Founder Thesis

The most successful businesses are the ones that are built around solving a problem for others.

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Kunal Popat, Founder, R For Rabbit.

Inspiration knocked at his door when he became a father and couldn’t find any certified and safe baby gear in India. He realized the massive potential this segment had and started R For Rabbit in 2014, along with his wife Kinjal. And today, R For Rabbit is one of India’s most loved and prominent baby products brands, with a strong base of 1.5 million loyal customers and has recently raised USD 5 million from private equity firm Xponentia Capital Partners.

Tune in to this episode to hear Kunal speak about how R For Rabbit is ready to capture the baby gear segment in India with its robust and innovative products.

What you must not miss!

• Building a D2C brand from scratch
• Customising products as per Indian taste and demand
• Fundraising journey and plans for subsequent product expansion

"Education is about addiction, not content."

This provocative insight from Anshuman Singh challenges the very foundation of modern education. He argues that the secret to effective learning isn't just delivering the best lectures or materials, but creating a highly engaging, motivating, and supportive ecosystem that gets students "addicted" to the process of self-improvement, leading to incredible real-world outcomes.

Anshuman Singh is the Co-founder of Scaler, an ed-tech platform valued at over $700 million. A former engineer and tech lead at Facebook , he helped build and scale foundational products like Facebook Chat and Messenger. Frustrated by the massive gap between academic knowledge and real-world industry skills he witnessed while hiring, Anshuman is now on a mission to forge over 1 million world-class engineers. To date, Scaler has raised over $76.5 million in funding to fuel its global ambitions.

• From Content to Community: The journey from InterviewBit to Scaler was driven by the realization that content is a commodity. The real, defensible moat is a structured, high-touch ecosystem that provides live interaction, peer learning, and constant support.
• Mentorship as the Core Differentiator: The pivot to a paid, intensive program was based on the data-backed insight that personalized guidance from experienced industry mentors was the single biggest accelerator for student success.
• Engineering 'Addiction' for Education: Scaler’s product is not just a learning platform; it’s an engagement engine. It uses gamification, daily streaks, and community dynamics to keep students spending an average of 186 minutes per day learning.
• The Power of the Prepaid Model: Anshuman explains why they deliberately moved away from an Income-Sharing Agreement (ISA) model to a fully prepaid one. This attracted more motivated and committed professionals, leading to significantly better outcomes and a 2.7x average salary increase for graduates.
• Building a Brand on Tangible Outcomes: Scaler's growth and ability to raise capital are built on trust generated by delivering tangible, life-changing results for its students, creating a powerful referral engine that now accounts for over 30% of new enrollments.

[00:00] - Introduction

[01:51] - How a Global Programming Competition Got Me Into Facebook

[04:32] - Why I Chose High-Risk, High-Growth Facebook Over Google

[14:22] - The Inside Story of Building Facebook Chat & Messenger From Scratch

[20:26] - The "Why": Leaving Facebook to Fix India's Broken Tech Education

[25:06] - Phase 1: Building a Free Tool (InterviewBit) & Our First Business Model

[33:25] - The "Aha!" Moment: Discovering the Real Secret to Effective Learning

[40:15] - The "Online Stanford" Playbook: How We Re-engineered Education

[55:18] - Why We Killed Our 'Pay After Placement' Model & Pivoted to Prepaid

[1:08:03] - Scaler Today: The Path to $100M ARR & Replacing Universities

#FounderThesis #StartupPodcast #AnshumanSingh #Scaler #EdTech #StartupIndia #Entrepreneurship #BuildingaBusiness #FounderStory #ProductMarketFit #Pivoting #Education #FutureOfWork #TechSkills #VentureCapital

When it comes to innovation, India has come a long way. But there is still a lot to be achieved!

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Vidit Jain and Shridhar Gupta, Founders, LocoNav. They have worked together at ClearTax before starting with their entrepreneurial journey.

Intrigued by the complex nature of the fleet management business and to make the life of fleet owners easy, Vidit and Shridhar founded LocoNav in 2016, with a mission to democratise access to cutting-edge technology for commercial fleet management. And today LocoNav is operational in 25 countries and is backed by global tech leaders like Anand Chandrasekaran and Ajay Agarwal.

Tune in to this episode to hear Vidit and Shridhar speak about how LocoNav is streamlining the fleet management industry by providing AI and IoT-led innovative offerings.

What you must not miss!

• The pivot from freight marketplace to a transport tech venture
• Scaling-up and fundraising journey
• The unique product portfolio

‘Karna hai, toh karna hai!’ – This is one mantra that our guest today lives by!

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Sasidhar Nandigam, Co-founder and CEO, CredR, an omnichannel platform for buying and selling used two-wheelers.

With more than a decade of experience with various venture capitalist funds, his eureka moment came when he had an unpleasant experience in buying a second-hand bike. He, along with his co-founder, Nikhil Jain, started CredR in 2015, with a mission to make personal mobility reasonable and cost-effective, which today is the country’s most trusted marketplace for used two-wheelers with a presence across seven cities in India.

Tune in to this episode to hear Sasidhar speak about how CredR is formalising the fragmented used two-wheeler market and changing the way customers buy, sell and trade used two-wheelers.

What you must not miss!

• Nothing replaces hard work and commitment
• Consumer insights are the foundation of any business
• How does owning the entire value chain improve customer experience?

