The Ashish Sinha Show

Koo’s Aprameya on building, scaling a global product

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On How Can Founders Go about Managing Teams | #Shortcasts

Understanding Bharat: how to speed up your GTM

Kunal Shah On Maintaining Journal And Decision Making Process | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On The Thinking Behind Zerodha's Scalable Architecture | #Shortcasts

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On Attributes That Define A Great Startup | #Shortcasts

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Idea Evaluation & Delta 4 | #Shortcasts

Sumit Of Chingari On NFT'S : All You'd Need To Know | #Shortcasts

Prukalpa Of Atlan On How to Control CAC In The Early Days | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On Zerodha's Way Of Making Technical Decisions | #Shortcasts

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On Prioritizing Tech vs speed: How Does One Go About It? | #Shortcasts

Scaling your GTM for Bharat: With Reverie’s leadership team

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Founder - Cofounder Relationship | #Shortcasts 

Sumit Of Chingari On Lessons Learned Building Chingari | #Shortcasts

Sajith Of Blume On - Is Growth Really An Important Part Of The Product Market Fit? | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On How Zerodha Approaches Product Development | #Shortcasts

Ajey Gore Of Sequoia Capital On Building Empathy In Teams | #Shortcasts

Sumit of Chinagri on DAO and impact of Chingari’s token on the structure | #Shortcasts

Sajith Of Blume On Measuring PMF And It's Process | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On How Zerodha Hires Engineers.

Ajey Gore Of Sequoia Capital On Staying Focused In the Early Stages Of Startups | #Shortcasts

Reverie co-founder, Vivek on building for Bharat market [Part 1]

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Fund Raising | #Shortcasts

Sumit Of Chingari On Lessons Learned Building Chingari | #Shortcasts

Prukalpa Of Atlan On Atlan's GTM In Early Days | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On Early Days Of Zerodha | #Shortcasts

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On Decisions That Help Early Stage Startups | #Shortcasts

On Building For Bharat: Vinay Singhal Of Stage

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Building A Great Design Team | #Shortcasts

Each and every startup has its own unique journey of finding Product market fit. But a broader theme is to understand what goes inside PMF, what are some of the core challenges, decisions that a company can look at and more.

In this episode, Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures and Prukalpa of Atlan share their experience of PMF - Sajith as a VC and Prukalpa as a founder

Startups are an act of balance – especially in the early days when you are setting up the foundation for scale.

Are you spending the right amount of effort in engineering? Are you *over-engineering* the product? How can you get the architecture right? Well, there are no right or wrong answers – but all we need is access to great perspectives.

In this conversation which happened at Productgeeks conf, Ajey Gore, CTO/tech operating partner at Sequoia and ex-CTO of Gojek brings you actionable wisdom on engineering. Some of the topics Ajey will discuss:

This conversation, recorded as part of Productgeeks Conf brings you a lot of great insights from Kunal Shah. Some of the topics we discussed:

Zerodha defies all standard norms of building a tech startup. While the world is going gaga over number of engineers, Zerodha builds and scales with..well just a handful of engineers.

33 member team powering the country’s largest stock brokerage platform! In this deep community cast, Zerodha's CTO, Kailash shares it all in conversation with Ashish Sinha.

Bharat is not a homogeneous lump of 500+ Mn basis access to Internet, Socio-economic background or a vernacular cut.  It has more refined layers and sub-cultures that drive it. With a stronger aspirational participation to the Indian economy & shift to producer mindset than consumers - building for Bharat means getting away from the mindset of stripped down version of products for affordability - but to re-engineer a suite of products from first principles needs, wants & desires of these users.   

In this talk, Ekta shares personal anecdotes from user research,  defining the right goals, "living" their lives, contrast it with other matured products for different user segments and how to set yourself up as Product leaders to build products that positively shape the lives of these users.

Meesho is known for its strong customer-obsessed product culture.  While it might work in the early days, how do you scale that up given  the hypergrowth Meesho is going through?

How do you work across different teams ensuring they are all aligned?  How do you ensure customer obsession? Meesho CPO, Kirti Varun shares it all @ProductGeeks Conf, India’s largest conference for teams that ships.

In this session of Productgeeks Conf, Ranjeet shares the early days of Pratilipi, onboarding the early set of users and building traction on the platform.

