Meena Ganesh on her journey of building 3 successful startups, acquisitions, and making Portea India's Leading Home Health-Care Company

The Neon Show

Founded in 2013, Portea Medical, India's Leading Home Health Care Company employes over 4000 people and covers 40+ cities in India doing 1,50,000+ home visits every month.

Portea has also helped about 5,00,000 COVID-19 patients, working with seven different cities and state governments, including Delhi, Mumbai, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Chennai, Bengaluru and all of Karnataka.

Meena Ganesh, Chairperson and Co-Founder, Portea Medical is one of India’s most celebrated entrepreneurs and business leaders. She sits on the boards of numerous firms like Axis Bank, and has a string of start-up successes to her credit. She co-founded her first company, Customer Asset, in 2000 and later on sold it to ICICI. Then came TutorVista, which she ran successfully till it was acquired by British publishing giant Pearson.

Before founding Portea, Meena also served Pearson India as the chief executive officer and managing director.

With her incredible career and achievements, she also became part of Fortune India’s ‘50 Most Powerful Women in Indian Business’ from 2015 to 2021.

In today’s episode, we talk with Meena about her entrepreneurial journey so far, learnings from building a healthcare startup in India and why even getting two large exists previously, she still thinks that journey with her third venture Portea is the most satisfying in terms of learnings.

Notes -

01:36 - Intro

02:04 - Family background & what got Meena into entrepreneurship

08:02 - Brainstorming Ideas during the conception of Portea

12:46 - Milestones after Series A till date

17:53 - Her thoughts on the notion that - “It’s difficult to create money from healthcare & health-tech startups”

21:36 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?

22:37 - How has the pricing model evolved at Portea?

24:06 - Learnings from building in healthcare in India

27:14 - How has she grown as a founder during her entrepreneurial journey?

30:04 - Her fundraising journey at Portea

30:33 - Balancing investor-founder relation over the course of a startup’s journey

32:07 - Managing her time between GrowthStory, Portea and home

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