer-to-peer technology platform which is quite public,” he says.
It also creates an audit trail, which ensures there is no link broken in the entire process. Vaideeswaran says that today Param’s blockchain platform can bring down the cost of handling the entire process of invoicing to around $3-$4.
Bootstrapped with some angel funding, Param is looking at extending the benefits of blockchain technology from finance to commerce.
Param’s platform also enables easy integration with any technology system already in place within the organisation.
Param customers include an automobile company, a bank, a travel firm, and a BPO organisation. However, it’s not all about cost. The technology can also be used to deliver various kinds of products and services.
“Today, invoice-based financing mechanism is still in its infancy in the country and such a platform can enable banks to have access to data that is trustworthy and secure,” says Vaideeswaran.
It allows banks to decide which invoices are weak or strong and accordingly decide on what they would like to finance.
Business model
Param’s business model is not the typical software as a service (SaaS) system, it’s a little more complicated, according to the founder. Its revenue is largely measured on the traffic that goes into the network.
Given that the technology is still in its early days, Param’s aim is to create more awareness among enterprises on the benefits of using blockchain.
“Typically, the IT team in an organisation does not recognise the problem but the finance setup understands it,” says Vaideeswaran.
As Param looks to garner a greater number of customers in India, it is also looking to expand to the North American and European markets in the near future.
In terms of any direct competition, the founder claims there are no companies with blockchain technology focused on the invoice segment. However, there are startups which provide certain basic automation services for invoices.
The invoice automation market is expected to grow from $1.9 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion by 2024 at a compounded annual growth rate of 11 percent.
Vaideeswaran, a hardcore techie, with experience in leading teams in organisations such as Texas Instruments and AMD, has always been an entrepreneur at heart. Param is his second venture and his first startup Divum Corporate Services, a mobile application development setup, is a little more than a decade old.
Millions across the world are celebrating Navratri, a festival celebrated to mark the triumph of good over evil. Many consider the celebrations as the start of something new. What are you celebrating?
Speaking of starting something new, this week, we explored Lambda School, an online coding bootcamp based out of San Francisco, which is now placing its bets on India. Austen Allred, Founder of Lambda School, says that Indian employers say that the university and college system in the country do a poor job of preparing graduates for the workforce.
Harabaag deploys sanchalaks (village-level entrepreneurs) to collect farmer data on a mobile app.
Mumbai-based Harabaag claims to have captured crop data from nearly 120,000 farmers in two years. The bootstrapped startup is doubling its revenue month-on-month, and looks to expand into the cow belt.
Samara Mahindra started Carer in 2018 with an aim to bring a holistic approach to cancer care. Now, the platform, which has tied up with top hospitals in the country, is aiming to treat other critical conditions.
San Jose and Hyderabad-based startup Schrocken is an enterprise blockchain-powered SaaS platform that helps businesses collaborate with other organisations to enable cross-enterprise transactions in a secure manner.
Aditi Bhosale Walunj and Chetan Walunj, Co-Founders of Repos Energy
Repos Energy is fuelling door-to-door delivery of diesel, thereby tackling dead mileage, spillage, pilferage, and adulteration. Backed by Ratan Tata, it’s stepping on the gas to target over 65 percent of India’s daily diesel consumption.
The world of GST, taxes, and accounting may seem arduous and complicated, but Hyderabad-based EZTax is a SaaS-based platform that is making it easier to navigate for startups and businesses.
Despite the presence of food delivery startups like Swiggy and Zomato, food delivery app Potafo is winning the game in this city. Started in 2017, it has tied up with Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association to have the best restaurants in Kozhikode as its exclusive partners.
Delhi-based Wobot is an AI-powered computer vision SaaS that helps hospitality, food, retail, and manufacturing businesses monitor operations. The startup currently has 2,000 installations, and is looking to scale its subscription model.
To mark the 69th birthday of Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently, his eponymous app got a makeover. The PM's official Twitter handle declared that the upgraded app is much "faster and sleeker" and "enables easier access to exclusive content".
The revamped NaMo app has introduced a slew of new features that will offer an "immersive experience" to users. The app is available in English and 12 Indian languages, including Hindi and Urdu.
NaMo App gets a new update!
It is faster and sleeker, enables easier access to exclusive content and has new features for an immersive experience.
Along with an all-new interface, the NaMo app comes with a one-touch navigation and a slide-access feature that lets users browse through content related to the Prime Minister and the current NDA government.
This includes daily news and updates, infographics and illustrations, government projects that are work-in-progress, Modi's blogs, Mann Ki Baat episodes, NaMo merchandise store, and much more. The app also features an online showcase of exhibitions organised by the BJP across the country.
In one of its most interesting features, the app has an Instagram-like 'Stories' section displaying short snippets of the PM's daily activities.
Other new features include "content recommendations" based on users' browsing patterns, and a content section called ‘NaMo Exclusive’. There is also a 'NaMo TV' tab that features video interviews and clips of the PM.
Users can also leave their ideas and suggestions for Mann Ki Baat episodes. They even have the option to communicate directly with the PM through a Messenger-like feature.
The NaMo app is calling out for "micro-donations" from users. You can enter your personal ids, choose a cause to support, and select an amount upto Rs 1,000.
The Modi app was primarily designed for information dissemination. Hence, both citizens/voters and those associated with the government stand to benefit.
"For anyone in public life, the smooth flow of information is empowering. Two-way flow of information ensures that people are aware of initiatives and benefit from them," said a NaMo app user.
The BJP is encouraging social volunteers to use the app to stay abreast of new government schemes, latest achievements, and other "authentic" information. They can also use it to connect one-on-one with the party leadership and even the PM.
Party officers too can use the app's 'New India Connect' feature to track, monitor, and stay updated about various volunteer initiatives, activities, and "works-in-progress" across states.
The app's “Create Event” feature is for galvanising people on-ground and online. "These can be transformed into virtual 'Jansabhas' and 'Jansampark Abhiyans' which can be conducted anytime at almost no expense. This will have far-reaching positive implications," added the app user.
There is also a 'Go Live' feature for amplifying social outreach.
Finally, in terms of content, there are plethora of research articles, trend pieces, news and other reading material. The BJP reveals that the NaMo app is being "actively used by lakhs of users all over India as well as abroad".
It recorded 15 million cumulative installs on Android and iOS, and is one of the most popular apps for any political leader across the world.
From Fabergé to Cartier, why have the world's greatest jewellery designers always preferred working with platinum for their most important pieces? Why is platinum increasingly becoming the metal of choice for the new breed of better-informed, self-aware on-trend men? We did a bit of data mining to understand the rising importance of platinum as a choice for men’s jewellery, and here’s what we got. Did you know platinum was found on our planet after a meteorite crash over two billion years ago? Only a few deposits were left behind, making platinum one of the rarest metals for precious jewellery - a truly celestial metal.
Today, platinum is increasingly the choice of men who want to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Choosing platinum is about doing something that’s not done before. Of not conforming to the expected. It’s about leveraging its quality of resilience, of permanence, of subtlety. Like the metal, men of platinum are rare, just like everything about them. These exceptional men aspire for stature, not status; they seek meaning, not material. The principles they hold are unbreakable; the zeal they possess is unparalleled. They bring with them a hope that’s new, a dream that is colossal, and a reality that is inclusive.
