S4 E0 | Blume Podcast Season 4 Kickoff: The Story Behind “Destiny Avenged

[00:00:00] Karthik Reddy: What the entrepreneur dreams about every night before going to sleep, which is, is this my calling? Is this my destiny? And have I done it justice? We see Blume companies on the verge of being profitable, going public, somebody in the street will own a piece of their stock. So, it feels like that destiny is finally getting avenged from stories that were started with literally a $100,000 or $200,000 or $500,000 a decade ago.

It’s a nod to Marvel Comic Universe kind of pop culture. When you use the word ​“Avenged” anywhere, it’s a very strong word. We’re always a little tired of hearing, ​“Oh, there’s XYZ company in some corner of the western hemisphere that can do better. I think it’s time for us to say that we can be the world’s best.

People would’ve said, ​“Hey, this is not for India,” or ​“This is not for anybody but a large conglomerate.” So, whether we have Sula or whether we have Razorpay, or whether we have Ather. But here, these guys proved everyone wrong. ​“Nothing comes easy” is when the line becomes punchier and you feel like you’re avenging something finally, after all the toil.

[00:01:08] Elton: So, Karthik, every season starts with a gut level hunch. What was bubbling inside you that crystallized into the phrase Destiny. Avenged? 

[00:01:17] Karthik Reddy: So, as you know this is Blume tradition every year. We have a t‑shirt at Blume Day. The caption has to be punchy enough that somebody young wants to wear it. So, the catchphrase is always from there.

And then if you double click on it, there’s always a semblance of both in our autobiographical and a biographical element to Blume and its portfolio companies.

So, what do I mean by that? Essentially, I think this is our proxy for storytelling, what we would like to see inside of Blume and its portfolio companies, but we don’t want to talk yet about that until they’ve actually arrived. So, we look in the ecosystem and say, who exemplifies these qualities? Who exemplifies this tagline, the story tell, the best? And we go and look for those stories so that we can inspire another generation of entrepreneurs.

So, of course, it’s a sort of a nod to Marvel Comic Universe kind of pop culture, when you use the word ​“Avenged” anywhere. It’s a very strong word. It got some resistance from people I ran the tagline to. It feels like punchy. It has a little bit of a negativity.

But then when you attach it to something like ​“destiny,” essentially, it’s what the entrepreneur dreams about every night before going to sleep, which is, is this my calling? Is this my destiny? And have I done it justice? Have I actually delivered to the promise of what my destiny or my fate line suggested to me when I started this journey?

And I think that was the sense behind the caption. And if you go and interview any of our founders or if you ask any of the partners at Blume, I think that’s the emotion we sleep with every night.

[00:02:59] Elton: So, last year was about ​“Winning Beyond Boundaries”, a tail of tailwinds and global winds. How is this year’s mood different? 

[00:03:08] Karthik Reddy: See, I think last year, we wanted to showcase that India’s time on the planet, on the globe from a startup lens was beginning to become more prominent. And I think we’re always a little tired of hearing, ​“Oh, there’s XYZ company in some corner of the western hemisphere that can do better.”

I think it’s time for us to say that we can be the world’s best. So, as you know, we highlighted a couple of phenomenal global sports stories from India, and then a lot of business stories around how some of the best in class in the world have been built from India, whether it was the Tatas or Indigo or even, startups that were actually building cross border like FreshWorks.

This year, I think the importance was shifting a little bit more towards the idea of totally unthinkable stories in the Indian context, like almost one of a kind in terms of the categories that they were building into where people like probably wrote them off even before they started and they said, this guy’s crazy.

There’s no way a company like this can be built. And then, we don’t know all of the stories. So, I want the founders to talk about their journeys and becomes very important to highlight. What was the starting point? Did it feel like they were chasing their destiny? Did they feel like they were building something which was first of its kind, the leader in its generation of such companies in this country, and I want to double click on that.

So, whether we have Sula or whether we have Razorpay, or whether we have Ather, these are the early shoots of what that we’ve planned in the season. You can see that they exemplify these elements.

People would’ve said, ​“Hey, this is not for India”, or ​“This is not for anybody but a large conglomerate.” But here, these guys proved everyone wrong and actually built out some of the most category defining businesses in the country. 

[00:05:00] Elton: So, building up on this, rejection, near failure and doubt, can you give us one moment from the last 12 months that proved that this was the storyline that founders needed to hear?

[00:05:11] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, so we are always reminded of this. If you ask any VC on their own personal journeys, it’s much tougher to dramatize that because it is a smaller… it’s always an aggregation of many stories. So, I can’t ever feel what the founder-founder is feeling in their business.

But when you look at the Blume portfolio itself, there are many stories that continue to remind you of that. And so usually when we go around the table and ask for themes for the next year’s Blume Day, it has to be something that resonates from a year of buildup or two years of bubbling up possibly. So, it’s a slow bubbling up off that emotion, and it feels like, I’ll tell you where it’s coming from.

