Digital transformation is a much-abused word in corporate circles. When traditional companies try it, they cut costs, they start experimentation and they set up outposts in Silicon Valley. But none of these approaches works well, according to Sunil Gupta, the author of the book Driving Digital Strategy, and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. 

In this episode, Gupta unpacks the framework of digital transformation that he’s come up with after studying over 150 companies for more than a decade. Gupta, who is also a board member at US Foods, a $24 billion food distribution company, also talks about getting startup strategy right. 

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To celebrate crossing 25 episodes we are giving away fifty copies of the book Driving Digital Strategy by Sunil Gupta. To take part in the book giveaway tell us what you liked about this episode on Twitter or LinkedIn using #theobitshiftpodcast and tagging us on @therealjpk and @guptsunil 

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About the Guest

Sunil Gupta is the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration and co-chair of the executive program on Driving Digital Strategy at Harvard Business School. He served as the head of the Marketing Unit from 2008-2013 and was the Chair of the General Management Program from 2013-2019. Sunil has published three books and over 110 articles, book chapters, cases, and notes on these topics. His research has been well recognized and his articles have won several national and international awards. Sunil is an advisor to several startup firms and serves on the board of US Foods. As a business expert, Sunil has frequently appeared on several national and international radio and television programs, such as CBS, CNN, NPR, and BBC, and has been quoted in Forbes, The Fast Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Sunil holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University

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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

As a founder, you might think that an investor has bought into your mission because they have  ‘put their money where their mouth is’. However, Ritesh Banglani, Co-founder of Stellaris Ventures contends that this is not enough and that a startup can be destroyed if there isn’t a  fit between the founder and the venture capitalist. 

In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Ritesh breaks down how to choose the right VC for your startup, what red flags you need to look out for when you are in conversation with VCs, how to tell if your VC has conviction in your mission, does it make a difference if you get a senior partner or a junior partner, how long your fundraise should take and much more. 

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This episode was originally recorded as a Linkedin live webinar. To stay in touch with our programs and to receive regular updates sign up for our newsletter. 

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About the Guest

Ritesh Banglani is the Co-Founder of Stellaris Ventures. At Stellaris, he invests in technology companies in Healthcare, Travel, and Financial Services. He has a strong interest in companies solving uniquely Indian problems, especially those applying new technologies to their industry for the first time. Prior to Stellaris, Ritesh was a Partner at Helion, where he invested in companies like Taxiforsure, Lifecell, and Trulymadly. Before he moved to venture capital in 2007, he was a product manager for online and mobile consumer products.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Paul Yacoubian is easily one of the most interesting entrepreneurs to watch out for. In the last four months, his startup, copy.ai has gone from $0 to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. 
Much of the company's early success comes from its ‘Build in public.’ In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we bring you a conversation with Paul on how to build in public. 
Paul shared some of the tactics that have worked for him. But more importantly, this episode is for you to get a sense of what it means to really build your startup in public. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Paul is the founder of copy.ai, an artificial intelligence-based marketing platform that uses GPT-3 to help marketers and entrepreneurs create the marketing copy they need to grow their businesses. Paul is on a mission to seek out, support, and inspire people to turn their entrepreneurial dreams into a reality and change the world for the better. As a key part of this mission, Paul has been building his company in public on Twitter.

 
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Serial entrepreneur and Product School CEO, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia reckons that a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be as small as creating a store on Amazon or even as minimum as a tweet. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast the product leader deep dives into how you can test your idea in the market without a product, the different approaches you can take to develop an MVP, how to identify product-market-fit, responsibilities of a product manager, hiring a product manager and the trends shaping product management. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

In the last 10 years or so, Freshworks has scaled from zero to hundreds of millions in recurring revenue and is among the few product companies from India that have managed to do that.  At Freshworks, we aim to give back as much as we can. Because we've had plenty of help getting here. To that end, we said a few months ago, that we'll start talking about how we built Freshworks and open up our playbook to other startups. This episode with Arun Pattabhiraman, the Chief Growth Officer at Freshworks is one such attempt.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest
Arun runs the revenue marketing and sales development functions at Freshworks globally. He was previously head of marketing at Hotstar, and before that, the chief marketing officer at InMobi. He has built and scaled teams that have delivered growth at some of the fastest-growing companies.

