Zero to Infinity

Between overprotective term sheets and oversimplified ones lies the real market. On this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Avnish Bajaj and Tarun Davda, are joined by Archana Rajaram to weigh in on one of the most misunderstood parts of startup building: the term sheet. As the founder of River Law (formerly Rajaram Legal), Archana’s work has quietly shaped the “market standards” that nearly every Indian SHA now follows. In this episode, they break down the real-world changes in Indian term sheets post-2021: from liquidation preferences and reverse vesting to governance, exits, board control, and how AI is already reshaping negotiations. The way a founder negotiates a term sheet often foreshadows how they’ll build their company, handle conflict, and navigate hard decisions later. Tune in for a rare inside look at venture’s most misunderstood document 01:23 Introduction to the Z47 podcast 02:52 Handshake deals to hyper-detailed clauses: how India’s term sheets have evolved 05:55 Why written guardrails matter, even in trust-based relationships? 08:48 Between one-pagers and legal novels lies the real market standard 10:38 Founders lose leverage the moment they sign without counsel 12:42 What founders miss at incorporation, they pay for at IPO 16:20 You can’t switch from founder-led to board-led overnight 28:02 In India, governance runs through SHAs, not boards 34:07 Every founder’s dilemma: what terms really matter in your term sheet? 37:39 Event of Default: India’s most controversial term and why it exists 49:49 How you negotiate your first term sheet predicts how you’ll scale 59:57 AI may change diligence, but judgment still writes the rules For more insights, revisit the related Z47 episode:   • The Terms of Term Sheets    • Hard clauses in a term sheet    • From (Z)omato to (A)ther: India’s Tech IPO...  Article:   / calculating-liquidation-preference  Follow us on: Website: https://www.z47.com/ LinkedIn:   / z47-vc  X: https://x.com/z47_vc Instagram:   / z47.vc  

In this episode of Zero to Infinity, Rajat Agarwal and Chandrasekhar Venugopal sit down with Vivek Sinha, second-time founder and CEO of Emversity, to unpack one of India’s most urgent and least-discussed problems: 👉 Why are millions of young Indians still unemployable after 16 years of education? 👉 What will it take to build a truly job-ready workforce? 👉 And why might the biggest opportunity in education lie in the “grey-collar” economy, not tech or test prep? Vivek takes us deep into the realities of India’s higher education system, the failure of legacy institutes to prepare students for real-world roles, and the massive talent gaps in healthcare, hospitality, construction, and manufacturing. He also breaks down Emversity’s groundbreaking model: On-the-job learning (not online, not offline) Industry-backwards curriculum co-designed with employers Earn-while-you-learn degrees that effectively cost students ₹0 VR simulation labs and real-world skill training 50%+ organic student acquisition driven purely by outcomes If you care about India’s future workforce, social mobility, or building meaningful businesses at scale, this conversation is a must-watch. 01:47 - Introduction to the Z47 Podcast 02:52 - What really happened to India’s EdTech boom? 03:25 - The three faces of EdTech: daycare, test prep & higher education 06:24 - Intent and Outcomes:  the two pillars of real education 10:51 - From disruption to discipline: building an education business that lasts 15:47 - Emversity’s goal: make every student employable, not just enrolled 18:59 - Bridging academia and industry through tech + training 22:43 - Why Emversity bets on India’s grey-collar workforce 27:55 - Earn while you learn: the zero-cost degree model 31:24 - Tech-enabled, execution-driven: how Emversity scales smart 37:27 - The long road ahead: can Emversity educate a million students 40:30 - Changing lives, one job at a time 42:00 - Building India’s next-gen education infrastructure Follow us on: Website www.z47.com/ LinkedIn www.linkdin.com/company/z47-vc/ Twitter: https://x.com/z47_cv Instagram: www.instagram.com/z47.vc/

