Scaling Technology Startups | Anand Deshpande | Candid Conversations | #venturecenterpune

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:02]Check.

[00:00:03]>> Just connect.

[00:00:06]>> You have a slides on. I can check.

[00:00:10]>> This is next.

[00:00:11]>> Yeah.

[00:00:12]>> Previous and the center one is.

[00:00:15]>> So I'll keep the pointer here.

[00:00:19]>> Not the first. Yeah, I can connect my laptop or I got out.

[00:04:57]underneath.

[00:05:17]Okay.

[00:05:29]Hello. Hello. Hello.

[00:05:34]Hello. Hello.

[00:05:42]Hello. Hello. Check. Check. Hello.

[00:05:48]Hello. Hello.

[00:06:00]Hello.

[00:06:04]Hello.

[00:06:23]Okay.

[00:11:34]Thank you, sir.

[00:11:54]Uh good evening all. Uh uh let us just give uh uh the rest of our people who are joining us another five minutes. Uh we really are grateful to all of you who have joined us on time but just let us give another five minutes to all those who are still joining in. Yeah. Thank you.

[00:12:17]Do you want to see it?

[00:12:31]>> That's okay.

[00:13:38]Keep me. Keep me.

[00:15:17]Prati on this side.

[00:15:57]Check and give. Okay.

[00:16:22]Q&A.

[00:16:24]The display will go up, but mic work.

[00:16:36]Check for Connect up Night soon.

[00:18:28]Should we get started?

[00:18:46]Okay, good evening to all of you here who who are present here on this extraordinary evening. Uh, no one thought that you know we would be able to brave the rains and thunderstorms and be here today. So, thank you very much.

[00:18:59]We are very delighted to have all of you present here today for this wonderful evening. Uh, my name is Niha and my colleague Pinky and I will be the host for today's program.

[00:19:09]Before we begin, we would like to take a moment to share the agenda for the evening. We will begin with a brief introduction about venture center followed by a talk by Dr. Anandh Pande on scaling technology startups given his deep experience in building and scaling technology led organizations. We look forward to this insights especially in the context of today's occasion the launch of canod 2. Following the talk we will be launching category 2 and we will conclude the evening with networking and refreshments and we probably request all of you to stay back with this I would like to now invite on stage to briefly introduce venture center followed by Dr. Premnath to introduce Dr. Pandi. Thank you.

[00:20:17]Uh good afternoon everyone. Let me take a few moments to introduce you to Venture Center especially those who are hearing us for the first time. So, Venture Center is a section 8 not for-profit entity incorporated as entrepreneurship development center in 2007 hosted by CSI National Chemical Laboratory the campus that you are today located and first incubator at the CSR ecosystem and we are an approved incubator of DST, DBT, U ministry of defense and Maharashtra state government. So about venture center um our mission is simple but very ambitious. We wish to nucleate and nurture worldleading inventive ventures emerging out of India that solve the world's most pressing problems with science and technology-led interpreions and we work with startups that are working in the domains of health and rehabilitation, energy, environment, engineering, automation, agro food and nutrition. Our work over the years have been recognized by various government and other agencies across the world. But the three marky ones that I have listed here are from the ministries. one for the best incubator, one for the best entrepreneurship award and the best incubator for nurturing IP award. Let me also talk give you a sense of the impact of the ecosystem. Right. So we have supported about thousand startups since our inception among which 300 plus startups have been operating physically from our campus. Over the years the startups that have been part of our active incubation program in a decade they have raised about,100 crores of risk capital including the grants and investment about 3,400 plus of revenue generation supported 2,600 uh jobs but what we take most proud is in our founders background. They all come from very renowned universities and they have very strong academic profile as well as professional credentials. 30% of our all founders are women which is way above the global average of women entrepreneurship today. 85% of our startups are still active and we take pride in having a great IP strength in our startup technologies as well. And this talks about that this particular ecosystem is no longer experimental.

[00:22:19]This is already globally competitive.

[00:22:22]Our ecosystem is able to support the startups in their entire innovation journey. Starting from deep touch mentoring, access to fellowships, access to the funding and continuity of funding including fellowships, grants, investments, they can set up their facilities in Venture Center campus and a gamut of specialized and state-of-the-art facilities especially in the domains of medtech, pharma, food nutrition, sustainability and supporting infrastructure like regulatory, tech transfer, IP all in the same campus and there are large national programs that we are also part of and supporting us throughout our journey. So uh for the startups starting with the preparation to all the way marketing and scaling at different stages for different startups we do have a gamut of program understanding that startups at different domain and stages require the different kinds of support and just to highlight that towards the scaling we actually facilitate a deep engagement with investor community as well as community partnerships with the global uh facilitating global uh ecosystem players as well. This is an incubity snapshot on who we have supported so far. As you can see the majority of our startups are working today in healthcare domain encompassing medical devices, diagnostics and therapeutics. But there's a great momentum happening in the sustainability area as well including energy, climate change and other domains. Agro food and nutrition also happens to be an important vertical and engineering automation and other ecosystem players also strengthening our overall support for the startups. These are could not have been possible without the great support from our mentors, our collaborators including the government support including the corporate support and all the other collaborators and mentors who have been supporting us throughout our journey. So with this thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:24:02]If any of you wish to know more about venture center and how we can support you, me and my colleague are there in the event. Please feel free to contact us and some of the details of our contact coordinates are over here. With this I stop here and I now would like to welcome Dr. Premak founder director venture center to take this particular event ahead and take it to the next segment of the event.

[00:24:36]Okay. Well, uh first of all Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:39]Please. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:07]This one.

[00:25:13]>> No, it's not.

[00:25:24]Okay, welcome everybody and thank you very much uh for being here uh despite all the thunder and rain that we had just now but uh I think you will you will uh uh you will you're going to hear something very inspiring and interesting. So uh it'll make up for all your efforts I'm sure. uh this year is uh actually venture cent's 20th year uh and on 18th December we'll finish 20 years and this has been of course for us our zero to one and one to 100 kind of a journey for venture center and now the task for us in front of us is to look at how do we go from 100 to thousand and 10,000 right um at the same time you know all these years we have been actually working with startups like many of you here. Uh and we are focused on your 0 to one journey. That means first sale that you have from zero to the first sale and then from one to 100 uh journeys in many of your cases as well.

