4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long into your independent journey did the acquisition happen?

Kashyap Deorah: Three years.

Sramana Mitra: Then you stayed at Future group for two more years?

Kashyap Deorah: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: In those later two years, did the business change? India was coming online at a very fast pace.

Kashyap Deorah: The biggest change was we had to let go of the SME part. The Future group itself had lots of stores and assets that were to be taken online. We had a captive list of merchants to bring online. There was also a tremendous amount of consumer marketing to piggyback on. I would say the biggest change during that time was that online payments started becoming more of a thing.

Our customer acquisition was still largely offline. Even in 2012, 50% of the business was over the phone. We started seeing a trend of credit card payments versus cash-on-delivery. You’d be surprised how many consumers would drop a check in their bank to buy a washing machine. A lot of that started shifting to credit cards.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve come a long way. Let’s now come to 2012. You have now left Future group. What is the next move?

Kashyap Deorah: The biggest thing in that journey is that Silicon Valley had become so much a part of my identity in terms of doing tech-oriented businesses. Consumer businesses in India are not truly tech businesses. They are tech-enabled, but there is a huge non-tech ops layer. I could understand the appeal of that and the effectiveness of that. I’m happy to invest in operators to do that, but that’s not me. I was missing that Silicon Valley tech connection.

Rakesh brought this opportunity by saying, “Let’s do a company together of solving the problem of restaurant diners in the US. Uber is doing really well. It’s more of a payment system. There’s a cab that shows up. The magic is that you just open the door and walk away. What if we could do the same thing for restaurant diners?”

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to do this for the US market?

Kashyap Deorah: Yes, we were sitting in India hatching this for the US market.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Kashyap Deorah: We built the product out in Mumbai. There were less than 10 of us. When we were ready, I started makings trips back to Silicon Valley. My DNA is very channel-oriented – piggybacking. On the one side, you have these small restaurants. On the other side, you have consumers. Let me go meet all the two-sided marketplaces that have the restaurants and the diners – PayPal, Groupon, Yelp, OpenTable.

We hustled and got a meeting with the business development people at all four of these companies. We had also hustled our way into getting the system installed in 50 restaurants through the POS resellers. Wherever this business development person was, we would have a nearby restaurant with their cuisine choice. We would take them to a restaurant and have a discussion about the business.

At the end, we would use our system to pay. In some cases, we walk over to the POS system and show them what happens. The impact of that moment was very high. One thing led to another. OpenTable actually said, “We were thinking of doing something like this.” We hadn’t raised outside money. It was all pooled between Rakesh, me, and one other person.

OpenTable acquired us. This was in lower tens of millions. I moved back to Silicon Valley. I became the General Manager for Pay with OpenTable. These were the early days of Stripe. We were one of the first users of Stripe Connect. We launched it in the US market under OpenTable.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack
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