Greatness for these men is measured with humility, strengthened by the power of their conviction. Nothing, not even adversity shakes the ground they stand on. Their word unsaleable; their resolve, unwavering, their commitment, 200 percent. The world belongs to them because they have risked everything to create it.
They are men that carry values like courage, uncompromising beliefs, humility, perseverance and authenticity as markers of their character. Platinum is the one metal that truly captures the essence of their being.
To choose platinum is to choose the rarity, strength, authenticity, and natural beauty that it represents. These elements factor into the construction of every piece of platinum jewellery. Its fluid texture and understated yet reflective surfaces brings together a palette that is strong yet aerodynamic, angular, and futuristic. This creates an aura of bold yet understated timelessness, perfectly complimenting the men destined to wear it. Read on to see why men of character choose Platinum, and what do they have in common with the metal.
A collection that complements and celebrates men of character
True character shines brightest when it is bold, yet understated, strong, yet fluid, subtle yet unforgettable. Platinum Guild International’s debut collection, with its intricately cut links and ergonomic fluidity, manifested by the handcrafted quality of each motif creates an infinite illusion of continuity. Disrupted by the use of tones, matt surfaces or elevated forms, it is indeed a reflection of platinum's unique character to make a subtle yet unforgettable impression of being bold, dynamic, angular, understated, faceted and iconic. Not unlike the men this collection pays tribute to.
Interpreted across two stunning collections - Bold Sculptural and Dynamic Links - The Men of the Platinum collection celebrates the age of the new breed of men with pieces that reflect the character of the men who wear them.
Bold Sculptural: Inspired By Urban Innovation
True to its name, this collection is a statement of individuality, its fluid texture, moulded to precision and seamlessly fitted together brings to life a palette that is aerodynamic, angular and futuristic. This creates an assortment that is full of bold, multidimensional, forms that use industrial contours as inspiration, understated yet reflective surfaces with matt lustre further accentuate each sharp angle and form. The end result is pieces that are true symbols of bold self- belief, perfectly complementing the men destined to wear them.
Dynamic Links: Inspired by Nuovo Classic
True character shines brightest when it is understated. This collection, with its intricately cut links and ergonomic fluidity, manifested by the handcrafted quality of each motif creates an infinite illusion of continuity, disrupted by the use of colour, matt surfaces or elevated forms, it is indeed a reflection of platinum's unique ability to make a subtle yet unforgettable impression. Not unlike the men this collection pays tribute to.
And as the new breed of men seek to pursue their dreams, achieve the extraordinary, stand by their conviction, the collection is the perfect partner to mirror their character, enable their journeys, celebrate their milestones and complement the platinum within.
Yaantra has grown 240 percent in six years and raised over $12 million. It now aims to start selling new phones and create a connected device ecosystem.
To mark the 69th birthday of Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently, his eponymous app got a makeover. The PM's official Twitter handle declared that the upgraded app is much "faster and sleeker" and "enables easier access to exclusive content".
The climate change movement is in full force today, but the credit goes beyond just Greta Thunberg. Take a look at five other young activists fighting to change the system and save the planet.
Param Network has created a technology platform based on blockchain technology, which can reduce the complexity of handling invoices while also ensuring there is trust and transparency in the entire process.
Rio 2016 was not a great show for India in terms of the medal tally, but the performances of women athletes won hearts back home. With Tokyo 2020 not far away, more women athletes are hoping for a podium finish.
(L to R) Sanjeev and Samarth Co-founders , Dockabl
Almost every company has an appraisal cycle or salary increment. To make the process more user-friendly, two human resources management professionals, Samarth Masson and Sanjeev Grover, started Dockabl in 2017.
From feeding the poor to giving shelter to the homeless, 60-year-old Devdas Goswami is running two homes for the needy, and has given new life to hundreds of people.
Issues about intellectual property rights (IPRs) have become critical for the sustainability of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in their attempts at achieving a competitive advantage. Here's a quick look at some of the major and minor activities undertaken by the Government in building awareness on intellectual property rights for small businesses.
Since its launch just about a year ago, TikTok has become THE phenomenon in the country -- winning the mindshare of over 200 million people in less than nine months, the fastest by any online platform till date. From youngsters to octogenarians, TikTok has become the go-to place for creative expression. Be it showcasing India as a key global travel destination, showcasing the cool dance moves or lip syncing to iconic dialogues, the reasons why people turn to TikTok are plenty. And, in doing so, TikTok has widened the definition of India’s creative economy to include micro artists, musicians, content generators as opposed to just big media and entertainment businesses and celebrities from showbiz.
In short, TikTok has today become the flag bearer of India’s new creative economy,
Surprisingly, while TikTok began its journey as a pure-play entertainment and creative platform, India’s new creative economy has unearthed a bigger potential -- harnessing the platform to fuel India’s growth story - via skilling.
Why India’s creative economy can help to narrow skill gap
Economic experts say that by 2025, India’s economy is poised to become the third-largest in the world, just behind the US and China. But, there’s a catch. To achieve this position and to keep employment rates constant until 2025, India will also have to create 8.1 million jobs annually as compared to 5.5 million jobs in 2017. In the absence of a skilled workforce, even if India manages to create the said number of job opportunities, it is highly unlikely that this would make a huge difference. A key reason is the widening gap between what skills are being taught today and the skills actually needed for jobs of the future to stay relevant in the face of increasing global competition. While the country’s mainstream education system is trying hard to catch up and make its pedagogy relevant to contemporary needs and bridge this skills gap, there’s much that still needs to be done.
Realising this opportunity and with a view to take on this challenge, the private sector has come forward to pitch in and support the government’s vision. And, in this space, India’s creative economy can play a big role. According to an industry report, the creative economy not only has the potential to be a $100 billion industry within the decade but also narrow India's skill gap by adding 3 million new jobs by 2030.
There are plenty of examples to substantiate how people across the country are leveraging the potential of the creative economy to bridge the knowledge and skills gap, and contributing to India’s progress. For instance, take Awal Madaan, a former marketing and advertising professional who is today better known by his handle @AwalCreations on TikTok, the short video-sharing platform. As a marketing professional, Awal worked with American clients, and that’s when he realised how important it was to have a good command over English to get good jobs in multinational companies. He also realised that people from smaller towns didn’t have the right opportunities to learn English, and so he decided to leverage the platform to teach them. Today, with a base of 5 million followers, Awal’s handle has become the go-to place for millions to learn English. What makes his channel so popular is that Awal explains complex concepts in an easy and interesting manner in Hindi, and often uses humour to drive home the point. Awal’s followers are not just students, but also sales-staff, self-employed individuals and people who want to improve their English skills for professional growth. While it has empowered people from small towns who otherwise don’t have access to quality education like those in metropolitan cities, it has also enabled Awal to earn revenues while also strengthening his personal brand.
The push into educational content to bridge knowledge and skill gap
Like Awal, there are thousands of professionals in the fields of management, finance, law, healthcare, science, engineering, architecture, design, education, arts, music, and entertainment who are creating videos on TikTok for promoting educational content through short videos, teaching simple hacks, or even life lessons to help others. And that push has been further intensified through the #EduTok initiative on the content platform. The content featured under #EduTok has already gained over 42+ billion views and the popularity is only growing, with the platform encouraging more of its 240 million users to join the effort.