[00:26:30]Uh and many of you are at a stage uh where uh you probably are now going to think about scaling your business to the next level, right? Uh and this of course is important because it's when you scale that you really have the financial and the soio economic impact that you might be eyeing as well and many of your journeys have uh already been featured in candid one and today we'll be uh releasing candid 2 which will have many more uh such stories as well and this scaling journey is what is today's uh the topic of today's talk by Dr. Anandesh Mande uh the topic is scaling technology startups as you see here and I'm very grateful uh to him for agreeing to be here as well. I just wanted to give a quick introduction uh but I don't want it to be very short so forgive me for it. In a recent uh interview, persistent uh Anand mentioned that persistent is in the sixth orbit right now. And for many of us in we who are in the first orbit, we would like to learn from him on how to get to the second orbit right and that's the purpose of today's uh talk as well. Um Anand Deshpad is a founder, chairman and managing director of persistent systems.

[00:27:45]He founded this company in 1990 and uh as of today uh his market cap of the company is around $8 billion. Uh he's been a key contributor to not only uh to many industry associations as well while pursuing his journey in the industry. Um Anand has also set up several nonprofit organizations and contributed to it as founding members. I'll just mention a few. One is the Indian cancer genome atlas which is a which is a multiomix database of cancers prevalent in Indian population. Second is deasra which is a foundation which is focused on promoting what he calls nano entrepreneurship grassroots entrepreneurs in society and of course persistent foundation which supports a variety of social causes as well. Uh many of you may not be aware uh that Anand is also the co-chair of brick which is the equivalent of CSIR uh of DBT right uh he uh is uh part of the uh governing body and he's also very passionate about PhD students postocs and scientistled startups recently uh in under DBT BRAAK um you know there's been a new program called entrepreneur residence program which joint joint funding from Bira and a variety of venture capital firms uh to advance DBT technologies to startups and that is something which is his brainchild and he has come up with it and we are all uh keen to see how that that will scale up in the future as well. Uh he's also a very passionate teacher and mentor. He's been one of the driving forces behind the second orbit program for entrepreneurs wanting to scale up and he's been teaching in Pune. But he's also an adjunct professor of practice at the Desaiet school of entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay. Uh recently you must have also heard of the RDIF uh which is the government's one lakh cr uh fund right.

[00:29:42]Um so Anand is also on the IC of that fund for TDB technology development board which is uh which has already announced a whole uh range of companies which uh they're considering for support. Anand is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Karakpur and holds an MS and PhD in computer science from Indiana University uh in the US. And with that with these introduc words of introduction I welcome Anand to kindly uh start his talk and tell us about scaling.

[00:30:29]Hello.

[00:30:47]>> Okay, now.

[00:30:48]>> Yeah, it's too loud.

[00:30:51]Okay, let's see how it goes. I'm just putting this on my bed because if it gets too hot, I want to remove my coat.

[00:31:01]All right, let's do one last thing and then uh Okay, so a lot of people ask for slides. Okay, so you can download your slides from here. If you take a photo, you should be able to do it. I'm going to try one more thing if it works because I think uh it may be easier for me to talk to you if I'm here rather than on stage because I think I can see you and I can move around better. Um yeah, we'll check it. Yeah.

[00:31:31]All right. So, um it's a form out there when you go hit this later form and I'm collecting who collects slides, you know. So I just want to know cuz a lot of people ask for them. I just sort of direct them to a website and then they can download it and if they get they fill in two lines they will get the slides. Okay. So it's not very complicated. So I'm happy to give them away. Okay. And uh first I would like to thank uh I'll skip through this because uh I would like to thank uh brainless for inviting me here. It's a pleasure to be here at this uh venture center where you know we've been a frequent visitor off and on for various things and I've known Premat for many years now and it's I'm very impressed with the work that is going on at venture center and it's good to see so many of you here at this event and uh with the new book I'm sure all of you are very excited about the book so I'm going to use my time efficiently so that you get a chance to uh hear the book and other details that are the main function for today anyway. way. So, first thanks a lot for inviting me. Uh, so this was the first book and these were the companies that are in there. I think some of you are here. Let's give them a nice ovation for their contribution. And we move on to the next one which these are the names which is on the website. So this is public information. I did not read the book yet. But good to see I'm sure some of you are here as well. So when you do an event like this 32 companies are captive they will show up.

[00:33:07]So it's good to see that. So congratulations to all of you for making the book and uh Premat mentioned or not Premat but somebody else mentioned that we have thousand companies that have been part of it. So just to get that uh right and that's sort of where you are as I see it. So today's plan I'm going to talk about three most important things in my opinion which are very essential for tech companies. So I'm going to talk about sales.

[00:33:34]Then I'm going to talk about teams and then I'm going to give you a little bit of context on funding. Okay? Because I think these three things become very critical for tech startup companies. And just so that you know when I'm going to end, I have three ideas that I'm going to share with you on sales. I'm going to share two ideas on teams and one idea on funding and we have about 40 minutes is what I've budgeted. So that's my plan.

[00:34:01]Okay. So if you feel there's something more you need, we can do Q&A and we can talk about it. But I'm quite open to taking interruptions or questions from you. I have I have the ability to move fast if I have to. But I don't want you to feel like you are missing something.

[00:34:18]The intention of this session is so that you can take something with you and put it to work. Right? So I want to start with this first thing that customers do not buy technology.

[00:34:29]They buy a solution for their problems.

[00:34:31]Okay? So that is the most important thing. And what I find is when I meet technology companies, if you ask them what they do, they will talk about the technology that they are building. And very few really try to explain what they're what what is the problem that they are solve. And this gap basically means the first set of people who are the pre-casm companies they are happy to buy technology but when it starts to hit the market you want to sell something that solves a problem. So this is a very famous case study that I thought I should share with and I'm going to do a little bit of a theory to follow up on that. So this case study is from Gen G in their MRI division and they found that they had built this very fancy MRI which had all the best technology parameters but the product was not moving in the market because you know when you are starting to compare you know looks at buying technology. So they were trying to find out how to make it useful how can I convince someone to buy it and all of that and uh they were looking for innovative ways to make that happen. So I found two case studies on this uh online. One is to do with the fact that when they moved from selling uh solutions such as how can the hospitals get patients in and out quickly, how can you run many cases during the day? How can you sort of improve the efficiency, hence help the hospitals make more money? All of those kinds of things when they started to emphasize they realized that they could sell the machine. Just selling technology is a very hard thing to do.

[00:36:05]Right? So this is an important point that I wanted to make and while they were doing this they also realized that one of the problems that they have is sometimes children a lot of times children are also required to go through this MRI machine and when they go through it this is very intimidating beast it's kind of uh and you have to stay still for some period of time and the kid moves and all of a sudden you have to start again and all that. So they created this thing called the adventure series which is kind of a classic one in terms of the design thinking world that they use. So they said that instead of making the MRI machine feel and look like a machine which is a medical device they sort of made a game out of it. So you know typically they give you a headset or something to look at where you can see the television screen or whatever. So you can choose a scenario whether you are trying to play some pirates or jungle adventure or whatever else. So the kids now have a very different point of view on the thing. So they're not selling technology, they are solving a problem, right? So this is really what you need to do. And I'm sure all of you should try to think about your products as to what problems you are trying to solve rather than talking about the technology as such. Now one of the theories that I like a lot, I like this guy quite a bit. He writes good stuff.

[00:37:24]His name is Clayton Christensen. He's no more. But he's a very amazing guy. He has written many books on this topic.

[00:37:31]But this particular article that I'm going to share with you is from uh Harvard Business Review. It is called it has to do with something called jobs to be done. And if you look for this whole thing as JTBD online, you should be able to find many references to his work and subsequently how he thinks about people mean you are a technology company. How should you think about solving the problem that you are trying to solve. So his point that he makes here is that the customers hire the technology to get a job done.

[00:38:05]So if you can identify what is the problem for which they are hiring your technology then that much easier for you to convince somebody to buy your product. So identifying that job that the customer wants to get done is really important. So in the X-ray sorry the MRI machine that we talked about the hospital is interested in trying to get as many MRIs done because that is the source of revenue throughput all those kinds of things are very important to them. The technology whether it is this Tesla or something here and there is useful for the doctors and the quality of the medicine but it is not the most important thing for those who are making buying decisions. For those who are buying deci making buying decisions, they have a very different point of view. So this is how you know you have to identify where what job are you trying to use using this particular technology of yours that you're trying to build. And this particular article has a very interesting example that he uses and I want to just share this example that he talks about. So Clayton Christensen is from MIT and all these guys have uh in addition to uh their teaching job they also have consulting gigs that they do with companies. So he was consulting with one food company which is he does not name but it's all yellow so you know who it is and they talk about this particular milkshake that they wanted to introduce in the US for that company. And there people who were introducing that milkshake thought that this milkshake is a good dessert.

[00:39:41]So people who are uh in a family they will come have burgers and order milkshakes. But what they actually found is that the milkshake was getting sold in the morning between 7:30 and 9:00 in the morning. One individual would drive in, buy a milkshake, buy nothing else and go on. Right? So it said this seems a little unusual what's going on. So they sat and sat and observed what is going on and they realized that people who are coming in to buy milkshakes are actually handing the job of breakfast to milkshake. Okay? Because you know they are commuting if they have to go 40 minutes whatever you need something that will last. You haven't had breakfast has this pseudo feeling that you're eating healthy. you have milk in it or some sugar, but all the same it feels like it's better than eating a donut where it sort of falls on your thing or it's very sweet or the bagel or whatever they might have or let's say you eat a candy bar and then you feel like oh I've eaten chocolate in the morning. So all of these reasons is why they found it and then they realized that the ice concentration of what they wanted to put in the milkshake was such that it should last 30 minutes because you're going to drink slowly and if you if it goes away very quickly then you will not have it.

[00:40:57]So you know you'll find unusual reasons why people make these decisions about buying technology but understanding reason why people are buying what problem are you trying to solve is the critical part to build when you look at technology that you are building. Am I are you with me? Any questions if you have we can uh take it. But so this is the first point I want to make that is uh customers are not buying technology they want solution to their problem. So as long as your technology is solving a problem that they want to solve then you are in game. But if you build something, if you're not able to identify the problem you are trying to solve, then building a technology for building the sake of for the sake of technology will not get you customers. Of course, you can build it there. There may be ways to a lot of people I find you know especially the startup community that I talk to a lot of them build technology because that's what they have done. They did a PhD in that area. So they have built something and they don't think about how it's going to get used. It's just that I can build it so I build it.

[00:42:06]Right? That is not going to get you customers and you can't scale because of that. So this is the first thing. The second case study that I want to share with you is about paper boat and uh and I will give you the what I what is the reason that I'm trying to share here. But uh paperboard has a very interesting way of how it was introduced and I want to talk about product segmentation in the context of paperboard. Okay. So if you if you saw how paperboard came into the market uh they did not start out. So this market predominantly the cold drink market is highly dominated by globally by Pepsi and Coke and even in India they have bought everything else. So Pepsi and Coke pretty much drive the world and most of that market is driven by an orange drink or a black drink. Basically some cola or an orange, right? So it's a combination of those kinds of things that pretty much dominate the market. So if paper boat comes out and sells a paper boat cola or a paper bolt orange, they would have to compete head-on with the guys from uh Coke and Pepsi. It's a very difficult market. They have too much money and they can lead you off very quickly. So it's not going to work very well. So they had to create something different and completely unique because otherwise if they were to sell it just like another product they would not have one. So what did they do?

[00:43:29]Say they first started out with if you look at the packaging it's quite un it has a story on it saying that it reminds you of uh your you know whatever bachana and all this stuff they talk about. So they are trying to sell to an emotion rather than trying to sell the product.