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

A few years ago, the Plantix app would have been the stuff of science fiction. All you have to do is take an image of a plant that’s sick and the app identifies the disease and recommends the treatment to cure the plant. But now it's a reality. The app has helped more than one million small-scale farmers improve productivity. On the latest episode of the podcast, we sit down with Simone Strey the Founder and  CEO of Plantix, and talk about her journey from a researcher to an entrepreneur; how she built Plantix: what metrics she tracks to scale the app; how she’s looking to monetize the platform; the company's strategy to hire;  and how she approached investors to fund a pre-revenue organization.   

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Simone Strey is the Founder and CEO of Plantix. During her Ph.D. in Brazil, she and her husband Robert Strey worked with farmers in the Amazon. Here the idea was born to train machine learning algorithms to become digital plant experts. Plantix is an app that allows users to take an image of crop diseases on their smartphone and then diagnose the ailments and prescribes the remedy for the plant. More than 30% of the worldwide harvest is lost due to plant diseases and pests - Plantix is there to change this. Simone studied Geography and Botany in Hannover, Germany.   

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

It's not very often that you have a venture investor at the peak of his career in Silicon Valley coming back to India. But Hemant Mohapatra did. In India, he's an investor at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. He's already backed several entrepreneurs and built a reputation for himself as a thoughtful investor. In this episode of the podcast, Mohapatra tells us why he is bullish about the Indian startup ecosystem, the metrics he looks at when evaluating a startup, what red flags he looks for in a pitch deck, what qualities he looks for in early employees and why he always hires for skill rather than passion. 

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Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Hemant is a Partner with Lightspeed India, a global VC firm. Prior to Lightspeed, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a VC firm based in Silicon Valley and an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and more. He joined a16z after 5 years at Google doing strategic partnership deals and investments. Before a16z and Google, Hemant was an Engineer at AMD, a microprocessor firm. He has a bachelor's and a couple of master's degrees in engineering, computer sciences, and business spread across India, the USA, and the UK.

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Anthony Rose is a serial disrupter. He first disrupted file sharing with his application Kazaa. He then disrupted streaming with the launch of the BBC iPlayer. And he is now looking to disrupt the legal industry with his legal tech platform SeedLegals. We spoke to the entrepreneur about the road he took to achieve product-market fit, how cash-strapped early-stage entrepreneurs can persuade talent to join them, the biggest learnings of his career, how founders can integrate customer feedback to their company, and his marketing strategies. 

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Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Anthony Rose is the Founder & CEO of SeedLegals, a new legal tech platform that lets startups and investors complete the legal work needed to build, grow and fund their business, at a fraction of the cost of using a law firm. Previously, Anthony co-founded Beamly, a social and content network for television, which was acquired by Coty in 2015. Known as “The man behind BBC iPlayer”, Anthony ran the iPlayer and other BBC services from 2007 to 2010, taking the iPlayer from pre-launch to major success story. Anthony’s patent portfolio includes patents for distributed online rewards, content discovery, and interactive television.

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

In a world flooded with content, how do you stand out as a digital media company? How do you then build this community up to 90 million readers? How do you grow profitably? 
The answer has a lot to do with community. And of course, content and commerce. 

In the first episode of our second season Dhimant Parekh, Founder of the Indian digital-media platform ‘The Better India’ talks to us about how he married content, commerce, and community to build his company. 

He talks about

🚀 His early journey and the inspiration to build The Better India

🚀 What he looks for in early-stage hiring

🚀 Cracking his first corporate client

🚀 Starting The Better Home and scaling the business

🚀 How founders should manage personal finances

🚀 His lessons from fund-raising   

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Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Dhimant Parekh is an impact entrepreneur. He built and grew The Better India, a social and environmental impact-focused digital platform with a reader base of 90 million. He then built India’s first e-commerce marketplace for sustainable products to connect MSMEs to conscious customers. Most recently he launched India’s only DTC subscription box of sustainable products called ‘The Better Home’. 

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

This week we bring you a special episode that's all about hiring for startups. It's the last episode of this year and we've been busy lining up guests for the next season. In the last four months, we've had 16 guests on the show and we asked many of them about how they look at hiring. 
This episode features Cal Henderson, the co-founder of Slack, investor and advisor Elad Gil, Rahul Chari, the co-founder of India's largest payments company, Tyler Sloat, the Chief Financial Officer of Freshworks, Yamini Bhat, the co-founder of Vymo, Jose Morales, the Chief Revenue Officer of Freshworks and a few others. 
We talked about hiring engineering talent, product managers, sales leaders, chief financial officers, and so on. 

Check out the Freshworks for Startups program, where we give out $10,000 worth of free credits to startups that are looking to engage with their customers better. We also have white-glove onboarding, mentorship, and resources for startups that are part of the program.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian