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The Tracxn IPO is a playbook for a true global tech play from India!

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Tracxn went public today… congrats to the founders, employees & investors!

It’s a small personal milestone also. First angel –>IPO for me (I angel invested in Tracxn in 2015-16)…. & chose not to sell in the pre-IPO window:) Besides, I’m a regular user of the platform & can vouch for its utility!

But what really makes Tracxn stand out? – It’s a true/rare global tech play from India – IPOed in India, HQ/OPs in India, but main market is US & Europe!

Most folks in the tech ecosystem know Tracxn, but to newcomers – Tracxn is building a “Bloomberg Terminal for Private Markets”. Public markets have all their data, analyses, trends, and reports out in the open, but that’s not the case with private markets (VC/PE/Angel). This report does a good job of explaining the position.

You can’t publicly find hard numbers or verifiable figures to base your decisions on… everyone is trying to guess and make judgments in the absence of data. That’s where companies like Tracxn come in – they collate data from a bunch of diff sources & create a dashboard that they sell.

The Tracxn IPO is significant for the Indian tech ecosystem –

1) Headquartered in India, but 70% of revenues from US & Europe – true global play!
2) It’s a software driven business (think MARGINAL COST = ZERO), hence lightweight & scalable without huge investments
3) Raised VC $$, but not crazy levels (think #Realistic #Valuation)
4) $8-10MN runrate & profitable (or knocking on those doors)
5) First-mover advantage (think #DataIsTheNewOil)

As @MohapatraHemant (from LightSpeed Ventures) points out in his tweet, this isn’t a case where a big chunk of the value discovery has already happened in the private markets (by VCs). It’s a relatively early IPO, where the company will grow & reward investors in the public space.

Indian stock markets have recently witnessed a string of grossly overvalued tech/ecommerce IPOs that make them question the very rationale of the Silicon Valley originated VC playbook/model. IPOs like Tracxn can help soothe such misgivings & help folks internalize how it really works!

Originally posted on Twitter https://twitter.com/amitranjan/status/1582996280443170816

Good startup read… How Twitter was born?

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Twitter’s startup story is fascinating. It sprung up as a new business idea from the creators of Odeo, the audio/podcasting startup which was going nowhere.

From the 140characters.com blog

“The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.”

For the entire story, go here… this will teach you some valuable startup lessons…