TechSparks 2022 recap – 80 quotes from India’s premier tech innovation summit
Products, platforms, policies - YourStory’s premier TechSparks conference covered the full spectrum of tech entrepreneurship. Here are 80 quotes with highlights and key takeaways!
Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our recent articles. Share these gems and insights from TechSparks with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights.
In this special collection of quotes from YourStory’s TechSparks 2022 coverage, we present expert insights on innovation, digital transformation, and tech scaling by successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.
See our earlier quotes compilations from conference editions in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.
We have divided these 80 quotes into ten categories: Startup foundations, Scaling, Tech dynamics, Fundraising, Sectoral trends, The India story, Creator economy, Economic downturn, Policy and regulation, and The road ahead. Check out our profiles of the Tech50 startups of 2021, and Tech30 startups over the years: 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011.
YourStory wishes our readers, innovators and ecosystem leaders all the very best for the holiday season, and a year of success and scale ahead in 2023!
Startup foundations
Entrepreneurship is a journey where the highs are super high, and the lows are really low. - Kaivalya Vohra, Zepto
You have to pick and choose the battles that you want to fight, you can't have everything on day one. - Ramesh Parthasarthy, Freshworks
One of the things you need to develop as an early-stage founder is how to calibrate advice that really matters. - Shailendra Singh, Sequoia Capital
Building a product is like making a song. - Tony Fadell
If you want to start building a company, build it for the right reasons. - Aadit Palicha, Zepto
The storytelling part becomes key for founders when you're actually attracting talent. - Roopa Kumar, Purple Quarter
No matter how great you are in what you do, unless the timing is right, things don’t click. - Sharmin Ali, Instoried
It is critical to be able to listen, accept and constantly work towards improvements. You should be able to have the ‘sahansheelta’ to say—‘Yes, I could be wrong. - Ritesh Agarwal, Oyo
When you are privileged enough to make such a big impact, it is criminal to become complacent. - Byju Raveendran
[As a founder] you need to have perseverance of a crow, focus of a crane, attention like that of a dog, even when asleep. - Rishi Das, IndiQube
Focus on building a strong founding team and better communication within the organisation. S-curves will follow. - Abhay Hanjura, Licious
Show your work, share your process, iterate in public. That's a great way of living a life. That's a great way of building a company. - Gaurav Mishra, Adfactors PR
You live and die by your reputation. So if you build a reputation for good quality, you'll get lots more business. - Kumar P Saha, ndhgo
If we change [from know-it-all] to learn-it-all, it helps to stay grounded and bring out solutions. - Sabyasachi Goswami, Perfios
Being an entrepreneur, one must make tough decisions, go through failures, have the grit to start all over again, listen to that bug, and go ahead. - Mabel Chacko, Open Technologies
Scaling
Your company will stop scaling if you stop scaling personally. - Shailendra Singh, Sequoia
Once you get the playbook right, scale fast. - Pranjal Kumar, Eruditus
When an organisation is scaling, they can offer ESOPs as incentives to ensure that the team members are hitting milestones. - Sharat Khurana, Carta
An IPO is never the endpoint; it’s always the starting point. - Skanda Jayaraman, Qapita-Marketplace
Building a unicorn is a milestone, that some significant value has been created. It does not mean further milestones won’t come. - Pankaj Makkar, Bertelsmann India Investments
While individual products can become multi-billion dollar businesses in developed economies, it’s extremely important to build multiple products here in India where markets are not so deep. - Rahul Kothari, Razorpay
Acquisition is costly, and constantly looking at acquiring new customers for each round is not sustainable. - Amit Srivastava, Rakuten
In incremental solutions through startup partnerships, there is less experimentation and more plugging in gaps. - Abhay Tandon, TVS Motors
Scaling geographically is a great way for startups to welcome diversity and have cross country knowledge in their teams and benefit from it. - Juliane Frömmter, EU-India InnoCenter
Brands are built in the consumers' mind and not just with your products or communication. - Aditya Ruia, Beco
Tech dynamics
Large scale, democratic and equitable platforms that offer serious outcomes is what technology enables. - Amit Zunjarwad, ShareChat
