There are two types of entrepreneurs that we celebrate. The first one is the founder who raised a lot of money and built a highly valued startup on the back of investor money.

The second type of entrepreneur - which we think is really the more special type of entrepreneur, is one who started from scratch and built up a business brick by brick on the back of his hustle and grit.

HP Singh is a great example of the second type of entrepreneur. He was a CA who accidentally got a chance to start a lending business in the nineteen nineties and has since then built up Satin Creditcare into one of the few listed micro finance companies in India - which today employs about 12 thousand people and has a market capitalization of 2,000 crores.

This is truly a story of the old-fashioned approach of building a business using grit, resilience and a bit of luck and HP Singh shares tons of lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs.

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What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I tell you that in this episode, we are featuring a Patel who built a business in the US? The stereotype says that he would be running a motel or a convenience store - but this Patel has built a b2b SaaS company that is almost a unicorn.

Nishant Patel moved to the US when he was just 14, and then went on to become a techie in the San Francisco Bay area at the peak of the dot com bubble in the year 2000. He was there when the term cloud was coined, and he was so fascinated by the promise of the cloud that he quit his job and started Raw Engineering - which was helping companies adopt cloud technologies.

He then achieved the rare feat of building not one but three product businesses within that services business, and the biggest of them is Contentstack.

Contentstack is a fascinating business - it’s a pioneer in the space of the headless CMS, and this episode is a deep dive that will help you understand the content space and how it has evolved over the last decade, and what is the secret sauce behind Contentstack because of which it has raised almost 180 million dollars and is near a unicorn valuation.

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Amit Koshal’s entrepreneurial journey began while working on a groundbreaking product at Intuit. Now, at TWID, he’s disrupting payment networks by turning reward points into a currency for transactions—an idea refined over five years of experimentation and failures, eventually leading to the product-market fit. This conversation delves into his path as a founder and his vision for a "happily ever after."

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Read more about Twid:-

1.Twid Unveils Industry-First 'Reward Mandates' to Revolutionise Subscription Payment Setups, Anticipates 15 per cent-20 per cent Reduction in Payment Failures

2.From Points To Payments: Transforming Loyalty Programs For The Digital Age

3.How rewards-based payment app Twid lets you use loyalty points to shop, eat out, and travel

After a career in U.S. investment banking, Nikhil returned to India to build Imarticus, offering offline-focused boot camps to upskill fresh graduates. Unlike many in the space, Nikhil views Imarticus as an education business rather than an edtech company, with a fundamental focus on delivering real learning outcomes. This approach has helped the company grow and reach an annual revenue of 300 crores with very little outside funding. In this episode, Nikhil talks about how he built a successful education business and discusses the future of offline learning in today’s digital world.

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Read more about Imarticus Learning:-

1.Success Stories: How Data Science and Data Analytics Courses Have Transformed Careers?

2.Winning Stroke: Interview With Nikhil Barshikar, MD, Imarticus Learning

3.MY STARTUP IDEA: Imarticus Learning founder on his Eureka moment

4.Bridging the industry-academia gap: Minimizing wrong career choices

5.Celebrating a decade of excellence in professional education: Imarticus Learning completes 10 years

6.Imarticus Learning the first and only approved provider for world's top 4 accounting certifications

Every year millions of young people migrate for jobs or education, creating a big market for hostels and paying guest accommodations. However, succeeding in this business depends on managing the operational complexities and getting the small details right. Zolo, one of India’s largest co-living companies, has mastered this challenge, currently managing living spaces for 60,000 people. In this episode, Nikhil shares the management mantra that helps him lead Zolo’s 2,500 employees and explains how he made operational excellence the company’s core strength.

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Read more about Zolo Stays:-

1.Zolo Stays redefines living experience for students and singles

2.How Zolostays is using customer experience to create its niche in the crowded co- living market

3.We provide 60-70% more value to the stay compared to local PGs: Dr. Nikhil Sikri, Co-founder and CEO of Zolo Stays

4.Handling large teams across multiple verticals, we need to ensure that they are involved and know they are part of the team: Nikhil Sikri, Zolo Stays

5.A fresh take on urban living

Neeraj Khandelwal is a passionate Indian who aspired to serve his country as a civil servant. When his initial plan fell through, he channelled his determination into exploring new ways to fulfil this objective. He saw the transformative potential of cryptocurrency and invested in building India's crypto infrastructure, leading to the creation of CoinDCX. In this episode, he decodes how crypto will change the world and how CoinDCX is paving the way for this future.

Read more about CoinDCX:-

1.Blockchain critical for India: 40u40 2024 Neeraj Khandelwal, CoinDCX

2.Revolutionising Web3 integration: CoinDCX’s Neeraj Khandelwal reveals Okto Web3 SDK's game-changing role in India's Web3 mass adoption

3.CoinDCX’s money minters

4.Revolutionising Finance- AMA with Neeraj Khadelwal

5.Regulation, conducive environment among top factors to fuel crypto trading among Indian investors: Sumit Gupta of CoinDCX

6.Celebrating 6 years of building the future of Internet in India.

7.4 observations on India’s booming crypto sector from CoinDCX co-founder Neeraj Khandelwal

Anand is an IT veteran who started his career three decades back and in his last role was heading an IT services company. Noticing the pain his customers were facing in searching and interpreting data, he recognized the need for a fundamentally new approach to insight generation, which led to the creation of Findability Sciences. In this episode, he talks about how AI is impacting large enterprises and the value it can bring to businesses.

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Read more about Findability Sciences:-

1.AI is key for business growth as it enables data-driven decisions: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar

2.Exclusive Interview with Anand Mahurkar, Founder and CEO, Findability Sciences

3.Fortune Magazine recognizes Findability Sciences as one of America's Most Innovative Companies

4.India’s AI roadmap in 2023: From CAGR 20% growth to creating endless job opportunities

Deepak Sahni shares his remarkable journey of building one of the largest diagnostics companies in the preventive space. Starting his entrepreneurial journey as a teenager, Deepak has consistently dared to dream bigger with each venture over the last two decades. In this episode, he reveals the secrets behind scaling Healthians to a revenue run rate of over 500 crores and raising 80 million dollars. This conversation is nothing short of a masterclass in entrepreneurship—perfect for anyone looking to take their big leap.

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Read more about Healthians:-

1.How a College Dropout Fought Back, Completed His Degree, and Built a Rs 240 Crore Turnover Health Lab Chain

2.How One Man’s Dream is Making India Healthier

3.Once A College Dropout, Now The CEO Of India's Leading Diagnostics Firm, Healthians, Meet Health-Tech Veteran, Deepak Sahni

4.COVID 19 – How a Crisis is Nudging us to Reinvent