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From Urban Ladder to Antler India: Insights from a Founder turned VC | Rajiv Srivatsa | BP2B S2E20

This week’s guest on the Best Place to Build Podcast is someone who builds by enabling others to build. Rajiv Srivatsa’s journey began with IIT Madras, moved through Infosys, an MBA, and multiple professional roles, before he went on to co-found Urban Ladder with a friend. In this episode, he shares why they chose to sell furniture online, how they challenged traditional buying behaviour, and what gave them the confidence to build a digital-first furniture brand. Today, Rajiv works closely with early-stage founders—helping them identify strong ideas, refine their vision, and build companies with clarity and purpose. He also talks about how the four stages of Ikigai inspire his thinking on work, life, and entrepreneurship, and how that philosophy guides the way he supports founders. Watch the full episode to learn about: The journey behind Urban Ladder Different types of builders and why they are both necessary How Ikigai influences Rajiv’s approach to building Four stages of building a company Chapters: [00:02:00] Antler India and Rajiv’s role in the company [00:08:37] Rajiv’s interpretation of the word ‘Build’ [00:16:30] Rajiv’s journey and perspective on Builders [00:21:33] The four stages of building a company [00:30:06] Mini Masterclass: How to Approach Building a Company [00:42:00] A walk-through of the Urban Ladder journey [00:49:00] Rajiv’s approach to building culture at work [00:54:04] Why IIT Madras is a great environment to build [00:57:59] Wrapping Thoughts and Rajiv’s IITM batch # Antler #AntlerIndia #VentureCapitalist #Builder #Founder #CultureatWork #BestPlacetoBuild #IITMadras

Rajiv Srivatsaguest
Jan 30, 20261h 0mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:00

    Intro

    1. RS

      I built the largest personal website at Infosys. I used to get, this was 2001.

    2. SP

      Okay.

    3. RS

      Stage one-

    4. SP

      Okay.

    5. RS

      -build something, get feedback, go iterate on it. We actually built something called Next Hundred, where we get the best ideas at a particular point in time. Second is the community. We actually have something called Before Day Zero, and within that, something called the Co-Founder Club. I think for me, the joy actually started at IIT Madras, where I built a version of Carmen Sandiego, the Indianized version of Carmen Sandiego. [chuckles]

    6. SP

      I have this amazing story with Flipkart where 2009, '10, we bought a bunch of stuff, and they canceled our order-

    7. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    8. SP

      -for a 60, 70,000 order.

    9. RS

      Talks through the Ikigai circles in a particular way. Psychology, founder personalities. There are two very clear sort of distinctive personalities. One who's a missionary-

    10. SP

      Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build Podcast. Today, we are sitting with Rajiv Srivatsa. He was the co-founder of Urban Ladder, and then now the founding partner of Antler India. So, and he's been a builder for a really long time, so I'm very excited to talk to him about what building means to him. Hi, welcome to the podcast, Rajiv.

    11. RS

      Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be in campus.

    12. SP

      Yes, um, you're here for your reunion, right? Uh, which year reunion is this?

    13. RS

      This is the 25th year reunion, the silver jubilee.

    14. SP

      Okay. Um, so I, I want to quickly understand your current role, and we'll... And I have some questions around that. Um, we haven't had too many guests in the VC side of things, investing side of things, so want to understand a little bit about how that works and, uh, your particular view of that.

  2. 2:00 – 8:37

    Antler India and Rajiv’s role in the company

    1. RS

      Sure. Um, I think the VC industry is br- pretty broad-based that way, and for me, the role that I play is very close to being that of a builder. Because Antler's prerogative is to fund, uh, startups across sectors on day zero, and literally at the idea stage. So for me, it allows Antler, more than just writing a cheque, to be actually a temporary co-founder of sorts to the founder. And I don't see personally myself any other way, because, uh, if you see, generally, you know, there's late-stage private equity, there is sort of mid-early stage venture capital, but the earliest stage is really where there's just a lot of fun. There's a lot of challenge also, and I just wanted to sort of continue my building journey of sorts. And when I was looking at what next to do right after Urban Ladder, around COVID, um, this opportunity came up. And for me, building a platform, building an institution, which sort of stands for being your first believer on day zero, was very exciting. I had never invested in my life before. And, uh, the moment I sort of took that on, over the last five years, what we've made Antler is, uh, at least your de facto platform. Whenever you think of wanting to become a founder, it doesn't matter if you're a college student, if you are working in a startup, if you're in a big company, Antler should be the de facto place. And we have done a bunch of stuff to make sure that whether it's deep tech, whether it's consumer, whether it's SaaS, enterprise, fintech, it doesn't matter which sector, Antler should be your first port of call to be your helping partner. Not just a capital partner, but your sparring partner, to even think through, you know, who should be your right co-founder? What should be the idea? Should you go path A, path B? And that's what Antler's role is. We have now funded 110 startups. We operate a $75 million or a 600 crore fund focused on India. Of course, Antler India itself is part of a larger global platform, uh, of Antler. Antler, funnily, in itself is a startup. It's only seven years old, uh, globally. It's four and a half years old in India. And today, we manage, uh, $1.2 billion across the world, so it's sort of mushroomed like a startup more than like a VC firm. And, uh, being part of a global platform also offers founders and the startups that we fund a much bigger sort of canvas, either whether to sort of get intelligence globally or whether to launch globally. So that's what Antler is, and I can get into any other specific aspects of what Antler is.

