DEZERV - building an expert investing platform

Sarthak Malhotra
SENIOR ASSOCIATE
No items found.

Salonie:

Hi and welcome to Matrix Moments, this is Salonie and joining us today is Sandeep Jethwani, the Co-founder of DEZERV. A company that’s focused on creating an effortless investment experience that goes beyond mutual fund and trading apps.

In conversation with Sandeep are Sarthak Malhotra, senior Associate at Matrix Partners India and Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. In this episode we cover dezerv. differentiated integrated portfolio approach. The founding team deep expertise within the investment space and how that’s leverage to create personalized solution for members. As well as learnings from their journey of building an expert driven investment platform. Tune-in to know more.

Sarthak:

Hello. And welcome to another episode of Matrix Moments. Today we have Sandeep Jethwani, founder and CEO of Dezerv. And we have Vikram Vaidyanathan from the Matrix team. Let me quickly introduce today’s guests. Sandeep is as I said the founder and CEO at Dezerv. Before this Sandeep was a senior managing partner at IIFL Wealth. Sandeep completed his engineering from VJTI Mumbai and then went to IIM Bangalore. From there he joined Kotak Wealth Management and then went to be one of the founding members at IIFL Wealth. He spent 13 or even more years at IIFL Wealth and in his most recent stint he built IIFL One and quickly scaled up to I think more than $3.5 billion in AUM within 15 months.

Vikram is a managing director at Matrix Partners. He leads our Bangalore office and our Fintech and Enterprise SaaS practices. Welcome to both our guests today.

Sandeep:

Thanks, Sarthak, thanks for having us.

Vikram:

And that’s Sarthak, Sarthak leads everything that we do in Fintech and he’s the lead on Dezerv.

Sandeep:

And he’s the guy who gets the champagne to the office.

Sarthak:

Great. So I’m also going to introduce a couple of co-founders at Dezerv. So, Sahil who is one of the co-founders at Dezerv, very similar background to I would say similar to Sandeep. He I think went to the UK for his education and then came back to join Kotak and then joined IIFL Wealth as a founding member as well. And then Vaibhav, Vaibhav is a CA by qualification and then he joined I think Anand Rathi.

Sandeep:

He was with Anand Rathi for a while and then --

Sarthak:

And then moved to IIFL Wealth. So I think all three founders have a combined let’s say 40-45 years of experience in wealth management.

Sandeep:

That makes us sound really old, we’re not that old, but yeah close to about 15-16 years of doing this.

Vikram:

Before I bounce into Sandeep,whetheryou like it or notyou’re getting old but for Vaibhav, Sahil, Sandeep, wealth is really in their blood.They’ve pretty much done nothing else in their lives so we’revery privileged to be partners with them.And I’ll tellyou alittle bit of background onthe Sandeepand my relationship. Sandeep is a senior of mine from IIM Bangalore and but I really got toknow him as a neighbor in Mumbai andactually our kids got toknow each other before we didbecausethey’re boththe same ageandthey got toknow each other as one year oldand that’s how we startedthis relationshipand we sort of kept in touch.

But Sandeep was essentially meant to be anentrepreneur, every fewyears hewould say, kuch start up karna hai, and hewouldhave an idea. And sowhen he called meaboutthis idea Isaidthis is just one of thosewhere he’s going to not start up. But suddenly hesaid oh, we started upand then in a week hesaid, oh,there’s a term sheet. And butI’mvery thankful and privilegedthatyou waited for us and even more sothat we got to be partners.

Sandeep:

I always was very excited to work with you at some point, Vikram. Obviously, there is stuff that we can’t talk about on camera that we’ve done together but it’s been a phenomenal journey knowing you and watching your own journey from relocating from Bombay to Bangalore and that entrepreneurial thing within Matrix itself has been inspiring. So, yeah, I always wanted to partner with him.

Vikram:

So talk a little bit about Vaibhav and Sahil and I know you’ve tossed about multiple ideas just between the three of you. So what made you want to start up with the two of them and what makes this partnership unique?

