Rajan Maruthavanan, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Upekkha, shares deep insights into the dynamics of building B2B startups from India for global markets, particularly in the US. He discusses the strengths and challenges of Indian founders, such as thriving in vertical, niche markets versus struggling with infrastructure and dev tools for global adoption. Rajan emphasizes the importance of founders learning how to take advice and shares his thoughts on the key skills needed for founder success.
Rajan Maruthavanan, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Upekkha, shares deep insights into the dynamics of building B2B startups from India for global markets, particularly in the US. He discusses the strengths and challenges of Indian founders, such as thriving in vertical, niche markets versus struggling with infrastructure and dev tools for global adoption. Rajan emphasizes the importance of founders learning how to take advice and shares his thoughts on the key skills needed for founder success.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[3:57] Building a new type of VC firm: The Upekkha story
[7:36] Why Indian startups struggle to break into the US market
[14:43] The Power of annual contract value (ACV): How ACV shapes startup strategy
[19:03] The vertical advantage: Why Indian founders succeed in niche Markets
[22:03] How biases and bad advice can trap founders into their biggest pitfalls
[28:07] Changing the VC game by improving founder success rates
The nonprofit organization Rajan is passionate about: Sitare Foundation
About Rajan Maruthavanan
Rajan Maruthavanan is the Cofounder and Managing Partner at Upekkha, with extensive expertise in guiding early-stage startups through their critical zero-to-one phase to achieve product-market fit. At Upekkha, he has made over 120 pre-seed investments in SaaS startups and assisted numerous founders with M&A activities in DeepTech and B2B SaaS over the past eight years. Previously, Rajan was an Operator and Head of Product for QuickBooks Global at Intuit, where he managed the India GST strategy and led iCombinator, Intuit’s internal accelerator. He also organized two notable conferences: SaaSx in Chennai (2014-2016) and StartupBridgeIndia at Stanford (2016-2019). Earlier in his career, he co-founded and served as CTO of a computer vision startup, developing a SIFT vector-based visual search for Nokia phones.
About Upekkha
Upekkha, established in 2017, is an AI SaaS accelerator dedicated to helping Indian founders create global software brands. Currently in its 13th cohort, Upekkha has collaborated with over 165 startups and cultivated a network of more than 300 SaaS entrepreneurs. The firm has a diverse portfolio including companies like iMocha, Almabase, Kloudle, and Cloudbankin. Notably, about 25% of its startups hail from tier-II cities, such as Pune, Kochi, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Raipur, Vadodara, Jabalpur, Warangal, Coimbatore, and Trichy.
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You have to ask this question saying, "how are the incentives aligned?" Like, for instance, this is an experience that I go through again and again during my like, you know, think tank days where I was helping with M& A. When you are having an M& A conversation, the incentive of your investor who's on your cap table, the incentive of your acquirer and the incentive of founders are not aligned.
So if you are taking advice from your investor at that particular point in time, not the best. What I suggest at that particular point in time to founders is go talk to a founder who was in a similar situation six months ago. He can be in a far better position to give you like unbiased advice.
[00:00:41] Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan. We're going to call him Rajan.
That's the name he goes by. He's a managing partner at Upekkha. What is Upekkha? What kind of startups he focuses on at Upekkha. And there's an interesting angle between India-US corridor that is getting more and more traction, more and more interests. We're going to talk about that.
Why is that important and how to prepare to take advantage of the opportunities that will come up in the near future. Rajan, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
[00:01:37] Rajan Maruthavanan: Gopi, thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast. I've shared that with you before. Very excited to speak to you today.
[00:01:44] Gopi Rangan: Let's start with you.
You grew up in India. You grew up in Delhi and you lived in multiple places in India, in Hyderabad, in Bangalore. And you migrated to the U. S. You now live in Silicon Valley, and eventually you started Upekkha. Walk us through that journey starting with Delhi?
[00:02:00] Rajan Maruthavanan: I'm from South India, but I grew up in Delhi. I moved to Delhi when I was in my third standard and I did all my schooling there. The way I introduce myself to a lot of people is I did my schooling in Delhi. I did my engineering in Hyderabad. Then I lived in Bangalore and then recently I moved to the Bay area, right?
So I have a lot of travel that is involved. And from an India perspective, I say I'm a true Indian because I've covered a lot parts of India. So the background in terms of Delhi, that taught me a lot about how to actually think things in a big way. When you are actually working and staying in places that you don't belong to, then you have to actually search for your identity, you have to actually assimilate what is happening elsewhere and then like, you know, mix your identity with that.
So I went through a lot of that. So Tamilian in Delhi, and then I wanted to always be in engineering. So, so that's why I went to Hyderabad. I studied from a place called Tripulati Hyderabad. While I was there I realized that, you know, tech is, is where I wanted to be in.
So, so that's the reason for me to move to Bangalore. So even when I was in Hyderabad, I'd always travel to Bangalore to attend conferences and things like that. And then if I push that further to the Valley, I worked in two startups. And when you're working in cutting edge technology, you want to be in places where cutting edge technologies is supported, right?
So if you're in the movie industry, you want to be in Bombay. If you're in the finance industry, you want to be in Mumbai or New York. So if you're in the tech industry, you want to be in Bangalore and Silicon Valley. So, you know, many years ago it was Bangalore. And now, most recently, it is Bay Area.
[00:03:31] Gopi Rangan: You were a founder and you worked at startups and you clearly come from the tech world.
Then you changed to the other side of the world, which is investing. And Upekkha is actually an accelerator. And over the years, Upekkha has invested in more than 100 startups, right? And there are three managing partners. You ended up starting the firm, Prasanna, Shekar and you. Why did you start Upekkha? And what was the genesis at that time?
What was the thought?
[00:03:57] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah, a great question. Just before Upekkha I was at Intuit. At Intuit I was a product leader there but I also ran an accelerator within Intuit. And before I joined Intuit, I was actually a founder. I ran a mobile startup. I was recruited in into Intuit because of not just my product background, but also my entrepreneurial background at this dual role of helping engineers understand how to build products. There'll be one of the product and also I was doing product management work. So I spent a lot of time at Intuit close to six years in helping engineers actually build product and those that become successful then would be funded by the BU and be taken to the GM and then you know it will be funded further to scale it more.
So I had a background in working with a lot of engineers in building the zero to one stage. Similarly, Prasanna worked at Microsoft Accelerator. He was the CTO there and he had done startup before. Shekar and Prasanna worked before together at a startup. They had come together after Prasanna's Microsoft stint saying, "Hey, we enjoyed doing this zero to one journey of helping founders." And what we realized is in that 0 to 1 stage is where the highest amount of mortality is. So that particular 0 to 1 stage is something Shekar, Prasanna and I enjoyed working. And we said, you know, what if we could bring that experience and help a lot of founders that we otherwise have known cross that stage much better and faster.
So that was the genesis for Upekkha. The name Upekkha itself means stillness in Buddhist or equanimity if I were to use the right English word. So in your entrepreneurial journey, you're always going through ups and downs every day. Maybe morning you're getting excited, in the evening something did not go well, so you're not so very happy about how things have gone through.
So you want to be always in a state of constant stillness so that you can deal with the ups and downs. So that's the meaning of Upekkha itself. So in short, I would say we had the experience and excitement about working with founders in the 0 to 1 stage. And because of that knowledge or previous network, we said, can we use that to help founders cross that stage better?
We love working with early stage founders. That journey of creating something out of nothing is very, very fascinating.
[00:06:07] Gopi Rangan: Well, you are the only investment firm I know that has two K's in its name. And equanimity is not something that I would associate with startups.
Startups always come with chaos. It's great to see that you're trying to bring some order and some peace in the minds of founders.
[00:06:23] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah. Someone asked us, no, do we have too much of Bollywood influence? Because in Bollywood, there is this astrology and numerology and naming thing that they go after saying that you need to have two Ks to become successful.
So that was not the case. We just, you know, literally translated that word from Pali to English came out to have two Ks in it.
[00:06:40] Gopi Rangan: But there is a superstition that two O's are necessary to make a startup successful, or if you have two O's in your Google and Yahoo and quite a few others like that, one of the startups I invested in many years ago had two O's. You know, what
[00:06:55] Rajan Maruthavanan: is the new way variation or version of that in the world of AI?