With a huge market opportunity to grab, it’s a golden age for digital-first businesses. And with plans to accelerate growth for the digital-first economy is Klub.

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Anurakt Jain, Co-founder and CEO, Klub, a Bengaluru-based start-up that is pioneering revenue-based financing in India.

Anurakt, a graduate of IIT Delhi and The Wharton School, has extensive professional experience as a venture capitalist. In his previous stint, he worked with InMobi, as a part of the founding team that established Glance and TruFactor. He founded Klub in 2020, whose unique and flexible revenue-based finance approach matches entrepreneurs with the right capital partners, thereby allowing them to focus on driving business growth.

Tune in to this episode to hear Anurakt speak about how Klub is challenging the traditional modes of equity and debt capital and revolutionizing growth capital for digital-first businesses.

What you must not miss!

• Learnings from his experience as an intrapreneur
• Cultural tenets of Klub
• How to build a team of super-achievers?

The universe is made up of stories, where everyone is a storyteller.

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Pratilipi. He is an alumnus of FMS, Delhi and has worked with Vodafone before starting off with his entrepreneurial journey.

Belonging to a modest background, Ranjeet has always been a voracious reader and preferred reading content in Hindi. However, he found it extremely difficult to get the books of his choice online, since most of the websites had English content.

To bridge this gap, Ranjeet launched Pratilipi in 2015, as a storytelling platform, primarily focussing on Indian languages, thereby allowing people to share the stories in the language of their choice. And today, Pratilipi is India’s largest vernacular storytelling platform with over 350,000 writers and 28 million monthly active readers in 12 languages.

Tune in to this episode to hear Ranjeet speak about how Pratilipi is opening the gateway to vernacular literature and making it easily available for the readers.

What you must not miss!

• The power of User Generated Content
• Monetization strategy
• Growth hack: Simplify your product
• Plans for expanding into different geographies

It’s 2022! By now, everyone knows that FinTech has taken India by storm and fascinating things will happen when such disruptive technology finds its applications in other sectors.

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Chris George, Co-founder and CEO, Qube Health.

A serial entrepreneur and an alumnus of NYU’s Stern School of Business, Chris started his entrepreneurial journey at the young age of sixteen. He briefly worked in the USA and came back to India to start his venture, something which he describes as his ‘Swades moment’. Through his personal experiences, Chris identified the gap between healthcare expenses and what all insurance pays for! He started Qube Health in 2019, which aims to aggregate FinTech and Healthcare to streamline employee healthcare management by providing primary care, health screening and other non-insurance healthcare services through a single platform.

Tune in to this episode to hear Chris talk about how Qube Health is simplifying and changing the way people pay for their healthcare in India.

What you must not miss!

• Chris’ entrepreneurial journey
• His experience of working in the USA
• Qube Health’s fundraising journey and subsequent plans for expansion.

Thanks to COVID, Creators’ economy has boomed in the past two years. Worldwide, there are more than fifty million creators. But most of them do not get paid.

In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Nipun Goyal, Founder and CEO, LikeMinds. He is a serial entrepreneur who has worked in corporate before venturing on this journey.

An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Nipun launched his first venture while in college. In 2014, he started Curofy, a networking app that enables the communication between doctors. Post its acquisition, he started working with community entrepreneurs and founded LikeMinds in 2020, with a mission to assist creators in managing and monetizing their communities.

Tune in to this episode to hear Nipun talk about how LikeMinds is fuelling India’s Creator Economy to the next level with its simple and easy-to-use SaaS platform.

What you must not miss!

• Experience of being a second-time founder.
• Why online communities are important?
• Mission 2025 for LikeMinds

In this era of start-ups in India, invention, innovation, and disruption have become a reality.

Founder Thesis presents you the journey of one such duo of techies who are on a mission to enable robots with human-like vision, which could unlock endless possibilities.

In a candid conversation with Akshay Datt, Nikhil Ramaswamy and Gokul NA, Founders, CynLR, have taken us through their journeys. Nikhil was an urban boy inspired by tech revolutions while Gokul saw automation challenges at a farm & studied the impact of code on real life. After gaining experience at National Instruments, they started CynLR in 2019 and has solved 70+ industrial machine vision problems with a 100% success rate, putting it on an exponential growth trajectory.

Tune in to this episode to hear Nikhil and Gokul explain cybernetics, what the future will be with robots and how it will alter the business landscape.

What you must not miss!

• The challenges to improving Machine Vision.
• The Paradigm Shift in Robot systems Design.
• Scalability & Expansion of the CynLR Platform.

Is first mover really an advantage!

In this episode of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Abhinav Sinha, Co-founder, Eko India Financial Services, a company that envisioned the innovations FinTech brought in recent years, more than a decade ago.

Eko started operations in 2007 with an aim to bring banking to consumers 24X7 through a network of business correspondents. After numerous pivots and adapting to the ever-evolving market, today Eko has a vast chain of merchant outlets to provide banking services, especially to the economically weaker sections of the society.

Tune in to this episode to hear Abhinav speak about how Eko is working towards making financial inclusion a reality in India.

What you must not miss!

• The pilot that got funded by Gates Foundation.
• The journey from USSD to an app-based platform.
• Survival tip: Keep pivoting!