Sandeep:

So I think whenever you’re looking for partners you’re looking for people who’ll sort of complement you in many ways, who are very different than you are. And for me I think and I guess even for them I think the three of us brought together different parts of personality dealing with people thinking about stuff. So Vaibhav is truly the investing brain within Dezerv, right, and his attention to detail on investing, his knowledge about how to think about portfolios, how to think about investing, is phenomenal. So that was really inspiring, something I used to admire for a very long time.

Sahil on the other hand has great perspective on people. I think he gets people very quickly which I thought was really helpful. I think for us our recruiting has been much easier because of him. The way we think about our user base has been very different and he really like humanizes the entire personality of the organization. So I think that’s been exciting for me to work with him.

Vikram:

SoI wasthinkingaboutthe three parts and for me Vaibhav is assetsbecause he just picks and Sahil is relationships andnetwork.

Sandeep:

And I’m indoors. [Laughs] The other side of the balance sheet.

Vikram:

But you bring a unique perspective I think actually on the customer because you’ve just always think what will my client think about, how will they react and always you come at it from that perspective.

Sandeep:

Yeah, I think there is that, Vikram, but I think when you’re making an investment recommendation, right, you’re making it for a human being for a real person. And I think that is something that has been central even as wealth managers and now that you’re thinking about how you would advise a friend or how you would advise a family member. So it’s not about this user service relationship, right, it’s more than that. So that’s something that’s exciting in this business.

Sarthak:

And, Sandeep, as Vikram said you’ve been trying to start up for a bunch of times. You’ve been an entrepreneur yourself like I think you were one of the first few people at IIFL Wealth in the early days, then you built multiple products and services within IIFL and scaled up. What was the nudge or the trigger to say I’m going to startup now.

Sandeep:

So first of all I have to give credit where it’s due, so with IIFL Wealth you had this amazing opportunity in the early days or the first 13-14 years to be able to experiment with new things, to be able to setup new businesses and that kept it going for a very long time. 2020 was a defining moment for us and that was the time when friends who were successful professionals in consulting, venture capital etcetra reached out and said that markets are falling, how should I manage my portfolio.

And that is the time we started wondering these guys should have access to the best talent and why are they even calling us. And then we dug deeper and we realized that there is definitely a huge vacuum there. That really successful professionals who have now saved up a reasonable amount of money don’t have access to the kind of advice that the UHNIs have. And I think Dezerv in some ways is a mission to solving for that and that’s exciting.

Sarthak:

Got it. Soyou talk alittle bitabout like access tothe best professionals and then how UHNIs manage their money,you’ve managed their money for a long time. Tell us alittle bitabout how UHNIs and HNIs manage their money and whatarethe retail investors missing, what dothey don’t get.

Sandeep:

Yeah, that’s a interesting question because some of it is factual and some of it is philosophical, right, so the first thing is that when we manage money for HNIs or when we would manage money for HNIs we wouldn’t take 20 decisions to them and leave it at their doorstep. We would understand them, create a comprehensive solution that works for their portfolio and then offer that. So I think that is the first thing that we thought we want to implement at Dezerv. The user or the person whose coming to us should not have to make or do all the heavy lifting, that’s the role and the responsibility of the wealth manager to do.

So that is one big difference, the second is that in terms of newer asset classes, in terms of alternative investments HNIs have far better access to the ecosystem. And the second thing is that even the kind of diligence that is done on the assets which are recommended to them is very unique and different. It’s very deep, it actually looks at all facets, return being one, but risk being a very important part of it. So we thought that that is something that is not happening on the emerging HNI side as we call them and probably an opportunity there.

On the philosophical point I think one thing that most HNIs or we work with HNIs on is building a thought process around money. What are they saving money for, what are the objectives around it. And I think that is something that a wealth manager truly needs to do, so I think those were the couple of gaps that we saw in terms of how service on wealth management was for HNIs and for the UHNI segment.

