E32: Srikanth Sundararajan (General Partner, VenturEast)

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Srikanth Sundararajan is the General partner at VenturEast, an India focused fund that helps tech startups looking to go global from India across segments like education, health, financial services, agritech, and Enterprise SaaS. Srikanth has 25+ years of international experience in the software product and services having worked at HP, Informix in the US, and was part of the executive leadership team at HCL, the world wide CTO at Cognizant and the COO at Persistent through its successful IPO. In the US he had also successfully founded his own startup, Pretzel Logic Software Inc., which was acquired by BEA spinoff WebGain. BEA was later acquired by Oracle. He was also part of the founding team at IDS, which was also acquired.

He is also a visiting faculty of computer science at IIT Bhubaneswar and has taught at several US universities. He also serves on national committees on technical education, an initiative of MHRD, Government of India. He was also a member of the tech committee for the Government of India initiative on indirect taxes (Customs and Excise).

He holds a B-Tech degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a MS/PhD in Computer and Information Sciences from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He has several publications and is the holder of patents, jointly with HP.

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The Desi Startups of the Week:

1. Foodwalas: Foodwallas is a Gourmet food delivery startup that lets mom and pop stores to reach a big, national audience.

2. Elo App: A vernacular audio streaming app for you to consume content if your preferred language.

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In this week’s episode we will cover:

1. Learnings through investing during the pandemic (3:29)

2. Srikanth’s background (8:20)

3. What aspect of Srikanth’s past is most valuable to him today as a VC (11:17)

4. What made Srikanth join VenturEast? (21:02)

5. Investment thesis at VenturEast (24:32)

6. Disruption: Incumbents vs new entrants (34:05)

7. Is legacy software dying? (41:29)

8. Differences in investing in different tiers in India (47:45)

9. Srikanth’s preference: startups from tier 2/3 markets or those targeting tier 2/3 markets (54:25)

10. India and its deep tech ambitions (56:53)

11. Rapid fire (59:15)