The Orbit Shift Podcast

Sara Varni has spent more than a decade scaling marketing organizations for various enterprise SaaS companies. Currently, as the chief marketing officer of cloud communications platform Twilio, she looks after all of marketing including growth, brand, and product marketing, public relations, developer relations, and events.
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, she talks to us about the four horsemen of a marketing org - Inbound, outbound, sales reps, and partner organizations and how companies can leverage these pillars for hypergrowth. She also talks about building marketing channels and how to budget for them, how to get field marketing right, and how to create compelling customer stories.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Sara Varni is a creative marketing leader with a track record for driving awareness and demand for enterprise software products. She is currently the CMO of Twilio, an American cloud communications platform. Before Twilio, she spent a decade at Salesforce in various marketing roles, including SVP of marketing for Sales Cloud.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian

When you sell subscriptions to a SaaS product that needs to be renewed frequently, it is necessary to prove the value of your product to customers every day. This not only prevents them from churning but also eventually makes them evangelists for your product. This is the essence of value SaaS.

In our latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we talk to Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, the Managing Partner at SaaS accelerator Upekkha about value SaaS.
We discuss how founders, can cut through the noise and build a sustainable SaaS company including how to find early adopters, which customers to target, how to position and build a website, and how to have successful fundraises.

Listen in.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Prasanna Krishnamoorthy is a partner at Upekkha, where he works with founders to build capital-efficient Value SaaS businesses. He is a full-stack growth driver who has coached more than a hundred entrepreneurs during his time at Upekkha, Microsoft Accelerator, and iKen. While working with these entrepreneurs, Prasanna has created frameworks for early-stage founders to accelerate growth predictably, scalably, and profitably. Prasanna was part of two B2B startups between 2005-2012 and also worked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Tejas Networks. He has a Master's Degree in Telecommunications from the University of Texas, Dallas, and a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from CEG, Chennai.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian

TAM, technology, team, and timing. There are the four ‘Ts’ that Ankit Sarwahi, Managing Director of Middle East Venture Partners looks for in a startup when investing in them.

In our latest episode, we catch up with Ankit the MD of MEVP, one of the biggest venture capital firms in the MENA region whose portfolio companies include Anghami, Rain, and Nana Direct. Ankit talks to us about his early journey, the differences he sees in the Indian and Middle Eastern startup ecosystems, his four T’s of investing, how he communicates clearly with his founders, and his due diligence process before investing in companies.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Ankit is the Managing Director of Middle East Venture Partners where he leads investments in fintech, food tech, and e-commerce verticals. He serves on the board of various startups and advises them on fundraising, organizational talent building, and new market entry. Prior to this role, Ankit invested for VC funds in India. Ankit is an alumnus of ISB Hyderabad and SRCC.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.

Producer - Shashwath J

Host - Soumitra Deshpande

Audio Engineer - Arjun Pillai

Intuition, analytics, and research are the three pillars that you should rely on when you make a product decision according to product leader Ravi Mehta.
We had a chance to sit down and go in-depth with Ravi Mehta, former chief product officer at Tinder, and several other top tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft.
In this conversation, we talk about his journey as a product manager, his learnings from his days at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and later Tinder.
We also took on questions like:
🚀What's the right time for a startup to hire a product manager?
🚀What do peak product managers look like?
🚀How do you build products for Gen Z?
🚀Making startups antifragile.
And much more. Listen in.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Ravi Mehta is a consumer tech leader who has built and scaled consumer tech products that have impacted millions of people’s lives and scaled teams to meet the challenge. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, he has previously held product roles at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Microsoft Xbox.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

Subscribe to Ravi Mehta’s Newsletter

The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian

On Monday, payments startup PhonePe said that it has crossed 250 million registered users with over 100 million monthly active users. The Bengaluru headquartered startup became one of India's biggest payments startup in a short span of six years.
PhonePe's co-founder and chief technology officer Rahul Chari spoke to Vinod Chandramouli of Freshworks about how the company stays focused and sticks to the mission even when there are distractions. Chari, who was earlier a top engineering leader at Flipkart, also talks about the lessons from his career.
He also discussed
🚀 How startups can bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic and settle tech debt
🚀The biggest learnings from his career

Compressing learning cycles

Lessons from Flipkart’s first ‘Big Billion Day Sale’

Continuous platformization to avoid growth hack hell
🚀The next phase of growth at PhonePe
🚀 Balancing agility and compliance using a core system and peripheral system model

This episode was originally recorded as part of the AgainstAllOdds startup summit conducted by Freshworks for Startups.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Rahul is the co-founder and CTO at PhonePe. He is a serial entrepreneur in the consumer internet space and has built PhonePe into one of India’s fastest-growing and largest fintech companies. He comes with over two decades of experience in the consumer internet and enterprise software space. He has strong experience in building world-class tech platforms for web-scale, continuously scaling systems to deal with hyper-growth, and evolving the processes and practices to meet the demands of a fast-growing organization.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian