The man across the table is often Vishal Bali, Executive Chairman of Asia Healthcare Holdings (AHH). He has earned the right to break the rules others follow. He grew Wockhardt Hospitals from a single hospital into a national chain, led its merger into Fortis, and ran Fortis as Group CEO when it spanned roughly 68 hospitals across 12 countries and more than 20,000 people. Since 2016 he has been building something quieter and, by footprint, larger. Start with the contradiction at its center: in Indian healthcare, the most valuable people are exactly the ones you cannot legally give equity to.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The footprint hiding in plain sight

The instinct is to assume the giant multi-specialty chains own the map. The numbers say otherwise.

Our own ecosystem today operates in 75 cities in the country. That has all happened over ten years, whereas the large-format enterprises have been there for 30 or 40 years.

The reason is structural, and it comes down to how many senior doctors a unit needs. A single-specialty hospital runs on three to six full-time anchor clinicians. A multi-specialty hospital needs around 60, because every department demands its own senior consultant. Fewer anchors per unit means each new city is cheaper and faster to open, which is how a focused chain out-spreads a sprawling one.

That focus has produced real scale. AHH runs Motherhood Hospitals in mother and child care, the Asian Institute of Nephrology and Urology, positioned as India’s only dedicated urology and nephrology network, and Nova IVF in fertility. Nova is the clearest proof of the model: when AHH acquired it in 2019 it had 19 centres. It has since crossed 100 centres across roughly 70 cities, with more than half of recent openings in Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns. The capital behind this is patient, not speculative. AHH was incubated by TPG Growth in 2016 and is backed by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, which put in US$170 million in 2022 and a further US$150 million in December 2024. Across its chains, AHH has deployed roughly US$300 million.

The people who will not be employees

Here the conventional playbook breaks. In most industries the prize for commitment is equity, and the vehicle is an ESOP. But under India’s Companies Act, ESOPs can go only to permanent employees and directors, not to consultants. And the best doctors, almost as a matter of identity, refuse to become employees.

What is changing is not their status but their exclusivity. Vishal is precise about the line.

The shift will not happen from them being consultants to employees. The shift is happening from a visiting model to a full-time model. While they continue to be a consultant in the contractual structure, they are committed 100 percent to you.

So the question becomes how to make a non-employee feel like an owner. The answer is a stack of instruments the ESOP rulebook never contemplated: phantom stock and stock appreciation rights, which pay cash tracking the share value without issuing a share; fully convertible debentures, which turn debt into equity at a set milestone; and retainers priced above what a clinician currently bills, so the overpayment itself becomes the lock-in. The audience for this is far wider than hospitals. Any founder leaning on fractional executives or expert consultants hits the same wall, and the same workaround applies. Host Satish Mugulavalli put the underlying tension in a single line:

I would love to own 2 percent of the company that I work for.

The catch is that doctors do not respond the way founders expect. Offered upside in place of cash, they tend to want both.

It’s actually the other way around. Increase my retainer, plus give me something else too.

And the deepest insight here is cultural, not financial. Ownership changes how a person thinks about the enterprise, and its absence changes it just as much.

In an ESOP program you never think like that. But under the clinical ecosystem, they start thinking it’s my practice and my unit, and that governs everything on the economic side for me.

That is why Vishal layers unit economics underneath enterprise upside. A clinician who lives and breathes their own hospital wants a share of that hospital first and a piece of the platform second. Reverse the order and the incentive misfires.

The 35 percent rule and the outsider hire

The other place AHH departs from convention is the acquisition itself. The standard assumption is that getting bought means cashing out and drifting away. Vishal engineers the opposite.

I prefer that they always remain at 30 or 35 percent. In two of our enterprises, that 35 percent has come down to 10 or 12 percent over time, and they see exponential value creation from there.

It is a smaller slice of a bigger pie, and the arithmetic tends to favour the founder: a diluted minority stake in a fast-growing, professionally run platform can be worth more than the whole company was at the point of sale. To stop founders waiting years for an IPO to feel any of that, AHH builds what Vishal calls liquidity boxes, pre-agreed windows to take money off the table before the listing. He is also clear about who carries the risk, which is part of why founders sign.

If we put mediocre talent to work and the enterprises don’t really change, then the fault is ours and not theirs.

For a business this clinical, the org chart is short on clinicians, by design.

My CFO comes from the edtech world. The marketing guys are from FMCG. The B2B sales teams are coming from the insurance world.

The logic is that domain expertise, left alone too long, stagnates a sector, and fresh DNA unsticks it. A soap-brand marketer selling IVF sounds like a category error until you notice that IVF and maternity are consumer choices, made by couples picking a brand, which is exactly what FMCG marketers know how to win. The rule of thumb travels well beyond healthcare: hire the functional expert over the domain expert when the domain has stopped evolving.

The problem the playbook cannot solve

Vishal does not end on the wins. The limit of the model is people, specifically the nursing and paramedical workforce. Buildings are the easy part.

Real estate is not an issue. We can start building beds anywhere. But the biggest issue we face today is the ancillary staff.

By his account, nursing attrition runs at 30 to 40 percent, churning frontline staff roughly every eighteen months. He calls it a self-created problem for the country, rooted in shuttered nursing colleges, the overseas pull, and a culture failure as much as a pay gap: nurses leave because abroad their work is respected in a way the hospital floor at home does not reliably offer. For any operator running a high-churn frontline team, the lesson holds. Pay is one lever; respect and aspiration are the ones that move retention.

It is also the live question hanging over everything else. AHH is still private, and the unified-cap-table listing Vishal points to in the next one to two years is the moment when phantom-stock and FCD holders convert belief into realised value. That finish line is the real engine of loyalty here, and it explains the clinician from the opening scene. Ownership, it turns out, is not a single instrument but a design problem, and the founders who solve it get to keep their best people without ever putting them on the payroll.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

Short of proving that we were actually alive, we had to prove everything else written on that paper. If your pitch contains any hyperbole, it goes out the window the day you decide to list.

The irony is hard to miss. Startups run on hyperbole; the whole funding machine is greased by the word “pioneer.” Here was a process that made you prove it or delete it. For a company doing hardware when nobody in India did hardware, and defense when nobody dreamed of it, that was just the final exam in a very long course.

We were doing hardware when nobody was talking about hardware in India. We were doing defense when nobody was dreaming of defense. And then we wanted to take on the challenge of going public in all of this.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The eight-year engine room

Before the public markets, there was the grind. Founded in 2007 by four IIT Bombay alumni, ideaForge was bootstrapped until 2015, with its first institutional check arriving only in 2017 from Qualcomm, when the company was still 35 to 50 people. The product was a drone, but the harder problem was getting anyone to use it.

A young boy with spiky hair would go around the country demonstrating the product. That was our only weapon.

