Venture Everywhere Podcast: Kaustav Das with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up Kaustav Das, Founder and CEO of Efficient Capital Labs (ECL) on episode 23: Efficiently Speaking.
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In episode 23 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, chats with Kaustav Das, founder and CEO of Efficient Capital Labs. Efficient Capital Labs (ECL) empowers B2B SaaS companies to leverage their steady revenue streams, thus providing them with access to non-dilutive funding options that support their expansion goals. With a career spanning over two decades, which include extensive experience in risk assessment and management in the fintech sector, Kaustav has positioned Efficient Capital at the forefront of cross-border financing.
In this episode, you will hear:
The deep impact of professional relationships, seen as long-term investments beyond transactions.
The evolutionary path of SaaS companies in India, charting their progress from local entities to global contenders.
Strategic approaches adapted to secure international funding and overcome regulatory hurdles.
Predictability of revenue streams in SaaS models and the challenges of striking a balance between risk and return.
The intricate balance between aggressive growth and risk management.
Efficient Capital’s expansion plans, which involve transcending the SaaS vertical.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Venture Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:20 Scott: All right. I'm Scott Hartley. I'm the co-founder of Everywhere Ventures. I'm super excited to be here today with Kaustav Das. Kaustav is the founder and CEO of Efficient Capital Labs or ECL. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:34 Kaustav: Thank you, Scott. Thank you for having me. Excited to chat with you, learn from you, share my insights. So thank you for having me again.
00:00:42 Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny, we were reflecting recently on where ideas and deals and connections come from. And one of the things that I've learned and I'm sure you've learned over the last you know, decades of your career are this sort of – the history of, and the roots of relationships don't go away and many things kind of snowball and pay forward in different ways and kind of lead to all these dividends.
00:01:06 Scott: So I was thinking back on the way that we got connected was through a number of overlaps from a prior venture fund investment in your previous company, Kabbage, where you were chief risk officer, to running Risk at Petal, where we had invested previously in Jack Arenas, who is the founder of Petal, who went on to found a company called Modern Life.
00:01:26 Scott: And so thinking through those connection points and all the overlaps and all the layers and layers of startups in pre-seed land, really fortunate to get to work with you. And I wonder, kind of over those years, have you seen that same kind of emergent quality in the way that your career has unfolded?
00:01:40 Kaustav: Absolutely, Scott. Like the way I tell people is a short story. I was with American Express for 15 years. Right, like, A long, long time. And if you have ever heard of the story, a frog that lives in a well and thinks that's the ocean. So when I was with American Express, I thought that was the ocean. That was my life. It's only when I jumped out of the well by joining Kabbage, I realized that that was not the ocean, but that was the well that I was in all this while.
00:02:07 Kaustav: And every passing year in 2016 and ‘17 is when I left American Express to join Kabbage. American Express shaped me. They gave me everything that I have ever learned, amazing people. But in terms of building yourself as a person that can stand on its own, it is the journey that started from 2016, being a chief risk officer of Kabbage. It was almost like a second professional life that started, and that is when I realized the extent of relationships that are built, it's never a transaction. It is a transaction at a point in time, but what you're doing is an investment for the future.
00:02:44 Kaustav: And It really doesn't matter whether you're speaking to a CEO, or whether you're speaking to a risk officer, or for that matter, you're speaking to an analyst. The relationship always comes back to help you or in a way to give it back to the community. And that is one thing which I've realized over time in the past, mostly in the past six, seven years. So I approach every conversation, every introduction, everything that I'm doing in a lot more long-term view and never in a transactional view. And that has really helped me.
00:03:14 Kaustav: As you rightly pointed out, when I started this venture back in 2021-2022, everything that got me started off was people that I've worked with in the past five to 10 years. It could have been a colleague, it could have been my boss, it could have been somebody that started something new. And I've started valuing these relationships a lot more and changed the lens. It's never transactional for me. So I completely appreciate the discussion that you guys were having in terms of how relationships are built and how relationships are nurtured.
00:03:47 Scott: It's so interesting. You know, people often ask Jenny and I how we make decisions so early, you know often finding out about companies before they're even incorporated in Delaware. And a lot of it comes down to founder DNA and sort of some of the heuristics or some of the litmus tests around what's driving a person. I often say that I'm much more of a psychologist than a finance person. And really it's about evaluating motivations. And oftentimes it's also about evaluating these halos and peripheral relationships that help you validate a person, a direction, an idea, a market, you know, competition.