    2. SP

      Okay, so you said Antler is a global fund with an, with an India arm, which you head?

    3. RS

      Right.

    4. SP

      Um, and, uh, you have funded 110 startups.

    5. RS

      Yeah.

    6. SP

      You also said that they should be your first... Your f- the founder's first call should be to you, something like that?

    7. RS

      Right.

    8. SP

      Is that, is that, are you running a community? Are you running a residency-

    9. RS

      Right

    10. SP

      ... in addition to the funding?

    11. RS

      Yes, and that's sort of what, what's unique about us, right? The way we see, I think the, the closest sort of, uh, I would say, inspiration for us was Y Combinator, because I think over the last 20 years, the kind of impact YC has had, I think has been phenomenal. And if you see the Antler hat, there are two big differences. One is, we are very decentralized, which means that me and my partner, Nithin, and the whole team operate the India fund. And when we operate the India fund, because in India, you also have a variety of other players sort of playing at the very early stage. What we did additionally was two things. One is, we actually built something called Next Hundred, where we get the best ideas at a particular point in time from builders, from ecosystem folks, from VCs, and sort of put out a report called Next Hundred every year. And that Next Hundred, what it does is, it sort of, uh, I would say, puts a lot of seeds of thought in people who are still working and who want to be a founder in the next 6 to 12 months. So that's one thing, which is a lot of focus on content itself as a, you know... And that's not just regular content, like, you know, a lot of people put, uh, content with founders, con- content with VCs. Of course, we also do that.

    12. SP

      Podcasts.

    13. RS

      Podcasts. But I think what is very specific about Next Hundred is, we really go try and understand, uh, either within sectors, emerging ideas, or even emerging sectors. Like, we were first to sort of really pick up this whole digital India, uh, you know, the ONDC and, you know, the mission that Nandan and the whole, uh, uh, digital infrastructure stack really put out. As well as we've been extremely early on even things like AI and deep tech and defense tech in India. So one is Next Hundred as a content arm. Second is the community. We actually have something called Before Day Zero, and within that, something called the Co-Founder Club. And again, this is something very specific Antler does, right? Because what we believe is, in that minus one to zero phase of a founder's journey, where someone is turning from being an employee to becoming a founder, there's just a lot of ambiguity. A lot of ambiguity on which idea, which path, which sector, who, who should be my right co-founder?

    14. SP

      Correct.

    15. RS

      And the power of that community, it has 700, 800 future sort of founders. Some of them might never become a founder, but the whole point of that-... community is to sort of nudge you, is to sort of guide you, is to sort of really help, uh, make this very, uh, I would say, extremely trouble-filled, problem-filled, minus one to zero, slightly less, uh, hazardous of sorts, so that there's a much higher chance that you become a founder. So the community Before Day Zero does that. Of course-

    16. SP

      Okay

    17. RS

      ... our core product after that is actually the residency, which is once you are clear of which space, once you're clear of who your co-founder is, today you can just come to us, and we have this very high-powered sort of, uh, you know, I would say physical space plus ideation sessions over a two-month period, where you sit in our Bangalore office as part of the residency. We get 1,500, 2,000 applications. We pick the top 20 teams. They work with us. At that point in time, it's really about, you know, "Should I pick customer A? Should I pick idea B?" And they are in that very last stages of what MVP to build, right? That is the phase with which the residency comes in, and we work with the founders there. And some of those founders, some of those residency folks, we actually invest in. That's what we do before even we actually invest in a company.

    18. SP

      Very interesting. So, uh, Next Hundred, from a content point of view, uh, Before Day Zero from a community point of view, the residency and investing.

    19. RS

      Right.

    20. SP

      It's a, it's a multi-armed thing.

    21. RS

      Yes.

    22. SP

      Okay. [chuckles] Thank you so much. Uh, I also know that, um, we, we, we have interacted before, and I've sort of followed your journey because you are a senior and you... Urban Ladder is just a very well-recognized brand, right? So you sort of end up following. And I also know you as a very thoughtful person, so I want to ask you this question, and really, from the minute you said, "Yes, I will come to the podcast," this is what's running in my head, is that we have this notion of what the word build means. Um, and of course, from somebody outside, they may think of it as building an organization, or maybe 20 years back, they would have thought of it as building a bridge. Um, in computer science, there's a, there's a meaning of the word build. Uh, and so, you know, sort of m- because of the way people perceive that word, it has different meaning to different people. W- what does it mean to you?