Buyers, mostly defense and government agencies, would purchase an expensive drone and then lock it away. Ankit’s team had to teach them to fly it.

Don’t use it like party wear, use it like a uniform. You can’t patrol because you found a thief. Patrolling catches the thief in action.

The lesson, for anyone selling into rigid institutions: adoption is a harder engineering problem than the product itself. Total pre-IPO funding eventually reached $53.8 million across 16 rounds, including a $20 million Series B led by Florintree in 2022. But the behavior change came first.

The equity bet that broke the mold

Here Ankit’s thinking diverges most sharply from imported Silicon Valley orthodoxy. The standard four-year, equal-installment vesting schedule was built for companies that listed in five or six years. Hardware does not move that fast.

If you’re building deep tech, a standard four-year equal vest doesn’t work. You have to backload the equity, because the real value of the hardware is created in years four, five, and six.

ideaForge’s ESOP scheme leaned on this backloaded structure, evolving from chunky upfront grants in the bootstrapped years to compensation-linked bands later. Underneath it sat a simple reframe of what employees actually value.

An employee is interested in the net value of what they receive, not the number of shares or the price. Beyond a point, they’re not keen on that.

The same anti-orthodoxy shaped the most-watched decision of the IPO. Venture wisdom says hire a public-market CFO 18 to 24 months out. ideaForge elevated co-founder Vipul Joshi, a childhood friend of Ankit’s with a commerce background, not a finance-veteran resume.

Everyone tells you to hire a CFO who has taken companies public before. We did the exact opposite, because he understood our operations better than anyone.

The result was a sprint of under nine months from decision to listing, executed while restating financials from Indian GAAP to IndAS. Most companies endure a wholesale management overhaul before going public. ideaForge kept its core team and bet on internal trust.

The 93% day

In June 2023, the bet paid off in public. The IPO was oversubscribed 106 times, the first Indian listing since 2021 to clear 100x. The stock listed at ₹1,305.10 against an issue price of ₹672, a first-day premium of roughly 93%. But the number Ankit returns to is not the pop. It is who caught it.

Enough people captured a disproportionate amount of wealth compared to what they’d have made otherwise. Including people who helped us with logistics and on the shop floor.

This was the backloading thesis cashing out on a single trading day. Employees in their twenties and thirties, many granted options on tenure rather than title, saw years of low-cash patience convert into real money.

Validation of a different kind arrived in May 2025. During Operation Sindoor, ideaForge’s hybrid mini-UAVs were deployed by the Indian Armed Forces for intelligence and reconnaissance in contested, GPS-denied environments, followed in June by a roughly ₹137 crore emergency procurement order from the Army. The company, which holds an estimated 50% of the domestic UAV market, has since pushed into offensive systems: drones that find targets and coordinate with assets that neutralize them, all while surviving jamming and spoofing.

The more consciousness there is about your effort, the more people want to contribute to it. If that effort contributes to the nation, you see a lot of positive motion.

Hiring for “trustlessness”

When there are no peers to poach, you cannot hire for pedigree. Ankit’s filter for early talent is built from first principles, the experience of having failed, the desire to contribute, and a quality he calls trustlessness.

The most critical trait isn’t a resume or pedigree. It’s the ability to hold a vision and drive the next steps without needing to be told what to do.

It is the through-line of everything ideaForge has done: a refusal to inherit the playbook, whether on vesting, the CFO chair, or the resume. A company that once had to prove it was alive is now making a larger case, that India can build sovereign hardware, list it, and reward the people who bet early.

India has to become a product nation. We must stop accepting black boxes and take sovereign control of our technology. You cannot stay at the surface layer and hope to build something new.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

Ravi Saxena, founder and CEO of Wonderchef, takes the call in the middle of a podcast recording. The celebrity chef is acting as an intermediary. Rajinikanth is shooting in Roorkee, and the actor wants a Wonderchef kitchen installed on location. Not endorsed. Installed. For his own use.

Ravi has never met Rajinikanth. He has spoken to his wife on video. He is even mildly suspicious that the request might be a fraud, because, as he puts it, fraud is a world. He agrees to send the kitchen anyway.

This is what a consumer brand looks like when it finally works. Celebrities you have never met seek you out, and you are too disciplined to make a thing of it. The man taking the call has spent fifteen years building a company that, by the standards of modern Indian startups, does not exist the way it should.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Citibank defection and the anti-domain thesis

In 1994, Ravi left Citibank in India, then the Mecca of finance, to join a French catering company nobody had heard of. He was going to sell something nobody had heard of either: a paper meal voucher.

Citibank is a far superior place to work, a more sexy name. But I realised I can spread my wings in a company which I am guiding, driving. If it’s not successful tomorrow, it’s my loss. I am willing to take that risk.

The numbers from Sodexo India followed him for the rest of his career. He built the business to 28,000 direct employees and roughly ₹2,000 crore in revenue on a cumulative capital injection of $5 million, about ₹19 crore at the exchange rates of the time. Sodexo India now employs over one lakh people.

The discipline carried over. When Ravi founded Wonderchef in 2009 with Sanjeev Kapoor, he looked at an industry full of obvious places to poach from, Prestige, Hawkins, Bajaj, Philips, Butterfly, and chose not to hire from any of them. Sixteen years later, he ran an audit in his head.

I did a quick scan of my management team, 22 people, eleven of them reporting directly to me. None of them, none of them, comes from any company in our industry.

The Nutriblend mixer-grinder is the case study. His own engineers told him it would fail because foreign brands had tried similar designs. He spent eighteen months developing it anyway, calibrating power specifically for coconut chutney and garam masala. It became the category-defining product. The lesson: domain experts arrive carrying the priors that caused the industry’s stagnation. You do not hire them to innovate. You hire them to maintain.

The bootstrap and the 1.15% solution

Ravi started Wonderchef at 40 with less than ₹2 crore of his own money. His wife had one condition: do not mortgage the house. There was no Series A. No pitch tour.

This is where Wonderchef diverges from the D2C cohort that came up alongside it. Atomberg, boAt, Mamaearth all raised aggressively early. Wonderchef raised its first institutional cheque from Sixth Sense Ventures years after launch, only after the unit economics were locked. Total funding across 11 rounds: approximately $50 million.

Unit economics is the holy grail. For me, that is the price of entry. If you don’t have the right unit economics, you can pay your fixed costs, but if your contribution is not positive, there’s no way it will become profitable. Then you have sexy words like ‘we pivoted.’

The current state validates the philosophy. Wonderchef closed FY25 with operating revenue of ₹421 crore, up 11% year on year, and net profit of ₹4.4 crore, its second straight profitable year. Quick commerce alone contributes over ₹100 crore in ARR. The company is targeting an IPO at a ₹1,800 crore valuation in 2026.

