Blume Beacon: Codifying culture, lessons on influencer marketing, confessions of a second-time founder and more
Blume Beacon is a monthly wrap-up of long reads from Blume's editorial desk that take you through the many facets of entrepreneurship in India
Welcome to another edition of Blume Beacon! Here’s a line up of all we published in September - a delectable mix of articles, interviews, and podcasts - to satiate your content hunger.
How to codify culture as you scale your organization.
Influencer marketing - How to get it right?
A heartfelt story of a second-time entrepreneur on why he loves being in the trenches.
And much more!
Without further ado, here goes the latest Blume Beacon!
Codifying Culture: Lessons from Manoj Agarwal, co-founder and President of DevRev
Building a successful company often boils down to how founders can find answers to the unknown as they face bamboozling googlies at various stages of organizational growth.
Finding (or not finding) answers to questions like, ‘How to create a scaleable organizational structure’, or ‘Why is my company slowing down even though I have more people’ or even something as philosophical as ‘Should I go slow for some time in the short-term to allow myself to go faster in the long-term?’, can make or break a company.
Given this enormous responsibility, what can founders really do to make these tasks a tad bit easier for themselves?
Codifying thought process and culture!
Former Nutanix top exec Manoj Agarwal, who is now the co-founder and President of DevRev, a California-based CRM startup that recently raised $50 million from marquee investors, shared his experience with Blume's portfolio companies to help them navigate these critical issues.
Just to highlight a few prescient takes, Manoj is of the opinion that the addition of new team-specific tools and lack of documentation are the villains when you feel that even though you now have 50 team members, you aren’t 10x more productive than when you had 5 team members.
The logic is rather simple, which is what makes these insights special.
New vertical-specific tools---> lack of effective integration--->information silos---> more meetings and wastage of time just to move data across functions.
Lack of documentation---> information asymmetry when new members join in--->No visibility into past decisions--->slow down in productivity of new members.
Read on to learn Manoj’s suggestions on how to tackle these issues
Driving under influence: Lessons in Influencer Marketing By Rahul Dash of Purplle
Innovative brands are always on the lookout for win-win partnerships with the modern-day ‘small screen’ superstars aka influencers.
However, brands must answer a few critical questions before hopping on the ‘influencer’ bandwagon - How to choose the right influencer? How to decide if the campaign was successful? Which influencer to partner with? - among others.
Rahul Dash, co-founder of beauty e-tailer Purplle, a Blume Fund I company, has all the answers! Read more to find out how to get influencer marketing right!
Confessions of a second-time Founder
If startup founders are a rare breed, second-time founders are literally unicorns. Vijay Rayapati is one such unicorn.
Having walked the challenging path once with Minjar (acquired by Nutanix), he’s again taken the leap of faith with Atomicwork, a SaaS platform for enabling employee success. (BTW both Minjar and Atomicwork are Blume’s portfolio companies)
He confesses, “Startups are painful, especially in the initial days. There is too much work and too many unknowns…The first couple of years are generally depressing for founders.” However, he also opines that the joy of starting up is unparalleled.
For Vijay, some aspects of starting up again remain the same as his first stint while others are starkly different. Know what goes into being a second-time founder straight from the horse’s mouth.
Blume Fintech Summit: Future of Fintech - A conversation between Karthik Reddy and Sharad Sharma
India’s fintech industry is forever scaling new frontiers. This metamorphosis has been led by a cohort of innovative thinkers, forward-thinking regulators, and zealous platform builders, who are not just building for India but rather creating a blueprint for the world to adopt.
Blume’s Karthik Reddy interacted with renowned ecosystem builder Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT, during the ‘Blume Fintech Summit’ to dive into the evolution of digital payment stack in India, the importance of data governance, and the need for innovative lending paradigms.
Sharad’s contributions to India’s digitisation, particularly within Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), are well-chronicled. He was a crucial part of the UID and UPI initiatives. Watch this video to learn about the new avenues of opportunities in the Indian fintech sector.
Captivate and convert: How retail media networks are revolutionizing digital advertising
Online marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart have transformed from being shopping destinations to powerful advertising ecosystems. Known as 'Retail Media Networks’, these advertising platforms, with their vast user base and high engagement, can convert casual browsers into loyal customers.
Despite their success, retail platforms face challenges in providing seamless experiences to advertisers and ensuring a great shopping experience for consumers. Automation, experimentation, and insightful analytics can play a crucial role in attracting advertising dollars.
Satej Sirur, founder and CEO of Rocketium (Blume Fund II company) pens his perspectives about the potential of retail media networks, exploring how they can offer excellent return on investment for advertisers and deliver exceptional consumer experiences.
PMF is not just cold metrics, it is also about intangibles like product curiosity and love
In the 6th and 7th episodes of the PMF Convo series, Asad Khan, CEO and co-founder of LambdaTest (Blume Fund III company), and Vasanth Kamath, CEO and co-founder of Smallcase (Blume Fund II company), talk about their intuitive takes on PMF, in conversation with Sajith Pai. While there are obviously metrics to track and numbers to hit, they believe that sensing PMF has a lot of other ‘soft’ signs too.
What’s interesting is that both Asad and Vasanth are building companies in vastly different sectors, but the ‘signs’ are similar. Early-stage founders should pay heed to these signals to find their PMF!
Blume Podcast: Manish Sabharwal of TeamLease on the upside of being a second-time founder
Manish Sabharwal, co-founder and Vice Chairman, TeamLease delves into a first principles approach to building companies for the long haul, in conversation with Karthik Reddy.
One of the most thought-provoking points is about finding the right balance between the next quarter and the next quarter century.
“You can't have balance if you only think about the next quarter; nobody's going to give you benefit for the next quarter century. If you only talk about the next quarter century though, you won't be around in a few quarters. So I think this balance of giving people a sense of an addressable market but sustained growth, that's the biggest signal of success.”
To add to this, Manish believes that compounding isn’t something that just happens, it is a conscious journey.
He highlights the bigwigs to drive home his point, “HDFC, Infosys, or TCS, all the companies have taken decades to do what they have done. The compounding, the real value has really come in the last decade, even though they've been around for 20-30 years.”
Given Manish’s voracious appetite for knowledge and his gift of connecting the dots, the conversation is peppered with lessons from history, personal anecdotes from both TeamLease and his earlier entrepreneurial avatar, and an interesting take on the need for civil service reform, as it plays a crucial role in regulatory reform and ease of doing business.
Listen in for lessons on building a long-lasting business from a second-time entrepreneur.
Blume Podcast: Dinesh Agarwal of IndiaMART on starting an internet business in India
In this podcast episode, Dinesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO, IndiaMART, talks to Karthik Reddy about his ‘why’ to start up and takes us through the bold journey of IndiaMART whose origins date back to the very beginning of the internet in India.
Among other nuggets, Dinesh recollects how he waited for the internet to be available in India, and as soon as it was announced on August 15th, 1995, he decided to move back to India from the US.
He landed here without a plan. All he knew was that he wanted to do something with technology in India.
“I didn't like the fact that most of the high-tech engineers, after doing IITs or computer science would not find much to do here in India. And they would go and automate the Western world with no benefit other than sending some remittances back home, which was not the idea of education for me.”
“Mine was: how can we utilise this whole education and experience for India? That was very important, probably because I come from a family which has had a history of freedom fighters.” he said.
Other than personal anecdotes, Dinesh also talks in depth about business growth and profit margins and encourages entrepreneurs to aspire for compounding. He also discusses the importance of having a mix of talent in a team and on India’s growth story and why SMEs are a crucial cog in the wheel. Tune in to know his riveting story.