Built To Share

Most founders guard their equity like a fortress. This conversation unpacks the startup ESOP strategy in India that made Ashok Hariharan do the opposite at IDfy, carving out a 14.5% employee pool, refusing backloaded vesting, and running a buyback that two-thirds of his team declined to take. A semiconductor engineer who once built high-speed network and graphics processors, Ashok Hariharan chose...

Your most valuable people may be the ones the law won't let you give equity to. Vishal Bali, who built Asia Healthcare Holdings across roughly 75 cities, breaks down the ESOP alternatives he uses to hand real ownership to doctors who refuse to be employees. Few operators have built at this scale. Vishal Bali grew Wockhardt Hospitals, led its merger into Fortis, and now chairs Asia Healthcare H...

Most founders are told to bring in an outside CFO and a credentialed leadership layer before they list. ideaForge did the opposite and pulled off a deep tech IPO India rarely sees, taking the company public in under nine months while turning shop-floor staff into shareholders. Ankit Mehta co-founded ideaForge in 2007 out of an IIT Bombay project and spent eight years bootstrapping a hardware compa...

Most consumer founders raise tens of millions before they crack profitability. Wonderchef's Ravi Saxena scaled to ₹420 crore as a bootstrapped consumer brand in India, with under $50 million raised across 16 years, and is now heading to a ₹1,800 crore IPO.After scaling Sodexo India to 28,000 employees on $5 million over 13 years, Ravi Saxena founded Wonderchef at 40 with chef Sanjeev Kapoor. T...

Sixty employees, zero venture capital, two acquisitions, and every single person paid out in cash: Ujjwal Jain's bootstrapped path to PhonePe is the startup ESOP strategy and exit story most Indian founders assume is impossible. In this episode powered by Hissa Fund, Ujjwal walks host Satish Mugulavalli through how he funded his company by selling his own IP, built equity culture from scratch...

Most startup acquisitions lose 30 to 50 percent of the team within a year. Serial founder Visham Sikand walks through the Indian startup cofounder equity, ESOP clauses, and deal structure that kept his entire Goals101 team at M2P Fintech two years after the ₹250 Crore exit. Across 18 years and three exits (Plat5, Indian Health Organisation, and Goals101), Visham Sikand has built a reputation few I...

Nakul Kumar is the Co-founder of Cashify, the company that made refurbished iPhones mainstream in India and quietly built one of the most operationally complex businesses in the country. Before Cashify, Nakul ran a tyre recycling facility. He had no tech background, no global playbook to copy, and no investors who believed in the category. What he did have was an obsession with hiring for attitude...

Edul Patel is the Co-founder and CEO of Mudrex, a Y Combinator-backed crypto exchange and stablecoin payments platform that has raised over $22 million from investors including Nexus Venture Partners, Tribe Capital, and QED Investors. In this episode powered by Hissa Fund, host Satish Mugulavalli sits down with Edul for one of the most candid conversations you will find on startup equity, crypto r...

In this episode powered by Hissa Fund, we feature Anurag Jain who co-founded CarDekho in 2007 from Jaipur - not Bangalore - and bootstrapped it to profitability for seven years before raising a single rupee. Today, the auto-tech group spans seven businesses, 6,000 employees, and is planning a $2.5 billion IPO. But here's what makes this story different: Anurag has conducted four ESOP buybacks...

In this episode powered by Hissa Fund, Ashish Goyal takes us inside Fibe's 10-year journey from EarlySalary to a digital lending unicorn that has disbursed over ₹20,000 crore across 9 million loans. Unlike most fintech startups that burned through Series C chasing growth, Fibe achieved year-on-year profitability while building in Pune, not Bangalore, keeping senior leadership attrition under 5...

In this inaugural episode powered by Hissa Fund, we uncover the brutal realities of hiring AI researchers, fighting Meta's offers, and turning 11 years of "paper wealth" into cash. Vinay Kumar, Founder of Arya.ai, started building Deep Learning solutions in 2013 when AI wasn't cool, profitable, or even proven. For over a decade, he bootstrapped an elite AI research team in India,...

Built to Share is coming soon. A podcast about the people decisions that make or break startups. Hosted by Satish Mugulavalli, Founder and Managing Partner of Hissa Fund, Built to Share features honest conversations with founders who've scaled companies in India's startup ecosystem. We're exploring the hard choices around building teams, sharing equity, and creating ownership culture....