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Episode 194 / November 7, 2022

Jaspreet Singh On Starting Druva From Pune, India To Making It a Global Leader in Cloud Computing

28 min

Episode 194 / November 7, 2022

Jaspreet Singh On Starting Druva From Pune, India To Making It a Global Leader in Cloud Computing

28 min
Listen on
 

 

 

There’s been a high rise in global data breaches for several years, and 2022 has been littered with information thefts.  As per Analytics India magazine, the data breach cost averaged Rs.176 million in 2022, reaching an all-time high.

In July, Twitter suffered a data breach of 5.4 million accounts, and throughout the year so far, there have been several cases of data theft of various scales. Our today’s guest, Jaspreet Singh, Founder & CEO Druva, has built and scaled the company since 2008 to provide a solution in this space.

Druva is trusted by over 4,000 global organizations. The company has such strong faith in these data-protection systems, that they even offer a Data Resiliency Guarantee up to $10 Mn against five key data risks. In today’s episode, Jaspreet shares with us the backstory of what led him to start Druva, move to the US, and more.   

Notes – 

00:42 – Intro 01:13 – Conceptualizing Druva

04:06 – What kept him going in the first 5-years?

05:37 – Reaching $1 Mn ARR

07:08 – Druva’s revenue till 2013 before getting their first large customer

07:49 – What were they building in the first 5 years and what did they transition into after 2013?

10:46 – Letting go of $8 Mn revenue 

11:45 – Milestones and evolving for revenue growth

14:19 – Critical requirement to shift to the US for scale

17:19 – Is a India Product-Market-Fit exactly replicable in the US?

19:26 – Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?

20:26 – What worked well for Druva in the 10 to 100 journey? 

24:52 – His advice to SaaS entrepreneurs to reach $20 Mn ARR  

 

Read the full transcript here:

Jaspreet  0:00  

You’ve to either choose the US or to Southeast Asia, you can’t do both. We figured out that we must constantly evolve, Product Market Fit and we were very aggressive but we are consistently in maniacally focused on building the product and defining a product market fit throughout. Have I learned enough to do it faster, sooner, better, bigger? Absolutely, yes. But like every journey is different. Like it took us five years to even get to a basic product market fit. People focus and talk a lot about innovation. I feel they don’t talk enough about curiosity. Humility gives birth to a curious mind and a curious mind is extremely critical.

 

Siddhartha  0:42  

Dear listeners, this is your host, Siddhartha Ahluwalia. Today, I will come to Jaspreet, founder of Druva to 100X Entrepreneur podcast. It’s been 14 years since Druva’s journey started. Jaspreet, you are known for your resilience in the SaaS Start startup ecosystem. Probably you are one of the few builders along with Girish of the entire India SaaS ecosystem. And I’m very proud to say that many startups have followed Druva, like my articles of the world, in their journey to become a 100 million ARR company. So Jaspreet, welcome to the podcast. 

 

Jaspreet 01:10

Thank you, I appreciate having me on the podcast. Thank you. S

 

Siddhartha 01:14

So Jaspreet, we would like to start from your first five years that you mentioned in offline conversations, what it took, from 2008 to 2013, how did you conceptualize, and the initial years of struggle, what went behind making of Druva today? 

 

Jaspreet 01:30

We tend to think like most startups, like overnight success in reverse case, the overnight took a long time is how we think about it. The first five years are like pretty much soul searching, like what we sell now is what it built in 2013, now 5 years before that, even though various sort of series A, Seed money like back in 2010, a bunch of Indian investors first and then Sequoia  capital, next in 2011 Like all that money was spent towards truly figuring out Product Market Fit. Druva’s initial product was very different. We were doing disaster recovery for the financial sector. 

 

So initially, we had built a product for the financial sector in banks, or long distance disaster recovery. While we could build the product, as technologists, we quickly realized that there’s probably no market to buy high worth products, tech products, deep tech products for the financial sector from an unfunded company out of a small town of Pune. So without any funding, we tend to pivot in terms of hey, what do we do to solve the problem, which probably people trust us to solve, and we don’t have to do door to door selling, but could really make it easy to deploy. So we actually went to build a backup software, which we could put up a website to make it an incredibly good way to backup content across the wire across the globe, like remote data, backed up centrally was sort of a big pitch. 