70% of enterprise AI projects never reach production. The solution: Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). In this episode, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Rocketlane CEO, Srikrishnan Ganesan unpack the rise of the FDE model, from Palantir’s origins to how AI companies use it today to bridge the gap between prototypes and production. They discuss why traditional SaaS orgs break in AI, the governance needed to scale FDE teams, and why India is emerging as the global engine room for AI deployment. A crisp breakdown of the role shaping the future of enterprise AI. Chapters  00:01:29 -  Introduction to the Z47 podcast  00:04:16 - The 70% problem: Why enterprise AI fails to scale 00:05:25 - The origin story: Inside Palantir, where it all began 00:12:43 - Evolving from deployment to GTM engine 00:14:23 - The Vision Selling era: from POCs to production ROI 00:17:09 - What does a great FDE motion look like? 00:18:59 - Building with FDE DNA: How Rocketlane practices what it preaches 00:24:06 - Product, success, or stand-alone: Where should FDEs sit? 00:26:22 - Scaling the FDE model: from speed to structured governance 00:33:38 - Pairing on-site FDEs with India’s 24×7 talent engine 00:34:21 - AI adoption as India’s next big export 00:37:49 - FDEs: The human bridge between AI promise and delivery  

From a small apartment in Bengaluru to powering over 2 billion users across 60+ countries, MoEngage is one of India’s most quietly global success stories. This is more than a startup story — it’s a story about India’s rise as a product nation, and the founders who are reimagining how the world engages with technology. Raviteja Dodda, Narasimha Reddy and Yashwanth Kumar built a world-class customer engagement platform out of India — long before “SaaS for the world” became a buzzword. We trace MoEngage’s journey through its toughest pivots, its cultural DNA, and the product decisions that made it indispensable to brands like Airtel, Ola, Nestlé, and Samsung. In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, MoEngage co-founders Raviteja Dodda & Narasimha Reddy join Tarun Davda & Pranay Desai of Z47. In a wide-ranging chat, they discuss the MoEngage journey - from initial failures to serving over 2Bn users. 

756 of 1,009 rows displayed Submarine parts. Metro casings. Agricultural harvesters. Even bombshell casings for the defence sector. In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Ximkart founder explore how solving the “thinking loop” first makes it possible to deliver parts for any industry, anywhere. Once the right inputs hit the execution loop, size, sector, and material become irrelevant, it’s all just precision manufacturing at scale.

The US innovates. China industrializes. Can India deploy at scale and claim its right to win in AI? India’s edge has always been its people: engineers, data, and scale. But as LLMs automate language and logic, can that advantage still hold? In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Chandrashekhar Venugopal speaks with Avnish Bajaj and Vikram Vaidyanathan about India’s crossroads in the AI race and what will define the country’s next decade. The trio unpacks: The rise of Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs): India’s secret weapon in AI deployment How data, assurance, and governance could become India’s strongest moat Why AI might finally flip India from back office to frontline How voice and vernacular interfaces could erase the digital divide And what government, investors, and founders must do to spark India’s inference leap With Aadhaar, UPI, and consent layers powering population-scale systems, India has the infrastructure and now the opportunity to lead the world by deploying intelligence at scale.

In the near future, less than 10% of access will come from humans, the rest will be agents? What happens when your next user isn’t human? In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Pranay Desai sits down with Satya Devarakonda and Ravi Madabhushi, founders of ScaleKit, to decode a fundamental shift in software: the rise of agents as first-class users. Humans log in and out with predictable patterns. Agents are transient, transactional, and unpredictable, hitting systems hundreds of times a minute. ScaleKit’s modular approach is built for this new reality, where AI agents, not humans, dominate usage. Satya and Ravi bring rare scar tissue and foresight. From PipeMog in 2013, to FreshID at Freshworks, to now ScaleKit, they’ve spent a decade solving identity and access at scale, and are rethinking it for an agent-first world. The duo also shares what it means to build again as second-time founders: why distribution matters more than product, what they’ve unlearned from Freshworks, and how agents are evolving from assistants into colleagues who accelerate productivity.

Dive deep into the transformative power of AI in India’s consumer app landscape. In this episode of Zero to Infinity, Avnish Bajaj, Chandrasekhar Venugopal aka CV, and Kishan Kashyap break down:  ✅ Why ChatGPT is AI’s MS‑DOS moment and what comes after  ✅ How token costs dropped 1000x in a year (and why Sam Altman calls it the “new Moore’s Law”)  ✅ The Disruptor–Digitizer–Enabler framework for founders building in consumer tech  ✅ Why QuickCommerce for “X” (fashion, pharma, events & more) is the next frontier  ✅ And why India’s rails: UPI, Aadhaar, WhatsApp—mean everything is aligned for founders After tracing India’s growing consumer instinct in Part 1, this segment explores what happens when that intuition meets AI and what gets reimagined when UX, infra, and distribution evolve together, not sequentially. Whether you’re an early‑stage founder, an operator, or just AI‑curious, this conversation will spark ideas on what to build next.

Most startup journeys are told in hindsight, GreyLabs AI’s told in the middle of figuring things out. In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, the founding team of GreyLabs AI reflect on what building actually looked like in year one: navigating a cofounder exit, cash running out, COVID hitting collections, and a work culture being built reactively. This conversation with co-founder Aman Goel is about what startup life feels like before structure, where ESOPs are misunderstood, leave policies don’t exist, and the only way to build trust with enterprise clients is to keep showing up. What started as a speech analytics platform for BFSI quickly turned into something more: a layer that could coach agents, surface cross-sell opportunities, and turn raw call data into revenue. But the real build wasn’t technical, it was emotional. GreyLabs was built without funding, a co-founder or a roadmap. Just presence, product sense, and a willingness to stay in the room longer than expected. Inside the team, hiring moved fast and policy came later. Hiring was led by instinct, and culture was shaped by how the team responded to mistakes, not how they talked about values. Who gets ESOPs? When do you make a leave policy? How do you scale trust without layers of management? When COVID hit: collections slowed down and revenue dried up, but even without clarity on survival, the team promised zero layoffs, and that appraisals happen. Because sometimes, the strongest signal a startup can send isn’t product, it’s how it shows up for its people. Why sustainable startups start with sustainable founders, only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

We’re not seeing enough entrepreneurship in India, not for lack of talent, but because most founders haven’t yet internalized how quickly India’s consumption story is shifting. As GDP curves bend upward and new behavior patterns emerge across services, spending, and aspirations, in this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Kishan Kashyap, joined by Avnish Bajaj & Chandrasekhar Venugopal, maps out the biggest trendlines shaping consumer India through the next decade. From rising discretionary income to evolving expectations around access, quality, and convenience, the Z47 team makes a case for how premiumization is no longer about luxury but about discernment, service, and experience. How full-stack brands are winning not by controlling supply, but by owning end-to-end experience and why India’s microtransaction economy is quietly creating massive consumer surplus in places few are watching. Tune-in

India’s largest creditworthy segment remains invisible to the lending ecosystem, not because of a credit problem, but because of a design problem. When every lender chased the top tier or flooded the informal market, Finnable saw an opportunity to build for the 60–70% in between: salaried, PF-backed Indians earning ₹15–40K a month. Join co-founders Amit Arora and Nitin Gupta on the Z47 podcast as they trace their vision behind building a full-stack, risk-first, and collections-led lending engine—designed to scale, but built customer-backward. The duo, in conversation with the Z47 team, reflect on the decisions that shaped the company: from making collections the third hire, to designing 200+ fraud algorithms rooted in field intelligence. Understand why their model went against the industry wave, offering longer-tenure, higher-ticket loans designed for credit discipline and repeatability. When COVID hit, their customers didn’t default. They returned. That resilience validated the model across cycles, powering a ₹3,000 crore book & pointing to a lending business quietly built for public markets. Listen to the latest #ZeroToInfinity podcast on building lending systems that stay with the customer.

India will see 100 tech IPOs by 2030. While Silicon Valley still waits for $5B+ exits, Indian founders are going public earlier - at $600 million. Why? Because market receptivity has fundamentally shifted. The buyers want this asset class. On the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Avnish Bajaj and Rajinder Balaraman define what it actually takes to go public in India today. Through the lens of four distinct IPO waves, the duo traces how market expectations have evolved — from the early public-market pioneers, to the pricing missteps of 2021, and into a new phase where predictability and return on capital lead the way. The team argues that IPOs are no longer about valuation peaks but about narrative control, access to permanent capital, and owning the category early. For founders, that means shifting how companies are built, instead of chasing scale at any cost to designing for profitability, pricing discipline, and long-term market trust from the outset. This conversation unpacks the why, when, where, how of IPOs and the thresholds that separate companies that list from those that last. The team reframes the “To IPO or not to IPO” debate into a first-principles question for founders: Are you building with the intent to go public? India may be heading toward its own Nasdaq moment -  the first 100 tech companies that go public will reshape how founders raise, grow, and exit.  See why India's IPO math has permanently changed and what it means to be IPO-ready in India only on the latest episode of the Z47 podcast.