[00:43:46]And they sold these flavors which were very Indian. Sorry I think. Okay. So they uh they sold all these very unique flavors which were very Indian but not necessarily competing with Pepsi and this thing Nimu pani ampana things like that. So they they started out with those. The packaging was quite memorable in the sense they did not use a bottle.

[00:44:10]They used a slightly different package to make this happen. And the interesting thing is I don't know if you know how did they first sell the product. Do you know? Yeah. They sort of gave it through Indigo. So they had a partnership with Indigo and you would get paperboard drinks on Indigo. They sold them on Indigo and they were not available in the market. So people would fly on Indigo and carry that paper thing or ask for it or buy it and they sort of built a brand amongst the middlecl class Indians who are paper boat users who were the clientele that they wanted to go after. So the so this is pretty much what they did. They started small with a very clear focus and then they went after doing what they did and now today you can they have many products now including the orange and other things and you can get variations of this in the market quite easily now. So many stores carry many paperboard products okay so so you start from somewhere and then try to create a niche. So I'm going to use this story to explain to you that all the big companies also they start with a niche. So here's the theory that I want to explain to you. So in a startup or in a company of your size, your biggest challenge is your sales team. Your you it is very difficult for small businesses to push sales up. You want sales to come to you. You want people to come to you for buying product rather than you having to sell to them.

[00:45:40]Now if you think about how buyers decide which product to buy, they go for leaders in the market.

[00:45:46]And there's a theory that any market the top three leaders pretty much get 80% of the market share and the rest of the market is dominated by or rather not dominated but distributed by lots of hundreds of thousands of small companies. But the top three companies pretty much get the market share. Now if you look at this theory, this is written about in the context of very large companies. So you talk about telecom, we had many players, now it's down to three. But there's two plus one in some sense, right? And if you look at airlines again, the same thing has happened. You have indigo and then little bit of Air India and then others are all kind of not sure who's going to make it. But these markets kind of cluster into two or three areas. Now what should you do when you are a small company? You are starting out a paper board. You're not going to go after the market of Coke and Pepsi where you have two dominant players already, right? So you have to define your segment in such a way that you can be a leader in that segment. So Coke and Pepsi are leaders in the drinks category but paper boat is a leader in the nimup pani category or aana category or traditional drink category. So the choice of the the category that you want to play is up to you. But choosing that category correctly so that you can be considered the leader in that market is the key to getting success in that market. If you are just one of many then it is very hard to win in the market. So my theory is that if you can be 20% market share in any market then you will automatically be a leader because 20% means you're one of five.

[00:47:27]Most likely you're one of three. But now let's say you're running a 5 crore business right and let's say you aspire to be whatever 20 crores and you want to be 20% market share. Unless you have clarity on defining the market of 100 crores you cannot be a leader in the market. So if somebody comes to me and says it's a billion dollar market I'm going to get a percentage out of it.

[00:47:51]That doesn't work like that. You'll get a zero out of that. If you want to be a leader in the market you have to define the market very carefully.

[00:48:00]Okay, this is a very important thing for people to understand because uh for small businesses, your biggest challenge is your sales teams. You cannot hire as many people as Coke and Pepsi can hire.

[00:48:13]Just not possible. So, you have to have something unique and different so that you are not competing with the Coke and Pepsi on the Coke and Pepsi battlefield, right? You have to find your turf. You have to win in your turf. And if you can define the turf very clearly then the buyers in that area will know that they are part of that game. If I'm a buyer and I'm looking for Nimbu Pani then I know I have to go to Pepsi uh to sorry to paper board. So like this if you can identify the group that you are trying to go after the market segment that you are in then you know who the buyers are how to sell to them and all of that then you have a much better chance of success. If you go after a large market and say I'm a, you know, I'm just a player in there, you will actually get wiped out. So defining this market clearly is the key to success for any company. I always believe that unless you are a leader in the market, you will not succeed. And who defines leadership?

[00:49:13]The market defines leadership. But who defines the market? You define the market. So defining that market clearly is the key to success. And this is not easy to do. And it's very important to do can segment the market many many different ways. So if you said cola it's a huge market but they picked a niche in there. If you looked at say for example amazon.com they started out with books.

[00:49:39]You build your niche then you expand right? So this is how they did it. Now one of the things that this also does is that it also helps you identify how your sales team is set up. And this is a common theme that people talk a lot about is whether you are selling elephants or you're selling rabbits.

[00:49:55]Okay? If you are selling rabbits, you need a team that sells rabbits.

[00:50:00]You can't use an elephant team to sell rabbits. On the other hand, you cannot use a rabbit team to sell elephants, right? So once you know what your product is, what is the solution that you are building, then you can build your team that aligns with the product that you are building. Now, let me explain what rabbits and elephants really mean in a corporate context, at least for us. If I'm trying to look for a deal that is in millions of dollars, that is for me an elephant deal. That is very different from a $10,000 deal. If I have to do a $10,000 deal, I cannot afford to have a human physical person go sell and all that. If I have a $10,000 product, I should do productled growth, PLG or something like that.

[00:50:41]People should try and buy feel like I got it and then you have very limited sales team in the beginning and then you go expand it. However, if I expect to make a million dollar deal, it's not going to happen through this model. So, understanding where your product is selling and then building that sales team that aligns with your product is the key to success. For all of this stuff, it is very important to have clear idea of your market segment and you are the ones who will define it. Any questions?

[00:51:14]>> Yeah.

[00:51:20]>> Yeah, it could be an important one.

[00:51:21]Social media influencers are very useful today in certain set of products. And the reason that becomes important is again they play in a segment. When a certain social media influencer let's say is interested in a certain area, let's say you take a cricket influencer.

[00:51:37]If he's going to influence you on something completely unrelated, it may not be the right one. But if you are selling cricket kit or something like that, they saying it because the audience is segmented by them. It often helps. But even if you have to do marketing, you cannot just randomly market to everyone. That is possible for large companies. For small companies, you have to pick your game. So identifying where your product is to win is very critical because then you know who the market is, you know who the buyers are and all of those kind of things. Okay.