 

And we made incredibly good technology. And how do we do system based backups across the world across the wire across multiple system, but like his son is there the podcast say hi to him while he could build a software, and we actually made it available this time, right on the internet for people to deploy and download interesting thing happened, like we got a call from NASA, we got a call from like variety of large enterprise companies who are willing to really try the software actually buy it on internet. And they were like fortune 100 companies in many, many cases. So we could prove the point that we could actually build an IP and distribute using a simple self serve free trial freemium model, and then keep Sequoia Capital we got funded by Sequoia and Sequoia actually requested that while we sort of really narrow down a product market fit and refine it, they requested, if I could relocate to Bay Area, and this whole new thing called Cloud is happening, I should give it a thought. 

 

So I moved to the Bay Area at 12. By then I met with a bunch of people. It sort of really understood that what we would be building in software to backup data across the globe, like remote data, as a software approach is actually far more valuable. The entire IP could be build as a cloud service. So in 2013, we launched a platform where any enterprise could protect information across their entire landscape into a single subscription model running out of cloud. And that really took off and here we are. So five years of sort of soul searching to VC rounds, ways to really refine the product market fit. 

 

Siddhartha 04:07

And what kept you going in the first five years because, as you said there was trouble for product market fit, getting the right set of customers figuring out what could scale globally, it must not have been easy to thrive. Imagine there was no SaaS ecosystem in India. 

 

Jaspreet 04:22

I think that’s the fun part of the whole thing. There’s a reason it’s called Venture, you are figuring out stuff. So we very well understood we are on the first of many, many things. And that was the exciting part of it. We also very well understood that look, there’s one thing which is critical about a startup that we got to dream big: that you have to have a big idea and spending a lifetime chasing a big idea is far better than getting an overnight success and a small idea.  

 

So we really wanted to find a product market fit where the market is large, TAM is large, data prediction of backup and recovery, disaster recovery, long term retention this entire market even though unless you understand the market close enough, it looks like a very infrastructure market, a $30 billion market. It’s a very, very big TAM, we were the first one to actually think and pioneer the whole SaaS based approach to change the game, this market was known to have multiple vendors to be deployed to sound a very, very highly complex problem. The joke was it’s seven vendor problem when you have to deploy multiple parties and the seventh vendor is the God. Ultimately you pray to God and actually works to really, really make it work to actually turn the market upside down and have a subscription option for enterprise to deploy was actually a very empowering thing, something which we truly aspire to build into, and truly kept us going.

 

Siddhartha 05:37

How much time did it take to hit the first 1 Billion ARR?

 

Jaspreet 05:42

We initially got immediate traction and vendors selling software between 2010-11-13. We actually had something like 100 plus customers rapidly deploying, we had to almost redo the entire business because the customer deploying the software was not the same one deploying our cloud. So when we were actually focused on deploying cloud, we actually got immediate traction almost immediately. We saw, I think, one of the really large pharmaceutical companies deployed globally and spent like a million dollars plus, like almost within the first year. So that’s how we came to the realization that this product market fit is actually a sucking sound in the market for what we have to offer. And then we have to double down triple down to actually solve the problem. So once you build something good, and once you hit a product market fit like this incredible hole in the market to achieve, absorb your product and deploy. 

 

Siddhartha 06:25

And this year it was this that you got your 1 million customers? 

 

Jaspreet 06:32

We started selling the cloud version in 2013 itself, I would say from March to March 2013. If my memory serves me, and I think by December in seven to eight months, like we had, we had a first million dollar ACB customer. Now getting one customer doesn’t mean the business model is viable, scalable, or repeatable, like the each of these three things, viability, repeatability, and scalability, like we had to spend multiple years so that you can write so often time when the product market fit is good, you get lucky with one or two really, really good early adopters, but getting into the mid stage customers. And then the mature customers and late stage market takes multiple years of refining your product and go to market engine. 

