Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!
~ Kalidasa
2022 - A year of many changes and challenges. Life is an inevitable mix of light and dark. I end the year with gratitude and begin the new year with Hope.
Kalidasa’s timeless words emphasize the power of today. The experiences of time make us wiser. For a better tomorrow, we may look back on lessons from our past on how we can live well today. As we begin a new year, it is an opportune time to reflect on the learnings and memories from the year gone by.
Here are my reflections from the year past:
Power of community: Amazing things happen when people come together for a cause. Building our CXXO community this year was a sheer high. We also hosted#KalaariConnect Lounge at the TiE Global Summit. The many old and new relationships we could renew was energising. The startup community as it grows, is a force.
I am one, but still, I am one: Can one person make a difference? It is easy to get dissuaded or feel daunted when you feel not much can be done by one person. This year so many stories of individuals who have transcended many odds to prove what one person can achieve had motivated me to feel a sense of oneness versus aloneness when faced with challenges. Even the smallest actions have the power to make a difference. Being my authentic self can be the unique superpower.
I’m excited for what 2023 has in store, I am ready.
Every year and in every journey, we must pause, cherish our relationships and build memories. Here is our celebration at the end of 2022.
Tring is a fan engagement platform where users can book personalized video shoutouts from their favorite content creators and celebrities, while brands can collaborate with a wide range of niche and regional celebrities to expand their reach more authentically.
The global celebrity marketing industry is estimated to be $15B, with most long-tail celebrities and content creators unable to monetize by existing solutions
Founders, Akshay Saini, Rahul Saini, and Pranav Chabhadia bring deep understanding of the celebrity ecosystem and have shown strong executional capabilities in solving for this market
Peer Robotics is building collaborative mobile robotics for material handling solutions for manufacturing industries
The US SME market represents a $2.2B opportunity for material handling, while the Indian material handling market is estimated to be $1.7B opportunity
Founders, Rishabh Agarwal, Tanya Raghuvanshi, and Alok Kumar come from a strong background in robotics and factory automation and bring complimentary skillsets to the team
CashKaro enables its 20M+ members to earn cashbacks and rewards for online shopping at 1,500+ e-commerce sites. The company has grown tremendously over the last two years, scaling from Rs 100 crore in revenue in FY21 to Rs 225 crore in FY22. Congratulations to Swati Bhargava, Rohan Bhargava, and the entire CashKaro team on this milestone.
We are glad to welcome Affle Global Pte. Ltd in the latest round. They join Mr. Ratan Tata, Korea Investment Partners, and us as investors in the company.
We are privileged to have been early partners in their journey.
The Metaverse is real, and it is being manifested. We hosted #Bharatverse22, a gathering of disruptive founders, investors, creators, artists, and ecosystem enablers to discuss the evolution of the metaverse. We were joined by over 290+ people in a 4-hour long event that was hosted inside our very own virtual address, a first of its kind in India.
We hosted our first ever #CreatorsCollective – a gathering of India’s growing creator community in Bangalore. We were joined by 200+ creators and founders who engaged in live discussion around the future of the creator economy. The showstopper at the event was Bhuvan Bam, who candidly shared his journey and learnings from becoming India’s top creator. Special thanks to WinZO, Google Cloud, and Good Creator Co for supporting us on this initiative.
Click here to watch our conversation with Bhuvan Bam
Net Zero Summit
We hosted The Net Zero Summit, a think tank that brought together pioneers from the climate-tech ecosystem to discuss innovative solutions to help India achieve its goal of Net Zero.
AgriTech is one of the most exciting sectors in India’s startup ecosystem. From a handful of players taking on complex challenges in 2011, to a vibrant ecosystem represented by 1500+ startups, India’s AgriTech sector has really come of age in recent years. We jointly hosted AgriTech Now & Beyond, along with Omnivore, where we gathered 250+ passionate AgriTech founders, thought leaders and ecosystem enablers to come together to discuss ways to optimize value chains for farmers and consumers alike.
