 Good afternoon, everyone. And a warm welcome to the sharks. Please a warm round of applause to the sharks as we welcome them here. Venita and Amit have joined us here today. And you know, we're extremely delighted to have them. And truly, you know, if somebody has gone forward and revolutionized the investment space, the angel investing space in India, it's really both of them who are doing some great work out there. So thank you very much for joining us. You know, before I sort of get into poor your investor and we understand, you know, how you as a shark, as an investor, how do you look at it? We'd love to know a little more about your journey, Venita. I know you've been in an entrepreneur and after finishing your education, you decided to take the plunge immediately. And so we'd love to know a little more about how you did it, what made you go for it, and how was it that you became an entrepreneur? We have a house full of entrepreneurs today looking to start or just started. So it would be great inspiration for them. Sure. Thank you so much, Ritu. First, every time Ritu or her team, they call me to come to one of these events. It's very hard for me to say no, because in my early years as an entrepreneur, 2007, eight, I remember reading the magazine and before entrepreneurship became cool in India and before other mainstream media started speaking about entrepreneurs that entrepreneurship is not equivalent to Beirose Gaari. And it can be an aspirational profession. I think her team was doing that. And I'm very grateful, because I've been around in the ecosystem for 15 years. And I think in the... So when I started at 23, I was, of course, very naive, all kinds of stupid. So when I thought about what's the first business that I want to start, I overestimated how easy it was to build a very large business. So my plan was that before I turn 30, I'm gonna have a publicly listed company. And the first few years were very hard. We actually started a business where we were trying to use tech in background verification. And it was a B2B company. And it didn't go. I think the max revenue we got to was about three crores. And we'd never raised any funding because, again, we overestimated how easy it was to extract money from corporate clients. And we always thought the best kind of funding is when the customer funds you. So we bootstrapped that company for about five years. And then it didn't scale. And I had exited that. My husband, who's also my co-founder now, Kaushik, he had tried running another business and that had failed. So he had gone to McKinsey. So when we decided to get together in 2012, we did a different kind of stupid thing. We thought that the first business didn't scale because we didn't try raising capital. So next time we start a business, we're gonna make a super scalable funded business. And my passion was always to do something in women consumer space because I just thought that there was so many opportunities around young women in India because this was one demographic that was changing most rapidly. The demographic that never had access to education, employment opportunities was suddenly stepping out and taking charge of her own destiny, which meant that the kind of product she would invest in would be very different from what her mom did. And so, and Kaushik wanted to do something in e-commerce because it was also the time where, you know, the entire, I think in the next 10 years, we saw the entire digital market go to about 100 million consumers. And so we launched this company called FabBag, which was a subscription business. And we thought that the way to raise capital early on was to do something that was so innovative, so hot case. So this was a subscription business where we had an algorithm that could curate products for consumers based on their very detailed beauty profile. And it was so complicated that even the consumers didn't understand. And, but because at that time we went, both of us had a decent educational background. We somehow convinced a bunch of angels to give us some capital. And I think that was even bigger mistake than bootstrapping my previous business because before product market fit, we got venture capitalists as an angel investors on board, which meant that you're on the treadmill. The moment the day you raise somebody's money, you're accountable, you have to give it back or you have to, you know, raise a future round. And before product market fit, we raised this early angel round and then we started scaling this subscription commerce business. And for three years, we kept trying to hustle, scale it, getting brands on board, getting consumers, got to about 18,000 subscribers, which for a subscription business I later realized was a lot. But when you have product market fit, you feel it because, you know, your product really starts growing organically. But we were on that treadmill of performance marketing where to acquire every single consumer, you had to spend more and more. And that's when we realized that we don't really have a product market fit. And we were very close to thinking about shutting this down because we had almost run out of capital. But based on the 500,000 women who we had over the last three years spoken to, we found something that turned out to be eventually a massive opportunity, which was to create products, to build a brand that could make products that were perfect for these young women. And at that time, thinking of launching a brand in 2015 was super hard because every single board meeting, we would have this conversation where our investors would say, you know, it takes about 50 crore. I mean, that was a number we would always discuss in all these conversations. 