EP56: Jai Jawan to Jai Dukan. Serving the country via corner stores {Karthik of Jumbotail}

Stars & Startups

{Karthik Venkateswaran, Co-founder & CEO of Jumbotail}

Karthik served with the Indian army in hard combat and had successful stints with marketplaces such as eBay in the US and Flipkart in India before launching Jumbotail along with his Stanford University batchmate Ashish Jhina.

On this episode I chat with why Karthik & Ashish united behind this problem, and we deep dive into the business & the inspiration for Karthik to leave the military service and pursue entrepreneurship.

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Jumbotail was founded with the objective of enabling the Kiranas or corner stores by envisioning a full stack experience; creating a wholesale marketplace and new retail platform to help retailers with inventory management, a digital PoS, working capital and retail as a service to make them modern convenience stores.

Jumbotail’s endeavour to build products, platforms, and services for the next billion people of India has landed them in over $55 million in funding from Venture Capital funds such as Nexus VP, Kalaari Capital & Heron Rick fund.

Enjoy another classic episode! Jumbotail is hiring massively across verticals, reach out to Karthik & the team via [e-mail]

Stay safe!

— V {i’m on Twitter @varunvummidi }

Timeline:

00:00 - Introduction to Jumbotail

03:45 - Moving to Entrepreneurship from Military service

06:38 - Challenges building Jumbotail

10:20 - Battling competition in the food & grocery market

15:46 - Distribution is king?

20:28 - Differentiating in a supply rich market

26:45 - Post pandemic user behaviour

31:24 - Managing many business under the umbrella

37:22 - Hiring

39:10 - Learning from combat applied to business