Vikram Shekhawat's entrepreneurial journey, including the successful exit of his company Bschool and later. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Vikram Shekhawat's entrepreneurial journey, including the successful exit of his company Bschool and later Pariksha. He shares lessons learned from scaling and exiting multiple startups, emphasizing resilience and adaptability.
If uh you want to become an entrepreneur, if that is something that you aspire to do, you should be starting pretty early. And I think I've started pretty late. I started my first company when I was about 20. I think I should have done it sooner than that. One of the key reasons why I didn't do that that early was because I was surrounded by people who wanted to have fun in life. But if you look at the success stories of all the people who made it extremely big, a lot of them had a significant hustle in the initial years and that came because of the right kind of people in their circle. So you need to have people who are equally or more ambitious than you are. That sets the tone for you and then it also helps you in forming the initial team that you need to build your business. I don't think individuals build great companies. It's a team that comes together. All righty. Hello everyone
and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have an amazing guest joining us. you know, I guess that, you know, he's done it a couple of times. You know, it's amazing the amount of times that he's done it because I was kind of like losing, you know, already the the the traction, you know, the track, you know, of of what he's done, which is remarkable. And on today's session, we're going to be talking about the way he has gone about building, financing, scaling, but then also, uh, even exiting, you know, his last company and now he's really writing this incredible world of AI uh, and really, really interesting stuff. So we're going to be diving deep into that. But without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Vikram Shakawat. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on the show, Aleandro. So originally born in the uh Punjab area there in India. So give us a walk through memory
lane. How was life growing up for you? Life was good. Life was fun. Um I was born into an army family. So my father used to get posted to a different location every 3 years. Uh so I had the privilege of mowing with him. um sort of setting me up for a bunch of different things that a lot of people are not able to experience which is you know moving into a new circle adapt to a new circle build new relationships figure out what works what doesn't work and you trying to do all of that when you're a kid so try and find focus in the middle of all the chaos around you um so started with that I have had most of my schooling in army school uh then did my uh graduation as a BBA graduate and then did my masters from uh one of the colleges that India had to offer which was symbis. But one thing one thing there to point out in your childhood is that you were not really surrounded by a lot of
ambitious people which I think that you know kind of like uh delayed a bit the entrepreneurial you know kind of like drive kicking in. So so tell us about this too. Yeah, I think that's that's one of the most important things if if uh you want to become an entrepreneur, if that is something that you aspire to do, uh you should be starting pretty early. And I think I've started pretty late. I mean, I started my first company when I was about 20. I think I should have done it sooner than that. And one of the key reasons why I didn't do that that early was because I was surrounded by people who wanted to have fun in life, which is typically how college kids or, you know, teenagers my age were. uh but if you look at the success stories of all the people who made it extremely big uh a lot of them had uh a significant hustle in the initial years uh and that came because of the right kind of
people in their circle. So you need to have people who are equally or more ambitious than you are uh that sets the tone for you and then it also helps you in uh forming the initial team that you need to build your business. I don't think individuals build great companies it's a team that comes together. So if you have likeminded people, ambitious people who want to change the world tomorrow and if you're surrounded by them, that's when you can make a real impact fairly quickly. And in my case, I think I didn't have that company initially. I got that company when I was doing my masters and that's the reason why I built my first company when I was about 20. So let's talk about that, you know, with your first company, Crusader. So uh how did this come about? Obviously, you know, you didn't have that drive yet, but what what would you say push you to say, hey, you know what? I think I'm
going to I'm going to test this venture venture thing, you know, out. It came from a personal problem. I was very very um shy till about um I graduated um and I had the feelings for someone that I was not able to express. Uh Crusher was a dating platform that connected people with mutual crushes. So my learning was that it's not just my issue. It would be an issue for most of the teenagers my age. And I wanted to create a platform that gives people um anonymity when they're expressing their feelings for somebody. So Crusher was a platform where somebody who has let's say feelings for you can come on the platform and express their feelings anonymously by using the right set of tools. So not everyone is born Will Smith. So they wouldn't know what to say and how to say it. That's where Crusher would come and help them. Okay, this is how you can express your feelings. uh some very good stats
that we figured out that on an average a guy has crush on at least seven females and a female typically has a crush on three guys at least. So, Crescendo is a platform where you can come on the platform and express your feelings for somebody and they get an anonymous message or an email that somebody like feels this way for you. Come onto the platform, let us know who do you like and if at all there was a match we would connect the people. So, this essentially eliminated three different fears for people. So fear of change in relationship dynamics, fear of embarrassment and fear of uh you know getting rejected in front of a lot of people. So now that's what crochet did. Now now with crocheter too I mean you didn't seem like very well prepared for uh meeting with investors you know at least at the beginning I yes agreed. So um we scaled this pretty fast. We got to about 600,000 users in
about 6 months uh when internet was still becoming a thing uh back in India. Even if you go on the likes of Facebook right now, you would see some 40,000 50,000 followers and they're all organic. So u when this kind of success uh comes to you at that early stage that messes up your head and you're getting a lot of attention, you're getting a lot of interest from all the people around you. Uh and that's when we got significant interest from a bunch of different VCs back in India when they're at least in my head thinking that I knew what I was doing but the only plan that I had was how do I acquire more users they wanted to figure out what the future plan looks like. I had zero understanding of that first VC meeting instead of killing it I I probably failed the attempt to even put a decent show out there and solid learning because uh then we saw in 2014 2015 the likes of Bumble and Tinder
coming on the block had becoming billion-dollar companies. We could have done that in 2009 when we were scaling too fast. But the lack of preparedness uh sort of resulted into us messing uh a couple of meetings and then I was still in college. So didn't really pursue the idea a lot. Um the server cost used to be a big pain point at the time. So we ended up um you know shelving the product uh for a while. Thought that I'll probably reignite it someday. It didn't happen. Uh still it remains in the shadows. So then what happened after you know because B school seemed to be the next the next stop. Yeah. So Crasher taught me a decent lesson that if you're meeting WC is you need to be prepared with everything that you want to do right from the kind of team that you would have to what the projections would eventually look like what this idea cat is to how do you solve it better than everyone
else in the market and that's when we introduced bchool.co. It was a platform that provided holistic information on business schools across the globe and uh the same set of investors that I had spoken to came in as angel investors uh in the in the business of B school and this scaled pretty fast. It was global yet local in nature helping people take rational call in terms of which college uh they should pursue and eventually the traction that we were seeing uh got someone's attention in the in the blackboard team and they reached out to us and there was an acquisition that happened. So uh I mean pretty amazing you know uh getting the company acquired. How how was how was how was like going through an acquisition? Very very good at the time because uh if you're building a startup it's a very meager or a very uh you know small proportion salary that you take yourself because you're you're
the one who's…