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Chakradhar Gade had the résumé everyone's supposed to want: engineering, CFA, a hedge fund, and felt like he'd lost himself inside it. So he walked away to sell milk.
This is the story of how a finance guy who once mapped "the IRR of a cow" learned that the spreadsheet was a lie, lost all his money proving it, and rebuilt Country Delight from first principles, one customer relationship at a time.
Avnish Bajaj and Chakradhar get into the questions most founders sit with alone:1. What do you do when a successful career leaves you with "a huge loss of identity"?
2. Should you bootstrap and survive, or raise aggressively and run?
3. How long does it really take to learn a business you've never been in?
4. How do you tell real customer love apart from people just being nice to you?
5. When the model that "looked very beautiful in Excel" collapses, what replaces it?A conversation about chasing meaning over status, why bootstrapping bought six years of depth, and why, in Chakri's words, "there's no downside" to starting.
Chapters
0:00 Welcome & introducing Chakradhar Gade
1:35 Growing up in Guntur, Infosys & chasing meaning
4:43 From MBA to Wall Street — why he chose finance
7:33 The decision to quit New York and become a doodhwala
12:05 The IRR of a cow (and why Excel lied)
14:51 Bootstrap or raise? The real answer
17:00 Raising from friends & family without ruining relationships
21:02 From ₹80 lakhs to ₹200 crores a month
23:01 The milkman model & month 60 retention
32:34 Final advice: take more risks, there is no downside -
Are entrepreneurs born or made? Asish Mohapatra is certain it's the second and he'll tell you plainly he's good at maybe 3 of the 10 things a founder needs.
Asish is the co-founder of OfBusiness and Oxyzo, which he built into one of India's largest B2B commerce and lending businesses. But this conversation with Avnish isn't about the scale, it's about the intellectual honesty underneath it.
In this episode, they get into:
1. How did you get comfortable in your own skin? Was there a trigger?
2. Are entrepreneurs born or made, and how do you decide which skills to build vs. buy?
3. How do you pick a co-founder (and run a company with your spouse)?
4. Why would you never hire someone at their last salary?
5. Do you have to go public and when?
6. A conversation about failing early, being honest about it, and finding the
🎧 New episodes of Unstarted every Thursday. For founders. By founders.
Chapters
00:00 Cold open
01:30 The boss he fired, the mentor he kept
03:30 The 10% you keep for life
07:30 Are founders born or made?
08:30 Why I got comfortable failing
08:45 Build it or buy it?
15:30 Picking a co-founder (and a wife)
19:00 Why I work 20-hour days
19:35 Baby is six days older than the company
22:45 The vulnerabilities he leads with
28:00 Never hire at their last salary
30:30 Always the next IPO?
35:00 Be yourself. Keep building your superpower. -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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Can you be a founder without ever founding anything?
Amarjeet Batra has spent 25 years building other people's companies, first Baazee, eBay, OLX, and now Spotify India, and never once thought of himself as an employee. He's what Avnish calls "professionally unstarted": a founder from within.
Avnish and Amarjeet get into the questions most operators never say out loud:
1. If you have the skills, the confidence, and the network, but not the one big idea, what do you actually do with that?
2. Is raising a fund a solution, or a responsibility you take on before you've found the problem?
3. Why would you choose 1% of a billion-dollar company over 100% of a ten-million-dollar one?
4. How do you build a category when ten players already exist and you've arrived last?
5. When is a difficult problem worth solving, and when does the market simply not care enough to pay?
6. This is a conversation about range over specialisation, ownership without a cap table, and why some of the most entrepreneurial people you'll meet never start a company of their own.
Chapters
00:00 Cold open
01:30 The professionally unstarted founder
02:55 Baazi, the born-again moment
05:10 Why I broke every rule of specialization
08:30 The eBay epiphany: time to do something bigger
09:43 China, and the scale that humbled me
18:26 The power of moving last
20:05 Building the category nobody built
21:15 Is there still a marketplace to win?