The genuinely interesting choice, though, is on employee equity. Wonderchef ran without a formal ESOP plan for its first ten years. When Ravi did design one, the pool came in at approximately 1.15% of the cap table. The typical Indian tech startup runs 10 to 20%. Grants get reassessed annually against three non-negotiable metrics: sales, EBITDA, and working capital. For every employee. Marketing and HR included.

The reasoning is rooted in something Ravi observed across thousands of hires.

There are two kinds of people. Those who want ESOPs and those who don’t believe in ESOPs. Especially salespeople. The better the salesperson, the smarter he is at negotiating. He’ll say, sir, this ESOP I don’t believe in, salary better. And I like that also.

The Silicon Valley orthodoxy that every employee must be an equity holder is, in much of India’s real economy, simply wrong. Across the Indian startup ecosystem, over $2 billion in ESOP liquidity has been generated since 2020. Atomberg recently raised ₹40 crore in a secondary round specifically to provide pre-IPO exits. The peer set is converging on liquidity-as-retention, which is the gap funds like Hissa exist to fill: an employee who joined at 26 and is now 36 with a family has had their life change, even if the company has not exited.

For a small, loyal core of Wonderchef employees, that tight 1.15% pool will translate into meaningful wealth at listing. The design is deliberate.

The unconventional moats

Three more pieces complete the picture, and each one reads as a refusal to do the obvious thing.

When general trade dealers threw his products back in 2010, Ravi copied Pampered Chef’s US model and built a direct-selling network. Fifteen years later, 87,000 women have joined it. Some became distributors. Around 65 opened their own Wonderchef franchise outlets. Zero fixed payroll, commission-only, negative working capital.

We have interviewed hundreds of women. One said, mera mardaan toh daru pita hai, at least I can give them milk. Another said, I don’t want to ask my mother-in-law for money to attend a kitty party. They came for independence.

On manufacturing, Ravi refused to own factories. Apple makes zero phones. NVIDIA fabricates zero chips. Wonderchef co-invests in specialist partners, India’s best injection moulder for the Nutriblend, and shared capex on 120-foot non-stick coating ovens that Indian cookware makers were too risk-averse to install themselves. The result: Wonderchef breached ₹500 crore in revenue in roughly a decade, a barrier some legacy brands have never crossed.

And on quick commerce, the Zepto founders initially laughed when Ravi suggested putting a ₹2,500 mixer on a 10-minute app. He pulled out a ten-line Excel sheet showing that a Nutriblend, sold once a week per dark store, generated ₹220 of profit while a kilo of onions generated a loss. They listened.

The connective thread across all of this is the closing thought worth keeping. Ravi has held a management committee meeting every Tuesday for thirty years, from Canada at 2am if he has to.

Every three years, not five years, we have seen a crisis. The global financial crisis. 26/11. The pandemic. Today, what to say. And it’s loyal people. You come to office every day, you see their faces, and you feel you are not alone.

The hiring heuristic is uncomfortable for founders trained to optimise for pedigree. He does not, as a rule, hire from IITs and IIMs. They leave too fast. He hires people who stay. Discipline is the only moat that compounds.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

From Calcutta to D.E. Shaw: the making of a quant founder

Ujjwal grew up in Calcutta in a Marwadi household where markets were ambient, like weather. His father was a small, passionate trader. So passionate he traded the day he died. By Class 7, Ujjwal was writing code in GWBASIC on a mainframe. By his third year of computer science at college, the question was not whether he loved programming. It was what he would point it at.

I wanted to pursue a career at the confluence of computer science and capital markets. So I applied to D.E. Shaw. They used to only take computer science guys, and I was fortunate to get in.

D.E. Shaw led to a joint venture with Reliance Industries. The JV was eventually shut down. Ujjwal stayed in Mumbai anyway, convinced the market had a decade of structural growth ahead. He was right. He just needed one more trigger to believe in himself enough to start.

That trigger was a 36-hour hackathon at the Bombay Stock Exchange in November 2015, where he solved an Aadhaar-based KYC problem at a time when the data still arrived in XML tags. He came home, told his wife they needed to try something, and quit his job in March 2016.

The ability to take risk, especially coming from a middle-class background, giving up a job where things are so good. That unlearning is real. It is one of the biggest challenges for an entrepreneur in India, more than the idea or the problem you are solving.

The IP that funded everything, and the team built to last

Before Ujjwal could build WealthDesk, he needed capital. He did not raise it from investors. He earned it by consulting for a proprietary trading desk, building algorithmic strategies, and then selling that intellectual property for over 10 crore rupees. That became his seed round, with zero dilution and no board he did not control.

He then built his early team without chasing pedigree. His first engineering hires were IIT Bombay graduates experimenting with prop trading as a hobby, not enterprise engineers. Curious, mathematically sharp, and hungry to build on cloud infrastructure from scratch. He tested the opposite approach exactly once, recruiting a senior technology executive from UBS Hong Kong. The tenure lasted eight months.

I never looked for the most senior engineering guy I could get. I always looked for people who were hungry and curious, with an immense love for solving problems for the customer. Pedigree was secondary.

His co-founder for OpenQ, Sujit, was a researcher Ujjwal had known from MSCI, a Calcutta native who had spent years at Deutsche Bank in London before returning to India. It took Ujjwal eight months to persuade him to join. Ujjwal gave him meaningful founding equity from day zero and structured the cash component carefully. Sujit is now the Chief Investment Officer of share.market at PhonePe.

10 cr+

IP sale that funded the bootstrap

40

broker integrations at time of acquisition

60

people, 95% relocated post-acquisition

ESOP as a promise, not a perk

Ujjwal is specific, not vague, about what good equity design looks like. He recommends starting with a pool of 10 to 15 percent, moving to monthly or quarterly vesting after the mandatory one-year cliff, and treating the founder’s intention around liquidity as the most important, largely undocumented, retention signal a company sends.

What is undocumented in the intentions of the founders with their ESOP instrument, that is the biggest untold retention strategy. People understand how founder dynamics work with their ESOPs. That intention comes out very strongly if you pursue the path of providing some sort of liquidity.

The tax context matters here. Under Section 17(2) of the Income Tax Act, the spread between Fair Market Value and exercise price is taxed at the individual’s slab rate, up to 30 percent or more, at the point of exercise. Employees receive paper wealth and a tax bill simultaneously. Founders who educate their teams on this, and on the 24-month holding period that converts the tax burden from slab rate to a flat 12.5 percent long-term capital gains rate, build a kind of trust that cash bonuses cannot replicate.

The PhonePe benchmark sits at the far end of this spectrum: monthly vesting post cliff, an 800 crore rupee buyback announced ahead of its anticipated IPO, and ESOP expenses equal to 46 percent of H1 FY26 revenue. When the acquisition closed, every WealthDesk and OpenQ ESOP holder received cash, with accelerated vesting applied across both cap tables.