50 crore lakh there to build a brand in India because there is no way without putting the product on television that anybody will come and buy your products. And we had the last 30 lakhs left in our bank account. And so for many quarters, we kept thinking of this idea of should we try it or should we just use the last 30 lakhs to pay all our dues, pay our teams and shut it down. And then of course, there was this, the more we spoke to these women who are our consumers, we realized that there's something that's happening which other brands, the other FMCG companies that had the largest brands in India had no idea about. The big shift that was happening was that these young women were beginning to shop online. They were spending a lot of time on social media. Instagram was beginning to take off and we had these brands that were saying things like, women will not put a picture of them wearing makeup on social and only 11% of online shoppers are women. So you don't have a market online. If you're trying to build a brand around women and India of course is a color cosmetics market that's per capita one eighth of the rest of the world and that's not gonna change because Indian women will only wear makeup when they go to weddings or when they go to parties. And for us, it just hurt us to the core that there were these large brands that have no idea how this young consumer is gonna dramatically change in the next decade. They're not ready for it. And we just felt that we couldn't let it happen. We couldn't let it happen that there's nobody building for this consumer. And even though it sounded hard to build a brand in India because everybody said that people would pay a premium only if the brand came from Europe or US, we decided to launch sugar back in 2015. And that of course was a time where we hadn't expected that GEO will go nuts and data in India will become the cheapest in the world which meant that suddenly as on 2023, 44% of e-commerce shoppers are women. And we hadn't expect that we could reach 100 million women on Instagram because at that time Instagram had just a couple of million women followers. And for us in this journey we realized that our journey has been the journey of the Indian woman where she has begun to take charge of her destiny. And we have this team of young, ambitious women who so closely mirror that. So we go where this consumer goes. So if she's spending time on social, we are there on YouTube, on Instagram. So we have a community of two and a half million on Instagram, one million on YouTube where we're just educating her, just let her discover products, let her fall more in love with herself, let her accept her skin tone, her skin flaws. You know, learn not to, that makeup is not equivalent to wearing foundation which is four shades lighter or you know, prescriptive definition of makeup. And through just the content and through of course our reviews which I later realized showed that we finally had product market fit. So our products went viral and on Amazon, on Nica, we had thousands of reviews, 4.7 star and without spending a rupee on marketing, we actually got to our first two crores a month number and contrast this to Fabbag where for every single consumer, we had to spend on average on a cake of about 400, 500 rupees. So I saw in my own journey what it's like to finally discover product market fit. And then of course, then the learning was that to raise capital you also need to have a very, very large market which we did not have for color cosmetics back in 2015 but luckily the market started growing. It's one of those markets which is currently growing at about 16% year on year. The e-commerce market is going from one billion dollars to about four and a half billion the next four to five years. So I feel that over the next two, three decades there will be a lot of opportunities around brands especially for young women and luckily we chanced upon it through many, many failed attempts at trying to build a business but this one just feels right again. No, I think every journey and your journey is so inspirational, Venita because the fact that you've hustled so much and then failed and then decided to do it again it takes so much energy and just so much self-confidence to say, no, nothing's gone wrong and we're gonna push it out again. So congratulations on building that beautiful entrepreneurial journey. And now of course as an investor when you're doing so much to help other women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs at large to find their mojo and to help them come up and be able to do their thing. So thank you. Amit, of course we've seen your journey as an entrepreneur, we've seen how you've grown and grown so fast in the last few years. And we'd love to know a little more about how you started out where you went wrong, where you went right and how you hustled and built a great empire for yourself. We started back in 2007 when startup game did not exist. There was nothing like startup, angel fund and all this structured point that existed, nothing existed. We started business for ourselves and that was probably blessing in disguise because we were not doing it to raise money and anybody I meet as a young entrepreneur I always say don't start up to raise money because that's the worst thing you can do to your company. So we kept on running profitably for the next seven years. In 2013 we raised the first sum. Between seven to 13 we started many sites like almost 10 startups I did. I wanted to build something large, I did not know what. So we kept on experimenting. What I was good at was coding and I was good at digital marketing. So I knew SEO well, I understood Facebook, Google very well. And we did not have money to spend on marketing which was a blessing in disguise. So CAC was practically zero. And till date at Cardiq and other properties we have are 95% traffic is organic. So we don't have to spend money on customer acquisition. I think that's what differentiated the company through that having no money basically meant that you have to discover, innovate and find a way to acquire Kandima without spending a dime. And you won't believe that when we, in 2013 when we raised the first sum we did not have a Google account to market or a Facebook account to market. We