Karthik Venkateswaran, co-founder of Jumbotail, successfully raised $54 million from various investment firms to digitize neighborhood stores using.
Karthik Venkateswaran, co-founder of Jumbotail, successfully raised $54 million from various investment firms to digitize neighborhood stores using an AI-powered fundraising approach. He previously gained experience at eBay and Flipkart, where he identified supply chain gaps that his startup now addresses.
from day one people know that if we have to grow in this company uh you know we need to adhere to the values and we need to live the values and they're all universal values managers know that the only way they can grow is to build a very strong team that is performing very well that's what i would advise all entrepreneurs to say that if you if you choose to do it the right way the right way is not the easy way the people are all across the people are looking for the structure alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today very exciting guest definitely joining us here from india and the incredible journey remarkable journey you know it goes from being in the military to going to the u.s to going back to india to doing corporate to doing startups and now he definitely has something very unique with jumbotel that he's going to be telling us about so i guess without
further ado let's welcome our guests today so let's say hello to karthik benkateswaran welcome to the show hey thank you very much for having me in the show i'm very excited to share my experiences to you to your audience so you were born and raised there in india in the southern part and you were born in a family that was a part of you know they had functions in the government so so how is life growing up there it's very slow very slow low tech and lots of lots of family and very very deep bonds and network and very close to the ground well i can't imagine and what about what about in your town i mean was there a lot of entrepreneurs or were there like all for the most part workers no my town is called temple town it's a tourist location india it's one of it it has a fascinating temple called meenakshi temple uh which was once a contender for seven wonders of the world and uh it's it's
a it's a fascinating place a lot of foreign tourists come there uh i grew up there in the town not not many entrepreneurs but hey india is a land of entrepreneurs so he has like 50 million small and medium businesses operating so quite literally everybody is an entrepreneur so 100 and i think there's like 1.3 billion people there so i mean talking about a machine of entrepreneurs you know one of the things that i really like about uh india is that there is a lot of um you know there's a big push towards engineering and you know many of the people that come out of um india you know especially the people that i have interviewed that end up being founders is that they have that engineering mindset of knowing how to resolve problems already so so why is there so many engineers there in india um you know people are always looking to upgrade their lives and engineer india has always invested
in math and science if you look at it in 1947 we got independence from the british but we uh despite our poor population we invested in space we invested in atomic energy we invested in science and india is actually if you look back at the history india zero was invented in india there are a lot of you know rich traditions and a deep cultural background of education so people started investing again and human resources is all what we had and we we our focus like especially for me my parents also want me to go and join engineering i in fact actually went and joined an engineering school i dropped out of engineering and then i went to the military so i was very clear as to you know what kind of life i needed to you know pursue i wanted to be a more purposeful life a life that serves my country and therefore i thought that a better opportunity would be to go to the military but many many of
my schoolmates they all went into engineering as a career choice that's what i wanted to ask you actually so so in your case you you did go the engineering route and you ended up dropping out and you joined the military the infantry and i mean that was like a 10-year uh journey i mean it's uh talking about you know lots of stuff that you can do while you are in the army but i'm sure that you were exposed to uh circumstances full of uncertainty uh circumstances were maybe they were not as pleasant uh and and really building startups is like going to work so i guess that to a certain degree you were able to experience you know the whole you know feeling and emotions that you go through with a startup but probably at a different level in the army i i can i don't know i i've never attempted to compare a startup life with a military life but there are some things that come very deeply uh
connected is the mission orientedness in both the places we are very mission oriented a startup entrepreneur is very deeply mission driven and mission oriented and the second aspect is survival so you have always you are living in that world of you know your survival is not guaranteed so you and it it imposes a lot of cognitive descendants in your mind and you need to be able to live and take decisions very calmly during that environment and you know both the both the places and and and of course uh the the the the easier if you if you go into the nitty-gritties obviously military is a very hierarchical uh organization which is like you know hundreds of years old and very set way of doing things and startup is like a lot of you know independence but ultimately i think the sense of accomplishing what you set out to achieve the mission i think that that sense for me was same so what does
it mean when you are mission oriented especially for the people that are that are listening you know there's many many founders that you know are are maybe thinking like hey you know i i'd love to to know what that mission oriented you know means so that maybe i can implement it to my own you know journey so what does it look like to be mission oriented so as an entrepreneur if you if you there are many different ways in which people arrive at entrepreneurship i am one of those people who had a very very specific problem to solve that i was deeply connected with that i considered as my calling i i thought that i am specifically capable of solving this very hard problem and therefore i started to started i chose to solve this problem so solving that problem uh and you know becomes the becomes a very uh goal that becomes a very life purpose and when you solve that problem the goodness that
it brings to the society the transformative ways in which the societies can live differently that becomes your mission every single day you have that five year ahead of time you already thought about what that life should look like and you're painting that and you're creating that and that is the sense of you know purpose in the vision that i have so you already have a way you already have a future picture of the world as picture of success that you think in the most benevolent way is right for this world and then you are steadfastly creating that perceiving enduring finding all ways and means to make that happen your goal and you are willing to sacrifice everything everything you know in pursuit of that goal got it so in your case you were for 10 years in the army obviously tons of experiences but one thing that is super interesting is that you land in stanford so how do you land in
stanford you know doing your mba coming from 10 years in the army that's just such like a weird transition so so can you walk us through what happened there i was posted in in kashmir valley and i got into silicon valley and divine indulgence is the only term i have i can't explain i i really don't know how to explain this uh but the genesis of that was um i gave my 10 best years for for for fighting but i was deployed in hard combat but i quickly realized that um you know the most powerful nations are the ones that are economically very prosperous the people actually end up doing the last mile fighting is actually you know if you're economically sound no one dare attack you no one dare touch you right that is the level in which i saw my country i want my country to be in that level that you are economically prosperous your people are very prosperous you are having a very important
strategic location in in in the geopolitical you know canvas um to that end i think you know 1.3 billion people at that time about a billion people in the country uh consuming food which is at a very very subsistence level farming was a very large part of our gdp and also 52 percent of our population involved in farming it was all you know done very very inefficiently so i thought that i should spend the remaining part of my life transforming the food value chain in the country so way back in 2008 2009 i was prototyping a platform called kisango.com connecting the farmers coconut farmers of my zone to distant buyers through an sms based platform so nokia n70 was the smartest phone then but i quickly realized that this isn't about just connecting two sides of the platform sure asymmetry of information was you know rampant but how do you ship the goods if you get the order how do you
collect the cash in…