Z47 Moments

Nirja Bhatt looks intimidating on paper: Columbia, Harvard Business School, strategy consulting. But she calls herself "a duck in water” i.e you never see what’s moving beneath the surface. It took her two years of analysis paralysis, ten abandoned ideas, and learning to normalize embarrassment before she could finally start. Nirja is the founder of Laani, a pre-launch personal care brand for wome...

Chakradhar Gade had the résumé everyone's supposed to want: engineering, CFA, a hedge fund, and felt like he'd lost himself inside it. So he walked away to sell milk. This is the story of how a finance guy who once mapped "the IRR of a cow" learned that the spreadsheet was a lie, lost all his money proving it, and rebuilt Country Delight from first principles, one customer relationship at a time....

Are entrepreneurs born or made? Asish Mohapatra is certain it's the second and he'll tell you plainly he's good at maybe 3 of the 10 things a founder needs. Asish is the co-founder of OfBusiness and Oxyzo, which he built into one of India's largest B2B commerce and lending businesses. But this conversation with Avnish isn't about the scale, it's about the intellectual honesty underneath it. In thi...

Can you be a founder without ever founding anything? Amarjeet Batra has spent 25 years building other people's companies, first Baazee, eBay, OLX, and now Spotify India, and never once thought of himself as an employee. He's what Avnish calls "professionally unstarted": a founder from within. Avnish and Amarjeet get into the questions most operators never say out loud:   1. If you have the skills,...

What does it actually take to build AI for 70 crore users? Vikram sits down with Rahul Chowdhury -  co-founder and CTO of PhonePeto talk about how India's most scaled fintech is approaching AI. Not with hype or a top-down mandate, but with a quiet, deliberate, engineering-first philosophy that started four years ago with a small team focused on making developers happier. Rahul shares the inside st...

Harshil Mathur started Razorpay after quitting the highest-paying job on his campus, a role his whole family had just celebrated, because he walked in on day one and realised he was a guy who wanted to sit and code, not step onto an oil field. Then he spent a decade away from that: walking into bank after bank getting laughed out of the room, surviving the grind no funding can fast-track, and the...

Anjali Sardana grew up in northern Virginia, studied biology at Georgetown, worked at Bain Capital — and then, without telling her parents, flew to India and founded Pronto: a platform building the world's largest labor organization network, starting with home services. In this episode of Unstarted, Anjali breaks down how she picked an operations business over a product business (and why), why she...

India's GPU footprint is on track to grow 40x by 2030, from ~50,000 today to a couple of million.  That number is bigger than any public forecast. Sharad Sanghi has the unusual standing to make it: he built Netmagic into India's most significant datacenter business, and he's now running Neysa, the only neo cloud in India that Semi Analysis has rated, backed by Blackstone. In this episode of Intell...

Chirag Taneja built GoKwik into 1 in 5 D2C checkouts in India. But the path there was a series of bets that didn't work, jobs that didn't last, and one moment in 2020 where the suitcases for Canada were packed and waiting in his living room. In Episode 12 of Unstarted, Chirag sits down with Avnish Bajaj to talk about what it actually means to keep tinkering, and when tinkering becomes the thing th...

Most founders can't tell you the moment they decided to build. Vedang Patel can. He was 23, a finance analyst with IIM seats in hand, and he looked at the MBA-holder sitting next to him in office and asked himself one question: "Is that what I want to do?" The resounding no from every section of his brain, and the ₹5.25 lakh he and his co-founders had between them is what became The Souled Store....

India's AI moment is louder than its rank. 100M+ ChatGPT users. #2 globally in usage. Still 76th in the world on per capita penetration. So what's actually happening on the ground? In this episode of Z47 Moments, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Ashwin Raguraman (Head of AI, walk through The India AI Edge: a three-month primary research effort by Z47, OpenAI, and Zinnov. The report draws on first-party Cha...

What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet? Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it.  By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a ru...

Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders? Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder...

What do you do with the regret of being right too early? Aakrit Vaish started Haptik in 2013: an AI chatbot company nine years before ChatGPT. By 2016 he knew the market wasn't ready. He kept going anyway. In 2019 he sold to Reliance Jio. In November 2022, he watched the world finally catch up to the thesis he'd carried for a decade and for a few weeks, sat with the sentence: "This should have bee...

What happens when you spend 13 years building something, and for most of those years, the people around you think it's not going to work out? Jaydeep Barman left a gilded career at McKinsey's London office to bet on a single roll shop in Pune. What followed was a decade-plus journey through India's costliest real estate market, the invention of an entirely new category (cloud kitchens — before any...

What does it take to fix the most broken system in America — from the outside? Ajay and Aniket, co-founders of Coral AI, had zero healthcare experience when they started. What they had was a burning problem, a one-way plane ticket to the US, and a relentless drive to understand healthcare from the ground up — visiting 17 cities in 30 days, becoming interns, and reading thousands of faxes doctors s...

Sanket Shah started thinking about business at 17. His first idea was putting ads on Mumbai's auto-rickshaws. The government said no. He went to Mantralaya three times, met the Chief Minister, got sent to the transport commissioner, and received government letters at home for four years. He got 4 rickshaws approved. Twenty-something years later, he's the founder of Invideo — a video creation platf...

Harsh Jain built Dream11 from a family business detour and a love of fantasy football into a company that sponsored every IPL team, sent athletes to the Olympics, and had 300 million users. Then the government effectively ended the business he'd spent 15 years building. This conversation isn't about the rise. It's about what happens after the nuclear bomb falls — how you grieve something you loved...

OpenClaw went from zero to more GitHub stars than React, a library that took a decade to build that following, in 60 days. One graph, vertical, like nothing the developer community had ever seen. When Z47’s founder, Avnish Bajaj saw that graph, something shifted. Six months earlier, the at Z47 had sat down to look at the velocity of AI deal-making, the valuations, the volume of capital flooding in...

Most people know what they want. The problem is they keep waiting for certainty that never comes. Oolka founder, Utkrishta Kumar built India's first just-in-time fulfilment network at 27, helped scale Meesho through one of India's biggest social commerce pivots and then left before the IPO. Not because he had to, but because the regret of not starting felt heavier than the risk of failing. In this...

What does it actually take to go from employee to founder — after 8 years inside one of India's greatest startups? In Episode 5 of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj sits down with Anil Goteti, CEO of Scapia, to talk about the real founder journey — not the highlight reel. From leaving McKinsey after just one year, to carrying a US loan back to India, to building and shutting down his first startup before fi...

Most people have never heard of Captain Fresh. In 2020, Utham Gowda walked into Z47's office with one belief: take a shrimp from Chennai to New York, and it's a very profitable business. Nobody believed him. He built it anyway. Five years later: ₹10,000 Cr in revenue. ₹550 Cr EBITDA (annualised Q4 FY26). Distribution across 15 of the top 20 European retailers. One-third of the white-cloth restaura...

What happens when you spend your whole career chasing external validation and it still isn't enough? Romita Mazumdar is the Founder and CEO of Foxtale, one of India's fastest-growing D2C beauty brands. But this conversation isn't about the business. It's about the years before it: the banking desk that made her feel seen for the wrong reasons, the VC firm where she was suddenly invisible, and the...

Most founders look at Aman Gupta and think: “he's different. I could never build that. Avnish Bajaj has known Aman for over 20 years - since before boAt, before Shark Tank, before any of it. He knows that's not the truth. That's exactly why he invited him on Unstarted. Aman Gupta co-founded BoAt in 2016 and built it into India's largest consumer audio brand, with ₹3000+ crore in revenue and a 45%...

Ahana grew up in Bharatpur, a small town in India where many believed girls shouldn’t always have the same opportunities. But her mother believed otherwise and pushed her to dream bigger. That belief eventually took her to Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and later to Harvard Business School. But this story isn’t about degrees or credentials. It’s about resilience, grit, and the relentless p...