How Razorpay Became India’s Largest Payments Company

It's

so exciting to sit here and chat with Harshil.

Um, I followed along, I've been a fan for a long time.

Um, now to give some context, because I would say that Razorpay really needs no introduction, but just to set some context Razorpay went through YC in winter of '15, 2015, and it was

the first Indian company that Y Combinator ever invested in.

And from then till now, it's the largest payments platform in India, and it's grown at breakneck pace.

And what I think is really interesting about the story is I love to learn more about sort of the early struggles.

You know, many of the folks in the audience were probably

kind of where you were in the beginning, right?

And there's a lot of lessons and interesting parts of your journey that I think everyone could benefit from.

So maybe what we do is rewind the clock a little bit.

And so did you, you know, kind of growing up and in your undergraduate studies, was it always the plan for you to start a company?

Like what was your mindset at the time?

Yeah, no, definitely not.

So I think I was a techie by background, uh, love to code during college, from school days, love to code, love to build stuff.

And when I was graduating college, even before we started Razorpay, I had no idea of finance or financial systems and so on.

Like, I just love to code.

Uh, so like getting into Razorpay and getting into building payments in a regulated space was definitely not on the cards completely.

But when I graduated from college, I went into a job.

I got placed into an oil company like you get into IIT placements and went to work in an oil company for, uh, in Middle East.

And I never really enjoyed it.

Oil was not really my calling.

So I used to spend my weekends and evenings, and like a lot of people, I didn't really have a lot of life outside work.

So I used to spend those days, uh, evenings and weekends coding and building stuff.

And for one of those things, he— I had to accept payments.

So, uh, I was building a social crowdfunding platform, most like a side project.

And wanted to accept payments for it.

So went through the standard channels, standard approach, approached banks and all of that, and realized that it was fairly complicated to accept payments in India.

First, it was very hard to just get started.

And even if you get started, the experience was very, like, really, really poor because it was not built for techies to start accepting payments.

It was built for large companies to start accepting payments.

And that seemed like a— like, a typical techie mentality is, how hard could this be?

So I thought that maybe it's easier.

In hindsight, it was a very dumb question.

But now I can say that at that point it felt like this seems such a simple problem, why is nobody solving it?

And I started spending my time figuring out like what other people are doing.

Facebook was very popular then, so I would go to Bangalore startups, Pune startups Facebook groups and see what other people are doing.

And I saw almost everyone had the same problem when they were starting up, that payments is extremely hard in India.

In fact, it was easier to accept cash in India than to accept digital payments.

And which as a techie made no sense to me.

Like, the point of technology, the point of internet, everything has been democratization, right?

So social media gives everyone a voice, internet gives everyone a channel, e-commerce gives everyone a selling point.

So it democratizes, right?

So when, when a digital system is harder than a physical system, it, it does the reverse of democratization.

It creates silos.

And that felt like a completely incorrect, wrong thing for us.

So I started spending a lot of time figuring that out, and that's how I got into payments.

But as I say now, that it was probably a very hard business to get into.

And if I knew what I knew today, maybe I would have not started.

Yeah, I think this is actually an interesting pattern for B2B companies because I think— I'd love to understand because it wasn't— what I find really interesting is that it wasn't your

actual idea to begin with.

And so what kinds of, you know, as you sort of develop that first version of the product, Was there a moment when you said, you know, look, this is clearly not going to work and maybe

I should just go build something else?

Or did, you know, as you said, it sort of naturally led to some insights.

How deep did you have to get into the weeds in order to get those insights?

So we were very clear we wanted to build in online payments, but we had to choose a GTM strategy.

So at that point of time, we thought we'll start by selling to educational institutes and payments for education because it seemed like e-commerce was a small and harder market to get

into.

So we thought education seems large because there are a lot of fees payments in India.

India, most of those fees payments were done through physical channels or non-digital channels.

We thought if we can convert the fees payments in India into digital, it could be a very large opportunity.

And it sounds logically right, like massive amount of fees is collected by schools and universities, and if we can digitize that and make some small percentage on that, it could be

a really good opportunity.

So that's how we create a plan.

In fact, we applied to YC by saying that we are going to go into education institutes.

What happened is once we got into YC, we started selling to education institutes And I would go, I remember like I was in Jaipur, and I would go into small universities and so on and

try to convince them that, hey, why don't you accept your fees digitally?