You're seeing some spelling mistakes like that, you know, have more prominence over others. Is there a new version of two Os?
[00:07:05] Gopi Rangan: Yeah, I'm sure there is. The common theme that we see quite often with many startups is a deliberate way of misspelling a normal word. And that becomes the new way of, uh, Yeah, I'm sure something will be launching.
Yes. Okay, let’s come back to Upekkha. You started Upekkha around 2016 to 2017, and since then you've had multiple cohorts. How does it work? Can you give a quick description of how does the accelerator work? How many startups per cohort and what happens during the cohort? How long is the cohort?
[00:07:36] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah, so we've evolved over a period of time and so our cohort sizes have increased. In 2017 we worked with 10 startups. Last year we worked with 60 startups. So we do two cohorts in a year and it's typically a six months program. We've been remote, we didn't have like an office from the very beginning.
What we do is we run programs which has taken like multiple different iterations. Everybody during the COVID world had to adjust how they run the program. But you know, typically it ranges for that time duration. We meet founders very frequently. When we initially started, we would meet every six weeks. And what we would do is, is that we would bring founders from different parts of India and get them to meet in Bangalore or Chennai and now in Bay Area and immerse them in how other founders are building things and learn from each other. So we would share with them the frameworks. We'll get them to meet with other founders that have been like them slightly ahead of them, and we connect them with the network of the industry that they are working in.
One thing that I may have not mentioned earlier is we only focus on B2B and enterprise. So we don't do consumer startups. So we are always bringing people to those places where like there is concentration of B2B and enterprise and Chennai is important from that perspective and Bay Area now.
So in that six months, what we are trying to do is, is we are trying to fix their fundamentals and getting to product/market fit. Where there are things that we have evolved over like last six, seven, eight years is in terms of what are the key questions to ask. Like, what is your high value problem? What is the persona?
What are you positioning? How are you messaging? And what is your initial go-to-market through this? What we're trying to help them with this is to get to first 3-10-30 customers based on whether they are SMB or enterprise and build the foundation for that. So this is what happens in our acceleration program and our value prop to founders is that, you know, do lesser mistakes or do new mistakes. Like if you can learn from other people's experience, can you actually make newer and newer mistakes as opposed to repeating the same mistakes again and again? And therefore our value proposition ends up becoming saying that, you know, the product/market fit journey, instead of it being four years, can you actually get to that in two years?
So that is what our entire design focus of the six months program is.
[00:09:56] Gopi Rangan: What kind of founders is Upekkha a good fit for? Who should apply to the accelerator? At what stage should they start thinking about it? What is too early or what is too late to apply to Upekkha?
[00:10:08] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah, so I would have said that it is first time founders because first time founders are the ones that could benefit the most from learning from other people's mistakes.
But the last two, three years, what it has taught us is that the zero to one journey or the product/market fit journey regardless of whether you have gone through it once before, like, you know, when you go through it again, second time, third time, there are, there are people who have actually been like fourth time founder.
They say that, you know, the zero to one journey of product/market fit is very, very difficult. Right? So anybody that is looking for support in their product/market fit journey, is definitely going to get like value out of Upekkha. Now, somebody who's like a repeat founder who may say, Hey, I know that these are like fundraising mistakes that I'm not going to make.
These are hiring mistakes that I'm not going to make. But despite all of that, in talking to customers, understanding what has changed in the market, how to position, how to actually build the experience and how to actually hire the initial sales in the zero to one journey, what happens is there is no much difference between product marketing and sales. Everything gets mixed up in a generalist kind of a way. So short answer, I would say that, you know, first time founders would find the most value, but PMF journey, like, you know, is, is always new, no matter how many times you have gone through. So if somebody looking for support in their PMF journey will find Upekkha, like, you know, the most resonant.
And then the other thing that I would say is that, you know, we've always focused on B2B and enterprise and like, even from my Intuit days, I used to say this, that it is easy to earn a dollar than to earn a rupee. So founders that are from India that are building for the global market will find a Upekkha is offering the most resonance for them.