Data is a collection of zeros and ones but insights are much more contextual. - Ramgopal Subramani, Perfios
Data is one of the most important resources that differentiates companies of today from those of yesterday. - Saurabh Odhyan, FreshToHome
The most competitive advantage companies have is how well they build using data. - Vinay Agarwal, MongoDB
When you talk about no-code/low-code product stacks, you are talking about optimising time to market using less resources. - Samyak Jain, Agora
Every company is realising that if they do not embrace a digital-first strategy, they are doomed. - Mithun T Dhar, Red Hat
A lot of offline stores, especially during the pandemic, have set up an online platform to receive their payments online. - Nakul Jain, Paytm Payments Services
Open source is the default engine for innovation. - Satish Mohan, Dhiway
The most important quality to becoming a leader in the engineering space is whether an individual is an “I” person or a “We” person. - Dr Sureshkumar Rajasekar, Optum Global Solutions (India)
Decentralised finance [cuts out intermediaries] but is not easy for consumers to use. - Shailesh Lakhani, Sequoia Capital India
Every startup needs to have a basic level of cybersecurity in place, otherwise it can be a serious disruptor. - Sandhya Vasudevan, Indian Angels Network
More and more companies are going cloud-native; your infrastructure is remote and your employees are also working remotely, risks can come from anywhere. - Jayesh Gadewar, Scrut.io
You'd be surprised how many organisations don't have a repository, or a catalogue of all their APIs. - Sumant Narayanan, Akamai Technologies
Fundraising
Investors want their capital back. How are you as a founder going to enable return on capital if there is no business model which leads to profitability? - Salil Thanawala, Edelweiss
The amount of LP interest I have seen in the last six months in India is probably more than what I have seen in the last eight years. - Amit Somani, Prime Venture Partners
The advantage of debt is you can build without the dilution aspect of the business but then it brings with itself a certain responsibility that there is enough cash flow in the business. - Ashish Fafadia, Alteria Capital
Taking money from someone to build a business is an obligation, and not money that you made. - Nithin Kamath, Zerodha
They (VCs) are not in the business of building business, they are in the business of entering and exiting businesses. - Ankur Warikoo
The domestic sector for investing is very vibrant. India has given $80 billion dollars back in the last 18 months to foreign investors which is a big number. - Vishal Kampani, JM Financial
Sectoral trends
The IT/ITeS sector contributes about 9 percent of the country's GDP. The revenue today is split between traditional and digital skills. - Priya Madhavan, NASSCOM
In proptech, you have to offer solutions that are homogeneous, and your platform should be able to operate on its own with less involvement from humans. - Harkaran Singh Boparai, MapMyHouse
China is the physical goods manufacturing factory of the world, India can become the digital goods manufacturing factory of the world if we focus on Web3. - Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon
In the next five years, next-day deliveries will be dead. Consumers will want groceries and essential items faster and within hours. - Kabeer Biswas, Dunzo
In India there are no brands which do Rs 10,000 crore. It needs multiple brands across verticals. - Darpan Sanghvi, The Good Glamm Group
If you embed insurance in other products, people will buy it. So that’s one way of increasing adoption. - Ravi Ranjan, Pazcare
People who are playing mid-core, hard core games are very monetisable. - Piyush Kumar, Rooter
Home improvement is a high experience, high involvement category so technology has almost unlimited uses. - Manasvi Sharma, Lowe’s India
Signalling really matters. Until there is equality, we need to make an outsized effort. - Priyanka Gill, The Good Glamm Group
Counterfeit is a technology problem to solve. Quality is relative. - Vidit Aatrey, Meesho
The India story
We still do not have a unicorn from India in the agritech sector, indicating a huge opportunity for players in this industry. - Abhishek Bhagat, JM Financial
There is a rise of the D2C brands in India which is poised to be a $100 billion dollar market by 2025. - Prashanth Aluru, TMRW
ONDC by design is a network of networks. So it is completely open access, it's unbundled and interoperable. - Thampy Koshy, ONDC
In India, we spend about 14% of our GDP on our supply chain, which is twice the average of the world. - Swarup Bose, Celcius
As Indians, our ability to be able to leapfrog and adopt technologies is generally high. - Sax Krishna, 3i Infotech
