Startup Garage (Powered By Microsoft For Startups)

This is a special episode where we had the honor of hosting the legendary, Joseph William Foster, the founder of Reebok (1958). Joe lives and breathes Reebok. His stories, anecdotes, the thrill and the lessons are timeless and wisdom in its purest form. Joe has recently also released his life story as a book, Shoe Maker, and is also doing university tours talking about his life. 

The episode is co-hosted by Pankaj Rai, Chief Data Analytics Officer, Aditya Birla Group who also is an athlete, a marathon runner and loves sports (and sports shoes!). In this episode, Pankaj and Joe talk about Joe's family, childhood, the beginning of Reebok, the scaling to a multi-billion dollar business and about the lessons to bring to the contemporary business. 

Recently, Aditya Birla Group acquired the distribution license for Reebok India and South East Asia and hence Joe is excited to impart history and love to the next generation carrying the legacy forward.  

This episode features Tal Sharon, Managing Partner, Equitech, a fin-tech consulting organization based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Tal has been leading dozens of engagements between fin-tech companies and global financial institutions, consulting regulators and government bodies in fin-tech transformation and market education, and supporting the growth of these companies. 

In this episode, we first look at the broad trends of the year 2021 in fin-tech, the year marking a huge funding appetite for startups and investors. The second segment of the podcast takes a quick dip into various sub-segments of fin-tech: digital banking, lending, payments (B2B and B2C) and wealth management.

Equitech's YouTube channel has in-depth sessions on each of these sub-segments and more that you can refer to.

After spending over 18 years in the corporate, leading large sales teams at HUL, Airtel and Vodafone, Harish Bali started experimenting with travel and food vlogging. At the age of 42! Used up his life-long savings to document his travels, barely breaking even and worked hard to understand his target audience. Today, Visa2Explore has over 1.2M subscribers and more than 300 videos. 

His story is simple yet truly inspiring, a story of sheer persistence! Listen to Harish Bali on this episode of Startup Garage, a first in our mini-series of Hinglish episodes. 

Karen Gabriel has had a fantastic career working with high impact teams across the world. She was a part of the team that launched the Windows phone at Microsoft, she lead program design, development and execution at Dubai Future Foundation, ran 7 cohorts with over 150 startups from around the globe with one of the most ambitious governments in the world, the UAE government. 

In this episode, Karin talks about why large organisations are moving towards innovation as the driving agenda for transformation, what should they consider before getting into these waters, how should they think about and work with startups and also talks about designing founder friendly innovation programs. 

Learn more about Microsoft For Startups, Middle East: GrowthX Accelerator and Highway To 100 Unicorns Series

Anuscha Iqbal is the co-founder of Spotii, a Buy Now Pay Later startup based in Dubai, UAE. Anuscha has been working in the investments and private equity space for over a decade with The Abraaj Group.
Spotii has grown tremendously in the past one and a half year and recently has been acquired by Zip, a global BNPL leader from Australia.
In this episode, we speak with Anuscha about moving into fintech from a traditional finance background, about the initial days of setting up Spotii, the BNPL ecosystem and how it's evolving and finally the big news, the acquisition!

Anuscha and Spotii are a part of the Microsoft For Startups Middle East family! 

In this second episode, we have with us Gülşah Gülser, Founder, Quin AI. Gulsah is a strategy consultant with over 10 years of experience mainly in customer and deal strategy. She has worked in retail, e-commerce and travel & leisure and has engaged with leading local and global companies.

In this episode, we talk to her about e-commerce and the emerging small seller segment in developing economies, about how Quin is solving for them using AI and about the Turkish ecosystem. 

Jose Rubinger worked in the computer-sales industry in Brazil when he identified a global problem: lack of accessible technology for specially-abled children. A few years of research and many MVPs later, he founded Key2Enable, a technology startup that empowers children with disabilities, their parents, caretakers and teachers to accelerate the child's communication, assessment, monitoring, and learning process.
In this first episode of Innovators Unplugged, powered by Microsoft For Startups, Middle East, we talk to Jose about building his impact startup from Brazil to UAE, managing talent, capital and metrics and about the support he has received from various corporate programs.
Jose and Key2Enable are a part of the Microsoft For Startups, Middle East

Abhishek Goyal has worked at Yahoo and Amazon, joined Accel Partners and led Flipkart's first investment round in 2009. He then became an entrepreneur and started Tracxn in 2013, one of the largest private-market data and deal services platform, globally. Today, Tracxn is used by governments, corporates and VCs across the globe to track innovative companies and access data. 

In this episode, co-hosted by Vaibhav and Gaurav, Abhishek talks about his journey from corporate to VC and then to entrepreneurship. He talks about the famous Flipkart-Accel deal that made history in the country, about Tracxn and about the SaaS play in India. 

Peter Hopwood is an international speaking coach. He travels the world and coaches TEDx speakers, entrepreneurs and corporates on building smart habits for impactful communication and thinking.
In this episode, he talks about the foundational aspects of communication, insights on how to share powerful stories and build acute speaking and presence and about how charming founders sway deals! 

The hemp industry in India is one of the fastest growing industries with more states legalising cultivation of industrial hemp. There are a lot of myths and taboos around hemp, cannabis and marijuana in India. For this episode, we invited Rohit Shah, Co-Founder & CEO of Health Horizons, a vertically integrated hemp startup from India. Rohit came to India after working in US real estate and has pioneered hemp product manufacturing and distribution in India.
In this episode, we talk about this fast growing, highly regulated and misunderstood sector, about the cultivation of the hemp plant, production and benefits of these products. 

Dr. Marc Nassim is the Partner & Managing Director at Awad Capital, one of the top investment banks in the Middle-East region. Dr. Nassim holds a PhD. in Finance and has spent about two decades working and investing across sectors for family offices, sovereign funds and HNIs.
In this episode, Kushal and Vaibhav talk to him about the middle east investment landscape, the IB process of evaluating new deals, about getting into IB and crypto-currency.
To follow Dr. Marc Nassim: Twitter | LinkedIn

Dr. Srikanth is currently a General Partner at Ventureast, one of the oldest venture capital firms in India (started around 1997), and has raised and deployed about $400 Million USD. In the past, he has held the post of CTO for HCL and Cognizant and prior to that he was an entrepreneur. Srikanth also is a visiting professor at Indian School of Business and IIT Bhubaneshwar among a few other universities.

In this episode, we speak to him about the transition from being the CTO of large enterprise-tech businesses to being a venture investor, about the SaaS market in India and a bunch of other things he is passionate about (cricket!).

Shaun Gold, is a former nightlife ninja, where his business was creating and promoting the some of the most exclusive parties and events in Miami. He is a true polymath, has written 4 books, lectures at universities and currently, is starting up again, this time in the mental health space: The Youtopian Journey.
In this episode, we talk to Shaun about starting a nightclub in the pre-social media era, building relationships with some of the top celebrities and entrepreneurs in the US and about mental health (for entrepreneurs and millennials).
Check out Shaun's books here.

Alexandre Lazarow is a venture capitalist with Cathay Innovation, a global firm that invests across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America in a range of startups including Chime, Neon, Terminal, FinAccel, Zola, Rensource, Paga among others.
Previously, Alex worked with Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm.  He is also the author of 'Out-Innovate' published by Harvard Business Review Press in April 2020, where he talks about how global entrepreneurs are re-writing the rules of starting up.
In this episode, we dive deeper into Alex's experiences of investing in global startups, we talk about building unicorns vs. camels and some facets of how entrepreneurs can "out-innovate". 

Our guest for this episode is Charlie O'Donnell. Charlie is the sole Partner and Founder at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.  The fund makes seed and pre-seed investments and was the first venture firm located in Brooklyn - where Charlie was born and raised.  Brooklyn Bridge invested in the first rounds of The Wing, Canary, Hungryroot, Ample Hills, Clubhouse, Imagen, and goTenna among others. Charlie has a reputation for picking out great companies really early on, as he did with Twitter and Foursquare. He is one of only a dozen individuals to be named to Business Insider's 100 Most Influential People in NY Tech five or more times.
In this episode we talk to him about early 2000s, the dotcom crash, his experiences of raising money as a first-time fund manager and how he pitched to Limited Partners (LPs). This episode can be a great resource to listeners looking to break into the VC industry.
You can read more about Charlie, here and also read his blog: This Is Going To Be Big.

"The world is no more the same", is probably going to be the most overused phrase of the decade. Or is it? Our guest for this episode is Victor Cheng, a celebrated business coach to Inc. 500 CEOs and a bestselling author. Victor is a Stanford University graduate, a former McKinsey consultant, and also serves as an expert source for media outlets including TIME, Forbes, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. In this episode, we talk about navigating through the crisis, about mental models of problem solving, about growth in SaaS companies and a lot more. Here is a link to Victor's blogs: SaasCEO | CaseInterview and his business books.