[00:52:08]>> Sir, I wanted to add one more point to the paper boat thing you mentioned. They also used to give tind. So that reminded us of paper boat again when we went back home.

[00:52:18]>> Yeah.

[00:52:19]>> Okay. Let me keep moving.

[00:52:21]So the third related to this uh one important thing to know is that you know if you are a very small business you cannot create a new market.

[00:52:32]Lot of people believe that oh I'm going to make this earthshattering game and I'm going to make my own market and I'm going to define a completely new market.

[00:52:40]If you have to define a completely new market you need a lot of money and then you are not a tech startup.

[00:52:46]It's a very different game altogether.

[00:52:48]So you are better off going with the wave and riding with the wave. And here I would like to give this story that I tell everyone is that you have to do the ride the buffalo strategy.

[00:53:00]Let me explain what I mean by the ride the buffalo strategy. Now in India it's kind of everyone knows what the buffalo is and you have seen them. Now you imagine that you are a small fly. Okay.

[00:53:12]And if you look at the buffalo very carefully the picture doesn't show it but there are lots of flies around the buffalo. You're one of those. Okay? And your goal is to go with the buffalo.

[00:53:22]Find the buffalo and go where the buffalo goes. Okay? Don't try to tell the buffalo where to go. You cannot win that game, right? You have to go with the buffalo. Now, if you don't like that buffalo, it's not going where it needs to go. Find another buffalo to go to.

[00:53:38]But don't try to lead the buffalo.

[00:53:41]It's not going anywhere. So if you are a small company, okay, you want to go somewhere, find a buffalo and ride with it rather than trying to create your own new market, all that stuff is very expensive, very hard, very difficult, very hard to create a new segment. When somebody is buying, they don't know what segment they are buying. And if you have to go to the meeting and spend the first 40 50% of your time trying to explain them to them the market and then tell them what you do, you've already lost their game.

[00:54:11]People are already buying things. you need to just kind of go along with it, right? So if you have some new algorithm that can improve the MRI quality, partner with G, make sure you have a G thing, then I'll sit in it. So something like that, you need to find your buffalo. If you find your buffalo, then you can do it. Now once you get really big as a fly, you can eat the buffalo if you want, but that will take some time.

[00:54:34]Okay? So that's the eat the elephant strategy, but u that takes a little bit of time to get there. Okay.

[00:54:42]>> Yeah.

[00:54:45]>> Just ask your question sir. What is the best strategy to find a new problem for a solution or already find an efficient one for a problem existing solution. Find the customer who is looking for a problem solve it. Okay, that's the solution because somebody solves your problem. So find a customer is the thing. Now how do I find a new customer is very difficult. If I have a buffalo then the buffalo is going to find customers. If I can tag along with them then you'll get some good stuff with it. Now this is the the three sales ideas that I wanted to share with you. Now I want to give you two team ideas. Okay. So first is that entrepreneurship is lonely. Everyone says that and I believe it and to some extent if you want to climb a mountain you need a team to go with you. But the interesting thing is that if you want to create a team, you need a mountain to create the team.

[00:55:46]Okay? Unless you have a mountain, the team will not come to you. Nobody wants to work for you. They want to work for the problem you have, your mission, your purpose. Because people are not coming to work for you. That happens in the early days. You and your two friends and two dogs, they can come work for you.

[00:56:03]But when you want to hire someone, unless you have a mission that's so compelling that all the people who want to join you will come and join you, this will not go anywhere. You'll have great difficulty in hiring people. So if you want to hire good people, good people come because there is a mission that you want to address. There's a problem that is so great that needs to happen. Why does ISRO retain people? Because they're sending people to the moon, right? Is going to happen. Even the janitor gets excited about the fact that you know I have a mission to the moon. So the mission is very critical and at this stage in your business your technology and all is fine but you need to create this mission as to saying that I need that mountain as to where I want to go.

[00:56:47]Okay. So very important activity that you need to create. Yeah.

[00:56:51]just ask >> from uh in the earlier slide you were uh I I I feel there's some sort of contradiction here because in the second slide you were talking about there needs to be a mountain right and in the in the previous slide you were talking about how you you need to be a a fly uh sitting on the buffalo right so the first one that's an incremental solution but the second slide is uh uh sort of suggesting you need to be uh the the solution needs to be a 100% solution Right? So I cannot uh convince uh when I'm when I'm hiring somebody that hey I I will improve the MRI machine by 15%.

[00:57:28]That's not a big enough goal. That's not a big enough mountain. Right? But when I go and create hey uh I I'll probably create something competing with MRI that's a big enough mountain to scale.

[00:57:39]Right? See again uh these examples are meant for explaining to you a concept.

[00:57:46]Uh the point here is that if you want to hire someone to come and join you, unless your mission is compelling, nobody will join you. Now if you make a mission that's so so compelling or so crazy that nobody believes you, then also nobody will come and join you.

[00:58:01]Okay? So you have to pick a mission that makes sense for your context, right? So yeah, meaning you say, "Oh yeah, I'm building this solution for MRI machines.

[00:58:11]If if you think it's something that is reasonable that people might like it, people might be quite happy to say that you know the first step we building this stuff that's going to go with all the MRI machines of the world. I don't need to convince somebody that I'm going to build the next MRI machine. If you have the capability to show that I can build it, yeah, sure you should do that. But it depends on where you are, right? The mission needs to be believable. If you told me tomorrow, let's go to Everest, I'll say, why the hell should I do it, man? I don't even want to try.

[00:58:39]Okay, Sim, if you push me, maybe I'll come.

[00:58:45]I'm not going to Everest just because you said you want to go there, right?

[00:58:48]So, everyone has to choose what they want to go after. But if you said Everest, there'll be five crazy guys who will be willing to go and you need those five guys. You don't need me to go to Everest anyway. So, everyone has to choose the mission that's right for them. Okay? But the important thing I'm trying to tell you is that lot of people try to hire for salary for this for that. Most people who will come and join you especially as you build your team are those who are coming because of the mission that you are trying to solve. So unless you create a mission that is compelling it'll be very hard to bring your team together. Yeah, that's the single point I'm trying to make. And this is a nice quote from I have books there that you can download when you have the slides. You can see that this is a very nice book that I like called Beyond the Summit. Uh it's written by a guy called Todd Skinner and he this is a quote from his book. It's the mountain that that selects the team. Okay? So it's not your team. You cannot select a team on your own. It's the mountain that's going to select the team. So unless you have the mountain, you can't build a team very easily. I'm watching clock. You ask a question while I play.