 

Siddhartha 07:09

So if you could remember till 2013, before you got your first large customer on cloud, what was the Druva’s was revenue till then?

 

Jaspreet 07:15

Even though, if my memory serves me right, on the software model, we had hit seven to $8 million already. But as I said, it was a complete redo of the entire company, we have to burn that $8-9 million down in the ground and build it all over again. Because these are two fundamentally very different companies with a tough choice to make, do we build a software business by replicating software across the board, because cloud is not a technology chattin by itself ? Cloud is also a business model shift, operational shifts in the company. So we had to almost burn the revenue which we built and softened the ground to build the company again, so pretty good starting with current counts on the Cloud Platform.

 

Siddhartha 07:49

If you could explain in layman’s terms to our listeners, what are you building in the first five years and what transition did you do in 2013? 

 

Jaspreet 07:56

So the first five years of focus was, if you’re an enterprise and you have data, across remote offices and branch offices and end users are sitting anywhere, typically, most enterprise had good sophisticated software to back up with the job of creating copies of software to avoid any human error, any malware and ransomware and be able to soft it to actually do backup of data and systems in the remote environment. Think of a manufacturing site and a hospital chain or educational system or oil rig . So you’re finding a variety of success of people downloading the software, setting up their backup systems and backing up stuff across the globe, we got Pepsi to buy across the manufacturing side, we got NASA to deploy across and actually the multiple offices across the globe.

 

While this was a good business model, we felt that the industry needs a complete shake up and reboot in favor of cloud because to actually build a backup system software is only one piece besides Druva you had to buy compute, you have to buy servers, then you have to buy storage then you have to actually buy what’s called offsite location, you’ve to direct your data to a remote location or cloud and then you do by third party services. You buy networking, there are a lot of moving parts to achieve just manage it and think about a company investing in 70 different vendors and multiple system just to make sure the data is always on always available. So we felt this is a very fundamental problem for all enterprises and we got to make it far more easier. This cannot be as complicated as deploying multiple technologies and multiple vendors. 

 

Nansi

Hi, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to share that this podcast is brought to you by Prime Venture partners, an early stage VC fund led by Amit Somani, Shripati Acharya and Sanjay Swami. Prime is often the first institutional investor in category defining tech startups in FinTech, SaaS healthcare and education, such as Markit Quizzes, Planet Spark, Bolt and Glip to know more about Prime visit https://primevp.in/ 

 

Jaspreet 09:57

So the SaaS based approach involved, and we collapse the seven vendors into a single vendor called Druva. We simply subscribed to our SLA saying, hey, my data is all across the enterprise. If I deploy Druva’s agents and sensors, my information is always protected. It’s always on, always available across the globe. And that was a fundamentally very, very big promise we delivered last year, we delivered 4 billion backups with Six Sigma precision, they will be made sure that no single byte of information which was in Druva’s preview is ever lost or non recoverable from ransomware events or any of those things. In fact you’re so confident about what we did in the last one year that we even offered a $10 million guarantee on any information loss by drover ever. So that was a big change coming from deployed software as you go to actually building a service on top of Amazon and offering a very tightly managed SLA to enterprises. 

 

Siddhartha 10:46

You let go $8 million in revenue. How hard was this decision to take at that point in time?

 

Jaspeet 10:52

It was pretty hard initially, we felt like, hey, we could do both. And that’s an easy answer for any entrepreneur, any company saying, how different would SaaS be from building software, or hosted software. As we got deeper into it, we spoke to customers, we realized they’re actually different sets of customers who are facing different sets of challenges. The company’s DNA to actually sell subscriptions, to sell software, which is downloadable and is very, very different. And the market is so large that it’s too one thing and one thing, even a 30% market comes our way and believes in us they would rather be number one in the world doing the 30% of market versus be a software, which could still be good, but to be fair, it could be over time, like not a big big advantage compared to the mark. 

