The Orbit Shift Podcast

A few weeks ago when we recorded this podcast, Aditya Kothari's startup was at 25 million users. Now it's at 42 million. That's the speed at which Chingari, the short video app is growing. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, Aditya talks to us about the startups that didn't grow and failed, raising funds, and how they're scaling the short video app Chingari. 

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

Aditya Kothari has been an active entrepreneur for the last 11 years, with ventures in customized events, e-commerce, and visitor management. He has also been proactively involved in other startup stories like Bounce, Getlinks (a Thailand-based recruitment venture), and Rapidbox. He is currently the Co-Founder of Chingari an Indian video-sharing app. 

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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  

When Yamini Bhat was a consultant at McKinsey & Company she helped companies transform their sales process. It was here that she saw salespeople were using CRMs merely as a customer database and not making the most use of them. This led to a gap in companies knowing what led to results and what didn’t. This is where her idea of starting Vymo a personal sales assistant that sits on top of the CRM came from. Vymo now helps 60+ enterprise customers and 125,000 sales reps crush their targets! 

In our latest episode, the SaaS founder speaks to us about

🚀How she achieved product-market-fit

🚀Hiring her first employee and how she sets up her team to complement founder skills

🚀Achieving success marketing at events and bouncing back from COVID 

🚀Managing customer churn through customer success 

🚀Empowering senior leaders and setting up rules of governance

🚀Her fund-raising journey 

🚀The power of saying no and not counting certain wins as momentum         

Listen In. 

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

Yamini is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vymo, which offers a Sales Excellence Cloud that is used by leading Financial Institutions across the World. She was, previously, Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, where she specialized in Marketing Strategy and Sales & Distribution. Yamini is a recognized thought leader in Digital Transformation and is passionate about data-driven growth.

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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 

Our latest episode is a fireside chat between Armando Mann, Chief Business Officer at Hopin, and Elad Gil,  entrepreneur, investor, and author. Elad walks us through how he sees companies coming out of the pandemic, the offensive and defensive moves a startup can take to protect themselves from uncertainties that arise during a pandemic, how companies can leverage the pandemic to recruit the best talent, explore new opportunities in mergers and acquisitions and go after enterprise clients. The future of remote work, the urgent needs, and problems startups are not addressing, what new technology Elad is most excited about, and much more.   
Listen in.

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

Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, and Wish. He is co-founder and chairman at Color Genomics and its former CEO. Previously, Gil was VP of corporate strategy at Twitter after it acquired his firm Mixer Labs, and he was Google’s original product manager for Google Mobile Maps.

About the Host

Armando Mann is Chief Business Officer at Hopin, the leading platform for virtual events where you can host a 50 person meetup or a 50,000 person conference. He is also a global investor in SaaS startups such as Carta, Blend, and Freshworks. Armando launched and led go to market for Dropbox for Business. Before that, he built the sales teams for various Google emerging businesses, including Google Offers and AdWords Express. Armando holds an Industrial Engineering degree from ITBA and a Master in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School, where he graduated as a Baker Scholar.

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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 

Intuition, analytics, and research are the three pillars that you should rely on when you make a product decision according to product leader Ravi Mehta. 
We had a chance to sit down and go in-depth with Ravi Mehta, former chief product officer at Tinder, and several other top tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft. 
In this conversation, we talk about his journey as a product manager, his learnings from his days at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and later Tinder. 
We also took on questions like:

🚀What's the right time for a startup to hire a product manager?

🚀What do peak product managers look like? 

🚀How do you build products for Gen Z? 

🚀Making startups antifragile. 

And much more. Listen in. 

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

Ravi Mehta is a consumer tech leader who has built and scaled consumer tech products that have impacted millions of people’s lives and scaled teams to meet the challenge. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, he has previously held product roles at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Microsoft Xbox.

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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  

As a startup founder, you must have gone through your fair share of sales playbooks, all claiming that they contain the ‘secret sauce’ to generate more leads and close more deals. This episode with sales leader Jose Morales is not that. In this episode, we explore the nuances of building a modern sales team —  when to build one, how to build one, and how to set it up for success.

“Your customer looks at your sales rep as a trusted advisor. Someone that really understands their needs,” says Jose, the chief revenue officer at Freshworks. 

Jose, who comes with an extensive track record of sales across the spectrum of startups — from the small company to the global giant — also covers how to scale modern sales teams, his sales philosophy, and several other questions that will help startups build an efficient sales organization.

Listen in. 

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

Jose Morales is the Chief Revenue Officer at Freshworks. He joined Freshworks from Atlassian, where he spent the last 10 years leading the field operations organization which included direct sales, partner programs, services, and other key GTM functions. The organization included teams supporting and driving the self-serve business to field sales organizations closing seven-figure deals in the global 2000. Jose joined Atlassian when they were less than  $100M in revenue and helped grow them to over $1.8B in annual run rate. During that time he built teams in many countries including the US, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. Prior to Atlassian, he held other go-to-market roles with leading Silicon Valley software companies.

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  

Startups that have a subscription model are valued a lot more than startups that have to repeatedly sell to their customers. This is why publicly-listed Netflix or privately held Notion, and many others are valued at a premium. 
Even traditional businesses have started to see this trend and are now building their own subscription businesses. But what is it that makes them successful? Why do they tend to do better than traditional companies? 
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we bring you a conversation with Robbie Kellman Baxter, one of the most prominent thinkers in the field of the membership economy. 
Robbie, whose clients include companies like Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft, and several others, talks to us about how startups should go about designing their membership models to unlock value for customers and shareholders. 