[00:59:55]>> Uh I have a question regarding the mountain thing. uh when you're mentioning about hiring uh people for Mount Everest or CAD different teams so sometimes if you're looking for people for Mount Everest out of your circle are there any ways that you could suggest uh beyond your network >> no so if you let the word around see see the thing is who who climbs Mount Everest is not you and me sitting in this room they are very specific people who are climbing best cam this that Anapura there's a group that hangs out which does all these kinds of things. So if you say you want to climb Mount Everest, there is a set of people who do those kinds of things and you need to talk to them, right? You can't convince people in this room to call let's go to Mount Everest. So so the point is that if you if you're clear about your mission that basically decides the kind of people who will come to you. If you're going to the Everest, I'm not coming to you. I don't even want to try.

[01:00:54]Right? So it's the mountain that will pick the team. It's not just you doing it. So this is an important thing. The second thing I want to mention is the importance of culture. Okay. At the end of it, companies move because of the culture. It's the people that make the company move and when the company moves, it's because of the culture of the company. Building this culture is an important aspect of where you what you want to do as you want to scale the company because without good culture, you will always keep fighting about things. Not everything can be written down.

[01:01:24]So it depends on what the beliefs are in the group, how the system works. Those are the things that are going to define how people make decisions on their own.

[01:01:33]They're not waiting for things that are written down. Okay. So how do you build culture? It's the stories that define culture. So you have to create stories within your thing that say what the culture is.

[01:01:46]One exercise I've so now all of us know about Shivaji Maharajas. So if you look at his values and all of that they all translate into stories that you will hear that he did a certain thing he did certain ritual Gandhi G spend the charaa that was not the point right he was trying to get a certain movement to happen through certain stories and culture that got created and the culture gets reinforced through rituals.

[01:02:13]So culture is all about creating stories about what you want to get done reinforced by rituals. So you have to do this deliberately because unless you create that culture about what you stand for, what your company stands for, your company will not move as fast as you would want it to move. It is not driven by rules. It's driven by beliefs and how people work together. Right? So the culture and how you set your culture in your company is very critical. And this is what I'm trying to say is the second thing. And finally, it's very easy to destroy your culture by doing stupid things. And this is one of the very important things that I find as founders. They write a whole bunch of things in their culture document. But they behave completely against that.

[01:02:59]Right? So if you say I'm a family-driven culture, then you say I I'm checking performance. How can you do both? Right?

[01:03:06]Families don't check performance. You born with family. So then you figure out how to deal with it. If you're performance-based, then if somebody is not performing, you need to get rid of them. So you have to be clear about what you are trying to do and your actions have to align to what your culture is.

[01:03:24]Okay. So this is the second point I want you to make that your culture defines how you play. So if you want to win and you want to scale your business, not everything can be written down. Your team has to come together and you have to work together to make things happen.

[01:03:38]And if that has to happen then your culture has to help you get to where you need to get to.

[01:03:44]And there are enough stories about this today. I don't have enough time but uh as was mentioned in my second orbit course I did this for with at golay some of you were there but we ran this like 12 months 6 hours every month so it's I have a lot of material on this topic I'm trying to compress some of these in like 40 minutes today the last thing I wanted to share was regarding funding I think lot of startups and these things are very enamored by the fact that I should go to VCs and ask them for money and then I can give myself a raise because I have got the VC fund and all that stuff.

[01:04:18]The point I want to make here is that the investors are looking for returns not just returns. They're looking for their money back. Okay, this is the important thing to note. I if I'm a VC and I give you money and you show I keep growing and you keep the money that doesn't work. I have to have the money back. Okay? And there are only four ways to return the money.

[01:04:40]It's not that there are many options.

[01:04:42]One option is you do an IPO at that point venture capital whoever can receive the money back.

[01:04:49]Second option is you sell off your company then the VCs make money back. Third is you get an investor who comes in the next round who kind of gives money back to the previous round investor. So you get some money back or you say that you will return back buy back from profits which nobody believes you. Nobody will give you money if you said that I will buy back from the profits of your company. Okay, that doesn't happen.

[01:05:15]There are only four ways to do this.

[01:05:16]Actually, three ways to do return the money. So, if you're not ready with these one, two or three, don't even bother to raise money from VCs because they just can't do it. They have to get the money back. Why do they need to get the money back? This is because the way it works, right? So in India and everywhere else VCs have something called their Aifs which is their funds and where is the money to the funds coming from? It's coming from people or from banks or from family offices or sovereign wherever else right? So they money from people like us. So we put money into a VC they give us 5 + 2 6 + 2 that I'll run I'll invest for first 2 three years then I'll harvest for the next 2 three years and I'll start returning the money before 7 years all the money will be returned so that's a guarantee or somehow they kind of make that kind of a commitment for people who are giving you money now so that is an important thing to note if the VC has to return the money to the LPs to the investors they have to get it back from from you otherwise they cannot return the money. So that's why they need the money back. They are not interested in being in your company till eternity and the other important thing to note is that partners. So every VC has a certain set of venture partners. These are the people who sit on boards.

[01:06:39]So if you go to their website you'll see that they have four partners, five partners. Each partner can be on maybe six, seven, eight boards at best, right?

[01:06:50]So this is again another signal. So if somebody has raised say 500 crores there are four partners each of them is going to deploy 125 crores they can do maybe 8 to 10. So unless you are looking for 10 15 crores this VC is not right for you.

[01:07:09]If you're looking for half a million 1 cr 2 crores then go to VC who has small fund or lots of you know those kinds of things right? If you go to a big fund, unless there is enough for them to do, they will not invest in the company.