[00:11:44] Gopi Rangan: That's a very interesting trend that has become quite prominent in the recent past, and I expect it's going to continue to grow. I want to hear your perspective, start with the macro, and then we can talk about some micro trends, this India-US corridor. Teams from India focusing on customers in the US.
How do you view it? What is your opinion?
[00:12:07] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah, the first startup that I did was a consumer startup. That was in 2007. And after that, I moved to Intuit. And like, you know, since my stint at Intuit, I've only worked with B2B and enterprise startups and my day job. When you're building consumer startups, India is a large market. But when you are building a software startup, where you are trying to actually get paid from the software that you're building, you need to look at a global market because in terms of building like 10 million, 100 million dollar business, global market is the right market.
And when you say global, I think 50 percent of global or more than 50 percent of global is US. So I used to have this struggle within Intuit where like, you know, we, we built QuickBooks online for the US, but then, you know, we also had QuickBooks online for India and I was a product manager for QuickBooks online in India.
In US, save time as a value proposition sells. Right. But in India, save time is not the value proposition that sells. You have to actually say that this makes money. Now, if you actually change the geography and change this value proposition, it'll actually kind of form. And most of software, if you really think about it, it is about productivity and saving time.
And those markets which have a cultural context of saying, look, this is about saving time, there you need to actually make that pitch. So I fundamentally believe that if you're building software and you're trying to make money from software and making the productivity pitch, you need to do it in the developed markets where that save time value proposition makes sense. So I think that's the underlying current that is driving why, from a India perspective, also, if you're building for a global market, then it is a way better value proposition than focusing on India as a market. Now, when the per capita income of India is going to change to a place where productivity is going to matter, at that particular point in time, maybe that will change. That's maybe like 10 years away. So if there is an Indian founder who's building a consumer startup, maybe focusing on India market locally is a much better option, but if you're building software business where you have to get paid directly from software, then it is better for you to actually build for a global market where like productivity will be valued.
And that is why the statement which resonates deeply with a lot of people saying it is easy to make a dollar than to make a rupee, provided you're building software and making money from software.
[00:14:24] Gopi Rangan: What is your advice to founders? Should they move to the US or particularly even Silicon Valley? When should they move if they have to move? And who should move? Does the entire team move or the sales team moves or some of the executive team moves here and when, how to plan for this?
[00:14:43] Rajan Maruthavanan: So, okay, let me actually give you two different examples. And I'll first preface this with the statement saying that you can move either before IPO or you can move before product/market fit. Girish moved just before IPO and Vinod from Cloud Cherry moved before product/market fit, right?
And I say to people that you know, you can move either at those two junctions or anywhere in between. But if you were to take, let's say, an enterprise company, which has at least 50k ACV or like, you know, trying to go to 100k ACV, you have to move immediately. There is no question about it.
Like, you know, you talk to any founder who has actually moved in the last two, eight years, and they have actually focused on 50k ACV. They have to immediately move because if you're doing like a sales led, go-to-market and your product is something that aligns with that, then you will just not understand what's the right purchasing pattern that is happening in the enterprise.
What are the pain points that you have to prioritize over others? How are you going to product market this? How are you going to package this? So 50k ACV and above immediately have to move. Otherwise, I have seen specific startups is that they build a business, they're selling to enterprise in India for 100k ACV, and then they think that, you know, they can come to U. S. and then just hire sales guys and marketing guys. They hire, then they fire and they realize that, you know, the sales and marketing did not work. But then after 2-3 years, they realize that the product itself did not work. So they have to rebuild the product, completely different product, and then like go back to that journey of going to a million dollars and beyond. So one thing that I tell is this product/market fit cannot be exported, like different geography, different product/market fit. Now, if you are on the SMB side and a little bit on the mid market side. On the SMB side, this is more close to what the Freshworks was where you can run the GTM sitting in India. There you can do high velocity sales and they're getting maybe even a $600 ACV or a $3000 ACV. Today, actually, it is very hard to build a $600 ACV company, right? I tell founders that you need at least a $3000 ACV product to be built for any type of GTM to work, but with $3000 ACV, you can attempt a GTM from India and you can get to your first million dollars in revenue without even moving to US. I have at least a dozen companies in Upekkha, which have done that.