The next 30 global SpaceTech giants will be built and 10 could come from India. But DeepTech is clunky, Series A is brutal & government still writes 70% of the cheques. So what makes a SpaceTech startup VC-backable and what makes one global? That's where the duo of Anurag Srivastava & Sudipto Sannigrahi from the Z47 team map out the government to private inflection point, opportunity, the reality, and the path forward for India’s SpaceTech ecosystem. This episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast isn’t about rockets but what comes after launch. ISRO gives us the talent & India gives us the cost advantage but enduring companies will be built by founders who design customer-backward, know how to navigate Series A, and solve with insight — not just technology. The conversation reframes spacetech as a build-now opportunity, backed by sovereign demand, frugal innovation DNA from ISRO, and a rare cost advantage in the global supply chain. Their top-down analysis covers application-specific payloads, downstream applications like earth observation as a go-to-market wedge to building full-stack solutions for vertical use cases, asking what it really means to build full-stack, export-ready, insight-led space businesses. Learn how India’s frugal edge is powering global SpaceTech, only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

How do India’s top founders actually think through a P&L?  This special episode of #ZeroToInfinity podcast takes you inside Z47’s experimental panel event with India’s leading consumer founders, including voices from Mamaearth, Urban Company, and Mosaic Wellness.  From CAC to contribution margin, & retention to revenue models, Kishan Kashyap, Avnish Bajaj & Chandrasekhar Venugopal, share insights on what it really takes to build a durable consumer business in India today. Listen for a break down of the P&L as a series of strategic choices: It starts with revenue, where TAM is reframed as a lens on market creation vs. market share, and demand signals emerge from how India vs. Bharat actually spends.  Gross margin becomes a moat, shaped by what you build vs. buy. Contribution margin reveals the true cost of platforms, and why owning your channel matters. And finally at the bottomline, it’s about cash, control, and building a business that lasts beyond funding cycles. Explore the full P&L rethink from an operator founder lens only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast. 00:25 Introduction 02:32 Breaking Down the P&L of Building Consumer Brands 04:37 Reframing the P&L as Strategic Choices for Founders 04:58 The Revenue Rethink - What & Who are We Really Biulding for? 08:58 Market Creation or Market Share? 12:27 Revenue = Clear Articulation of the Opportunity You're Going After 12:39 Gross Margin Isn't Fixed - It's a Function of the Choices you make  18:43 Don't Just Hope COGS Will Fail - Design Margin from Day Zero 21:39 Contribution Margin: The True Cost of your Channels 25:13 Q-comm's Biggest Mistake: Chasing Scale, Not Sustainibility 28:44 Find the GTM Unlock: PLG, Word of Mouth & Retention 32:52 Bottom Line: Where your P&L becomes your Reality 34:14 RoCE Matters more than EBITDA 35:27 The ZIRP Era Skewed Founder Behaviour 41:20 Limit your Highs. Ground your Lows. Build with Zen Mode on Follow us on:  Website www.z47.com/ LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ Twitter https://x.com/z47_vc Instagram www.instagram.com/z47.vc/

What if the next great Indian startup isn’t another consumer app — but a B2B company quietly owning a supply chain, exporting to 40 countries, and compounding capital without ever chasing a billion-dollar valuation? This #ZeroToInfinity podcast episode walks us through a decade-long arc of insight — from Z47’s first B2B bets to the inflection points that changed everything: GST, UPI, COVID, and the rise of trust-based distribution models. Avnish Bajaj and Sudipto Sannigrahi lay out the real arc of India’s B2B evolution - from ignored category to unstoppable force. From how horizontal and vertical marketplaces came to dominate post-2015, to why cheap capital created artificial winners in the ZERP era, the conversation is all about rewiring how you think about margins, moats, and manufacturing. This #ZeroToInfinity conversation isn’t about B2B vs B2C — it’s about what it really takes to build for India’s core economy.

Z47 invested in WizCommerce in 2022. Since then, Divyaanshu Makkar and team have scaled to $1mn in revenue from the B2B Commerce SaaS mid-market. In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Divyaanshu Makkar, Co-founder & CEO of B2B Commerce SaaS startup WizCommerce -, joins Sudipto Sannigrahi and Ashwin Pandian to unpack: 🚀 WizCommerce's pivot from SourceWiz 📈 Scaling to $1M ARR in 5 Quarters 💥 India-made SaaS is eating the world From selling to enterprises to winning trust in slow-moving industries — this episode is a crash course in building category-defining SaaS. Tune-in

The real revolution is not just AI building products - it’s AI rewriting how we build them. In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Avnish Bajaj and Aakash Kumar cut through the noise to reveal why AI is far more than just another tech wave - it’s a paradigm shift. This conversation offers a comprehensive, unfiltered exploration of AI’s evolution, its current impact on industries and knowledge workers, and how it’s reshaping the future of work. From drawing parallels with past tech bubbles like dot-com and crypto to decoding AI’s leap from correlation to causation and the emergence of “Servitization of Software,” they break down why founders who wait will be left behind. Discover why the future isn’t about AI replacing humans - but enhancing human capability. Only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast. 

What if India transformed from outsourcing hub to global engineering powerhouse? In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Sudipto Sannigrahi, Z47's investor in B2B Commerce and Manufacturing, sits down with the visionaries making it happen—Karan Anand and Himanshu Uniyal, founders of Wootz.work. Their conversation unlocks the ambitious blueprint behind India's largest advanced engineering export company. Witness how they're breaking the "build to print" ceiling, catapulting Indian manufacturing into the elite "build to spec" territory—where cutting-edge solutions aren't just manufactured but conceptualized, engineered, and perfected on Indian soil. The founders reveal how they're harnessing India's untapped engineering brilliance to create precision systems that global industry giants now depend on. With candid insights and surprising revelations, Sudipto explores their unconventional journey and the high-stakes gamble that's quietly positioning India as the next engineering superpower. Can the ancient legacy of Wootz steel—once the most sought-after metal in the world—inspire a modern manufacturing renaissance? Find out for yourself in this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast. 

Consumer brands are being built differently and the next wave of unicorns won’t just be about speed or scale - they’ll be built on AI, hyper-personalization, and a global-first mindset. In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Rajinder Balaraman, Tarun Davda, and Rajat Agarwal demystify the rise of real-time commerce and how AI is no longer an add-on - it’s the foundation for intelligent shopping.  Indian founders? The winners will be those who break past borders & build for the world.  The next consumer unicorns won’t play by old rules - will you?

FinTech is transforming the economy at every level. India’s financial ecosystem is at an inflection point, where technology isn’t just enabling transactions but engineering entirely new economic structures. In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Avnish Bajaj, Pranay Desai, and Vikram Vaidyanathan bring the sharpest insights to the table, revealing the forces shaping FinTech’s next decade. The businesses that will define the next decade are not where everyone is looking right now. This conversation reveals the contrarian bets, the high-stakes risks, and the market forces shaping the biggest opportunities ahead. If FinTech is the future, who’s building it right? 00:00: Coming up 01:50: The Compounding of Value in Financial Services 02:42: The Opportunity Sets in FinTech 04:55: Vital Viewing: How to go Phygital for Growth 05:45: Is FinTech Phygital or Digital 08:30: What are the New Opportunities in FinTech for the 1%? 09:38: The Tight Credit at the right time can have a Multiplier Effect on the Economy 11:27: Opportunities for the Next 10% in FinTech 12:00: Will How India Saves Money Change with Tech? 13:20: The Future of FinTech is Infinite ROE Businesses 13:47: Untapped potential across Credit, Insurance, and Wealth Products Follow us on:  Website: www.z47.com/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/ Twitter: https://x.com/z47_vc Instagram: z47.vc