1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 4)

Jishnu Battacharjee: There are two core principles for Unacademy. One is that the educator can build the content easily. The second is, the content is bite-sized. The idea was, you can talk about a topic but it cannot be more than five minutes. That whole theme took off.

Fast forward to now, they are serving 10 million people across the country. Suppose I release content and students start using it. Based on the student reception, I get a rating. Unacademy then organizes live classes for the interested students who want to go deeper. Those are paid.

There are a lot of concurrent live sessions happening. Each class might be attended by 200 to 300 students across the country. At this point, the classes are happening mostly for test preparation.

There were two things that resonated with us. One was the founder was product-led. Even today, the marketing has been very minimal. The second is, the entrepreneur is a very out-of-the-box thinker. His co-founder was a topper in the Indian Civil Services exam. He was also a medical doctor. All of them are very different thinkers.

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned that for Postman, the $50 million round that you raised is sitting in the bank. What is the thinking behind taking such a round? Why do you take money when you don’t need money?

Jishnu Battacharjee: In this case, we didn’t plan for a raise. People noticed and structured an offer that was very difficult to say no to. To get to your question, a few reasons. Many of these enterprise accounts are coming up. Microsoft alone has 2,000 users.

We thought that having some cushion in the bank will help us grow even faster and we might do a certain kind of parallelization of product development.

Till now, the company is growing really fast. There is not a single salesperson in the company. There is marketing and there is customer success. We want to continue that journey of go-to market but invest heavily in product development and a lot of product-led growth.

Everything is data-driven. There’re 10 million users. We want to stay in that path. One of the models that we are following in the company is that of Atalassian. They also raised a lot of money. But for the first 10 years, they didn’t take any money.

Sramana Mitra: Atlassian is a wonderful company. Just like Zoho showed something that was believed to not be possible, Atlassian has showed something that was believed not to be possible. These are all superb case studies on how to build companies with product focus and adoption focus as opposed to funneling a lot of money into sales.

How much of the Nexus portfolio fits into this model? 

Jishnu Battacharjee: One-third of our companies are product-led. Many of them are open source. Many of them are self-serve. We love those. Today, money is abundant. If somebody is doing well, it’s not difficult to raise money. There’s a lot of peer effect also. I see my friend raising money. I’m also doing well, so I go for raising funds.

We’re very bottoms-up. We want to emphasize that. Focusing on your fundamentals is difficult. There are later-stage investors coming in and they have different expectations. Alignment of the board is a key role we need to play.

Sramana Mitra: It was a pleasure chatting. You’re stating a philosophy that is very much our company-building philosophy of not gratuitously spending money without figuring out how you’re going to make money.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners
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