But then the more you go to enterprise, this lesson keeps coming back again and again is that you should have moved much, much earlier because then you would have saved that time. So more SMB, you can afford to actually not move or move late. More enterprise, you have to move as quickly as possible if you want to actually save time in terms of the growth milestones that you want to hit. One thing you should not do, though, is you should not say that, "look, I'm going to first focus on India and get some revenue and then see that, you know, how can I scale this?"
Because that I've not seen a single instance where it works. Not even a single instance in the 100 plus companies that I saw at Upekkha and 100 plus companies that I've seen before Upekkha. So product/market fit just cannot be exported.
[00:17:42] Gopi Rangan: There's a lot you've shared here. I want to unpack a few things, some of the highlights.
If the ACV is small, you can run it from India, you can get to a million dollars in revenue and then think about how to scale. If the ACV starts at $10,000, $50,000. And if the goal is to get to a hundred thousand, $200,000 ACV, then you need to be close to the customers. It's a longer selling process and it's more intimate selling process.
You need to spend time with the customers on the ground. If you want to take product/market fit that achieved, you know, while in India and try to export it to the U. S., that's not going to be easy. And especially if you figured out how to sell to Indian customers, and then you want to take those lessons and try to target the U.S. customers. that would be incredibly difficult. And so far, we haven't seen a successful transition any startup has made. Are there any trends or startups that do well? When they are successful selling in the U. S. market, are there certain sectors that are easier, like maybe retail or utility or enterprise infrastructure or cyber security or some of the HR tech, fintech?
These are various areas that you focus on. You have a broad overview based on like many, many companies that you've tracked. Can you highlight some trends on which sector might be easier or where some of your portfolio companies have been successful?
[00:19:03] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah, so one of the things that I have not seen work at all is is like there are except for like one or two exceptions is on the dev tools on the infrastructure side, right?
So I have not seen founders from India to be able to build like very good, successful infrastructure layer, right? On the other hand, one of the strengths from an Indian founder building for global market is on the application side, not as much on the infrastructure side. On the application side, there are companies which have done horizontal, but then when you're building horizontal, you're competing with extremely funded competitors in the U. S. So it becomes like a very tough battle. There are few who have traversed that and crossed that well, but most of the like, you know, are not able to do that because of the heavy funded competitors that are there.
[00:19:46] Gopi Rangan: Can you give an example?
[00:19:48] Rajan Maruthavanan: Freshworks is a horizontal, right? So it's, it's, uh, it's used a very different GTM which otherwise most people had thought when it started in 2011/12 saying that, "look, this doesn't make sense. Why would somebody sell a $600 ACV? How can you actually close it in seven days or 14 days? Does the cost structure of doing this GTM even work?" So that's a horizontal plane. But where I think, like, in general, Indian founders advantages is building on applications.
In fact, if you think about infra versus application, most of the infra guys try to actually, uh, disrupt the application guys by giving applications free, but then they cannot go into the depth. So the customers that buy, they go to those application builders who can go in depth into the application use cases and can solve the problem really, really well.
So the application is a general advantage for Indian founders. Horizontal applications is one, but where they actually shine is, is where they are able to go more in depth, right? One of the best examples is Zenoti, which is like picking a vertical and going really, really deep. The general area that we as Upekkha like is, is we like verticals.
We like boring industries where most of the folks don't want to come and build startups. And there are many founders that have gone into that space and then kind of work. So the anti-pattern for me is more around building, let's say an MLOps. Platform from India for the global market. One is is that the tech stacks keep changing in a camel ops became LLM ops.
Now LLM ops is changing every three months, right? So that is one thing that is happening. So you have to be very, very close to where the model guys or the platform guys are there and you have to actually change your platform much, much faster. So that particular space I would say is a little bit of an anti pattern.
The exceptions are people like Hasura, people like Postman who actually have built like good dev tools. But most applications that you would see is that somebody is building for, let's say, salon industry, for the utilities industry or somebody is building like a QA tool. These are all things that I would put it in the bracket of boring applications.
