The Bellwether Club: Sitashwa Srivastava on Building for India & Growing it for the World

The Bellwether Club is a new series at trica, in which I interview India’s most prominent new-generation entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, and fund managers, to find out what makes them who they are. What are the qualities that make them exceptional leaders? How did they get through the toughest of challenges in their journeys?

In this edition, our guest is Sitashwa Srivastava, co-founder and Co-CEO of global investment platform Stockal.

Sitashwa’s entrepreneurial journey — which started almost two decades ago — is also the story of the early Indian startup ecosystem and the evolution of Bengaluru as a startup city.

Originally from Allahabad, Sitashwa graduated in engineering from Kanpur, worked in Delhi, and did MBA in Chennai, before moving to Bengaluru in the late 2000s for a job and, later, starting up.

The world, and Bengaluru, was a little different then. “The Bangalore airport was on the Old Airport Road then. I used to live right next to it with a few friends. It was much quieter, but the hustle bustle was growing. Whitefield was a much smaller area, there was a lot more greenery in those days. Koramangala was being developed, and HSR layout was almost non-existent,” he tells me.

At a time when Flipkart was an early stage startup, and the digital payments ecosystem was in its nascent stage, Sitashwa’s first entrepreneurial venture was a marketplace for creative work. He had left his job at Cognizant with quite a decent amount of savings and had won TiE’s entrepreneurship contest before launching Jade Magnet with Manik Misra, his friend from B-School.

Although the business did make money, Sitashwa and his co-founder realised in a few years that Jade Magnet could not scale, especially without external investment. Sitashwa is candid in revealing that he learnt some valuable lessons in scaling and sustaining a business the hard way. “We reached a stage where we were not growing; nothing was happening. Unless you decide to kill the startup, it won’t die. We had realised through the course of the journey of Jade Magnet that it would be tough to raise capital, because ultimately it was a services’ marketplace. And we were in the market for funds around the time when Flipkart and big ecommerce marketplaces were in the market for funds. And there were only those many VCs, honestly. And the Indian ecosystem also was not very strong,”he tells me.

By 2014–15, the company was sold off to a digital marketing agency, and Sitashwa decided to start up again, this time with Vinay Bharathwaj who came from a hedge fund background and had run a startup himself. This was the beginning of Stockal. And what a journey it has been! I don’t want to give you any spoilers; you can read the full story here: https://trica.co/capital/blog/sitashwa-srivastava-on-the-secrets-of-building-a-startup-and-knowing-when-to-kill-a-startup/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=TBC2&utm_campaign=Mail1