00:04:21 Scott: And so I think with the case of Efficient Capital Labs, we were obviously excited to invest in you, but there were a number of these other kind of overlapping effects from our relationship with Kabbage to Orchard Financial, which sold the Kabbage to Modern Life, which spun out of CoverWallet and sort of all of these peripheral relationships that kind of led us to be able to say, gosh, you know this is a core part of our ecosystem and a business that makes a lot of sense for us to partner with. And so with that, I'd love for you to describe a little bit of what Efficient Capital Labs does. You've been on this journey now for a couple of years.
00:04:55 Kaustav: Yeah. So Efficient Capital Labs started back in 2022. It's been a little above a year and a half, if you may. So what we do is we are a revenue-based financing company focused on enterprise SaaS. But the other important thing is we also focus on companies that are cross-border. And our mantra, our USP is we want to make sure that the cost of capital is borderless. So when you go to countries like India, and for that matter, other Southeast Asian and South Asian markets, you'll see that there's a big disparity when it comes to the cost of capital.
00:05:31 Kaustav: However, a lot of these SaaS companies are growing to be global. They start off local and they grow to be global. So the question that we asked ourselves, Manish, who's my co-founder and somebody who helps us in every step of the way. Unfortunately, he's not here, but he's always there. So, the important thing is what we realized is when we speak to these SaaS companies, when they are growing from being local to global, the thought process still remains local.
00:05:58 Kaustav: So what that means is when they're thinking of capital, they believe that the opportunity that is there for the capital is only local. And we wanted to challenge that. We wanted to open up and to make them understand that capital is also global like them. And that is where Efficient Capital was born with the sole intent of breaking down the barriers of the local nature of capital and we want to make it global.
00:06:24 Scott: One of the things that's a fascinating trend that we've probably both observed, you know over the last decade or so, is, particularly in those markets that you mentioned like India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, with large domestic markets, I think in the kind of early wave of technology startups that came out of those markets, there was such a large domestic consumption or such a large ability to focus on the domestic market that these companies weren't born global from the start. They were born local, as you said, in only over the last maybe you know, five to 10 years that I've seen.
00:06:55 Scott: You're starting to see, kind of a global flattening of access to information, of ability to sort of create global startups from the get go. A phenomenon that you did see in smaller markets previously, you saw that in markets like Scandinavia or Israel, where the domestic market was not sufficiently large to build a company kind of internal to that market. So you had to launch global from day one, but in markets like India and China, that wasn't really the case until a few years ago.
00:07:21 Scott: So I think what's been interesting in, seeing you guys capitalize on a born global perspective from a market like India, where you have maybe some cost arbitrage, although that's debatable at this point. You know, I know Bangalore engineers make nearly as much as San Francisco or New York engineers these days. So not much of a cost arbitrage there, but there's still these asymmetries or dislocations in sort of the interest rate that you could borrow at locally versus globally that you guys are helping make more efficient, obviously, to your name.
00:07:51 Kaustav: That's exactly correct, Scott. That was one part of the things that I did want to touch upon today is the tailwinds that we have. So when the phenomena of SaaS picking up started happening in India, I would say seven to 10 years back, there was very few components that was thinking global, when you think of the Zohos of the world. But slowly and steadily, when they realized that the product that is being built, which is catering amazingly to the Indian population, can absolutely do that to any other parts of the world, that's when the global outreach started happening. That's when people started moving from being local to being global.
00:08:28 Kaustav: And we've been able to harness that win. So whenever you speak to any of the SaaS companies that are coming out of India, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, they are trying to solve a problem that is a lot more global. They might be starting off local, but whenever they're building a product, they're keeping the global aspect that is there in mind. And that is where the synergy comes in. When we talk to these founders, we say that, hey, this is amazing that you're thinking about the product to be global. You should think the same way when it comes to capital, right, that it should be global. You should be able to access capital.
00:09:03 Kaustav; If you are building a team in the US, if you are trying to get new enterprise customers in the US, you should be able to get funding in the US itself. There are challenges that are there in India to be able to move funds from outside, as in you can get the funds in India, but moving it from India is a big challenge. So, that is where what we are building comes into play. So, we are able to help some of these software companies, help some of these SaaS companies to take money where they need it. If you need it in the US, you take it in the US. If you need it in India, you take it in India.
