Moonshot Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA)

Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer at Cloudflare, chats with Peak XV CMO Gayatri Yadav about building Cloudflare, the global powerhouse that stops 209 billion cyber threats a day.

In this conversation, Michelle reflects on the initial struggle to garner support for Cloudflare’s offerings and emphasizes the importance of perseverance, especially in the face of skepticism from potential investors, customers, and employees. She delves into why founders should listen to their own voice and not be deterred by doubters. Michelle also talks about Cloudflare’s approach to customer acquisition as well as the evolution of the company’s go-to-market strategy. While talking about the complexities of building and scaling a company, she also delves into the importance of hiring the right people, as well as the leadership principles that guide her.

Brands rarely interact directly with customers in the digital world, making it a challenge to create personalized customer experiences and retain clients. While working at a media company in 2013, Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas, and Suresh Kondamudi, were faced with the same problem. They struggled to find a product that could leverage data to meaningfully engage with customers. To address this gap, they set out to build CleverTap, an all-in-one customer engagement platform that leverages data, analytics, and automation to empower digital brands. In this episode of Moonshot, we speak with CleverTap's Anand and Sunil about what it takes for founders to build products that can adapt to changing markets.

Paying for things digitally is now a part of daily life – but this wasn’t always the case. In 2013, long before the reality of cashless payments had become the norm in many parts of India and the world, Amrish Rau co-founded Citrus Pay, an online payment provider built with a mobile-first focus. This was one of many ventures in his two-decades-long journey to pioneer India’s payment ecosystem in the digital age, culminating in his most recent appointment as CEO of Pine Labs. On this episode of Moonshot, Peak XV Managing Director, Shailendra Singh, speaks with Amrish about his early life and how it defined his approach to company-building, his transition from Citrus Pay to Pine Labs, and how building a company with a heart will help a startup as it scales.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are transforming the world of business intelligence and marketing. But before ‘AI’ became a buzzword, it was not easy to convince businesses that the technology could be a game changer for their enterprise. In 2012, Chih-Han Yu launched Appier with a vision to make AI accessible for all. That vision was tough to sell as it was a technology the world had yet to discover. In the years that followed, Appier pivoted many times on its mission to help companies adopt AI and big data to power business decision-making. On this episode of Moonshot, we speak to Appier co-founder and CEO Chih-Han Yu about what it takes to build a global AI-as-a-service company, and how he tapped on his team’s deep technical roots to build a product focused on customer-centricity.

The dawn of AI is upon us and Enterprise AI is finally getting its time in the sun. With more people experimenting with the likes of Chat GPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney, companies are also moving swiftly to implement AI tools to help them drive productivity and efficiency. One person who’s been building AI tools for over a decade is Ashwini Asokan. In 2013, she left her job as a designer at Intel and teamed up with her husband, Anand Chandrasekaran, a neuroscientist, to launch Mad Street Den, a computer vision and artificial intelligence company. On this episode of Moonshot, we chat with Ashwini about the current state of Enterprise AI, how Mad Street Den is setting itself apart from its competitors, and what it takes to build a global artificial intelligence company out of India.

“The best leaders and founders I’ve worked with have the ability to have conviction about a vision and an opinion, but also the ability to open up the decision or the moment and say, ‘OK, is there something I'm not thinking about?’ or ‘What could I have done differently?’” Claire Hughes Johnson draws on her experience leading and managing teams at Google and Stripe, and reflects on all things people management on this episode of Moonshot. Delving into insights published in her book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, Claire discusses the difference between leadership and management, how to build trust and set expectations with early hires, and how startup founders can effectively give and receive feedback.