Plumbing for the metaverse with Sai Krishna

In this episode, Sai Krishna, a serial entrepreneur, who calls himself a metaverse plumber, loves creating interesting applications based on emerging and maturing technologies. In this conversation, he shares

His adventures and misadventures in ITHailing from a south Indian family that emphasized educationMoving to Bangalore to continue his education in RV CollegeHis attraction to build products, more with an intention of having fun in doing itHis first product in the education spaceUnderstanding the need to think like an entrepreneurship and getting sponsored for an entrepreneurship program at StanfordStarting his company Scapic - with AR/VR as core technologies and being acquired by FlipkartHis approach to identifying problems to solveShiny toy syndrome: to pick something that looks cool; these may not be a venture worthy ideaChoosing a problem that matches your expertise: your and your team’s complementary skills; this helps accelerating to marketSelect entrepreneurs: going after massive market opportunityLousy team, great market, market winsGreat team , lousy market, market winsGreat team, great market - nonlinear outcomesHow to think scaleVisualizing the finish line: that is not a goal post; focus on the next milestoneThe importance of obsessing over the first cohort for a startupThe value of creating a playbook after validation and further experimentation with the second and third cohortsDifferences between B2B and B2C solutionsHow a decentralized squad model, working with local partners and having an engineering focus for differentiation would help scale and localize, as needed

Sai has spent more than 9 years in building deep tech startups. He was an early believer and pioneer in the Metaverse, and built & backed startups in the domain. Notably:

- His Virtual & Augmented Reality venture, Scapic was acquired by Walmart/Flipkart

- He backed a venture studio for the Metaverse, Cope.Studio, which was acquired by Polygon/Matic

- His marketplace for Metaverse assets, Reality Tools, was acquired by MotionPage

Sai currently leads Flipkart Labs, where he focuses on new deep tech initiatives such as Camera (Augmented Reality) & Firedrops (NFTs & Web3) in the Walmart Group. He is currently an advisor at Polygon & Polygon Studios. He is alum of Stanford University Graduate School of Business, recipient of the Indian National Startup Awards and a fellowship recipient from Ondeck. 

He's been awarded by organisations such as Facebook, the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards, Wharton and IIM. Sai has delivered 80+ keynotes at international conferences, IIT-Bombay, NSRCEL & more. 

When it's not about work, Sai is quintessentially south Indian, with an affinity to dosas and filter coffee.

You can reach out to Sai at [email protected] on anything around building moonshots.