00:09:32 Kaustav: You don't have to be constricted or restricted because of other regulations. That has been a huge aspect which has contributed to the success of Efficient Capital, to be able to deploy capital on both sides of the geographies. And the founders don't need to worry about different things, arbitration costs, they don't need to worry about regulations, they don't need to worry about taxes. Everything is within the boundaries, whether it's US or India.
00:09:57 Scott: One of the lines that I love, one of our limited partners, our LPs, says this often to me, he says “When money is your product, it's easy to sell. When you're lending capital and money is what you're giving away, it's easy to give it away, it's hard to get it back.” Right, so that speaks to the job of chief risk officer is, how do you actually evaluate and underwrite certain types of borrowers? I guess the wedge that you guys are playing in is oftentimes being able to underwrite more efficiently or evaluate risk more efficiently at a smaller scale that it beats into a market that's maybe not being serviced by the large banks.
00:10:36 Scott: You know, if you're a local Vietnamese company, maybe you can borrow in high interest rate, local Vietnamese bank capital, but you then need to have a bigger book to get to Singapore, a bigger book to get to Hong Kong and an even bigger book to get to New York levels of capital. And you guys are able to, through technology, more efficiently underwrite or more efficiently evaluate that risk. Is that right? To be able to move farther down that stack.
00:11:00 Kaustav: That's exactly correct, Scott, but I'll give you an important analogy, you rightly said that it's very easy to give money, but it's more difficult to get it back. But the other analogy that I always tell people is when you're a risk person, it's very easy to have zero loss rates, but just not giving anything to anyone. So what that means is if you don't originate and you don't give anyone, which is zero, your loss rates are zero. So the fine thing is how do you balance the two in which you give and you get back or you give as much as needed and you get back. So that's the two analogies, the two sides of it.
00:11:32 Kaustav: And the reason we have been, in Efficient Capital, what we are building, we manage and maintain that balance fairly well. And one of the primary driving factors of that is because of the fact that we are cross border. So what that means is we have built an entire infrastructure to be able to assess risk, as well as assess everything in terms of top line for the company in both the geography. So we have built an infrastructure in US, where we are connected with the taxing, the banking information or the payment processors like Stripe.
00:12:03 Kaustav: We have done that very similarly in India in which we're connected to the banking ecosystem, we're connected to, if they're filing for the taxes, which is called ITR in India. That is something that's unique. We are able to treat a global company by looking at the revenues and the geographies that are there, not just look at one geography. We are able to assess risk by looking at the entire cost structure in both the geographies, by looking at the debt structure in both the geographies.
00:12:32 Kaustav: And that has been one of the primary reasons to be able to get to the numbers of extremely low, almost zero loss rates that we have today is driven by this very unique way of looking at and evaluating risk.
00:12:47 Scott: Over the course of your career at AmEx, at Kabbage, at Petal, in being in this role, oftentimes, as chief risk officer, were there any lessons or any particular experiences in those three or four prior work experiences that have refined how you guys are going after running ECL?
00:13:05 Kaustav: The one thing that we had to unlearn and learn again is no matter I've been in the risk domain for 21 years, for every risk that we have done, has mostly been for established companies. So what that means is they have been there for two, three, four years, even when you look at Kabbage, while we had small businesses that was there for a year or two years in business, most of our portfolio was two years plus, three years plus, four years plus. American Express is even more, if you do the distribution, most of them were four, five years plus, especially when you're doing financing.
00:13:37 Kaustav: This was very unique. What we are doing is very specifically for newer companies, very specifically for companies that have been in business for two, three years. So we have to unlearn something like margins. When you think about the companies that you are evaluating or we are evaluating, margins are mostly negative. But when you think about it from American Express’ point of view, if the margins are negative, it's almost like, “I'm sorry, I'm unable to go forward.”
00:14:03 Kaustav: So I have to unlearn that and learn that even when margins are negative or margins will be negative, for companies that are new, for companies that are growing because we are reinvesting that money in growth, that is a very important – I know you asked for learning, but I'm talking about something a little bit different, I had to unlearn certain things and learn new things when it comes to this thing.
