The Boy Who Harnessed The Internet to solve people’s problems

Varun Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of Ketto (@ketto). As a young lad with a finance background, he worked as a swap trader in investment banking. But that was not his calling. While the internet and e-commerce grew exponentially in India, he explored crowdfunding. With Bollywood actor Kunal Kapoor and Zaheer Adenwala as Cofounders, they found success in crowdfunding for healthcare. Listen to Varun of Ketto on harnessing’s Internet to solve people’s problems.

Although, finding one’s true calling is challenging for a lot of youngsters, Varun found it with his thought process on how the Internet can be used to raise money. As a young founder, he tells a story of finding co-founders, of finding the right product-market fit and of the support system that helped him through the pilots and pivots. There is a lot to learn about resilience and network effects from this scale story. Hear it out!

Here are a few excerpts from the Episode:

4:33

The first three four years went in figuring out right product market fit. Once we realized what was really working, it was just a matter of putting more money, adding more fuel to the fire. And that’s when we saw the multiplier effect coming in play rapidly.

25:10

Once we started seeing more health cases, we saw that the volume of patients that each doctor had, who really could not pay for the treatment. That’s when we realized that if we’re able to get even a small portion of these patients that are unable to pay for the treatment, for us sitting at a doctor’s OPD clinic, the opportunity could be huge.

27:04

Crowdfunding is no guarantee that you will raise money. Some people do, some people don’t.

31:55

Leadership is a mix of co learning from peers and from everyone around you. Leadership is all about listening and interacting with people who are greater, who have much more experience than you have. And its a lot about patience.

35:57

I think, like it’s in hindsight, as it’s easy to say that you can do things differently or change but I think all those mistakes also can get you to where you are right now. So I think it’s, it’s a difficult question, but maybe everything, maybe nothing. It depends on what day you asked me this question, but if today asked me, I would say maybe everything.

Importance of The Journey

36:20

If you are able to create strong relationships with people that you meet in the journey becomes a very strong advantage that you have on your side, which, only can be built over time and money can’t really buy it.

38:05

You’re playing a very, very small role in the larger scheme of things, but it just feels good that they get another new lease of life. And there’s a new opportunity for them to get back to healthy life and potentially live their dreams.

With a strong founding team, Ketto is leapfrogging towards the next phase of growth. With that, we hope more and more people will potentially live their dreams.

Show Notes

Follow Varun (@VarunSheth7)

Checkout some fundraiser and contribute to some Ketto.org

Books discussed during the episode:

This Will Never Work by Mark Randolph

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Trailblazer by Mark Benioff

What It Takes by Stephen A. Schwarzman

Range by David Epstein

Alchemy by Rory Sutherland

Follow Maharajas of Scale on Twitter (@maharajaofscale)

Here a word cloud with some popular world used in the episode