The Rainmatter Podcast

Please enjoy this conversation with Osborne. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we're @rainmatterin on Twitter.

Please enjoy this conversation with Kushal. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we're at @rainmatterin on Twitter.

Please enjoy this conversation with Suruchi and Suhail. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.

IndiaDataHub is a data portal that aggregates and provides insights on economic and financial data. Though the government, regulators, and other systemically important institutions publish tons of data, it's highly unstructured and messy. Ashutosh had long dealt with the issue of messy data and based on his experiences, he started IndiaDataHub started as a passion project while he was working as an economist at IIFL. It later became a startup. Ashutosh and his team also publish an annual publication called The Data Book which gives rich insights on various aspects of the Indian economy. This year's edition gives you a bird's-eye view of the Indian economy across various parameters like demographics, agriculture, industry, trade, banking, capital markets, and much more. 

So I caught up with Ashutosh to talk about the backstory of IndiaDataHub and also discuss some of the highlights from The Data Book. In this conversation, we talk about:

1. How Ashutosh became an economist
2. How IndiaDataHub started
3. What could disrupt IndiaDataHub
4. The quality of Govt data and the move toward open data
5. Opportunities in making sense of data
6. Alternative data
7. Learnings building IndiaDataHub
8. The state of the Indian economy post-COVID19, formalisation, household savings and other highlights from The Data Book. 

This was an absolutely fascinating conversation and we hope you enjoy this as much as we did recording it. 

You can purchase your copy of The Data Book—State Of India here.

Visit Rainmatter for more. 

Given the sheer amount of activity in the space, we caught up with Sriram Mani from Moneycontrol, who covers the startup and venture funding ecosystem. Sriram has published some brilliant pieces on the evolving startup world. In this conversation, he spoke about:

1. His personal journey and how he got to covering startups and VCs
2. The madness in the Indian startup world
3. How the size of startups deals have changed in India vs globally
4. Tiger Global and their investing style
5. Hottest and coldest spaces in terms of funding
6. The rise of direct investing vs through funds
7. Founder burnout
8. Where's all this money coming from, and what's driving this frenzy
9. Crypto

And a whole lot more. This was a fascinating conversation, given that Sriram spends his entire day looking at this space. You can also follow Sriram on Twitter; he's @manicontrol2020. 

We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed recording this. 

Thanks for tuning to episode 3. In this episode, Nithin caught up with Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Shrivastava, and Rohan Gupta, the founders of smallcase.  

In this freewheeling conversation Vasanth, Anugrah, and Rohan talk about:   

0:00 Introduction and Individual backgrounds
9:20 The chronology of the smallcase story
12:05 What's smallcase
13:13 The Rainmatter side of the smallcase story
15:10 The initial days of building smallcase
25:57 Navigating the technological challenges of integrating with different brokers
29:20 Onboarding older brokers
35:06 Growth hack: Getting customers to tag other brokers on tweets asking for smallcases  
36:50 Deciding on broking partners
38:40 smallcase Publisher - a platform for advisors
42:42 Building Publisher
43:59 Breakup of smallcase transaction across platforms
46:14 smallcase Gateway
51:50 Tickertape
58:20 Being a broker on their own vs deciding not to
1:01:20 Thinking about now in the light of billion-dollar valuations ascribed to brokers
1:02:40 Going global 1:05.21 Direct indexing vs ETF
1:10.15 Learnings from Smallcase journey
1:15:27 What next  

If you guys want to explore all the awesome things that smallcase is building:  
Tickertape
smallcase Publisher
smallcase Gateway

In Episode 2, Nithin speaks to Prateek Singh, the founder of LearnApp​ on how he working on making quality financial education accessible.   

Prateek talks about:  

00:00​ LearnApp 

4:51​ Prateeks' background and his trading journey 

16:36​ The behind deciding to teach people 

25:56​ How LearnApp started 

29:39​ Demographics of LearnApp users 

32:40​ Competing against people selling greed  

38:58​ On funding and raining more money 

42:03​ What content gets consumed the most 

45:27​ Organic growth vs ads 

50:00​ Advice for wannabe entrepreneurs 

50:38​ What motivates him

Please enjoy this conversation with Prateek. We'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.

In the first episode, we decided to catch up with Vishvajit Sonagara, the founder of Quicko which is working on making taxes easy for individuals and businesses. In this conversation Vishvajit talks to Nithin about:

1. The Quicko story and the motivation
2. How he built the core team and the challenges
3. What the Quicko team does all year round given that tax filing is seasonal :) 
4. What is Quicko Sandbox, the objective of building it, and how it is helping businesses 
5. Observations about the userbase of Quicko
6. Thoughts on the taxation announcements in the budget
7. The Indian tax base in numbers
8. Why people don't file taxes and some reasons why the Indian tax base is so small
9. What if income tax was abolished
10. His learnings throughout this journey
11. His thoughts on managing people
12. Advice for budding entrepreneurs

Please enjoy this conversation with Vishvajit. We'd also love to hear your thoughts on this episode and also in general, we are @rainmatterin on Twitter.