Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal - Co Founders, Tracxn

Breaking Investment Stereotypes with Rajkumar Singhal

We are kicking off a brand new series called Founder Series. Here at Founder Series we will be calling founders , CEOs and builders who have created world class businesses and deep dive into them. My guests for today are Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal, Co Founders of Tracxn

Tracxn is one of the largest private market intelligence platforms tracking Startups & Emerging Technology Sectors globally like IoT, Blockchain, AI, Robotics, FinTech, CyberSecurity and more. Used by Venture Capital Funds, Private Equity Funds & Fortune 500 Corporates across 50 countries.

Prior to Tracxn Neha was a Venture Capitalist at Sequoia Capital. Before Sequoia, Neha was a Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Engineer by background, Neha did her BTech & MTech in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Bombay where she graduated with Institute Silver Medal. She also got the Google Women in Engineering Award recognising women student achievers in the field of CS. Neha did her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. She has been awarded Fortune 40 under 40 by Fortune India Magazine and Outstanding Women Award by Outlook Business.

Abhishek is a graduate from IIT Kanpur, worked with Yahoo and Amazon before joining Accel and then starting Tracxn. He has been recognised as part of the ‘40 under 40’ list by Fortune India in 2018 and 2019.

In various avatars (Accel, Tracxn Labs & personally), he has invested in 150+ startups over last 13 years which included names like Flipkart, Delhivery, Rupeek, Gameskraft, Airmeet, and Lafz.

This episode is brought to you by multipie.co where we believe Investing is an ignored life skill. Multipie is building up a platform where people can form communities and learn, share , collaborate on growing their wealth using the right tools. We want your hard earned money to work for you

Show notes:

0:00 - Introduction

3:20 - From Engineer to VC to Founder: How Neha shaped her career?

6:02 - Abhishek's career journey from a conventional family to founding Tracxn

9:44 - Tracxn Journey from Inception

12:36 - How does Tracxn collect data at scale?

14:11 - Tracxn's early vision

15:55 - Highs and lows in starting days

18:55 - Tracxn's growth and competition story

22:56 - Tracxn's drive: Private market investors vs. Large corporates

24:44 - Impact of Tracxn on Private market investing

27:42 - Future of traction in next 10 years

29:46 - Will Tracxn serve retail investors too?

31:31 - Sales strategy of Tracxn

34:21 - Evolution of Indian Unicorns & Startup ecosystem

37:00 - Are VCs too bullish on Indian startups?

39:43 - Lessons from failing startups

42:41 - Secret of successful VCs

45:55 - Women in the Indian startup ecosystem

49:05 - What's Future of work: Remote or In-office?

50:58 - Thoughts on Indian startup IPOs

55:34 - Avenues to look at while investing in Private companies

58:01 - Rapid Fire Round 🔥🔥

59:02 - Top 3 startups to watch out for

1:00:43 - Learnings from life as a VC and Founder

1:04:57 - Advice to 20yr old self

1:07:35- How does it feel to have a spouse cofounder?