What do founders discuss when the pitch decks are closed?

Today, eChai Ventures brought together founders, investors and operators in Ahmedabad for a candid conversation with Hari Balasubramanian.

It wasn't a rehearsed keynote when we met. The discussion moved from his early investment journeys involving Wow! Momo, Mukunda Foods Pvt. Ltd., Spinny, Rapido and Brevistay to some of the harder questions founders are confronting today:

▶️ Where is capital really going?
▶️ What has AI changed about building and selling software?
▶️ Is conventional SaaS becoming harder to fund?
▶️ How do founders and investors actually achieve liquidity?

Recalling the conversations, I found a few ideas that stayed with me.

▫️Capital is no longer India’s biggest constraint. The constraint is whether a team has a bold enough idea and the operating capacity to deploy that capital intelligently.
▫️AI has made building faster. It has not made distribution easier. Product creation is getting cheaper, while customer access, domain expertise, trust, and monetisation are getting more valuable.
▫️SaaS is not dead. But the comfortable middle is being squeezed. Either reach enormous user scale or own a workflow so deeply that a smaller number of customers will pay serious money.
▫️Paper valuation is not a return. Liquidity is. Many meaningful companies take 10 to 15 years to build, while the structures funding them often expect answers much earlier.

Perhaps the most important lesson was this:

A strong ecosystem is not built through speeches. It is built through rooms where people speak honestly, challenge each other and make the right introductions.

Thank you, Hari Balasubramanian, for sharing decades of experience without trying to make the journey sound neat.

Thank you, Jatin Chaudhary, Umesh Uttamchandani, eChai Ventures and DevX for creating the room.

Amish Trivedi Anil Motwani Anuj Dalal Bhavesh Patel Jash Gor Jayesh Kadivar Koumal Kalantry Nikita Lalwani Rahul Kumar Vikas Mundhra Viraj Rajani Balkrishna Agarwal Chirag Panchal Amit Gupta Dr. Isha Goswami Dr. Saiful Khan Ekta Shah Harsh Joshi Ishani Dave Mitesh Shethwala Murtuza Badami Er. Nandan Shukla Sagar Thakker Satya Mehta Shyam Parmar Sweety Patel Twinkle Barot

The carousel here distils the entire conversation.