The global cross-border payments market is on a remarkable growth trajectory, expected to hit $290 trillion by 2030. Amidst this booming landscape, discover how Srivatsan Sridhar successfully navigated the challenges and founded Skydo, a platform which addresses traditional pain points around high fees, delayed settlements, and compliance hurdles and makes international transactions hassle-free.

Akshay Datt, a serial entrepreneur who has run ventures in employability training and hiring, hosts the Founder Thesis podcast. He has interviewed 500+ founders to date.

Connect:

Srivatsan Sridhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/srivats80/

Akshay Datt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshay-datt/

Founder Thesis: www.founderthesis.com

In this episode, Divakar Vijayasarathy shares his inspiring entrepreneurial journey, from overcoming early struggles to building a global financial powerhouse. Tune in for invaluable lessons on scaling businesses, mastering tax dynamics, and creating lasting value in the professional services sector.

Divakar is the Founder of DVS Advisory Group, a tax advisory, business advisory and PE firm that has grown to an annual revenue of $300mn and has 18,000 clients across 40 countries. He is a published author of 17 books related to Tax.

Akshay Datt, a serial entrepreneur who has run ventures in employability training and hiring, hosts the Founder Thesis podcast. He has interviewed 500+ founders to date.

Connect:

Divakar Vijayasarathy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/divakar-dvs/

Akshay Datt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshay-datt/

Founder Thesis: www.founderthesis.com

In this episode, we delve into Rajul Garg's inspiring journey from his beginnings as a budding entrepreneur to a successful venture capitalist.

Rajul is the founder and managing partner of Leo Capital, a venture fund that invests in early-stage technology companies. A serial entrepreneur turned investor, Rajul co-founded GlobalLogic, a digital engineering services company that was acquired by a Japanese company for $10 billion. He also co-founded Pine Labs, a merchant commerce platform valued at $6 billion, which plans to launch an IPO soon. In addition, he ventured into the edtech space by co-founding Sunstone Eduversity.

Akshay Datt, a serial entrepreneur who has run ventures in employability training and hiring, hosts the Founder Thesis podcast. He has interviewed 500+ founders to date.

Anand Jain lost his father when he was just 12. This experience caused him to step into an entrepreneurial role very early in life and Anand has literally done it all - from selling detergent door-to-door, to repairing and assembling computers to writing software. Despite no academic track record to speak of, Anand ended up getting hired by a tech company in the Silicon Valley in peak dot com era.

And while he could have settled for the American dream and made big dollars, he decided to come back to India and chase impact instead.

In India, he set up the original restaurant discovery website before Zomato, and if things had worked out differently - that startup would be a peer of Zomato and Swiggy today.

But the best is yet to come and Anand is currently the co-founder and product head at Clever Tap - which is a 100-million-dollar Saas company with a strong focus on serving India. This puts CleverTap into a category of its own with hardly any peers.

This conversation is proof that adversity leads to the best kind of resilience and Anand’s humility and depth of insights will leave you hungry for more.

Stay tuned for this very special episode of the Founder Thesis podcast with your host Akshay Datt.

It’s no secret that the business model of the internet is basically advertising. Think about what you spend time doing online - there’s a high chance that 80% of the time you are viewing ads.

And you might think that the business of serving ads to consumers is done and dusted, but there are still opportunities for startups to win ad dollars away from the googles and the Metas of the world, and one such startup is Adonmo.

Adonmo started life as a company converting cabs into ad spaces by installing screens on them. And this was a smart move if you think about it - the offline advertising market is the last great untapped opportunity, and cabs are the perfect way to run hyperlocal ads that dynamically change based on location and time of day.

But life had different plans for this young startup, and they went through multiple near-death experiences before finally emerging as a dominant offline hyperlocal ads platform that has raised more than 40 million dollars from the likes of Zomato and others.

Listen to the rollercoaster story of Adonmo’s journey straight from its amazing founder Sandeep Bommireddi in this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast, with your host Akshay Datt.

I can bet that almost all of you who are listening to this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast would have interacted with Vehant’s products.

The next time you go into an airport or an office building, take a look at the brand name on the baggage scanner that they are using - there’s a very high chance that you will see Vehant’s logo on it.

But Vehant is so much more than a company that makes X Ray baggage scanners, and in this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast, your host Akshay Datt interviews Kapil Bardeja who founded the company pretty much straight out of college.

The humble startup that was born in the dorm rooms of IIT Delhi is today helping the government power futuristic smart city projects and bring India at par with the western world in terms of the security infrastructure.

Stay tuned for a deep dive into the business of security and safety and subscribe to the Founder Thesis podcast on Youtube or any audio streaming app.

Globally, the market research industry is at least worth a hundred billion dollars! We really are living in a world where everything is market researched.

The ads you watch on TV, the packing designs of products you use, even the movies you watch - they have all gone through a validation process using market research. The reason for this is simple really.

When a company intends to spend millions of dollars on a product, they want to reduce the risk of failure. In this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast, your host Akshay Datt speaks with Rajiv Lamba - the founder of the market research tech company - Neurosensum and Surveysensum.

In this freewheeling chat about entrepreneurship and market research, Rajiv shares valuable insights about the business of market research, building a business with profitability as the primary goal, and b2b sales.

Stay tuned for the conversation and subscribe to the Founder Thesis podcast on any Youtube, Spotify or any streaming app

If you want to understand the evolution of Entrepreneurship in India over the decades, then there is really no better story than this.

Srikumar Misra is the son of an entrepreneur who made the mistake of taking a bank loan backed by him home, and his untimely death ended up teaching the young Sri a valuable lesson about the risks of entrepreneurship.

And you might think that this experience would scar him for life, but it was actually the opposite - despite having a successful global career in the Tata Group, he decided to quit his well-paying job and come back to India to set up a consumer brand in the dairy industry in his home state of Odisha.

And after a 2-year struggle to raise funds to get his business off the ground - Sri finally succeeded in launching Milk Mantra which sells its products under the Milky Moo brand name and is one of the few profitable players in the premium dairy segment.

After scaling Milk Mantra, Sri was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug again and he is currently building Aarna Protocol - the first of its kind AI powered crypto investing platform.

This conversation is a gem in which Sri took us from the very offline and traditional world of selling dairy products to building a tokenized decentralised finance platform to invest in crypto currency.

Stay tuned and subscribe to the Founder Thesis podcast with Akshay Datt.