
8 segments available
Razorpay is India's largest payments platform, processing over $180 billion annually. They were also the first Indian company YC ever invested in, and went through the W15 batch. In this fireside at Startup School India, co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur sat down with YC's Jon Xu to talk about the early days of building a payments company in India, the near-death moments that shaped the company's culture, and what he's learned about staying in founder mode ten years in. Chapters: 0:00 – Intro 1:11 – Discovering the payments problem 3:47 – Pivoting from education to startups 6:49 – Building in a regulated market and the one-year wait 9:10 – Losing conviction and finding it again through customers 11:10 – The bank pulling the plug two weeks after Demo Day 16:11 – Betting early on UPI before India's biggest banks 23:50 – AI, founder mode, and what it takes to build for 10 years
"B2B is a business of trust and the trust at the end of the day nothing replaces the human touch point of trust right you pick up the phone you call even today like just having somebody a human on the ..."
"bit. And so did you, you know, kind of growing up and and in your undergraduate um studies, was it always the plan for you to start a company? Like what what was your mindset at the time? >> Yeah. No,..."
">> Yeah. I I think uh this is actually an interesting pattern for for B2B companies because I think I I'd love to understand because it wasn't what I find really interesting is that it wasn't your act..."
">> Yeah. So let me talk about how our journey started. So we decided to start into build into payments. We applied to IC. We got into IC. We spent the 3 months of YC without doing single live transiti..."
"think we every every like say it's easy to say today that yeah we had commission it it wasn't really the case like every single month I would sit my with my co-founder and say why are we building in t..."
">> Yeah, it keeps happening in a business we are in. Uh I can tell you one of the early days right we got a bank approval we got a license I was telling you throughout the YC time uh we were not live ..."
">> Yeah. And I I think that that happened very early like in in our space it actually happened very early when we were in YC even before we launched we started getting acquisition offers uh from from ..."
"Yeah, I think AI is such a fundamental shift. So, first we have to calibrate ourselves a lot, right? So, I think it starts at the top. So, I am like I and the leadership are spending so much time on A..."