[01:07:24]Now, the other variation is that most VCs would like to see that they have some control over you because in general there's a belief that VC's money will be misused by the founder. Okay? So, that's a very legitimate risk that they are taking. I'm giving you the money and you will take that money and go buy a boat.

[01:07:43]That would not be so nice. So I want you to use the money in the company. So then they want to make sure they lock you in.

[01:07:50]So they want to ensure that they have enough equity in the business to make this happen. So when you are trying to raise money, you have to understand the VC, what stage the VC is in, how much check can they do, what is the situation and all of that. So don't waste your time going to VCs which are not right for you. Partner needs to have expertise. All of those things are their considerations. So make sure you go to the right people for the right kinds of things. So this is the last one on that.

[01:08:18]So as I said investors, just let me finish this. Investors are looking for returns and their money back. Okay. So choose the investors correctly. It's not their fault. This is the business model.

[01:08:28]Okay. That they need the money back.

[01:08:29]Even though so if you are building something that has a very long gestation period, then you have to figure out a way to do multiple rounds of funding to provide exits to the previous one. Okay?

[01:08:41]If you're going to take 10 years for your product, the VCs don't have that level of leverage in them unless there is a VCs that says I'm going to take it at an initial commitment for 10 years.

[01:08:51]So you have to be careful about how you're looking at this because this is what people miss out and they sort of apply to a lot of places and they expect the VC should just give money because you have a cool idea and it's not quite that way. Yeah, you had a question.

[01:09:12]Yes. Uh uh why do you say that uh if you say that you'll become profitable and return from the profits nobody will accept?

[01:09:21]>> Yeah because you know then you should go to the bank. No if I'm a VC I want you to make so much profit that it pays for my return right and if I if you make that kind of money the money will only be made in the valuation rather than in the return per sale. So I don't believe VCs will invest in you if you said that you'll return the money through a buyback.

[01:09:44]It doesn't work in the equation. Okay, let me just take a short pause here and say this is my summary slide. Okay, these are the five things I have shared with you or rather three things and then 3 2 1 on them. So these are the six things that I shared with you. My intention was to try to make these as actionable as possible so that you can take them tomorrow and start it in your own business. As you start to sell your business, make sure that uh you're selling a solution to a problem, not just technology. Second, uh it's important to be a leader in any market.

[01:10:18]Leadership is important, but you define the market. So, be careful about doing that. And third is it's think about partnerships. If you are a small business, having large customers is very useful. Okay.

[01:10:31]But if for a small company, just do the paperwork in a large company in itself will be very hard. But having a partner who takes you along the buffalo that I said is the way to do it. Teams, it's the mountain that will pick the team.

[01:10:44]Your culture defines how you play. And then the last thing is that investors are looking for returns. So I will stop here and I'm going to let you have questions or not. Okay.

[01:10:58]>> First of all, thank you very much.

[01:11:04]>> So, those of you who are wondering if I should download, if you want to sit, look, I'll make this happen.

[01:11:11]>> We are going to be short of time, but I'll allow couple of questions only. So, one is here and maybe there.

[01:11:18]>> Let's do one thing. Let's take all the questions together and then we can choose the ones.

[01:11:24]We'll see.

[01:11:27]>> So, uh I was like trying to understand in the first example that you gave for the GE MRI machine, uh you mentioned that when they said that uh hospitals can make money at that time it worked.

[01:11:39]Didn't the impact thing work like if they have a MRI machine they can visualize the disease better the patients can uh like their life would be improved. Didn't that work? Just the sale thing work?

[01:11:55]Shall we just take the other questions also just one and then >> hello >> last one >> I think I >> so with the VCs let's say if I categorize VC in two uh categories one is a VC as a growth partner and the other one a VC for refueling so what's the sweet spot or what kind of exit we need to give to the refueling uh part uh arrangement >> there's only one fuel in VC business is How much is the sweet sweet number which a VC >> VC when he models it is looking at at least 10x return.

[01:12:28]>> 10x returns. Perfect.

[01:12:30]>> Okay. Yeah. Thank you Dr. Pandandy for a wonderful talk. I had a question about the first part. Suppose you have a product say you are competing in the space of Coke and Pepsi. You have a product which is niche and you believe that people can stop looking at Coke and Pepsi and look for you. The possibility is that these are people with big pockets and they can really wipe you out of the market. So the alternative is to ride the buffer as you said but that can be get you in a comfort zone where you don't want to get off that. So how do you guard against do you need to continuously innovate or how do you uh go about that? So uh of course you need to stay innovate and all that is fine but if you look at it indigo was the buffalo for the paper boat without Indigo being the buffalo paper boat would not have been able to get that entry. It happened because it found the buffalo.

[01:13:21]So that is important thing to note.

[01:13:22]Okay. Second thing is that um even today paper boat cannot compete with Coke and Pepsi. This is far out for them.

[01:13:32]for Coke and Pepsi, paper boat is such a mach that they don't even want to waste their time thinking about it.

[01:13:39]And the theory behind this is again a very nice book that Clayton Christensen has around dilemma where he talks about how incumbents don't bother with lots of small niche players because their main business is not to go after all the corners. When you start to affect them, that's when they start to think about it. At that point, how robust you are is where the future will define.

[01:14:05]>> Yeah.

[01:14:16]>> Hello.

[01:14:18]>> Yeah. Uh I'd like to thank Dr. Anandesh Pande for his insightful talk and for sharing his valuable perspectives with all of us today. May I request uh Dr. Manisha Prenat, executive director and chief operating officer of venture center to felicitate Dr. Vesh Pandi on behalf of venture center and for taking out time to be with us today. Yeah.

[01:14:42]Yeah. May we have a round of applause.

[01:14:54]Uh and before we move on, I just want to quickly warmly welcome Dr. Ashish Lelay, director of NCL and chairperson of the board of venture center for taking out time to be with us today. Yeah. Thank you, Ashish. Yeah. Yeah. With that, I'd like to hand over the next session to Pinky, to my colleague, Pinky. Yeah.

[01:15:10]Over to you. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:15:30]This one.