 

So given that TAM was so big, even the decision was very, very hard like it initially confused us, confused the board, we have be thankful to our investors and board, they let us experiment and think big, it was very, very hardcore. But in hindsight, it was the best decision we ever made. 

 

Siddhartha 11:45

And in the new product, how much you share that, within 2013, you got your first million ACV customers, how long it took you to reach 10 million ARR with the new product? 

 

Jaspreet 11:55

The first 10 million came pretty quick, probably next 18 months, we got $10 million ARR, over the next 30 it took some time, because a different problem at different stages, the product market fit takes you along pretty quickly. The second sound in the market building viable and scalable, repeatable processes sometimes takes time. This drove us growing pains and we had to learn to get to the next 30 and 40. And then the next 50 And the next 100 Like it all took some stages of growth.

 

Siddhartha 12:23

What changes it required for you to go from the first 10 to 100 million ARR, the first 10 is basically trying to understand your customer exceptionally well. The first million typically proves that you can actually service and meet first 10 proves that there’s a market for your needs. So I think there’s a fundamental belief that product market fit, that is a market for the product. And it’s a scalable and larger market for your product. Probably a 10 mark is a right mark for it. So $10 million, you’re basically proven out as a TAM for your product is a sizable lead for your product. 

 

You get there by hiring a very early stage sales team. It is in the enterprise SaaS world, which is a creative sales team, which is empathetic of the customer’s needs to understand the customer very, very well and has creative ways to actually sell the product. So the first 10, as you sell to these product 100 Plus customers, or maybe even more, you’re actually learning about the market and its needs and how sort of a selling process may work like what are the sales pitch to sell to this product to a customer, it needs a very well defined from 10 to 100. Now you’re building a scalable, go to market motion and probably multiple iterations of it, I guess 10 to 50 You have to find the demand engine like what will be the primary mode of demand creation? Will you go direct to customer through a channel partner through a distribution mechanism through a freemium model, a plg approach and then you have to figure out a fulfilment engine like how do you fulfil the needs by deploying a sales team and inside sales team, a field sales team and all those things. 

 

And then 50-100 You’re making it repeatable, cost effective scalable, figuring out multiple verticals, multiple countries, it’s an iterative way to scale it go to market engine and kind of along the way from 10 to 100, we are very very lucky if a single, it starts to take off like 100 to 200 or more usually along the way like you can disrupt and you can disrupt it by competition by market and you have to sort of evolve your offering think about a wider offering bigger offering larger TAMs and sort of evolve along.

 

Siddhartha 14:20

Was your shifting to the US, 100% required to make the world in today what it is? 

 

Jaspreet 14:25

I think so, it depends the kind of business you are in we are an enterprise SaaS sort of business and the proximity to customers and proximity to talent which understands enterprise customers are sort of critical for Druva’s existence, the certain talent pool at least back then or even now certain talent pool like product marketing, which takes the technology and simplifies and messaging which customers can understand, repeatable go to market engine from an enterprise model perspective is the engine just a very well defined and very well known in the valley. If you are building a very horizontal plane, which anybody in the globe will have a need for, which is what we did. The US is still the biggest market and sort of attacking this market, getting the lion’s share building the repeatable go to market engine, having product marketing and all those areas, the Bay Area still is actually a very great, very good place to sort of find talent, find access to customer and sort of get going. 

 

Siddhartha 15:16

And your advice to enterprise SaaS founders would be to look into the US, as you said, the largest enterprise on the US for the SaaS market.

 

Jaspreet 15:23

I think it depends what problem you’re solving. I see a lot of entrepreneurs who say they have found a bunch of customers in India or Southeast Asia, and I feel I must come to the US. What is your advice. I think every single time you cross a segment segment is mid market to SMB, or enterprise or a vertical, or a country or a region, we have to revisit product market fit. Oftentimes the needs change many, many times like the country or the region, it’s not always easy to assume the country entering will obviously have the need. Each country may have different levels of competition, different types of need to segment vertical countries may have to reassess product market fit. What made you successful in Southeast Asia may not make you successful in the US or Europe or enterprise or mid market . 

