HTBV Podcast: Hard Truths About Minting the Next Indian Unicorn w/ Piyush Kharbanda

Thank you for your strong support for our Series 1 — Hard Truths by Vertex podcast. We are now back with our Series 2.

Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India is a pioneer in investing in tech start-ups in this region and has helped to build a number of unicorns. In this podcast, we want to share and uncover Hard Truths — raw, unfiltered insights and venture capital experience across Southeast Asia & India. Tune in to hear from leading founders, innovators, venture capitalists and industry experts in the region and to gain industry insights from those in the know.

For this episode, Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2JMf3yPwhuOIY85rpx5B2Y?si=e682a6607f0146e0

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT_cDAOsBMA&list=PLPbU1xKnX4FXGY0Q5USG1zW3ZoS3LvhU4&index=18

Our Guest, Piyush Kharbanda’s Bio:

General Partner, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India

Piyush Kharbanda joined Vertex Ventures in 2016 and is focusing on opportunities in India. Prior to Vertex, he spent five years investing across sectors with Multiples, a leading India based mid-market fund, where he was involved in investments through portfolio management and exit. Before that, Piyush worked with Alvarez and Marsal on performance improvement and strategy consulting assignments.

Elise: Hi, I’m Elise Tan. And I’m your host for this episode of Hard Truths by Vertex podcast. Today, I’m excited to have Piyush Kharbanda, my colleague and general partner at Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India. Hi Piyush!

Piyush: Hi, Elise!

Elise: So Piyush joined Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India in 2016.

Prior to that, he was with Multiples. It’s a leading India-based private equity firm looking at deals across finance and technology sectors. Before multiples, he was a strategy consultant. So hi Piyush, I have lots of questions for you today. How are you doing?

Piyush: Very good. Let’s dive into those.

Elise: Sure, how did you come across Vertex? How do you know about us?

How did Piyush come across Vertex?

Piyush: Yeah, you know, the journey was quite interesting. Our colleague Nikhil ​​Marwaha, who joined us very recently, used to work with Ben (Ben Mathias, our managing partner) back in his earlier role. And Ben was looking for someone to join him in the India team as we were rebooting our India strategy. And that’s how Ben and I met. And then I met Joo Hock as a part of the process. One thing led to another, and then I joined in 2016. So it’s been a very nice seven-odd years, actually coming to seven and a half years now.

Elise: Yeah, and I believe you’re the second person to join the India team after Ben Mathias.

Piyush: Yes, that’s right. On the investing team, I was the second person on the team. And we are six people now.

Elise: Yeah, the team has grown a lot. And with that, the Indian startup ecosystem has grown a lot along the way as well. How did the ecosystem grow when you started with Vertex?

How has the Indian ecosystem grown since his joining?

Piyush: I think there’s a lot that has happened in the Indian ecosystem. I think back when I started, there were very few companies that had any business model to speak of. We were all working off of some form of expectation and hope that the Indian technology ecosystem would mature like China and the US.

So there were a lot of copycat business models that were sort of starting to blossom at the time. And over the years, what we’ve seen is that that has completely transformed. People have now realised that copycat business models just don’t work. And then from there, people have started investing in business models that are built for India.

I think the ecosystem has also matured a lot. This is especially from the perspective of maturity of everyone in the ecosystem, but most importantly, the founders. Most people at the time were first-time founders.

There wasn’t too much advice going around. There wasn’t too much help in problem-solving among founders. And the thing we’ve realised is that founders rely on each other a lot for help in looking at problems in a unique manner that each of them face, the founder camaraderie has really matured a lot as well and obviously, now that we’ve seen a lot of dollars go in and a lot of dollars come out in the form of exits We have more liquidity in the ecosystem.

There is more risk capital at play. Obviously, we’re nowhere as mature as some of the other markets our network funds operate in, but we’re getting there.

Elise: Yeah, I think that this is a really exciting time for Southeast Asian India markets because, you know, the first wave of startups has grown and now what we are seeing across the markets is like the second generation of, you know, startup founders who were employees of, you know, companies that have done well in the first wave. [Read our colleague Abhijit Gupta’s article on the second wave]

Yes. So I’m just wondering, what do you think are the types of companies that have done well in the ecosystem?

What are the types of companies that have done well in the Indian ecosystem?