And the guy would look at me and say, if they pay digitally, they're going to pay you 1% extra?

I said yes.

So he said, then why don't I charge just 1% more fees, right?

So, and that's when you realize that your customer doesn't really care about digital collections.

Like, education institute didn't really care.

They knew that if they want, whatever way they charge the fees, the guy is going to come and pay it.

Because education in India is that kind of a business.

That if you are in a college and the guy says, I don't, I don't collect digitally, I will only collect cash, you will go and give cash.

He says, I want to collect cheque, he says you have to go to this counter and pay, you will go to that counter and pay.

So nobody really cared about smooth, easy collections in education.

So on this, parallelly we started selling to startups because we were working in a co-working setup and a lot of startups are our friends who wanted digital payments.

So they said, why don't you give it to us?

And we started getting traction there.

So we quickly pivoted our way and said that this is a sector that is growing, even though it's small, it's growing for us.

This is a sector that's definitely not working for us.

So we completely pivoted away into startups, and I think it was a very good decision in hindsight.

Interesting, interesting.

That's— I love how because you were kind of in the weeds with the customers and in front of them and like watching them and understanding their problem, you kind of got those insights.

I'm curious, sort of as you look at the fintech space, and you mentioned that It wasn't— if you knew how complicated or difficult the problem was, you know, maybe, maybe it would have

been a different way that you would have started.

Um, but as you look at regulated industries, as you started to continue to build the product, um, was there a moment when you said, actually, this is going to give me, um, more energy?

Or this is actually the, the hardest problem actually gives you more energy, or perhaps more moat?

Over time.

Yeah, so let me talk about how our journey started.

So we decided to start into— build into payments.

We applied to YC, we got into YC, we spent the 3 months of YC without doing single live transition because we didn't get an approval from the partners.

So we got an in-principle approval before YC.

It took us a year after that to do our first live transition.

Now, very few businesses in the tech world have that kind of a gestation period.

Most tech businesses, you can start off out of your bedroom, start selling, you can build an e-commerce store, start selling.

And typically YC also recommends, just go and start, sell.

Selling first.

We were in a business where we couldn't start selling.

We needed to wait for approvals, we need to wait for things.

Yeah, even after getting into YC, it took us almost a year to do our first live transition because that's how complicated regulated businesses are.

We had to wait for a license.

We first had to get a lot of certifications, approvals, license, then the final approval, then we could do first live transition.

The— so while all of that sounds fairly complex, the— and our teams used to discuss that, hey, it's taking us a year to do our first live transition, like, how do we have that patience?

One thing that I kept telling us is that yes, there are a lot of hurdles, but everyone coming after us will also face the same hurdles.

So it's— the hurdles become a moat over time because unlike most spaces in India which get funded, we are still in a space where there's still much lesser number of companies in competition

because it's not very easy to just bring— build a payment gateway, get an approval started.

You don't have 100 companies coming up in our space in a month because not easy to build in that.

So The, the regulation can seem unfair to your times, but the best part is it's actually very fair.

No, no company, no matter how big or small they are, they have to clear the same light of guidelines, same set of rules, follow the same 1-year process that we followed to get an approval

and go live.

And very few companies will have the patience or the energy to go through that effort.

So that itself creates a very deep moat, that it's not easy to get into that space.

So I say regulated businesses are hard in the sense that You have— there are certain set of rules you have to comply with, but it also allows you to build a very deep moat once you

comply with them, because everyone coming after you also has to do the same job.

And that makes— that allows you to create a lot of differentiation on top.

Yeah.

And, and is that what gave you ultimately the conviction?

Because I think, you know, these types of cold start problems are very, very difficult, and you had to wait a year, you had to go well beyond YC to sort of like land that first— solve

that first cold start problem.

Was there a moment when you said, actually, you know, this is going to take too long?

Or did you get conviction as you were building?

I think we— every— like, it's easy to say today that, yeah, we had conviction.

It wasn't really the case.

Like, every single month I would sit with my co-founder and say, why are we building in this space?

Like, why don't we do something else?

Why don't we— like, there were companies getting funded in e-commerce, companies getting funded in food delivery, and so many spaces.

And he said, why don't we just do that?

Why don't we— we are techies at the end of the day.

Spend our time coding something else, we can spend our time building something else.

But we connected with the problem so much because we spoke to so many founders, so many people who could be our customers, and I think that gave the highest form of energy.

Every single customer we started meeting, everyone said, yes, we have a problem, yes, so nobody's solving it.

And that gave us the conviction that, yeah, it is hard, but the hard— see, if it is hard to sell to customers, it's a problem.

If it's hard for other reasons, it's not really a problem, it's actually a moat.

Because if it's hard for other reasons, then nobody else will get into the problem.

And if your customers really care about it, once you build it for them, they'll really love you.

So once we started getting customers, when we were actually able to start onboarding customers, the customers loved it.

Hey, finally you are there.

Finally there's something who solves for us the way we want it to be solved.

And I think that really created a deep motive.

And we had a lot of loss of conviction through this process.

The only thing that kept us going is like there were enough customers.

As YC says, make something people want.

So as long as there were enough number of people who wanted what we were building, I think we were in a good shape.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting.

It's a very common theme among really, really, um, really generational founders and building generational companies is that ultimately the customer kind of gives you energy, right?

And that's, that's really what, what you focus on.

Not investors, not sort of regulatory bodies, but really the customers that give you that energy.

Um, one thing that, you know, is often quoted is that points of crisis, or, you know, when you kind of have these like near-death experiences,

You can either survive them or you can actually get out of them stronger.

And you know, in our conversations, there's some near-death moments or crisis moments.

Would love to hear a moment when you thought maybe things were going to end and how you kind of tackled it and how did the company get stronger because of it.

Yeah, it keeps happening in a business we are in.

I can tell you one of the early days, right?

We got a bank approval.

We got a license.

I was telling you throughout the YC time, We were not live.

Just a week before Demo Day, we got our final approval and we actually went live and launched.

In fact, before Demo Day, we were considering that YC has an option that you can delay and do the next Demo Day.

So we're discussing not to launch on Demo Day because you're not ready.

But we got approval week before Demo Day.

We did TechCrunch launch, we went live, all great.

We did the Demo Day, a lot of investors were interested.

About 2 weeks after Demo Day, the bank that had enabled us pulled the plug.

They said like There were some issues, some— one customer did a complaint and they said we can't support you anymore and they completely stopped our platform.

We had at least 50 customers live, merchants live who were using us for payments.

And one day all of them were shut because the bank pulled the plug.

Now this is like the— like it's the hardest place you can be in a payments business because your customers want to collect money.

Somebody has finally agreed that they want to use a small payment gateway like you to accept your money and And now you have to tell them that, hey, your business is shut because our

bank pulled the plug.

And I think that was probably the hardest time of the company because a lot of us were in the room.

We tried begging and pleading the bank that, hey, give us some more time.

And they said, no, we can't.

And it's done.

And they didn't care.

So I think we had to take some very— we had to discuss what we do.

Because in a payments business, trust and reliability is so critical that once these guys go out and say, hey, Razorpay, like duped us or whatever, and then our business is impacted

because of them, and we had just done a YC launch.

Like, it could be its own set of things, and then we'll never be able to establish trust.

I think the one fundamental principle we set is that we'll call every single customer and tell what is happening, exactly why it's happening, and what we are doing about it.

We'll— I think a lot of times when this crisis happens, people stop picking up calls, people stop responding, because you don't have much to say.

Like, what do you tell your customers?

He's gonna— he's gonna pick up the phone and scold you.

We said we'll get all the scolding, we'll hear all the abuses, but we'll never stop picking the phone, we'll never stop calling these people and telling what's happening.

So we had like 6, 7 of us, 6 of us sat in a room, started calling each and every customer, explaining what's happening.

A lot of them understood, a lot of them didn't understand, a lot of them abused us.

And I can tell you, like,

when Indians abuse, they abuse a lot.

So they're like full-on Hindi abuses that our team had to and me, I personally had to listen to.

But we said, it's okay, we'll listen through it, we'll hear them out, we'll let them vent their frustration, we'll tell them what's happening.

And we kept doing that.

And it took us about 4 or 5 days before which we could get another partner and we could take it live.

And then we were able to get a lot of these merchants live.

And even some of those merchants, some of the merchants who even abused us are still live with us, with Razorpay, even today.

Because, yeah.

Because at the end of the day, like, uh, B2B is— so unlike B2C, B2B is a business of trust, right?

That's— and in particular in financial institutions, it's a business of trust.

And the trust, at the end of the day, nothing replaces the human touch point of trust, right?

You pick up the phone, you call.

Even today, like, uh, for when customers raise a support query or questions, we have a rule that if it crosses 2 or 3 or 4 exchanges, you pick up the phone and call the customer.

I mean, we do be like the— just having somebody, a human on the other side saying that yes, I am with you and I'm gonna— I'm managing it, gives a lot of trust.

Uh, even though the efficiency might be weaker, the trust coming out of that is stronger.

So for example, a lot of companies are using AI to replace, uh, support today.

And we've taken a call that we are using AI in everything except replacing customer support.

Because in customer support, in our case, customer support is not about solving the problem.

It is a channel to establish trust that, hey, we are here.

There's somebody as a human spending his time on solving a problem, and we can't take that away.

So it I think that fundamental got set up for us because of the crisis, because we learned that even when we had the worst of worst happening to us, just because you are picking the

phone and saying that, hey, I'm on top of it and I'm spending my time just figuring this out, gave a lot of trust to these people.

That's dedication.

That's very inspiring.

I think that's a hugely important lesson for building any company, but certainly very, very much for a trust-based company.

One of the interesting things about our conversation was this notion of conviction that you guys had very early on.

And you know, this was a time, and I think folks probably realize, maybe some of the folks here are a little bit too young to remember, you know, the UPI systems wasn't there, demonetization

has not happened yet.

And so early days, there are many competitors, particularly competitors from overseas, competitors locally, And, you know, they would say things like, oh, you know, we're gonna, we're

in this space already.

You don't know anything.

You don't have the background.

We're gonna crush you.

How about we just buy you?

Or, you know, and they're certainly motivated by some amount of fear associated with that, right?

So

what was your mindset at the time?

Like, what gave you conviction to keep going when in some of those cases, I think some founders probably would have said, well, you know, maybe we pack it up and join one of these companies,

or maybe we're not gonna win.

Yeah, and I think that, that happened very early.

Like, in, in our space, it actually happened very early.

When we were in YC, even before we launched, we started getting acquisition offers, uh, from, from one of the— some of the largest payment companies in the world, uh, started saying

that, hey, because of YC we got noticed.

Uh, so some of the large payment companies, the founders of them reached out and said, why don't you join us?

Why did you build India for us?

And so on.

I think it, uh, and I think some of those were actually exciting because the companies were really good, uh, I think what kept us going is, A, India is very, very hard and very different.

So when we met a lot of these companies, global companies, I felt they didn't understand how complex India is.

And the worry from that perspective was not that what will happen today, but our worry was that 2 years, 3 years out, the amount of investment India needs.

So India is a massive opportunity today, but in 2014, 2015, if you looked at India, India, like, the payment volume was $60 billion, right?

The total GMV.

That's what I put in my business when my VC application, I put the payments market of India is $60 billion.

Today, Razorpay alone does $180 billion, right?

So that is the way the market has grown in last 10 years, right?

So it's so hard to—

it's so hard to plan for India.

Now, if I told a company that, hey, for a $60 billion market, we need $500 million to build, it's going to be very hard to convince them.

But if I— if somebody understood that a $60 billion market is going to scale up massively right?

And there's a lot of opportunity that is going to have.

Even today, I feel Bharati is very small.

India is going to be a trillion-plus market, at least in payments, right?

But it's very hard to explain that to a global player who's not seen that, because most other markets in the world are not growing at that pace.

So I think for us, it was very clear that if we have to solve India, we have to think a very long-term perspective.

And if, if we were able to consider that, we need to have a partner who's going to be able to understand that that is a long-term play of India.

And we didn't find that.

So I think for us, the answer became very clear.

Unless we feel that what we want to achieve, we can achieve faster with somebody else, there's no reason to work with somebody else.

And we never found that.

Yeah, your, your insights were pretty unique in that regard, I think.

Um, so it did work and it did start to take off.

And, you know, um, there was a period, I think, um, in sort of 2017, 2020, um, even before the pandemic, where you guys had grown some insane multiple, like 40x.

Um, at what was amazing about that wasn't just the growth, it was that you guys did it with record capital efficiency.

What was your mindset in that?

Because, you know, I think we, you know, we get a lot of questions obviously about how much money do I need to raise.

Um, I need to do this thing and therefore I need to raise a lot of capital to do it.

Um, but you guys were able to grow, you know, at a breakneck pace but stay very, very capital efficient and very lean.

What was, what was that mindset?

Yeah, it is, uh, in fact, it's again a great thing in hindsight, but if you know the 2015 to 2020 time period, it was not really considered a good thing for a company to burn less money.

Like, there's a, there's a time when people were— investors expect you to burn a lot of money.

So we raised, like, when we raised our Series A funding, we raised like about $10-11 million.

We didn't really have that much burn.

Our burn was less than $200,000 a month.

So we took that money and we put it in bank FDs, fixed deposits in India.

The interesting part was the interest on the deposits was more than our burn, so we became profitable.

And our investor was very unhappy with that because he was like, we have given you this money to burn and grow, why are you making profits out of it?

And we had to explain that because they were investing a lot of other consumer companies which were burning massive amount of money.

And here we were, we had $11 million, we are growing their money just because of interest rate.

And that made them very unhappy.

So it was a very hard conversation in hindsight.

But I think for us, it was very clear that we are in a B2B business, right?

You know, B2B is a very logical business, right?

Unlike B2C, which in my belief, because I'm a B2B founder, I find it very logical.

Because you do— in B2C, you have to first get the customers, spend a lot of money, get the— spend a lot of money to grow the customer, spend a lot of money to build engagement.

And then at some point, through some other channel, you monetize that customer.

In B2B, it's very simple.

You add a value to a business, the business pays you for it.

It's a simple business that you go to a business, you say, hey, I'm adding this value to you, this is what I need to charge for it.

Either the business likes it or dislikes it, but that's how it is.

There's no point of burning money for it, there's no point of spending money to engage and all of that, because the business is going to be logical.

He uses you today because you add value.

If you tomorrow stop adding value, he uses somebody else.

There is, there is modes and there is depth in product, but at the end of the day, it's it's about the value you add to their life.

I think for us it was very clear.

We told the investor that like, I can burn a lot more money and grow a lot faster, it's not going to do anything because there's no point of that.

It's not a DAO business where I can have that DAO and I can say, hey, tomorrow this is going to be worth this much value.

It has as much value as the value I'm adding to him today.

If I stop adding that value, he's going to move out tomorrow.

And that makes the business far more logical.

But also there's a lot of intensity to that business because every day you have to fight for your share.

The business decision maker on the other side is every day evaluating, are you still adding more value than you're charging me for?

Because if you're not, then he's going to find something else.

And it is easy to say, but it's harder to constantly compound, especially as the org gets larger.

So to give an example, like you said, like UPI was launched in 2016, April 2016.

Actually, we just celebrated 10 years of UPI.

April 2016 is when UPI was launched.

There were a lot of payment gateways at that point of time.

And I don't know if people here would remember, but in 2016, when UPI was launched, there was a lot of skeptics.

A lot of people didn't believe that UPI will take off.

The two largest banks of the country hadn't integrated on UPI till demonetization happened, till November 2016.

So most payment gateways in India actually didn't integrate UPI at all because they felt that without the two largest banks of the country being on UPI, who will use UPI, right?

So, and that's where the value of being small is so high because we had nothing to lose.

We had 10,000 merchants.

We were very small.

We had launched in 2015.

This is 2016.

In September or October 2016, we became the first payment gateway in the country to go live on UPI.

Much before the largest banks of the country had gone live.

And then, and then November is when the largest banks went live, and then demonetization happened, and no other payment gateway was ready to support UPI at the scale at which we were.

So all the largest companies— we were only supporting SMEs before that, but the largest companies at that point of time— Zomato, Swiggy, BookMyShow— all of them went live on Razorpay

in a period of a couple of weeks because suddenly everyone wanted UPI.

And we were the only payment gateway offering that.

Now that's the advantage of being a small player, that you can make these bets early on.

That worst thing— and we discussed with our team— the worst that will happen, that UPI doesn't take off, it's fine.

We are still fighting the battle anyway.

But if it does take off, it creates a unique wedge for us and we can go out.

And so that bet, that early bet, played out in a massive way for us because it took 6 months for any other payment gateway to go live on UPI after we went live.

And in that 6 months, we were able to enter spaces that we couldn't have entered if there was no differentiator for us to play on.

And that is how it compounded for us.

That's, that's such a classic, I think, lesson.

Yeah, it's such a classic lesson.

I mean, we, we talk a lot about, you know, being able to be faster, right?

Your rate of building product, your rate of learning, your ability to adapt to markets.

And those advantages accrue to startups.

This is such a classic story and, and such an amazing indication that that works.

I'm curious, you know, as we look at the age of AI, there's obviously multiple things that it's fundamentally shifted our thinking on product, on how we run companies, right?

Both of those things.

And I'm curious how you think about the product.

And I think you guys recently launched, you know, core AI functionality layering in the fundamental sort of AI backbone for running a business.

Um, how do you guys think about integrating AI into the product?

Yeah, I think AI is such a fundamental shift.

Say, first we have to calibrate ourselves a lot, right?

So I think it starts at the top.

So I am like— I and the leadership are spending so much time on AI.

Like, I am addicted to Claude code so much right now.

Uh, as I was meeting the Anthropic team yesterday and I was saying that, that you need to start having de-addiction programs because people like— yes, I'm personally spending so much

time on Claude code, on OpenClaw.

And so on.

And it's so much fun and exciting, and it allows— like, I think as most founders, like, we start building companies because we love building, we love coding.

But over time, you— the layers get built in, the company gets large, and you end up becoming people manager.

And honestly, no founder gets into building a startup to become a people manager.

So I think AI is such an amazing tool because it allows you to get back to building in some shape and form.

Uh, and I think I personally have been loving that.

But the advantage of that is that when you spend your time doing that, you understand the power of the tool to understand the power that technology brings in, and that is allowing us

to make some very fundamental decisions.

So like a couple of months back, we just sat down and said, if I were to start Razorpay today, how would I build it, right?

And we just started putting down on drawing board that how would our integration look like, how would our onboarding look like, how would our support look like, how would our platform

look like, how would people interact with us, how would people use us?

And just put it all down on the paper, and he said, okay, like, let's make that happen, right?

This— because that's the incumbent policy, right?

Like you start believing that, hey, we have everything, we are well set.

And I mean, DSRP disrupted a lot of incumbents to get where we are.

And it is because of the— UP example was the same reason.

Everybody felt that we are the largest payment player, we are doing all the cards and everything.

If something changes, we'll respond to it.

But the respond to it— the market changes faster than you can respond.

So if you're going to respond when the market is starting to change, you're already too late.

So we said that we are going to do the same thing with AI.

And we're not going to act like an incumbent.

We're going to act like a startup.

We're going to decide what changes are happening, and we are going to bring these changes before a new startup brings those in.

So we completely reinvented the platform into it.

We launched it a couple of months back, and the traction has been massive because, like, it fundamentally allows you— and some of this is not perfect yet because AI is still evolving.

The tech is there but not fully there, but you have to go with that belief that it's going to get there.

It's improving every day.

And so we had to spend a lot of time building this.

Rewiring our teams, rewiring.

And it's not easy because when you have large pools of capital sitting, large pools of teams sitting, doing something that they're doing every day, asking them, hey, we'll hurt ourselves

in short term, but, you know, pivot ourselves completely to what is going to make sense long term.

It is hard, and every team has an incumbent fallacy, but this is the only way to survive in the world that we are heading towards.

AI is going to bring down time to build so rapidly that the only differentiation is going to be how fast can you move.

How fast can you really decide what to build?

Because the build itself is a very short process.

I think that's the only mode.

I think we've seen that tech itself was the only mode in tech became how fast can you execute?

Because a lot of other things came down.

There's not the capital mode came down, the infrastructure mode came down.

I think AI is going to bring down the building mode as well because build itself is going to be very easy.

The only thing you have to spend time is what to build, how to build it, how should it look like?

But just the build itself is going to compress massively, and every single company will have to go through the transformation.

Some of them are going to take the time and say, hey, I'll respond to the market.

Any company who takes that call that we're going to respond to the market is already dead.

The only way to survive is to figure out what the market is going to be and move today, and that's the call we had to take.

This is true founder mode right, right here.

Um, that's amazing, that's amazing.

As you look at your journey, your startup journey,

you've grown from a few people, maybe in an apartment in Jaipur when you started, to now sort of one of the generational companies.

How have you think you've changed?

As you scale, certainly the business changes, the organization changes, but one of the things that we often hear is that founders that choose to build and have this intensity to build,

they change.

They become a better version of themselves or a more formidable version of themselves.

As you reflect on your journey, what has changed about you?

Yeah, I think there are a lot of learnings in the 10 years, and it's not that we did everything right.

I did a lot of mistakes.

Uh, let me speak about, like, for example, some of the mistakes, like the founder mode that you spoke about.

Like, I love that essay when it came out because we went through that same journey.

What happens as a founder, you typically start a company, you are into it every day the first 2-3 years, you're ramping up, you're figuring out, you're in the trenches.

Then the company starts taking off.

Then you start hiring a bunch of executives, you start hiring a lot of leaders, and you start feeling that, hey, now I have good leaders that can take care of what I used to do, and

I don't need to spend my time on that.

I can just manage the leaders.

And that's what the SS is— manager mode.

And a lot of founders shifted to management.

I myself shifted to manager mode for a couple of years where I said, I have the best leaders, the leaders know what they are doing, why do I need to get into everything?

Like, let me just manage the leaders.

And that's the worst mistake you can do.

Now there's a fine line between micromanagement and being in founder mode, right?

So you don't want to be micromanaging everything, but the things that really matter to you, the founder has to get into it.

For example, as a product company, the product vision, the product direction, the way a founder is going to think about it, no leader can ever think about it.

So like, I think, and we had to all— and I've spoken to a lot of founders who had to go through the journey where you start acting in manager mode, you start getting your leaders, and

you get the best leaders.

We had like Razorpay, some amazing leaders.

But at the end of the day, what differentiates a company is the founder's conviction on something that your day-to-day execution people can't take.

And those decisions have to come from founders.

So, and I think the fundamental point is that nobody is going to care about your company as much as you do.

And that, that is never going to change.

It's not going to happen on day 1, it's not going to happen on day year 10, it's not going to happen on year 20.

And I think every, every company, whether it's whether it's Facebook or whether it's any large company that's run by the founder, the founders slowly and quickly realize that nobody,

no good leader can care about your company as much as you do.

And I think we had to go through this journey.

So I think that journey took almost 10 years for me to personally see that, hey, I need to be into the core things that matter to the company is something I need to be there and I need

to spend my time on it.

And everything else I can delegate.

And I think that learning took a lot of time.

One last quick question for me.

So as we look at, you know, the over 2,000 people that are here, that maybe reflect where you were when you started.

What advice would you have for folks to take actionable steps to get building and to get started on a, on a company?

Yeah, I think the, the core premise of like entrepreneurship, right, like AI is making a lot of stuff easier, right?

So people are thinking, hey, maybe entrepreneurship will get easier.

I don't think entrepreneurship is going to get easier because of AI.

I think the fundamental tools required to build a company are getting easier.

But the core aspect of entrepreneur is the ability to connect with the problem deeply and spend all of your time and effort in solving that problem, right?

And I think with AI, my worry is that because it's easier to build, it's easier for people to latch on to problems that they don't really care about, right?

Because it's easier to say, hey, I can whitecode something, I can build something and deploy this, and I can start going live.

I think what every founder really needs to think is, is this something that you can spend your next 10 years of your life building?

Because that's what it's going to take.

It is— can be easy to build and deploy a software on AI today.

It can be easy to deploy a website on AI today.

But is that a problem statement that you can spend your 10 years of your life building?

Because that's what it's going to take if you're going to build a successful company.

AI is going to make the build process easier.

The company building part is still going to take 10 years of your life and every day spending that hour.

So you need to find a problem statement that you closely connect with, not just because something is cool or because AI allowed me to make that that code, that Y project, the only thing

that's going to work is, is that a problem statement that you can spend all of your time and effort for next 10 years solving for?

Because that's what it's going to take at the end of the day.

Inspiring.

We're going to leave it there.

Everyone give it up for Harshil Mathur from Razorpay.

Yeah, thank you.