S01E09: Rahul Chari, Co-Founder & CTO of PhonePe on how startups can bounce back from Covid-19, avoid growth hack hell, and balance agility and compliance
11/03/20 • 23 min
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
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
Previous Episode
S01E08: STS Prasad on hiring early engineers at startups, scaling engineering teams while staying nimble
As the engineering leader at Freshworks, STS Prasad plays an integral role in the development of the Freshworks suite of products. In the latest episode of the podcast, we talk to him about engineering at startups. We covered
🚀How founders should go about hiring engineers for their teams
🚀 What should the role of the early engineer at startups be
🚀 How to identify the right tech co-founder
🚀 How Freshworks remains an eternal startup using the 'Freshwave Model'
🚀 Retaining the startup culture even as you scale
Enjoy the show!
About the Guest
STS Prasad has been an entrepreneur, a top engineer who transitioned to manage several engineering teams, and one of the most successful engineering leaders at Freshworks. After graduating from IIT- Madras and acquiring his master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, he started his career at HCL, became a chief architect of Junglee (acquired by Amazon), and later he headed up Walmart Labs. STS Prasad also served as the CTO of Aventeon, a mobile enterprise solution startup that he founded. He is currently the SVP of Engineering at Freshworks Inc.
Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast
Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme
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
Next Episode
S01E10: Slack Co-Founder & CTO Cal Henderson & Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham discuss leadership, failure, side projects and success
Twenty years ago, Cal Henderson was working in London while Stewart Butterfield was making a game called Game Neverending. Henderson, a big fan of the game, broke into the email server to join the internal mailing list of Butterfield’s 4 person company. Eventually, Cal convinced Butterfield to hire him. The game was not going anywhere, so they started focusing on a side project which eventually became Flickr and eventually sold to Yahoo in 2005. The two founders went back to building another gaming company called Glitch. That didn’t do well either. Another side project, that helped Glitch manage their remote teams now became the core product. They called it Slack. And the rest is history. Today Slack has a market cap of almost $15 billion. In the quarter ended April 2020, it pulled in over $200 million in revenues, growing at 49% compared to the year-ago quarter, with a gross margin of 87.3% and a stellar net retention rate of 132%.
This episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast brings you a fireside chat between Cal Henderson and Girish Mathrubootham. The two talked about
🚀Achieving Product-market fit
🚀Convincing others to use Slack
🚀Growing beyond the original product-market fit
🚀The #2 reason why startups fail
🚀Success comes from failure
🚀Giving away your lego blocks
🚀Go from sprinting to running a marathon
🚀Stress and the role of leaders
🚀Succeeding in the post-Covid world
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
Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack. Previously, Cal built and led the engineering teams at Flickr, until its acquisition by Yahoo. An experienced technology leader and a popular speaker on engineering scalability, he authored the best-selling O’Reilly Media book Building Scalable Websites. Cal was also a pioneer in the use of web APIs and created the basis for OAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter and many others. He has a Bachelor of Computer Science and has received an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University. He now resides in San Francisco.
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
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