Piyush: Sure. Actually, maybe as we respond to that, we should think about why the copycat model does not necessarily work in India. And, I want to just touch upon two specific things. One, if you look at markets where venture capital has really worked and a lot of startups have done well with the backing of venture capital, they have typically been slightly richer than India on a per capita basis, which means the spending capability of people is just a little higher.

And secondly, they tend to be very heterogeneous, which means most people behave in similar manners. So if you look at China, everyone speaks the same language. Everyone has a very similar education system. Similarly in the US market and some of the other smaller markets where this has happened.

India is very unique. Our per capita income is lower. Our behaviours across state lines are very different. Languages are very different. So, in a nutshell, what you’re dealing with is a much more complex ecosystem than has ever been seen elsewhere, which makes it exciting, but also makes it a unique way that a business needs to be built.

But coming back to your question, I think what has worked over the last, I would call it a good part of seven to ten years and more recently over the last two or three years are models that are finding ways to make money in constrained economic conditions.

In every unit in India, of whatever you sell to the consumer or the business, there are fewer dollars available to take, which means businesses have to be built in an extremely efficient manner, and companies have to work under a lot of constraints. And typically it takes more time to build a scalable, profitable business. That I think is fairly unique to the Indian context. I don’t know if any other market works like that, and that’s the exciting part of being in India. We think that businesses that address consumer problems or business problems in unique ways, that bring products or services to consumers, in an efficient manner at the right price are the winning business models in India. There are somewhat similar businesses that have been built and this is Kuku FM [Read Kuku FM raises $21.8 million in Series B funding].

This is a company that provides audio content to millions of Indians, in Indian languages, and this content sort of has taken the country by storm. This platform has really done well in that it provides content at a very low price point. So it’s give or take about a dollar a month or 80 rupees per month.

And so the nuanced part is how to acquire this customer at a price. Or at a CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) that’s in line with this price point. How do you then retain the customer so that there’s a lifetime value that makes sense? And then from there, how do you continue to deliver value to the customer?

So keep listening to your customers, and keep delivering content that they like.

Piyush: Kuku FM is a unique example where such a business has never been built before globally. We’ve had, somewhat successful examples of businesses like Spotify that have done well on podcasts and music, actually music and now podcasting, we’ve also had examples like Audible and there are similar ones in China that have done well on audiobooks, but get serialised content, servicing the needs of aspirational Indians, motivational content, religion, mythology, all of that thrown into the mix using data to understand what consumers want — Some of that has never really happened, before.

So problems are unique. There’s no way to do copycat models from the West, or the East and and have that work in the country. So we have had similar examples of companies that have really done in India.

Elise: I’m really fascinated with the model because, you know, it is a platform. So you need to discover content that the user wants, you know, bring it online, you know, and at the same time keep CAC low, keeping the subscription price low. You know, how do they do that?

Piyush: The team has editorial content or editorial control of what they produce so while they work with freelancers and content creators on the one end Kuku FM team has a very deliberate choice on what they produce. So there’s a lot of thought that goes into deciding what kind of content they produce. There’s a lot of deliberation and thought on identifying how that content has to be produced.

So taking a storybook to serialised content requires effectively, building a script, effectively getting the right kind of background notes to be produced for it, getting the right voice actors, identifying who should produce that, etc. So it takes production effort. But what we’ve done, I would say moderately well, is that we have sort of found a way of doing it without incurring any or too many fixed costs.

And so we are choosing what kind of content we produce, and, and it’s not an open market or free content production platform. To the extent that we also don’t have an RSS feed for podcasts. So you can’t just publish your podcast on Kuku FM. The team has to editorially open it up if they think that the users will like it.

Elise: Yeah, I think it’s amazing, you know, being able to understand what the consumer wants and then being able to scale the whole content creation and curation. I’m just curious because prior to Vertex, you were with a private equity fund, you know, in the mid-market.

So what brings you to the early stage?

What brings Piyush to the early-stage market?

Piyush: It’s very interesting. A couple of things that actually stand out. The kind of problem-solving you do in private equity is very incremental. So there are obviously very smart people out there who are building companies and there are very strong management teams out there.

You’re effectively working with them to find very incremental value-addition opportunities. Because at the end of the day, you’re working with somewhat more mature companies, somewhat more mature business models, and somewhat more mature individuals. In the world of venture, it’s completely different. Every day is unique.