We hosted #KalaariConnect, our annual ecosystem mixer at the TiE Global Summit in Hyderabad, where we had more than 800 founders, industry leaders, investors and startup enthusiasts dropping in to meet us. A big thank you to everyone who joined us and filled our lounge with energy and dynamicism. Our gratitude to TiE for creating such a vibrant platform to foster entrepreneurship and give back to the community.
Watch our conversation with T Koshy here
Watch our conversation with Ananth Narayanan here
Watch our conversation with Agam Khare here
Follow news on all our meet-ups and sessions: here
1. “Choosing your customers is as important as choosing your employees. Your customers will determine what your product journey looks like.”
Raviteja Dodda, Founder and CEO of MoEngage, shared his insights on building MVPs, best practices for product development and more in our recent #SaasFromScratch session.
Here are three key takeaways:
Beta testing is critical to derive insights on what are “must have” features that people will pay money to use. Figma representations of the product are effective in getting initial market feedback
As you scale to different geographies, it's crucial to set up localized teams to understand the cultural nuances of each region. Hire hustlers with a founders mindset as you build your zero to one team in these regions
SaaS companies should invest in building strong product design teams early on in their journey. This significantly improves the user experience of buyers and sellers and leads to an overall customer journey.
2. “Today any technology, digitisation, credit, etc only makes sense if the farmer is profitable at the unit economics level. The true meaning of value creation here for startups is creating bottom line revenue for all the stakeholders involved, especially the farmers because that is what is long term and sustainable.”
Anand Chandra (Co-founder, Arya.ag), Mukul Garg (Co-founder, Agrim), Sanjiv Rangrass (Venture Partner, Unitus) and Mayank Tiwari (Co-founder, Reshamandi) shared their thoughts on how AgriTech startups can build for long-term value creation.
Here are three key takeaways:
To build sustainable business models in AgriTech, you need to ensure that all stakeholders – farmers, middlemen, retailers – all make money
There are two ways to approach building AgriTech business in India – a) choose a particular crop and go deep into it and build verticalized solutions b) take a horizontal outlook dealing with a broad range of customers
Build trust with farmers by helping them increase their profitability at a unit economics level. Steer away from charging an upfront fee and ride off the profit the farmers make by using your product or service.
To access our exclusive library of learnings and knowledge: click here
The Indian SaaS market is expected to hit $50B by 2030, with 100+ SaaS startups from India becoming emerging leaders globally. We’ve sorted through some of the most popular SaaS resources and compiled a list of books, courses, podcasts, tools and templates that will help SaaS founders stay at the top of the game.
Practice and experience drive success. Those who follow and implement the 10,000 hour method typically end up being the standouts in any particular field. It’s an obvious yet highly undermined rule and Gladwell beautifully helps us realize its importance in Outliers.
The five-time New York Times bestselling author is a master at mining academic research for insights and theories and his knack for storytelling makes Outliers an inspiring, entertaining yet highly scientific read.
Here are some of my favorite takeaways:
Timing is and always has been a critical component of success and opportunity. Gladwell talks about a bunch of different interesting examples to prove this, including how all the top IT entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley were born between 1953 and 1956 and how Bill Gates was among the first college students in the world to get access to a computer, by virtue of attending a prestigious university.
Having a high IQ does not guarantee success. There are diminishing returns after a certain threshold, where factors like creativity or subversiveness start mattering a lot more.
Legacy and social ties drive and heavily influence our behavior. Here, Gladwell cites various cultural references, including the cultural legacy of several Asian countries where rice was a dominant crop, essentially demanding farmers to wake up early and work all day, every day; allowing Asians to inherit the ‘hard-working’ mentality from childhood.
CreatorsCollective
AgriTech Now & Beyond
The Indian SaaS market is expected to hit $50B by 2030, with 100+ SaaS startups from India becoming emerging leaders globally. We’ve sorted through some of the most popular SaaS resources and compiled a list of books, courses, podcasts, tools and templates that will help SaaS founders stay at the top of the game.