    23. RS

      Hmm.

    24. SP

      Or maybe I can also ask, how do you see a builder thinking or being?

  3. 8:37 – 16:30

    Rajiv’s interpretation of the word ‘Build’

    1. RS

      I think it starts with the... And, you know, maybe I'll take one step back, you know, in terms of how I see the overall philosophy of build, and then I'll come to personally what really excites me or the angle I would go, right? I think today, the world we are in, I think the builder definition has, I would say, expanded. Because at the end of the day, the one genesis of any builder is he or she creates something from nothing, and that something from nothing has some impact on some customer. Some def- you know, definable impact. Now-

    2. SP

      Yeah

    3. RS

      ... I would look at that impact on two scales. One is the depth of impact, in terms of an impact when you say generally means it's positive impact on even one person's life, right? So an individual caregiver is also impacting a particular person in a one person life in a very positive way. So that's also impact, right? So that is also sort of-

    4. SP

      Mm

    5. RS

      ... building service as impact. So one is depth of impact and what value it is. The other is scale of impact, which means that can I build something which does not just, uh, positively impact one person? Can it impact 10 people? Can it impact 100 people? Can it impact a billion people, right? You can also think of scale. Not everything someone builds has to either ve- have very high depth of impact or high scale of impact. It could be any permutation combination of this. It could be low on depth, high on scale. It could be high on sca- uh, you know, low on scale, high on depth. Or the ideal super, uh, utopian version is, it's both high on depth and high on scale.

    6. SP

      So you're of course, talking about this table that you've drawn for me. Uh, I'll just push it towards you, and we'll show it to the, to, to the audience-

    7. RS

      Sure

    8. SP

      ... as a super.

    9. RS

      Right.

    10. SP

      Uh, I see that you've written s- scale-

    11. RS

      Scale

    12. SP

      ... here and depth here.

    13. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    14. SP

      So can you run us through this and-

    15. RS

      Sure

    16. SP

      ... explain it to us?

    17. RS

      Sure.

    18. SP

      Assuming that everybody can see this.

    19. RS

      Okay. So, uh, okay, so, you know, I'll keep it simple just so that, you know, uh, let a framework not obfuscate at w- at least what the message should be.

    20. SP

      Okay.

    21. RS

      I think the, uh, today you can be a builder of content, and you can really spread across a variety of people, right? Because you build content, you build content that's interesting. At the end of it, everything has to have impact to particular human being-

    22. SP

      Yeah

    23. RS

      ... a particular human being. It could be a system also-

    24. SP

      Yeah

    25. RS

      ... but content building is one area where you typically have very high scale-

    26. SP

      Yeah

    27. RS

      ... because digital allows you to do that. The impact of it is not that much. Content you see, you read, you saw, you have some aha at that moment, and then you forget it generally.

    28. SP

      Yeah, you move on.

    29. RS

      You move on, right? So which essentially means content is usually associated with high scale, low depth.

    30. SP

      Mm.

  4. 16:30 – 21:33

    Rajiv’s journey and perspective on Builders

    1. RS

      So I think now is the second hat to that-

    2. SP

      Yeah

    3. RS

      ... right? Which is, how do you really at- you know, sort of go towards being a great builder?

    4. SP

      Yeah.

    5. RS

      I can sort of do a bit of proxy on my own journey-

    6. SP

      Yeah

    7. RS

      ... because I think the-

    8. SP

      That-

    9. RS

      ... that's probably the best, uh, example. And it's not like I knew all this on day one. I'm sort of giving a story today, so it's much easier to sort of look back at things.

    10. SP

      Yeah.

    11. RS

      But I started... I was a quite a nerd back in school, right? The first time I started loving computers was 1994, and literally, you know, 10th standard, uh, when I- just 1993, '94, you know, I had this book on Pascal, and I started coding. Quintessential definition of a nerd.

    12. SP

      Mm.

    13. RS

      Would always be on my computer.

    14. SP

      Yeah.

    15. RS

      And when you see your code coming out as "Hello, World!" on the other side of the screen, it just gave me joy.

    16. SP

      Mm.

    17. RS

      Until then, I was this extremely introverted, you know, Chennai boy, going to school, doing good on studies, playing cricket outside my house, gully cricket in Chennai, and listening to some good music, Tamil music, and movies and comedy. This was the quintessential Tamil, you know, Chennai schoolboy. Now, the moment I started seeing this computer code in 1994, that's when I said: "Okay, I need to just..." I just started loving it. I think for me, the joy actually started at IIT Madras, where I built a version of Carmen Sandiego, the Indianized version of Carmen Sandiego.

    18. SP

      Yeah.

    19. RS

      I had learnt a bunch of coding on the side in IIT, and I put it out in the campus, uh, you know, computer, on the Naval Arc computer. I could see my own classmates and juniors actually play that and really derive a lot of joy. And for me, that was, like, ultimate, right? Not just seeing the "Hello, World!" output in 10th standard or 12th standard, but actually put out something, and seeing people actually use it was just outstanding. That sort of translated into me getting into Infosys. I built the largest personal website in Infosys.

    20. SP

      [chuckles] Before that.

    21. RS

      Yeah.

    22. SP

      You're talking about the game, Where the Hell is Carmen Sandiego?

    23. RS

      That is correct.

    24. SP

      There is a detective, and you have to figure out where he's gone-

    25. RS

      Yes

    26. SP

      ... based on some clues.

    27. RS

      Yes.

    28. SP

      We are on the same page.

    29. RS

      We are on the-

    30. SP

      Okay

  5. 21:33 – 30:06

    The four stages of building a company

    1. RS

      So this is the thing, which is, what I'm saying is, I'm a very consumer guy. I'm not a deep tech guy. I'm not a platform guy, and that's a very personal thing. The exact equivalence of that is, in a deep tech sense, you'll have to imagine that you're going to put that product out, whether that's building a rocket or building an electric scooter or building a motor that's going to be used. You can do all of this within yourself. Now, who is the consumer? Is you have to start thinking of as a consumer, because at the end of the day, you can't maybe put it out in a company. Because if you're building something for enterprise, something where there's a very inherent deep tech thing, where you're going to take years to get-

    2. SP

      Yeah

    3. RS

      ... to a particular technology, you have to imagine yourself as a consumer-

    4. SP

      Yeah

    5. RS

      ... to sort of really, you know, tinker with things, right?

    6. SP

      Yeah.

    7. RS

      And that's a lot to do with anything which is deep tech. You know, anything which is hardcore engineering. I was probably not a great hardcore engineer ever, leave aside naval architect engineer.

    8. SP

      Sure.

    9. RS

      So for me, it was just about seeing impact on consumers. So the ease of that is, you put something out in one day, you can get feedback from someone else.

    10. SP

      Fair enough. I mean, from the art marketing point of view-

    11. RS

      Yes

    12. SP

      ... let's say, an artist may, uh, may be focused on their art mastery and so on.

    13. RS

      Correct.

    14. SP

      But there is a point where you're interacting with someone, that art is creating impact.

    15. RS

      Yes.

    16. SP

      So, you know, you want to put it on a metro station, or you want to put it in an airport-

    17. RS

      Yeah

    18. SP

      ... just see how people are interacting.

    19. RS

      Yeah. And that I would call as even phase minus one. Because at the end of the day, if you're not really great at that, the more very specific it is, like art or music or something even very deep, scientific or technical-

    20. SP

      Mm

    21. RS

      ... you have to have prepared for that. For me, it was putting something out for consumer. It's-

    22. SP

      Yeah

    23. RS

      ... that much easier. I don't have to be a specialist at something, and especially in the early days in 2000 and stuff.

    24. SP

      Yeah.

    25. RS

      Today, if I have to put something for a consumer, the bar is much higher versus 10 years back, versus 20 years back. So I would put that as the phase of preparation, which is literally a minus one stage. I wouldn't even put it into the product stage. But putting out the first version of the product, getting customer feedback, is really phase one-

    26. SP

      Okay

    27. RS

      ... of building, right?

    28. SP

      Fine. Done. Phase two.

    29. RS

      Now, phase two. Okay, so if you now extend this to phase two, what you would look at is you'll have to then build it and now scale it. Now, how do you do that as people? I would call anything and everything that I've learned with actually, specifically the Urban Ladder journey, on just pulling people together. Because at the end of the day, you can never build a great service or a great product without pulling people. Now, as IIT-trained engineers, we are also extreme introverts, and I think somewhere, for me, the whole growth of being just an IC, very smart IC, to actually being a people thing just happened only with Urban Ladder. Because when you're building an organization, and at peak, Urban Ladder had 1,200 people. I was the head of HR, um, as well as, you know, brand and just how do you build culture? How do you build a story? How do you build vision? How do you pull people together? How do you sort of build their careers? How do you performance manage? How do you set goals? Because people have to be aligned in a direction. In that direction, especially if you're growing a super hyper-scale company, you're also going to have failures of people sort of not aligning, friction, all of that stuff.

    30. SP

      I've heard other builders talking about this. You move from org- uh, from product building to org building, uh, kind of mindset shift has to happen.

  6. 30:06 – 42:00

    Mini Masterclass: How to Approach Building a Company

    1. RS

      do you want me to get in this? [laughing]

    2. SP

      [laughing]

    3. RS

      Because I think the, the core of all this is, I think with every passing year, you also get to understand what is it that you want out of your own life.

    4. SP

      Mm.

    5. RS

      From the outside, it feels like, okay, everyone wants to be an A. R. Rahman in music, or everyone wants to be Hrithik Roshan in, let's say, bodybuilding, or Shah Rukh Khan in acting, or an Apple or a Steve Jobs, and that's great.

