1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is Abhinav the CEO?

Jishnu Battacharjee: That’s correct. He has two other co-founders. In 2017, we started thinking of what we should do regarding monetization. 2018 was our first year of monetization. At this point, it was tripling every year with cash added into the bank.

We also ended up taking unsolicited $50 million Series B. That money is sitting in the bank. That exemplifies a few core things we look for. It’s an absolute poster child and I’m not expecting all other companies to follow exactly that kind of trajectory.

The first thing is that the founder is totally obsessed about the problem. If somebody is not obsessed with the problem, then they will never be able to come up with the right solution. That is one core thing that we saw in this company. 

Sramana Mitra: What was your analysis of what’s happening at Mulesoft and the trajectory when you went down this path?

Jishnu Battacharjee: Tipco had this enterprise service. They popularized software-oriented architecture. The idea was that there will be a message bus running on which you will build enterprise applications that will talk to the message bus. That was the architecture until web apps started coming in.

Then APIs came in. Mulesoft was an open-source, enterprise service bus. As the movement started going to API, they thought that they would need to build an integration platform where different applications will be brought into their platform and then will be connected by APIs.

The core difference in observation between Postman and Mulesoft is that Mulesoft is about existing applications and tying them up. Postman is about how to write applications when there are already APIs which are existing. It’s more of an API-first approach.

Sramana Mitra: It’s complementary.

Jishnu Battacharjee: It’s complementary, but there are a lot of things you can do in Postman. The way to put it is if somebody has Mulesoft, Postman is complementary. There are a lot of things you can do in Postman which you cannot do in Mulesoft. Many people from the bottom-up have started using Postman. There are very few things that Mulesoft can deliver that Postman can’t.

Sramana Mitra: Want to do another story?

Jishnu Battacharjee: Let me talk about a B2C company. It’s called Unacademy. The journey started two years ago. Our interest in the company started from the day we got to know the name of the company.

The thinking was how thinking is being done in an academic-oriented approach. The idea is somebody is sitting somewhere who might not have the right professor, can you give them a platform where they can learn?

There have been companies like Udemy. The idea is how do you do it in a mobile-only world, which is India. If I’m an educator and I know I have something to offer, how do I create content on the platform and then start teaching students on the same platform.

The founder built the product so that any educator can build the content on the mobile phone. Once you have the content, you publish it on the portal. From there, student will consume content. Initially, it was totally asynchronous. I’m a teacher. I publish my content. Students start studying. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners
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