The acquisition, and what it was built on

By 2020, WealthDesk had integrated with 40 broking firms. Revenue was linked to how fast broker partners grew adoption, a model with a ceiling. COVID clarified the thesis rather than threatening it. India had 20 crore Demat accounts at that point, but only 3 to 4 crore investors remained active in any given year. Mutual funds showed the inverse: 6 crore unique PANs, over 20 crore folios, because professional management handled the complexity. The retention problem in broking was structural, and the solution was intelligence at scale.

Institutional backing came through Florintree Advisors, led by Matthew Cyriac, formerly the India head of Blackstone. The round totalled 25 crore rupees, with a first tranche of 10 crore. PhonePe entered the picture shortly after, initially exploring a minority stake before the conversation became an acquisition of both companies.

I never used to do a typical sales pitch. I used to tell the journey, why we are building, what we are building for. Rahul said: you have cracked consumer distribution through payments. You have built an IP that is really impressive and long-lasting. Why don’t we come together?

Ujjwal is now building again, this time targeting ultra-HNI clients and family offices, the segment he describes as the most underserved corner of Indian finance. India’s WealthTech sector is projected at 63 billion dollars by FY25, and the next decade of value creation, in his view, sits entirely in the intelligence layer on top of commoditised distribution.

He started in 2016. He is closing that chapter exactly 10 years later. He expects the next one to be shorter, because AI has changed the leverage ratio for small, high-agency teams. Whether that turns out to be true is the next story to tell.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

Most founders would have moved on. Visham wrote a letter to Vedi’s parents.

Umang called me with wet eyes and said, ‘Visham, I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs. I missed joining you, but you wrote this grand letter. It shows your character. This is something I’m going to follow in life.’

Three exits in, he is still writing letters.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

Three exits, one pattern

The resume is dense. In 2007, Visham left ABN Amro at 27 to start Plat5, a loyalty upgrade platform for banks. Fully bootstrapped, it crossed ₹400 Cr in revenue in four years before being acquired by Indian Health Organisation, which Aetna later bought outright. In 2016, he co-founded Goals101, a transaction intelligence platform that raised $27.6M across nine rounds from Nexus, Dentsu, and Sprout and ran operations in India, MENA, and Southeast Asia. In December 2023, M2P Fintech acquired Goals101 for roughly ₹250 Cr, about $30M, in cash and equity.

The headline number was not the deal size. It was the team. All 30 Goals101 employees joined M2P. Typical acqui-hires see 30 to 50 percent attrition in year one. Goals101 saw none.

In September 2025, Visham co-founded 1Buy.ai with Nitin Jain, a co-founder of OfBusiness, and Pradeep Paliwal, formerly CTO at RateGain and TBO. In January 2026, the company closed a ₹32.5 Cr ($3.9M) seed round led by 100Unicorns, with participation from Nikhil Kamath’s Gruhas, FJ Labs, Ashish Kacholia, CP Gurnani, and KRS Jamwal. The round was four to five times oversubscribed. Several investors are existing enterprise customers.

The odd-number rule and the equity education

Across three companies, Visham has held to a governance preference he calls the odd-number rule. One founder or three, never two, never four. He credits Aditya Gupta, his first partner at Plat5 and twenty years his senior, for the discipline.

He said there won’t be a two-person partnership in this company, because two is a conflict and three is a decision.

The philosophy reappears in his angel portfolio of roughly 68 companies.

Anything that leads to a binary outcome in life should not be encouraged. Except a marriage.

At Plat5, rather than charging banks for the upgrade service, he built a rev-share where banks saw only revenue, no cost. Plat5 kept 60 percent. By year two, the business was generating ₹10 Cr a month in partner-bank revenue at sixty percent margins.

A lot of life is not just about the product. It’s how you structure the product. How do you structure it financially.

The operating manual most founders skip

Three practices stand out.

The founder prenup. Reverse vesting, leaver clauses, and dilution rules signed on day one, before anyone cares.

It’s like a prenup. Do not under-assume that there can be a problem down the line. It’s best to do it when the times are best, rather than when the times are tough.

The exercise window. Visham argues that the most under-negotiated clause in Indian ESOP contracts is the post-termination exercise period. In an illiquid market, a short window means employees walk away with nothing. He fights for long windows in every acquisition he touches.

A good company should have a long exercise period given to employees. If the acquirer is not having that kind of policy, the founder is not keeping it right for the team.

The parent call. Before hiring at Goals101 during the bootstrapped stretch, he phoned candidates’ families directly.

I used to call the parents and say, ‘Uncle, your son is going to learn from me. Is that okay with you?’ Then I used to write them letters. Last year we struggled like this. This year we’re getting a 10 percent jump.

He also elevated two Goals101 employees, Shivam Maheshwari and Nikhil Raj, to co-founder status mid-journey. On the day of the IHO acquisition, he doubled a friend’s 15 percent stake to 30 percent. No legal trigger. He thought it was fair.

The decacorn bet

1Buy.ai targets the $2.3 trillion global electronics components market. Its stack, 1Data for cost intelligence, 1Source for compliant sourcing, and 1Xcess for excess inventory liquidation, plugs directly into SAP and Oracle ERPs. Early customers report 5 to 10 percent cost reductions on active BOMs within months, and up to 40 percent faster RFQ cycles. The platform already processes ₹4,500 Cr in annualized sourcing volume for Indian OEMs.

The team is 25 today, scaling to around 60 with the fresh capital, with expansion into the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia planned by 2027. Three co-founders. The odd-number rule, holding.

In a market that rewards founders for what they build, Visham may be building something rarer. Not companies. The operating system the companies run on.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

I sat down with Nakul on the podcast to pull apart the actual mechanics of how Cashify built its people, culture, and ownership architecture. What came through was less a playbook and more a set of convictions, held tightly for over a decade.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Hire That Started Everything - and the Rule That Followed

The origin story of Cashify’s first sales hire is, in many ways, the clearest expression of how Nakul thinks about talent. A sales representative came in to pitch a monster.com subscription. The founders couldn’t afford it. They hired the rep instead.

We couldn’t afford a monster.com subscription, but we made him an offer. We really liked his sales presentation, the way he was pitching to us. From the next month, he was with us.

The logic is simple but rarely practiced: the most reliable signal of a good salesperson is how they sell to you, under real conditions. No recruitment fee, no sourcing algorithm. The funnel ran the other way.

This approach defined Cashify’s first several years. Technicians, call center staff, logistics workers, the IT guy from the same co-working space. Nakul personally interviewed every one of the company’s first 200 to 250 employees - not as a founder ego exercise, but because the HR function didn’t exist yet.

And when the hiring market in NCR went sideways in 2016 and 2017, with Paytm and Snapdeal putting “We’re Hiring” billboards on highways and offering inflated packages to any engineer they could find, Nakul held his salary bands.

I’ve never seen anyone’s salary stay hidden from anyone. I don’t know how it leaks, but everybody knows. You can never build an organization where people doing the same work are paid at different levels. I’ve tried to abide by that for ten years.

The discipline extends to the offer stage. If a candidate’s expectations exceed the budget for a role, the offer is withdrawn. Not negotiated down. Withdrawn. An underpaid hire who accepted a compromise walks in demotivated on day one, and that cost compounds fast.

The ₹1 Lakh Decision and the Culture It Built

When Cashify started pushing for more female workers in its Noida factory, the warehouse manager surfaced a problem: no female washrooms, no female security guards. Fixing it properly would cost roughly ₹1 lakh per month in additional OPEX.

Nakul approved it.

It would hit our P&L. But the next warehouse we built, we already provisioned everything - because we knew it would work long term.

The factory now runs at 22% female workforce, with a stated target of 50-50. The case Nakul makes is operational, not just principled. Female workers at Cashify have shown higher output, stronger attention to detail in device diagnostics, and lower attrition. The infrastructure cost paid back through the workforce.

The same logic applies to how Cashify thinks about internal mobility. Nakul treats mistakes as a measure of organizational health, not a failing.

If you’re not making enough mistakes, you’re not taking enough risk. And if you’re not taking enough risk, you don’t have ownership - you’re just doing a job.

This isn’t abstract. Cashify’s current retail head started as a regional bulk sales head. He raised his hand in a meeting to take on retail in the South, delivered, and grew into the national role. The HR head before him moved from a non-revenue function into running the retail division entirely, because he wanted P&L responsibility. Both were given six months to a year to break things before an AOP was built around their function.

Nakul also openly advises employees not to stay beyond three to five years. “Anything beyond that is unfair to the company and to the employee. You stop learning. You get into a comfort zone.” The people who have stayed longer at Cashify did so because they kept evolving, not because they got comfortable.

The ESOP Truth Nobody Says Out Loud

India’s startup ecosystem wants to believe employees will trade cash for equity. Nakul’s decade of data says otherwise.

I have not seen a single person say ‘give me less cash and more options.’ When we’ve offered a choice between a 10% cash increment and shares worth 20%, people choose the cash. Every time.

Cashify doesn’t use ESOPs to offset below-market salaries. They use equity in two specific ways: as alignment grants for senior lateral hires from large corporates, and as top-up retention grants for proven mid-level performers after one to two years of tenure. Nakul’s $1 million ESOP buyback in 2021, which allowed employees to liquidate up to 35% of their vested options, changed something. After people saw real cash, the conversation around equity shifted permanently.

As Cashify moves toward a public listing, that conversation will shift again. SEBI’s June 2025 Regulation 9A now explicitly protects founder equity through the promoter reclassification process at IPO, provided grants were made at least 12 months before the board’s listing decision. For a founding team that has been building for over a decade, it arrived at exactly the right moment.

The Cashify story is not about a single funding breakthrough or a viral product moment. It’s about twelve years of holding a line - on salaries, on hiring standards, on what ownership actually means - through every cycle where someone else was raising more money and moving faster.

Nakul’s parting advice, the thing he says nobody listens to:

Just interview more for any role. Don’t settle. Talk to people, meet them in person. We as a generation are losing our physical touch, and it matters enormously when you’re hiring.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

He graduated from IIT Bombay in 2011, spent two years at Deutsche Bank’s FX Risk desk, and by 2013 had the itch that most engineers who end up building companies get: the feeling that working inside someone else’s system is a slow way to die. He co-founded Niffler, a hyperlocal deals platform, built a team of 25 to 30 people, and by 2015 had sold it to Tapzo (then HelpChat). Tapzo was later acquired by Amazon. The journey from small-cap to mid-cap to large-cap, as Patel describes it, played out in roughly four years.

He left Tapzo in December 2017. By January 2018, Mudrex had begun. And then the RBI banned crypto.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

Ten days before Mudrex’s exchange was set to go live, with a thousand alpha testers already signed up, the Reserve Bank of India effectively shut down crypto activity in India. Most founders would have taken that as a sign. Patel took it as a design constraint.

He pivoted immediately to building a global algo-trading platform for crypto. The logic was clean: crypto trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across every time zone, with volatility that makes manual trading emotionally and practically unsustainable. Mudrex built the automation layer. By the time Y Combinator backed Mudrex in its Winter 2019 batch, the platform had scaled to over a million users globally.

In 2020, the Supreme Court overturned the RBI’s ban. Patel turned back to India. He launched Coin Sets, a product built along the lines of index funds for crypto. He ran a Delta Neutral crypto fund for global family offices and HNIs. Then the 2021 to 2022 boom-bust cycle hit, and the company went through what Patel calls its “Year of Persistence.”

By 2024, Mudrex had seen a 200% rise in its user base and a 20x surge in monthly trading volume, reaching $200 million. Today the platform supports over 700 tokens, 500+ derivatives products, and 30 index products for more than one million investors.

I joke that this is probably the fifth company we are on inside Mudrex. One battle after another, that is the title of the last eight years.

The sixth chapter may be the most consequential.

In December 2023, Mudrex launched Saber.Money, a stablecoin-based cross-border payments infrastructure now licensed in seven countries including India (FIU), UK (S21), EU (VASP), Canada (MSB), and Australia (AUSTRAC). The business case is stark: India is the world’s largest recipient of remittances at $135 billion annually. Nearly $10 billion of that is lost to fees and settlement delays. Traditional SWIFT transfers cost 3 to 5% and take 3 to 7 days. Saber completes 93% of its transactions in under a minute, at roughly 50 basis points.

In January 2026, Saber integrated with Circle Payments Network as a Beneficiary Financial Institution, enabling instant USDC off-ramping across global markets. Saber now processes over $1.5 billion in annualized payment volume.

Crypto has gone well beyond trading and investing. It is now becoming a new OS for financial services, especially with stablecoins. The financial system is being rewritten in real time.

When I pushed Patel on what this all means for the people who build these companies, the conversation got genuinely interesting.

The Indian startup ecosystem has a liquidity problem that nobody likes to talk about plainly. Employees join early, accept below-market salaries, receive ESOPs, and then wait. And wait. The average time to a meaningful outcome has stretched past ten years. Meanwhile, public company RSUs, which are effectively cash with a vesting schedule, make competing for experienced talent increasingly difficult.

Patel’s approach is direct. At Mudrex, every employee holds equity, including customer support agents. It is non-negotiable. The average tenure is 3.5 years. His oldest team member has been with him for seven years, through every cycle, every pivot, every near-death moment.