 

So all these things must be revisited. If you do think that your product market fit is viable and good. And you’ve proven it out by getting a few customers and getting a certain amount of scale, then you have a critical choice to make, you have to choose either choose a US or to Southeast Asia, you can’t do both. Because if a product market fit is good, the best company will still take the biggest market pretty quickly. So being in two different markets actually doesn’t help because these two markets don’t talk to each other. They have nothing in common often. Different distribution engines go to market, different customers have different different customer needs. So you rather choose one market and do it well until you reach probably about 100 plus million dollars. Once you’re 100 Plus you can be in different countries, different segments and any of those things. 

 

Siddhartha 16:47

Have you seen any journeys where the entrepreneurs moved to the US and it didn’t work out for them? 

 

Jaspreet 16:53

Never say never, like there’s always cases where it worked or did not work. I’m not sure on top of my head couldn’t think about like people who moved to the US, there are a lot of cases that people actually if I think about it yesterday a lot of cases where people simply moved to the US assuming that what they had built in Southeast Asia or India would replicate it it did not replicate and actually they have to either revisit or pivot or fold and go back, i don’t know if it’s prudent to talk about in a podcast or name the companies but yes, a few come to mind for sure. 

 

Siddhartha 17:20

So, how hard it is for entrepreneurs once they have achieved product market fit in India and then assuming that they will be able to figure out the US product market fit or you will advise that when you’re zero just moved to the US and then figure out.

 

Jaspreet 17:32

Yeah, I would say like often time, even that may sound harsh like oftentimes a product market fit in India is a bad news, it’s a false indicator of success, at least as of today I think India or many markets are not easily replicable to the US with earnings you have to unlearn them. So, bad news from a point of view that the learners have to be unlearned to probably build a different product for example, a market like India still biased horizontally that hey, can you help me with an IP address exposure . So like a lot of horizontal buying still happen in India while the US still buy very vertical best of breed which must integrate well. 

 

So, since the learnings are not very easily replicable, like people tend to build on false hope or false expectation when they get product market fit India in many many cases that she could not to find that product market fit and sort of replicate but look this is for a reason called a venture or a startup that there’s never a straight path to success many of times you have to just figure out stuff along the way and survival  it’s a man’s desire to survive like that’s that’s probably like the most critical fundamental factor all along the way.

Siddhartha 18:34

So Jaspreet from your learnings, as you mentioned that entrepreneurs as soon as they move to the US in enterprise SaaS that’s better for them because then there is no learning curve involved for them that how to replicate what has worked in India in the US that assumption that every entrepreneur SaaS entrepreneur comes to the US at least something has worked for them in India. Why is this learning so hard? 

 

Jaspreet 18:57

Unearning is not hard and can be done. It’s just, by itself, startups are so incredibly hard, you have money to raise, you have competition to take care of, you have to build a product. And now if there’s a sort of unlearn and learn of new markets,it’s just a setback, but as I said, like no startup or venture is a straight line. There’s probably multiple detours along the way to sort of get to where you want to get to. So this is probably part of the process but still pretty, incredibly hard to get done if you have a setback of this sort.

 

Siddhartha 19:27

Dear listeners. Before we dive further into the podcast, I would like to welcome Prashant Kunti, Head of Product Management at Zoho payroll and Zohobook. Prashant, what does Zoho payroll do and what is the story behind it? 

 

Prashant 19:38

Zoho payroll is a Payroll solution from the Zoho suite of products. It’s designed from the ground up to completely abstract the payroll complexity and put your payroll complaints on autopilot mode. So what do I mean by this? So, when we talk about abstracting payroll complexity, we mean that a business needs to know just who their employees are where they work and how much they get paid. And by putting your payroll compliance on autopilot mode, what we mean is that our ever changing rules and regulations that affect your payroll and Zoho payroll takes care of all those things business need not worry about all those things. 

