The Startup Operator

Driving growth for mid-sized businesses via GTM and integrated marketing strategies, Devdutt, or Dev, heads enterprise marketing for cloud communication startup - Exotel. The unique thing about him is that he has both demand gen and branding skills in equal measure. 

In this episode, we spoke to him about his tenure at Talisma & then transitioning to Exotel, optimizing marketing campaigns for enterprise businesses, and much more. 

Kushal is the CEO of First Cheque - a venture capital firm investing in early-stage startups.  He started his career by founding Nayi Disha to build motion-based educational games for kindergartners. Kushal transitioned from a founder to an operator in 2015 and was then a part of upGrad’s early core team building key corporate partnerships. 

In this episode, we talk to Kushal on what it's like to transition from a founder to an operator to an investor, learnings from meeting early-stage startups, and what founders can learn to build a successful company.

Marketers have had a rough time in this market. It's an understatement to say things have changed! Joining us today is Ashwin S L, who heads Marketing at MoEngage Inc., about how his team is adapting to this new paradigm, what are the strategies to experiment with to generate new leads, and how internal and external communications are changing.

Co-Founder and CEO of Rocketium - Satej Sirur started his career with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, and then later transitioned to head product & strategy for Taxi for Sure. He was the youngest member of the executive team until TaxiForSure's $200M acquisition in 2015. In this episode, he talks about his journey of transitioning from enterprise to a startup,  modeling consumer behaviors through product, and building a team of out-performers.

Nikhil Kumar, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist of Setu, started his career building the partner ecosystem at Tally. Featured in Forbes 30 under 30, he has been instrumental in building the India stack - UPI payment interface that processes over $19 Billion in a month and e-KYC through Aadhaar. In this episode, he talks about how startups can build direct and indirect distribution channels, and what it's like to be in the ground-zero of digital disruptions.

In today's weekend special, we are in conversation with Harish Vaidyanathan, SVP - Product for Vymo. No matter who is in the room, Harish is always the youngest because of his unmatched enthusiasm and wit. In this episode, Harish shares his stories of what it was like transitioning from a tech-giant such Microsoft to a fast-growing startup - Vymo, building a product function from scratch, negotiating with other functions, and a bunch of different things.

Tune in!

Most startups bias towards sales and product in the early days. It’s right for leadership to invest most of their time and energy into enabling the first few successful sales reps or working with product teams building product, of course. But, soon enough this isn’t the best use of Leadership time and any additional effort only gives a marginal increase in gains. If you want your sales to extend beyond people and relationships, if you want to add more depth to your product, then you have no other way out than to invest in marketing to increase lead velocity and brand awareness.

The perfect employee fallacy goes like this - if a person on the team is fantastic at something, but lacking in other areas, we should enable him/her to improve on his/her weaknesses and measure progress on that basis. 

But, only a machine capable of producing reliable, quality work through all of those good characteristics. And humans are not machines. They have their natural proclivities and tend to bias one way or another. 

In this episode, we'll be talking about why you should avoid this mindset at all costs.