His hiring filter is equally direct. When candidates negotiate hard on ESOPs, he sees it as a green flag. When they do not bring it up at all, he reads it as either disengagement or a sign they are using the offer to fish for a counter-offer elsewhere.

People who argue and negotiate for ESOPs, that is a clear green flag. It tells me you are valuing something that matters. If you do not talk about it at all, I wonder why you are here.

On the question of token-based compensation, Patel is more cautious than most crypto founders. He believes most businesses should not issue tokens. The moment a token exists, it puts a public, real-time number on a company at a stage when that number reveals very little that is useful and can damage morale, distort decision-making, and distract from the actual work.

Issuing a token for your business is, in most cases, a really bad idea. It puts an objective worth on your company at a time when that number might represent anything, and you will always be dissatisfied.

Tokens make sense, he argues, only in network businesses where early participants take on disproportionate risk for later-stage gains, and where you genuinely want to incentivize the builders of the network itself. Binance’s BNB token is his cleanest example: $15 million raised, a loyalty flywheel built into the exchange, and a positive loop between token utility and company growth.

For everyone else, the answer is simpler and harder: pay people fairly in cash, give them meaningful equity, build a secondary market for that equity over time, and then make the company worth something.

If your company’s ESOPs were liquid, there would be a clear answer for almost every candidate coming from big tech. You could tell them: as soon as your grants vest, there is a liquid pool available. You are not waiting for an IPO that is a decade away.

Patel ended our conversation with a question I had not expected to be the most revealing. Given a choice between Bitcoin and Coinbase stock, which would he choose?

He chose Bitcoin, because Coinbase carries company-specific risk that Bitcoin does not. But if building a portfolio, he said, he would go 60 to 70% Bitcoin and 30% Coinbase. It is the same mental model he applies to everything: separate the signal from the structure, understand what you are actually betting on, and size accordingly.

It is, perhaps, the cleanest summary of how he has built every company he has ever built.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

Their father had just passed away. They’d returned from comfortable jobs in Bangalore to be with family. The garage office had wedding tables for desks. Fourteen years later, CarDekho joined the unicorn club with a $1.2 billion valuation, becoming Rajasthan’s first unicorn.

But the more interesting story isn’t the valuation. It’s what Anurag Jain and his brother Amit did with the wealth along the way. While still private, they created over 60 millionaires among their 500+ ESOP beneficiaries. They conducted four liquidity events, letting people buy homes and clear EMIs years before any IPO. They built what Anurag calls a “house of founders,” where employees become co-founders of new business units and raise their own capital.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Profitable Foundation

The early years of GirnarSoft, CarDekho’s parent company, defy the modern startup playbook. For seven consecutive years - from 2007 to 2014 - the company was profitable every single month. No venture capital. No “growth at all costs.”

When investors started approaching them in 2010, after CarDekho gained traction, the brothers said no.

We did not know what to do with the money.

It wasn’t until a 2012 trip to the US, where they saw what large auto tech companies were building, that their vision crystallized. They took their first institutional capital in 2013: a $15 million Series A from Sequoia. By then, they’d already built something more valuable than a product - a culture and talent system that could scale.

The Jaipur decision, initially born from family necessity, became a strategic advantage.

The cost of living is quite low, relatively low. It’s not as low as a Jodhpur or Ajmer, but it is significantly lower than a Gurgaon.

But talent was scarce. So Amit and Anurag became teachers, personally conducting lectures for “hungry freshers” from tier-2 and tier-3 colleges. They eventually formalized this into a finishing school, hiring a director from NIIT to run it.

Talent is in every person in every country. We need time to bring that talent in the right place at the right time. You just need to groom them, hone them in the right skilled areas and basically they’ll do wonders for you.

Many from that first batch are still with the company 15+ years later, now in leadership positions across the group’s 6,000 employees.

The ESOP Revolution

CarDekho created its ESOP pool in 2014, with Anurag and Amit personally diluting their stakes. Today, that pool has over 500 beneficiaries, at least 60 of them millionaires. The company is still private.

The wealth creation happened through four separate liquidity events. Each time new investors came in at higher valuations, CarDekho negotiated secondary sales allowing employees to cash out portions of their vested options. The first round in 2014 priced shares at less than ₹10,000 each. Three years ago, the price had climbed to ₹1.25 lakh - a 13x jump.

Most people end up either clearing off their EMIs of their house or end up buying a house. But did people stop working once they had money? I have never seen people stop working once you generate liquidity for them. The hunger for doing better doesn’t go down.

The company’s most distinctive policy is what Anurag calls “4+4.” Work at the company for four years, and you don’t lose your vested ESOPs when you leave. Instead, you get four additional years to exercise them - enough time to potentially participate in a future liquidity event or IPO. Both active and inactive employees were included in all four buybacks.

When conducting buybacks, CarDekho caps how much senior leadership can liquidate, ensuring benefits flow to junior employees too. The ESOP program includes multiple types: loyalty ESOPs based on tenure, performance ESOPs from annual appraisals, talent ESOPs for exceptional contributions, and long-term incentive plans for leadership.

The House of Founders

The CarDekho group operates seven different businesses, but here’s what makes it unusual: many have their own co-founders, separate from Amit and Anurag. An employee who shows exceptional promise after eight to ten years can be elevated to co-founder of a new business unit, then raise external capital.

Take InsuranceDekho. It started internally, headed by Ankit Agrawal. As it scaled, it was carved out as a separate entity. Ankit raised $70 million in external funding in March 2025. The Competition Commission recently approved its merger with RenewBuy. Anurag describes it as a “unicorn in making.”

The Southeast Asia business shows a different path. Umang joined through the 2015 acquisition of Gaadi.com. A decade later, he’s co-founder of Southeast Asia operations. The group invested $30 million internally, then Umang raised $50 million externally.

We today call ourselves as a house of founders. It’s not just me and Amit who are the founders of this company. There are multiple founders. At the right material scale, the person who has been working with us as an employee for eight, 10 years in leadership is converted into a co-founder and is asked to raise capital at the subsidiary level.

Each subsidiary often has its own ESOP pool. Someone working in Jakarta gets Southeast Asia equity, not parent company equity. But business unit leaders typically get both.

Values Under Pressure

When COVID hit in 2020 and automotive sales went to zero, CarDekho’s response revealed its priorities. Employees below a certain salary bracket faced no cuts. The founders went to zero salary. Leadership took 50% or more reductions. Everyone else saw progressive cuts based on salary levels.

The company also granted zero-price shares to employees who took pay cuts, allowing them to recover losses later.

We have kind of always put our people first.

This wasn’t new. From day one, even before it was fashionable, CarDekho offered flexible work hours. When teams pulled all-nighters, the founders were there with them. The company today has open-house town halls, whistleblower policies, a recognition system, even a mood-o-meter where employees log how they’re feeling.

