Our guest today is Rahul Bhalla, cofounder and CEO of Zenatix, an IoT based energy management solutions provider for small commercial buildings. Zenatix was acquired by the Hero Group in 2018 and is part of its Hero Electronix unit. In this conversation, Bhalla talks about the massive opportunity to take Zenatix’s solutions to the US and European markets.

Our guests today are Simmi Sareen and Shravan Shankar, co-founders of Climake at Unitus Capital. Climake is a growth platform for climate tech startups to access markets and access equity and non-dilutive capital. In this conversation, Simmi and Shravan discuss their second annual report on the state of climate finance in India, in which they note that climate tech financing increased 4X in 2021, and is inching towards mainstream finance.

Notes:

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:51) Our guests today — Simmi Sareen, Director at Unitus Capital and co-founder, Climake, and Shravan Shankar, co-founder of Climake

(02:04) A brief background on Simmi and Shravan’s work at Climake

(04:23) How Shravan got interested in sustainability ecosystem development

(07:20) The latest report on the state of climate finance in India

(07:56) Some context about the state of climate action in India

(10:47) India’s net-zero goal

(13:04) The main findings in the climate finance report 2022

(16:51) How climate action will work in practice

(22:00) More on the move from productivity-based action to embracing more radical innovations

(26:49) Financing of climate tech innovations

(30:02) More about fractional ownership of assets

(31:46) Trading of such assets, and green bonds

(32:50) Looking ahead, three to five years, at how climate finance could evolve

More about Climake and the Climate Finance report

https://climake.co/

Our guest today is Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO of Hasura, a Silicon Valley company that is pioneering an open-source and cloud platform that makes it easy for developers to pull together data from multiple sources. Backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Greenoaks, Hasura has just become a unicorn. In this conversation, Gopal talks about plans to make Hasura much more widely available and capable of talking to many more databases, while staying true to its open-source ethos.

Notes:

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:55) Our guest today — Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO of Hasura

(01:51) What Hasura is about — a brief background

(03:30) The idea behind Hasura when it was started four years ago, and a bit on how it has grown

(07:46) More on the innovations at Hasura that brought it rapid customer traction

(12:00) Hasura’s reach today and more on the adoption of its commercial version

(14:16) GraphQL — a very short primer on what it is, and the work that is at the heart of Hasura

(21:13) Some of the advantages and features of the commercial version that addresses the pain points of the users of Hasura

(24:20) A stand-back look at how people are trying to manage their data and tap disparate sources of data, what are some of the biggest trends; and in that context, some thoughts on the direction in which Hasura is evolving.

(29:04) How the Indian SaaS ecosystem has changed over the last three years since Hasura moved base to Silicon Valley

(31:53) Hasura recently announced a $100 million investment, which also made it a unicorn; Some thoughts on the company’s biggest priorities in terms of its product roadmap and business expansion over the next 12-18 months.

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Our guest today is Francisco D’Souza, co-founder and former CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions. In 2020, after more than 25 years at Cognizant, Francisco stepped back from the IT services giant he helped found and build. He’s now looking ahead at his next innings, as co-founder and managing partner at RECOGNIZE, a US-based private equity firm that will focus on a new generation of deep intellectual property-led tech services ventures.

Notes:

At RECOGNIZE, Francisco has teamed up with Charles Phillips, former CEO and Chairman of Infor and former President of Oracle, and David Wasserman, a former Partner at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, leading their technology and services vertical. The firm has raised $1.25 billion for its first fund and has already made some investments in companies that Francisco believes will be among the winners in the tech services arena of the future, bringing sophisticated domain knowledge and IP to the game and focusing on real outcomes for their customers.

