The Rainmatter Podcast
By Rainmatter
The Rainmatter PodcastApr 18, 2023
Talking early stage investing with Kushal Baghia of All In Capital
In this episode, we caught up with Kushal Baghia from All In Capital to talk about the state of early-stage investing in India. Kushal has around 8 years of experience as an investor and has supported around 130 teams throughout his career. Having started his investing career at FirstCheque, he then set up his own fund All In Capital, through which he supports founders who are giving it their all in building a business.
We spoke about a bunch of things with Kushal;
1. Formative years and how that shaped him as an investor
2. His journey of becoming a VC and how should look at VC as a career
3. A bit about his earlier stints at Upgrad, FirstCheque
4. How All In Capital happened, what are the mandates and focus areas
5. Typical investing process Kushal follows and what he looks for in a startup
6. Views on the funding environment
Please enjoy this conversation with Kushal. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we're at @rainmatterin on Twitter.
Whats the fuss about Green Hydrogen anyway?
This week, I caught up with Suruchi (CEO) and Suhail (CTO) from Ossus Bio. Ossus is a climate tech startup that is developing a bioreactor to product green hydrogen. Ossus was founded in 2017 by Suruchi Rao, Shanta Rao, and Kamar Suhail Basha. They are working on green hydrogen by using waste carbon in industrial effluents as the starting material. They were bootstrapped until now. In this episode Suruchi and Suhain talk about: 1. Why Hydrogen as an alternate energy source. 2. Why is Green Hydrogen a potential choice despite the challenges with storage and transportation. 3. How did Ossus Bio grow to where it is today. 4. What are some of the policy changes needed to mainstream green hydrogen. 5. Personal journies of the founders.
Please enjoy this conversation with Suruchi and Suhail. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.
Organizing economic and financial data with Ashutosh Datar
IndiaDataHub is a data portal that aggregates and provides insights on economic and financial data. Though the government, regulators, and other systemically important institutions publish tons of data, it's highly unstructured and messy. Ashutosh had long dealt with the issue of messy data and based on his experiences, he started IndiaDataHub started as a passion project while he was working as an economist at IIFL. It later became a startup. Ashutosh and his team also publish an annual publication called The Data Book which gives rich insights on various aspects of the Indian economy. This year's edition gives you a bird's-eye view of the Indian economy across various parameters like demographics, agriculture, industry, trade, banking, capital markets, and much more.
So I caught up with Ashutosh to talk about the backstory of IndiaDataHub and also discuss some of the highlights from The Data Book. In this conversation, we talk about:
How Ashutosh became an economist How IndiaDataHub started What could disrupt IndiaDataHub The quality of Govt data and the move toward open data Opportunities in making sense of data Alternative data Learnings building IndiaDataHub The state of the Indian economy post-COVID19, formalisation, household savings and other highlights from The Data Book.This was an absolutely fascinating conversation and we hope you enjoy this as much as we did recording it.
You can purchase your copy of The Data Book—State Of India here.
Visit Rainmatter for more.
Making sense of the madness in the startup world with Sriram Mani
2021 was a banner year for startups. According to Crunchbase, $643 billion of venture money went into startups, compared to $335 billion in 2020 globally. Investors poured $38 billion into Indian startups in 2021 compared to $11.1 billion in 2020, according to Fintrackr. The sheer amount of activity in the world of startups was maddening. 2021 will forever be remembered as the year when venture capital changed. We saw the rise of non-traditional investors like Tiger Global, who play by different rules compared to the vintage investors like Sequoia etc, a record number of unicorns, the highest ever early-stage rounds, a record number of new funds and much more.
Given the sheer amount of activity in the space, we caught up with Sriram Mani from Moneycontrol, who covers the startup and venture funding ecosystem. Sriram has published some brilliant pieces on the evolving startup world. In this conversation, he spoke about:
His personal journey and how he got to covering startups and VCs The madness in the Indian startup world How the size of startups deals have changed in India vs globally Tiger Global and their investing style Hottest and coldest spaces in terms of funding The rise of direct investing vs through funds Founder burnout Where's all this money coming from, and what's driving this frenzy CryptoAnd a whole lot more. This was a fascinating conversation, given that Sriram spends his entire day looking at this space. You can also follow Sriram on Twitter; he's @manicontrol2020.
We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed recording this.
Making investing easy with Vasanth, Rohan and Anugrah of smallcase
Thanks for tuning to episode 3. In this episode, Nithin caught up with Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Shrivastava, and Rohan Gupta, the founders of smallcase.
In this freewheeling conversation Vasanth, Anugrah, and Rohan talk about:
0:00 Introduction and Individual backgrounds
9:20 The chronology of the smallcase story
12:05 What's smallcase
13:13 The Rainmatter side of the smallcase story
15:10 The initial days of building smallcase
25:57 Navigating the technological challenges of integrating with different brokers
29:20 Onboarding older brokers
35:06 Growth hack: Getting customers to tag other brokers on tweets asking for smallcases
36:50 Deciding on broking partners
38:40 smallcase Publisher - a platform for advisors
42:42 Building Publisher
43:59 Breakup of smallcase transaction across platforms
46:14 smallcase Gateway
51:50 Tickertape
58:20 Being a broker on their own vs deciding not to
1:01:20 Thinking about now in the light of billion-dollar valuations ascribed to brokers
1:02:40 Going global 1:05.21 Direct indexing vs ETF
1:10.15 Learnings from Smallcase journey
1:15:27 What next
If you guys want to explore all the awesome things that smallcase is building:
Tickertape
smallcase Publisher
smallcase Gateway
Making financial education accessible with Prateek Singh of LearnApp
In Episode 2, Nithin speaks to Prateek Singh, the founder of LearnApp on how he working on making quality financial education accessible.
Prateek talks about:
00:00 LearnApp
4:51 Prateeks' background and his trading journey
16:36 The behind deciding to teach people
25:56 How LearnApp started
29:39 Demographics of LearnApp users
32:40 Competing against people selling greed
38:58 On funding and raining more money
42:03 What content gets consumed the most
45:27 Organic growth vs ads
50:00 Advice for wannabe entrepreneurs
50:38 What motivates him
Please enjoy this conversation with Prateek. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.
Making taxes easy with Vishvajit Sonagara of Quicko.
Yay, we finally decided to start a podcast. Thanks for tuning in to the first episode of The Rainmatter Podcast. The idea of the podcast is to talk and learn from the best and brightest founders and investors in the Indian startup ecosystem. We hope this podcast becomes a source of learning in your entrepreneurial journey.
In the first episode, we decided to catch up with Vishvajit Sonagara, the founder of Quicko which is working on making taxes easy for individuals and businesses. In this conversation Vishvajit talks to Nithin about:
The Quicko story and the motivation How he built the core team and the challenges What the Quicko team does all year round given that tax filing is seasonal :) What is Quicko Sandbox, the objective of building it, and how it is helping businesses Observations about the userbase of Quicko Thoughts on the taxation announcements in the budget The Indian tax base in numbers Why people don't file taxes and some reasons why the Indian tax base is so small What if income tax was abolished His learnings throughout this journey His thoughts on managing people Advice for budding entrepreneursPlease enjoy this conversation with Vishvajit. We'd also love to hear your thoughts on this episode and also in general, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.