In addition to the organic interest shown by content creators towards educational content, TikTok has also partnered with key edutech companies in India like Vedantu, Vidya Guru, Hello English, CETKing and Testbook to encourage subject-focused content creation and learning. This includes content on subjects such as social sciences, English, mathematics, Hindi, biology, as well as current affairs, vocabulary and more. The company says the partnering edutech companies are creating videos in various formats and languages to enable personalised learning for TikTok users, thereby helping them learn and grow as individuals, thrive in their careers and tap new market opportunities. This has meant that TikTok today is increasingly being seen as an educational platform as opposed to a pure-play entertainment platform for India’s netizens.
TikTok’s EduTok is just one of the many examples that illustrate how India’s creative economy is leveraging different mediums and platforms to share their knowledge with a wider audience and empower them. This trend is likely to only grow bigger in a country like India where access to quality educational facilities is still a major bottleneck. As much as it is important to seed knowledge into the economy, it is equally important to enable churning of ideas and knowledge, for it leads to people acquiring new skills, creating new products and services and thereby foster economic growth. And, it is here that platforms like TikTok with their popularity and reach, become enablers of economic activity and growth,
On May 9, 2018, Flipkart and Walmart announced their long-awaited deal. Walmart would pay $16 billion for a 77 percent stake in Flipkart, valuing India’s largest ecommerce firm at $21 billion. The Press statement by the companies was accompanied by a picture of Binny Bansal, Co-founder and then Group Chief Executive Officer, Flipkart, shaking hands with his Walmart counterpart Doug McMillon.
But it was one of the photographs released the next day that was far more striking.
On May 10, Flipkart published an ostensibly warm blog post by Binny in which he bid farewell to Sachin Bansal, Co-founder, Flipkart. Though it was well known that Sachin had resigned from his post as Flipkart’s Executive Chairman, details of his exit or even any mention of his name had been completely missing from the deal announcement. It was as if Sachin had never been associated with Flipkart.
The cover of the book, 'Big Billion Startup, The Untold Flipkart Story'.
At the end of the post was a picture of the two Bansals along with Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the former Tiger Global representative, who had become Flipkart CEO in January 2017. The three men were standing close together.
But it was the position of the three that caught the eye, revelatory, like a Freudian slip. Sachin was on the left, Kalyan in the middle, and Binny to his right with an arm around him. The photograph had actually been taken many months ago – it was inconceivable that Sachin would agree to such a photo after recent events – but it was an apt representation of how things had turned out between the Flipkart founders.
Sachin and Binny had started Flipkart together from a house in Koramangala in Bengaluru in 2007 with Rs 4,00,000 of their own money. More than a decade later – after building a company that generated $7.6 billion in revenues, after making entrepreneurship cool, after becoming billionaires – they could no longer stand each other.
How did it all go so wrong between them? Why wasn’t the momentous $16 billion sale to Walmart an unqualified success?
Flipkart’s sale was in fact the culmination of a tumultuous three-year period for the company, during which it had narrowly escaped disaster. In this time, Flipkart squandered its preponderant position in the ecommerce market and allowed Amazon, its prototype-turned-arch-rival, to come frighteningly close to toppling it.
Though Flipkart recovered towards the end of 2016, the Bansals were made to pay for their mistakes by ceding the management of their firm to Kalyan, who was installed as Flipkart CEO by the company’s investors.
But before Flipkart faltered in 2015-2016, its rise seemed like a fairy tale.
When the Bansals launched Flipkart in 2007, despite many years of liberalisation, business in India was still dominated by opaque companies whose success had as much to do with their ability to keep regulators happy as it did with the founders’ business acumen. Companies such as Infosys and Airtel were the exceptions, and in the arena of high-technology, Indian companies were especially wanting. This wasn’t surprising.
(From left) Binny Bansal, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, and Sachin Bansal.
In that period, internet entrepreneurship was considered a feeble initiative, doomed to fail. Many venture capital firms in India, despite being in the business of funding startups, didn’t believe in the possibility of large indigenous internet firms.
The Bansals were among the few dissenters. Sachin and Binny were an unlikely duo. Considered unexceptional by their friends and acquaintances, they weren’t even particularly close to begin with. Though they had both grown up in Chandigarh and studied computer science at IIT Delhi, they got to know each other only in Bengaluru. They lived in the same apartment complex and worked at Amazon, which was operating a technology development centre in the southern city since 2004.
In September 2007, the Bansals quit the American retail giant to launch an Amazon-like ecommerce firm of their own.
For a long time, it seemed like they wouldn’t make it. Flipkart’s early period was marked by a series of setbacks, travails, and near-blunders. The Bansals failed to convince any of their friends to join them. Investors told them they were wasting their time. Their first two employees were a packaging worker who had lost his job, and a chain-smoking hippie slacker who was hired primarily because he happened to own a functioning laptop.
Finally, in the summer of 2009, after being turned down by every venture capitalist in the country, the Bansals wore down the resistance of a small investment firm, aided by one of its associates who had spotted them and become a true believer.
It had taken them more than 18 months to attract a majestic sum of $1 million. A few months later, Flipkart received unsolicited interest from Lee Fixel, a little-known fund manager at Tiger Global, a hedge fund in New York. Within weeks, an investment of $10 million was finalised.
What followed was a singular journey of entrepreneurship in India.
Over the next five years, the Bansals would come a long way towards validating their founding idea – that two Indians could build a world-class internet firm in India. Flipkart wowed customers with its magnificent service, continually added new product categories, constantly cut prices and expanded its delivery reach.
Business doubled every three to six months, and investors kept pumping hundreds of millions of dollars so Flipkart could grow even faster.
Sachin, the co-founder with the big vision, transformed into a daring businessman, relishing the high-risk game that was internet entrepreneurship.
In many ways, Flipkart’s internal environment was a reflection of his personality – volatile, chaotic, excited, constantly churning in the rush to grow by leaps and bounds. He was obsessed with the term ‘billion’ – an expression of Flipkart’s mission to take ecommerce to the masses, and also, perhaps, an expression of Sachin’s own desire to become a visionary billionaire entrepreneur.
In Binny, Sachin had the ideal foil. While Sachin took the bold decisions, Binny was more thoughtful about how to implement them. Along with their outstanding team, they seemed unstoppable.
As Flipkart rose irrepressibly, the company uplifted the entire startup ecosystem. The belief – held by other entrepreneurs, investors, startup employees, as well as those who had chosen to stay out – that India could sustain a thriving startup scene grew stronger.
In July 2014, when Flipkart raised a mammoth $1 billion, Sachin declared,
“We believe India can produce a $100 billion company in the next five years, and we want to be that.”
In that year particularly, Flipkart embodied the anxieties of the Indian economy’s place in the world, its keen awareness of its inferiority vis-á-vis both China and the West, and, of course, its vast promise. It seemed that Flipkart would lead India into the age of the internet, as the country’s answer to Amazon and Alibaba.
But in its ultra-consumerist vision, its belief that it would take its rightful place alongside the American and Chinese internet giants, as well as in its subsequent stumbles and its extraordinary but narrow wealth creation, Flipkart is a parable of the post-liberalisation era that has delivered substantial gains, but eventually fallen far short of its promise.
This is the story of how the Bansals built Flipkart into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse, succeeded where dozens had failed, made entrepreneurship into a desirable occupation, over-reached, lost control of their creation, and were forced to sell out to a retailer whose dominance they had once dreamt of emulating.