did not create any. And our investors asked, you know how much do you spend? We want to audit. And I said if you don't spend anything we have not spent a dollar, they don't believe. There is a company with largest auto category traffic not spending a single rupee till 2013. After that of course we created some accounts. Still I believe that as a young Amit not having money was a blessing in disguise. I was very hungry so we kept on pivoting again and again and again and again without realizing we were actually pivoting. It was more like, it's my paisa ni bane gaya, it's my paisa bane gaya. So I just kept on doing things that will give me cash back because there's no pool to support it. Between 7 to 13 the things that shut down I shut down a jewelry site, I shut down a e-commerce site which I started to sell mobiles. And there were people who were raising money and discounting the mobiles and I did not want to do all that. I wanted to build for profits. And I think that probably helped us keep on pivoting. So I then created a price comparison site where I let others sell at loss and I will make money on the traffic I know how to acquire. I had revenue of that site became 50 like a month back in 2011. And I was investing maybe two lakh, one lakh in development. I was very frugal in building teams around me also. I was a developer myself so we hired freshers. Like intern the 10,000 bucks a month and I trained them myself. So my development costs also became very low. Then we hired sales team in similar format. I would go sell it to dealers myself and I would take young freshers along with me to sell and they would get coached and again 10, 15,000 interns. When people tell me, I need money, I say you know, you have to first learn how to basically create a process which is frugal enough. So you're not raising to survive but you're raising to scale and create playbooks. So what I did very well was in Jaipur, my hometown. I started creating playbooks. I learned how to sell to used car dealers. I learned how to sell to new car dealers. Then I sent people out to replicate the playbook in other cities. And every single business that I do till date, I create a playbook in my own town Jaipur and then I go out with that. That has helped me build more sustainably. Of course, to scale faster, you have to invest in brand, other things which we do. But fundamentally, my transaction never loses money and that's what I've always focused on till. You'll see me in Shakti asking a lot of unit economics. It's for that reason. I'm trying to figure out where are you burning? And if you're burning, is it a healthy one? If you're investing in tech, innovation, I appreciate such burns. But if you're discounting the transaction or losing money on the transaction, I usually don't like to invest in such businesses for that very reason. I love to see businesses which have hustled an innovator on the CAC side, customer acquisition side. I love to invest in people who have built a brand without spending money on Instagram, for example, New Age Ways or building brands. So I've seen how constraints can create these kind of innovation and that has happened to me. Be hungry is all I can say. Be lean while you build it. And I think that's such valuable lessons for anybody who's building a startup out here. And we always talk about burn and here is an entrepreneur and a shark who says don't burn, you don't need to burn. So that's great advice too, I think. Sometimes we just need to think of more ingenious ways to be able to figure our way around. So burn to expand the playbook, multiply faster because it will require large manpower costs to start with. But if your playbook that finally gives cash, it will come back eventually, right? So have a playbook which is generating cash. It will require very little investment. I'll just break the problem down. Usually what I do, and that's what I advise to every young entrepreneur, you don't have to capture India. You have to just capture your local pin code. Or local pin code is large enough then capture the Aldarsh Nagar mall. Doesn't matter. Just form that small playbook that works for you which generates cash back. Then it's about expand it to pin code, expand it to city, expand it to state, expand it to India. And you know how much it will take to build those teams around. And don't go too fast. Time's up, it's not in my view. Market is over there, consumer is over there. Don't rush into it. Many times you will raise VC money and you'll play the GMV game. You'll grow fast. The growth on steroids will fall back, frankly. I have seen all my time in my life. Many unicorns that have raised money, have GMV game, they are trying to fix the problems they've created for themselves now. They're trying to get the burn right. DNA is wrong for the company. So create a company with good culture because if you are not creating that, it's not going to happen later. You can come to scale and say, you're going to be a profit, it's going to be very difficult. So my view is build it right from the beginning. Have a strong foundation. You'll go slow in the beginning. Look, I'll tell you, I'll give you my revenue. We made a car in 2013, we used to make 6 crore revenue, 6CR. Now let's do around commission revenue. I don't talk GMV ever because in used car GMV increases. We now do 1600 crores of commission revenue. So it's about 1 crore to 16 crore per year. If you reach 4 or 8 from 1, the compounding effect gets very fast. If your foundation is strong. So my view is build playbooks and then multiply. And that's the right way to do it. I think that's great and the numbers look great too. I mean, that's for sure. So you know, I'll also love to know a little more about, you know, from you because we have a tech community here. We have deep tech startups. We have every startup which is just beginning to grow and grow big in India. So my point is that, you know, we're in the middle of a startup revolution. In our country. And the funds are always