00:14:23 Kaustav: Second thing is revenue-based financing is about being able to predict what your revenues are, which is a lot easier when it comes to SaaS companies than any other small businesses, like a restaurant. Yes, it is somewhat predictable, but I do not know what might come tomorrow, or I might not know what might come a month later, two months later. SaaS, that is not the case. I have the contract, I have the contracts, and we can exactly say that what the payments will come in the next 30 days, in the next 60 days, in the next 90 days, that is, again, a very important thing in terms of being able to predict revenue, to be able to assess risk, which is usually not the case for other small businesses.
00:15:02 Kaustav: That's another big differentiator that had to be unlearned and learned. But other than that, the risk theories or the risk learnings are fairly similar across bigger, smaller institutions that are there. You have to take measured risk. If you're not taking measured risk, you either are not growing the top line or you're growing the top line very quickly to blow up in which you're going to have a lot of loss rates. How do you have measured risk?
00:15:27 Kaustav: As I said, the second thing is data is your friend. Use as much data as you can that is coming from different sources. So use data, harness data, whether you're building a model, whether it's a machine learning model, whether it's a simple logistic regression model, or for that matter, whether you're using a simple if-then-else statement also, but use data as much as you can for every small things that you're doing, whether it's prospecting, whether it's risk assessment, or for that matter, even if it's collections, every part of it. Leveraging data becomes important.
00:15:56 Kaustav: The third thing is, rely on history, but also know what is coming in the future. It's a very important thing that is there. Just because you've not seen loss rates, that is there, in the past 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, doesn't mean that your loss rates will be the same in the next six to 12 months. So be very well aware of what is happening at this point in time that is going to dictate what's going to be there for the next six to 12 months, whether it is economy by itself by looking at the economic factors like inflation, unemployment rate, everything that is there. So you're able to predict what is gonna come in the future.
00:16:33 Kaustav: So don't just look backwards, which is important when you're building a model and historical, but also be aware that what is coming in front, this balance of the two is what separates in my mind a risk officer – somebody who relies only on the future and not so much on the past, or somebody who relies a lot on the past, not being aware of what's coming in the future, can be a little bit lopsided and the results might not be in their favor.
00:16:58 Scott: It's like that yin and yang or that balance you just mentioned about both originating and trying to push money out the door, but you also need to balance that against the loss ratio. One question I had, we see across the spectrum of startups, that typically there's a certain inflection point beyond which things change, whether that's scale or that's low-hanging fruit, working your way through the market. the way we often see this is in customer acquisition cost.
00:17:25 Scott: You have a certain subset of early adopters that maybe you can acquire through Facebook, beyond a certain threshold, those early adopters expire, there's kind of a late majority or laggards that move slowly, don't convert as fast, and then CAC will spike. So customer acquisition costs will kind of go through the roof. I imagine a similar analogy in your field would be when maybe there are high-fidelity, highly successful SaaS businesses that are trailing 12-month revenue is going great, and there's sort of an early portion of low-hanging fruit that have, very, very low loss ratio.
00:18:04 Scott: But how do you think about predicting that kind of inflection point beyond which maybe loss ratio spike or the revenue fidelity isn't quite as robust as it seemed in the early days? How do you think about that inflection point? Or do you see that there's just enough volume in a market like India that it would take millions and millions of dollars of origination to ever eclipse that early category?
00:18:27 Kaustav: So the way I look at it, Scott, is how you manage expectations of yourself and your board and your investors. So let's assume we saw phenomenal growth like 25% quarter over quarter. We originated more than $30 million in last year itself, in 2023. Now, the question that you can ask is, could I have done $50 million? I absolutely could have. I could have done $50 million, but that inflection point would have come to me a lot quicker, in which I'm now thinking about the risk is higher.
00:18:59 Kaustav: So the question is how you manage the expectation in terms of growth, how you manage expectations of when the growth is going to start translating itself into losses, and what is the capacity to be able to absorb that? So as an organization, as I mentioned, if somebody said that you had to grow to $50 million, which had been almost 100 times, than what we were, I would have been able to do that too. But I would not have a lot of control on my losses, which could come in this year or the following year.
00:19:28 Kaustav: But what we've been able to do is being able to grow, being in full control of our losses so that I can pump my fist and I can still say that in 2024 and some part of 2025, I know the losses are still going to be minimal. So some part of it is completely under your control or under the control of you and the management and your board and your investors to be able to figure out what is the fine balance of growth and not growing to the extent that it comes to block later.