The Road Ahead

CarDekho has been “IPO-bound” for a while. Originally planned for 2023, then 2025, the timeline shifted due to the InsuranceDekho-RenewBuy merger. When it happens, the IPO is expected to raise around ₹4,000 crore. The company reported 50% expected growth for FY2025, building on 54% profit increase in FY2024.

Three major used-car unicorns - CARS24, CarDekho, and Spinny - are preparing for public listings that could collectively raise over $1 billion. India’s used-car market, valued at $32.14 billion in 2021, is expected to reach $74.70 billion by 2027. The only listed player, CarTrade, saw its stock surge 63% in 2025.

But Anurag doesn’t seem rushed. The company is profitable. The businesses are growing. They’ve already created substantial wealth for employees through private liquidity.

Perhaps that’s the lesson. In an ecosystem obsessed with “exit velocity,” CarDekho has played a different game - optimizing for sustainability over speed, culture over growth-at-all-costs, shared prosperity over concentrated wealth.

The wedding tables are gone from that Jaipur garage. The company now operates across India and Southeast Asia, with expansion into Saudi Arabia and the UAE in progress. The LinkedIn proclamation from 2007 has been validated.

But as Anurag would point out, the real moonshot wasn’t the valuation. It was creating 60+ millionaires along the way. It was proving that tier-2 cities can build world-class companies. It was showing that patient, profitable growth can coexist with ambition.

Dream big, not small. Even if you do half a good job, it’s kind of good enough. The entire universe in cosmos tries to align in the thoughts that you’re creating in your own head.

In a startup ecosystem often characterized by winner-take-all dynamics, CarDekho has built something different: a house where many founders can thrive, where employees become owners, where wealth creation is distributed rather than concentrated.

That might be the most valuable thing they’ve built - not the billion-dollar valuation, but the blueprint for how to share it.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

Even today I don’t have a cabin. I sit on the floor along with everybody else, do my work. Nobody in the company has a cabin.

This isn’t theatre. It’s the physical architecture of a company that has achieved what most Indian fintechs couldn’t: actual profitability. Four consecutive years of it. Revenue jumped 107% from ₹392 crore to ₹812 crore between FY23 and FY24. Net profit exploded 1,770% in the same period, from ₹5.4 crore to ₹101 crore. The company now serves over 3 million customers with Assets Under Management of ₹4,429 crore, maintaining credit costs around 8% despite 90% AUM growth.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Blessing of Not Knowing

In 2015, when Ashish and co-founder Akshay Mehrotra decided to start a lending company, they violated fintech’s first commandment: neither had a coding background. Ashish was a Chartered Accountant and former Chief Investment Officer at Bajaj Allianz. Akshay brought marketing expertise from Future Group and PolicyBazaar. Between them, zero lines of production code. Zero experience in retail credit underwriting.

The industry whispered concerns. Every serious fintech had at least one IIT graduate. How could you disrupt banking without a technical co-founder?

Ashish saw it differently.

I think that was a blessing in disguise, to be honest. Both of us came with ideas which if 10-15 years of experience could have negated them.

Domain expertise, he realized, can be baggage. Veterans came loaded with assumptions about what was possible. Ashish had something else: “childish curiosity” - the ability to see patterns that 15-year experience had trained people not to notice.

The pattern was absurdly simple. Young salaried employees lived a monthly cycle banks ignored. Flush after payday. Stretching mid-month. Scrambling or borrowing informally in the final stretch. It wasn’t a credit problem. It was cash flow timing.

That point in time, if somebody asked me to write a 50 crore check, it is a small check for me. From there, I’m coming down and thinking of distributing 50,000 rupee.

The name “EarlySalary” came from a casual conversation. Someone said “so you want people to take their salary early” and Ashish immediately flipped it into a brand. No agencies. No committees. Minutes, not months.

But the tech gap still needed solving. His answer: hire a CTO and Head of Risk Analytics as employees, not co-founders. The logic was structural - you can find talent if you build the right systems, but you can’t fix a diluted cap table.

You can always find talent if you know what right systems to build, what are the right ways to persevere and how do you really ensure that you have the right tracking mechanism.

Ten years later, that Head of Risk Analytics is still at Fibe, now as CEO of the NBFC arm. The early CTO built the entire proprietary tech stack - loan origination systems, mobile apps, analytics - before moving on. The gamble paid off.

The Pune Advantage and the Culture Machine

While tech was being built, Ashish made a second contrarian bet: Pune over Bangalore. Everyone said he was wrong. Bangalore had the ecosystem, the talent density, the venture capital.

It also had a culture he found toxic.

In Bangalore, the attrition rates are, whatever story I hear is quite high. There is a saying that in the lunchtime people go and give interviews.

Pune offered loyalty. Global banks (Citi, Barclays, Credit Suisse) had technology centers there. Bajaj and insurers had data science teams. But no 500 startups competing for the same 5,000 engineers in a bidding war that rewarded mercenaries.

Ashish also rejected the “tribe hiring” common in tech - leaders bringing entire former teams.

I generally don’t like tribes following as a founder purely because you get all single-minded people with the same kind of thought process.

He wanted diversity - people from insurance, banking, retail, creating cognitive friction rather than groupthink. He screened for “hunger” over pedigree, asking if candidates could “replace their own boss” in three years.

The retention validated the thesis. One early hire recently completed ten years at a 10.5-year-old company.

The “no cabin” policy serves multiple functions. In lending, the feedback loop between collections and risk modeling must be instant. Physical proximity eliminates latency. But deeper, it’s psychological. It screens against “entitlement coefficient” - people resting on past laurels.

Ashish built a culture that accepts failure as inevitable in risk businesses. The response to errors determines whether people hide problems or surface them early.

It is always that how do you really go every day and do things is the culture, what will determine your company.

His definition: culture is what you do habitually, not what you say in meetings. The test: maintaining 100-person culture at 1,000 employees. Fibe passed.

The Numbers and the Evolution

The company that started offering salary advances now operates across four categories: personal loans (instant, mobile-first), education loans (6-24 month courses banks ignore), healthcare financing (point-of-care at hospitals), and travel financing.

The healthcare insight came from frustration.

It is much easier to get a mobile phone financing in two minutes, but it is very, very tough to do healthcare funding.

A parent needing IIT coaching for their child has no options. A 30-year-old can’t finance dermatology treatment. Banks optimized for high-ticket secured lending and ignored these “small” needs. Fibe built the rails.

The financial trajectory defied the sector’s “growth at all costs” narrative. Between 2015 and 2023, Indian fintechs raised over $30 billion, mostly burned chasing monopoly scale. Most are now dead or zombified.

