In this podcast with we explore Mayank Khanduja’s journey as an investor at SAIF Partners India. SAIF is among the Tier-1 early stage investors in India, investing across all sectors.

Mayank comes from a family of engineers so getting highest education was the top priority in his family. After completing his engineering from Delhi, Mayank went on to MBA from IIM-Calcutta.

After working 5 years in Technology consulting in McKinsey, Mayank itch to work closely with technology companies brought him to world of early stage investing with SAIF Partners.

Some of the companies at SAIF, Mayank has been involved and invested in, are Sharechat, PropTiger, NoBroker, Playsimple, Treebo, TravelTriangle, Airblack.

Mayank has spent most of the time at seed stage of the companies. SAIF had invested in 2015 in Sharechat. Back then there was no wave of content startups. It was a thesis from SAIF looking at growth of content consumption in China and asked themselves will India get to that stage in 3-4 years. Yes of course it will. And once data and handsets are available to Next Billion Users, which is a big term now. Back then they thought next 200-300 Million users what will they do first. They will like to access some content, some entertainment on their phones. And that was SAIF thesis when they invested in Sharechat there was a new wave of users coming in India and they would like to access some form of entertainment content on their handsets.

In the podcasts Mayank continues to share his insights on:
1. Importance of storytelling in building a large company. Can it be learned or great founders are born with it ?
2. What happen when your competitor in a large market raise tons of money from VC like Softbank ?
3. How to spot the Founders who create 10x – 20x value for their stakeholders ?
4. Key skills for Founders to learn and keep building on ?
5. The current exit scenario in India and some of the SAIF portfolio exits ?
6. Book recommendations by Mayank for founders on scaling and thinking ?
7. What habits Mayank attributes in his success as a Venture Investor ?
8. What is the one most important factor which will have disproportionate impact on the size of outcome you generate ?

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