Half-Century of Insights
Highlights from our 50 episodes of the Accel Insights Podcast Series
It’s been an amazing journey since January 2018 since we started the Accel Insights Podcast Series. As we get to 50 episodes in this series wanted to reflect on what has been covered in this series and the plans going forward. We also have a section dedicated to getting feedback from our listeners below and look forward to hearing from you.
Reasons for starting
There are amazing startup related podcasts out there globally that I am personally a big fan of and listen to on a regular basis. Some of these are listed here. The reason for starting and persevering with the Insights Podcast Series continues to be what we stated in our original blog:
“… none of these are focused on Indian entrepreneurs. Many lessons from the podcasts are very much applicable to entrepreneurs globally, but there are some nuances of each geography. The aim of our Insights Podcast Series is to address some of those issues that are more specific to India more sharply and to bring out stories from Indian founders and investors so that its more relatable for Indian founders.”
Over the past two and a half years, we were fortunate to chat with so many different leaders across industries and stages.
Before we move ahead here are the links to the podcast. Please follow us on one of the podcast platforms you like to get notified.
SIMPLECAST
SPOTIFY
APPLE PODCAST
All the amazing guests who were part of the INSIGHTS Podcast Family
Looking back
The one thing that stands out right away, is the fact the most of these industry leaders were very generous with their time to participate in the podcasts and we are grateful to them for sharing key learnings from their respective journies.
Our Season I (in 2018) was aimed at “Key Ingredients of a successful startup” from the perspective of both founders and investors. We covered topics such as:
- Picking the right co-founders — The Swiggy Journey
- How to select the market opportunity — from Raghu (TaxiForSure)
- Finding Product-Market Fit — with Subrata from Accel
- Strategies for fundraising — Ashish from BookMyShow
- Importance of Execution — Vamsi from Vedantu
We also covered a few specific verticals such as B2B, Healthtech, and cross-border SaaS in Season I.
Then in Season II (2019), we went deep into founder stories across various sectors and stages of companies — here are a few of them to give you a flavor
- The Flipkart Story with Binny Bansal
- Impact across private and public sectors — Nandan Nilekani
- Psychology of startups — Kunal Shah
- The master storyteller — Girish Mathrubootham
- The man behind Mi India — Manu Jain
- Building and scaling a Biotech powerhouse — Kiran Mazumdar Shaw
This was a fun journey for me personally as I got to learn from these Industry Stalwarts and share it with the Insights Podcast audience. Here are the Top 12 takeaways from Season II (2019) in case you have not listened to it already.
We are now in Season III (2020) and we started the year with a plan to do a mix of deep dives into topics that the podcast audience expressed interest in, as well as more stories from startup founders (like Season II). We started with sharing a couple of deep dives into SaaS and have one more planned in the series. But, given COVID-19, we wanted to take some time to share best practices that help the startup ecosystem and have done a couple of podcasts around that.
What could be better
As we reflected on the journey, one thing we realized we have not done much is to engage with the Insights Podcast audience more actively to serve the podcast’s purpose of being helpful to the startup community in India. With this in mind, we have started a newsletter here which will keep you up-to-date on our podcasts and we request you to subscribe. We also realized that it would be a lot better if we can plan out the topics involving our audience more — to that effect, we did a twitter poll (check the tweet thread below) earlier this year that gave us some feedback, but we would like the audience to be more involved going forward.
With the above in mind, we would like to involve you in fine-tuning the plan for the rest of the year and beyond. Tweet or DM us on Twitter if you would like to be a contributor of ideas or any feedback to make the Insights Podcast series a lot more effective and helpful. We are also open to get some guidance on growing the podcast reach & listens.
The main focus areas for the rest of this year are broadly in three buckets (but we are open to more ideas):
- Deep dives into specific sectors (similar to the SaaS one)
- Stories from the Seed stage — key learnings and mistakes from the first couple of years of the startup journey and what would they do differently
- Coaching sessions with expert CEOs — our 50th episode is with one such CEO — Mukesh Bansal — who has been through multiple successful startups and will be sharing some valuable tips to budding entrepreneurs
That’s all I had for now and would love to hear from you all on ways we can make this podcast a lot more effective in serving its purpose. Finally, I want to thank all the people Accel who have been instrumental in making this podcast series possible — in addition to all my partners, a special shout out to Avinash Raghava, Siddharth Ram, Shrrinesh Bala, and Pranay Y for all their hard work behind the scenes. Also thanks to guch admin for being a great partner. Thanks, team!
