00:20:57 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:20:57] S1: Sure. So Anirudh, in fact, hinges on the previous piece only. So when I was writing to a lot of people when I was applying for my MBA I ended up writing to a lady called Heidi Roizen. Ah who is a Stanford MBA and ah she is a Harvard Business School case study on her. Ah as ah one of the most networked people in the world and she was great friends with both. She was only person in the Valley who was best friends with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And she she was kind enough and she wrote back to me and told me that, hey, you know what? I can't be a mentor. I'm super busy. She was a partner at DFJ. So DFG Ventures used to run... Tim Draper used to run Draper University. And so I I told her that, hey. You know what? I know you're super busy, but can I just write one simple email to you every month? And I think... And and she talks about it, in fact. I'll share that link with you sometime. She spoke about this at another event that she was speaking at in 2016 or '17. She's like, hey. On a whim, I said yes to this guy because just he was just very polite in his email. And I literally put that on the calendar, and I used to kind of write on every single fifteenth. Hey. This is... You know what? This is what is happening in my life. I'm trying to make the shift. Now I've got to business school. Now I'm reading this case study. Now I'm doing this. And one fine day in two thousand fourteen, September, when Leverage was in its very initial, was just discussing it with a professor called professor Anirudh Aghos, who's a director at NYU Stern. And that's when Heidi reached out to me and said, hey, you know what? You've always wanted to be in Silicon Valley. You keep sharing all these stories. There's a fellowship which has come in. Why don't you apply for it? And I'll kind of put in a word for you. And that's how it happened. And I finished ISB on April 10. On April 11, I picked up the first flight to go to San Francisco. It was a big deal in my extended America satch of liberty and all of those things. Right? And also... It it it was very funny for me when I went to SF that I realized that SF is no different than. It's like America is going to be super fancy. Figure difference Not until I got to New York Times Square did I really realize what that US is like slightly different when I saw all those dazzling billboards.
00:23:05 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
But anyway, so I think Draper was great again from a fundamental structure building perspective. They gave us a chance to hear from people like great founders, like the founders of Airbnb, Elon Musk in a in a larger classroom session, and a lot of other series b, series c, series b founders. Himself kind of used to spend time with the entire group. And I also realized that Silicon Valley is magical because there's this amazing attitude. I think parts of it, we have already started to experience in the Indian ecosystem as well. But still, we haven't got there. Silicon Valley Silicon Valley because people are so... They go out there to kind of help you, and hence, that overall environment nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit in some sense. So I remember writing with Tim Draper, who's essentially such a senior guy. He has invested in companies like what? Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, all of that. And I tell him, hey. You know what? Like, I'm an Indian. I was a big fan of Sabeer Bhatia. Can I just go in and meet Sabeer Bhatia as well? He immediately writes a email to Sabeer in the next two minutes, and I'll land [00:24:06] S0: up in [00:24:08] S1: Palo Alto meeting Sabeer in a very fancy restaurant. He comes in a very swanky car. And, I think that, I think just a lot of those introductions, meeting a lot of those, fancy people in the valley, and, I remember meeting a bit Oh, wow. [00:24:23] S0: Akshay looks so different in this. I was like,.
00:24:23 · Anirudh A Damani, Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:24:23] S0: Akshay looks so different in this. I was like,. [00:24:30] S1: Chunky chunky as hell. No. I I remember meeting a lot of these, folks, and I think what that really helped was, that it helped me build an ecosystem in The US. Mhmm. And... Which I think has also been helpful. We got a lot of Silicon Valley angels when I was raising. Helped me. For example, when when came in to invest, that was a combination of a lot of things. That was a combination of [00:24:55] S0: I think we'll get into the funding conversation, but I really wanna talk about, like, after you came back from Draper, and, you know, you talked about this right before we went live. You came back, and you decided to first join Snapdeal. Right? You were there for about six months. And you will, you know, so so you go you go to university with all talks about entrepreneurship. Like, how to become an entrepreneur? But you come back and decide Exactly. And then after that babajob, I don't understand how this happened.
00:25:23 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:25:23] S1: Sure. So when I had gone to Draper while I had gone on a scholarship, my flight tickets were very kindly paid off by from Snapdeal. And my accommodation was sponsored by Thai and through a referral by Kalra, sir, because I shadowed Deep Kalra for an entire day from breakfast to night. Again, a lot of hustle there. So thanks to kind of knowing these guys, and I I often say that I kind of publicly grew up in front of the Indian startup ecosystem, at least in the Delhi Indian startup ecosystem. Right? So so when when when everything was happening and leveraging its initial left around that time was a very dirty looking orange app, which would help students meet mentors who are like them, and mentors are giving them career advice. Students would... It would be free for the students. Mentors will get karma points for helping all the students. And these karma points could be redeemed at outlets like Levi's, Apple, Starbucks, all of that. So think of it as Credit one point o in some sense. But because my name is not Konalks, and I don't look anything like him, and nobody paid any heed to this idea. And people would ask me random yet important questions like, where the hell is Sunda? How do you monetize this? And I would go back to them, and I was a kid of the late two thousand, early two thousand tens. I would tell them let me get to 5,000,000 installs. At that point of time, we had 8,000 installs in the app. And just before entering the program. And so... And and and and and you've seen this phase. Right? 2016 is when the rain came in India, and you could feel the tremors in summer two thousand fifteen in the valley as well when people started to ask these more hard questions. And that is when I had I had spoken to Kunal, and I had a standing job offer from Snapdeal as part of the entire thing. And the larger play at that point of time was Samsung So by the way, tell this story with a lot of pride that I came back to Oakland. I had my Sovereign moment India. Oakland, we have an ecommerce company. But the other opportunity that I left around that time was to assist Adam Draper, who was James' son, with the... This Boost. Vc, which is this Bitcoin accelerator that he was putting forward. Wow. Bitcoin Bitcoin, Bitcoin, the life would have been very, very different.
00:27:45 · Akshay Chaturvedi
So I used to narrate this story with a lot of pride until last year, and now that narrative has slightly changed. So anyway, I came back working with Snapdeal for about less than a year. Huge fan of the founders, huge fan of a lot of folks I've worked with. But still had this so called... Also, realized that e commerce is not all glam that it looks from outside. It's a of fairly it's a mix of marketing plus sort of ops, seller management, and then also logistics. I remember it's time. So that experience of kind of being in a... At an e commerce company during a Diwali is absolutely fantastic. I used to remember.. That's that's an absolute obvious thing. So literally and this was like, you hadn't thought about this when I was coming here from SF. So anyway, but I still had this so called Valley hangover of sorts that, no, I want to run my own thing, but I want to work in a smaller startup. I had grown on the story of, who was a fifth employee at WhatsApp, and who was also an ISB alum. So I started to talk to a lot of founders who were at that series, a series B, series C level. And luckily, I had access, which is when I met the founders of babajob. I had a senior of mine who introduced me to them, Rishi Dogra, who used to be the CMO there. And I loved the problem. I just fell in love with the blue and gray colored job marketplace. And at that time, for a while, we were the largest supplier of drivers for both Uber and Ola in both Delhi and Bangalore. We were one of the largest suppliers for delivery folks for eCart, Go Java, all of these logistics where we're gonna excuse to support the larger ecommerce companies. But unit economics was a slight struggle. We were trying to... I I believe we were trying to solve things through tech that we could have solved through ops. We saw Quess Corp kind of come in and build a very ops first business right in front of us and kind of take a company all the way to $4,000 IPO. Even if it was a 2x, 3x multiple, not a very fancy 30, 40x multiple like startups right now are getting. But big fan of the founders. They built a beautiful company, beautiful culture. My boss Veer, who is one of the co founders of babajob and Uniconnect, be a investor in my business. But when babajob was wrapping up and getting sold to quicker, which is when I realized that I need to give my passion project a shot.
00:30:11 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
And in 2017, hence, Leverage started as [00:30:13] S0: a How downloads that happened over the two years since you started and then since How many? 70 when you... How many downloads or, like, how much traction had you gained in those two years when you were obviously just working on that on the side?