Pritish Sanyal Pritish Sanyal

Episode 29: Tarun Davda- Building Matrix Partners India

Tarun Davda is the Managing Director of Matrix Partners, India. Prior to joining Matrix Partners India, Tarun was the Co-founder, India CEO and Board Member at StepOut.com, a venture-backed startup. StepOut became India’s #1 online dating site with over 5 Million users. Before that, Tarun established BigRock.com (incubated by the Directi group) - India’s #1 provider of domain name registration and other web services. Tarun started his career at Infosys as an IT consultant. He has an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and an Engineer from VJTI, Bombay.

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Episode 28: Mahi de Silva- Building consumer-focused businesses

Mahi de Silva is a serial entrepreneur. His company AdMarvel was acquired by Opera, and within the first month of acquisition, AdMarvel 10Xed Opera’s browser monetization. With his latest entrepreneurial stint, Amplify.ai recently merged with Triller.

Mahi is a University of Kansas and Stanford graduate and was a part of the core startup team at VeriSign. He eventually became the company’s VP (Engineering) and, later, GM of its Wireless Services.

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Episode 23: Omid Scheybani- Scaling Growth Stage Ventures.

Omid is of Iranian origin who was born and bought up in Germany. He kicked-off his career with Google in Dublin, then moved to Google US and was responsible for Google’s LATAM cloud business, landed up heading international expansion for the Chinese bike-sharing unicorn platform Ofo and now he is with Robinhood, Fintech unicorn in the US. Omid's vast experience across different international markets allows him to draw comparisons between regions in ways few can.

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Episode 21: Aviral Bhatnagar- Building & Scaling “A Junior VC” Community; Democratise Start-up Conversations

Aviral Bhatnagar is the founder of “A Junior VC” Community and he is A Junior VC at Venture Highway. Aviral is a graduate of IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad. Aviral’s startup essays and his views about the Indian Venture ecosystem have led to the creation of the 20,000-member strong “A Junior VC” Community and earned him 170,000+ follower on LinkedIn.

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Episode 20: Sanjay Mehta- Being a Founder Friendly Inves

Sanjay is the Founder & Partner at 100X.VC and Mehta Ventures Family Office. Sanjay has invested in 150+ Start-ups across sectors with a 86% internal rate of return. in his words “Most startups will fail, so you can say everything sucks and be right most of the time. Although you never lose money with that strategy, you never make any either. “. In this conversation, he shares his learning from investing in Start-ups, the ethos of 100X.VC and ISAFE, his advice for new angel investors & VC on brand building and mentorship, and his “So What” strategy while evaluating a business idea.

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Episode 18: Devaiah Bopanna- The New Age Story Teller

I was introduced to Devaiah Bopanna and his work through an article about his recent nationally acclaimed CRED IPL Ad series that he co-wrote with his ex-AIB colleagues. The series is a bold attempt by CRED, the Celebrities and the Script-Writer using celebrities to poke fun at advertisers’ obsession with celebrity endorsements.”.

He talks about his career from engineering to creative writing, his AIB journey, distribution by OTT platforms and his process of creative thinking and scriptwriting.

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Episode 14: Victor Lang- Scaling Gini to 60 Countries with 3,000 Banks in 4 years

Victor Lang, Co-Founder and COO of Gini shares how within 4 years of Gini’s existence they have been able to build a network of 3000 banks in 60 countries with a small team based in HK through afflictions and partnerships and consumer adoption through word of mouth marketing.

Victor also shares his insights on businesses he built previously and how he managed a successful exit after going insolvent 3 times.

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Episode 13: Vikram Chandra- Decoding a Writer’s Mind

My next guest on The One Percent Project is the world-renowned author, professor and tech entrepreneur Vikram Chandra. His first book Red Earth and Pouring Rain, published in 1995 was received with outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. In 2006, he published Sacred Games,  which won the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction and a Salon Book Award. In 2016, Sacred Games was chosen by Netflix to be their first original series from India. Vikram has been teaching creative writing for 25+ years first at George Washington University and now at UC Berkley. He is the co-founder and CEO of Granthika Co., a revolutionary software startup that is re-inventing writing and reading for the digital age. 

I enjoyed speaking to Vikram about his early life, his work and his entrepreneurial journey.

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Episode 12: India on the 74th Independence Day

On the momentous occasion of India’s 74th independence day, I have with me a very special guest on The One Percent Project, Mr Jayant Sinha, Member of Indian Parliament and former Minister of state of finance & civil aviation government of India. Mr Sinha is alumni of some of the most prestigious universities across the world, the Indian Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School. He had a remarkable corporate career prior to joining politics, from heading the global IT practise at McKinsey to impact investing at Courage Capital and Omidyar Network.

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