We tried to go from only India in 2011 to like 10 countries by 2013. Then we shut down all those offices in 2014 after blowing up $18m. I wish someone had sat me down hard in 2011 and told me to just forget everything else and go and sit in the US.… When we went back to the US in 2021, I reached out to my younger peers who had good business in the US by then, for advice.

The sign of a true community is when you don’t need an event for people to connect. And the first thing I noticed in this community is how intense things were even when we were not together at an event… The SaaSBOOMi community is so close; there’s fondness towards each other.

One founder told me, ‘Nobody gets fired for buying SAP, but if they buy our software and it doesn’t work, the CIO will be fired.’ So then the question for me was, how do we help the CIO community? Because otherwise nobody will use a software product made in India.

More and more founders are not making the mistakes we all used to make. There’s a wave of SaaS companies growing very fast from India in global markets, and a lot more talent is also entering SaaS in India, which is truly on its way to becoming the SaaS capital of the world. I've never seen such an ecosystem evolving so fast with a pay-it-forward attitude in so many founders.

(SaaSx 2015) was the first time we openly shared internal metrics and numbers… My thought process was that the world is so big and moving so fast. Salesforce etc. had tens of billions of dollars in revenues. And we were such young startups, trying to fight against global competitors. So why are we holding onto information as if it's some secret sauce?

One of those decisions we overthink is to get pricing right, from the beginning. The truth is nobody gets it right, and you don’t need to. It’s a two-way door. You can always test it and change the pricing. With that mindset, it becomes a much lighter decision… Most of our learning came from pricing, which was also unique for the ecosystem.

There's genuine help given to founders in a transparent, contextual, and storytelling fashion… where you feel the happiness and excitement of seeing a young founder learn to create an even bigger SaaS company than what has been created from India so far.

As a volunteer, you put yourself in customers’ shoes when you talk to other founders. I learn a lot when I engage so closely with them, and that learning is immense.

In one of the events, the real conversations started at 10 PM in one of the rooms about how one can build massive companies. By 2 AM, the group moved to another room, where another set of founders was discussing what makes a good M&A candidate. By the time I got to Manav, it was 5 AM. Then we created a deck on GTM and went straight to the event.

In the Valley, pay-it-forward mostly happened in an unstructured, peer-to-peer way, and it has taken 50 years for the Valley to get to where it is. We didn’t have 50 years; we needed to do this in 10 years. So we figured out how to scale this knowledge-sharing for founders by founders. Hence the roundtable format.

When you tell a founder something and they go out and execute what you just said 10x, you suddenly learn there’s a better way of doing it, right? You’ve become enriched. So, you can be the most selfish person in the world and yet find enrichment from paying it forward.