00:19:58 Kaustav: The second thing is, I personally believe that there is, what we’re looking at both cross border valuations, we have some part of US in it, but a big chunk of it is US-India, US-Singapore. There's a lot more juice to be squeezed. As we mentioned before, we are right now at the beginning of the SaaS journey for these companies where they're going global. We are beginning of the SaaS companies where the US was probably five, six, eight years back. India is there right now.
00:20:26 Kaustav: If you draw a bell curve of these Indian SaaS companies, 85% of them are Series B below, or maybe 90% of them are Series B below. When you draw a bell curve of the ARR, 90% of them are $4 to $5 million of ARR below. There are only very, very few small companies that are there, you’re growing with them. So which means that it's only when they reach $20, $30, $40 million of ARR in which they grow out of anything that is what we're revenue-based financing.
00:20:55 Kaustav: Now they start thinking about bigger venture debt. They start thinking about commercial loans. They start thinking about going to bigger banks that are there, which is a lot more more lucrative for them. But right now, this is the wave when it's growing. This is the wave when they would be looking at other alternative capital as we are providing. So this is the right time to be where we are right now.
00:21:14 Scott: One of the metaphors or analogies I think of as a CEO is you're controlling these various levers that you've got at your disposal. And we talked about it a little bit, one is the origination sort of accelerator, be able to push more money out the door. The other is the break of loss ratio. the other metrics or levers that you have at your disposal are thinking about diversification or turnover of loans over time and how you manage that, and then retention and looking at, not just expanding and expanding, expanding the customer base, but actually repeating with the same customer base. And so how do you think about those other KPIs or those other metrics that you have additional levers to maneuver?
00:21:54 Kaustav: I'm glad that you brought it up, Scott. We have a board meeting coming up in exactly two days. And one of the most interesting things that we are presenting to the board is repeat customers. So we have got more than 70 percent of our existing base has come back to take a second financing, which is way more than what we expected. From the 2022 cohort that we had, we have an 85 percent repeat rate, which means that 85% of the customers that took one financing in 2022 came back to take a second financing right now.
00:22:27 Kaustav: I'll not just stop at that. The other interesting thing, what we did was for all of the companies that have taken financing from us, two-thirds of them are growing. They are utilizing the capital to grow their ARR. It is such a fascinating and something that we are so proud of that we've been able to be a part of their growth journey. So 66% of the people that have taken the first financing and have come back to the second financing have seen more than a 10% growth. And 28% of it that are there, which leads with only 5%, 28% of it have been between minus to 10%, which means they're stable. And only 5%, which is like one or two customers, have seen, trajectory, which is below 10% in terms of their growth.
00:23:17 Kaustav: And that is so fascinating. And all of these customers that we have been able to support has used the financing to be able to grow than when they were. So it's not only that number of times they're coming back, but the utilization has been to the effect, to be able to help that grow.
00:23:34 Scott: One of the things that we see as we evaluate hundreds and hundreds of companies is everyone's looking for a wedge or they're looking for a white space in the market. I was curious, as you think about what you've been able to build over the last couple years and where you're going. Do you see your thesis and what you're going after as kind of uniquely identifying a dislocation or an asymmetry in the market, a market inefficiency that you're able to exploit, or do you see what you've been able to build as a contrarian viewpoint, maybe in a risk perspective, vis-a-vis other risk officers or other people that have held this position before?
00:24:13 Scott: You know, one of the drivers of big businesses that we often see is power law or outlier companies are typically both contrarian or a little bit against the grain and right. You know, you could be contrarian and wrong, but if you're contrarian and right, there's typically a bigger alpha kind of in that space. And so I was curious as you think about what drove you to create this company, was it just an obvious glaring market dislocation and inefficiency that you saw ripe for exploitation?
00:24:42 Scott: Or did you see this as a contrarian thing like, gosh, I've been in this job for 20 years. I've seen this repeatedly in my life and I seem to disagree with a lot of things that other people are saying and I think that I'm right. I was just curious how you think of it.
00:24:55 Kaustav: I would say that it's less of the contrarian view. It's more of the market opportunity that was left unencumbered, that was left wide open for us. The only contrarian view that I would say, Scott, I think I touched upon this before is what I've been told, what I've learned in my past is all certain metrics is a certain way to look at it, which is different right now when I look at these new companies that are coming in. And I gave the examples of margins, I gave the examples of volatile revenue that are there, which is the only small part of, contrarian view that is there.
