When retail tech startup Mason started out in 2020, several companies were already helping brands build online stores, seeing the success of Shopify as a D2C (direct-to-consumer) alternative to marketplaces. This brought a tsunami of brands online. So the problem Mason wanted to solve was to help brands stand out and grow faster on their […]

In the first part of this Founder’s Playbook, we looked at some of the hard choices Zenoti made to win in the US market and eventually become a category leader in enterprise SaaS for the wellness industry. One of the hardest calls was to keep its sales and product people focused on a specific vertical, […]

Zenoti, a SaaS unicorn in the beauty and wellness space, was called ManageMySpa eight years ago. Why manage only spas? Why not salons, fitness centers, et al? The choice of name was deliberate. Founder and CEO Sudheer Koneru wanted employees to be narrow-focused at the outset, instead of chasing every opportunity in the industry.  Then, […]

Over the past few years, the world is going through an interesting time. Business models have been challenged, the way we think about growth is changing and that means the way we build our companies has to evolve as well. Recently, we’ve seen a few interesting community-led companies bloom. Hubspot, Figma, and Duolingo are three […]

Guest Background Nivedha Sridhar is a Director of Marketing at Facilio, which builds property operations software for large enterprises. They manage 60M sqft across 500 buildings and are headquartered in New York with offices in Dubai, Chennai, UK, Italy, and Australia. Previously Nivedha was a product marketer at Zoho. Evolution of Facilio org chart Facilio […]

Disprz raised a bridge round of funding in January this year to go to the next level of scaling its AI-powered learning management and upskilling platform for enterprises. This will bring new challenges in hiring and internationalization. But for CEO and co-founder Subramanian Viswanathan, the inflection point for hiring came between 2019 and 2020, when […]

Black Swan Bingo If Covid and the financial market reset weren’t enough, the run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week was a sure sign that “Black Swan” events are no longer as unpredictable as one might have imagined a few years back. It almost seems that facing existential threats on a daily basis is […]

When Vantage Circle started out 12 years ago, it got corporate clients for its employee engagement SaaS platform mostly by personal contact and word of mouth. Co-founder and CEO Partha Neog leveraged his 13-year prior corporate career, which included a stint as Product Management VP at a Naukri group company. The first big client he […]

When Guru Hariharan left Amazon, where he applied machine learning to build an automated vendor management system, his vision was that the future of ecommerce was going to be algorithmic. As an entrepreneur, he knew the value of AI/ML to other retailers as well as retail brands for whom ecommerce marketplaces accounted for 90% of […]