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:54) The Big Picture — the first of a series of exclusive conversations with technology’s biggest leaders — our guest today is Francisco D’Souza, co-founder and managing partner at RECOGNIZE

(02:53) A little bit of looking back on the last 12 months

(04:28) How RECOGNIZE got started

(06:50) The big picture changes in technology

(09:52) The opportunity ahead for RECOGNIZE

(14:31) The founding partners at RECOGNIZE and their collective strengths and experience

(20:52) How the firm will work in practice — a PE track for growth businesses and a studio investment track for truly original ideas and startups

(23:45) Cheque sizes of $50 million and bigger, and some examples of investments that the firm has already made

(28:50) Can RECOGNIZE help its portfolio companies build ecosystems that are greater than the individual capabilities of those startups

(33:19) The markets for the next generation of IP-led tech services companies

(35:34) Talent pool in India

(37:18) A decadal fund that can back entrepreneurs for the long haul

(39:36) Enterprises more urgently embracing technology versus consumers becoming more suspicious of big tech

(43:09) The vision for RECOGNIZE three to five years from now

(46:08) Building a culture that empowers employees will be a pre-requisite for the winners in tech services of the future

More about Francisco D’Souza and RECOGNIZE:

https://www.recognize.com/team/francisco-dsouza/

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Our guest today is Jani Pasha, co-founder and CEO of Lokal, a three-year-old startup developing a hyper-local social media platform. In this conversation, Jani talks about the takeaways from building Lokal so far, which now covers the four southern Indian states as well as Maharashtra and Gurajat, and figuring out what users value that they’d be willing to pay for.

Our guest today is Ashish Lachhwani, cofounder at Steradian Semiconductors in Bangalore, which is developing chipsets for 4D radar sensing that can go into autonomous vehicles. In this conversation, Ashish talks about Steradian’s partnership with a global tier 1 auto components supplier, an intelligent traffic system in India and university alliances to grow the semiconductor ecosystem in India.

(00:40) Introduction to The Daily Tech Conversation

Our guest today is Mehul Mohan, founder and CEO of Codedamn, which he started right after engineering college, to turn his passion for coding into a business. Mehul’s interactive approach to teaching coding within a web browser won him early funding from Antler, an international VC firm. Going forward, Mehul wants to build a platform that can automatically suggest jobs to people learning on Codedamn, based on their current levels of proficiency.

Notes:

(00:40) Introduction to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:52) Our guest today — Mehul Mohan, founder and CEO of Codedamn

(02:00) Coding — a passion from school days, a blog and a YouTube channel called Codedamn

(10:52) Codedamn’s early days — a lot of videos on coding

(12:09) Codedamn today — an affordable way to learn coding in an interactive environment within a browser itself

(14;54) Getting traction for Codedamn — tens of thousands of users and adding more every day

(16:33) The target customers — for now, college students typically in their third and fourth year of college

(18:01) What are the pre-requisites for someone to take some coding courses on CodeDamn

(19:11) Innovations in Codedamn that makes it a user-friendly and effective platform to learn coding on

(21:06) Codedamn Playgrounds

(24:13) Integrated development environment, or IDE, is a fancy way of describing a software package used for coding

(26:08) Advances in web technologies and cloud computing that enable many more features today

(28:16) A snapshot of how Codedamn was selected by Antler, the mentoring and funding offered

(31:18) Plans ahead over the next 12-18 months

More about Codedamn:

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

Our guest today is Vindhya C, who is something of a products management aficionado. In 2019, Vindhya was named product manager of the year by Hacker Noons, an online community of techies. She is a co-founder at OnThatJob, an e-learning startup, and currently works on products at Pexels, a curated photos and videos platform. Vindhya writes a blog on the subject and consults with startups on launching and improving their software products.