22:56 Disruption, distribution, and the AI shift
23:58 Q: How do you actually scale an events business?
26:15 Q: (cont.) Why your event might be the wrong product
28:14 Q: Should we build a place to apprentice under founders?
31:32 How to actually reach a busy operator
34:20 Q: Difficult problem, or one nobody will pay for?
35:09 Problem-first, and the willingness-to-pay test
36:37 Vitamin or painkiller
39:01 Play-front music: a business model flips
41:09 Why success looks overnight -
What does it actually take to build AI for 70 crore users?
Vikram sits down with Rahul Chowdhury - co-founder and CTO of PhonePeto talk about how India's most scaled fintech is approaching AI. Not with hype or a top-down mandate, but with a quiet, deliberate, engineering-first philosophy that started four years ago with a small team focused on making developers happier.
Rahul shares the inside story of PhonePe's AI journey from building their own LLM gateway and Agent Hub, to launching AI search with Microsoft, to betting on on-device models for privacy and cost. And it ends with the biggest idea of all: India's DPI stack has spent a decade making data AI-ready.
The opportunity now is to use it to build the bank branch of one — truly personalized financial products for every Indian.
If you're a founder, engineer, or product leader trying to understand where India's AI story is really headed, don't miss this.
What you'll learn
🔹 Why PhonePe avoided output metrics in year one of AI and why it worked
🔹 How to build an AI culture without a top-down mandate
🔹 What an LLM gateway is and why every scaled company needs one
🔹 Why on-device models are the right bet for consumer AI in India
🔹 How DPDP will reshape how companies think about AI and data
🔹 Why India's role in global AI is in applied AI — not foundational models
🔹 How DPI × AI creates the opportunity for hyper-personalized financial products
Chapters
0:00 Intro & who is Rahul Chowdhury
02:30 PhonePe's AI journey: tinkerers to transformers
06:00 The DevX team: why developer happiness came first
10:00 Don't rush into AI — the engineering first mindset
14:30 Building the LLM gateway & data stack
18:00 Agent Hub: PhonePe's internal marketplace of agents
22:00 AI Search with Microsoft & on-device models
26:00 Why India needs edge models, not foundational ones
30:00 DPI × AI: the bank branch of one
34:00 Conclusion -
Harshil Mathur started Razorpay after quitting the highest-paying job on his campus, a role his whole family had just celebrated, because he walked in on day one and realised he was a guy who wanted to sit and code, not step onto an oil field.
Then he spent a decade away from that: walking into bank after bank getting laughed out of the room, surviving the grind no funding can fast-track, and the night Yes Bank froze with customer money stuck inside it. This is the founder story, lived experience as an edge, why the rejections compounded in his favour, why the grind always comes, and the values that made the hard calls simple.
And then the thing that pulled him back: agentic AI. "It went from being an assistant to an execution engine." Six years after he last wrote real code, Harshil locked himself in a room, asked "if I were to start Razorpay today, how would I build it?" — and rebuilt everything.
The second half is an operator's view of what that shift actually changes:
1. Why AI magnifies an org's weaknesses instead of fixing them
2. Why an agent with no plan drifts exactly like a company with no plan
3. How Razorpay flipped its leadership hackathon and the bet behind Agent Studio
4. Hosted by Avnish Bajaj with Vikram Vaidyanathan this is a conversation about building, walking away from it, and being pulled back, and what that says about where AI is headed.Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:15 Growing up in Jaipur & coding since 6th grade
05:30 IIT Roorkee, SDS Labs & building without permission
10:45 Quitting a $100,000 Schlumberger job in 6 months
14:20 The Facebook comment that sparked Razorpay
18:00 100 banker rejections & how rejections compound
24:10 Getting into YC with zero expectations
35:30 Yes Bank freezes — one decision defines the culture
40:00 Going back to coding after 6 years — AI changes everything
52:00 Rebuilding Razorpay from scratch with AI agentsFollow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
Anjali Sardana grew up in northern Virginia, studied biology at Georgetown, worked at Bain Capital — and then, without telling her parents, flew to India and founded Pronto: a platform building the world's largest labor organization network, starting with home services.