We also discuss the metrics the co. is focused on to the thought process behind hiring and building a strong product culture.

Chingari is among the early players in Web 3.0 space and there are many questions around the model itself - for e.g with the launch of GARI token, what are the changes to Chingari model? In terms of business and product?

And how can a private company issue tokens? What does the community own and not own? And what about the creators in Chingari? How do they benefit?

How can I evaluate between ESOP vs CTC? 

How should I plan for long-term  returns while keeping short-term $ growth in mind? 

How does the equation changes with stage of the startup?

If you have questions around this, do give this episode a listen. 

How do you plan a product roadmap? Is there a better way? Listen to this perspective from Praful Poddar on his experience workign with different teams - right from product management to engineering, marketing and leadership.

We are currently seeing a lot of hypergrowth in the startup ecosystem. 

One of the main challenges with such a hypergrowth phase is that teams often end up working in a silo, as the common denominator of company/team culture often is overruled in the name of hustling.

So how does one look at this from a product leadership perspective? As with most things in life, there are no right or wrong answers - just perspectives.

Here is one from Praful Poddar, who has seen some of this hypergrowth phase at Snapdeal/OLX.

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How do I create an effective roadmap? Perspective from Movin, Phonepe's Director of Product.

The 'Moving FWD with Ashish Sinha' show brings you actionable wisdom from accomplished leaders - all delivered in a bite-sized format.

In this episode, Praful and I discuss how one can go about building empathy among product and engineering teams. 

Building Empathy among Product and Engineering Teams: With Praful Poddar, Ex-Director of PM @OLX. 

Zomato has gone public now - among the first Indian tech startups to go public !

If you truly want to understand Zomato's growth journey - go back 5 years and look at what the company was facing - a few wrong decisions, changing landscape (dine-in vs. delivery), new competitions and more.

What Zomato did 5 years decided its journey and here is presenting a great conversation between Deepinder (Zomato founder) and myself, wherein we talk about the journey..the challenges, the early days of ebay going after the brand name to everything in between.

Whatfix cofounder and CEO, Khadim shares the product-market-fit journey of WhatFix and how the company went about scaling globally.

Imagine this.  You are a Mexican chef and you have now joined a South Indian restaurant. Will you survive? Will you be able to thrive in the new company? 

On the same lines, how technical should you be to excel in a product management role sounds like a similar question.

It all depends on the company and what they need.  For example, if you applying for a role with Google, you are obviously expected to understand quite a bit of technology. 

More than most of us, actually !

But if you are applying for say a company like Salesforce, you are expected to know how to deal with multiple teams to how to engage with big customer accounts, to even how to up-sell.

Let me share a simple evaluation matrix for you.

If you are really good in technical knowledge and have a deep understanding of the same, go for companies that match your technology depth or even look at taking up the CPTO, that is Chief Product and Tech Officer route. 

But if you are low in technology depth, look for companies that are more process or operations-centric. For example, food delivery companies etc.

Of course, within the same company there will be multiple roles that require different levels of technical depth, but here are a few basic technology pieces you should be in the know of.

 📍 APIs  

Software ate the world. And APIs ensure good digestion. 

APIs are everywhere - all of the apps on your phone integrate with third-party applications and all of these work using APIs.  In this ever-changing world, you need to understand APIs to stay relevant. 

 📍 SQL

Half of the user research is about understanding what the customers are doing in your product. And the other half is about understanding what your customers are not doing with the product.

You can always interview customers, but looking at actual usage is what makes the world go round for a product manager. And this is where knowledge of SQL is helpful. 

 📍 Excel / Google Sheets 

I have said this a million times, and I will say it again. Excel / Sheets is the biggest no-code platform one can ever have. Just learn a bit of functions and you can do a lot more with data and  pretty much everything. It's the most important tool for any product manager - aspiring or experienced. 

To sum it up, the role and technology requirements change over a period of time, but having a great understanding of how things work and being curious about it is immensely helpful.

Hiring has become tougher these days. the quality talent is witnessing lucrative offers and the average stay in the company has gone to an abysmal low. 

How can one hire and retain great talent? Listen to this conversation between Ashish Sinha and Amiya Pathak on this *hot and burning* topic.

Amiya Pathak is the Founder of EzCred and is Ex-Twitter / Zipdial.