I think it’s coming from the fact that finally we see Blume companies on the verge of being profitable, going public, somebody in the street will own a piece of their stock. So, it feels like that destiny is finally getting avenged from stories that were started with literally $100,000 or $200,000 or $500,000 a decade ago.

So, it definitely comes from the first two cohorts of what Blume built in Fund I and Fund II, how arduous those parts were, how long it took. Each one of them as decade long stories.

And I think when you go through that entire decade, nothing comes easy, is when the line becomes punchier and you feel like you’re avenging something finally after all the toil. 

[00:06:36] Elton: And you met hundreds of founders over the years, what separates the ones who claw back from the brink and from those who quietly fade? In our own portfolio, we have seen examples like IDfy, Niqo, Pixxel, etc.

[00:06:49] Karthik Reddy: So, firstly, I think, to qualify for that, commemoration, I think, you have to put in at least a decade. So, if you haven’t put a decade, I wouldn’t say you’ve toiled long enough to survive and see the right, the end of the tail. So, companies that haven’t, I’m not saying you haven’t achieved enough, but I think the true test is when you surpass those, sort of big milestones in terms of age and scale, etc.

Also, underlying that is founder journeys and whether you’ve built together, you’ve stayed together. And when you ask me what keeps the best companies going, I usually think it is a mix of very difficult for a single founder to pull it off all by themselves. Usually the single founders, pick up a fantastic team or a set of co-investors and believers who give them that resilience over a 10-year period.

Otherwise, usually you’ll find a two or three co-founder member team that actually has pulled each one of themselves out of those ruts in that entire journey. And even one level meta above that, I think what we sense is that, the best founders are super, super, sort of, driven by what originally motivated them in terms of the problem solve, right? So, fundamentally, did they think this can be game changing?

Can this solve for something that was, can catapult their customer base or the country or a particular target group into a different orbit? Not that there won’t be 10 copycats behind them, but they should feel that every day. I think, in the darkest, deepest doubts, when you have those darkest moments, what actually pulls you back is the mission that you originally started with.

I think mission is underrated. It’s what keeps the best founders going. 

[00:08:42] Elton: And how did you choose the mix of guests this year to ensure listeners hear new kinds of scars across sectors, stages, and backgrounds? 

[00:08:52] Karthik Reddy: No, the entrepreneurial journeys are, there are common themes, right? So, while we give it a new tagline every year, there will be commonalities. A lot of our season 1, 2, 3 guests could have very well fitted into this theme, right? And vice versa.

So, it’s not a hard line. The theme inspires, going and looking for such guests and seeing whether it gels and fits with the phrase that you came up with.

But fundamentally, I think the early picks that I’m sensing is founders were either building in a category that nobody believed you can actually build a credible business or they were written off or not believed just because of their age or where they were in the market back then or where India was at that point or probably that India has no chance on the global stage.

So, it is a mix of those. So, we are halfway through in our selection of guests, and this seems to be the common theme. I won’t be surprised if the second half actually has a similar mix of guests. 

[00:10:02] Elton: Awesome. Where do you hope the ecosystem will be when we record episode zero five years from now, if founders truly internalize these stories?

[00:10:13] Karthik Reddy: So, I’ve maintained that like India is a novel startup market. Yes, of course, we get inspired and copy from whether the US, whether it’s China in different phases, there’s a lot of stories of inspiration, but it’s a very different market. And therefore, I’ve maintained that there is a certain sanctity of building in India, which can’t be simply borrowed from the west.

So, yes, we should celebrate the risk of failure, enterprise, startups, innovation, but also not recklessly. And I think what we are trying to do with each of these seasons is if you see almost by default, most of these founders have built for a decade or more, right?

And so if you’re looking back from 2030 at season four and saying, we’re shooting season nine, I think the ecosystem will be littered with phenomenal stories of decade plus public companies built from scratch.

And I think it’ll be a true testament to what we built as a startup ecosystem over 20, 25 years at that point that we are able to build businesses from scratch with folks who did not come from a business background or families, rode against the odds and built well. It’s not about celebrating, ​“Oh, we had 10,000 or a 100,000 startups” and they blew up. Yeah, we get that.

You need the top of the funnel, but we need more role models at the bottom of the funnel and who actually stand the test of time. And it doesn’t matter… as one of our guests said, ​“it doesn’t matter whether they’re around or not, they built something that outlives them.”

And we’ve said that in the past where, the founders should outlive the investors and the company should outlive the founders. And I think we’ll be rich with far more examples of that come 2030.

And by 2040, you will have 40, 50 such companies and you will be writing startup history in India and it would’ve been scripted over 30 years at that point. But 2030, I feel we should have a lot more of these folks we’re interviewing today looking like the best role models Indians startup ecosystem could have generated over the last 20 years.