Sarthak:

And just for our viewers, right, like I think in the beginning of the year we put out this thing called the Matrix Fintech idea board for this year. And you know the couple of problems that we identified was and honestly it was like personal problems for people like me and like a bunch of people at Matrix as well. Like if you have money, you know, there’s markets, you can do like mutual funds, SIPs, but when do you want to put money, where do you want to put money beyond equities, how much to put where, right. All of us struggled with that and we’ve really identified these two problems in that note and I think Dezerv like hits the nail on the head with these offerings.

Vikram:

So we had two questions by the way, I don’t know if you ever read it but --

Sandeep:

I wish I had, it would be better.

Vikram:

Thereare two questions,the first question was for early investors which is when to invest, what to invest in and at what priceIthink. Andthe second was what do rich investors or smart money, what does smart money dothat dumb money doesn’t. And when we spoke toyouIthinkyouansweredthat second questionthat it isabout less decisions, and it’s decisions at aportfolio level not at a product level andthat immediately sort of clicked for us.

Sandeep:

Yeah, I didn’t have access to that document. It’s a public one but --

Sarthak:

Vikram, we’ve been, like at Matrix been investing in Fintech companies for I think more than a decade now. This is a truly first invest tech, wealth tech investment, right. What like made us, like when you do this versus like you’ve seen so many of these wealth tech companies over years, what stood out?.

Vikram:

One,I would confessthat it’s not for want of trying, wehave been looking at wealthtech for a while and there were one or two that we came close to doing and I would argue that we’re this investment is probably a little bit behind time in terms of for us not in terms of time of the investment, for us. We should have made probably more wealth tech investments already. But I’ll talk a little bit about the market and then about this investment.

First about the market, I think finally wealth and wealth tech is a pull product not a push product, where you don’t have to call people and say you should invest money and so it’s a much -- actually you don’t have to sell. People are coming online searching, being aware, making an investment transaction and then figuring out oh, this didn’t go well, what do I do. So that first part of the process of discovery, awareness, discovery and trial is getting done on its own, you don’t have to do it.

Sandeep:

Yeah.

Vikram:

So that’s the thing that has changed dramatically over the last 18-24 months. Which essentially means suddenly you have a large market of people with very different need stakes. And one of the things that’s happening is people have made investments, some have gone well, some have not gone well. Then over a period of time they’ve discovered their own risk, am I a low risk person, am I a high risk person. How do I want to manage this portfolio, what objectives am I -- all these questions suddenly that are coming into an investor’s life.

I think what hit home for us was actually the other thing, one is this explosion of new investors, the second is this explosion of things that they can invest in. They can invest in early private companies, they can invest in debt, they can invest in alternative assets, they can invest in fractional properties, they can invest in crypto, suddenly the gamut of things that they can, products that they can invest in have exploded. And then they’ve discovered what is my risk with respect to products.

The thing that hit home for us with Dezerv was, hey, we need to match this investor and their life choices and what they want to their risk and therefore then to their portfolio. And then we’re going to figure out these matching portfolios which will work for them. That was one and second they were obsessed with their clients and their customers. Almost every conversation would start there that this is what we learned with our client, this is what we want to do for them.

And those examples it was clients so that’s how you were managing them and now it’s moved to consumers. So the fact that they were obsessed with the journey, obsessed with making sure that they were standing by their expert advice and they wanted to make sure that their consumers and clients was okay, that was I think very different about them versus the others.

Sarthak:

Sandeep, Vikram touched upon a couple of why now as we say, right, there’s an explosion of assets, there’s an explosion of people coming in and trying. But I would say people have tried the I would say trying to do some part of portfolio allocation, some of the other things that you were also trying to do before. Why do you think today is the right time to solve this in a much more tech enabled fashion?

Sandeep:

So I think, Sarthak, this is an exciting question for me because of many reasons why I think this is a great time, right. So first of all, Vikram alluded to this, right, most of the common assumption around investing was that nobody gets up in the morning thinking about the fact that I have to invest today. And I think for the first time in many decades or at least in our lifetimes that is changing. People are actually seeking out investment opportunities, so I think that is one thing that’s -- so investing is becoming mainstream, it’s becoming central to your consciousness. So that is I think exciting.

The second thing is that when it comes to investing in India the India stack or the plumbing has been now established around investing. So some of the problems that we would solve earlier as offline wealth managers are no longer real problems in the digital space, how do accounts get setup, how does money transfer happen? So all of that has now been addressed and now it’s the time to build on top of that into a solution based approach.

The third thing which I think is really important is humanizing wealth management. And I think coming from a platform where we’ve interacted with users or clients as we call them and help solve for that one of the biggest missing pieces on wealth was this absence of a human interface, sort of human touch in many ways. So I think that is an exciting opportunity today to deliver that. And how do you humanize the experience, try and understand the segment and which is why we’re very focused on creating a solution for one segment and make them our advocates.

Sarthak:

JustIthink we knowthe segment, but talk to us alittle bitaboutthe segment,right, the emerging HNIs and what is it, whoarethepeoplethat Dezerv is really targeting in delivering solutions?

Sandeep:

Yeah, so there is again given there are many ways to cut it there is a behavioral aspect at the top of it all. And that is around the fact that how do you perceive or how do youthink about investing. There is one group of people who love investing, who want to look out for individual ideas on a day to day basis, they’re active users of Moneycontrol, Value research etcetra and they enjoy the thrill of the process. And they we believe are serviced extremely well today, then there is a second group which is essentially people who are saying, people like me, who would want somebody else to manage their money.

Like handle it for me, I don’t want to do it on a day to day basis, I have much more exciting stuff like hanging out with Vikram on a weekend, right, I don’t want to deal with money. So I think that is really what our segment or the kind of people that we want to address and deliver to them an expert investing approach. Like we believe that having the team that we’ve been able to put together we have the expertise to be able to ensure that they don’t have to do all the work we will do it for them.

The second is I think majority of these folks are in their jobs, working professionals very successful in what they do during the week. And therefore we’re firmly focused on that group of people.

Sarthak:

I’m just going to put a personal nugget here like I think I was on the Moneycontrol, do everything on your own category till a few years or months back.

Vikram:

Till he got promoted.

Sarthak:

Yeah, thenI got promoted and then Vikram gave us a lot more moneyI would say.I mean jokes aside it’s been really tiring,right, just waiting up everyday going to my brokerage account figuring out, oh,this is moving x percent,this is movingy percent, midcaps, small caps, large caps, and there’s a bond marketplace, where do I go. So, Sandeep, you talk about this platform being a lot more expert driven. I think the two things that people think about in Dezerv is integrated portfolios and hard to access opportunities. Talk to us a little but about the customer journey of the platform and explain this integrated portfolio approach to our viewers?

Sandeep:

Look, I think we’re obsessed about delivering a great experience to our user. So one of the things we’ve done initially at least is kept it invite only. And we’re overwhelmed by the kind of applications that we’ve got. So what we’re doing is opening up the platform gradually, we’re releasing invites to people who are now becoming members on the platform. As they come on to the platform they first invest in the integrated portfolio and in a sense they unlock all these exclusive investing opportunities.

We’ve been fortunate to be able to access some exciting pre IPO opportunities on high yielding bonds. We’re doing some great work on identifying global experts on international assets and bringing Indians first time access to those global experts. So I think for us ensuring that the user gets the entire experience and a very high quality level is important and therefore one of the first few things we’re doing is an expert conversation right at the top of the journey where before you onboard on to the platform we want an expert to actually talk to you in person and walk you through what we’re doing here.

So there is complete alignment, there is the right setting of expectations that you’ll know what we stand for and what we will deliver to you and that’s something that we believe is in it.

Vikram:

So, Sandeep, you talked about a few exciting products underlying the solution which is access to international markets, potentially alternative debt assets and so on and I know Vaibhav’s the investor behind it. What do you do to underwrite let’s say an alternative debt category that you’re investing in because you’re sort of putting investor’s money to work but it’s really on their behalf you’re making that investment decision.

Sandeep:

Yeah, that’s a great question, Vikram. So what we’ve done is first setup a framework about things that we will look for in every asset class, so we’re almost like have a 20 point checklist on every instrument that we bring to the platform, sort of bring through the filter to begin with.

The second is the qualitative check and that’s where we actually meet the team which has brought the deal, go behind the screens and try and understand. So for instance if we’re working on a lending product we’ll try and understand who the money is being eventually lent to, what is the behaviors on that side. So while some of it is scientific some of it is a gut call taken by an expert and there again we’ve been very lucky to be able to pull people from industries where they’ve done this for a very long time.

And I’m also excited and these people, Vaibhav especially so, but all of the others are much smarter than I am. So they actually go into much more detail than I thought other platforms are doing.

Vikram:

And I know there’s a lot happening behind the scenes because sometimes you know, they’re looking at alternative debt assets that I might have a little bit of information on and I’ll get a quick ping from Vaibhav or somebody saying what do you think about this. And I know that they’re doing like a 100 such pings to actually collect enough sort of qualitative information and I think that does make you guys stand out.

Sandeep:

I think we’ve been fortunate, Vikram, to have folks like yourself around us and advising us to be able to get that perspective. So when I’m looking at a pre IPO transaction for us to be able to access you and figure out where the industry stands on this and what do you know because not everything is in a deck, not everything is in the balance sheet or the annual report. And that’s where we’ve been lucky.

Vikram:

AndIthinkyou’ve done agreat job of building anetwork of thesepeople and maybe talk alittle bitaboutthat?

Sandeep:

Yeah, so I think for us and this not only around investing but in general around the other parts of the business we were very conscious that we’ve been money managers. We’ve dealt with people’s money and that’s one thing we understand is people and how to manage money. But there are many parts of the businessthat we realize that we did not know or did not know enough about, did not have the right experience around. Tech was one, product design, all of those were areas where we thought that we needed to complement our lack of ability or lack of skillset around that.

And there we’ve been extremely lucky to be able to, one, through you a lot of them being able to access some of these people who eventually came onboard as angel investors. So that’s been very helpful and I think we’ve really opened up the technology eco system for us which is exciting. The other thing which we are doing is leveraging our connections in the investing eco system so we speak to a lot of fund managers, we do a market mood check on what people are feeling about the markets, what are the flash points, what are the areas that they’re getting concerned about.

And I really believe that it takes a village, right, so the more people you talk to the more -- so we need to do what the user would have otherwise done before making an investment.

Vikram:

I will highlight for all of our listeners the humility with which you approach this that you didn’t come in saying, hey, we know or do well. You came in saying, oh, we don’t know anything about the startup tech ecosystem and you just surrounded yourself with experts and you’re giving us some credit. But we push a lot of these experts to a lot of people but you just went and just created fantastic relationships with a lot of them but I will also say the second thing which is you’ve used and abused those relationships where I think you’ve built enough of a relationship with each of them that I know they pick up your call in the middle of the night. So kudos to you for having done that.

Sarthak:

Yeah, I’ve tried to like say, Sandeep, I’m going to connect you with this person, he’s like yeah, I’m speaking to him tomorrow. So it’s just like happened two or three times now.

Sandeep:

No, but I think you know, one thing which is this is a very different world for us from the usual financial services ecosystem which is where you assume sort of the pie is limited and everyone’s fighting for their share of the pie. But in this ecosystem and I’ve dealt with a lot of founders in the invest tech ecosystem also and they’ve also been really helpful. So it’s not been about guarding your own territory or thinking of knowledge as being some sort of a preserve of the few. So I think that is exciting for us and thanks for all the help.

Sarthak:

Sandeep, one otherthing we wanted to touch upon,yousaidyou’re not coming fromthetech ecosystem, right, but I’ve been really surprised that you’ve been able to build such a strong team so quickly. I mean it’s like less than six months since you like moved from IIFL Wealth. There’s like folks, strong people in tech, there’s people in design, there’s people in like angel reviewing and everywhere across all functions. And you’ve built this while being in Bombay, right, which is not as some of the people think --

Vikram:

Not that sexy.

Sarthak:

Not that sexy or not the hub of the startup ecosystem, it’s not easy to hire great talent. So couple of questions that, one, how were you able to do this and second what do you look for in prospective candidates when you’re hiring them at Dezerv?

Sandeep:

So, look, I don’t think I have a great answer to that question. We were given a reality of the second wave when we started recruiting, right. So I finished my last day at IIFL Wealth the 31 March, 2021 and just right after that we started talking to folks and bang in April we were like hearing like really sad stories from across the country around that so we were hold up in a room. But I think one thing that made a difference was the sort of the network of supporters that we had around us, so that really helped.

And I think the introductions that you folks made some of our other investors and angels made, I think they were exceptional, that really helped. I give credit to you folks for selling Dezerv to them and I think that was great. The other thing was that I think, you know, we have to make a recognition of the fact that there is a talent war going on and that talent has won that war. So I think so we made that, that came to us very early and therefore it became about the human aspect of the person that you’re trying to bring onboard, so trying to understand what their motivations are.

And one thing which was very exciting for me is pretty much everyone related with the problem that we were trying to solve and there we had an unfair advantage. Everyone had some money saved away, everyone wanted to know how they can do better, everyone had felt the pain. So I think that made I think our job a little easier. And the other thing is like using the network I think that’s something that I like encourage everyone to do is to reach out to as many people and talk about what you’re trying to solve.

Sarthak:

No, it was avery easy sell honestly,you give us credit for selling but asyousaid it’svery easy.I tell candidates like okay, how doyou manageyour money andthey’re all overthe place.And then like this is what we’re going to solve for.

Vikram:

So I’ll tell you one thing that makes you guys stand out for me which is usually the advice that I give is somebody’s life needs to depend on recruiting. Everyone says it’s the number one thing that they’re trying to solve for, the number one problem they’re trying to solve for and then it is the tenth item on somebody’s list. And I say let’s actually make someone’s life depend on it. But for the first 4-5 months I would say every co-founder made it their life’s mission to say we’re going to get people. And especially him, you know, if you tell him there’s an intro he was all over it like the next day especially with the engineering tech hires and so on. That was one where it was just multiple people saying I’m going to get five people to Dezerv.

And second you made use of like this expert panel to really figure out which is what you’re calling network to really figure out whether the candidate is good and then the references to make sure that you’re making the right decisions. Both I think stand out for me.

Sandeep:

I think that’s the kind of support that you get and the angel investors in Dezerv are very successful founders, they’re potentially hiring all the time themselves but them to take out time on a Sunday morning to do this call for us I think that was incredible for me.

Sarthak:

And, Sandeep, just on my second question, just touch upon you started hiring or like started building the company --

Vikram:

Sorry, canI interruptthere.You know, he brought us agreatthing, he hasdifferent angels who perform almost different roles inthere. And so he hassomebody onthedesign front whoactually helps him buildthedesign team,somebody onthetech front who builds the tech team. And I don’t think many founders actually think like that, and it’s a great nugget to say create those roles for angels even as part of your recruitment process.

Sarthak:

Yes. I think the second part of my question I think was around as you said you started to hire in the middle of the pandemic, right, half the team is in Mumbai, half is distributed. Like, one, what is it that one thing or like that thing that brings everybody at Dezerv together, is this like a personality that you look for, how are you keeping the company together which is distributed as well as centralized?