 

Siddhartha 20:18

Thank you, Prashant. Dear listeners, you will find more about Zoho payroll in the show notes. Now, let’s further continue with a podcast. 

 

And if you could recollect and summarize what worked well for Druva from 10 to 100 journey, because as you mentioned, there were a lot of repeatable processes made, what were those processes that you got right and we have seen in enterprise SaaS world as well, as even in SMB or mid market SaaS that entrepreneurs get lost somewhere in between 10 to the 100 journey, and ultimately, the company gets stuck between 15 to 20. There are a lot of companies in that valley.

 

Jaspreet 20:56

Yeah it comes down to a variety of factors like almost systematically all of those have to either work or you have to refine and sort of make them work for you. But the first fundamental still remains product market fit is the market need and desire to get the market big enough for you to constantly grow and mature. That’s number one, you need to constantly refine and rethink your thinking around the topic. And often the market changes,  what got you successful early on in the first few years, the market demand changes, the competition comes in, somebody else feels the need. ? So that’s the viability question ? And the question comes around repeatability. Have you found a repeatable sales motion? I understand my buyer, but I also understand how to get money from the buyer in a repeatable manner? Not my demand engine, my fulfillment engine, my marketing and sales engine like these are working together. And the metrics are predictable. 

 

And then comes the scalability question : what is viable and repeatable? Can I scale it? Can I borrow more money and hire more salespeople? Have I made the learning simple enough that what made two reps successful would be the same process to get to 20 reps to 200 reps? Like how do I get sales process marketing process demand, enrich and scalable, that I can simply pour money or build, actually, the repeatable model can be applied to scale? All these things have to get done. I think for Dhruva, we had obviously a variety of challenges, but we figured out that hey, we must constantly evolve, Product Market Fit and we were very aggressive in sort of very almost like along the way people thought it’s a science experiment, it cannot be done if too hard or too difficult. But we are consistently and maniacally focused on building the product and defining a product market fit throughout you are always leading edge to what and pushing the boundaries of what the market could should take could take. You’re maniacally focused on repeatable and viable sales process or a marketing process to see like, hey, let’s just make it a scientific means and a repeatable means and operational means, literally, how can you make a sales team more productive and better productive and shorter period of time. 

 

And same for marketing, those are the areas we literally focus a lot, but a lot of energy behind got multiple times wrong, or once he got them, the companies or the structure scale along the way, we got great partnerships along the way, and sort of those really helped to propel us forward in multiple markets. So yeah, many of those things are if you could call us resilient, call it fortunate, like we call us along the way, which were actually very, very critical to get to 100. 

 

Siddhartha 23:25

But it took 14 years to get fortunate or 14 years for overnight success. 

 

Jaspreet 23:27

It’s true, very much true. 

 

Siddhartha 23:29

And if you have to, go back and change a few things that if possible, you could shorten this journey down to six, seven years. Is that possible? And what would you do differently? 

 

Jaspreet 23:39

Getting a cat Dollar Tree is a different trick every time like in hindsight, everything is 2020. Like, have I learned enough to do it faster, sooner, better, bigger? Absolutely, yes. But like every journey is different. Like it took us five years to even get to a basic product market fit and then , viability repeatability sort of had to build the wrong way. So it’s just really hard to think back and clear a few things because it always sounds easy, but they’re a very, very clear variety of variables that you don’t even control. 

 

Siddhartha 24:05

So let me ask you what are the mistakes that you avoid in this journey? 

 

Jaspreet 24:09

That’s a difficult question for me. The reason I say so is that I know a lot of mistakes that I made. I probably wouldn’t even know the mistakes I avoided somebody probably watching me outside and would say that better, a lot of mistakes are made along the way. I’m not sure which one I avoided.

 

I think the learning was how to hire the  person for the job was always a big learning curve. The learning curve on how to build a repeatable process. As an engineer, you get trained to sort of work on more creative means, sort of process is not a thing but I learned that the US may not be the best country like it is, besides being a very innovative country. It’s also the country to scale innovation. The scale part, the process is also critical as an engineer is not very natural. 

