Simran Khara is the founder and CEO of Koparo. She has an MBA from the Indian School of Business and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Shri Ram College of Commerce. With over 16 years of experience, she has advised, built, and monetized in her roles at McKinsey & Co, Star TV, and Juggernaut Books. Now, she is building Koparo, a D2C toxin-free home-care brand.

Ahana Guatam is the CEO & Co-Founder of Open Secret and a Harvard Business School & IIT Bombay alum. Open Secret is on a mission to un-junk the $ 15 billion Indian snack industry.

James served as the Chief Executive Officer of 7-Eleven and chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. James graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the College of the Holy Cross. He also obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1980. James is the founder of the 'Education is Freedom' foundation

Sourjyendu is the founder and Chief Business Officer at DealShare.

After spending 15+ years with leading Retail and FMCG organisations such as Metro, Raymond and Britannia, Sourjyendu kicked off his startup journey at the age of 40 to build Bharat's first social e-commerce unicorn.

Taru Kapoor is the general manager of Tinder and Match Group in India. In her previous stints, she has worked with Sequoia Capital and The Boston Consulting Group. Taru graduated from IIT Delhi with a B.Tech and M.Tech in Chemical Engineering and received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

Shrishti is the Managing Partner at SSV. SSV is a sector-agnostic family-office investing in early-stage companies. Through SSV, she has invested in 30 companies such as Plum, Kutumb, Chingari, Rupifi, Jar and 10Club.

Abhinandan is a screenwriter who kicked off his career as an assistant director to Andhadhun writer and National Award-winning filmmaker Hemanth M Rao. His writing credits include Netflix's Little Things Seasons 3 & 4 and Teen Tigada, a film for Prime Video's Unpaused anthology.

Jeffrey Paine is the Managing Partner & Co-founder at Golden Gate Ventures and an Edmund Hillary Fellow. Jeff is one of the most thoughtful VCs I have come across. Last year, he launched an initiative called Coachable that focuses on founders' mental wellness by pairing them with experienced coaches and mentors. He wishes for other like-minded VCs and corporations to join this initiative so that more founders get the support they need while building their startups.

Ashwin kicked off his career as an investment banker landed up working on Walls Street. In 2011 he took a one-way ticket to India to explore the New Media industry and today he is the founder of Pocket Aces and Loco.

Pocket Aces is the production house behind the hugely successful web shows such as Little Things, What the Folks and Please Find Attached.

Utsav is an entrepreneur, a networker and a hustler. He kicked off his career in the music industry, managing Indian rock bands and went on to build a music app. Post his entrepreneurial stint, he joined Uber and launched it in eight Indian cities and Dhaka in Bangladesh, breaking all growth records. After Uber, he joined Glovo and launched it in nine Eastern European markets and built a team of 250+ people. Delivery Hero acquired Glovo for $2.6 billion. Utsav is now back to entrepreneurship, building Evenflow, a roll-up platform acquiring and scaling e-commerce businesses.

Sabeer is the co-founder of Hotmail.com and ShowReel. Sabeer and his co-founder started Hotmail with $300,000 and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million within two years.

My next guest on The One Percent Project is Pushkar Mukewar, Co-founder and CEO of Drip Capital. Pushkar kicked off his career at Capital One, went to work for Oliver Wyman and Saama Capital. He has masters from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Wharton School of Business.