So where like, you know, Indian founders do really, really well is in these vertical, boring spaces where there is less competition, there are deep markets, and you can have a deeper understanding, go there and solve that really, really well.
[00:22:03] Gopi Rangan: This is a wealth of wisdom here that would be super useful for founders.
What is something that founders do that doesn't really help them? Are there some patterns you've seen where founders try and it just doesn't work or they repeat the mistake and I know you want them to make new mistakes so they can learn and learn from other people, but some mistakes are just, it's just very difficult.
[00:22:28] Rajan Maruthavanan: Oh, there are like, you know, a lot, right? In fact, you know, one of the session that Prasanna and I do as the first, first session that we do is, is on biases. So a lot of founders have, I mean, all of us have biases, but then there are a lot of like founder biases that come in the way. I can actually think about many things.
The one thing that I was thinking about yesterday, I've been meaning to write a blog post on how to take advice. I actually feel that how to take advice is a skill or a muscle that founders should develop. I was sharing this literally yesterday with a founder saying that, first quoting Nawal, saying, you know, talk to enough number of people or the advice cancels to zero.
And because we were having this conversation of like how to actually take the advice, like, there are founders who would go to and talk to like multiple people and then like summate the advice from everybody and then come back confused. Saying, Oh, like, like we're having this conversation about like when to go to U. S. and when not to go to U. S. Right. If you speak to 15 different people, you will get 15 different opinions, and then you'll get thoroughly confused. So there are a few thumb rules that I actually share on thinking about how to take advice. One I would say is that you have to first understand that despite you taking advice as a founder, you are responsible for the decision that you make.
There is no lawyer in the world who you know, he can actually charge you $5, 000 an hour, but because you have taken his advice, he's not going to hold himself responsible for saying that I gave you this advice. So instead of you, I will go to jail, right? So that is not going to happen. So as a founder, you have to actually take responsibility whether you took somebody's advice or not.
So first thing you have to keep that in mind. The second thing that you have to do is to differentiate us in like the context. Every advice works in a context. You have to first understand that the advice that you're getting and the context in which that that advised work, does it match your context? If it does not, then you have to question the context and say the advice really is useful or not.
The other thing that I realized is the more charming the person is, it is not advice, it is persuasion. So, so you have to be very careful when you are getting advice from somebody who is charming. Then I love this one input that one of the founders shared with me, like Neil Kothari from iZuto. He said that, look, when I take advice, if it is on the topic of GTM, if it is a topic of marketing, then I discard others people advise, I trust my gut and instinct more than I try, try others. Because here is the thing, right? See a person who has a national player in hockey cannot give you advice on how to play pickleball. Right. He may have been great in that particular game, and that was like 10, 15 years ago. He cannot actually come and tell you, he can actually tell you about the psychology of the sport, but he cannot tell you like, what are the tactics for this?
The second thing that he said was saying that if it is matters about compliance, accounting, if it is matters about HR, if it is a problem, which is very, very old, then old problem, better to have old solution. I rather listen to my accountant on what he's saying. Then the next aspect, which I think about is this incentives.
You have to ask this question saying, how are the incentives aligned? Like for instance, this is an experience that I go through again and again during my think tank days where I was helping with M&A, when you are having an M&A conversation, the incentive of your investor, who's on your cap table, the incentive of your acquirer and the incentive of founders are not aligned.
So if you are taking advice from your investor at that particular point in time, not the best. What I suggest at that particular point in time to founders is go talk to a founder who was in a similar situation six months ago. He can be in a far better position to give you like unbiased advice. So this whole thing about how to take advice.
This has been on my mind for a while and I think founders make a lot of mistakes. And if there is one skill founders were to build, I would say on how to take advice, not how to give advice, how to take advice and parse the advice because at the end of the day, the most important role or a job of a founder is his decision making.
That's the job that a founder is making and what happens is that that particular job gets polluted by advice that they take. It gets colored by the biases that they go through. And so hopefully this like, you know, uh, kind of unpacks that on how to actually think about taking an advice and I see a lot of people making mistakes, like, you know, just talk to 15 people come back confused and then say, I'm overwhelmed and I don't know what to do. Sometimes people end up losing two years of their journey because they did not think through it correctly.