Pandemic was a wake-up call as most of the SMEs are family-run. The lockdown gave them time to strategically think the way ahead. - Sidhya Senani, BAF Consultants
Creator economy
Building a business today in content when you do not own the distribution, is really hard. When you do not own the distribution, you just own the content, which is purely creative. - Ayush Wadhwa, Owled Media
We are at a stage where experiences are going to become far more important than the content itself. - Advait Gupt Kulfi Collective
Customers' willingness to pay, particularly for gaming, the arrival of cloud gaming, superior graphics, and the emergence of immersive gaming experiences is now helping convert the audience into willing-to-pay subscribers. - Shashank Randev, 100X.VC
As a content creator, one business is not enough. The business is all about reinvention. - Ranveer Allahbadia, BeerBiceps
Algorithms are in place, but it is the storytelling that is winning. Whichever content creator is growing today is doing so by beating the algorithm with constant persistence and hard work. - Manish Pandey
Content builds relationships, and relationships build trust, and trust is what brings revenue. - Ashwarya Garg, HYPD Stores
You have to keep sane and do whatever you are doing at your own pace… If you stress about the likes and subscribers, then you will not be able to do your job too well. - Bhuvan Bam
Anything that has worked in India was because of a movement. It is a very chaotic country. - Shlok Srivastava
Over the years, there has been a paradigm shift and now a lot of the marketing budget is moving towards creators. - Rohit Raj
You have to create that connection with your audience by experimenting with content, and expanding. - Tarini Shah
Content creators are so special these days because they have the superpower of telling a story. - Ajay Yadav, Simplified
Economic downturn
Fiscal prudence and better execution will ensure that you can tide over that situation [economic headwinds] in the most cost efficient and effective manner. - Abhishek Gupta, Clevertap
There is some dampening of spirits but India has excellent entrepreneurs and our digital ecosystem is only evolving for the better. - Mandeep Julka, Chiratae Ventures
Investors are taking longer to make their decision but good companies will continue to get funding though founders should be prepared for this slowdown period. - Shanti Mohan, LetsVenture
The fundamentals of building a business will not change and founders will have to navigate through this phase. There might be tough questions for them but it is not all gloomy. - Ankur Khaitan, Fireside Ventures
Smart people who know exactly what to do are ready for the winter and know this is followed by spring. - Gopal Srinivasan, TVS Capital Funds
I think the growth stage has slowed down, largely because it's not a founder problem. It's actually an industrial problem. - Anand Chandrasekaran, General Catalyst
Every industry goes through ups and downs, where one rebuilds strategies and life goes on. - Sudhir Sethi, Chiratae Ventures
The only thing that matters during tough times is the solution. Be very missionary about "doing the work" instead of reminiscing about the good times. - Kunal Bahl, Titan Capital
The wind and tide don’t wait for anybody. All I can do is adjust my sails. - Ashish Hemrajani, BookMyShow
The preparation for the worst-case scenario is a founder’s responsibility. - Vani Kola, Kalaari Capital
Policy and regulation
The scale of the digital revolution—the India Stack—has not been achieved elsewhere. That is what we need to leverage and capitalise on. - Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman
While UI/UX is important, it is also important to ensure the checkout is compliant with laws and guidelines. - Ranjan Kant, Arthmate
Government has done 100X more than what was expected [for the EV market], and they’ll continue to do more as we innovate; now we, the startup ecosystem, have to take it ahead. - Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola
Today many regulators are extremely positive about deep tech startups in this country. - Ravi Chhabria, NetApp
Cybersecurity is such an important factor today that any misadventure can actually lead to an arrest by the government. - Rahul Tyagi, Safe Security
The road ahead
A lot of fintech has happened in the last five years, and there'll be a lot more happening in the next 10 years. - Harshil Mathur, Razorpay
I hope that there is more awareness on genetic conditions and the next generation benefits from this. - Dhanya Ravi, Aasman Foundation
Children must learn important skills like tech literacy and problem solving skills. - Pooja Goyal, Avishkaar
Fundamentals of money must be taught in schools and colleges. - Nithin Kamath, Zerodha
This is India’s moment; why can’t we make the country of our dreams in our lifespan? - Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).