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What's your role as a leader? How can you reduce team dependencies? Listen to this conversation between Ashish Sinha and Amiya Pathak (Founder, EzCred, Ex-Twitter, Zipdial).

This is part 1 of the series.

Note that this conversation was recorded in late 2019 when Indian app ecosystem was mostly dominated by Chinese apps like TikTok etc.

Excerpts from the conversation with Kunal Shah.

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And I get such interesting information from them that I knowing sitting in this country don't know about it. Right. But for them (Chinese product managers who were solving for India), it is, they have no choice, but to look at data. And therefore they are probably doing better at it. Right. And I think we tend to have very judgmental views about things like, Oh, tick tock, but guys look at the DAU, right?

So why do you want to put a judgmental lens on product that people want? And I think that's where we make a mistake that we are, we are, there's an interesting thing. That one guy told me in my family function. Somebody told me that the best business in India to do is have of innerwear and, I said, why. 

Answer: there's so much of shame associated with these two categories that you'll always make money in these two categories.

And, and that is very powerful. Like, we need to understand what will this country do not do? Why do we do certain things? Right. And, we, we tend to just get, like, for example, if I asked anybody. I actually, if I asked you that amount of money, your dad spent on you for your education and how much you will spend for your kids, is that a 20 X or 30 X it's a market data is a two for most people.

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Why all consumer products eventually become cluttered? Everyone starts with a simple and an appealing user experience, but after a few rounds of funding and user traction - they all look like the same.

What gives? Hear out this interesting explanation from Kunal Shah.

The Mistrust in Indian Society provides an opportunity to crib about it (why is no one willing to buy from my startup) or a great opportunity to create a massive brand built on trust.

Learn how.

How Kunal Shah Identified the opportunity called CRED.

How is he able to identity opportunities and create new business models, when everybody is guesstimating the business model of CRED :)

Catch this #UnPluggd conversation between me and Kunal at the last real-world #UnPluggd conference in Bangalore (this happened just a few days post CRED's launch).

Why Performers Make Great Product Managers: Kunal Shah shares how he hacked his way into building an empathy-led team.

The Ashish Sinha podcast brings you byte-sized powerful actionable insights from business and product leaders less than 5 minutes.

How do I build a global sales team for my SAAS startup? Raviteja, cofounder and CEO of MoEngage shares his playbook.

After all, each geography is a new market - goes through zero to one, one to 10 and 10 to N phase.

The Ashish Sinha show brings you actionable wisdom on product, growth and org building from the best practitioners out there - all in less than 5 minutes.

Finding Product Market Fit is tough and while there are tons of books written on it, there are a very practical insights from the doers. Do listen to this conversation between Ashish Sinha (Founder, FWD app) and Bhavin Turakhia (Flock, Zeta, Radix) on how Bhavin looks at the product-market fit journey.

Since startups are fundamentally different from regular businesses, the way they should be structured is also very different.

ESOP has been one of the most critical tool in startups to attract and retain talent. This makes it imperative to implement ESOP effectively and efficiently to gain maximum advantage from the same.

The Government of India has been making changes to existing laws and compliance systems to make it faster, easier and more responsive for startups, thereby making India a preferred Startup destination and boost the overall ecosystem.

The Startup India program is designed to boost the ecosystem in India and help them grow faster through multiple incentives and support extended by multiple Government agencies. Over the years it has been refined and made more attractive and really useful for startups.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA undertakes for sake of regulatory filings.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA or Lawyer undertakes.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA undertakes for sake of regulatory filings.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA undertakes for sake of regulatory filings.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA undertakes for sake of regulatory filings.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA undertakes for sake of regulatory filings.

When you are raising investment, the investors will conduct a detailed due diligence on various functions of the startup. A due diligence is very different than a regular audit that your CA undertakes for sake of regulatory filings.

If you have an Indian subsidiary, either as a cost centre or a profit centre, any international transactions done with the parent entity or any other of your own company, qualifies for transfer pricing. Transfer pricing is essentially a markup that is arrived after detailed study of multiple factors and business conditions. This markup leads to the Indian subsidiary being profitable.

If you have an Indian subsidiary, either as a cost centre or a profit centre, you need to keep it compliant under various applicable laws. These law vary from Company to FEMA to Taxation to Labour to Regulatory etc.

If you are looking to do business in India, you can set up a company in multiple ways like Private Limited company or an LLP depending on what your objectives are - Cost centre Vs Profit Centre.

Conditions subsequent (popularly known as CS) is a list of activities that investor requires a startup to complete immediately after they put in the money. This includes things like allotting shares to investors, appointing them as director and many more activities derived from the findings during investor due diligence.

Conditions precedent (popularly known as CP) is a list of activities that investor requires a startup to finish before they actually put in the money. Many tasks in this list is derived from the findings during investor due diligence.

Founders may need to sell their shares to 3rd parties (partly or fully) depending on their requirements. Sale of shares is a regulated process agreed with investors and other shareholders of the company.

Though Founders hold a substantial stake in the company during incorporation, they need to go through a vesting schedule to protect their interest in the company. This schedule can start from incorporation or subsequent funding rounds depending on investor negotiations.

When you raise money, the investors want the founders to stay back and run the show. Although you may have agreed for a reverse vesting schedule, but while onboarding investors they may ask for few years of lock-in for founders. This is critical from a strategic and company's perspective.

When you raise money, many times the investment may come in tranches instead of single shot. The tranches could be linked to time, milestones or both. The tranches are committed now and released when the underlying factor is complete (time/ milestone).

While raising investment, you will liquidation preferences clause in your SHA. This clause impacts how investors are paid in events of M&A (mergers & acquisition) or during liquidity of the company.

For founders who are not related to each other (like husband-wife, father-son etc.) it is important to enter into Founders Agreement covering important working relationship between founders and vesting schedules for founder's share holding. This document is a must for due diligence when you are raising money from professional or institutional investors.

When investors come onboard, they ask for anti dilution rights to protect themselves from any down trend in valuation of the startup in future. Startup should issue additional shares for free to existing investors whenever this gets triggered.

As investors come on board post investment, they need regular updates on various aspects of startup followed by review meetings. Sharing accurate MIS on agreed timelines is very important.

Life of startup founders change a lot after raising money. The new investors comes on board and is also involved in many decision making and operations of the company.

In between term sheet and signing the SHA, every investor conducts a detailed due diligence on various aspects of a startup to ensure that they are investing in a right startup and that there will not be any surprises in future from a regulatory or legal point of view.

The extent and duration of due diligence depends on the age, stage and amount of investment, but if you have prepared for it well, you can reduce the time frames drastically. Shorter due diligence time means faster time to bank the investment amount.

Investment is not just about valuation and stake. There are multiple avenues and opportunities where founders can strike a great deal for the startup with tactful negotiations. These options can become a bigger pain or gain during the whole lifecycle depending on how well you have handled it.

Before a startup receives the actual investment amount in their bank account, the investors, founders and startup execute a share subscription & share holders agreement (SSSHA or SHA). This is an important and elaborate legal document which is binding on all sides.

Term sheet is the most important strategic document that a startup gets while raising money. It is more critical than the share holding agreement or share subscription agreement (SHA or SSSHA) as all the crucial terms of the deal are agreed at term sheet stage.

For every startup valuation is of paramount importance. When you are raising money, it is important to understand and know what valuation is being discussed - Pre-money or Post-money?

The current capital structure of the startup is called a cap table. It contains details of various stakeholders and their holdings alongwith the type of instrument they hold. It gives a clear and crisp picture of all investments made in the startup from date of incorporation till date. An authoritative piece of information that is referenced during a fund raising exercise.

For startups who are raising investment, it helps to understand the ecosystem, the various stakeholders and what roles they play. It is also important to have an understanding of what factors interests an investor so that the chances of you striking a chord with them improves.

When you are trying to raise your first funding round, this episode shall help you to understand what preparations are needed before you reach out to investors. Tips and recommendations may help improve the funding potential and optimize the efforts.

The times ahead are challenging for companies.

With limited marketing budget (esp in times like these), how can you  stay ahead? How can you own the brand narrative and not  ‘let-it-get-decided-by-media’?

The big question - should you even be marketing anything in times like these?

Listen up to this interesting conversation between Ashish Sinha (NextBigWhat Founder) and Ankur Warikoo (Cofounder, Nearbuy) on marketing in the time of crisis.