The Orbit Shift Podcast

We’ve had several venture capital investors on this podcast. But Loyal VC certainly stands out. The Toronto-based firm operates a global startup index fund with over 130 investments across more than 30 countries. It is designed to minimize systemic bias in the investment process, unlocking greater returns. Its diverse portfolio of founders, of whom currently over 30% are women CEOs and almost 30% are from emerging markets, includes 80% social impact entrepreneurs who leverage technology to...

Rajiv Srivatsa co-founded Urban Ladder, a top online furniture brand in 2012. With over 5000 designs across 35 categories such as living, dining, bedroom, study, and decor, Urban Ladder was established as an online-first brand. The company went on to become one of the most loved brands in India and was sold to Reliance in November 2020. Srivatsa now leads global venture capital firm Antler in India. The firm has plans to invest in over 150 early-stage startups over four years. In this...

Andrew Gazdecki’s entrepreneurial journey started right out of college when the serial bootstrapper founded Bizness Apps a low code DIY mobile app builder that enabled small businesses to create, edit and manage mobile apps online. Over eight years he led the startup from 0 to $10 million+ ARR right up to a successful acquisition. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Andrew talks to us about his latest venture MicroAcquire, a startup up acquisition marketplace. Andrew talks about how...

How do you scale your startup from three to thirty to three hundred people without losing sight of your company’s culture, values and mission? When do you bring in specialists, put in processes at your startup? In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast HR leader and CHRO of Freshworks Suman Gopalan talks about how a company can scale its people function, how to set up an HR function from scratch and scale it as your company scales, how to avoid conflicts between new recruits and the old...

Wen Johanna Flower joined Crowdstrike in late 2014, cybersecurity was a growing field with a large number of vendors supplying solutions to enterprises. Worldwide spending on information security was expected to grow 4.7% to $75 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. Dozens of companies with competing products were in the market. Through her six-year career at the company, Johanna successfully led Crowdstrike’s marketing organization to differentiate the product, launch outside the United...

Digital transformation is a much-abused word in corporate circles. When traditional companies try it, they cut costs, they start experimentation and they set up outposts in Silicon Valley. But none of these approaches works well, according to Sunil Gupta, the author of the book Driving Digital Strategy, and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. In this episode, Gupta unpacks the framework of digital transformation that he’s come up with after studying over 150...

As a founder, you might think that an investor has bought into your mission because they have ‘put their money where their mouth is’. However, Ritesh Banglani, Co-founder of Stellaris Ventures contends that this is not enough and that a startup can be destroyed if there isn’t a fit between the founder and the venture capitalist. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Ritesh breaks down how to choose the right VC for your startup, what red flags you need to look out for when you are in...

Paul Yacoubian is easily one of the most interesting entrepreneurs to watch out for. In the last four months, his startup, copy.ai has gone from $0 to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Much of the company's early success comes from its ‘Build in public.’ In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we bring you a conversation with Paul on how to build in public. Paul shared some of the tactics that have worked for him. But more importantly, this episode is for you to get a sense of what...

Serial entrepreneur and Product School CEO, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia reckons that a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be as small as creating a store on Amazon or even as minimum as a tweet. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast the product leader deep dives into how you can test your idea in the market without a product, the different approaches you can take to develop an MVP, how to identify product-market-fit, responsibilities of a product manager, hiring a product manager and...

In the last 10 years or so, Freshworks has scaled from zero to hundreds of millions in recurring revenue and among the few product companies from India that have managed to do that. At Freshworks, we aim to give back as much as we can. Because we've had plenty of help getting here. To that end, we said a few months ago, that we'll start talking about how we built Freshworks and open up our playbook to other startups. This episode with Arun Pattabhiraman, the Chief Growth Officer at...

A few years ago, the Plantix app would have been the stuff of science fiction. All you have to do is take an image of a plant that’s sick and the app identifies the disease and recommends the treatment to cure the plant. But now it's a reality. The app has helped more than one million small scale farmers improve productivity. On the latest episode of the podcast, we sit down with Simone Strey the Founder and CEO of Plantix and talk about her journey from a researcher to an entrepreneur; how...

It's not very often that you have a venture investor at the peak of his career in Silicon Valley coming back to India. But Hemant Mohapatra did. In India, he's an investor at top venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. He's already backed several entrepreneurs and built a reputation for himself as a thoughtful investor. In this episode of the podcast, Mohapatra tells us why he is bullish about the Indian startup ecosystem, the metrics he looks at when evaluating a startup, what...

Anthony Rose is a serial disrupter. He first disrupted file sharing with his application Kazaa. He then disrupted streaming with the launch of the BBC iPlayer. And he is now looking to disrupt the legal industry with his legal tech platform SeedLegals. We spoke to the entrepreneur about the road he took to achieve product-market fit, how cash strapped early-stage entrepreneurs can persuade talent to join them, the biggest learnings of his career, how founders can integrate customer feedback...

In a world flooded with content, how do you stand out as a digital media company? How do you then build this community up to 90 million readers? How do you grow profitably? The answer has a lot to do with community. And of course, content and commerce. In the first episode of our second season Dhimant Parekh, Founder of the Indian digital-media platform ‘The Better India’ talks to us about how he married content, commerce, and community to build his company. He talks about ⚡️ His early...

This week we bring you a special episode that's all about hiring for startups. It's the last episode of this year and we've been busy lining up guests for the next season. In the last four months, we've had 16 guests on the show and we asked many of them about how they look at hiring. This episode features Cal Henderson, the co-founder of Slack, investor and advisor Elad Gil, Rahul Chari, the co-founder of India's largest payments company, Tyler Sloat, the Chief Financial Officer of...

A few weeks ago when we recorded this podcast, Aditya Kothari's startup was at 25 million users. Now it's at 42 million. That's the speed at which Chingari, the short video app is growing. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, Aditya talks to us about the startups that didn't grow and failed, raising funds, and how they're scaling Chingari. Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email,...

When Yamini Bhat was a consultant at McKinsey & Company she helped companies transform their sales process. It was here that she saw salespeople were using CRMs merely as a customer database and not making the most use of them. This led to a gap in companies knowing what led to results and what didn’t. This is where her idea of starting Vymo a personal sales assistant that sits on top of the CRM came from. Vymo now helps 60+ enterprise customers and 125,000 sales reps crush their...

Our latest episode is a fireside chat between Armando Mann, Chief Business Officer at Hopin and Elad Gil, entrepreneur, investor and author. Elad walks us through how he sees companies coming out of the pandemic, the offensive and defensive moves a startup can take to protect themselves from uncertainties that arise during a pandemic, how companies can leverage the pandemic to recruit the best talent, explore new opportunities in mergers and acquisitions and go after enterprise clients. The...

Intuition, analytics, and research are the three pillars that you should rely on when you make a product decision according to product leader Ravi Mehta. We had a chance to sit down and go in-depth with Ravi Mehta, former chief product officer at Tinder, and several other top tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft. In this conversation, we talk about his journey as a product manager, his learnings from his days at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and later Tinder. We also took on questions...

As a startup founder, you must have gone through your fair share of sales playbooks, all claiming that they contain the ‘secret sauce’ to generate more leads and close more deals. This episode with sales leader Jose Morales is not that. In this episode, we explore the nuances of building a modern sales team — when to build one, how to build one, and how to set it up for success. “Your customer looks at your sales rep as a trusted advisor. Someone that really understands their needs,” says...