    6. SP

      Yeah.

    7. RS

      Everyone should have that ambition, and that's how young minds are made, and that's sort of looking forward something from a desired perspective. As you go through life... Now, one thing is, I think, you know, we probably won't have too much data today because AI is still new.... all of these have been sort of short cycle of sorts.

    8. SP

      Yeah.

    9. RS

      You can do a bunch of things much faster-

    10. SP

      Mm

    11. RS

      -than what I did in the last 20 years, right? Because of the whole AI wave, much lesser people, much faster access to capital, blah, blah, blah. Let's keep that out for a bit, because fine, it's gonna- no one is able to fully predict as to the impact of it-

    12. SP

      Yeah

    13. RS

      ... so let's keep that out.

    14. SP

      The 10,000 hours may actually be lesser.

    15. RS

      It might be just way lesser, right?

    16. SP

      Mm.

    17. RS

      Um, if you keep that out, it's a very philosophical point, because at the end of the day, if you're doing content, and if you believe that content is what gives you joy-

    18. SP

      Mm

    19. RS

      ... everything else is great, okay? The biggest, you know, most inspirational founder became everything else also, but might not be for you. You know, and a series of, let's say, successes, failures, if you really have high self-awareness, you know what d- gets the joy for you. Some people get that joy: more funding, higher valuation. But at the end of it, not everything is a success, right? And so when you go through life cycles, the more self-reflective you are, every three years, five years, you start knowing as to what really gives you the joy.

    20. SP

      Yeah.

    21. RS

      Maybe it's not the unicorn valuation.

    22. SP

      Yeah.

    23. RS

      Maybe it's not a million views on your video.

    24. SP

      Yeah.

    25. RS

      Maybe it's not friends talking about you in an alumni reunion.

    26. SP

      Yeah.

    27. RS

      All that is just very momentary. At the core of it, you go back to why you started being a builder.

    28. SP

      Yeah.

    29. RS

      And if you wanna stay true to that, just be true to that. You don't have to do all of the rest of it, because you could still have a product or a service that's impacting one human being, and leave the- live the whole of life.

    30. SP

      Mm.

  7. 42:00 – 49:00

    A walk-through of the Urban Ladder journey

    1. RS

      So-

    2. SP

      You started in-

    3. RS

      We started in 2012. So I, uh, obviously paired up with my classmate from IMB, and we used to... I think pretty much in 2008 to '12, both of us lived in the- were neighbors in, um, in Bangalore. We used to keep meeting up pretty much every weekend for dinner. I was in Yahoo! He was the chief operating officer of Amrita Shergil, the, uh, uh, book house. And he was ex-McKinsey, so he was really into building supply chains and, you know, sort of physical product and services business. I was into digital products with Yahoo!, so and I'd built a bunch of really, uh, interesting products in Yahoo! that gathered a lot of audiences. 2011, September, which is, let's say, 14 years back, um, we sort of- one of those j- you know, car journeys in Indiranagar. We were just going for dinner or something, and we said, "Okay, let's do something; let's start something." I think by then, Yahoo! had sort of made more decks than products, and it was getting to me, and he was also sort of phasing out. I think, uh, Amrita Shergil had been acquired by someone, and so we said, "Let's do something."

    4. SP

      Back when, back when a journey through Indiranagar would-

    5. RS

      Yes, yeah

    6. SP

      ... not be stuck in traffic for-

    7. RS

      ... there was still traffic, it's just that we were not stuck in traffic when we were driving through. And the first idea, finally, was actually grocery.

    8. SP

      Okay.

    9. RS

      Um, actually, not even grocery, it was gourmet food. Uh, the gourmet food, within gourmet, we said, "Let's build a bunch of stuff where you get a kit of a set of products, and you can cook gourmet food in your own house."

    10. SP

      Mm.

    11. RS

      And that was the original idea. We then very quickly realized the market was not great, in terms of it was still a very small market. And somewhere when we said we want to spend the next 10 years, we said, "Market has to be big." We have to be passionate about it-

    12. SP

      Yeah

    13. RS

      ... and the customer need better be real. And one of the... You know, it should be a-

    14. SP

      Mm

    15. RS

      ... an intersection of all three. And that's when we were in that zone. Gourmet became grocery very quickly, because at least market was big, but we were not passionate about doing grocery. And this was before BigBasket and a bunch of others came, right? And so we said, "Okay, grocery," we spent some time in the market, we understood the need, and we just felt not our cup of tea. We were not passionate about it. The same, going back to the Ikigai circles. It would have probably made us a lot of money, but just didn't have passion. Then we circled through multiple ideas-

    16. SP

      Or you could have quit midway.

    17. RS

      I might have quit midway, but we were also still- we were still in jobs, and we were still figuring out, okay, which is the idea that we could marry all three-

    18. SP

      Mm

    19. RS

      ... right? Which is sort of really doing the background work.

    20. SP

      Right.

    21. RS

      That's when, you know, we transferred from one idea to another, from energy to education, to a variety of other stuff, and landed at that home, and really changing the home. Because at that point in time, roti, kapda, makan. Roti and kapda had had a lot of different companies that did a variety of jobs, but really, the inside of the Indian house had not changed. And we said, "Okay, it's time that someone goes, really builds that." We didn't want to build a furniture store or a furniture shop. We said, "Let's do something which is online." Now, it's counter to a lot of things. Market size was zero at that time. No one sold furniture online, 2011, 2012. And we had zero experience on furniture, we had zero experience on home décor, we had zero experience on e-commerce. So we said, "Okay, it seems interesting. It seems the good marriage of the three." Home décor itself was a 20, 25 billion, extremely heavily offline. Big market, completely zero online. Very passionate because you have to innovate. You can't just go build another Flipkart or Amaz- Amazon-

    22. SP

      Okay

    23. RS

      ... because that's not going to just sell furniture.

    24. SP

      Yeah.

    25. RS

      And we felt that the customer need was real. Every single human being that we talked to had had a bad experience putting furniture inside their house.

    26. SP

      Yeah.

    27. RS

      Including our own experience when we were sort of building our houses. So we said, "Great need, big market, passionate about it, let's go build something." That was the genesis of it, and I think we went through all of this ourselves, right? The phases of what is the core product, which is the core physical product, furniture. So we did a variety of sort of selections of that. Went to Jodhpur, picked a bunch of stuff. Then we had to get the right people, because we were building an organization, an institution, that had to scale beyond us, and it has. It's now been seven years since I moved out, it's been three... two years since Ashish moved out. It still exists.

    28. SP

      Yeah.

    29. RS

      And that is the stage four of-

    30. SP

      Happily well.

  8. 49:00 – 54:04

    Rajiv’s approach to building culture at work

    1. RS

      s- to- like many things in life, there is no one right answer. It was important to us. We operated the way that it was. And for us, what is culture, right? In terms of, see-... I think Simon Sinek talks about this really well, right? There is a why at the core of why you build anything or why a company exists, and that's the why. What is the customer? Who is the customer? What's the vision to that customer? That's the why. The how has two components. The how has, what's your values? How are you building the company? And how are you differentiating in the marketplace, which is the strategy, the USP, all of that stuff. So that's sort of the second circle, which is, uh, really living that in action. The third circle is the what. It has a variety of things. What is the product you are putting? What's the KPIs? What's the marketing jargons? What's the set of people? All of that stuff. Now, a lot of companies talk a lot about the what, they forget about the why, and that's when they have existential questions. For us, we were very clear. The why, Urban Ladder vision was making millions of homes beautiful. We believe that if you make the place in which a human being stays beautiful, they will live a much happier, better life every day. The moment that happens, you sort of spread that, and we would, like a broken record, talk about that vision to everyone. Which means that everyone who is coming in understood, and each of those words are extremely important. Making, we're making a home, which means that we are starting from z- build... It's almost like building from scratch. Millions, we were not a designer brand. We wanted to impact millions of homes, so don't do something which is just impacts five people or 100 people. It's home. We didn't call furniture on day one. We said, "It's the whole home," which means that it's far more than just furniture. It could be decor, it could be modular, it could be a variety of other stuff. Beautiful is the core word, which means that anything that you put out there, whether that's a product experience or a physical product or a digital experience, has to the customer say, "Ah, it's beautiful. It's, it's great for me." The moment we put that, on the values front, we were very clear that we were gonna be online first, then offline, which means we were omni-channel the reverse way. We never... Offline, the first store came in our fifth year, and it operated so differently. It won us so many re- uh, physical store awards that year. Uh, right? When essentially it became sort of a paradigm of how a dig- physical store that tied back into online traffic should be. The online experience, when you come to the store, you will not start like a new customer. We will go back to what are the things that you wishlisted, what are the things, and would start from that. So even the offline experience is so tacked to your online experience. So we did a, a lot of O2O at that point in time, and that was very different. But most importantly, the values, what we look for in the people. You could be the smartest person, but if you didn't breathe the values, you can't join Urban Ladder, and that was something that we maintained from day one. Which meant that it was a really close-knit set of people, the first 5,000 people. As I said, some of those have become great founders who have now gotten invested in my venture capital and built on building great companies. But what are those values? We actually had something called CHEFS at that time, which changed to CHASE. Customer obsession. How do you sort of rate customer obsession? Honesty and transparency. Excellence in every small thing we do. Fun as a way of life. Stepping up to create magic. Even during 2016, '17, when we realized that some of those values were being misconstrued, and values also go through change-

    2. SP

      Mm.

    3. RS

      -we sort of changed it to saying that efficiency as well as action bias needs to be important, so we changed it to CHASE. But the whole point of it is: how do you get people in who live those values? How do you assess those values? How do you reward those values? What are the things that you do to make sure that the right set of people stay back, the wrong people leave? All of that stuff is how you make that whole culture in action. Because the behaviours that you live every day is sort of what culture in action is and how a company gets built.

    4. SP

      I'm thinking of what you said earlier about missionary founders and mercenary founders. It sounds like a very missionary way of-

    5. RS

      See, even mercenary founders, at some point in time, have to do all this for a long-lasting organisation. Otherwise, you're gonna have some sort of issues or the other. If you see an organisation as a very transactional, tactical thing to get to a particular outcome, like a unicorn or a M&A or a listing or whatever, yeah, you can do whatever, right? But if you see it as something that has to last beyond you... Because it's gonna change. It's not like... The vision statement today might be very different from what we created, especially after the acquisition, and maybe the culture and the values are a bit different. But that's for the new sort of, quote, unquote, "person who runs it" to decide, right?

    6. SP

      Yeah.

    7. RS

      So I think you will have to go at it, missionary or mercenary, you'll just have to adjust yourself to do all this.

    8. SP

      Yeah. I'm also thinking, uh, from an IIT Madras point of view. We are sitting in CFI, and, uh, uh, I don't know how, uh, it's come to it, but there is a sort of a built culture that's now established among students. They love doing things.

    9. RS

      Yeah.

    10. SP

      A lot of students are doing stuff. Uh, whether they're starting companies or not, I don't know. Compared to others, I don't know, but compared to our times, it's much more. Uh, I want... I, I mean, I know that loosely speaking, IIT Madras has a slogan, I think it's Sudhir Bhavati Karnajay.

    11. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    12. SP

      Um, and I don't know how much that influences everything, or how much of it is just a sort of a legacy that's sort of gained momentum over time-

    13. RS

      Mm.

    14. SP

      ... deep impact of the overall environment and culture of, on the people here.

    15. RS

      Right.

    16. SP

      Um, yeah, I don't know. I, I don't- While you were saying that, I was thinking of-

    17. RS

      No, I think it's

  9. 54:04 – 57:59

    Why IIT Madras is a great environment to build

    1. RS

      phenomenal. As a VC now, if you see the different institutions and just the focus of, uh, engineering and deep tech in India over the next five years, the last five years, IIT Madras has played a phenomenal role. It's, it's just great to see, and it's a very proud moment in terms of what I think the institution has become. I think this is probably the best place for any technology person. If you're in your 12th standard, if you know even in your 12th standard that you're gonna be a builder, you're gonna be an entrepreneur at some point in time, I cannot think in this country of a better institution to join today. Because you get a phenomenal campus, as much as it's in Chennai, not the most favourable city by, you know, compared to a bunch of other cities, but it's with- it's a cocoon within Chennai, and a lot of people probably coming from outside don't realise it. It's really the most beautiful cocoon, which allows you to sort of shape into a butterfly of sorts. It's got... You know, it's a, it's a campus like no other. There is a reason, uh, you know, why so much, uh, so much happens in this campus. It was just the most beautiful campus that I've ever seen. And the moment you have an environment like that, coupled with what the institution is doing, which is creating this centre, or just the focus, the IITM Research Park, the bunch of student initiatives that offers for building-... it is but natural that you don't fall into this whole thing of day-one job. And if you want to do higher studies and stuff, of course, you should go do that.

    2. SP

      Yeah.

    3. RS

      But I would be surprised is, if you don't really want to be a builder right after the, you know, IIT Madras experience. So if any student ever is thinking of right after, uh, 12th standard to come to an institution, I cannot think of a better place to build. And I personally have been-- I don't know exactly fully as to what's happened in the last fifteen years, because I've sort of been a- it's been a ringside view for me. But just the kind of impact, the kind of founders that have come from here, you know, some of these f- guys are very, uh, closely, you know, I've interacted with them-

    4. SP

      Yeah, we just spoke, uh-

    5. RS

      The Tarun and Satish of Medibuddy, and Suyash. And, you know, I think the kind of... Uh, it's not just founders who are strong technical, they have been great storytellers. They have been just great institution builders, culture builders, you know, and you can see the difference in the kind of companies they are building compared to many others.

    6. SP

      Yes.

    7. RS

      So something really has happened, and I would say that the students who are coming in, uh, should absolutely use that benefit.

    8. SP

      That is correct. Tarun occasionally talks about building a company for two hundred years, and I'm like: "What is this?"

    9. RS

      Yeah.

    10. SP

      "Where did this come from?" [chuckles]

    11. RS

      Yeah, absolutely.

    12. SP

      Uh, I just want to tell you that both of us are from Chennai.

    13. RS

      [chuckles]

    14. SP

      So if he spoke about Chennai seat-

    15. RS

      [chuckles]

    16. SP

      ... both of us love the city, both of us are family.

