Divya Aathresh

Whoa…… from $22B to zero. And before this, in February, once the world’s most valuable Edtech startup was valued at $250m post money. Chilling. Any thoughts on why this is happening and insights for founders, Edtech and beyond? #startup #fundraising #valuation #chasingthebubble #fundamentals

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First is always special & so is our first #podcast. Thank you Avinash Tripathi & YesUsers Re-Lived the journey & early days especially. 3D-Secure & Nodal the game changers! #fintech landscape is an upward curve since inception of our journey. Loving to continue been meaningful & leveraging our learnings now for Light! Listen Us to Know Us! Syncing in with Vidhi Bhatt #podcast #entrepreneurs #startuplife

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Excited and looking forward to discussing the evolving challenges of raising capital for early-stage startups at SAASCON24. Join me as I dive into the current trends, what founders need to know, and how we can navigate this more challenging environment. #SAASCON24 #StartupFunding #EarlyStageStartups #SaaS #Entrepreneurship

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New Episode: From Jugaad to Y Combinator! This week, we chat with Abhinav Das, Co-founder of Orangewood , about his journey from a basement in Faridabad to raising $5.5M and building innovative hardware. 💡 Hear his story of perseverance, jugaad innovation, and making it to Y Combinator. Perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs! Listen now and join the conversation on youtube @atalovesyou #HardwareEntrepreneurship #AbhinavDas #YCombinator #StartupJourney #AtalPodcast

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🚀 Excited to announce the latest update for Binge Movies! 🎬🍿 Collaborators: A huge shoutout to the amazing team: Ankush Jha, Nikhil Thakur, Shivansh Gupta, Divij Jain, @Vipin . , and Lalit Aggarwal 🙌 Binge Movies is a modern, fully containerized web application designed for movie enthusiasts. It offers users the ability to browse, search, and discover movies through an engaging and user-friendly interface. This full-stack project includes both frontend and backend components, built with the latest technologies to ensure a seamless, dynamic experience for all users. 🌟 Key Features: Movie List & Details: Browse through an extensive collection of movies, complete with detailed information such as cast, director, release date, and more. Dynamic Search: A responsive search bar allows users to quickly find their favorite movies with ease. Feedback & Contact Forms: Users can submit feedback and reach out to support directly through the platform, streamlining communication and improving user experience. 💻 Tech Stack: Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript – delivering a sleek, responsive, and intuitive user interface. Backend: Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB Atlas – ensuring a robust and scalable infrastructure. Deployment: Docker, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, GCP VM – optimizing deployment for fast, automated updates across all environments. Notifications: An integrated Python script sends real-time alerts to our BINGE-PLUS channel for key events, keeping the team up-to-date on crucial developments. One standout feature of this project is its CI/CD pipeline, which ensures automated builds and deployments, making updates both fast and efficient. Plus, we’ve integrated notifications to keep the team informed every step of the way. 🔐 Important Note: Secrets such as SONAR_TOKEN, DOCKERHUB_USERNAME, and GCP_VM_PRIVATE_KEY are securely stored in GitHub, ensuring smooth and safe workflow execution. Special Thanks: Ankush Jha: For expertly ensuring that the GCP Terraform integration is spot on! My role: I’ve been actively working on both the frontend and backend development, contributing to the core functionality and ensuring the platform delivers a high-quality experience to all users. Visit BINGE-PLUS here: bit.ly/binge-movies I’m excited to hear feedback from the community and can't wait to bring you even more updates soon! 🚀 #movies #webdevelopment #nodejs #expressjs #mongodb #docker #ci_cd #githubactions #terraform #GCP #devops #fullstack #BingeMovies

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Had an insightful conversation with Alok Mehta on the intricacies of ESOPs. His core message was both compelling and clear: “The essence of ESOPs lies in empowering individuals to contribute meaningfully to building something significant, and in turn, sharing in the resulting growth.” Alok demystifies the complexities of equity compensation, covering everything from motivating employees to designing effective ESOP structures. This episode is a must-listen for founders and anyone navigating the nuances of equity planning.

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I had an opportunity to be on the panel alongside Arun, Lijo, Vineet and Parikshit (co-founder, thesys) at MagicBall AI Bangalore Week organized by the The Product Folks, Grayscale Ventures and Founder Folks to talk about how AI will impact the software categories, where it will create opportunities for entrepreneurs to replace the existing software behemoths like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Adobe etc and what product shapes are most likely to resonate with the users. few notes from there: - A thin product layer on top of the infrastructure would be hard to defend and mostly likely will move towards commoditization. - An agent might not be the best shape to productize the workflows. - Multiple companies are promising to provide insights and thereafter actionables on top of aggregates, but lack of full context is still keeping them from becoming mainstream - Building software with AI native workflows, and thereby creating extremely high efficiency pockets appears to be the right way shape the offerings. - There is a lot of chatter about selling 'Outcomes' but we are still far from it given LLMs are nascent, and works only well in limited scope. Most of the new AI native companies built today will have the optionality to graduate their monetization on 'Outcomes' at a later point in time. Between now and then make sure the product built is extensible. For now, don't worry much about 'Outcomes' - SaaS isn't going anywhere. There are too many problems to be solved using software. Monetization is evolving, but 'usage' is going to be there as a billing atomic unit for sometime, before we jump on to a new work unit. - Existing legacy companies software deployments, and spaghetti code implementations will hinder legacy companies from brining the goodness of AI to their customers in ways a young new startup could bring with AI native products. Sometimes the strength becomes weakness :( Ps: My thoughts, and not my employers'

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🌟 Ever wondered why restaurant staff often urge you to share your dining experience through a text review? 🍽️ NextLeap has granted me a golden opportunity to delve into the profound significance of reviews within Zomato's online delivery restaurants business vertical. 🚀 In my recent endeavor, I took a stab at mapping business outcomes to actionable product outcomes. However, I understand that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's fascinating to realize that reviews transcend mere feedback – they wield immense influence over consumer perception, purchasing decisions, and the overall success of restaurants. In today's digital age, where online reputation reigns supreme, reviews wield the power to make or break a restaurant's destiny. 💬 A huge shoutout to Arindam Mukherjee, whose structured teaching approach in product management has been an enlightening experience. Despite it being just two weeks, the learning curve has been steep and rewarding. #Zomato #OnlineDelivery #TextReviews #ProductManagement #Nextleap #milestone PM School Your feedback is invaluable – I'd love to hear your thoughts! 🌟

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I shared our full journey from college students to a YC-backed AI startup on the Inkle podcast! Last January, we were final year students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, when Y Combinator picked us up from Chennai, made us stop whatever we were doing, and dropped us in the heart of San Francisco to build a new startup. For a group of kids with no exposure to the professional world (we had literally never worked at a company before), the experience was life-changing for us. Listen to the full episode to hear our full journey! I touched on topics like ... 1️⃣ How did I meet my co-founders? 2️⃣ Who does what at Clueso? 3️⃣ How does San Francisco compare to Bengaluru? 4️⃣ How do we resolve co-founder arguments? ... and many more! Link in the comments below ⬇

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It's peak election time, and my mind rolls back to 2019 during the last elections. I was just graduating college then. Few people know that Aniket and I started our first venture to help with election insights and analytics in 2019. We named it Konscience. We collated news and social media information to give candidates a 360-degree view of their digital campaigns. Within the first month, we had five interns working with us. We endured 16-hour coding sessions and slept in the lab by putting four chairs together. Even the lab head eventually let us stay after growing tired of throwing us out (our first real sales negotiation and deal closed!). Realizations Building a Product is Hard: Unlike a well-defined college assignment, building a product meant dipping into the unknown and being responsible for our decisions. Selling a Product is Harder: Reading people's cues, especially politicians, was tough. The feedback loop on whether our idea was good or not was difficult to process. Grasp Value is Hardest: We focused too much on the product rather than the end user. We realized that understanding how and why the product would help them was crucial. Despite the hurdles, we worked with several politicians across parties over 10 months, which was a rewarding experience. However, we eventually realized we could aim for bigger things and decided to shut it down. We loved the journey so much that we gave it another go. After a 6-month break, we started LimeChat. Awesome mentors helped us transition from college life to the business realm. The outcome didn’t matter as much as the journey. The biggest lesson we learned is that failure is part of the process, and it's perfectly okay. Building a business requires a diverse set of skills, and we need to keep leveling up. Game on! PS> Here is a picture of us back in 2019 after pitching our idea to the first VC we ever met. We thought we did awesome, hence the smiles. Never heard from that guy again.

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Luv Gupta Amrita Agrawal Ambrish Gupta Mayank Chouhan Abhinav Mehta Rohit Kumar Singh Saransh Mahere Dr. Kartikey Gupta Thrilled to unveil Forescribe's xAI suite, featuring Smart Alerts and AI Post Mortem—innovations in SaaS Ops designed to elevate strategic oversight for CIOs, COOs, and their teams. 📨 Smart Alerts delivers proactive, tailored insights, enabling faster decision-making to keep your digital landscape aligned with your vision. ✨ AI Post Mortem now offers executive summaries on product spend, usage, and benchmarks with Forrester’s Digital Transformation Maturity Model—empowering leaders with clear, instant actionable insights. With xAI, unlock real-time data to drive transformational outcomes and make every tech investment count. 💰 🥂 Kudos to the teams involved in taking this live. Learn more about Forescribe xAI initiative here: https://lnkd.in/gzxxxh6W

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When Karthik, Rohit, and I were laying down the foundation of PeerCapital, the most important question we asked was: “Why are we doing this?” The answer didn’t just appear out of thin air; it took work. The thing is you cannot invent your why. You cannot manufacture it. You only discover it by curiously observing what is dysfunctional in the world and how you can uniquely contribute to making it better. I meet tons of founders who often aren’t madly in love with the problem but are somewhat mildly convinced about solving it. But to play for the long haul, the calling must come from within. External motivation runs out. And that's where the why is important. Gravity wasn’t invented—it was discovered because someone dared to ask “why?” This led humanity to build foundations of advanced physics and engineering. Because innovation is an action, and ‘the why’ is the intention that drives the action. Some questions we asked ourselves that helped surface our why: • What’s a niche/industry/idea I cannot stop thinking about?  • How do I envision changing my world? Where can I contribute the most with my current skill set and passion?  • What are my key motivations in life?  • Which problem pushes me to enter my flow and makes me feel alive? How connected a founder is to their purpose is the most underrated success-determining factor. Dare to ask - “why?”

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We observed that 25% of all Plum Telehealth consultations booked for siblings are related to mental health. Some qualitative research led us to this case study, and our latest feature. Akash (name changed), a college student, has been experiencing anxiety and stress due to academic pressure. While open to seeking help, Akash feels uncomfortable sharing these concerns directly with family, fearing unnecessary worry or misunderstanding. Besides, he is not financially stable enough to get professional help. He knows that his elder sister has access to health services from Plum. Luckily for Akash, his sister was supportive enough to book an appointment for him through her Plum app. However, there are countless cases where dependents might not have support from their families. Therefore, while they have the choice to choose this benefit, they don't feel empowered enough to do so. We wanted to fix this – because healthcare needs are private. Your loved ones shouldn't have to be dependent on you, it goes against our philosophy of making healthcare easy and accessible to every Indian. Which is why Saurabh and team built (in)Depent login. With (in)Dependent Login, Akash doesn't have to rely on his sister, and can independently access the Plum dashboard to schedule telehealth appointments with a mental health professional. This feature ensures Akash's journey remains private, enabling a safe space to discuss and manage mental health. Akash benefits from regular counselling sessions, leading to a significant reduction in his anxiety levels. This privacy and autonomy in managing mental health care fosters empowerment and responsibility. There are many similar stories, and I'm proud to be working with some of the country's best talent at Plum to solve these problems. If you have ideas or feedback, let me know in the comments. Read Saurabh's blog about (in)dependent login here: https://lnkd.in/gPEFcP88

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I came across Dr. Sujaya Banerjee's article, "How to Retain Restless Gen Zs," and it covers such a pertinent topic that I had to share it, hoping it reaches the intended audience. This is a well-written piece that demonstrates an acute awareness of Gen Z needs. What I have noticed is that senior leadership is often detached from the reality of Gen Z's needs and expectations. Mid-level managers and leaders are not equipped to nurture Gen Z talent, and they lack the leadership support needed to address this issue. As a result, Gen Z employees remain disengaged and leave, while promising mid-level talent gets burned out in the process. I wish more business and HR leaders were aware of this and could act on the aspects highlighted in the article, such as the importance of mentoring, redefining job roles, effective communication, and hiring for demonstrated interest. Now is the time to act. Otherwise, the long-lasting damage caused by ignoring the needs of Gen Z talent and millennial mid-level leaders could become irreparable. (Credit: The Times Of India - Ascent, 17 July 2024) #GenZ #Millenial #ModernWorkplace

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🌟 India’s Incredible Contributions to AI in the U.S. 🌟 Did you know that Indian innovators are leading the charge in building some of the largest AI-focused billion-dollar companies in the U.S.? 🇮🇳✨ Here are some remarkable achievements: 🔸 HighRadius – Valued at $3.10 Billion 🔸 Uniphore – Valued at $2.5 Billion 🔸 Eightfold.ai – Valued at $2.2 Billion 🔸 Moveworks – Valued at $2 Billion 🔸 H2O.ai – Valued at $1.5 Billion 🔸 Cambridge Mobile Telematics – Valued at $1.5 Billion 🔸 SparkCognition – Valued at $1.4 Billion 🔸 SeekOut – Valued at $1.2 Billion These companies are transforming industries with cutting-edge AI technologies, thanks to Indian founders and co-founders. India’s talent continues to redefine global innovation in technology and artificial intelligence. 🚀 #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #India #Innovation #TechLeadership #Startups #Entrepreneurship #Technology #GlobalImpact #IndianTech

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"Ye maine theek toh kiya na....?" Every founder’s toughest battle? Self-doubt. As a founder I go through a series of doubts often: "Did I push the team too hard today?" "Did we make the right call on hiring or layoffs?" "Could I have handled that better?" I feel self-doubt keeps me in check and also keeps me sane! To every founder: you’re not alone in this. Keep building, keep learning. What are your thoughts around this? #startup #doubts #entrepreneurship

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Announcing the BRAND NEW partnership between pclub.io and Hyperbound! In 2024, I watched in awe as Sriharsha and Atul took the sales world by storm with their AI role play bots and social media contests. I knew I wanted that to be part of pclub. I had to admit: It’s not enough to learn. If you want to truly transform skills and boost win rates: Your reps have to practice what they learn. Your reps have to apply what they learn. Ideally, not on a live customer(!). So. We integrated the two platforms. Hyperbound AI role play bots are now embedded inside the pclub skills platform. If you’re a sales or enablement leader, dream come true. Your reps can use pclub to master virtually every topic or skill area that exists in sales (all from the top 1% of revenue experts on the planet like Kevin "KD" Dorsey, Krysten Conner, and Nate Nasralla). After taking a course, they can practice and apply what they learned: - without wasting leads - without alienating customers - without managers doing the role plays themselves. The result? Steady skill transformation across your SDR, AE, and revenue team. Boosted win rates, bigger deals, shorter sales cycles. And ultimately: Growing ARR and revenue faster in 2025. Want to see how it all works? Book a call with my Skill Advisor team here: https://lnkd.in/dVBAvgYQ

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HSR Founders Club is doing an AI for GTM Fireside this Friday. Where? Most probably HSR :) If you're in a 5km radius and looking to do something before you step out, drop by. Look forward to meeting Rapti Gupta Piyush Agarwal and Akshay Hangloo. #GTM #AI

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I’m excited to share insights from my recent interview with Arundathi Ramanan at CNBC-TV18, where I discussed the journey of str8bat and our vision for the future of sports technology. Key Takeaways: Roadmap for Growth: With our recent Series A funding led by Exfinity Venture Partners, we are ready to expand our product offerings and market reach. Our focus is on integrating cutting-edge technologies, including Generative AI, to enhance user experiences and provide real-time insights that empower athletes. Innovative Tech Play: We’ve launched the world’s first "smart willow" cricket bat along with Sanspareils Greenlands Pvt. Ltd., featuring IoT sensors that deliver actionable metrics like bat speed and impact analysis without cameras. This technology democratizes access to advanced training tools for all aspiring cricketers. Customer-Centric Approach: Our partnerships with Cricket Australia and Rajasthan Royals highlight our commitment to delivering value. With thousands of users benefiting from our platform, we aim to make elite-level training accessible to everyone. As we navigate the rapidly growing sports tech industry, str8bat strives to be a guiding light for innovation. Together, let’s harness technology to unlock human potential in sports! I invite you to watch the full interview for a deeper understanding of how str8bat is transforming sports training https://lnkd.in/gcDaTMWW Rahul Nagar Madhu Sudan Shailesh Ghorpade Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl Vansh Oberoi Yasuhiro Seo Vikrant Varshney Dhiraj Kumar Sinha Utsav Somani Techstars Paras Anand Greg Chappell AO MBE   #str8bat #SportsTech #Innovation #CustomerFirst #AthleteEmpowerment

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