Shreyas Srinivasan from Insider.in | Super Spotlight

Hey, I'm Shreyas. I'm the founder of insider.in@insider. I design all our products, I code a bit, I get involved in business a bit, I help customer support sometimes pretty much anything which requires me to roll off my sleep and help someone, I do that. So basically gotta go back to 2010 a bit. I was part of the founding team which started NH7, right. That was the first real music festival in India. And we worked with different people when we are trying to build the ticketing experience for NH7. And we found that the existing solutions ticketed a music festival and experience an event like they would ticket a movie. But they were different. These were experiences. These were not just going to any theater buying popcorn. This was for a lot of people, a life changing experience. So I thought the discovery and the buying process for these events needed to be different and we thought we were the best people to build it. So yeah, I don't think we're doing that yet. I think it's fairly presumptuous to think somebody can change the world. What we're trying to do is we're trying to improve how you discover and buy events in India. And if we do a great job of that, hopefully in some small way we're improving somebody's life. I think the dream for anyone who builds stuff is always to make sure a lot of people use your product. I think the dream we are chasing is to build a product which people care about, is to build a team which is happy working together and to push the barriers of what we know. I mean, if we keep learning new things and building new stuff, I think that'll keep me happy. If you are between the ages of 15 to 35 in India and if you're in one of the top seven, eight cities in India, we want you to think of Insider every time you want to step out of your house. If you want to go have a good time, if you want to figure out what you want to do, we want you to think of Insider. I think that's the dream. The work culture is largely defined by the people here. I think the work culture is intense. People work very hard. People really have a sense of ownership about what they do. There's no strict timings or we are not very particular about processes. I think they get built over time. We're fairly early in that way. The culture is still being built, but we're built on a culture of respect. So I think the one good thing is everyone needs to respect everyone else. If that doesn't happen Everything breaks down. But other than that, people have fun. We're young company. I'm the oldest person here and I'm not that old. And we like to have fun, but we also like to work really hard. I think what I have fundamentally felt in a lot of different places I've worked is people end up not respecting other people's work. And especially it's true in a cross functional teams where you don't know what the other person does. I think what I respect the most is everyone here has developed a sense of respect for everyone else and the same vice versa. So the people here are great because I think they're open to feedback, but they also are proud of what they do. So it's a good balance. We're a very cross cultural team. I find that a lot of teams are either too tech focused or too marketing focused or too sales focused. One of the great strengths we have is our team very balanced. There are people who are very good at technology, we have people who are very good at communication and marketing, and we have people who are very good at building content. So that cross functional nature of ours makes us very different. So you will see a very, very well rounded product which has good design, which has good amount of great tech behind it, but is also packaged really, really well. So I think that cross cultural dimension of ours is what makes us better. It depends on what you do. And it also is common at some level. At some level, if you care about going out and if you care about all the cultural things happening in India. I think in the last 10 years we have seen a humongous change in India. Right? We have gone from when I started getting involved in indie music and this was 2003. There are probably 30, 40 bands in India today. There are thousands. Right. Stand up comedy was unknown at that point of time. Look at where AIB or Kannan Gill is today. I think India is going a massive cultural change and we are one of the players in it. So if you want to be involved in this cultural change where we move away from just Bollywood to a vibrant independent movement, I think you want to be here. But in specifics. If you're a technologist, look up anyone in the team. You will know that we are people who've been involved in technology for over a decade and we know what we're talking about. If you are into marketing, look up everything we've done in marketing our festivals. I think there are case studies in a lot of different colleges today, but basically across the board, whether it's product whether it's communication, whether it's marketing, whether it's customer support, I think what we are trying to build is the best teams for those particular verticals. And I think in a lot of those verticals, we have the best people working in it. So if you want to excel in any particular thing, you do, and that vertical exists at Insider and you care about the independent ecosystem in India, you need to be here. Just getting up every day and not giving up, it's harder than you think. Just being optimistic about life, I feel, is one of the most super things about, about me. It's just don't give up. So come join Insider and stay super.