    17. RS

      Oh, I am as Chennai as it gets. I do live in Bangalore for the last eighteen years, but I would still-- Oh, the Chennai ecosystem today is way different and way better. But still, I would think that a lot of your time gets spent in campus, and this campus is probably one of the most beautiful campuses.

    18. SP

      Even the companies who are coming to campus now are probably looking for the builder kind of folks.

    19. RS

      Yeah. It does help your first job. It does help everywhere. It doesn't have to be that you become a founder right after campus. Actually, very few people should become founders right after campus. I would say it's just better to get some experience and really fine-tune and hone some of your skills. And I've seen... You know, so college founder also is an anomaly, right? Not everyone needs to be a Mark Zuckerberg, and everyone has that inspiration, and not everyone can be a Tarun or a, you know, all the other people who started right after campus. But I think a few years of work also help you. You can be a builder after three years, after five years. Some of the best builders, maybe after five, seven years-

    20. SP

      Mm

    21. RS

      ... become the, become founders.

    22. SP

      Yeah. There's some statistic I've read that founders in their forties are-

    23. RS

      Are-

    24. SP

      ... statistically more likely [chuckles]

    25. RS

      ... more likely to build companies. Okay, maybe it's time that I, I become a founder again. [chuckles]

    26. SP

      Um, thank you so much. Uh, this was great. I, I- when I, when I spoke to you first, I really wanted to get a sense of what do people think of build and builders, and so on. And, um, maybe... Yeah, I know it's reunion time for you, and your batch is all over the place. And, um, if, if you look at your batch now-

    27. RS

      Mm-hmm

    28. SP

      ... in retrospect, I know you were in Naval, and you're no longer in Naval Architecture.

    29. RS

      Yes.

    30. SP

      But how has that spread happened? Where have people moved to, and what is the spread of things that people are doing, and-

  10. 57:59 – 1:00:25

    Wrapping Thoughts and Rajiv’s IITM batch

    1. SP

      How many have become builders?

    2. RS

      How many have become builders? I don't know the exact percentage, and maybe we should just do a poll tomorrow when we do the reunion, but, uh, I think it's probably gonna be probably north of seventy percent, uh, right, who are builders. And see, by the way, the other thing I'd also be honest, is you could be a builder within a larger setup.

    3. SP

      Yeah.

    4. RS

      You could be very entrepreneurial. You don't want to take on the risk of building something of your own. That's also absolutely fine.

    5. SP

      Actually, that's the majority, right?

    6. RS

      That's... Today, probably it's fifty-fifty. People who have gone on to do, build their own stuff, I'm saying it's fifty-fifty, or sixty-forty, or something like that, right? It's probably very high, fifty percent or more. And that's great because that essentially means that you have created institutions and things come from no background, like literally nothing. No, no big corporation. But a bunch of the others are also probably builders. Uh, bunch-- See, I think the geographical spread of this batch is also very interesting, different from what is happening today. In our batch, there was probably like eighty, eighty-five percent who went to the US, and today it's probably like twenty, twenty-five, I don't know-

    7. SP

      Yeah

    8. RS

      ... twenty percent. It's literally flipped.

    9. SP

      Exactly.

    10. RS

      It's, it's probably flipped in a twenty-five-year period. And I think a lot of those folks went for their M- MS, and then because the market was pretty bad, some of them continued on to PhD. There was a variety of them who I thought would never do their PhD, went on to do their PhD. And, uh, so a lot of them, actually, right after that, became very deep, I would say, builders in bigger companies, or went the academics route. And today, if you see the mix, probably around seventy percent of the batch has come from outside, uh, of India, right? In terms of even the reunion tomorrow, a hundred people, I would say at least seventy percent are completely outside India. The good part is, some of them, over the last ten, five, ten years, have started coming back to India, you know, either because of personal reasons and/or want to go do something of their own, and that's a good new thing to also see.

    11. SP

      Mm.

    12. RS

      So I would say that a good percentage have been their own builders, and if you just look at builders, even within a larger setup, it's probably ninety/ten.

    13. SP

      Nice. Okay, Rajiv, this was great. Thank you so much. Uh, I don't want to hold you for any longer. I just want to say that if somebody's watching this, and they want to play a drinking game with how many times we said "build,"

    14. RS

      [chuckles]

    15. SP

      go for it!

    16. RS

      [chuckles] No, thanks so much for having me.

    17. SP

      Um, any last thoughts?

    18. RS

      There are, uh... No, I think the- we covered the philosophical thing, also. I actually don't have any other last thoughts. Zilch.

    19. SP

      Great. Both exhausted.

    20. RS

      [chuckles]

    21. SP

      Uh, thank you for watching. Uh, please like, share, subscribe, drop a comment, follow, uh, Antler, follow Rajiv, uh, and follow us. Thank you.

Episode duration: 1:00:30

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