In this episode of Unstarted, Anjali breaks down how she picked an operations business over a product business (and why), why she sees India's informal labor market as a trillion-dollar opportunity, and the founder mindset that got her through the messy, chaotic, sleep-deprived early days.
She also gets brutally honest about faking confidence, hiring missionaries not mercenaries, and why she thinks most human limitations are completely made up.
Chapters
0:00 Intro — Meet Anjali Sardana
1:20 Growing up in Virginia, studying biology at Georgetown
3:10 The evolution framework that shaped her business thinking
5:00 Product vs. operations vs. distribution — how she chose
8:30 Why India? The labor-market thesis
12:00 Moving to India with zero experience — and hiding it from her parents
15:40 Fake it till you make it: raising a seed round at Bain Capital
19:15 Running pilots, vibe-coding the app, and getting the first bookings
24:00 The Kapil story — recruiting 30 workers in one afternoon
28:00 Operating 24/7 with 5 people, sleeping in shifts
31:30 Building culture: missionaries vs. mercenaries
36:00 Urgency as a core value — actions beget information
39:30 Conviction vs. market signals — how to balance both -
India's GPU footprint is on track to grow 40x by 2030, from ~50,000 today to a couple of million.
That number is bigger than any public forecast. Sharad Sanghi has the unusual standing to make it: he built Netmagic into India's most significant datacenter business, and he's now running Neysa, the only neo cloud in India that Semi Analysis has rated, backed by Blackstone.
In this episode of Intelligent Indians, Rajinder Balaraman and Sharad cover:1. Why neo clouds exist as a category, and what hyperscalers structurally can't do for one market
2. The ITQ case study: how to define ROI before infrastructure
3. The three infra mistakes that quietly cost AI teams 10x their compute spend
4. Why power, not GPUs, is the real bottleneck, and why 50% of India's data centre capacity sits in one city
5. What India's AI Mission could actually unlock in the next phase
If you're building AI infrastructure in India, tracking the space as an investor, or working on policy in the area, this is the operator view.
From someone whose entire balance sheet depends on getting the call right.
Chapters
00:00 India's AI Moment The Big Picture
02:00 Welcome Introducing Sharath of Neysa
03:30 How He Built India's First Data Centre with NetMagic
06:00 How ChatGPT Sparked the Idea for Neysa
18:00 India is 2nd Largest AI Consumer
21:00 50,000 GPUs Today. 2 Million by 2028
24:30 Neysa vs AWS, GCP, Azure
28:00 Why Indian Banks Are Early AI Adopters
31:30 Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing
35:00 PhonePe, Perfios, Hungama - Real AI Use Cases in India
38:30 Why Most AI Projects Stay in Pilot and Never Reach Production
52:30 GPU Obsolescence Risk — How Neysa Manages It
55:00 Healthcare, Education, Agriculture — Where Founders Should Build
58:30 IIT Bombay and the Bharat Gyan Project
1:01:00 Why India Needs to Keep Its AI Talent at Home
1:04:00 Why He Refused to Flip the Company Outside India
1:06:30 What It Takes to Make India the AI Research Capital of the World -
Chirag Taneja built GoKwik into 1 in 5 D2C checkouts in India. But the path there was a series of bets that didn't work, jobs that didn't last, and one moment in 2020 where the suitcases for Canada were packed and waiting in his living room.
In Episode 12 of Unstarted, Chirag sits down with Avnish Bajaj to talk about what it actually means to keep tinkering, and when tinkering becomes the thing that holds you back.
They get into:1. What's really important to start a business: idea, capital, or knowledge?