Gurugram-based hospitality unicorn OYO Hotels & Homes on Monday said it will be raising $1.5 billion as part of its Series F funding round. Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and Group CEO, OYO, through RA Hospitality Holdings, will be infusing $700 million as primary capital, and the remaining $800 million will be pumped in by the existing investors.
RA Hospitality Holdings has received CCI approval to invest nearly $2 billion primary and secondary management investments in OYO.
The funding will be focussed on Oyo's growth in the US, and to also strengthen its position in the vacation rentals business in Europe.
In September last year, Oyo raised $1 billion in funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from existing investors - Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Greenoaks Capital.
In a press statement shared by the company, Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO (Global), Oyo Hotels, said,
"With the CCI approval now in place, the company will get a capital infusion of approximately $1.5 billion to support this mission, supported by me and other shareholders."
He added, "I am also happy to share that on a Y-o-Y basis, we have seen that not only are we operating profitably at the building level, but at the same time, our EBITDA has also improved by 50 percent (on a Y-o-Y basis). The losses as a percentage of NRV have also been on a steady and significant declining curve. The growth across verticals in India and globally has been phenomenal, and we truly believe that we will be able to build a truly global brand out of India, while ensuring that the business is run efficiently and with a clear path to profitability. Our immediate goal, however, is to make forward looking investments so we can achieve our mission, while delivering on our fiduciary responsibility to our investors by building a sustainable business."
OYO today is present in over 338 cities and has over 590,000 rooms in China, in Indonesia it is present in over 100 cities and over 27,000 rooms, in the UK, it is present in 30 destinations and has over 3,500 rooms, and more recently in the US, with presence in 60 cities, 21 states, and over 7,500 rooms.
The team added that it has seen a 3.8x year-on-year growth in revenue this August, with over 1.2 million rooms under management across hotels and homes. The company already has a strong balance sheet of approximately $2 billion across group companies, a significant part of which will be further invested in the business, given the company’s focus on maintaining its growth momentum.
The company already employs over 20,000 OYOpreneurs, and has created opportunities for over 300,000 local hospitality enthusiasts around the world.
Foodtech unicorn Swiggy on Monday announced it had solidified its presence in 500 cities across the country, and that it is planning to expand to 600 cities by December 2019. With this expansion, more than 350 million or one in four Indians now have access to the food delivery platform.
Founded in 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jaimini, the footech startup was able to comfortably penetrate into Tier III and IV cities of the country, after marking its presence in the metropolitans and Tier II cities.
In the last month alone, the platform has launched in 130 cities like Himmatnagar and Vyara in Gujarat, Sirsi and Bagalkot in Karnataka, Sawantwadi and Sangamner in Maharashtra, Puri in Odisha, Behror in Rajasthan, Hindupur in Andhra Pradesh, Bankura in West Bengal, Ramanathapuram and Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu, Nagaon and Johrat in Assam.
Vivek Sunder, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Swiggy, said,
"Enabling restaurants with added revenue and building Swiggy Access Kitchens for our restaurant partners to expand to small towns will bring better quality food closer to every consumer. Our growing fleet of over 2.1 lakh active delivery partners have more income opportunities due to the scale and offerings of Swiggy."
Besides expanding to smaller towns, Swiggy also announced it has expanded its service to over 75 universities including IIT Roorkee, NIT Kurukshetra, IIT Kharagpur, NIT Calicut, BITS Pilani, and Lovely Professional University (LPU) among others. Situated in the outskirts of larger cities, the universities usually do not have access to the convenience of food delivery.
It also reported that it had on-boarded 60,000 new restaurants in the last six months, and through its Launchpad programme, Swiggy has entered more than 75 universities in the country. The company believes that students are its strongest brand ambassadors, and that it intends to leverage upon it by launching in more than 200 universities by end of year.
As of today, Swiggy has around 2.1 lakh active delivery partners and connects its customers to over 1,40,000 restaurant partners.
Verizon Media’s women-focused platform ‘MAKERS’ was launched on Friday evening, holding out the promise to accelerate the women’s movement in India, replicating its success in the US over the past six years.
Before unveiling the MAKERSIndia logo and a video featuring women-makers from India, Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO, YourStory, and Rose Tsou, Head of International Markets, Verizon Media, recounted the start of MAKERSIndia one year ago. Shradha remarked that Rose is a woman ‘who sets eyes on something and makes it happen’.
In a freewheeling conversation, the two delved into why a platform such as MAKERS was necessary to shed the spotlight on women who make it.
Rose shared some of her own experience as a woman in climbing the professional ladder, in a milieu where the state of women in leading positions is still found wanting when compared to that of men. She said that, ultimately, women have to set out to break the glass ceiling.
“As a woman, we have a lot of self-doubts, and those can constrain us. I remember, early on in my career, when I was a general manager at Yahoo Taiwan, I had been successful for many years but didn’t get a promotion. One day, our founder called me in to assess another colleague for a bigger role. At that moment, I really drew on my courage and asked if he had considered me for the job,” she added.
After what seemed like the longest waiting-period of her life, she secured that position in two weeks.
She pointed out that women need to fight for the things they work so hard for because they deserved them.
Rewinding Verizon Media’s journey, Rose recounted that the company recorded major milestones when it acquired the two major media brands - AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017. After this, others have come under the umbrella, including TechCrunch, HuffPost, and MAKERS, apart from other advertising technologies.
Personally, Rose has mentored many entrepreneurs. At the launch event, she advised that it was always best to follow the heart and passion in making important decisions. Rose recounted her own experience of leaving a big marketing firm and joining a record company. “It was a great company, but it was not for me. And, after joining the record company, I was able to flourish with my creativity and unleash my entire powers,” she noted.
Rose is credited with Yahoo’s success in Asia, and when asked what it means to translate diversity at the workplace, she laid down her simple belief that when people feel safe and trusted, they would realise their largest possible potentials.
“Especially, as women, we have a lot of personal responsibilities: as a daughter, a mother, and a professional. I have seen many women whose careers did not advance because of these personal commitments.” Stating that she’d faced her share of challenges in marriage, aging parents, and a child, Rose asserted that she fully understood their impact.
“Building an inclusive and safe environment and supporting women employees when they really need will help in having them bring their whole self to work,” she noted.
The conversation was later joined by Rico Chan, co-head, Verizon Media, Asia-Pacific region, and Nikhil Rungta, who has recently joined as the country manager in India.
Speaking from his experience, Rico explained that an inclusive environment with diverse voices ensured much truer decisions. In this regard, the MAKERSIndia platform addressed a now–or-never situation, he said.
“When you look at the internet population in India, women internet users account for 42 percent of the total, which is an all-time high. And I believe this number is going to increase further,” he added, before pledging to bring pay parity in his organisation. Nikhil, too, pledged to create a work environment where all women could do their best.
One learning from this fireside chat would be that all that’s coming to India is good, including the MAKERSIndia platform.
“Always stay hungry and curious,” says Akash Saxena, SVP, Head of Technology, Hotstar. Akash, who started coding and working with BASIC programming when he was in Class 6, says he always knew computers were going to play a huge role in his career.
In the startup circuits, Akash is also known for helping build the tech stack of foodtech company Tinyowl early on. Today, at Hotstar, Akash and his team have built the platform that broke the concurrency record for a live stream: 18.6 million concurrent streams.