You know, every problem is brand new. There’s no template to attach. And given that your business is innovative or the company that you’re investing in, your business is innovative, you typically would not have problems that have been solved before.

And I would tend to think, I felt a lot of talent or friends moved towards startups and somehow felt that, that we are sort of at the cusp of something interesting when smart people who’ve become friends leave cushy jobs in consulting and financial services to move into venture-backed startups.

You start to think, what are they doing? Like, what are we staring at, at this moment in time? And this is, I’m going back to the 2015, and 2016 timeframe and realising that there’s a lot more activity that’s happening. The kind of people who are sort of building some of these companies are very unique. You could have a much better conversation with them than you would in the world of private equity.

So some of those, and you know, I also wanted to invest in software technology. Somehow I had never done that before, but I felt I’d be good at it. But, there weren’t really any opportunities at the growth stage at the time. Even today, those opportunities are few and far between. So that was the background.

Elise: Very cool. And I can totally understand where you’re coming from because, you know, literally, at Vertex, we are, we see ourselves as a co-founding partner to the startups, and it is the truth because we are so involved and really providing the extra, you know, pair of brains or hands to the business. [Read why Joseph Phua, cofounder and chairman of 17LIVE, says Vertex is Family]

So yeah, it’s really exciting to be working with early-stage startups.

Piyush: Yep, yep, absolutely.

Elise: So having been, you know, in the ecosystem as such, during such exciting, you know, high growth period, but, what do you think are some of the hard truths that you would tell entrepreneurs who are entering the Indian market for the first time, or, you know, just being a first time entrepreneur?

Hard truths for first-time entrepreneurs

Piyush: I think entrepreneurship and startup are hard enough that people realise a lot of, you know, things end up being hard truth, but I think the one thing I do want to mention, which is not being talked about a lot more but isn’t often addressed, is that a high valuation and large fundraising is really not the criteria of success.

I think high valuations and large fundraised amounts can end up causing a lot more damage to startups and to founders than the other way around. The fundamental belief is that great businesses get built-in constraints.

I think there is nothing new being said about that. You know, if you go back a lot of good companies that, that, you know, we use as model examples in the world of startups and venture capital really ended up not raising too much money, worked out of their garages, etc, and were successful early on those circumstances would have been very different.

But I do think that working under a set of constraints and not having a lot of limitless capital at your disposal is a super important thing, especially in the early life of a startup at the stage and scale we invest in. I’ve worked with companies that came on the verge of failure, came very close to not having the dollars to last six months or nine months, and were forced to find a business model or forced to find a path to success that they wouldn’t have found had they had that capital, and kept on going in the direction that they were going.

So it’s not you make tough decisions when faced with tough circumstances. I think having a lack of constraints in many ways, which as capital, can cause founders and companies to go astray. The other contrary to all of this is that oftentimes actually in India, more often than not large capital in the recent past has come with lack of oversight.

What I mean is investors who’ve invested large amounts of dollars have come in, in almost all

cases from abroad, not brought with them a governance framework for the companies they invest in, but have burdened these companies with a very, very high degree of expectations. So when you combine sort of high expectations with low partnership, low oversight, low problem-solving support.

You’re often left with a recipe for disaster. And this disaster can be many things. In many cases, it ends up being companies just bulking up a business model without finding product market fit. And in many cases, it can be a lack of governance or just poor governance that shows up in some of these companies.

So I think finding the right partner who can sort of help navigate the early journey, is also super important. It gets missed out in more cases than you would realise.

Elise: I really love what you mentioned about the second point because, I think something that is often not spoken about, you know, that, when somebody gives you a really high expectation, and the money, sometimes what happens is that, you get really creative with it, you know, and sometimes, you know, it’s like, too creative.

Piyush: You know, you can’t cook up data.

No, there is really no grey to governance. I think it’s very black and white. I think it gets missed out. I think expectations have a weird way of working on human psychology and oftentimes people with even the best of intentions and best of backgrounds somehow tend to think taking a shortcut is fine.

And you know, all blame lies with founders who do bad governance, but maybe some blame could also lie on the investors who are just not providing any form of oversight on some of these founders and these companies.

Elise: I mean, obviously we want entrepreneurs to be really charting new frontiers, right? But cutting corners and I think doing certain things with a short-term perspective in mind, rather than a long-term perspective normally have, you know, disastrous consequences that we actually also see right now happening around us. So, yeah, great point.