Sandeep:

So we have this thing within Dezerv, right, you have to be exceptional at what you do. So hiring the highest quality talent means that people are exceptionally passionate about the work that they’re doing. And if they’re excited about the problem that they’re solving I think your job is done. The other thing which I think and, you know, this is something from “No rules rules” that Reed Hastings wrote about is to develop a culture of feedback and of candor within the -- and I think I’d admit that we have some distance to walk on that side. So like we’re very focused on this that, one, get exceptional talent who are passionate about the problem and second like create this culture of feedback and candor in the company and then hopefully the right talent will stick around.

Sarthak:

Vikram, just one question for you from an investor perspective, right, like now that you’ve made a debut in the invest tech space with Dezerv what are the other themes that you’re personally excited about investing in the next six months, twelve months?

Vikram:

Whatever you tell me. [Laughs].

Sarthak:

I’ve toldyou a bunch soyou reallyhave to choose it for me.

Vikram:

I truly think that this next decade is going to be the golden age of wealth tech and some of it is self-serving because you want to make some of these investments and so on but the way lending Fintechs have exploded and will continue to and they go through these phases of in the early days they were using digital underwriting as one hook. Then it went on to now transaction credit as the biggest hook and it’ll keep going. I think they’re just at the beginning of figuring out what wealth tech is. And if you look at the great wealth platforms globally, they cater to anywhere between 100,000 to a million investors but serve them deeply.

And as long as you have a large share of their AUM you can build a huge company and a million investors is a lot. So and India can have multiple niches of million investors and each of them will self-select themselves into a brand customer experience, kinds of portfolios and so on. And so we will keep looking for some of those where a Betterment, a Wealth Front, a Charles Schwab, a Nutmeg, everything can co-exist and that’s the way we think about wealth tech.

Sarthak:

I think I would just say one thing that we couldn’t miss, I don’t know if he’s excited about, but I’m personally super excited about one, the social aspect of investing and second is just crypto. I think it’s a fascinating asset class, you know, it’s a very hot topic to debate upon but personally excited about doing something in crypto as well.

Vikram:

SoI was going to askyouthat question which iswhere wouldyou putyour money, butif you were not doing Dezerv what is your other wealth tech that you would start. And second, outside of Fintech what is the company that you would start?

Sandeep:

Just I’ve not thought about that, but within wealth tech if I were to do something I would do something in managed crypto. I feel that there are lot of people like us who want to have access to crypto but can’t wrap our heads around what’s really happening. So I think managed crypto is an exciting space. There are some global platforms which are beginning to now do that in real and we’re also thinking of partnering with some of those as we go along, so that is one.

Outside of Fintech I would think that, look, I think self-development is a very big theme and I think skilling and developing yourself or improving yourself is going to be an important part of staying relevant in a time when you have to work till the age of 80 or 90. And I think that’s something that is exciting so something in that space would have been super exciting to look at.

Sarthak:

Great. Thank you so much, Sandeep.

Sandeep:

Thanks. And I enjoyed it, Sarthak, much against what I thought it would be like. But it was in good fun.

Vikram:

Closing thought from me, you know, Sandeep and I have sort of followed each other’s careers with sort of respect and admiration for a while now so it’s really special to convert that into a partnership. And I’m really looking forward to his journey as an entrepreneur.

Sandeep:

Likewise. I couldn’t agree more, Vikram. Thanks so much.

Sarthak:

Thank you everyone.

Salonie:

Thanks for tuning in. For more Matrix Moments episodes, you can head to www.matrixpartners.in/blog. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.

Related Content

Building the Organisation from Ground 0
Building the Organisation from Ground 0
Rupali Sharma
Travel the world like never before? Go places with Scapia
Travel the world like never before? Go places with Scapia
Vikram Vaidyanathan
Unravelling Fintech Infra and BankTech Opportunities
Unravelling Fintech Infra and BankTech Opportunities
Vikram Vaidyanathan
Sarthak Malhotra
Sarthak Malhotra
SENIOR ASSOCIATE