eChai Ventures

Tomorrow I'll be at @iiscbangalore
One of India’s best research institutions.
The place where a lot of what we call “deep tech” in this country actually started.

AI Cafe happened in Ahmedabad yesterday at House of Starts. Utpal Vaishnav, founder of EightCor, who started AI Cafe with me, was flying back from the Netherlands and he came to the venue straight from the airport, did not even go home first.

good discussions, and a lot of people who came in the earlier weeks came again, which was nice to see

next one is on friday 16 October, 4 to 7, same place. it is eChai and Upsquare together. if you are building something with AI, or trying to figure out where it fits in your business or your work, bring your laptop and whatever you are working on. register on echai.ventures, and share it with friends who are working on the same.

thursday nights are now eChai founders padel night.. Viraj, Sid from Digipple, Rishit from Kinetiq and me keep switching partners to try every combination and it ends the same way every week, whichever side Rishit is on wins. except the last 15 mins, we are still not sure if he gets tired or just feels sorry for us :-)

everyone has that one friend you call before buying anything.. what to buy, from where, and whether to buy it at all. for me and Kunal that friend is Hardik Manwani from HMMBiz. eChai's tech infra, our personal stuff, all of it goes through him first. at this point he probably knows our wishlists better than we do.

with AI, a lot of people thought work will become easier and folks will finally get time for hobbies.. but what i realise is a lot of founders around me now want to learn more. the appetite to do things has increased. founder groups which had memes now have prompts, and the hobby people picked up is also AI. this is an incredible time of our times.. people are burning the midnight oil to learn new things and discover things, and that thing of co-learning with others at eChai AI Soundboard is something i really look forward to. feels like college days again

recently we were in Udaipur for the eChai Founders Retreat, to celebrate Usmanpura Imaging Centre doing so well, led by Dr Amit Gupta and Dr Aradhana Gupta. this whole group loves cricket, that was the one common thing. so we are sitting in the villa and someone notices there is a match happening near by.. obviously. one of us just shouts "hey guys can we play?" and they say yes yes. now we got some confidence so next shout was "we are coming, we will bat first" haha and they said yes yes that works. no idea who those guys were but they were super chill about it. anyway this keeps happening with us, planned or not, eChai group goes somewhere and cricket happens

so many times in founder circles someone says i want to learn coding properly or do some course from a good college.. and then work happens and it stays there only.

Anuj Dalal actually went and did it. he is founder of Zestard, then started CheckMyWarranty, and now he is going for ISB’s IVI program for entrepreneurs. new city new people and classes again after so many years

if you know Anuj you know he gets best deal in everything and knows somebody for anything. he is going there to learn, but i wont be surprised if in 2 weeks batchmates start coming to him for personal finance and real estate deals

we did farewell dinner for him in Ahmedabad with Koumal from BigNano, Kush from DI AI, Viraj and Sid from Digipple, Rishit from Kinetiq and me. lot of advice was given to him on classes, by people who have not been in a class for years

all the best @anujdalal_87, learn a lot.. and dont come back saying “as we discussed in class” in every meeting

every founder group has one host.. the person who says come home for dinner and actually means it, who has his favourite places in every city, and by the time the group chat is still discussing, the trip is already planned. for our eChai founders group that is Dr Amit Gupta.

yesterday caught up with him at Usmanpura Imaging Centre. he is a radiologist from B J Medical College who later went to ISB, and today UIC is Gujarat's largest radiology chain with 20+ centres running CT and MRI with AI. along with Dr Aradhana Gupta he also co-founded Airmed. UIC recently raised growth capital from OFAAFO Advisors, a family office, to take it into new geographies and build out more advanced imaging and pathology.

most of us who studied computers know this life.. anybody in family or friends has a laptop issue, printer issue, wifi issue, first call comes to us. he plays the same role, just at a much bigger level and with much more serious problems. somebody has fever, somebody's parents have a report nobody understands, somebody just wants to know whether to worry or not.. first call goes to him. he has become the family doctor of our group, and having him and Dr Aradhana around has been a big relief for all our families.

consultation fee is usually just showing up for the next eChai dinner he is hosting

with work and family both full, planning a proper meetup with friends is almost impossible now. everyone's calendar is different and by the time a date gets fixed someone or the other cancels.

so over time a few of us just settled on one default.. our chai tapri. nobody plans anything. if you are passing by between meetings or driving back from somewhere you just drop a message, and whoever is around also comes for 20 mins. one cutting each, what's going on in work, and then everyone goes back to their day.

some friendships do drift as work grows, its ok, whenever you meet you pick up from where you left. but the ones which stay mostly have one small thing like this.

and in eChai there are so many such founder circles.. the poker night group, wednesday cricket, thursday padel, AI soundboard, the founders retreat group, the dinner at someone's home group, and the ones who stay back for one more chai after every event. everyone finds their own.

whenever there is a big summit, it opens up opportunity for side events..

this time it was Hari Balasubramanian, here to speak at the NRAI Summit. Hari is in this since 1987.. he started Calcutta Online, one of the early internet portals, which got acquired by a NASDAQ listed company in 1998, and these days he is mostly with founders, investing through Indian Angel Network. he gives a lot of his time to founder communities in different cities, eChai in Bengaluru being one of them, so when he was coming to Ahmedabad, meeting the founders here was already on his list.

so we got 25-30 founders together for eChai Founders Social at DevX Capital One, from different sectors and stages. everyone came with one question and then one more and one more, and he kept answering everyone.

a lot of eChai sessions have happened like this over the years, someone comes to the city for one thing and ends up spending a few hours with the founders here. this was one of those afternoons.

.@VikasMundhra1 was with iBall from 2001. by 2008 he was handling a big sales and admin team in many states, Vikalp Somani joined around then, and both worked together for more than 10 years.. being a CA, numbers were anyway his thing, and lot of their work was on that, which market is moving, which distributor is doing what.

in 2019 they saw that their distributors had the same problem as them. data was there in the ERP but everyone was still making excel reports, and the BI tools available were not made for these businesses.

Vikalp made a prototype, 3 customers confirmed the order, and Magenta started from there.

it started with reports from Tally, Busy, SAP. today they also have OnField for sales team visits, Workflow for approvals, and DMS for the distributor’s stock, orders and payments.. same customer, they just went deeper into his business. 21+ ERPs and 25+ industries now.

Vikas and Vikalp were the customer themselves for years before building this. at eChai we see this a lot with B2B founders who are doing well, they knew the customer very closely before they started

a few months back me and Utpal Vaishnav from EightQor group were sitting at his House of Starts office. we were talking about how fast AI is changing, there is a new update every other day. we felt people should meet in person and figure it out together. Utpal said why don’t we do it.. that is how AI Cafe started in Ahmedabad, eChai and Upsquare (part of EightQor) together at House of Starts.

the first few weeks it was mostly people we knew. then they started bringing their friends. if someone was visiting the city that week, they also came. people sit with their laptops, show what they are working on, ask how someone else did something, and try it there itself.

then people from manufacturing companies started coming. they are generally the first ones there. they come with problems from the factory floor, and the whole table gets into it.

some come every week. some come once and then come back after a month with something they built.

now it is a weekly ritual for a lot of people, they look forward to it.

today, 4 to 7 at House of Starts. Open to all.

Rishit Shah did his engineering from DDIT in Nadiad and his MBA from Georgetown, and has spent most of his career in the US, building products for global media and data companies.

he started on the media side, as Director of Digital Products at The Washington Post, at a time when newspapers were figuring out how to live online. from there he moved into data and strategy as Head of Strategy at Lotame, a company working on audience data for advertisers. then came the bigger product role, Chief Product Officer at 7Park Data, which went on to get acquired by Vista Equity. and today he is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Kinetiq, which uses AI to track brand mentions second by second across thousands of TV channels, for clients like Mercedes-Benz, Uber, Fox and Google. he also led Kinetiq’s acquisition of Veil Global Technologies, bringing video and audio watermarking into the same platform. each step took him a little deeper, from building media products, to understanding audiences, to owning both product and technology for a global AI company.

there is a growing trend of people who have built all of this abroad and still choose to come back. for a long time the choice was simple, if you wanted a global career you stayed where the work was. that has changed. today a global product can be run from anywhere. you take the US calls in the evening, fly out when a client needs you, and the rest of the time you live where you want to live. so where you are based becomes a choice, and Rishit and Vishakha chose Ahmedabad.

and the city gets something out of that choice too. founders here get to sit with someone who has seen how products are built at The Washington Post, how a data company gets acquired, how an AI product sells to Fox and Google. a lot of founders in Ahmedabad have learnt from him, most of them over conversations that were never meant to be about work.

it started at eChai, and over the years Rishit and Vishakha became good friends. trips, late night poker, long dinners.. and now whenever we plan anything, the first thing we check is whether they are free :-)

tomorrow morning eChai Bengaluru is at IISc, at the Department of Design and Manufacturing, with D-CoE IISc. the session is about making things, hardware, software and devices.

i was going through the list of who’s coming. Sk8sapien, Tidemark Robotics, O2 Animation Studios, Drinkzip, a hardware validation engineer, a researcher from IISc, and a few designers from big companies.

on the panel, Mrinal Rai is co-founder and CPO of Intugine, which gives companies like Philips, Flipkart, Xiaomi and Diageo visibility on their shipments across air, land, sea and rail. Himanshu Upreti is co-founder and CTO of AI Palette, where they use AI to help food and consumer brands come up with new product concepts. and Dr K Joshil Raj is CEO of D-CoE, the Centre of Excellence in Design at IISc. Harsha Bhurani will be hosting.

it will be a candid conversation, mostly Q&A, on how they took their first prototype to actual customers.

saturday 11 to 1, IISc campus. registration is free at echai.ventures

I attended a session organised by @eChaiVentures in Mumbai, it was so glad to see people building cool products around and sharing the journey of @coeaterapp with fellow builders.

No fancy networking events. No calendars. Just chai at eChai with @eChaiVentures and conversations that can go from “What are you working on?” to “Let’s build something together.” :)

That’s #Ahmedabad for you.

@jatin10 @rushabhms @eChaiVentures

Meetups aren't just networking events.

When the product solves a problem attendees already feel, a meetup becomes cheap customer discovery and a distribution channel in one.

That dual role is often overlooked.

Had an amazing time at a recent meet-up by @eChaiVentures

Join Ahmedabad Startup Day.

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