2. Why choosing the right problem matters more than solving any problem
3. The Canada PR that almost happened (and the suitcases that are still in his house)
4. Probabilistic thinking, and why "generate choices" beats "make decisions"
5. Should you have a co-founder you don't already know?
6. How he thinks about ESOPs, the size of the pieUnstarted is a Z47 series. For founders, by founders. New episode every Thursday.
Chapters
00:18 From the shop floor to a 1-in-5 D2C company
01:35 A banker father, a single parent, and "play with intent"
03:15 Why he chose Delhi College over IIT Delhi Civil
05:30 The first Asian team to build a Formula race car
06:25 The Maruti bet that landed him on the shop floor
07:10 Q: Idea, capital, or knowledge — what matters most?
08:50 How Bombay Shaving Company became the foundation of GoKwik
09:35 The right problem matters more than the right solution
10:55 Payments were broken in 2005. They were still broken in 2017.
11:50 Pick your game: badminton or golf?
13:20 The Canada PR, the suitcases, and the trip that never happened
15:25 Generate choices before you make decisions
17:50 When the tinkerer turns on himself
19:15 Why "what worked then" stops working at 1-to-10
22:45 Q: When should you have a co-founder?
24:45 Why arranged co-founders are too risky
28:30 Closing -
Most founders can't tell you the moment they decided to build. Vedang Patel can. He was 23, a finance analyst with IIM seats in hand, and he looked at the MBA-holder sitting next to him in office and asked himself one question: "Is that what I want to do?"
The resounding no from every section of his brain, and the ₹5.25 lakh he and his co-founders had between them is what became The Souled Store. ₹1000 crore in revenue,
₹150–200 crore in profit, an NSE bell on the way.
In this episode, Avnish and Vedang sit with three questions sent in by aspiring founders:
1. How do you actually validate an idea?
2. How do you separate polite encouragement from real market demand?
Brand or revenue first?
3. They also talk about the part most founders won't: the $10 million Vedang got "lost in frameworks" with, the 15-20 CR in personal-guarantee debt, and how exponential's cheque pulled him back.Chapters
00:00 Cold open
01:30 From a cupboard of t-shirts to ₹1000 crore
03:30 The Sunday-Monday test
06:30 "She cried for days"
08:30 Risk vs Recklessness
11:00 Q: How do I validate my idea?
13:30 ₹5.25 lakh, no money for movies
15:30 Discounted PMF is false PMF
17:00 Q: Polite encouragement or real demand?
20:30 The empty chair of the customer
24:30 When the $10 million came in
27:30 "Maybe I should be inspired by Neera Modi"
30:30 Q: Brand or revenue first?
32:00 A brand is what the customer expects
35:30 Why he never left Bombay
38:30 The ESOP wall and the 5-10-85 rule
41:30 "Don't overthink. Start."Follow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - / z47.vc
LinkedIn - / z47-vc -
India's AI moment is louder than its rank. 100M+ ChatGPT users. #2 globally in usage. Still 76th in the world on per capita penetration. So what's actually happening on the ground?In this episode of Z47 Moments, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Ashwin Raguraman (Head of AI, walk through The India AI Edge: a three-month primary research effort by Z47, OpenAI, and Zinnov. The report draws on first-party ChatGPT data from OpenAI and interviews with 100+ CXOs across India's largest enterprises, traditional businesses, and emerging companies.
They unpack:
Why India's AI map looks nothing like its tech map: Delhi #1 in GDP penetration, Ahmedabad in the top 5 for coding, Assam 3x the national average on education usageThe flip nobody saw coming: in mid-2024, Gen Z (18–24) overtook 25–34 as India's dominant AI cohort, and now drives nearly half of all ChatGPT messagesWork-to-non-work: how India went from 60% work usage to 65% non-work usage in a year, and what that says about penetration The four enterprise adoption archetypes: Tinkerer, Democratizer, Transformer, Enforcer, and why ~1 in 4 Indian enterprises is stuck in the wrong one The trillion-dollar gap to Viksit Bharat, and the specific role AI would have to play to close it The four pillars India needs to scale: compute (200–250 MW today → 7 GW needed by 2030), talent, data (and the "data colony" question), and the companies actually being built
To read the full report, go to:The India AI Edge Website: https://z47.com/how-india-uses-ai
Link to report: https://www.ai-edge.z47.com/The-India-AI-Report.pdf
Chapters
00:00 — Cold Open: The Stats That Set the Frame
00:49 — Inside the Report: 100M Users, 100+ CXOs, OpenAI Data
02:14 — How AI Is Redrawing India's Map
04:59 — The Gen Z Takeover
11:24 — Work to Non-Work: India's Usage Flip
15:01 — Enterprise AI: The Four Archetypes
25:27 — The Enforcer Trap (And How to Escape It)
33:21 — Can AI Close India's Trillion-Dollar Gap?
37:22 — Compute, Talent, Data, Companies: The Four Pillars
47:15 — India's AI Ecosystem & Closing -
What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet?
Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it.By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace.
In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud:
Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating?
1. How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you?
2. How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs?
3. When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years?
A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family
1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940
2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing
4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11
6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale
11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet
13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck
14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant
23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet
27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra
28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway
31:40 3 metrics every founder should track
41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months)
43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea
46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence
49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May) -
Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders?
Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder, and no personal stake in the category. He still built Purplle into one of India's largest beauty platforms.
In this episode of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj and Manish sit down to work through the questions that every founder without a clear edge asks themselves:1. Do you need an original idea, or is it okay to be a "copycat entrepreneur"? When VCs tell you your team is missing something
2. Do you fix the weakness or back your strength? – How do you find a wedge in a category where everyone else has more money, more experience, and more insider knowledge?
3. What do you do when your ego won't let you leave — and is that the thing keeping you in the game?
4. How do you build responsibly without losing your edge?
Manish's answer to all of it, in the end, comes down to two lines: back your strengths, and build responsibly. This conversation is about how he got there.
Chapters
00:00 The $100 million mistake
01:55 Faridabad, the frog in the well
03:03 Feeling small at IIT, and the speech that changed everything
05:31 Lehman, Avendus, and the long apprenticeship
08:52 "I was the original copycat entrepreneur"
12:58 The feedback from Matrix: no woman co-founder
14:54 Why beauty, and why now
17:52 Dabau early: the rosemary water playbook
22:00 How Purplle won Kerala (and met the priests)
26:02 The internal compass, and saying no to Thrasios
28:53 Why your ego won't let you leave
30:36 Why he built in Bombay
33:17 The IPO question
35:49 Build responsibly -
What do you do with the regret of being right too early?
Aakrit Vaish started Haptik in 2013: an AI chatbot company nine years before ChatGPT. By 2016 he knew the market wasn't ready. He kept going anyway. In 2019 he sold to Reliance Jio. In November 2022, he watched the world finally catch up to the thesis he'd carried for a decade and for a few weeks, sat with the sentence: "This should have been me."
Today he's co-founder of Activate, an AI-native VC firm running with two partners, one employee and seven agents, and an advisor on the India AI Mission. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj sits down with a founder who has rejected him more than once, and asks the questions most founders quietly carry:
1. How do you know whether you're early, late, or correctly timed?
2. Why do you keep going when the rational move is to stop?
3. When the world eventually proves you right, what do you do with the grief?
4. In AI today, what does it actually mean to be in the 99th percentile — globally, not locally?
5. How does a high-agency founder stay ahead when the tools keep rewriting the job?
6. What Aakrit lands on: market timing matters, but identity matters more.
7. Mission over everything else. And the only advice he gives, seven times a day, to anyone who'll listen: have agency. Build. Don't wait.Chapters
00:00 Why Did You Let ChatGPT Happen?
02:30 Welcome to Unstarted — Introducing Aakrit Vaish
04:00 Growing Up in Juhu — Normal Mumbai Business Family
06:30 UIUC, PayPal Mafia & Moving to Silicon Valley
09:00 Why He Came Back to India at 27
11:00 What Was Haptic? India's First AI Chatbot Company
14:00 The Alexa Moment That Started It All (London 2012)
18:00 How Founders Can Know If They Are Too Early or Too Late
23:00 2016 — He Knew It Was Too Early. He Kept Going Anyway
27:30 Fear of Failure vs Fear of Not Trying Hard Enough
31:00 The Pull vs Push Test — The Clearest PMF Signal
35:00 Why He Sold Haptic to Reliance
38:30 ChatGPT Launched. His First Reaction Was Personal
43:00 "Should That Have Been Me?" — The Honest Answer
47:00 From Reliance to India AI Mission to Activate VC
51:00 How to Know Which Problem Is Worth Solving With AI
55:30 99th Percentile or Nothing — The New Bar for AI Founders
59:00 Why AI in India Is the Most Ignored Opportunity
1:03:00 Anthropic vs OpenAI — Two Different Strategies Explained
1:07:00 Voice AI, FinTech & How GDP Will Actually Grow
1:11:00 The K-Shift — GDP Growth at the Cost of InequalityFollow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
What happens when you spend 13 years building something, and for most of those years, the people around you think it's not going to work out?
Jaydeep Barman left a gilded career at McKinsey's London office to bet on a single roll shop in Pune. What followed was a decade-plus journey through India's costliest real estate market, the invention of an entirely new category (cloud kitchens — before anyone called it that), and the slow, painful work of staying in the game while companies that started years after him became unicorns overnight.In this conversation, Avnish and Jaydeep wrestle with:
1. How do you find the one insight nobody else has, and trust it when the world disagrees?
2. What do you do when your investors mentally write you off?
3. Why does every real innovation at Rebel come from the moments they were closest to shutting down?
4. How do you build a team that stays for 13 years, through the pain, the doubt, and the long wait?
5. This is a conversation about what it actually costs to stay in the arena longer than everyone expects you to, and what that buys you that nothing else can.
Chapters:
00:00 The reality of startup comparison & investor pressure
01:30 Why we didn’t pivot to food delivery (despite the hype)
02:30 From McKinsey to starting a food business
04:10 The first roll shop: how Fasos began
09:00 Learning the business & why curiosity matters most
11:20 Insight v/s timing: finding your “right to win”
13:40 Building a cloud kitchen breakthrough
17:30 Founder mentality vs CV mentality
20:00 Hiring, ownership & building real culture
24:50 Performance vs culture: who stays, who leaves
27:20 Rock bottom moments: running out of money & pushing throughFollow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
What does it take to fix the most broken system in America — from the outside?
Ajay and Aniket, co-founders of Coral AI, had zero healthcare experience when they started. What they had was a burning problem, a one-way plane ticket to the US, and a relentless drive to understand healthcare from the ground up — visiting 17 cities in 30 days, becoming interns, and reading thousands of faxes doctors still send in 2026.
In this episode of Zee47 Moments, Ashwin and Vikram sit down with the founders to unpack how Coral is using AI to eliminate the administrative chaos of patient referrals — cutting weeks of back-and-forth down to minutes — and how they're building one of the most AI-native companies in healthcare.
🔍 What we cover:
• Why 40% of primary care visits result in a referral — and how that process is broken
• How fax machines still run US healthcare in 2026
• The technology behind going from 80% to 99.1% accuracy on medical documents
• Why Epic and OpenAI can't solve this problem — but Coral can
• Winning head-to-head against a competitor that raised $100M+
• The "forward deployed engineer" model and why it's not services
• Building a lean, 10x team of future foundersCoral just raised $12.5M led by Zee47. This is their story.
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CHAPTERS0:00 17 days to get a scan
2:22 Picking healthcare with zero healthcare background
4:48 17 cities in 30 days and the Mamba mentality
8:26 Inside the fax machine: how a US referral actually works
14:16 Getting to 99% accuracy (and why 95% isn't enough)
20:48 Beating a competitor with 10x the money
24:56 $100K to $500K without a sales team
28:07 The 10X-only team and the FTE model done right
33:40 Failure, rapid fire, and what's nextFollow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
Sanket Shah started thinking about business at 17. His first idea was putting ads on Mumbai's auto-rickshaws. The government said no. He went to Mantralaya three times, met the Chief Minister, got sent to the transport commissioner, and received government letters at home for four years.
He got 4 rickshaws approved.Twenty-something years later, he's the founder of Invideo — a video creation platform operating at serious scale, with under 100 people.
And right now, he's stopped looking at his revenue numbers entirely. He has two people running the existing business. He is fully allocated to what comes next.In this conversation with Avnish Bajaj, Sanket talks about why you can't optimise your way through a ceiling — and what it actually costs to do something drastic. He talks about the one conversation he had in San Francisco where he and his co-founder both knew they had to change course, chose not to, and paid for it all year.
Founder questions tackled in this episode:
1. What's the difference between an L1 insight and the insight that actually can't be copied?
2. When does persistence become stubbornness? How do you know which side you're on?
3. How do you talk to customers without asking leading questions — and what do you do with what you hear?
4. When everyone's going agentic, how do you actually stand out?Recorded in association with Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM), ahead of Mumbai Tech Week 2026 May 29–30 at Jio World Convention Centre. Register at mumbaitechweek.com.
Follow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
Harsh Jain built Dream11 from a family business detour and a love of fantasy football into a company that sponsored every IPL team, sent athletes to the Olympics, and had 300 million users.
Then the government effectively ended the business he'd spent 15 years building.This conversation isn't about the rise. It's about what happens after the nuclear bomb falls — how you grieve something you loved, how you decide whether to fight or pivot, and how you keep 1,000 people from walking out the door.
The questions Avnish and Harsh wrestle with:
1. Do you really need an original idea, or do you need to be obsessed with a problem?
2. What's the difference between being in love with your company and just being attracted to the outcome?
3. How do you keep going after 150 investor rejections — and is "keep going" always the right answer?
4. What do you do when the nuclear bomb falls on everything you built?
5. Can culture actually survive catastrophe, or does it only exist in the good times?
In the end culture is the only thing that scales. Not the product or funding. The team and whether you built something worth staying for.
YouTube Chapters
00:00 The neighbour who built Dream11
05:09 Love vs. lust: the only thing that keeps you going
06:39 Q1: Do you really need an original idea?
10:27 150 rejections: the napkin, the car ride
18:37 Q2:How to know if you actually have product-market fit
22:03 Culture is the founder's DNA
27:43 The nuclear bomb falls
32:54 What happens after you grieve together
39:45 Why Harsh never left Mumbai
41:21 — What Mumbai Tech Week is actually for
44:10 — B talent. A culture. One big problem.Follow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
OpenClaw went from zero to more GitHub stars than React, a library that took a decade to build that following, in 60 days. One graph, vertical, like nothing the developer community had ever seen.
When Z47’s founder, Avnish Bajaj saw that graph, something shifted.
Six months earlier, the at Z47 had sat down to look at the velocity of AI deal-making, the valuations, the volume of capital flooding in, and called it a bubble.The consensus was clear: enterprise adoption would lag, the economics wouldn't close, and the correction would come.Then that graph happened. Then agentic AI happened. Then self-healing code happened. And the thing everyone assumed would lag — enterprise adoption — is now about to explode.
Avnish sits down with Rajinder on Intelligent Indians to work through what changed, what it means, and what every founder and operator needs to do right now before the window closes.
The conversation covers:
1. Why the bubble call was wrong, and the specific moment that broke the consensus thesis
2. The AI Agency vs. Mastery K-curve an what it means for your trajectory
Answering the question “Will AI take my job?”3. How India is positioned to build AI services
4. What AI-native actually means (And no, it is not using ChatGPT)
5. A live demo of Avnish's WhatsApp-based agent Zen
Chapters
00:00 "I Called a Bubble. I Was Wrong
06:15 The Moment That Changed Everything: OpenClaw and the Enterprise Unlock
08:16 The K-Curve: Why AI Won't Take Your Job — But Someone Else Will
14:29 India's Real Opportunity (It's Not What You Think)
22:16 What Founders Should Actually Do Right Now
27:48 Live Demo: Avi's AI Agent "Zen"
33:24 I've Been Waiting 35 Years. It's Finally HereFollow Z47
Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ -
Most people know what they want. The problem is they keep waiting for certainty that never comes.
Oolka founder, Utkrishta Kumar built India's first just-in-time fulfilment network at 27, helped scale Meesho through one of India's biggest social commerce pivots and then left before the IPO. Not because he had to, but because the regret of not starting felt heavier than the risk of failing.
In this episode, Avnish and Utkrishta work through the questions early founders actually get stuck on:
1. How do I know I'm ready to start up?
2. How do you find PMF and is tracking PMF enough?
3. How do I build an AI product that ChatGPT can't just replace tomorrow?
4. If I've already made money, why does failure still terrify me?
5. The conversation lands somewhere honest: you won't see the whole road. 6. You just need to be okay with the fogA new episode of Unstarted - every Thursday
00:00 Leaving before the IPO
00:56 Introduction: the one question every aspiring founder is asking
01:55 Growing up risk-averse
04:54 Q1: How do you know if starting up is the right move?
07:12 How to build a founder's operating system without an MBA
11:43 Q2: How do I know if I've reached PMF?
13:47 What Oolka does — and why every credit problem is individual
16:51 Why he left Meesho before the IPO — and the fear money doesn't fix 19:58 Q3: How do you build with AI without being replaced tomorrow?
26:49 Final advice: more than 70% never fire the bullet -
What does it actually take to go from employee to founder — after 8 years inside one of India's greatest startups?
In Episode 5 of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj sits down with Anil Goteti, CEO of Scapia, to talk about the real founder journey — not the highlight reel. From leaving McKinsey after just one year, to carrying a US loan back to India, to building and shutting down his first startup before finding PMF with Scapia.
This episode covers:- Why entrepreneurs are made, not born
- The Monday Morning Test — knowing when to quit
- What 8 years at Flipkart actually teaches you
- Why competition never killed a company — customers did
- How to know when your product is (and isn't) working
- The failure before Scapia and what it taught himIn the end, the destination was always clear and the route was never going to be linear. Finally, the Monday morning test doesn't lie.
Unstarted is a podcast by Z47 - by founders, for founders. Whether you've started or you're yet unstarted.
YT Chapters
0:00 - Introduction & What is Unstarted
1:45 - Meet Anil Goteti — IIT, McKinsey, Flipkart & Scapia
4:00 - Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?
7:30 - The Kid Who Wanted a Product in Every Indian's Hand
11:00 - IIT Electrical vs Computer Science — The First Detour
14:00 - Leaving McKinsey After 1 Year: "I Want to Be the King"
18:30 - Joining Flipkart - Taking One Notch of Risk
22:00 - 8 Years at Flipkart: The Best Projects & Lessons
31:00 - The Monday Morning Test
35:30 - Who Inspires Anil Goteti?
39:00 - How Do You Know When Your Product Is Working?
45:00 - Competition Never Killed Anyone - Customers Did
49:00 - The Failed Startup Before Scapia
54:00 - What's Next: Building Scapia - Visa fler