Akash belongs to Pune; his mother was a teacher and his father was a medical representative, who later went on to start his own hotel business. However, he lost his father at a young age.
“It was at my friend’s place that we would play different computer games. I found it completely fascinating,” he recalls. His love for computers was further reinforced when his cousin, then studying at IIT, gave him computer magazines to browse through.
"That was probably one of the big reasons why I didn’t do my Class 11 and 12, and had decided to do a diploma. In those days, a diploma was a last resort; it was something you did if you didn’t score well in Class 10 boards. But I knew I wanted to do only engineering and computers so I went ahead and did a diploma from Bharati Vidyapeeth,” Akash says.
It was during his diploma that Akash was exposed to assembly programming and micro controllers. One of the HODs at the department also ran an electronics consultancy, and it was there that Akash and his peers spent most of their time. They created PCB design safety programme micro controllers and early microchips. It was here that they would work on C and C+ programming.
“I have a bit of a DIY streak in me. And while it was tough, it was something that I simply loved doing,” Akash says.
It was during 1991 and 1994 that Akash began tinkering with and worked around different systems and models. When he was 19 years old, he had his first lesson in failing to build something.
“I was a part of a super unrealistic project. My mentor told us that we were biting off more than we could chew, but in our naivety we thought we could conquer the world,” Akash recollects.
Most people go door-to-door for water and electricity meter readings, and Akash and his batchmates thought of creating a digital way to record these. They went on to build a PCP, putting in their own money. But when the final product was out, they realised it just didn’t work.
“We figured out a fundamental mistake in our layout. You can programme other languages, but when you are working on hardware, it is terminal; there is no room for error. It was educational from that perspective. It was a tough one and we were so psyched about what we were trying to build. Ironically, it was the first thing that I built that didn’t end up delivering,” Akash says. “I think it taught me more humility.”
After completing his diploma in 1995, Akash joined the Government College of Engineering, Pune. Here, he was exposed to the internet for the first time and says in was “in complete awe with Netscape”. It was also when he got his first email id.
Akash during his school days
Tinkering whenever he could
“I was exposed to a peer group that was superior and intelligent. We would walk around with hard disks in our bags; every computer and machine was always open and tinkered with. We would either be replacing RAMs or messing around with clock speeds. We saw technology grow and evolve in front of our eyes,” Akash recollects.
While at college, Akash and a friend also set up a data club. He says Keshav Noori, then head of TCS and also a visiting faculty, made him fall in love with compilers.
After engineering, like most peers, Akash gave his GRE. But his scores weren’t what he expected them to be. “I have never been good at theoretical computer science and engineering; it has always been applied principles,” Akash says. So he decided to stay back and work for a year, at Persistent Systems in Pune.
“I was employee number 80 I think. I remember in those days campus placement interviews were a written exam and a half-hour interview. And at the end of that you either got the job or not. But Persistent Systems was different. As the day progressed, each one of us kept getting weeded out. I had the longest time with the CEO, Anand Deshpande. I thought I didn’t get the job because I didn’t know any answer, but I did get placed,” he says.
Akash calls his stint there as one of the most formative ones. Everything that Akash had to learn about systems programming he learnt at Persistent. “Systems programming was the data science of the 90s,” he says.
"I just couldn't keep up with the rigours of working in a professional environment for the first six months. It was another humbling experience, so I knew I had to keep my game up. A lot of my colleagues and mentors helped and rallied around me. I fell in love with databases at Persistent,” Akash says.
After a year at the company, Akash went to do his master’s course in Engineering at Arizona State University, US.
“I think just the cultural exposure, going there and adjusting to their style of education was very tough. I had no financial aid when I moved to the US. So I pretty much had money only for one quarter. A foreign education was out of my league and I knew I had to find some sort of financial assistance soon,” he says.
Having reached the US early, Akash began looking for jobs. Arizona State University had arrangements with off-campus companies, and he got placed at Vitrix.
Burning the candle at both ends
Vitrix build time and attendance software, and Akash worked here full-time while completing his master’s course.
“I was responsible for architecture and writing significant portions of the client server platform that Vitrix was developing at the time. The highlight was the third-party integration support we built into the product and the scale of using distributed components to orchestrate the entire application. The product worked with biometric solutions and we also had a WinCE /telephony interface at the time,” Akash says.
Here, Akash was bitten by the startup bug. After completing his course, he was looking for a job when a colleague from Persistent Systems told him about Exemplary Software, a spin-off from an HP Labs research project that built an ERP solution. Here, he built an application server from scratch.
“I wrote and managed the application server that we wrote for our products and was responsible for dealing with application-level access control for client requests,” Akash says.
Exemplary changed the trajectory of Akash’s professional life. By then, he had also got an offer from Oracle. “It was very common to get equity. I remember talking to my manager at Oracle and asking about equity; I was told it was given only to Ivy Leagues. The thing was my interview was as tough and yet there was discrimination. So on that point I joined Exemplary instead.”
Soon, the dotcom bust changed things. Web traffic became half and everyone was going back to India, because they couldn't afford to live in the US anymore.
“Exemplary was no different. We went through three layoffs and I survived. As a young person, you're very idealistic. I think it taught me that this was business; it wasn’t personal.”
He built application servers to the front end at Exemplary. “It was just because I had some cross-skilling and I was curious that I got to stay back. We were up close and personal with how the whole company was running. We learnt about due diligence, how VCS works; the company was incredibly transparent.”
But Exemplary shut down and Akash was out of a job. It was a tough time, but a friend helped him with a job at Radvault, a medical imaging company. Here he took over the entire back-end engineering and wrote the backbone for communication framework, which was responsible for picking the closest data centre for medical records.
But in six months, 9/11 happened and Akash was out in the market again. “It was a hard time for me. But I learnt a lot during these adversities. I learnt how to survive and take things in my stride,” Akash says.
Building it all at Open Table
However, he got a break when he got a call from Open Table, San Francisco.
“It was a day-long interview. I remember in the end I figured I'd cracked it. I asked, 'how do you make money? What's your revenue model? How much is the red? What is the runway?' He said, 'we send people to restaurants and we charge the restaurant a fee for it.' I was very sceptical,” Akash recollects.
Going with his gut, Akash ended up working at Open Table for 12 years. He was part of the three-person team that re-architected the Open Table consumer website to operate under strict performance thresholds. He also built the logging infrastructure. “One of my friends jokes that some of code is still there,” Akash says.
When he moved back to India in 2016, he was asked to continue working at Open Table.
“I resigned and my CTO said, ‘why don't we try working remotely from Mumbai?’ I never worked at a more employee-friendly place. I moved back to India and took on all of Open Table’s internal systems and built a team here. It was fun because I was in Mumbai, my team was in Pune, and my stakeholders in San Francisco. We kind of perfected the art of truly working remotely,” Akash says.
By 2012, Akash was part of the team that had worked and built the company’s IPO journey. Soon, Akash felt he had reached a ceiling at Open Table.
“After seeing so much failure, being at Open Table was liberating. I saw what success looked like. I learnt the power of simplicity,” Akash says.
Akash with the Open Table Team
In 2015, Akash joined TinyOwl, the online food delivery app in Mumbai.