[00:26:51] Gopi Rangan: I can't wait to read that blog post when you write it. A lot of my time with founders is fighting bad advice they got from someone and someone charismatic or someone important or someone close to them or someone who did it five years ago. It feels like they come from practical experience and we have to now undo and unpack the incentives behind why they gave the advice and the context behind why they gave the advice and see if it makes sense for this situation. I spend a lot of time with founders and the skill of learning how to take advice is very important.
[00:27:23] Rajan Maruthavanan: Yeah, the first time founders are more gullible to this because they come in saying, "I have no idea and anybody who sounds very authoritative, they're like very sure. So maybe they are right." That hurts first-time founders more than people who have been around and I've built a little bit of muscle on how to take advice.
Yeah.
[00:27:39] Gopi Rangan: This is incredible. I know you are a new VC firm, a new type of VC firm, and you're focusing on something that is also unique, the India-US corridor, B2B infrastructure and applications, and you're doing it very differently compared to many other investment firms.
As someone who's coming in to the industry, what is something that you would like to change about the venture capital ecosystem to make it better for founders and for venture capital investors?
[00:28:07] Rajan Maruthavanan: So one of the things that we started out with this is to improve the odds of success for founders or improve the mortality rate. I'd say that before you can change the game, you have to know the rules of the game. So I'm in that phase where I'm still trying to learn the rules of the game.
And, uh, I don't know, Gopi, if I shared this with you, I wrote a blog post last year called 'AVC for Kids'. I have this fascination for taking topics and then, you know, deconstructing it. I've been reading Fred Wilson for the last 20 years and in trying to understand how VC works, I created this book, which I wanted to give to my nephew.
So, I'm still in the phase of learning on how the VC industry is working. And one learning that I've had is, like, you know, since the time I wrote 'AVC for Kids', I was looking for timeless principles. And I don't think there are timeless principles, right? And this is like a fast moving environment and ecosystem.
The only thing that I can say, which is a little timeless is that power law works as in like, you know, if I were to break it down, I would say once every three, four years, generational companies come up. And like every investor, like you and like every other investor that are out there, we want to work with generational companies.
We have all our own ways of how to find those generational companies. We believe to pick her that, you know, we can find those generational companies with, when we work with lots of entrepreneurs, like how YC did, and if we can improve the odds of success or odds of survival or the odds of crossing the zero to one, if you improve that particular odd, then, you know, we will have a better shot at finding those generational companies.
I know the VC world gets a lot of bad rap and I tell founders or anybody that are willing to listen to me that, you know, investors are not bad. Bad investors are bad, right? And it sounds very tautological.
Right. So everybody has a role to play. And the role of an investor that is coming out there is to say that, look, when a generational company comes in, let's make sure that, you know, we give them all the resources that are available and that can be allocated to them because those generational companies create a massive impact on the world.
And that is what, like, I feel all investors are trying to figure out and in the process of trying to get rich.
[00:30:10] Gopi Rangan: We're coming towards the end of this fascinating interview and I want to ask you about your community involvement.
Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which one?
[00:30:21] Rajan Maruthavanan: So the one that I resonate the most with is actually done by a. Friend, he runs something called a Sitare Foundation, Amit Singhal. So he was one of the earliest engineers at Google and he practically rewrote PageRank, right?
So what he does is he takes care of the education of children from like, you know, class 1 to class 12. And then trains them in computer science and helps them find a job. He started with 30, I think, you know, he's impacting 160 and I help him out in wherever I can. Where I find the maximum impact can happen is when you can actually change the education trajectory of someone. I was able to move from whatever economic zone to where I am today is because of education. And if that opportunity can be given to more and more people, then that I think is like one of the biggest needle moving impact that you can create.
[00:31:09] Gopi Rangan: Rajan, thank you very much for spending time with me. Thank you for sharing real-life practical nuggets of wisdom based on your experience working with hundreds of founders over the years.
Thanks for sharing stories based on those experiences. I look forward to sharing your wisdom with the world.
[00:31:27] Rajan Maruthavanan: Thank you, Gopi. So fun to have a chat with you.
[00:31:32] Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.
Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode.