Develop Your Leadership Style: Lessons From Scaling Teams At Stripe

Brands rarely interact directly with customers in the digital world, making it a challenge to create personalized customer experiences and retain clients. While working at a media company in 2013, Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas, and Suresh Kondamudi, were faced with the same problem. They struggled to find a product that could leverage data to meaningfully engage with customers. To address this gap, they set out to build CleverTap, an all-in-one customer engagement platform that leverages data, analytics, and automation to empower digital brands. In this episode of Moonshot, we speak with CleverTap's Anand and Sunil about what it takes for founders to build products that can adapt to changing markets.

Show notes:

• “What if it works?”: Find a spark to get you started [1:38]
• Adapt your product to changing markets and channels [5:25]
• What “build for the world” actually means [9:36]
• Co-founder dynamics: Give each other space and establish extreme trust [12:32]
• Hire the right people and then let go [16:11]
• Having a good VC-founder relationship [23:02]

Paying for things digitally is now a part of daily life – but this wasn’t always the case. In 2013, long before the reality of cashless payments had become the norm in many parts of India and the world, Amrish Rau co-founded Citrus Pay, an online payment provider built with a mobile-first focus. This was one of many ventures in his two-decades-long journey to pioneer India’s payment ecosystem in the digital age, culminating in his most recent appointment as CEO of Pine Labs. On this episode of Moonshot, Peak XV Managing Director, Shailendra Singh, speaks with Amrish about his early life and how it defined his approach to company-building, his transition from Citrus Pay to Pine Labs, and how building a company with a heart will help a startup as it scales.

Show notes:

• From passbook printer salesman to CEO [4:04]
• Focus on product-market fit and get cheesy [8:36]
• Retiring at 40 and other startup exit myths [15:02]
• The Pine Labs approach to digital payments [21:20]
• “Be nice to everybody” and other advice for startup founders [26:30]
• Stay unsatisfied [29:10]

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are transforming the world of business intelligence and marketing. But before ‘AI’ became a buzzword, it was not easy to convince businesses that the technology could be a game changer for their enterprise. In 2012, Chih-Han Yu launched Appier with a vision to make AI accessible for all. That vision was tough to sell as it was a technology the world had yet to discover. In the years that followed, Appier pivoted many times on its mission to help companies adopt AI and big data to power business decision-making. On this episode of Moonshot, we speak to Appier co-founder and CEO Chih-Han Yu about what it takes to build a global AI-as-a-service company, and how he tapped on his team’s deep technical roots to build a product focused on customer-centricity.

• Introduction [00:31]
• Appier’s first-mover advantage [01:26]
• A race against time to find product-market fit [11:27]
• Developing software prowess in a hardware kingdom [13:55]
• Maintain a learning mindset and tap on the best [16:42]
• Going public: The transition from startup founder to public company CEO [27:00]

The dawn of AI is upon us and Enterprise AI is finally getting its time in the sun. With more people experimenting with the likes of Chat GPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney, companies are also moving swiftly to implement AI tools to help them drive productivity and efficiency. One person who’s been building AI tools for over a decade is Ashwini Asokan. In 2013, she left her job as a designer at Intel and teamed up with her husband, Anand Chandrasekaran, a neuroscientist, to launch Mad Street Den, a computer vision and artificial intelligence company. On this episode of Moonshot, we chat with Ashwini about the current state of Enterprise AI, how Mad Street Den is setting itself apart from its competitors, and what it takes to build a global artificial intelligence company out of India.

• Introduction [00:30]
• Consumer AI vs Enterprise AI [03:26]
• Different industries have the same data problems [09:55]
• AI automation: Freeing you up to do “the job you should have been doing in the first place.” [13:58]
• Entering the era of Enterprise AI [22:44]
• Do you need to raise a ton of capital to get into Artificial Intelligence? [26:59]
• Raising the next generation to be AI native [31:03]

“The best leaders and founders I’ve worked with have the ability to have conviction about a vision and an opinion, but also the ability to open up the decision or the moment and say, ‘OK, is there something I'm not thinking about?’ or ‘What could I have done differently?’” Claire Hughes Johnson draws on her experience leading and managing teams at Google and Stripe, and reflects on all things people management on this episode of Moonshot. Delving into insights published in her book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, Claire discusses the difference between leadership and management, how to build trust and set expectations with early hires, and how startup founders can effectively give and receive feedback.

Show notes:

• The four operating principles of leaders and managers [03:34]
• Seek feedback: “What could I have done differently?” [12:19]
• How self-awareness helps you receive feedback [15:43]
• Scaling: “Repeatedly being able to do something incredibly well.” [25:29]
• Play to your strengths when developing your leadership style [33:16]
• Build trust and set expectations with early leadership hires [35:21]

Launching a new software product and successfully driving user adoption and retention is a challenge for many startups. According to sales engagement platform Vymo’s co-founder and CEO Yamini Bhat, the secret is to ‘go live’ quickly and show users their return on investment. On this episode of Moonshot, we take a peek into Vymo’s playbook to learn about some of the key product and sales design choices the startup’s team made to attract and retain users across large enterprise customers.