The TinyOwl journey
Akash says he knew he wanted to work for the Indian startup ecosystem. While TinyOwl was growing and Akash was hired to build the platform, the foodtech platform had started seeing its downward spiral.
“The hostage situation had just begun. I nevertheless continued there. I knew we could turn it around and worked towards building the systems and platforms. The experience was just brilliant. Turning a ship around, while you are still building everything, has its own high,” Akash says.
While he knew that the journey wasn’t long, Akash believed that the tech and product could be turned around. His journey at building Open Table and being a part of the early team helped.
The stint, unfortunately, didn’t last long. TinyOwl was soon acquired by Runnr, which in turn was acquired by Zomato.
“I nevertheless had a stellar team at TinyOwl; we built things every single minute and day. The platform was seeing a change and had begun to turn around. The team was in it for the long haul. But then not everything happens according to your plans,” Akash says.
After that, Akash had a small stint at Craftsvilla. He describes the stint as “tough” as there were several things that just didn’t work.
Soon, Akash got his break with HotStar through a common TinyOwl connect.
By now, he had many different experiences - in food, ecommerce, and CRM Systems. HotStar was then keen to scale the platform to a different level. At HotStar, Akash has been leading the tech team to ensure that the platform reaches a higher scale.
“HotStar already has a great scale. We have worked up to 10 million users but now we are looking at 50 million,” Akash says. While he doesn’t build everything hands-on today, he does take on projects with a long-term focus.
Today, when Akash is hiring people, one thing he looks at is attitude. He adds that culture fit is the most important thing.
“I am okay if you don’t answer questions. I just want to see if you try and are open to ideas. I believe it is important for engineers to be articulate. Be fundamentally curious. If you are curious, you become hungry, and you find ways to learn,” Akash says.
YourStory's Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma and Ninjacart's Co-founder Thirukumaran Nagarajan.
For months, a group of techies camped overnight at the fruit and vegetable market in the outskirts of Bengaluru with only one aim in mind: figuring out the complicated supply chain.
This is what led to the birth of Bengaluru-headquartered B2B agritech startup Ninjacart, which has in four years notched up a delivery accuracy rate of 99.88 percent all year round.
Founded by Thirukumaran Nagarajan and Vasudevan Chinnathambi in 2015, the agritech startup has successfully built a tech-enabled supply chain for fresh farm produce, delivering 1,400 tonnes of fruits and vegetables daily.
I recently spoke to Thirukumaran Nagarajan, fondly known as Thiru, and came out energised by his contagious positive energy, passion, and his straight-talking.
No doubt, Ninjacart is solving an India-specific problem. Thiru tells me,
“We have gone deep to crack the problem from the roots.”
India is the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables globally, but this is just half the story. Around 10-15 percent of this produce is wasted because of various challenges, especially in effective management in the supply chain.
Over the years, the biggest problem for this segment has been that the actual producer, the farmer, is generally not given a fair price. Blame the ubiquitous middlemen for that.
Ninjacart's work is impacting farmers in a positive way.
Over the last four years, Ninjacart has been ardently going about solving this problem. The founding team believes that the core solution lies in the supply chain, from the time a vegetable/fruit leaves the farmer’s land and reaches a shop.
Watch the full interview here:
Cracking the fresh produce supply chain
Today, Ninjacart transacts over 1,400 tonnes of fruits and vegetables daily across seven cities; the produce is moved from the farms to retail stores in a span of 12 hours. Thiru says,
“It has been an incredible journey for us in the last four years. We believe that we are solving an India-specific problem and innovating for India from the grassroots."
To say that the founders of Ninjacart have done it easily, given their tech background and experience of founding startups, will not be fair.
For starters, there is no supply chain software or infrastructure built for Indian conditions of handling fruits and vegetables. In the West, fruits and vegetables are transported in refrigerated conditions, a luxury in a market like India. So, Ninjacart had to build everything from the ground up without any domain expertise.
Thiru strongly believes that not having a background actually benefited the founding team of Ninjacart otherwise “it would have been baggage”.
“It is the best thing that has happened to us as we questioned everything and it helped us sort of build a much more unconventional supply chain,” he says.
Start and scale
Things started in a single city, Bengaluru, where the founders fine-tuned the entire process of sourcing vegetables from the farmers and supplying to shops. Investors like Qualcomm Ventures and Accel bet on them, and Thiru says it was because of the confidence they had in the team.
Thiru adds that they had to fix a number of things in the supply chain before they could show enough growth for the investors to be interested in them. There was no room for error, and Ninjacart took about 18 months to perfect the art and science of the supply chain, which is extremely unlike a typical ecommerce setup.
“The main thing about ecommerce is aggregation, sorting, and searching. In our supply chain, none of these things are actually there,” Thiru says, adding,
“We started from the fundamentals; it's not like we had the money and force-fitted our model into the business. We actually created a natural model. People come with an understanding of how the supply chain works and then they force-fit their model on to it. We went module by module, and that's what helped us scale.”
Today, Ninjacart’s presence in seven cities has a delivery error rate that is almost negligible - 0.2 to 0.3 percent. This is astounding considering that they pick up, sort, and deliver thousands of tonnes every 12 hours.
A business model for a bounty harvest for both consumers and farmers.
The farmer stands to benefit greatly from this. “We buy directly from the farmers and they make 15-20 percent more revenue as the inventory risk belongs to Ninjacart once we source the produce from them,” Thiru says.
A focus on quality
When asked what his big vision for the future is, Thiru says this is “just the beginning” and that the processes employed by Ninjacart ensure that a higher level of quality standard is maintained.
“We wanted to increase the standard of the food that an Indian consumes. Right now if you ask an average Indian, s/he does not know the origin of the food. It also boils down to the fact there is no supplier who can supply them that quality of food currently,” Thiru says.
Given the dependence of the Indian economy on the agriculture sector, this is sort of “giving back to society” for Thiru. Coming from a lower-middle-class background and finishing his schooling and engineering at educational institutes heavily subsidised by the government, he has a strong commitment to creating value.
“The biggest value addition that we are doing is aiding the farming community to expand their business,” Thiru says.
Given the scale of operation of Ninjacart, the agritech startup soon started receiving investor interest from biggies in the game. Tiger Global and Steadview Capital are some of the new investors in Ninjacart, and Thiru says there are more people willing to invest.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Through this journey, the founding team of Ninjacart has remained intact.
“I know that if they (team members) put their resume out in the market, they'll be paid two to three times a salary by every competitor who wants to get into this field. However, they have not been able to hire a single person from our team,” Thiru says.
He adds that the bond has been strengthened because of the culture Ninjacart has built over the years, where they strongly believe in solving a bigger problem together.
The Ninjacart team
I asked Thiru about the key ingredients/skillsets a founder needs, and he tells me: “Working through the supply chain helps you understand many problems. Like we understood that loading and unloading are among the most critical pieces of the puzzle....whatever processes we put in place, we made sure these were reduced." His advice is simple:
“Stay close to the ground, do your work, work in your warehouses and trucks; that's where you'll learn the most. This will give you enough learning to build a more robust supply chain.”
Amid all the work, Thiru seems to thrive under pressure. He is known to work even on Sundays and holidays, but does not consider himself a workaholic.
“I love doing what I am doing. So you don't feel the pain of working late or coming early to the office. I come with a lot of happiness to the office because I believe I'm changing something and I'm really excited about it,” he says.