00:25:33 Kaustav: The other thing is predictable revenue. This is very different from any other business that I have been in my past 21 years, which is absolutely predictable from this point of view. I can, exactly, tell you what it is going to be for the next 30, 60, or 90 days, unlesss you're doing only working capital or factoring. Factoring is another predictable business that is there. But everything else, for like installment loans, a line of credit, and so on, it's not predictable.
00:25:54 Scott: One of the things that we all know from having been doing this for the better part of a couple of decades, is that life is long and these companies are not easy to build. And really it takes a lot of motivation and a lot of grit and perseverance to stick with it. As you think about Efficient Capital in the year 2025 or the year 2030, where do you see taking this business and what does success look like for you?
00:26:20 Kaustav: If you ask me, I have a very clear vision of where I want to take it in 2025 and 2030, maybe even 2035. Time will tell how much I'm being able to do that. I can definitely tell you for year one and year two, it has been very much to what exactly I expected, anticipated and wanted to build. So the way I look at it is, and explain this to people, is my vision in the form of, concentric circle. My innermost concentric circle was to build this financing product/platform, which focuses on cross border and a vertical, which is SaaS. We wanted to make sure that the capital is borderless. And we did that.
00:26:57 Kaustav: So in the most concentric circle, we focused on the India-US corridor and SaaS as a vertical. And we have done that fairly well in the past 18-24 months. The second concentric circle going outward is we want to make it market agnostic. And we started doing that from October of last year when we went to Singapore. So the intent is for the entire 2024 would be to go to at least one other market along with Singapore to make it market agnostic with the same US-Singapore or US-Philippines.
00:27:24 Kaustav: The third concentric circle would be, which will be in the year 2025 and above, the 2025, 2026, 2027 would be the different verticals other than SaaS, but which is again, predictable revenue. For example, hardware, you'll see a lot of robotics companies, a lot of drone companies that are coming in, which is a combination of hardware and software and predictable revenue that is there servicing is another component that is cross border, predictable revenue and recurring. That is there.
00:27:52 Kaustav: The last concentric circle, which will be in four or five years from now, which has, comes to very close to 2030, is other products, which focuses on cross border like remittances. Billions and trillions of dollars are being moved from one country to the other. And we already have a wedge and entry into it. Deposit accounts, when you think about it, most of these cross border companies that we're dealing with, they have two bank accounts that are there, one in US, one in India, transferring money from one to the other.
00:28:21 Kaustav: We want to make sure that we make it seamless for them when they're moving money. We do have a vision in terms of anything that is cross border, anything that has to do with payments, anything that has to do with financing, anything that has to do with movement of funds would be Efficient Capital.
00:28:36 Scott: It's amazing to think of that the rollout makes so much sense just going from almost having this matrix approach of basically market specific corridor to vertical specific business model to even product across the fintech landscape and building that out into four or nine or 16 different business lines, you could see a pretty clear path to scale, which I think as venture funds look to invest, you know it's never in features. It's never in products. It's sometimes in companies, but really it's in platforms and in movements.
00:29:10 Scott: And really thinking about these tailwinds that we talked about, the global macro tailwinds of flattening of opportunity across the planet. SaaS companies being able to be built out of India for truly global audiences. And then not only India, but as you mentioned, Singapore, Philippines, a number of other markets that will be close behind. And those are the characteristics that I think, you know, make us really excited to be on board with you.
00:29:35 Kaustav: Thank you.
00:29:36 Scott: So we have a speed round. I just want to ask you a couple of quick questions here. This is the fun part. I just want to know, kind of what's a book that you're reading currently or a podcast that you really enjoy.
00:29:45 Kaustav: I just came back from a weekend outing. I just started reading the book, River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh. That's the most recent one that I can think of.
00:29:55 Scott: Amazing. I'm a big fan of that work. And I'll say that one thing that's not a book that I'm excited about that's coming out of Bollywood, that came out on Republic Day a couple days ago is the new movie called Fighter, which is basically the Top Gun lookalike out of Bollywood. So that'll be on my, not my reading list, but my watch list over the next week.
00:30:15 Kaustav: Wow, you're very much up to date. Exactly right, which is a little bit of a replica of Top Gun.
00:30:20 Scott: I just, you know, I follow anything that Hrithik Roshan does.
00:30:24 Kaustav: Now you're amazing me even more with the names and all coming.
00:30:28 Scott: The second question of speed round, if you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?
00:30:33 Kaustav: It'll be two choices that I would say. One would be going back to my hometown in Kolkata.I left when I was like 20 years old. Now I’m past 40. I really want to go back and spend a long time than just like one week, or two weeks. If I'm able to work out of Kolkata for one year, that'll be amazing. The other place is anywhere in South America. I love the South American pace and culture and so on and so forth to be able to balance between your professional life and personal life and yet be successful, that is there. So anywhere in South America, I would love to spend a year and be able to work out of that country.
00:31:11 Scott: Maybe we can line up the team offsite to Eden Gardens sometime if you're back in Kolkata.
00:31:15 Kaustav: Yeah, sure.
00:31:18 Scott: As far as a favorite productivity hack, what’s something that you've found to be effective for you running a large organization?
00:31:25 Kaustav: So what I usually do is on a Sunday night, I go through my entire calendar in which there are meetings. And what I try to do is a lot of times there are overlapping meetings or meetings for which I need to prepare, meetings that are non-essential or in which my participation is non-essential, I try to clean up and rearrange it just to make sure that, like for example, we had this podcast and we had rearranged it, I'd given myself 15 minutes before this meeting at the very beginning.
00:31:58 Kaustav: And that's the reason you must have received a note from me saying that, hey, are we on track to have this particular meeting or not? That was on a Sunday or a Monday when I was going through my calendar. Because I wanted to give myself 15 minutes to make sure that I'm not coming out of an investor meeting or not coming out of a sales meeting in a different frame of mind altogether. So to be able to figure out what are the type of meetings that you're getting into and to be able to make sure that you have enough time to switch on or switch off or to change gears, they're important.
00:32:27 Kaustav: I don't like going into an investor meeting from a sales meeting. The sales meeting are usually high energy meeting that are there. There are different types of discussions that are happening, I don't want to switch gears. Managing and maintaining my calendar, I do it on a Sunday night or a Monday morning. That has been a very, very very important hack for me.
00:32:48 Scott: It's interesting to be able to stack meetings that have a particular focus or a particular mentality or energy level to kind of match, calendar based on energy level. That's interesting. Lastly, I guess, where can listeners find you? Where can they find you online?
00:33:02 Kaustav: That's a tough one. I'm not one of those people. I'm glad I get these opportunities that are there. I'm coming out more having these webinars and podcasts. There's one that's going to come out, I believe, in the next one week, not with Everywhere Ventures, but another podcast that I did or webinar that I did. I would say that I still do not have my presence out in the open as much as I would like to. I'm working on it and I'm hoping that in another couple of months, but sometime before the end of this year, I will have something which will come out a little more proper cadence than bits and pieces right now.
00:33:37 Scott: I'm just very excited for your TikTok account when that comes out.
00:33:40 Kaustav: I don't have one. I mean, and no I don't even have a Twitter account. I need to work on that too.
00:33:46 Scott: Well, thank you so much for spending the time with us today. Very excited to be investors in Efficient Capital and partners with you on this journey that will, I'm sure, take us many years into the future. So thanks for joining us today, Kaustav.
00:33:58 Kaustav: Yeah, thank you. But Scott, I do want to mention that Everywhere Ventures, and this is not scripted at all, Everywhere Ventures has been amazing. Not just because of the fact that you give us these opportunities to come, but you and Jenny, you have followed up. As we're thinking about the different rounds, you have followed up to be able to throw in your hat. And that counts a lot.
00:34:17 Kaustav: This is all relationship building. It doesn't matter whether anything comes out or not, but the fact that you make us feel that this is part of it, we're gonna solve it together, helps a lot. Helps a founder like me who's doing it for the first time out. So I wanted to thank you for that too.
00:34:32 Scott: Thanks so much. Yeah, obviously we all love it. And I think that speaks volumes to just wanting to lean in and continue to work together. So we appreciate your time.
00:34:41 Kaustav: Thank you again. Thanks.
00:34:42 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Check out Kaustav Das in Founders Everywhere.
Read about ECL’s $7M raise.