Show Notes:

• The problem statement thesis: “Sellers hate any tool that is given to them.” [6:30]
• Use the challenger sales approach to build credibility [11:33]
• Narrow your focus: Look for indicators to hone in on a specific market [18:29]
• Take a DIY approach and allow for the customization of your product [22:39]
• Adapt to different cultures when launching your product internationally [30:04]
• “Why not the US?: Weighing up which market to break into first [36:38]
• Communicate the magic of your product and ‘go live’ quickly [39:24]

"If you are deciding everything, then you are limited by your own speed". That’s a belief Groww co-founder and CEO, Lalit Keshre, keeps front and center as he and his co-founders scale the investment platform. Keshre believes that by having a decentralized structure, team members are empowered to make quicker decisions around products. On this episode of Moonshot, we chat with Lalit Keshre and Ashish Agrawal, Managing Director at Sequoia India, about key design choices Groww made to take on a market with strong incumbents.

Show Notes:

• Financial services is a basic human need [01:16]
• When engineering and finance converge [05:20]
• Set up a decentralized structure and empower your teams to make quicker decisions [14:03]
• Taking a pull-driven approach to building an investment platform [18:12]
• Bake customer-centricity into every product decision [ 21:44]
• Don’t sell, educate instead [23:43]
• Pursue long-term success over short-term gains [26:04]
• Attract talent by offering purpose, autonomy, and growth [28:16]
• Trust in your own convictions [30:35]

India's manufacturing sector, which contributes 18% of the country’s GDP, is on the cusp of change. This highly labor intensive sector, which is plagued with logistical and technical issues, is undergoing a transformation as workers upskill and companies start to digitize their processes to improve efficiency. In 2018, Amrit Acharya, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Vishal Chaudhary, and Rahul Sharma launched Zetwerk, a B2B manufacturing network that offers companies manufacturing solutions across a wide variety of products. On this episode of Moonshot, we speak with Amrit Acharya, Co-Founder and CEO of Zetwerk and Shailesh Lakhani, Managing Director at Sequoia India, about how the startup is taking a bold bet to bring a centuries-old industry into the digital age.

Show Notes: 

• Fall in love with unsolved problems (5:40)
• “We built exactly what you wanted.”: The challenges of selling software in India (9:40)
• The answer to how you pivot your startup lies in user behavior (11:15)
• Taking on a centuries-old industry (16:28)
• Finding opportunity in adversity (20:24)
• Taking a software approach to building hardware (among other things) (23:39)
• Running an international business without an overseas footprint (27:30)
• “Done is better than perfect.” (29:30)
• Showcasing India’s manufacturing potential (33:28)
• Paying it forward with Zetwerk Build (34:34)

In 2017, a group of hackers in India figured out a way to get the best prices on cryptocurrencies at any point in time by aggregating data from all the crypto exchanges. That was the origin of CoinSwitch, a startup with a mission to ‘make money equal for all’. The platform gained traction, went through a few pivots and soon became one of India’s largest cryptocurrency trading apps. On this episode of Moonshot, we chat with CoinSwitch co-founder and CEO Ashish Singhal and Sequoia India Managing Director Shailesh Lakhani about how the startup is taking crypto to the masses by differentiating itself from its competitors, educating users, and tracking user gains to improve their product.

Show Notes:

• Start by solving a problem that you’ve encountered (1:36)
• If mom can use it: The CoinSwitch differentiator [06:03]
• Build user confidence: Educate them on how to use your product (9:10)
• Go-to-Market strategy: Web3 vs Web2 (12:11)
• Bear markets make you work harder for your users (14:52)
• Track user gains to improve your product (17:23)
• Be frugal, be focused (20:08)
• Know that there’s a right time for your idea (23:05)
• Give yourself two chances at success (28:15)

"We need to do the hardest thing. If you choose the easy things to do, many people choose that way. That route is very crowded." It’s this mindset that propelled Hugh Yao to grow LingoAce into a global startup with a team of over 4,500 teachers. The EdTech platform, which was launched in 2017, started out offering Chinese language courses for kids that used gamification to make learning fun. In 2022, the platform rolled out its English program in just three months – something Hugh credits to hiring and acquiring teams quickly. On this episode of Moonshot, LingoAce founder Hugh Yao chats with Sequoia India & Southeast Asia Managing Director Abheek Anand about how he saw opportunity in tough times, what it takes to hire moonshot talent, and how the LingoAce team rolled out its English program in such a short span of time.

Show Notes:

• Differentiate yourself: Choose the hardest way to build a global company (08:00)
• Be ambitious about hiring moonshot talent (10:50)
• Hire and build out teams quickly (16:04)
• A good hire accelerates everything (17:44)
• Focus on what you can control (21:36)