going to fall short of, you know, the amount of startups that will be chasing them. So what would you advise them? You know, obviously, because just for the reason that you've not been able to do it, not follow their dreams or build their business. So how do you advise them to sort of look for capital? How, and if at all, you know, they can do less capital and be able to grow. So what do you tell startups on that? Yeah, first advice would be that, you know, when you look at something like a shark tank and you see what's happening there. And of course, what happened in 2021 in India, it is definitely very misleading because you feel that everybody gets funding, right? Now, in shark tank, the formula is that there are on in an episode with three pitches, two out of the three get funded. And in 2021, there was, of course, a lot of international US dollars that flowed into India. So it looked like every day you open the papers and you see funding announcements and you feel that, you know, this is just a natural milestone for every business to go through. And I feel that that neglects the fact that there are crores of entrepreneurs in India who are bootstrapping businesses which are fundamentally scaling from revenue that they're making from their customers really at the end of the day, the purpose of a business is to sustain itself, make profits, scale, and manage that working capital tightly. And you cannot try to think that I will build a business just to raise capital. And that can be very confusing. So firstly, I think that that whole euphoria that was in 2021 and what we see in shark tank makes it look like it's very easy, but I've been an entrepreneur for the last 15 years and after going through more than 100 VC rejections, including, I always say, that we're probably the only company that had two IC rejections, which is like the final IC approval, investment committee approval. That's the bad rejection is very rare, but that also we've had. It's very hard to raise funding. So if your entire thesis depends on raising money, then you're really taking something which is outside if you control and factoring it into your success. And if you're doing that, and there are people who play that game, then you need to play by the rules of the game. And the rules of the game, that game are that the most important, like the way to a VC is hard, I always say, is through time. So there is, like three conversations with VCs and you learn that they will say a great founder, but if it's a bad market, the market wins. Bad founder, great market, also the market wins. So the market, which is how large the market in which you're playing is, is really the most important factor when you're raising funding. And unless, and I have made that mistake of over and over again, trying to build something which was, you know, when you like become an engineer and you do an MBA, you wanna create something innovative and innovative businesses generally have to create a market. But a VC will rarely invest in something where you're creating a category. They will prefer to invest in something where there is a clearly large market. Probability of failing would be super high, but if there is a success, the outcome is very high. And many times when we see what happens on Shark Tank, there are many companies we invest in on Shark Tank which are not traditional VC definition may fundable. And don't use that as an example to think that your own not so scalable business can be funded because Shark Tank is a different program where you're trying to impact some level of grassroots startup revolution. And which is why there are a few of these companies that do get funded, probably half of what Amit and I have invested would be companies which won't be from the traditional definition, super large markets and super scalable. But there is a reason you do it because it is promoting a grassroots entrepreneurship. But if you go to the traditional definition of angel series A, series B, the most important criterion boils down to capital. And if you, if that is your game where you're saying that I will have to raise to sustain my business, then it's also important to remember that you will take six to 12 months and in a market like this, if you don't have at least 12 months of runway, then you need to figure out a way to redo your burn every month to ensure that you have at least 12 months of runway because entrepreneurs are irrationally optimistic and we're all in that situation. But fundraising, I feel, is one of those things where there is a lot of for more that has to build up also amongst those venture capitalists for you to get a check, right? So at the end of the day, easiest, people often ask me that, are you, how do you get your valuation right? I said, it's like, you know, basically what happens in a Bhaji market, right? You have three offers, you'll get the best valuation. If you have one offer, you'll never get a better valuation because at the end of the day, and then if you want to be a really hot startup, the only way is that there should be four more, a lot of people should be investing in that space. Now, all of these things, I learned in my own journey that you can't plan, you can't deliver it to precision. So for us, everybody says that, wow, D2C is so cool, 2020 made D2C was one of the most hotly invested in categories. 