Indian founders and the Indian Start-up ecosystem have grown leaps and bounds in the last several years. We have been a witness to this journey for almost seven years now. It has been a transformative journey, where we have seen companies invent and innovate on every aspect of business, whether its technology, core infrastructure, people management or customer understanding. The tailwind of a progressive governmental approach to startups and an industry led push around the realization of the digital India dream, have immensely supported this journey. BEENEXT is a `founder first' firm and our learning is tied to the incredible journey of founders who we learn from every day. Based on our proximity to these founder journey's, we think there are a few aspects and trends that are clearly observable in India and more generally across the emerging regions like South East Asia.

• The journey from a founder to a CEO:
While it takes time to get used to the role of a CEO of an evolving company from being the founder who developed the first product for the company, there has been a clear shrinking of this timeline. Founders today are much more `ready' and prepared to fulfill the scaling role requirement. This deep understanding of issues related to organization growth, setting up a company culture and evolving relevant metrics & OKRs is helping products evolve faster in our view.

• Waking up to a great customer experience focus:
We have been always amazed by the quality of products and the 'Jugaad' innovations. The Indian founder's unique ability to quickly innovate and hack together a working prototype that 'solves' the problem was never a question! Today, we are delighted to see the inherent customer focus in many of our startups right from the get-go. It's great to see this customer obsession becoming more of a norm rather than something that you start fixing as you move from a PMF (Product Market Fit) sniff test to an actual product roll out.

•Not afraid to delve into adjacent markets:

As the startup ecosystem matures, founders are taking bolder risks to

build a strong customer mindshare and loyalty in a product category. Be it any marketplace, B2C fintech or B2B focused, the change and expansion is evident.The startup teams are building products and entering into adjacent markets without inhibitions to offer a complete solution. This is a key point in our view to nurture an ambition of category dominance rather than just product/feature dominance over time.

•Focusing on inefficient systems and processes to unlock opportunities:
Conventionally India has been known to build products & services to support other industries. Today, we are working with founders who are developing deep subject matter expertise in an area and unlocking process efficiencies with a combination of both hardware and software thinking. Whether its manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, agri-business or healthcare tech, the founders are not afraid of dirtying their hands learning the hard way to uncover the best ways to contribute. They are not limited in any way by just the software but are designing products/services that include a range of capabilities. Conventionally India has been known to build products & services to support other industries.

Today, we are working with founders who are developing deep subject matter expertise in an area and unlocking process efficiencies with a combination of both hardware and software thinking. Whether its manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, agri-business or healthcare tech, the founders are not afraid of dirtying their hands learning the hard way to uncover the best ways to contribute. They are not limited in any way by just the software but are designing products/services that include a range of capabilities.

•Crossing the habit change inflection point:
Working on products/services that eventually end up making a customer's life easier and enables a new way of transacting or consuming is a real hard problem. But the digital and mobile internet revolution has now made this possible. The bedrock of digital infrastructure improvements has enabled the founders to create innovative products that just do the right habit transformation for its users. Classic example is UPI enabling digital payments, thereby spawning many startups across the value chain ­ Payments, Lending, SME accounting etc.
As one of the players in the early stage startup life, we continue to learn from founders on what makes a great business tick. It's also our responsibility to empower and enable these founders to take on these challenges with confidence. It's never been a better time to be in India and see these changes with your own eyes and through the eyes of visionary founders.

Teruhide Sato, Founder & Managing Partner, Beenext
Teruhide Sato was a founding member of the Japanese arm of CyberCash, a U.S. online payment company (now known as Veritrans), and a joint venture with SoftBank Corporation. During this time, in 1997, Teru was studying at the Faculty of Policy Management, Keio University. In 1999, he was co-founder of BEENOS (formerly known as netprice.com), a global internet and e-commerce business incubator. Teru took the company public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2004 as CEO. In 2011, he co-founded Open Network Lab, one of the earliest seed accelerator programs in Japan dedicated to raising domestic startups that developed globally competitive products. In 2015, he launched BEENEXT, an early stage venture capital firm in Singapore actively investing in India, South East Asia, Japan, and the U.S to support and invest in tech entrepreneurs with an ambitious vision to make a significant impact on society. Teru was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2008.