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.

Sarthak & I deep dive into India's Food and Beverage industry. We discuss the unit economics of running a restaurant to make butter chicken, ordering patterns in India, the business models of food aggregators like Zomato and Swiggy, cloud kitchens, and the reason behind the rise and fall of Uber Eats. We uncover the success story behind Domino's and how Ankit Gupta and Chirag Chhajer built Burma Burma, a Burmese cuisine restaurant chain in such a competitive industry.

Salone Sehgal is a trailblazer in the world of gaming and interactive media. Salone has shattered the glass ceiling by becoming the world's first female general partner of games and interactive media VC funds. Her impressive journey has seen her co-founding Lumikai Fund, India's first early-stage interactive media and gaming VC. Salone's remarkable career expanded to over 18 years as a global game and new media investor, games entrepreneur, and former M&A banker.

Globally, incense is the silent bridge that connects humans to the divine. And naturally, no Indian wants to compromise when it comes to their hopes and prayers. This episode of The One Percent Project is an intriguing exploration of the incense business and its essence in Indian culture with a remarkable guest, ⁠Arjun Ranga⁠, the CEO of ⁠Cycle Pure Agarbathis⁠, a part of the NR Group.

Vijay Rayapati, the co-founder and CEO of Atomicwork a startup that helps enterprises bring their employees, IT systems, and HR operations together to drive business impact. Previously, Vijay co-founded Minjar, a cloud management startup. Minjar was acquired by Nutanix in 2018.

Vijay’s journey is a testament to grit, patience, and perseverance. From his early life in a small town in Andhra Pradesh in India to becoming a prominent entrepreneur, Vijay shares his counterintuitive insights on entrepreneurship, the importance of people's success, and his passion for seeding and building.

Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, the co-founder of Wakefit, a household name in India synonymous with quality sleep. Chaitanya's journey to Wakefit is a testament to persistence and unwavering determination. Before starting Wakefit, Chaitanya had nineteen years of experience spanning entrepreneurship, management consulting and marketing. Wakefit, his third start-up stint, co-founded with Ankit Garg, has emerged as a game-changer in the world of sleep solutions. Crafting products that redefine comfort and wellness, Wakefit's journey parallels Chaitanya's own pursuit of excellence in entrepreneurship.

Brendan Boyle is a toy inventor, an adjunct professor at Stanford, and the Founder of the IDEO Play Lab. He is also the inventor of the world-famous Jumperoo.

Brendan consults companies about redesigning their organisational behaviour to include space for play and co-authored the award-winning encyclopedia of never-before-seen inventions, The Klutz Book of Inventions.

Aditi Sharma is the co-founder of Grow Commerce, ex-Grab & McKinsey. She talks about why she chose to join Grab and declined an offer from Google even when she was expecting her first child to join a hypergrowth stage startup.

Rajan Singh is a graduate of IIT Kanpur and a former Indian Police Service officer who served as the Trivandrum Police Commissioner. But after a few years, Rajan felt a sense of intellectual stagnation in his job, and he decided to quit and restart his career. He then pursued an MBA from Wharton Business School and worked as a consultant with McKinsey in New York before returning to India as an investment professional at New Silk Route, a billion-dollar private equity fund. However, his restlessness did not end there, and he eventually became an entrepreneur, founding a habit-building startup called HabitStrong. At HabitStrong, Rajan helps people improve their lives by inculcating focus, self-discipline, and good habits.

Deepit Purkayastha is the co-founder of Inshorts & Public app. Deepit's entrepreneurial journey began in an IIT Kharagpur dorm room with his co-founders Azhar & Anunay. 10 years later, Inshorts is India's #1 short news app, with 10 million+ active users, and Public App is India's largest platform for hyperlocal content, with 50 million+ active users.

Anand Jain is the Co-founder of CleverTap. CleverTap is the world's leading customer engagement and retention platform, valued at USD 775M and backed by Sequoia India, Tiger Global and others.

In this fascinating conversation, Anand talks about how curiosity and constant tinkering of an average student from a humble background have led him to build multiple successful businesses, the value of thinking in first principles, how understanding the customer is selling and much more.

Peter is the Chief Technology Officer at Buzzfeed, overseeing Product Management, Engineering, Design, and Data teams across all portfolio brands. Peter has built both consumer and enterprise products and fundraised from a diverse range of investors across industries—health (The Mighty, backed by GGVC, Upfront, and WPP Health), SaaS (Buddy Media, backed by Greylock, acquired by Salesforce), media & e-commerce (Refinery29, backed by Stripes, WPP, Scripps).

Peter, in this conversation, talks about his journey as a CTO, leadership vs management, and his delegation mechanism, which Keith Rabois outlined in his essay How to be an effective executive and what has been learnt as an angel investor.

Sidu Ponnappa is a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. His most recent startup C42 Engineering was acquired by GO-JEK in 2015, with C42's founding team joining GO-JEK's board of directors. GO-JEK grew 900X in 18 months and became Indonesia's first unicorn in 2017. Sidu has experienced building and scaling businesses as a founder, CEO, and head of engineering, sales, marketing and HR.

The Namkeen Industry of India. Namkeen in Hindi means snack. It is a $ 15 billion industry in India. No conversation on namkeens would be complete without mentioning, Haldiram's, India's No.1 Namkeen brand. Haldiram's 85+ years of history is an MBA in itself. It is fascinating to learn how Gangabhishenji Agarwal, fondly known as Haldiram, in 1918 kicked off the making of a Rs 5000 Cr, USD ~600M, brand, which is now a household name in India.

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.