2021 made more D2C investment happen than any other category, which is amazing, right? Building brands out of India, so you were at the right place at the right time. But we started in 2015. At that time, most VCs said, brands out of India will never get funded because it's a crowded small market. We will never invest in this category, and it took five, six years for suddenly D2C to become the flavor of the month. Now, how do you, you can't build a business planning, oh, my category will become flavor of the month in this year, and that's how I'll plan my entire journey. You can't. So you have to build your journey based on your own understanding of the consumer, your own, and you should be prepared for those many years before it becomes the flavor of the month because it really is not something that is in your control. And in that journey, so we did everything from raising from friends and family to debt, managing a business with a very, very tight ship where it was profitable. So, you know, there's like a lot of times people are like, oh, you're not making profit. We were profitable till we were at 56 crores net revenue, and then we took a call to not be profitable for three, four years to like gain market share, and because we had the cash in bank. So it's a choice, but till 56 crores, nobody will always come. You can take a unicorn that's raised $500 million, and they are also susceptible to the market's ups and downs, which is what's happening to the social media. Yeah, no, I think you're totally right over there. I mean, I would very quickly want you to tell us, you know, once you've raised capital, let's say, you get lucky and you find the right investor who buys your story. How then do you deploy that capital? Are there some good practices in which you can say that, okay, these are five things or four things you should do to make sure that you're able to get the best out of the fund that you've raised? No, I think on the previous question, I'll just say, there's no glory in raising funds. So don't think that raising funds is the glory moment. Actually, when you build a profitable business and you're able to list it or there is some strategic exit, that's when you really make money as a founder. Remember that. So I have a lot of equity left in my own company for that reason. The bootstrapping helped me retain a lot big equity into my own firm. So sometimes delaying funds is fine. I mean, you don't need to really raise, don't raise it. I'll tell you real, to 10 to 13, I got every single year, I got offers of couple of million dollars, which I did not take because that was a profit sitting in the bank. And I did not know how to deploy it. So my brother asked me, do you have a way to deploy the capital you'll raise? I said, yeah, paper me now, so he said, okay, literally, I feel like there's a glory here. You know, paper me now, I raised the fund, so don't do that. And that trap, I got saved because of Anurag, my brother and co-founder. And 10, 11, 12, every single year, a term should have a few million dollars. Then we raised cities around that to and back in 2013, or 15 million directly. We did not raise any money till that seven to 13 journey. That helped us in a way. Now coming to the deployment of funds, look, when we raise one, in any case, you have to build a plan and you have to submit before you raise. So it's usually a very structured plan given to investors at the stage I raised. But if it's a very early stage company, it will be very different. My view would be, if you are gonna optimize your money spends to bring innovation that can be permanent in terms of lower CAGs or technology built to reduce operations cost or technology used to increase revenue, either way it works. That kind of is a good work to have. But if you're gonna just fund that transaction, that's the worst way you can use the money in my view. And what will happen to you as an investor will expect you to go from X to 10X. So what you will feel is that I have to grow the GMV quickly. And that is the trap I'm trying to call out here. Don't get into that trap because fundamentally you don't build strong businesses in that zone. You have to step back and think what is the good use of money. If I'm building technology, I'm hiring a lot of developers, but what am I expecting out of it? So I have a very KPI driven approach that I invest in technology only for three reasons. Either it will save some money. It means I'll automate some process, I'll introduce chatbots, I'll introduce something that will reduce the cost. Second is it will be something that will increase my revenue. The technology intervention will give me digital reach or something that will increase revenue. So I am investing in digital distribution or something that is organic in nature. Third, it will increase consumer experience. So that's another critical piece that you must invest that you've made the process smoother for your end user. So I try to deploy money in these three and I have a measurable number that I take from my team. That give me dollars you will make through this product intervention. That has helped us prioritize our money better. Otherwise, I have to deploy money for growth, not for maintenance. And that's the key part how I look at a capital. Second, I think I try to avoid performance marketing where it is negative in economics. So my performance, so I always talk to my team that if we raise money, we have to make sure that the other guy has to burn five times us. So if my click is coming, I mean 50 paisa and I'm still able to do marketing at 50 paisa in my category by the way. So 50 paisa or click is possible in cars category then your category is also possible. So, but you have to learn how to do it. It's a deep art of optimizing your campaign which I personally learned when I had no money and still works. So my point of view is that don't fall into trap of spending like more than what you can get back and name of, you know, lifetime value and whatever, unless it's a really repeat product that you have got into hand, then it's okay to spend. But if you have no repeat codes, I would avoid the trap of spending in the hope that somebody will repeat. Break the problem into smaller parts, Jaipur le lo ya koi lokal area le lo, waha par spend kar lo, bhaat hum main ho jaya ka poori India mein want ka. Aur uspe deko repeat codes kaite bitha na, aur playbook one ke poori India mein expand kar lo, no problem. But don't deploy a performance capital, usme sathya tha rich ore in Google or Facebook, aap ne ore. Reality again. So please, Kandav, your cash deploying innovation is what I would say. No, I think.