At the same time, he says, he does not miss watching a single movie in a theatre with friends and family.
Thiru remains ambitious about the future and while hiring, looks for people who have a certain ambition.
About his own focus on the journey rather than the goal, he quotes a line from a popular Hindi song, “Safar khoobsurat hai manzil se bhi (the journey is more beautiful than the destination)".
Thiru says, “If you enjoy every moment of the journey it does not matter if you have reached your destination. The destination is but just a mirage. You reach one and the goal post moves to the next.”
For Thiru, clearly he has his next goal post measured.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data scientists are together changing the world. Engineering teams work long hours experimenting with dynamic code and deploying them to achieve results. But it often turns out to be expensive and time consuming, especially with production models not available.
Founded by Vamshi Ambati and Nazeer Hussain in 2017, Predera aims to bring “automation to machine learning so data scientists can do better data science”.
Vamshi and Nazeer, Founders of Predera
The two founders, friends from 2004, are technology experts who have worked in corporate for 15 years. Nazeer has worked at IBM and NTT Data, two large corporates pushing the boundaries in using data. Vamshi, a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, is a data scientist who has worked for the likes of PayPal.
In 2016, Nazeer and Vamshi decided to launch a company in Hyderabad and in San Jose to help other companies build their AI and machine learning strategies. As a services company, they realised that they could build a platform that manages AI for companies. And that’s how Predera was born in late 2017.
The startup is building the world’s first automation engine for managing cognitive apps. The product enables continuous integration, human-in-loop feedback, quality monitoring, and auto-updating capabilities required to reduce the cost of maintenance of AI models, which requires teams of data scientists as of now.
“We help companies manage their entire machine learning stack. They can run and train models on large scale data sets. Our platform is like an enterprise-grade data scientist working for a startup,” Vamshi says.
The founding duo invested $300,000 in the business, which includes personal money and the support of a few angels. Predera currently employs 15 people.
They are currently based in the FalconX Accelerator in Milpitas, which has been connecting them to corporate and VCs to scale the idea. They also have an office in Hyderabad.
How does Predera help?
Building AI from the ground up can be expensive if a company uses data scientists to clean and organise data. This is where Predera comes in, ensuring that data sets are available in the right format so that data scientists can crunch data instead of worrying about the organisation.
The platform ensures that teams never lose an AI/ML experiment, artifact, metrics, and lineage. It ensures that data is collected from all programming languages and that teams collaborate.
Predera offers a Smart Operations Engine that brings the complex art of taking experimental models to deployment at scale on a variety of infrastructure, all with one single click. It allows teams to monitor data science and machine learning models in production in a reliable, scalable, and explainable way, so data scientists spend less time debugging them.
With an integrated approach to managing model deployments, Predera acts as a dashboard and offers insights for model challenges, but can take actions on their behalf for fixing issues in production. The product works when integrated with libraries that host machine learning algorithms like TensorFlow, Pytorch, and Keras.
“Enterprises are just entering the era of AI and they need tools that can help them use data efficiently by deploying AI. Predera can show them how,” Vamshi says.
The market and the future
Global business value derived from artificial intelligence (AI) is projected to total $1.2 trillion in 2018, an increase of 70 percent from 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. AI-derived business value is forecast to reach $3.9 trillion in 2022.
The Gartner AI-derived business value forecast assesses the total business value of AI across all enterprise vertical sectors covered by Gartner. There are three different sources of AI business value: customer experience, new revenue, and cost reduction.
“AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technologies during the next 10 years due to advances in computational power, volume, velocity and variety of data, as well as advances in deep neural networks (DNNs),” says John-David Lovelock, Research Vice President at Gartner.
One of the biggest aggregate sources for AI-enhanced products and services acquired by enterprises between 2017 and 2022 will be niche solutions that address one need very well.
Predera competes with companies such as Dataiku, H20, and RapidMiner, which offer similar services.
The business model for Predera is based on the algorithms deployed from development and production to scale. This software-as-a-service company, which includes a global fintech credit card company and a couple of pharma companies among its clients, expects to scale its business in 2020.
Predera, which uses an integrated approach to provide a unified experience and put every data scientist first, is clear about its future plans: it wants to be one of those niche solutions that will go global.
Benjamin Franklin, polymath and one of the founding fathers of the United States, famously said: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Deepshikha Kumar and Vithal Donakonda seem to have taken this to heart, starting their knowledge-based startup SpeakIn to make knowledge dissemination easy.
Founded in 2016, Noida-based SpeakIn brings the “excellence of content and credibility to knowledge and learning initiatives worldwide”. With over 15,000 experts in more than 500 different genres, the company brings top professional experts to global organisations in India and overseas on to a single platform.
Deepshikha Kumar, Founder and Managing Partner of SpeakIn
The lineup of experts on the platform is a veritable who’s who of politicians, entrepreneurs, tech experts, authors, and motivational speakers. These include Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog; Jairam Ramesh, economist and politician; Jeby Cherian, Chairman, Isha Foundation; Anu Acharya, CEO, Mapmygenome; Aditya Ghosh, CEO, OYO Rooms; Sreejesh PR, India hockey team captain; Pullela Gopichand, national coach for Indian badminton team; Kailash Satyarthi, Founder, Satyarthi Children's Foundation; Ambareesh Murthy, CEO, Pepperfry; Anita Dongre, Founder, House of Anita Dongre; and Boman Irani, actor.
The expert network engages with business organisations, academic institutions, associations, and investment management companies to access curated experts for one-on-one discussions or forum-based knowledge sessions. Individuals can also engage experts for personal guidance and mentorship.
The company claims to be Asia’s first and largest AI-enabled network of speakers.
“Our aim is to minimise the six degrees of separation among the who’s who of the world’s top thought leaders to zero. The company boasts of multiple online and offline platforms, which have brought an entire generation of thought leaders online onto one single platform for unparalleled knowledge intermediation,” says Deepshikha Kumar, Founder and Managing Partner of SpeakIn.
“Traditional ways of knowledge sharing are no longer relevant. An ‘InExpert’ can provide in five minutes the same information that takes institutions weeks and months to acquire through their due diligence and secondary data analysis. Our platform caters to client requirements, be it content, genre, pricing, home location, availability of experts, and their rating to make accurate matches,” she adds.
SpeakIn, which aims to bring the power of insights to decisions, was founded by Deepshikha and Vithal, batchmates at Indian School of Business (ISB), in 2016.
Deepshikha has spent over 15 years in business consulting at organisations like Ernst & Young, Accenture and JDPower, Singapore. Passionate about education, she serves as honorary faculty for MBA students at Fortune Institute of International Business, New Delhi, and for Executive Business Education at Bridge School of Management, Gurgaon. She also writes actively on industry interests for newspapers and association journals for FADA, SIAM, and FICCI.
Vithal is asenior management professional with over 17 years of experience in the procurement, operations, and digitisation space across pharmaceutical and FMCG industries. Over the years, he has been associated with industry leaders such as Unilever, Genpact, GEP Solutions, Novartis, and Infosys.
He came up with the idea of a startup focused on matching knowledge seekers to domain experts in one of their first-year business classes. Based on this idea, the duo launched the website www.indianspeakerbureau.com in their college days, in 2007. It created organic traction, which kept giving the duo organic leads.