Fibe raised approximately $266 million total - a fraction of peers - and built profitability from early days. The thinking: if unit economics don’t work at small scale, volume won’t fix them.

Valuations reflected fundamental strength: ~$300 million (Series D, 2022), ~$600 million (Series E, 2024), crossing $1 billion (Series F, 2025 with $35 million from IFC).

The risk-first doctrine drives this. Ashish repeats an old finance saying: “You need to talk about risk. Growth numbers need to be seen, not talked.”

Most of the fintechs who did not succeed or could not make it, most of the time falters on the business side, not on the tech side.

Elegant algorithms mean nothing if you underwrite badly or collect poorly. The math is unforgiving.

The target: India’s aspirational middle - salaried employees earning ₹25,000 to ₹75,000 monthly, underserved by traditional banking. Ashish uses telecom as analogy. In 2005, analysts predicted max 200 million mobile phones in India. Today: 160 crore phones for 140 crore people.

His projection: the next decade will be “much more vibrant, stronger and very, very much diversified” for aspirational consumption. Fibe is building the financial infrastructure for that wave.

The Twenty-Year Game

When asked about milestones, Ashish’s answer reveals his time horizon.

Personally, I’m here for 20 years. With that piece, I’ll build the company. So there will be three, six, 12 months when we might slow down, but we will build the company with a very, very long-term objective.

This isn’t the language of founders optimizing for a five-year exit. It’s institution-building. The implication: Fibe can absorb short-term volatility that forces competitors into panic. The company survived 2023’s brutal fintech downturn precisely because it wasn’t dependent on the next round to cover losses.

Fibe’s journey demonstrates you can build sustainable lending in India without burning capital on customers you’ll never profit from. It proves thoughtful location strategy creates advantage through loyalty and cost structure. It shows culture, defined as “what you do habitually,” can scale without dilution.

Most importantly, it validates a different definition of fintech: not a technology company doing lending, but a financial services company using technology as an enabling layer. The distinction changes where you focus, how you hire, what you measure, and whether you survive.

For now, the CFO continues sitting on the floor with everyone else in Pune, reviewing credit models and approving loans for coaching classes and medical treatments. The cabin-less office keeps humming. The profits keep compounding. And somewhere in Bangalore, competitors with better pedigrees and bigger war chests wonder how they missed this.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli

They overcrowded with valuation and inflated the price but now the inverse is also happening. Meta Labs is now consolidating which means they are removing a lot of other researchers as well.

This isn’t about $100 million offers or overnight unicorns. It’s about what happened in April 2024 when Aurionpro Solutions acquired 67% of Arya.ai for $16.5 million in an all-cash deal, and Vinay’s early employees, some there since 2013, finally converted paper wealth into real cash.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Different Path

Arya.ai’s numbers tell a contrarian story. Founded in 2013 when deep learning was largely academic, the company raised only $2.19 million total over 11 years. The team never exceeded 20 people during most of that period, with an average age around 25. They reached 45% EBITDA margins while growing 2-3x year over year.

The exit delivered a 3.1x return to early investors like YourNest Venture Capital. More importantly, it generated actual liquidity for the founding team and early employees.

Most of our initial team got rewarded really, really well. They were able to buy good apartments. We may not have generated too many of them, but whatever people have who have stayed with us, they had good amount of exits.

Vinay’s one regret?

The only regret that probably I would have is I should have done this more than what I could think of, and more people as well such that more people could have been able to get the benefit quite well.

His philosophy is unambiguous.

No point giving it back to investors. There is zero motivation for founders to do that. If it is for the team, it is for the team.

The Valuation Distortion

While Arya.ai built profitably, a different pattern emerged in frontier AI. Seed-stage labs began launching at $100 million-plus valuations with no product, no model, just founding teams and $10 million in the bank.

People thought they would have gotten good ESOPs but no, not that. You are 14th employee right. And there is no product, there is no model, there is nothing. The risk is very high.

An engineer joining as the 14th employee might receive 0.5% equity at a $100 million valuation. Compare that to traditional SaaS five years ago, when 20 employees collectively received around 5% at much lower valuations. The structural difference: old-school startups generated value through employees first, then investors. In 2024’s frontier AI, investors and founders capture value first.

The result is widespread job-hopping. Engineers move between startups seeking higher percentage ownership or authorship credit on published models, the new “worked at Google” credential, before moving elsewhere for better equity.

Meta briefly offered $100 million packages spread over 3-5 years to a handful of key researchers, with million-dollar baselines for others. But 5-10% have already left.

You have built a lot of highly skilled people in one group. Now, how do you create a hierarchy between them? Nobody wants to report to anyone.

Building Before the Hype

Vinay’s 2013 playbook offers stark contrast. India had no credentialed AI researchers to hire. Universities weren’t teaching neural networks. The Arya.ai team used Nvidia’s Digits framework, one of the earliest tools for building deep learning models.

At that time, it was simply like, okay, you know math, you have done good paper in math, fine. You don’t know what deep learning is. Let’s learn together.

They hired curious math majors from IIT, not credentialed researchers. Compensation was acknowledged as low. The value proposition was learning and solving problems “you will nowhere see in India.” Many used Arya.ai as a stepping stone to Masters programs in the US. Four to five people made that transition in the first three years.

By 2024, standards have shifted dramatically. Arya.ai now runs labs in Paris, London, and India, with requirements matching frontier labs: minimum four to five published papers even for undergrads, first-author preferred.

For college students, they created an AI Academic Research Internship paying ₹25,000 monthly regardless of year, with bonuses for publications or six-month completion. Fresh full-time hires earn ₹12-24 lakhs annually, experienced researchers ₹18-36 lakhs.

The geographic strategy is deliberate. Europe for academic research depth, particularly math-heavy work. India for engineering execution.

In India, the problem is the guy is good, but their PhD concept is bad because the PhD concepts come from sponsorships. Good students are solving bad problems.

The Labor Market Reality

As someone deploying AI in banking, Vinay sees labor shifts directly.

There is already job compression happening in the market.

Back offices, BPO services, DevOps roles, and fresh graduates face the hardest impact. Two age brackets see negative hiring: over 40 and under 30.

High-skilled labor remains in demand, though “the payability can vary.” The question is whether new opportunities will offset reduced headcount per problem, requiring 100x more problems solved to maintain employment levels.

What the Exit Means

After 11 years and an exit where both co-founders stayed with Aurionpro, Vinay’s view on equity is clear. Three of the initial six-person team remained through the entire journey. They bought apartments. They built financial security.

That’s not revolutionary. It’s decent. And in today’s AI talent market, where Meta offered million-dollar packages before laying off researchers over organizational politics, decent might be the real competitive advantage. Paper wealth that actually converts to real wealth is increasingly rare.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Until next time,

Your Host,

Satish Mugulavalli