Sajith Pai
Writings on VC, Tech & Culture
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Tokeni$eMe

December 23, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: Crypto, Startups, Venture Capital

(This is a fictional news report. Nothing mentioned here happened. There are some real names here, but none of them said or did what is reported. Think of it as a fictional ‘postcard’ or news report from the future.)

Tokeni$eMe, a ‘controversial’ people funding play, becomes fastest-growing ‘decacorn’ after Tiger-led ‘round’.

10th December ‘23 / techcrunch.com / Sarah Hegarty

Danny Chu, Asawari Kini and Noam Levine founded DAO Tokeni$eMe to …

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Shower Thoughts

December 21, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 2 Comments Tags: Hiring, Startups

A frequent conversation topic that comes up with founders is that of individual employee performance. Once a company nears Series A, team size crosses 30 — I haven’t heard of too many Indian companies with low team counts (this is a topic for another post!) – and invariably the founder’s attention is drawn to managing employee performance or the impact of this. Almost every month or two, someone is being …

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The Congruent Square

November 26, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: product market fit, Startups

Of late, I have been thinking of a concept I call the Congruent Square (or Rhombus for the math-purist) to better explain to founders why some of them are struggling with hitting product market fit (PMF).

Defining the Congruent Square

Congruent Square says there has be a broad alignment / congruency in the product you are taking to market, the team that is taking it there, the consumers / market …

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Defining ‘Product-Market Fit’

November 11, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: product market fit, Startups, Venture Capital

Two discussions, one with a founder, and another with an experienced operator, both around the definition of product-market fit (PMF) encouraged me to write this post.

Product-market fit (hereafter PMF) is seen variously as the ‘holy grail’ for startups (Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund) to the ‘only thing that matters (Marc Andreessen) to ““arguably the most critical milestone for a startup” (Jill Soley & Todd Wilms, …

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Down the ‘product-market fit’ rabbit hole!

November 3, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: product market fit, Startups

An innocent google query around the origins of the term ‘product-market fit’ sent me down the internet rabbit hole a few nights back.

‘Product-market fit’ (or PMF hereafter) is a seminal concept in startupland. It is considered as a turning point in the life journey of every successful startup, and not being able to achieve PMF is considered the leading cause of failure (see here and here).

The term …

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VCs making fun of VCs, and what it says about VC.

September 26, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: Founders, Startups, Venture Capital

A twitter theme I have noticed of late in Valley VC tweets is the self-deprecating VC tweet, where VCs make fun of themselves, for wearing Patagonia vests (!), or spouting philosophy, or the way they interact with founders.

Take these two tweets. 

when a vc pitches their value add and then you ask them to actually help with something pic.twitter.com/PNHvC56b3Q

— Turner Novak 🍌🧢 (@TurnerNovak) September 11, 2021

When you’re

…

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Nailing Capital v Scaling Capital

July 31, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 1 Comment Tags: Startups, Venture Capital

Thoughts and reflections inspired by the frenzied pace of investing and dealmaking we are seeing in the early stage in India, and specifically the trend of traditionally later stage investors playing early.

Two, or maybe three types of capital

All money in venture capital is not similar. We can distinguish between

  • Nailing Capital: money required to get you to nail your product proposition + GTM (Go To Market) approach and
…

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‘In-N-Out Burger’: A Book Review

June 27, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews No Comments

I read a 2009 book by journalist Stacy Perman on cult burger brand In-N-Out Burger. It is an enjoyable read. I shared a brief review of the book + what I found interesting from the book on LinkedIn as an article and Twitter as a tweet thread. I broadly lump what I find interesting into three buckets – car commerce, food tech and finally, franchising as the accompanying …

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What startups can learn from India’s fastest growing edtech startup, Classplus

June 27, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: Edtech, Startups

One of the startups I lead, and manage, Classplus, has been on fire of late. It is seeing a lot of customer and investor love. I wrote out a tweet thread, to explain, their secret sauce; at the heart of which is an obsession with customer feedback, and ensuring everyone in the company is continuously talking to customers. Later, as the tweet got popular, I converted the thread into …

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Unbundling Humans, or, Unbundling Human Creation

June 13, 2021 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 1 Comment Tags: Fertility, Startups, Unbundling

“There are two ways to make money in business: You can unbundle, or you can bundle.” – Jim Barksdale, cofounder of Netscape

As frameworks for identifying opportunities in startupland go, unbundling / (re)bundling is amongst the most seminal ones out there. Here is an example of how it works.

Visualize a product that helps you read (for a fee) any magazine / newspaper story – effectively you have unbundled or …

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Recent Posts

  • The Three (or More) Products Founders Have to Keep in Mind
  • PMF Convo #6 – Asad Khan, LambdaTest
  • PMF Convo #5 – Pulkit Agrawal, Chameleon
  • PMF Convo #4 – Nishchay A G, Jar
  • PMF Convo #3 – Sheel Mohnot, Better Tomorrow Ventures

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