Matrix Moments: Asish Mohapatra's journey from being an investor to building a fintech startup at scale

#buildtolast #buildtosuit #startups #strategy #fintechstartups

In this episode of Matrix Moments, Asish Mohapatra talks with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, about his journey of building OfBusiness, and his transition from being an investor at Matrix Partners India to the founder of a fintech startup.

Key takeaways for building big #FinTech startups:-

1. Every commerce company, once it attempts to scale, essentially has to solve for financing. Even Amazon and other big players are realising the potential of installment economy.

2. To be able to make a financing transaction, you need to have different capabilities. And those should be around debt raising (because debt is cheaper than equity), underwriting, and collections.

3. People at the top have to have to speak the exact same language as the customers' requirements.

4. You have to force people to consciously develop a risk mindset, which not many of us do because fundamentally, we are empiricist in nature.

5. Being customer-centric is necessary but it is never sufficient.

6. You need to have technology in your businesses because without that you won't have access or low-cost access.

7. To scale a company, it is also important to have a strong team and a set of founders.

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[Matrix Moments] Asish Mohapatra's journey from being an investor to building a fintech startup at scale

In this episode of Matrix Moments, Asish Mohapatra talks with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, about his journey of building OfBusiness, and his transition from being an investor at Matrix Partners India to the founder of a fintech startup.

Startup Strategy: The opportunity for startups in India & ASEAN to write a new M&A playbook

#manda #mergers #mergersandacquisitions #startups #startupindia #strategy #startupstrategy #buildtolast

Please read what Piyush Gupta, MD - Strategic Development at Sequoia Capital has to say on how M&A can make you big, provided executed properly.

M&A will become an increasingly important tool for startups that want to scale, enter adjacent businesses and enhance their financial profile. This will require a change in mindset among founders in India and ASEAN.

M&A has been drastically under-utilized as a growth tool by startups in this region. That’s partly because many founders on both sides of the fence feel a natural sense of anxiety about , loss of control and the impact on culture, customers and employees. It’s also because M&A, as a tool, has a bad reputation.

Startups Sequoia worked with on M&A have been able to achieve their objectives by structuring their deals with these principles in mind:

• Create an ownership mindset with stock-weighted acquisitions.
• Change your organizational structure to make a home for the acquired team
• Add on incentive for successful integration and performance
• Bring some cash to the acquisition if you can
• Simplify cap table liquidation preferences

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The opportunity for startups in India & ASEAN to write a new M&A playbook

By Piyush Gupta Even before COVID, public and private investors assessing late-stage startups were looking much more closely at their path to significant scale and sustained profitability. That focus is here to stay, and many companies will need to expand their toolkit.

Does CAC and RoI really matter when the opportunity is big? - Build to last and Build to kill (Competition)

Does CAC and RoI really matter when the opportunity is big?

Reliance Jio, which its commercial launch on September 5, 2016, disrupted the Indian telecom industry with its ‘Welcome’ and ‘Happy New Year’ offer, with its free voice and data services along with access to its digital content ecosystem for 15 months. It could thus add a whopping 100 mn subscribers in a matter of 170 days.

What about competition watchdog CCI? In fact, CCI rejected Airtel's plea of "predatory pricing" by Jio and said that in a competitive market scenario, where there are already big players operating in the market, it would not be “anti-competitive for an entrant to incentivise customers towards its own services by giving attractive offers and schemes.”

Such short-term business strategy of an entrant to penetrate the market and establish its identity cannot be considered to be anti-competitive in nature and as such cannot be a subject matter of investigation, CCI said.

With the free-mium model, Reliance Jio achieved two things - Captured major share of market within no-time and forced competitors to bleed by forcing them to slash tariffs.

So, now you know how to build a big startup not only to last but also to kill (competition).