[01:16:11]Good evening everyone. We now move to the next part of the evening, the launch of Candid volume 2. Each edition of Candid brings together 15 founder stories that capture the journey of deep tech entrepreneurship in its most unfiltered form. The founders featured in both volumes have been chosen to reflect the diversity of journeys across domains, backgrounds, experiences, and impact. Yet what connects all of them is the shared experience of building something difficult, impactful and deeply rooted in science. While each journey is unique, together they reflect the depth and diversity of innovation in our ecosystem.

[01:16:58]Reading through Candid, one of the first things you may notice is the attentiveness with which these stories have been captured. the founder personalities, their motivations and small details that make each journey distinct. True to the name of the book, you may also notice the openness reflected in these conversations, made possible by the trust Rami has been able to create with the founders.

[01:17:27]This year we are also introducing Candid Conversations, a podcast series that extends these stories beyond the books and brings together founders from both volumes.

[01:17:42]We will now take a moment to introduce the 15 founders featured in the latest edition of Candid. Starting with healthcare, we have Blackfrog Technologies developing last mile cold chain solutions. Sport Sense focused on neonatal health. Addio Diagnostics working on timely diagnosis of wound infections. Pragmatic healthcare working in the area of cancer diagnostics and Cyenica developing safer cancer therapeutics.

[01:18:13]Moving on to startups working in energy and environment. We have craft and zero circle developing sustainable alternatives to conventional materials and packaging. Recharging energy and battery pool working on battery and energy solutions. Respir focused on air quality monitoring and Graham URA working on decentralized renewable energy solutions.

[01:18:42]This edition also features startups working in engineering and automation.

[01:18:48]We have Pratiti Technologies working on software solutions using digital technologies. Irov building underwater robotic systems and helium developing bamboo based sports and lifestyle products. Finally, we have Bharat Agree working on technologydriven solutions to support farmers and help improve agricultural decision making.

[01:19:14]We are also happy to have with us today some of the founders featured in volume one of candid and I would like to extend a warm welcome to them.

[01:19:27]Both of these books are the result of the efforts of several people and this evening we are fortunate to have two of them with us. First we have N Ramak Krishnan or Rami the author of Candid volumes one and two. He is a very wellrespected journalist who has covered the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem for more than three decades having previously worked at the Hindu business line for more than 26 years. May I now request Rami to come up on stage and please say a few words.

[01:20:11]Mike.

[01:20:13]>> Oh yeah.

[01:20:16]>> Thank you so much.

[01:20:19]Thank you so much Pinky for the nice words of introduction. Good evening everyone. Sorry. It's my privilege to be here on this occasion uh in the presence of Dr. Desh Pande and Dr. Rashish Lele when the second volume of candid is being released. This book book too features a set of amazing founders from the venture center ecosystem. I had the privilege of uh talking to them interviewing them over a few few months I should say and then following up the questions following up questions over email and WhatsApp and I would like to first thank the founders for giving me the time and uh sharing their journeys with me. I mean most of the questions that I asked them would have been pretty basic but I needed to ask them to understand what I was doing so that I could write it better and second I would like to thank um a whole lot of people at venture center starting with Premat Manisha Pinky Neha Vayish Nami and Arusha for having put up with me and for all the trouble that I've caused them over over the months and weeks that I had to get this job done. Finally a big thank you to Manish uh who's been travel who's been traveled with me on the journey with both candid one and two the number of times I've had to make changes and edits and he's quite willingly accepted it. Thank you so much everybody. I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you.

[01:21:50]We also have with us Manish Purohit who brings over two decades of experience across publishing, media, education and content strategy. He has been closely involved in the design and positioning of the book and was also the one who suggested the name candid which some of you may have noticed is quite interesting in itself because it's an interesting play on words that reflects both the nature of the conversations as well as the can do did it spirit of entrepreneurship that runs through the book. May I now request Manish to come up please. We are very happy to have both of them with us this evening and I would like to request Dr. Ashish Lele to please come up and felicitate Rami and Mr. Sanjay Kani to please come up and felicitate Manish.

[01:23:26]You can actually please stay back because the launch is next.

[01:23:30]Yeah.

[01:23:32]So to officially mark the launch of Candid volume 2, I would now like to invite Dr. Anand Desh Pande, Dr. Premnad and Dr. Manisha to please come forward.

[01:24:04]We haven't I think >> yeah.

[01:25:10]She's the most With candid officially launched, I would now like to invite the founder ers who are present today to come forward and receive their copy of Candid. First up, may I request Nusra and Fazl of Saienica to come up, please?

[01:26:17]Next, can we have Pratik Sharma from Helium?

[01:26:49]requesting Dr. Vilas and Mandusha Shel from Recharge and Energy Next up, can we have Mr. Ronach and Sati Sutaryia from Respir.

[01:27:55]Nha Jan from Zero Circle.

[01:28:05]She's here.

[01:28:30]requesting uh Prashant and Nitan from Pratiti Tech to come up please.

[01:28:43]We have Prashant from Pratiti Tech.

[01:28:55]Next, please put your hands together for Anumuan Lut and Prasad Kulkarni from Graja.

[01:29:29]Finally, please welcome Mahul Baldwa who is here on behalf of Shubhham Singh from Crust.

[01:30:04]We would now uh like to invite all the founders and the dignitaries to come back once again for a group photo.

[01:31:49]I think all these startups have actually you know done a great job with their early journey. Now it's the scale up part that really matters. But we hope to have Candid volume 3 in the future with many of the others also featuring in those uh uh volumes as well.

[01:32:12]>> Okay. Uh so we've reached the end of today's uh event and I'd like to thank everyone who joined us today and we hope you all had a great evening. We would also like to extend our s sincere thanks to the NCL team tis mani gati and ainash and javeed and everyone who supported us behind the scenes to make this event possible. A special note of thanks to the candid team for bringing this book together and to the organizing team Jessica Vinit and Basavj for all the effort and coordination that went into planning and executing today's event. We invite you all to continue the conversations over networking, snacks, and copies of the books available outside. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.

[01:32:58]Yes.

[01:33:02]Yeah. I just made an announcement that we have snacks waiting outside, so please help yourselves to it. Thank you.