We spoke to Robbie about

🚀how a startup can discover their forever promise 

🚀how a company can pivot to a subscription model by identifying their forever promise 

🚀how startups can manage churn without hiding the cancel button 
🚀the importance of a customer success team 

🚀why more and more companies are shifting to a membership model 

🚀how a membership model benefits the company and how it benefits the consumer 

Listen in.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility. 

About the Guest
Robbie Kellman Baxter is the founder of Peninsula Strategies LLC, a management consulting firm. She is also the author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction and hosts the podcast Subscription Stories. Robbie has more than 20 years of experience providing strategic business advice to major organizations, including Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft, and Consumer Reports.  She has been focused on subscription and growth strategies for the past decade.  Baxter has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. She earned her MBA from the Stanford GSB and graduated with honors from Harvard College.

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

Robbie Kellman Baxter Official Site. 

Additional Goodies for our listeners from Robbie. 

Listen to Robbie’s Podcast Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches

Buy The Forever Transaction book by Robbie Kellman Baxter

Buy Membership Economy book by Robbie Kellman Baxter

Free Download of a chapter from The Forever Transaction by Robbie Kellman Baxter

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian 

Twenty years ago, Cal Henderson was working in London while Stewart Butterfield was making a game called Game Neverending. Henderson, a big fan of the game, broke into the email server to join the internal mailing list of Butterfield’s 4 person company. Eventually, Cal convinced Butterfield to hire him.  The game was not going anywhere, so they started focusing on a side project which eventually became Flickr and eventually sold to Yahoo in 2005. The two founders went back to building another gaming company called Glitch. That didn’t do well either. Another side project, that helped Glitch manage their remote teams now became the core product. They called it Slack. And the rest is history.  Today Slack has a market cap of almost $15 billion. In the quarter ended April 2020, it pulled in over $200 million in revenues, growing at 49% compared to the year-ago quarter, with a gross margin of 87.3% and a stellar net retention rate of 132%.
This episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast brings you a fireside chat between Cal Henderson and Girish Mathrubootham. The two talked about 
🚀Achieving Product-market fit

🚀Convincing others to use Slack

🚀Growing beyond the original product-market fit

🚀The #2 reason why startups fail

🚀Success comes from failure

🚀Giving away your lego blocks 

🚀Go from sprinting to running a marathon

🚀Stress and the role of leaders 

🚀Succeeding in the post-Covid world

This episode was originally recorded as part of the AgainstAllOdds startup summit conducted by Freshworks for Startups. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility. 

About the Guest

Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack. Previously, Cal built and led the engineering teams at Flickr, until its acquisition by Yahoo. An experienced technology leader and a popular speaker on engineering scalability, he authored the best-selling O’Reilly Media book Building Scalable Websites. Cal was also a pioneer in the use of web APIs and created the basis for OAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter and many others. He has a Bachelor of Computer Science and has received an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University. He now resides in San Francisco.

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

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian

On Monday, payments startup PhonePe said that it has crossed 250 million registered users with over 100 million monthly active users. The Bengaluru headquartered startup became one of India's biggest payments startup in a short span of six years. 
PhonePe's co-founder and chief technology officer Rahul Chari spoke to Vinod Chandramouli of Freshworks about how the company stays focused and sticks to the mission even when there are distractions. Chari, who was earlier a top engineering leader at Flipkart, also talks about the lessons from his career. 

He also discussed

🚀 How startups can bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic and settle tech debt

🚀The biggest learnings from his career

            - Compressing learning cycles

            - Lessons from Flipkart’s first ‘Big Billion Day Sale’ 

            - Continuous platformization to avoid growth hack hell

🚀The next phase of growth at PhonePe

🚀 Balancing agility and compliance using a core system and peripheral system model

This episode was originally recorded as part of the AgainstAllOdds startup summit conducted by Freshworks for Startups. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility. 

About the Guest 

Rahul is the co-founder and CTO at PhonePe. He is a serial entrepreneur in the consumer internet space and has built PhonePe into one of India’s fastest-growing and largest fintech companies. He comes with over two decades of experience in the consumer internet and enterprise software space. He has strong experience in building world-class tech platforms for web-scale, continuously scaling systems to deal with hyper-growth, and evolving the processes and practices to meet the demands of a fast-growing organization.

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

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

As the engineering leader at Freshworks, STS Prasad plays an integral role in the development of the Freshworks suite of products. In the latest episode of the podcast, we talk to him about engineering at startups. We covered

🚀How founders should go about hiring engineers for their teams
🚀 What should the role of the early engineer at startups be
🚀 How to identify the right tech co-founder
🚀 How Freshworks remains an eternal startup using the 'Freshwave Model'
🚀 Retaining the startup culture even as you scale 
Enjoy the show! 

About the Guest

STS Prasad has been an entrepreneur, a top engineer who transitioned to manage several engineering teams, and one of the most successful engineering leaders at Freshworks. After graduating from IIT- Madras and acquiring his master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, he started his career at HCL, became a chief architect of Junglee (acquired by Amazon), and later he headed up Walmart Labs.  STS Prasad also served as the CTO of Aventeon, a mobile enterprise solution startup that he founded. He is currently the SVP of Engineering at Freshworks Inc. 

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

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Our latest guest is Ranjeet Pratap Singh the co-founder and CEO of Indian language storytelling platform Pratilipi. Ranjeet walks us through how frustrated by the lack of access to Hindi literature he built Pratilipi, much before the concept of Next Billion Users became mainstream. He talks to us about how he built his team and scaled the platform to over 20 million monthly users, the lessons he learned from raising funds, and his future strategies to monetize his platform.  

About the Guest

Ranjeet Pratap Singh is the co-founder and CEO of the Indian language storytelling platform Pratilipi. Pratilipi has over 2.5 million stories published by more than 240,000 writers in 12 languages and over 20 million Monthly Active Users. 

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme 

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

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian