Made to Bridge What No One Connected | Entrepreneur Stories

So let's just start with like an introduction. Full name, company name, and like elevator pitch.

Sure.

Just the sort of core problem you're trying to solve.

Sure.

Vikram is fixing the part of online shopping nobody designed for— the moment after delivery, when a product still needs a skilled hand to actually set it up.

You know, I left from India. I went and worked and studied in the US. I went from a grad school in the US. That was late '90s. And then I lived and worked overseas for about 10, 15 years. And I realized most of the work I'm doing in the Western world is about eliminating jobs. Whereas back home in my own country, I see a lot of unemployment, you know, and a lot of people, but unemployment. So that's the problem I felt is a problem I need to solve or is more important, a big problem. So I decided to move back and work towards that.

Sure.

So I'm a manufacturing engineer by training. First 15 years of my career, I worked inside the factories, and what I realized was Most of the problems inside the factories have been solved. In fact, I've worked around the globe, and what I realized was what I was doing was actually reducing jobs. But there are millions of blue-collar workers who are unemployed. And my— now my mission is to create employment for those people who are outside. So my current company, we are creating jobs. The problem we are solving is, see, there are consumer durable brands inside the home. It could be furniture, it could be appliances, TVs, smart home products. So these products are super complicated, modern, and the blue-collar workers in the market don't really understand these products. So homeowners struggle in solving these or managing these products. The brands who make them also don't know how to solve this problem, how to send a technician who knows how to solve that product. So that's what we are creating. A pool of skilled technicians who can solve any problem. So we have taken these people, given them skills, made them employable, and now they're making progress. Like, for example, there's a guy, he was a pizza delivery guy. Today he's a senior supervisor in our team. He came up with pizza delivery kind of a background. We taught him in the carpentry field some work. He became an apprentice, and then he became a full technician. Now he's a supervisor. Many such stories. So we are a— our go-to-market is B2B, but the problems we are solving is for the consumer. So we have adopted this approach because it is very capital efficient. It's a— ours is a B2B2C kind of a business. We have so far only burned about $4 million, but our cumulative revenue is over $15 million. And the impact— every dollar that we spend on training and skilling has a yield of more than $8 Recurring every year in the form of increased incomes of the people. It's huge impact. Most people who work with us are able to double their income every year. Then we have, we also have women technicians. We are the first company in the country to create and bring on board women carpenters, electricians, and so on.

Vifi's technician network handles installation and after-sales service for over 100 brands, including IKEA, Livspace, and Homelane.

So I'm Vikram Sharma. I'm from Wi-Fi. We are a home improvement and home maintenance services company. Yeah, so we have a big team. We have almost 1,000 employees and then another couple of thousand gig workers who work with us across the country. In the office, we have just about 50-60 people. So my day usually begins in the office but ends in the field. So I, you know, go to our stand-up meetings in the morning, then I'm out in the field every day, a new city sometimes. Like today I was supposed to be in Bangalore, but I'm here now. I'll go there tomorrow. So meeting brands, meeting technicians in the trenches most of the time. It took a while for us to explain to investors what we are doing. You know, like when we first— in our first year, we went to investors. Investors were like, oh, your business is too people-intensive. Where's the tech here? Like, I'm not interested. This is just too many people. Like, somebody gotta solve the people problem too, right? We have more than a billion people in India. We gotta find work for them. We need to find ways to get— and see, it is important to find employment because there is work which is not getting done. There's a shortage, right? That's the irony. We have more than a billion people, but common problem in India at least, or in many of the developing nations, is you can't find people. But there are plenty of people who could be upskilled to become plumbers and electricians with the help of technology. So our solution, what we have developed, is we are going to build it in India, but it is easily exportable because the tech that we are building is going to enable even a pizza delivery person to be a plumber or electrician in the long term because there'll be copilots with the help of the app. They'll be able to solve a lot of the problems.

What would the opportunity to work with Tim mean for your company right now?

What would working with Tim mean? You know, this is a name I have been hearing for a long time. I remember when I lived in the US, went to business school, I would hear the name Tim Draper. So it's something which I know what it means. And plus, I think what it would open for us is a ton of opportunity and also insights. So it'll be wonderful to have a person with whom we could partner on our thought level as well as vision and guidance.

He isn't building for the checkout page. He's building for everything that has to go right after it.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for the company right now?

It would mean ability to skill and, you know, provide employment to even more people faster. We are going to do that anyway, but this will enable us to do it faster. And as I mentioned, every dollar invested in skilling in our company yields $8 per year of recurring returns. Not to us.

So this is a little abstract, but like if that guy working back at McKinsey like saw what you're doing now, would he be surprised? Would he be proud? Like what would be your reaction? That other version of you, what would the reaction be to what you're doing now?

No, he will be very happy because this is the path that I had seen for myself. Only thing is I might Be slightly in that, like in year 2000, I'm sitting and looking at 2025. One thing which would surprise me is like, oh, did it take that long? 25 years to get there? At that time, I couldn't have imagined it will take so long for me to reach where I am today. I would have imagined at that time it'll take me 10 years to get where I am today. It had taken me 25.

So we'll start out with just kind of like an intro. If you could say your full names, the name of your company, and like the elevator pitch, like one sentence about what you guys do.

Vidyarthi and Kajal noticed a mismatch hiding in plain sight: young people in India's smaller cities wanting to earn, and digital brands unable to reach them.

If you look at the number of salaried people in India, both organized and unorganized sector put together, it roughly stands about 7%, right? And India is considered to be a really young country with a lot of people who are in their youth or early adulthood, right? So where are they going? I mean, if 7% people are getting jobs and salaried jobs, what about the rest of the 25 to 30%? Right, so we are solving a big, big problem, and what we are trying to do is sales or customer acquisition as a gig, right? So gig is going to stay. Gig is going to be something that is going to be encouraged by the government also, because the government is also not able to provide so many jobs for such a large populated country.

We were really good friends 2013 to 2015. That's when we met. We were in college, really good friends. 2016, uh, we took a trip together just as friends. We liked each other, uh, we started dating, and at the same time, Vidyarthi said he's, he's working on this idea to change the way campus placements work in this country. And I knew, I knew how things are, how bad things are, and I felt, uh, at that moment itself that I need to be a part of it.

At that time, it was a really passionate problem that we were trying to solve as part of the college student placement committee. But then we saw that the problem was larger. The entire campus placement or college placement is not digitized. So we believed that there was an opportunity to solve it. So we set out to start it— we set out in 2017 to start solving it. But very soon we realized that in India it is the problem of unemployment. There are not a lot of corporates offering full-time jobs. And a lot of people are having to fend for themselves, looking out for jobs or part-time jobs or gig jobs, or sometimes they end up opening a small mom-and-pop store in their local neighborhood. So that has been the journey in terms of discovering ourselves, that we wanted to solve the problem of employment and then slowly moving towards gig as a platform where eventually we realized that there's a white space And a bigger problem to solve, which is the larger unemployed youth in the country.

And we realized that there is a startup boom coming in the country. In tier 1 cities, customer acquisition is fairly easy. In tier 2 cities, this is, this is where digital acquisition sort of fails because people do not trust digital advertisement as the way to use a product, or, you know, they'll see an ad and will they trust the ad and use the product? No, it's not going to happen. Usually tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 cities in India, they work on referrals. And we started working for companies like Paytm, Google Pay, Swiggy, helping them go beyond the tier 1 cities and acquire customers and gig workers, which is their, you know, the people who are doing acquisition for them, restaurant acquisition, cab driver acquisition, or customer acquisition for them beyond the tier 1 cities. So that's how we started. Things have changed a lot now. It's, uh, we've seen like small pivots within PickMyWork from 2020.

PickMyWork turns everyday gig work into real pay-per-sale income at scale.

I'm Vidyarthi, she's Kajal. Our company name is called PickMyWork. At PickMyWork, we help banks and fintechs with last-mile customer acquisition. And this is done through a network of gig workers.

Hi, I'm Kajal. I'm co-founder at PickMyWork. So on the day of Dhanteras, this is 28th October, I think. It's the day when you buy things in India. You buy utensils, gold, silver, you buy vehicles. So— We call that Prime Day.

Prime Day?

So it is Prime Day and Dhanteras. In India, and we got a message from one of our employees who shared a photo of one of our gig workers buying a really cool bike. This is what exactly what we wanted— underemployment to be solved. People who are probably just, you know, earning $100, $120 a month getting that opportunity to earn at least $300 to $400 a month.

So we are a 20-23 people organization including the both of us. And we're extremely proud to say that we manage 3,500 monthly active gig workers who are selling at least one product in their local neighborhoods. So they sort of become the local heroes, and we also call them financial advisors. They act as a financial advisor for people in their local neighborhood.

So it naturally leads to a person, um, over a period of time cracking it. Selling is one of the most difficult jobs if you're looking at, you know, on paper, but it's a life skill. And if a person is able to learn that life skill, it's just perfect.

So what would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for you guys right now?

So I think first of all, the show has a very wide audience. So, you know, our message about gig work and what PickMyWork is doing can potentially reach millions of homes in India. So, uh, all in all, the way the show is global in nature and multiple people across the globe continue to watch it is going to give a business like us, you know, ability to grow and reach out to a lot of people and also probably inspire more people in different parts of the globe to try out something similar around gig, right? So that is, that is the opportunity that Together, they built more than a platform.

They built a way for ambition in any PIN code to actually pay off.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for your company right now?

A million dollars would really help us rocket. Right now we're profitable and we are just working with our profits and growing at almost 10-15% steady rate. It will really help us Reach out to more gig workers across India, across the world, and that is going to make a lot of difference in the lives of gig workers, in the lives of companies, the marketers who really want us to do the customer acquisition for them. It's, it's really going to mean a lot.

I mean, Deloitte's a pretty good, recognizable company, you know, that's probably a pretty safe career path, right? So when you decided to become entrepreneurs, what did your family and friends think about that?

So I think it's hard to convince families because in my family also, my father had a stable job. He was working for the government and he took a plunge into business and he had his ups and downs and more downs than ups, which is what is typically the case with running a business. So it took a while to convince him. So almost every weekend I would go back to my hometown, take a train, spend the entire Saturday, Sunday with him trying to explain the business model. It took about 8 weekends and 2 months of continuously going and probably to an extent badgering him, saying that, you know, I want to do this. This is what my calling is probably, and I want to do this.

When I told my family, they knew that we were dating. She's like, My mother, she's like all eggs in one basket, Kajal. How are you going to do it? And does this even make sense? But just entrepreneurship plunge in India, and at that time when it had just become cool, just become cool, and they were not very happy. However, my younger brother, he's always believed in me. He convinced my mother; he helped me convince. my mother. And he still to this point believes that Pick My Work is going to be really good and we're gonna, we're gonna crack it. So there are times when I'm a little demotivated and he's like, you're gonna do— I know you're gonna do it. I am convinced you're going to do it. So he's, he's sort of been there. He's, he's been extremely supportive.

Could we start with your names, your company name, and the core problem you're solving?

Radha Prasad and Neel Kant turned the college coding project and their own love for travel into the state's go-to guide for getting around.

The nature— we have seen the beaches, okay, the beaches of Goa. We haven't seen the greenery of Goa. Okay, the nature that Goa offers is a different experience altogether. Okay, what we see in the advertisements, which we— what we see in the promotions is just one part of Goa, but there is 10x times more that Goa is offering. And the most important thing that we like about Goa is its people, its, its nature, okay, and, and its diversity. Before entrepreneurs, we were travelers. We are—we love to travel. We visit places in India, outside India, okay? And we love to travel together. And since then, we graduated together. After we graduated, we worked in startups. We did not work in big companies, but we worked in startups.

So we gained the experience of. developing the things from the startup companies inside Goa only. So, and then since we had a love for the traveling in the college time, so we thought of developing something which will be very helpful for the users or tourists traveling to Goa.

So we traveled in India, outside India together, and we have seen a lot of things which were making us very happy. The experiences were pleasant. Okay, when we came back in here, we saw that it's not that good in Goa. Uh, people, other tourists are disappointed after their travel. So our interest was traveling and our core skills were development. So we thought, why don't we bring these together to find or to create a solution, you know, or to create a solution that will help tourists to get experience which we experienced outside India. So with that motive, we started, you know, developing this app. In general, there are a lot of problems which people are facing here with respect to accommodation, transportation, even finding good places to eat. Okay, this, this trust— there is no trustworthy guide. Okay, so that's what people are lacking. And then because of this lack of you know, trustworthy information. People are affected, the tourists are disappointed when they are in Goa. So that's, that's the main concern that we want to, you know, address. So we provide trustworthy options in 5 segments. We provide trustworthy options in accommodation, transportation, food, leisure, and local Insights. Okay, so if you have our app, you have all of Goa in your hands. You can book the services, you can book your tickets, you can find nearest events, you can book your transportation, you can book a rented vehicle, you can do everything on the app. And the more important part is we have local insights, and this is a localized app specially made for the Goan tourism.

Goa app now covers everything. From sightseeing to travel plans to car rentals, all in one place.

My name is Radha Prasad.

And my name is Nilkanth Shirodkar.

And together we have AppBuddy Consultancy LLP. At AppBuddy Consultancy LLP, we have an app called as Goa App, which solves the travel-related problems that are faced by tourists visiting Goa.

What we are mostly working, like, we have a community of travelers who are coming to Goa. Okay, so they put the queries in, uh, in the group and all. So over there we are trying to continuously get improved over there. So where they also, they put their queries, then we try to resolve it on our application, and then once they are going back, they give the feedbacks. Okay, so we are trying to gain that feedback and try to work on those things, improving the application. So day by day we are trying to improve the application based on the user's feedback. We are mostly focusing only on one state, Goa, and wherein we are trying to provide a hyper-localized experience to the users. And also, like suppose for example, one person is interested in having a food like seafood, okay, so we'll provide them all the restaurants which is nearby and which are giving the local Seafoods to them. So based on the locations, we'll provide them all the nearby restaurants which are good restaurants of seafood. So something kind of those things, we are based on the personalized things, we will try to give the experience on that local area. So that's what we are trying to do.

What would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for you guys right now?

Working with Tim would be a game changer for us because we, as developers and travelers, we need someone to guide us to make a business out of it. Okay, we have combined our skills and our passion together, but to make it as a business, we need someone like Mr. Draper. And with his guidance and his experience, we see ourselves, you know, exploring the You know, providing our art, I would say, to the entire world.

They aren't just mapping a state. They're proving the best local guide can come from 2 students who simply got tired of getting lost.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for your company right now?

If we get a million dollars, okay, we would spend it on hiring a big team. We want to build a team of travel enthusiasts, Techies, okay? We would love to generate local employment here, okay? That would be our main goal if we have that amount of money with us. My family always wanted me to have a job, okay, to support the family. I come from a middle-class family in India, so they always wanted me to have a job, but I was not meant for that, okay? I had a passion to travel and I had a passion to develop. I am a techie, so I wanted to You know, do something of my own, create a brand, okay, that will, you know, eventually go to the community, help the community, okay, and that will bring, uh, you know, happiness to people. So that was my aim always in my life.

So for me, it's like I can't give much time to the family and all, so I'm mostly occupied with the workloads only. Sometimes they feel good when I come on the paper or on TV. So that's what I feel as a regret in the things, like I'm not giving that much time to the family. I mostly like just sit in the room, just work, work, work for the most of the time, and then sometimes I go out and sit with them. More rarely, that's a rare case.

Could we start by your full name, your company name, and the shortest version of what you guys do?

Malav and Alap are closing the gap between a finished script and the moment a filmmaker can actually see it.

There is a scene which is shot, a close-up which is happening, and a slow ambient music which is being played. when there is some emotional scene, and if audience is exactly feeling the way that director has shot and thought that shot of, right? If that is received exactly, right? That, that particular process was really inspiring to me, right? Right from you pick the pen, you write it on the paper, and director imagines it, and exactly how calculates, this is where I want audience to feel XYZ, right? And audience exactly feels it at the end of a year or so. That process is inspiring, and that is the exact process. And not just the process, I don't want to add technicalities to it, but that is exactly what we as humans manifest as well in some way or other, not just media. Right, in the way that we lead our life and everything. So I am coming from immersive tech background. This is essentially my third company. The previous two were into hologram technology and metaverse, and meanwhile I have been a creative director. Academically, I did my computer engineering. So Alap was coming from the same background. He was exploring the immersive media in general, and we belong from the same startup ecosystem and city in general, so we knew each other directly.

So for me, as Malu mentioned, uh, my first company was into manufacturing. We were into manufacturing street food carts for the local vendors. Uh, we shut down because of COVID and then post that, I was exploring into multiple industries. Augmented reality, immersive tech was something which was very interesting for for me. And Mala was also building in the same space, so we connected. We started doing some projects earlier, thought let's start something building for filmmakers because he was already— he like, he was working with a couple of filmmakers as a creative director. And then thought, yeah, let's start something there. Started talking to multiple people, figured out this is what— something which we can solve for. And that's where we started Immersive Eye.

So this is also coming from some sort of personal story as well. So growing up, I had a lot of health issues. I have been physically challenged guy. I had lost my vision as well. I'm partially blind. So I know the crux of living through and living through and living the dream of what I have had imagined and realizing it and living it through within reality.

For us, one of the biggest aha moments was probably when we were ideating for Immersify. We were speaking to one of the filmmakers, probably 2 in the night, discussing. We had a long conversation with him, and at a point of time, he started talking to us about this. If this was something which I would have, it would have made a lot of sense to me, and on production, it would have saved this much money for me. And that was the aha moment because that was exactly what we were building. So we were getting what users wanted. We were building it from, like, without him knowing what we were building, he was telling us that this is what I need. That was the biggest aha moment we had when we started building Immersify.

Immersify's AI reads a script, breaks it down scene by scene, and turns it into a full cinematic storyboard in minutes.

Hi, I'm Malav Shah.

Hi, I'm Aalap Sanghavi. We're both founders of Immersify. We're building a creative suite of products to revolutionize media production. I started my first company from my first year of university. Always been like, I never wanted to work for anyone, always wanted to start something of my own. And in fact, we come from a community called Gujaratis in India. All of them are business-minded people, so always wanted to start something of my own. So started first in my first year of university itself.

Similar journey it had been for me as well. Since childhood, I always wanted to do business, and when I say childhood, I mean when I was 8, I was very clear I wanted to do business. I was always into tech. I used to play around with building small robots, so I always had the entrepreneurial kida within me. And while I was growing up, I— during my second year of the college, I started my first company that was into hologram technology. So it eventually panned out for me in a way to never pursue job because every— everything that I am doing today and the vision that I had of how I want to lead my life always resonated within the boundaries of what entrepreneurship is. And yeah, always have been.

What would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for you?

Honestly, one of the biggest things which I'm super fascinated by Tim is that he's been an early investor. He's seen tech coming miles away. Taking example of Tesla, Twitter, like when we talk about Tim, he's invested in Tesla even before FSD was a thing. So for us, the way Tim views the world from a different perspective, different lens. The way he views tech in different perspective is something that would add a good value to what we are building as well, because this is not just a company which we would probably build for next 2 years. We are trying to build a lasting impact as well.

They aren't replacing the director's eye. They're proving the fastest path to a film's vision doesn't have to cost its creativity.

What would $1 million mean for your company right now?

$1 million would mean to unlock, uh, the doors, uh, will unlock the doors for the kind of scale that we are seeing for Immersify, and that can— and which can create the impact for the industry that we are looking at, right from the grassroots level to the top.

What would like a younger version of yourself Maybe the kid who was interested in technology or the kid who was an entrepreneur, what would they think about what you're doing now? Would they be surprised? Would they be proud? Would they think it was inevitable? What do you think?

I think the younger version of me would be content enough to see what I am doing today because he always wanted to build something that not just people want but build something at scale that changes the behavior essentially and leave the lasting impact. And he always wanted to build something around games because that is what he always found himself indulging into, not just playing games, but reverse engineer the psychology of it.

For me, definitely my younger self would be surprised. Because initially the idea was work on your bachelor's, go to master's, and then probably become an astronaut. That was the idea behind it. But probably in the first semester or first year of my university, I ended up giving up on my bachelor's and started my company. So I think my younger, younger self would definitely be surprised on the path I've chosen.