Mint Startup Diaries

In the latest episode for Startup Diaries, Vishal Gondal, founder of Goqii Inc. talks about how he is building a super app for health and fitness. On the growth trajectory, Gondal shares that they want to get to 100 million users from the current 10 million users in the next 3-4 years. Listen to this podcast for an engaging watch as Gondal performs fitness stunts during the course of the interaction.

There is a lot of buzz about India’s e-commerce battle between Walmart,  which bought Flipkart for $17 billion, and Amazon. But over in the B2B space, Moglix — an e-commerce service for buying manufacturing products - now wants to revolutionize this and has huge expansion plans up on its anvil. The startup which last raised $23 million in funding counts Accel Partners, Jungle Ventures  and World Bank-affiliated IFC as its investors. It's other backers include Venture Highway, ex-Twitter VP Shailesh Rao,  InnoVen Capital and  Ratan Tata. Mint's startup Diaries gets into a conversation with Rahul Garg, Founder, Moglix.  Also, E-commerce major Flipkart’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy has made a personal investment in B2B e-marketplace Moglix. His  first individual backing of a company in the B2B e-commerce space.

Alok Mittal, CEO and Co-founder of Indifi Technologies, shares how Indifi is trying to ‘verticalize small business lending,’ a market that is under-served in India despite having well-capitalised banks, by focussing on eco-system-based lending, in an exclusive conversation with Mint’s Associate Editor Shrija Agarwal. According to Mittal, focussing on right product design and under-writing, fintechs in lending space can avoid stress that has plagued credit market in recent times, and Indifi leverages supply chain information, alternate credit footprint and channel partners to achieve this objective. Alok Mittal shares his candid views on a host of issues, such as, India’s approach towards challenger bank concept being different from that of Europe, how innovations in public (Aadhar, payments etc..) and private space have been catalysts for fintechs, impact of slow-down in financial markets on traditional lending and market-place lending, his growth plans and product experimentation, among other things. 

In an exclusive conversation with Mint’s Associate Editor Shrija Agarwal, Ambareesh Murty, Co-founder and CEO of India’s leading online home furnishing retailer Pepper Fry, discusses his journey in creating a profitable brand in the highly competitive e-commerce space. Ambareesh believes that the road to profitability for an e-commerce niche such as Pepperfry is through creating ‘differentiation,’ ‘scalability,’ and ‘brand recall.’ And these three factors allow Pepper Fry to consistently make 20%+ contribution. Ambareesh shares his intension to take Pepper Fry ‘public’ and believes that ‘IPO’ is the true measure of success, at a time when many tech-entrepreneurs prefer to stay private for long. Ambareesh, further opens on a host of topics: his initial mistakes and course corrections in creating Pepperfry, frugal capital raising at a time when capital is abundant, advent of Ikea and its impact on his business, and some of the key challenges and learnings in the course of creating a successful brand.

Ritesh Agarwal, Founder of Oyo, in a candid conversation with Mint’s Associate Editor Shrija Agarwal, says that there is no plan for a capital float anytime soon. In the second part of the conversation, Ritesh asserts  how due credit of Oyo's success should go to its business model and not the quantum of capital raised. He also opens up on a variety of other topics; ranging, from Oyo’s expansion plans and profitability to culture and its leadership team.

According to Oyo's Ritesh Agarwal, getting Softbank on the cap table is meaningful not only in terms of capital but also the meaningful inputs he gets from its founder Masayoshi Son, the powerful tech investor in the world and his team. In the first part of this conversation with Mint's Associate Editor Shrija Agrawal,  Ritesh also opens up on the rationale behind consolidating his ownership in the company via the massive promoter buy back.

Yashish Dahiya, co-founder and CEO, of Policybazaar shares insights on building a unicorn, what it means to get Softbank on its cap table, expansion plans and more. According to Dahiya, opening up of FDI in the insurance space will help deepening the market further.  In this part of the conversation with Mint's Associate Editor Shrija Agrawal, Dahiya adds that getting a deep-pocketed investor like Softbank is like getting 'relentless capital' on board. He also talks about  the rationale behind energies focused in the direction of the health venture - Doc Prime and where does he go from there.