100x Entrepreneur Siddhartha Ahluwalia

Founded in 2013, Portea Medical, India's Leading Home Health Care Company employes over 4000 people and covers 40+ cities in India doing 1,50,000+ home visits every month.


Portea has also helped about 5,00,000 COVID-19 patients, working with seven different cities and state governments, including Delhi, Mumbai, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Chennai, Bengaluru and all of Karnataka. 


Meena Ganesh, Chairperson and Co-Founder, Portea Medical is one of India’s most celebrated entrepreneurs and business leaders.  She sits on the boards of numerous firms like Axis Bank, and has a string of start-up successes to her credit. She co-founded her first company, Customer Asset, in 2000 and later on sold it to ICICI. Then came TutorVista, which she ran successfully till it was acquired by British publishing giant Pearson. 


Before founding Portea, Meena also served Pearson India as the chief executive officer and managing director. 


With her incredible career and achievements, she also became part of Fortune India’s ‘50 Most Powerful Women in Indian Business’ from 2015 to 2021.


In today’s episode, we talk with Meena about her entrepreneurial journey so far, learnings from building a healthcare startup in India and why even getting two large exists previously, she still thinks that journey with her third venture Portea is the most satisfying in terms of learnings. 



Notes - 
01:36 - Intro
02:04 - Family background & what got Meena into entrepreneurship
08:02 - Brainstorming Ideas during the conception of Portea
12:46 - Milestones after Series A till date
17:53 - Her thoughts on the notion that - “It’s difficult to create money from healthcare & health-tech startups”
21:36 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?
22:37 - How has the pricing model evolved at Portea?
24:06 - Learnings from building in healthcare in India
27:14 - How has she grown as a founder during her entrepreneurial journey?
30:04 - Her fundraising journey at Portea
30:33 - Balancing investor-founder relation over the course of a startup’s journey
32:07 - Managing her time between GrowthStory, Portea and home


Also, try out a 30-day free trial of Zoho Payroll, and simplify your Payroll journey as an entrepreneur!






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In startup ecosystem a lot of people talk about Category creating startups, but it is equally difficult and as it sounds glamorous and exciting. 




That’s possibly the reason why we don’t see a lot such Category creating startups around us very frequently. And even if they do come up, they don’t sustain very long. 




In today’s episode we are talking with Vijay Arisetty, Founder, MyGate, i.e. a category creating startup in its space. 




As of now MyGate cators to almost 4 Million+ homes across India. It is very likely that you would have interacted with MyGate directly, as its installed in your society or indirectly probably when you would have visited to meet a friend or family in a gated community, and you would have experienced the seamless flow it brings to gates of these gated communities.




During the episode, catch Vijay sharing what all challenges and opportunities did they come across being a category creating startup in terms of hiring, what to offer to its customers, how to monetize better and much more. 




Notes - 


01:51 - Intro


03:11 - Family Background and joining the Armed Forces


06:55 - His first startup - PurpleRoad in the Delivery space


08:19 - Aha moment which led to starting MyGate?


11:53 - Final Scale with his logistics startup and initial scale at MyGate before first funding


14:48 - Challenges during the first funding round being a category creator


21:25 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?


23:13 - Current and operationally capable scale of MyGate


24:56 - Evolution of monetary channels


29:48 - Challenges during their 0 to 1 journey and then in 1 to 10 journey


37:36 - Existential crisis prior to first round of funding


42:13 - Journey from Series A to Series B and beyond


44:55 - How were the two years of Covid for MyGate?


49:02 - Similarities between being in the Armed Forces and being an Entrepreneur


54:08 - 30 Million homes untapped market by MyGate



Also, try out a 30-day free trial of Zoho Payroll, and simplify your Payroll journey as an entrepreneur!





https://zoho.to/zoho-payroll

In Sales the stakes are high. And for company’s growth it is important to get it right.


Thanks to multiple options of Sales engagement softwares which streamlines the sales process through integrations which enables companies to combine their sales and marketing efforts to create personalized and automated sales journeys.


In today's episode of 100x Entrepreneur, we have with us Yamini Bhat, Co-founder & CEO, Vymo; i.e An intelligent sales engagement platform for financial institutions.


Started in 2013, Vymo is used by 300,000+ Sales Reps across 65+ Enterprises such as HDFC Bank, SBI Life Insurance, and Sun Life Financial among others.


While most SaaS startups go global from Day 1, Vymo is one of the few Indian SaaS companies which scaled to more than $10M ARR with India Enterprises as clients.


During the episode, catch Yamini sharing why did they chose to focus on BFSI, how did they brought awareness for both their team and customers about their product and much more. 


Notes - 
01:33 - Intro
03:05 - Career background in Sales Transformation at Mckinsey which led her to Vymo
06:48 - Family background and getting into BITS Pilani & IIM Bangalore?
14:58 - Quitting Mckinsey and identifying the problem statement to startup
17:29 - Till Series-A being focused on a horizontal solution
20:53 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?
23:04 - Milestones during Vymo’s journey
26:26 - Key challenges with team and customers early-on
28:56 - Convincing the first few BFSI customers for an average contract value of $350K
31:54 - Building a SaaS behemoth from India and then expanding globally
36:16 - Her 0 to $10 Million ARR playbook for SaaS-entrepreneurs in India


Also, try out a 30-day free trial of Zoho Payroll, and simplify your Payroll journey as an entrepreneur!


https://zoho.to/zoho-payroll

As per a recent article,“About 60% of companies that reach pre-series A funding fail to make it to Series A, so the success rate is only 30%-40%.”


Infact if you check on Crunchbase, in India you’ll find 4300+ startups at Pre-seed or Seed-stage, but only 600+ out of them have managed to reach Series-A, which bring the success rate to even lower at just 15%. 
 