“At first, it was just academic institutions that would seek pro-bono speakers. It was only around early 2016 that we started seeing more traction from the corporate world, and organisations and event hosts were willing to pay big money for bringing in quality speakers,” Deepshikha says.
Numbers do the talking
Since then, SpeakIn has expanded its network of experts to over 12 countries in Asia, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Israel, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Philippines, and Vietnam. From a demand perspective, their focus regions are the UAE, the UK, and the US.
“We have created a seamless process for our clients to connect and engage with global thought leaders and industry experts. Each experience for a SpeakIn expert is structured as a two-way communication, which is not just economically rewarding but also contributes to an expert’s personal and professional development goals. As soon as we get a client request that matches an expert’s area of expertise, we share the profile with the clients for further review,” Deepshikha says.
SpeakIn, now a team of 17 people, has helped deliver keynote presentations, motivational, business and technical sessions, and workshops to over 125 clients in India and abroad. Their client list includes Barclays, Hyundai, IBM, Accenture, NASSCOM, FICCI, European Business Federation, IIM-K, Wizcraft, Viacom 18, Zee Media, and more.
“We continue to bring the best of speakers and experts to the market to deliver on impact, communication, innovation, leadership, digital transformation and more,” Deepshikha says.
Market and future plans
In 2018, SpeakIn raised half a million dollars from investors such as Vinod K Dasari, CEO, Royal Enfield; Padma Shri Dr Pradeep Chowbey, Chairman, Max Institute; Mohit Arora, Partner, Mondriaan Group, Singapore; and Ashish Kale, Managing Director Provincial Group. The company also counts seasoned corporate leaders such as Nakul Beri, Managing Director, Standard Chartered, Singapore, among its key advisors.
In 2019, it also raised an undisclosed amount of funding from OYO South Asia CEO Aditya Ghosh-backed Homage Ventures.
The expert network industry generates over $1 billion globally in revenue with a CAGR of 20 percent. Similar to SpeakIn, there are few other platforms that help connect speakers globally. These include GLG, GuidePointGlobal, London Speaker's Bureau, and LinkedIn.
In the last quarter, the company has built its open search-platform and simultaneously expanded its operations to Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Singapore. Garnering an eight-digit turnover, the founders are expecting a 15x jump in revenues this year, riding on the platform and its global expansion into key Asian markets like Singapore and Hong Kong.
SpeakIn aims to build a network of at least 75,000 experts from India and abroad, and reach 100 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the country by 2020. It also has plans to expand globally and connect to PE and VC firms from the US, the UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
“Our future plans include developing four core programmes around speech, communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration,” Deepshikha says.
Flipkart, India’s leading ecommerce marketplace, is not all about business. The Walmart-owned company believes strongly in giving back to the society. In partnership with GiveIndia, one of the leading donation platforms in the country, Flipkart has launched programmes like Daan Utsav and Giving Tuesday India to offer help to those in need.
Giving Tuesday is a global programme started in 2012 in New York, US, while Daan Utsav was launched in 2009 in India. Both aim to serve the underprivileged.
The Daan Utsav week is being held from October 5 to 10 this year and will highlight the various causes citizens can contribute to from the Flipkart platform. These range from sustainability, women empowerment, equality for the differently-abled, menstrual hygiene, animal welfare, and children empowerment. Through this, every donor will be able to view periodic impact reports that will show them how their donation is being utilised.
In an e-mail interview with YourStory, Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy spoke about the rationale of being part of this programme for the first time. He said this partnership will take its 200 million customers, lakhs of sellers, and employees to the concept of “everyday giving” a notch higher.
Edited excerpts from the interview:
YourStory: What was the driving force behind Flipkart to be part of Daan Utsav?
Kalyan Krishnamurthy: We strongly believe that the success of any business is reflected in its positive impact on the ecosystem. As a homegrown company, we strive to ensure that we contribute meaningfully to the larger community. While creating a positive impact is at the heart of everything we do, a step ahead is to enable our consumers, employees, and seller partners towards conscious giving.
We believe that doing good is a part of doing well in business, so by partnering with Daan Utsav this year, we are trying to mobilise efforts and work towards contributing to solving pressing issues, including climate change, inequality, poverty and starvation, among others.
While Flipkart has been leveraging its platform for social welfare in every hour of need ranging from calamity relief, disaster rehabilitation, and supporting armed forces, this is the first time we have participated in Daan Utsav to take a proactive and 360-degree view of a variety of social causes and democratise giving.
Between October 5th and 10th, a new cause will be highlighted each day on the platform, and every donor will be able to view periodic impact reports that will show them how their donation is being utilised. This partnership will facilitate outreach to over 200 million Flipkart customers, lakhs of sellers, and Flipkart employees and enable them to contribute to any of the six social causes of their choice.
As the nation gears up to celebrate the festive season, our goal is to ensure that we also create goodwill for the underserved.
YS: How will Flipkart bring its ecosystem together – the company, sellers, and consumers to be part of Daan Utsav?
KK: Coming together of people from across India is a very powerful thing. We want to encourage, motivate, and empower millions of our consumers to give back to the society. Ecommerce has made in-roads to very remote places in India, and we believe our consumers and seller partners from these regions will now have an opportunity to contribute and be a part of the joy of giving, for causes closest to their heart.
While giving in India is an informal activity on an everyday basis, initiatives like this open more avenues for formal giving and encouraging people to become a part of a movement of civic transformation. The youth today is very open to everyday giving. By simplifying everyday giving to them and bringing it to their computer or phone screens, we hope to facilitate their contribution and work toward a thriving and flourishing society.
By making the Flipkart platform available for Daan Utsav, we are also serving as an enabler of giving. The partnership will take the concept of ‘everyday giving’ a notch higher by bringing charity to the fingertips of millions of Flipkart users.
The causes that we’re supporting here range from sustainability, women empowerment, equality for the differently-abled, menstrual hygiene, animal welfare, and children empowerment, supported by various non-profit organisations, including Magic Bus, Goonj, Haritika, Charlie’s Animal Rescue Centre, Uma Educational & Technical Society, and Udayan Care.
YS: Will Flipkart’s engagement with Daan Utsav also help in bridging the digital divide as reaching out to the citizens of Bharat seems one of the focus areas?
KK: In today’s scenario, the internet has become a pervasive and fundamental part of our lives that continues to provide massive economic and social benefits. Despite that, there are millions of people who still don’t have access to it. Although much progress has been made to bridge the digital divide, the challenge remains complex and multipronged. It requires a collaborative, multi-stakeholder approach to overcome the barriers to internet inclusion.
At the core of our operations is ensuring that we offer services, products, and features that help narrow down and then eventually eliminate the gap between India and Bharat, and the privileged and underserved, and by the virtue of being an ecommerce platform, our efforts commence at digital inclusion.
YS: Being part of the programme for the first time, how is Flipkart going to sustain this relationship as part of its future roadmap?
KK: We are a socially responsible and purpose driven business, committed to bringing social impact with our line of work. Our employees are motivated to solve for India through tech solutions every single day of their work, and we believe that we will create enough opportunities to contribute towards social upliftment and be a positive force in the community.
We will keep contributing towards creating strong and sustainable communities. The Flipkart group will continue to look at engaging deeply with giving ecosystem and movements such as ‘Daan Utsav’ to spread the joy of giving and leveraging our reach and scale for social impact.
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