 

Siddhartha 24:53

If you have to advise on as a brilliant SaaS entrepreneur selling an enterprise SaaS, top five things to do or 10 things to do to reach the first 20 million ARR very quickly in the large market what would it be? 

 

Jaspreet 25:06

I think there’s probably no single answer like look every entrepreneur journey is very different this this dream big, thing long term, thing first principle fundamental basis, listen to your customers question when we think which don’t make sense think repeatability, think viability, think scalability, like all those things that is fundamentals. If you do well, like the rest, many, many variables and orderly control, you can have the best wings. But if there’s no vent, there’s no picking you up and flying. So you have to be disciplined to be ready, you have to build the  discipline to be ready. When the opportunity comes, you have to strike and look the opportunity could take six months, two years, five years. If your dream is critical to you, the dream is big enough to you like you have been disciplined, like you will nail it. 

 

Siddhartha 25:48

But what was your dream when you started the war that kept you going for 14 years, I think my dream or rather my desire was sort of to be the best myself. And it’s just two fold, I really was motivated in design to sort of really be the best I can be and sort of solve the problems which are larger than life and be I was also very fascinated about data like and I was always incredibly puzzled at how wide data management is so incredibly difficult. When these two came together, I found a challenge worthy of sort of me to solve for a challenge worthy of customers who would actually care about the relevance is critical before revenue. 

 

So I felt that this problem was very relevant. I felt that this actually really, really challenged me appropriately and sort of draws from.

 

Siddhartha 26:32

And what has helped you, this is my last question for you. What will help you in your learning, is it by reading books? Is it by meeting other entrepreneurs? Is it by interacting with people like, Shailendra Singh from Sequoia who is on your board. 

 

Siddhartha 26:47

I think all the opportunities were great. I had an incredible time learning from Shailendra, still having it. Many, many advisors, entrepreneurs along the way. First and foremost, to be even receptive to learning. You have to be like, humility is key because you have to be grounded to understand who you are and who you’re not . And then comes the, people focus and talk a lot about innovation. I feel they don’t talk enough about curiosity. Humility gives birth to a curious mind and a curious mind is extremely critical. And a scientific mind is very critical. They’re like, Oh, are you curious about the world can ask the questions haven’t been asked before, but how you’re also scientific in your mind and thinking to sort of make deductions and learnings and theories and conjectures and sort of prove and disprove and learn along the way. 

 

Like once you have the  foundation for learning, humility, curiosity, a scientific mindset, like then your response to actually learn from people books and surroundings. And then of course, I was fortunate to be surrounded by great people and I met great people along the way, who taught me great things and are still learning a lot. So it’s very critical for entrepreneurs and anybody successful in my mind to sort of focus on a learning mindset. 

 

Siddhartha 27:56

Thank you so much. It’s been a wonderful masterclass hosting your entrepreneur podcast. 

 

Jaspreet 28:02

Thank you very much Siddhartha. Thank you.

 

**Sponsors**
  • Prime is a high conviction, high support investor, backing star teams with differentiated ideas. All partners at Prime work actively with the entrepreneurs post-investment to accelerate building a great company. Prime focuses on building differentiating companies whose solutions are 10X better and are powered by technology and product. Prime is now investing from its fourth fund of $ 120M and is often the first institutional investor in category-defining startups such as MyGate, HackerEarth, Niyo, Glip, Bolt, and Wheelseye. To know more about Prime visit primevp.in 
  • Being an entrepreneur means balancing a lot of tasks, and payroll is just one of many. But handling payroll manually is particularly time-consuming and chaotic. Teams inevitably end up processing inaccurate salaries, struggling with compliance, or losing track as your business expands. With Zoho Payroll, you can automate routine payroll tasks such as salary calculations, payments, payslip distribution, and compliance. Set up payroll once, and as your employee count grows, your payroll process scales without you spending additional time or effort. Try our 30-day free trial, and simplify your journey as an entrepreneur with Zoho Payroll.

 

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