Apart from this, even in the entire Indian startup ecosystem, there are so many Product Managers, Ex-founders, and many more, who either have an idea around a Problem-statement, but don’t know how to proceed or there are students in college, who are amazed by the startup ecosystem, and want to take their early step, but afraid on how to take the next step. 


In order to solve this we have with us our guest of this episode, Rajiv Srivatsa & Nitin Sharma, Antler India. 


Antler unlike most VC firms bets on the startup ideas at Pre-seed stage with their Antler India Residency or in some cases even earlier with college students via Antler India Fellowship.


During the episode, catch Rajiv & Nitin sharing their First Principles approach and what infrastructure they are building at Antler India to make the founders succeed considering the time constraints at Pre-seed stage and much more. 


Notes - 
03:50 - Intro
04:44 - Why did they choose to build Antler India? 
09:35 - How did Antler happen? 
12:02 - Why kind of institutional mindset do they bring in? 
16:18 - How do they balance the equation of a Founder’s optimism & a VC’s pessimism between them?
18:22 - Background around Antler’s India Portfolio over the last 18+ months
22:08 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?
23:47 - What’s their approach and what’s the general cheque size? 
29:48 - Learnings from the Ups & Downs in Urban Ladder Journey
33:28 - Focusing on building around core foundational use-cases during times of crisis
38:18 - Keeping founders from falling in love with the product and not the actual problem-story
42:12 - Examples of building PeakPerformer & Bookee with Antler
46:47 - How & when do founders get distracted after funding?
50:08 - When do founders have the best chances of succeeding at Seed-stage?


Also, try out a 30-day free trial of Zoho Payroll, and simplify your Payroll journey as an entrepreneur!


https://zoho.to/zoho-payroll

Varun Mayya was in college when he along with his friends started up a t-shirt manufacturing business called SIZR. Later on, he went into building a recruitment platform, Jobspire. And they were one of the youngest teams to raise venture capital of Rs 1.7 crore even before they graduated, and scaled the company to serve 4 million requests in 2016. In 2017, they sold Jobspire to a New York-based company.


Varun also authored a book named Pyjama Profit which is a guide for millennials to get started with an online freelance practice, while developing the skills needed to succeed.


Along with running a youtube channel, Varun also co-founded Scenes, a community platform for creators to manage, moderate, and monetize their communities in one place. 

Scenes has raised funds from some notable investors including Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Tanmay Bhat as well Tanglin Ventures, Better Capital, Whiteboard Capital, iSeed Ventures, and Blume Founders Fund.


Tune in to this insightful episode with Varun to learn about building a brand, processes around content creation, and leveraging your youtube channel to scale your business. 

Notes – 
03:10 – Intro
04:05 – His journey before entrepreneurship
06:49 – Getting introduced to oDesk (now Upwork) via his mother and earning his first $100
09:10 – Starting a visual version of Naukri in fourth year of college
11:09 – Writing an Amazon Bestseller Book – “Pyjama Profit: The Millennial’s Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career” 
12:48 – Starting Avalon Scenes
18:07 – Two rounds of funding for building a community space
19:22 – Top clients and why do they use Scenes?
22:11 – Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?
24:09 – What excites him the most about Scenes? 
26:40 – Solving a problem really well v/s Building a large business
28:41 – What’s their longterm goal with Scenes? 
33:02 – Can Scenes eventually replace Discord? 
34:36 – Why he continues to a creator with Scenes growing? 
41:25 – Learnings on YouTube and Twitter around content creation
46:15 – One of his best videos on YouTube
52:44 – “I think we live in a trust-deficient economy and content is the only way to beat it.”
 
Also, try out a 30-day free trial of Zoho Payroll, and simplify your Payroll journey as an entrepreneur!

https://zoho.to/zoho-payroll

According to a recent article in Forbes, as per data of ProductLedGrowth.org,“Buyers want to self-educate.” 


Personalization is expected by customers—not only are 80% of people more likely to do business with a company that offers personalization but Salesforce’s 2017 State of Marketing Report found that 52% of B2C customers would actually switch brands if they weren’t getting a personalized experience. 


In today’s episode we’ve some Dheeraj Pandey, CEO at DevRev; Board Member at Adobe; Investor & Co-founder at Nutanix. 


During the episode, catch Dheeraj sharing his experience around Product-Led Growth over the past two decades, taking Nutanix Inc. public within 6 years of inceptio and much more. 


Notes - 
01:44 - Intro
02:26 - Achieving Product Market Fit - “What is the journey is not a destination.”
05:15 - Identifying the problem statement for first 10 customer at Nutanix
07:54 - Main value prop by Nutanix for early customers
10:11 - How to identify large problems?
13:22 - Whether to find a niche problem and then expand or find a problem statement of the larger market?
15:07 - What’s the first Aha moment for customers on DevRev?
20:04 - Zoho Sponsored - Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?
21:18 - Why have Startups as the target audience v/s Large Entreprises?
27:10 - History of Product-led growth
32:50 - First principle thought behind Product-led growth with velocity
37:49 - Customer Relationship Management v/s Sales First Automation
39:07 - How a B2B developer can think like a B2C developer?
40:23 - What are risks of failure they need to think about?
41:40 - Building an entrepreneurial culture
43:47 - Dealing with the most difficult part of an acquisition (i.e. Integration)
45:38 - An early childhood in Patna, graduating from IIT Kanpur & Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas
50:33 - Why did he chose to startup in a downturn of 2009?
54:07 - Milestones in Nutanix’s journey
58:31 - Becoming a Public company
59:58 - Aspirations for DevRev
1:02:29 - What kind of person he is in his personal life?

Also, try out a 30-day free trial of Zoho Payroll, and simplify your Payroll journey as an entrepreneur!

https://zoho.to/zoho-payroll