In this episode of the Rainmatter podcast, we spoke to Osborne of EMVC. He is quite clued in with the fintech investing space. We spoke about his view on spotting some of the disruptive teams, thoughts on fintech regulations, and more.
Please enjoy this conversation with Osborne. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we're @rainmatterin on Twitter.
In this episode, we caught up with Kushal Baghia from All In Capital to talk about the state of early-stage investing in India. Kushal has around 8 years of experience as an investor and has supported around 130 teams throughout his career. Having started his investing career at FirstCheque, he then set up his own fund All In Capital, through which he supports founders who are giving it their all in building a business.
We spoke about a bunch of things with Kushal;
1. Formative years and how that shaped him as an investor
2. His journey of becoming a VC and how should look at VC as a career
3. A bit about his earlier stints at Upgrad, FirstCheque
4. How All In Capital happened, what are the mandates and focus areas
5. Typical investing process Kushal follows and what he looks for in a startup
6. Views on the funding environment
Please enjoy this conversation with Kushal. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we're at @rainmatterin on Twitter.
This week, I caught up with Suruchi (CEO) and Suhail (CTO) from Ossus Bio. Ossus is a climate tech startup that is developing a bioreactor to product green hydrogen. Ossus was founded in 2017 by Suruchi Rao, Shanta Rao, and Kamar Suhail Basha. They are working on green hydrogen by using waste carbon in industrial effluents as the starting material. They were bootstrapped until now. In this episode Suruchi and Suhain talk about: 1. Why Hydrogen as an alternate energy source. 2. Why is Green Hydrogen a potential choice despite the challenges with storage and transportation. 3. How did Ossus Bio grow to where it is today. 4. What are some of the policy changes needed to mainstream green hydrogen. 5. Personal journies of the founders.
Please enjoy this conversation with Suruchi and Suhail. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.
IndiaDataHub is a data portal that aggregates and provides insights on economic and financial data. Though the government, regulators, and other systemically important institutions publish tons of data, it's highly unstructured and messy. Ashutosh had long dealt with the issue of messy data and based on his experiences, he started IndiaDataHub started as a passion project while he was working as an economist at IIFL. It later became a startup. Ashutosh and his team also publish an annual publication called The Data Book which gives rich insights on various aspects of the Indian economy. This year's edition gives you a bird's-eye view of the Indian economy across various parameters like demographics, agriculture, industry, trade, banking, capital markets, and much more.
So I caught up with Ashutosh to talk about the backstory of IndiaDataHub and also discuss some of the highlights from The Data Book. In this conversation, we talk about:
This was an absolutely fascinating conversation and we hope you enjoy this as much as we did recording it.
You can purchase your copy of The Data Book—State Of India here.
Visit Rainmatter for more.
2021 was a banner year for startups. According to Crunchbase, $643 billion of venture money went into startups, compared to $335 billion in 2020 globally. Investors poured $38 billion into Indian startups in 2021 compared to $11.1 billion in 2020, according to Fintrackr. The sheer amount of activity in the world of startups was maddening. 2021 will forever be remembered as the year when venture capital changed. We saw the rise of non-traditional investors like Tiger Global, who play by different rules compared to the vintage investors like Sequoia etc, a record number of unicorns, the highest ever early-stage rounds, a record number of new funds and much more.
Given the sheer amount of activity in the space, we caught up with Sriram Mani from Moneycontrol, who covers the startup and venture funding ecosystem. Sriram has published some brilliant pieces on the evolving startup world. In this conversation, he spoke about:
And a whole lot more. This was a fascinating conversation, given that Sriram spends his entire day looking at this space. You can also follow Sriram on Twitter; he's @manicontrol2020.
We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed recording this.
Thanks for tuning to episode 3. In this episode, Nithin caught up with Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Shrivastava, and Rohan Gupta, the founders of smallcase.
In this freewheeling conversation Vasanth, Anugrah, and Rohan talk about:
0:00 Introduction and Individual backgrounds
9:20 The chronology of the smallcase story
12:05 What's smallcase
13:13 The Rainmatter side of the smallcase story
15:10 The initial days of building smallcase
25:57 Navigating the technological challenges of integrating with different brokers
29:20 Onboarding older brokers
35:06 Growth hack: Getting customers to tag other brokers on tweets asking for smallcases
36:50 Deciding on broking partners
38:40 smallcase Publisher - a platform for advisors
42:42 Building Publisher
43:59 Breakup of smallcase transaction across platforms
46:14 smallcase Gateway
51:50 Tickertape
58:20 Being a broker on their own vs deciding not to
1:01:20 Thinking about now in the light of billion-dollar valuations ascribed to brokers
1:02:40 Going global 1:05.21 Direct indexing vs ETF
1:10.15 Learnings from Smallcase journey
1:15:27 What next
If you guys want to explore all the awesome things that smallcase is building:
Tickertape
smallcase Publisher
smallcase Gateway
In Episode 2, Nithin speaks to Prateek Singh, the founder of LearnApp on how he working on making quality financial education accessible.
Prateek talks about:
00:00 LearnApp
4:51 Prateeks' background and his trading journey
16:36 The behind deciding to teach people
25:56 How LearnApp started
29:39 Demographics of LearnApp users
32:40 Competing against people selling greed
38:58 On funding and raining more money
42:03 What content gets consumed the most
45:27 Organic growth vs ads
50:00 Advice for wannabe entrepreneurs
50:38 What motivates him
Please enjoy this conversation with Prateek. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.
Yay, we finally decided to start a podcast. Thanks for tuning in to the first episode of The Rainmatter Podcast. The idea of the podcast is to talk and learn from the best and brightest founders and investors in the Indian startup ecosystem. We hope this podcast becomes a source of learning in your entrepreneurial journey.
In the first episode, we decided to catch up with Vishvajit Sonagara, the founder of Quicko which is working on making taxes easy for individuals and businesses. In this conversation Vishvajit talks to Nithin about:
Please enjoy this conversation with Vishvajit. We'd also love to hear your thoughts on this episode and also in general, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.