Piyush: Like I said earlier, there are enough problems to be solved for founders. If they need to manage the perception of their investors and their board, they are taking up almost an insurmountable problem, which will almost end up becoming the largest problem they end up solving.

And so it’s just better to be fully transparent with investors and the board.

Elise: Yeah, and going back to your first point, you mentioned the importance of, you know, real investing experience as an investor partner. Yeah. So to be able to guide the founders and be able to give, you know, kind of educate them on what governance means. I think all this goes a

long way.

Piyush: Sure, no, I don’t think we have to, I don’t think it’s our job to educate the founders on

what is governance. I think it’s our job to have very clear communication with founders and help them understand that investors are true partners. So when there is a problem, you should come to us, and if there isn’t a problem, you should come to us, but the relationship should be built on trust and transparency.

That is super important.

Elise: Yeah, definitely. You mentioned Kuku FM earlier, so I’m also very interested to hear about, you know, how they managed to monetise.

How do successful start-ups manage to monetise?

Piyush: Yeah, no, I think a lot of companies in our portfolio have found great insights into their business model. Actually, let me step back. When we invest, we typically invest in people. We are investing in founders who are very early in product market fit. Our job is to sort of work with them and ideally help them solve problems because we are not running the company.

And I would say more often than not, our portfolio companies have found a business model when faced with a very tough situation.

And the core ingredient has been, they have consistently been listening to their customers and all the constituents in their ecosystem. So we can take the example of Kuku FM when we invested was a platform that was sort of driving free listenership to people and we always had the hope that we would be able to monetize because the customers love us.

I think what we realised very quickly was that there is a certain kind of user that likes our platform and they, they, we used to call them super users at the time.

They would spend a lot of time on our platform. They would listen to content pieces end to end. And they used to show very clear characteristics of what kind of content they wanted. And what the team really used to do well was they used to constantly talk to these users, constantly used to get their feedback, constantly used to understand these users and I think we took a very tough call that hat we’re going to turn off the free platform and we’re going to make everything go behind a paywall.

So it’s a subscription or nothing. And nothing meant that you could still listen to one episode of one series. And that was more a user acquisition story that you’re on the platform. You come to the platform through whichever channel we acquire you from. You listen to this content, you realise how good it is, and then you pay us to listen to the rest of the library. That’s not an easy thing to do for a company that’s sort of got millions of daily active users or weekly active users at the time and to turn it all off see that number go off the screen literally and start monetizing you know content. And this was at a time when really there wasn’t too much subscription monetization happening in India.

There still isn’t. But Kuku FM was one of the few non-sports-led content monetization platforms in the country. The real aha moment for us was when we, in terms of the number of subscribers or paid subscribers overtook Netflix in India.

And maybe the audience that we’re building for is larger than Netflix’s audience in India, which was, which is very unique, so the company is going strong. We are solving problems every day and, you know, in a very exciting environment. Another similar example is Kissht. You know, when the monetization happened, we had to shut down collections.

We had to sort of completely turn off our new business because we didn’t know who the consumers were. If you think about the economic environment in India, a lot of people who work are actually migrants to the place of work, and so people just moved around the country, and very few people had a trace of where people were. So we had to completely revamp our business model. And all credit to the team, they continue to look at the data, they continue to look at the right approach to solving the problem and are now profitable as one of the largest fintech platforms in the country.

I think more for Kissht and more in general on fintech and credit. I think it’s not lost on anyone that credit is one of the largest opportunities in India, consumer credit specifically. Credit looks like an ugly business till it becomes large. And then when it becomes large, it looks like the most beautiful business out there. There is this rubicon that credit businesses somehow cross that once they get to profitability and scale, there’s really no looking back if you’ve built it the right way.

The real fatality comes in credit businesses that are not built well. For instance, they don’t focus on the foundations of financial services or customer service. of always listening to the customer, having the right product for the customer, etc. And so if you build it ground up in a fundamentally solid manner, over time, credit businesses have a level of compounding that very few other old-world businesses in India have.

But there is a lot of fatality in this journey, very high fatality in this journey. And we’ve been, you know, we’ve seen it all around us. There are businesses that were sort of darlings of investors that are nowhere to be seen that got decimated during the last 3–4 years.

Elise: Yeah, thanks for the amazing examples of Kuku FM and Kissht. and I think both of them, you know, they went through periods where I guess there’s immense fear of, you know, turning off the free part and really looking at who is willing to pay. So I’m just wondering, you know, did they have a backup plan then, you know?

Piyush: No. it’s funny. I guess that’s not how life works, there’s no construct of a backup plan. It’s also interesting looking back and I’m thinking about this at the time when, when these companies were sort of going through these, these tough times.

You know, no one was thinking about backing an audio content platform play in the country and really when Kissht was sort of coming out of Covid, credit was a frowned upon subject.

We won’t go into that today but when Ace Turtle was pivoting into the apparel brand business that they started just after Covid, people were not investing in apparel brands, especially omnichannel apparel brands. It’s a theme that’s caught on now, but these were not easy decisions.

They were not sort of the consensus decisions in the market at the time. and investors really did question, hey, you want to make money off subscriptions in India at, you know, these prices, how will you ever make money? So, you know, we had all those questions, but I think all credit to some exceptional founders. We’ve had the privilege of working with.

Elise: You have stressed again and again is really, great companies are built during hard times, you know, because, the, I guess the constraint that you mentioned will help the founders kind of really focus on the things that matter and to monetize, and also to become profitable.

I think a lot of things have changed now that we come out of the COVID pandemic, the hard times didn’t just extend to the entrepreneurs. I think the hard times have also extended to the VC funds. What do you think we are going through right now and how have the rules of the game changed?

How have the rules of Venture Investing changed coming out of the pandemic?

Piyush: I think we’re in very interesting times in the venture investing world. I think what has happened is that across Southeast Asia and India, the ecosystem is sort of going through the first big uncertainty wave, if I can call it that, because what we’ve seen till now is we’ve seen only things go up, only in one direction, there’s always an up round for your portfolio companies.

I think it’s a time for a lot of reflection on our ecosystem right now, especially for the investors that the days of up rounds and a lot of capital being available for every company are long gone.

So I think what we’re starting to see in the ecosystem is sort of, and I don’t say it in a bad way, but sort of signs of failure among startups at scale for the first time. And that I think is a very interesting and difficult time to be in, simply because one, people don’t know how to adapt to it and two it’s not easy to adapt to especially because, let’s say you have 15 companies in your portfolio and five of them are going through times of trouble and you’ve never had to deal with that before as an investor There’s really no way you know how to deal with it.

There is really no guidance that you’ve had on how to deal with it. It’s almost like you’re going through a tough personal time and you need therapy to get through it. And really there isn’t much available. So investors are in a tough spot right now. And the only way to come out of it is to work very closely with portfolio companies. And make sure that you’re consistently focused on helping them solve problems and helping them build good business models.

Elise: Yeah. You know, it’s not the time to grow at all costs. It’s really the time to tweak the unique economics and make sure there’s a path to profitability. Do you want to share something about that?

Product market fit is a journey

Piyush: Yeah. No, I think about it differently, I think. I think there is a, I think the construct of product market fit needs to be thought about as you think about growth. And I think product market fit is a journey. So you as a company or companies that we work with could have a product market fit in a narrow segment of the market.

And then if you try to grow into it. Another adjacent market that’s not heterogeneous to the market that you have a product-market fit in. It’s not going to scale very well. And that’s where you end up with problems like very high CAC, low retention, lack of users, churn, etc, etc, etc, and this applies across customer segments b2b, b2c doesn’t matter. And product-market fit has various nuances to it.

Effectively, it means that you can have scalable, repeatable unit economics or unit models in the model that you’re operating in. And I think where companies end up going wrong or missing the point is that they don’t have product market fit in a segment that they’re trying to expand in. I think if you’re in a segment where you have a product-market fit, then the answer still is growth at all costs.

But I think the difficult part of understanding that is whether you do have a product market fit in that market or that market segment. And I think that’s where I’m going to go back to my earlier point of needing to work with as many smart people around the table. And I’m not saying that investors are the only smart people around the table, but you need to find the answer to that, that point.

And then if you don’t have product market fit, it’s time to cut because, you know, it’s very easy to double down and invest in an idea or a, in a company or in a product where you have a lot of belief and you’ve seen early success, but all of that investment is not going to result in anything if there’s no PMF.

Oftentimes the, the, the most difficult part of this is lack of market depth. in a segment, you have a PMF in and you miss that point altogether and you believe that the entire market is there for the taking and you have PMF, and let’s double down and that’s where the problems arise. So actually I think if you have PMF it’s still blitz scaling growth at all costs nothing beats growth nothing beats momentum but if you don’t especially in a or if you have a product market fit in a very narrow segment.

You better wait till you find a product market fit in another segment where you want to scale in.

Elise: Yeah, I love the way that you put it, you know, achieving PMF first before doubling down on what you’re already doing. We just announced our fifth fund of $541 million, what do you think, you know, maybe just share with the listeners, what would be the strategy for investing in India?

Investing strategy in India

Piyush: Sure. The investing strategy in India is very simple, do boring investments that’ll make money for our investors, you know, back high-quality founders who are building world-class companies. I think we are very blessed in a way that the Indian ecosystem is where it is today, I think we have very high-quality founders, a ton of repeat founders, a ton of professionals who are sort of great at working in early startup environments, who enjoy the rapid scale up.

So there is a very high volume of good investment opportunities available. We would love to invest in great founders who are building unique business models. What we don’t want to do is go and do consensus high-price deals. I think there is no money to be made in that and there’s no joy in doing some of those investments, we are very keen to do non-consensus bets that are not obvious today, but you know, the tenet of the venture is that investments that end up being the most successful were always the most non-consensus.

And if it is consensus today, highly likely that it’s not going to make money for your LPs. So yeah, slowing down and investing in generative AI as we speak.

Elise: Yeah, I think, I think Vertex has been, we have been very consistent, you know, in terms of, even in really like, exuberant times, you know, where valuation is sky high and even the deal looks good, but the valuation don’t, you know, we have been very sane, very logical in terms of, not participating in those consensus deals.

Yeah. So I think that that’s remarkable. Yeah. Yeah. And I think Piyush, you know, in the last six to, seven and a half years that you’ve been with Vertex, you have seen companies exiting. Maybe one example is Recko being acquired by Stripe [Read about our portfolio Recko acquired by Stripe]. What do you see are the exit opportunities for the Indian market?

Exit opportunities in the Indian market

Piyush: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any helping any company build towards an exit. I think that’s the wrong objective setting. I think the right objective setting is to be aware of that and acutely aware of a potential exit path and be constantly sort of aware of it. So we think about exit at the time of entry.

We think about who could be a potential acquirer, who could, if things go well, right? You’re

always planning for things to go well. Can this company go public? Is there a deep enough market in this segment that a strategic, either from India or from outside India can come and acquire? etc.

The most important part about being exit-ready is for founders to be having constant conversations with everyone in the ecosystem, be it a competition, someone who’s strategically aligned, who’s adjacent to you, and probably has intentions to go into the market you’re in.

Some of these are very difficult things for founders to do. For example, to have a transparent conversation with someone who could potentially be a competitor is not easy. To potentially build a partnership channel with a behemoth of a company is not easy, but those are the most important ingredients towards being exit-ready at all times.

There are two ways to think about it broadly at least. One is how to think about an exit where things are going great. And typically in that situation, you’re usually dealing with an inbound, and you’re only dealing with an inbound from someone you know.

And truth be told, all exits are great and no exit is better than an exit in a good time. When your company is doing well, when you have all the cylinders firing behind you and someone comes and acquires you, there’s nothing better.

The other circumstance is that things are not going well. You’re either struggling for growth or struggling for economics, sort of runway looks like, you know, stretched, etc. And then you’re going out to find a buyer. I think those are the more delicate ones. You (investor) have to have a strong conversation with the founder and it’s a tough conversation to have because you invest in the company.

You’re, you want to be seen as a partner. You don’t want to be seen as someone who’s panicking and trying to exit when things are not going well. So it’s a very delicate conversation to have with the founder. Oftentimes the most mature founders end up initiating that conversation themselves. And so you should be aware of how to have that conversation with

the founder.

Elise: Yeah, thank you so much, Piyush. You know, I think this conversation has really helped us to understand how our team works, you know, how we think as an investor, why the investment trends going forward, advice for entrepreneurs, and I love your contrarian views as well.

So thank you so much for your time.

Piyush: It’s been my pleasure, Elise. Thank you very much.

Elise: Thank you.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Hard Truths by Vertex podcast, we hope this has brought you valuable insights. To listen or watch the other episodes, visit www.vertexventures.sg/news/podcast.