Notes:

(00:40) Introduction to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:51) Our guest today — Vindhya C, co-founder at OnThatJob, and product management specialist at Pexels

(02:20) Vindhya’s background — started as a computer science engineer, but decided to get into the business side of things, which led to product management roles

(05:19) What is product management, myths and misconceptions versus reality

(08:06) Why it has become an important subject in India’s startup ecosystem

(11:00) In the context of software products, how things are being done differently today for developing and shipping products

(15:04) Are founders the first product managers, and what should first-time software entrepreneurs know about product management

(16:36) Products management is a science, and building products that are different versus those that are better — focus on a better experience for the end-user

(18:58) Differences to keep in mind in building products for B2B applications versus B2C

(23:45) What’s product-led growth all about, and is it right for every startup

(28:56) What makes for a great products culture in a company, and how can founders get there

(31:33) Is the definition of the minimum viable product changing? MVP versus ‘minimum loveable product’

More about Vindhya

https://www.vindhyac.com/about/

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Our guest today is Tyler Sloat, CFO at Freshworks. Tyler is a software industry veteran and, most recently, is credited with being instrumental in Freshworks’s successful IPO. Six months on, Freshworks crossed the $100 million quarterly revenue mark. In this conversation, Tyler looks back at how he got onto a career track that made him a successful CFO. He also talks about Freshworks’s next target of a billion dollars in revenue, and how the products culture within the company will get it there.

Our guest today is Tyler Sloat, CFO at Freshworks. Tyler is a software industry veteran and, most recently, is credited with being instrumental in Freshworks’s successful IPO. Six months on, Freshworks crossed the $100 million quarterly revenue mark. In this conversation, Tyler looks back at how he got onto a career track that made him a successful CFO. He also talks about Freshworks’s next target of a billion dollars in revenue, and how the products culture within the company will get it there.

Notes:

(00:43) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:55) Our guest today — Tyler Sloat, chief financial officer at Freshworks

(01:38) What got Tyler interested in economics and finance … and keeping options open at college

(03:08) Selling marbles in fifth grade in school, and holding garage sales

(06:22) A bit more about the marbles

(09:18) Getting to San Jose, with Coopers & Lybrand, and the beginning of a job that would put Tyler onto the track that would eventually see him become CFO

(11:48) What a Deutsch Bank did about POET Software

(15:29) The experience at Freshworks so far

(18:01) Three teams with three different numbers for the same data

(21:13) Freshworks’s IPO — was there a bit of deja vu?

(25:15) Business mindset versus accounting mindset — being the guardian of the business model

(30:06) Top attributes of a great CFO

(33:22) Advice to finance career aspirants in the tech industry — how should they prepare?

(35:53) A job Tyler started with that you didn’t know about

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

Our guests today are Mohamad Faraz, Shivam Prasad, and Vinay Jain, founding partners at Upsparks, a micro VC firm that the entrepreneurs-turned-investors started in 2020. In this conversation, they talk about bootstrapping a communications platform-as-a-service business at a time when there were no playbooks in India and seeing it go through an acquisition and eventually the IPO of the parent business—an experience that they want to offer startup founders, along with their cheques.

Notes:

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:52) Our guests today—Mohamad Faraz, Shivam Prasad and Vinay Jain, founding partners at Upsparks micro VC firm

(02:22) Three friends from college, coming from a lower-middle-class family, everything starting in Bangalore

(04:59) More about Solutions Infini, the CPaaS venture the trio built

(10:35) Starting Upsparks, switching from startup founders and operators to VC investors

(14:05) A sense of the kind of startups that they are seeing today. What kind of entrepreneurs are coming on the scene? What kind of ideas are they bringing to investors?

(17:05) The initial fund at Upsparks

(18:09) Changes in the Indian startup ecosystem — are aspiring founders bringing really original ideas to investors

(21:43) The time it takes for an entrepreneur, from first pitch to the first cheque at Upsparks

(24:12) Any subsets within SaaS and fintech that Upsparks would be interested in?

(26:25) What are some of the advantages of having a small fund? What are the ways in which it helps Upsparks to focus on its investments; what are the advantages that they bring to their portfolio founders as a micro VC firm?

(31:37) What is still missing today in the Indian startup ecosystem?

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: