Harshil Mathur, Co-Founder and CEO Razorpay chats with Sanjay Swamy Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

2:51- Razorpay’s early days and original thesis

4:40- Why developer centric way to approach the market

9:12- Mistakes made and lessons learnt during early days

10:59- Maintaining the innovation spirit while scaling

14:59- The difficulty founders face in taking tough decisions

17:18- How to avoid culture dilution as the company scale

20:53- How Razorpay caters to both SME and Enterprise customers

27:02- How to adapt and find new opportunities

30:10- Advice to young entrepreneurs

Read the complete transcript below

Sanjay Swamy 1:21

Hey everybody, this is Sanjay Swamy welcoming you to another episode of the Prime Venture Partners podcast. I have a very special guest with me today at a special timing, in fact, Harshil Mathur, the co-founder and CEO of one of India’s fin tech darlings Razorpay, and the latest entrant to the unicorn club from India. Harshil, welcome. Congratulations, and welcome to our show.

Harshil Mathur 1:43

Thanks, Sanjay. Thanks for inviting me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Sanjay Swamy 1:46

Yeah, it’s a great moment. And although it’s of course, a milestone in the journey of a startup, and we will talk about that, what I thought, given that it’s the middle of IPL season, we will kind of use a couple of cricket analogies and think through your journey at Razorpay. You and Shashank remember from the early days when you started the company, and talk through that journey from the early days all the way to where you are today and the path ahead.

So maybe we can break it up into three phases. You know, the powerplay phase, the early days where, you know, things were still getting defined and set up and then sort of the middle over space where you went from being a player in the space to being today the undisputed leader in the segment. And then now, you know, the slog overs or the consolidation of the latest stage, I would say, relatively speaking, where you’re now the incumbent, and you know, the market leader, and how you see the evolution of the space. So let’s start with the early days, you know, the power play phase, you know, where you guys are getting started? How did you identify the opportunity? And you know, what did you know? And how did you get going?

Harshil Mathur 2:51

Yeah, thanks. I think your journey started about five and a half years back, me and Shashank knew each other from college days. And we used to work together on projects, a lot of side projects during college times. So when we graduated Shashank joined Microsoft in the US, I joined Schlumberger in the middle east. And while we were doing our jobs, we had a lot of free time, at the end of the day. So we used to do side projects at that time as well just try to build cool things for the community and try to get adoption.

And for one of those things, we’re building like a social crowdfunding platform. And for that we had to accept payments in India, when we tried to do that and reached out to all the large incumbents at that point of time, we realised that it was extremely hard for a startup to accept payments. This is early 2014, to mid 2014, when startups were not as big or as mainstream as they are today. So most companies are focused on large enterprises, because that’s where the business really was. And this felt oddl about it. Because we know that, hey, startups are just coming up in the country. And payments is a bottom layer stack and every startup would need payments in some shape or form.

So if somebody like us were to build that, I think the kind of growth we could see as somebody started to go up to become big, to be really high. I think that was the original thesis because of which we came up with the idea to start Razorpay. Of course, it’s not easy, because payments is a regulated domain. It’s not something you can just build in our garages and launch out. We had to get banks for partnership and all those things. There was a long slog after that. But I think that’s where the original idea of building something like this came up first.

Sanjay Swamy 4:24

Right. One of the things you all also did was, take an API and a developer first centric approach. Although Stripe had started that they were also in the early days in their journey as well. What gave you the conviction that that was the right way to approach this market?

Harshil Mathur 4:40

Yeah, I think one of the things that we had on day one is that we built very much from the customer first angle. So if startups are supposed to use us and we are a startup ourselves, how would you expect the payment gateway or payment platform to look like? I think that was the thesis, and I think you’ll give this example most payment layers in India at that point all looked similar in terms of integration. Razorpay was a standout and a lot of people called and asked why is your integration so different? There’s an interesting reason why our integration was different. The way most payment platforms are built is that they take API’s from banks, they take integration from banks, and they build an integration layer on top of it.

So most integration kits look very similar because they are built on top of the same bank. In our case, fortunately, or unfortunately, we didn’t have the bank integration on day one, we still had to source it. So while we are sourcing and getting integration kits from the banks, we started building the product first. We said, Okay, let’s assume that a merchant wants to integrate, and let’s assume the bank side is a black box. How do we expect a merchant to integrate. So we built the merchant side integration layer first, and that’s why our API’s are built the way they are, because they are built from a merchant first angle. And then when you got the bank integration kit, we realised okay, they look very different. So we build the scaffolding on our side to connect those things together. So whether it is by intention or by chance, we build the product with a merchant first or customer first approach, simply because we didn’t have the inside out view.

Sanjay Swamy 6:02

So definitely focus on the customer and thinking customer first, you know, is, of course, something that everybody preaches. In your case, it ended up being sort of a very important part of the journey, and it’s very clear for you your customer is the merchant and the business. What were some of the things that in hindsight, you know, were some mistakes that you all made in the beginning and or specifically how do startups, our audience, look out for making some rookie mistakes and take corrective action quickly in the early days.

Harshil Mathur 6:31

There are a lot of mistakes the founders make early on. I think, from our perspective, there were a lot of them. But fortunately for us getting into YC helped us reduce a lot of those because they were able to advise us early. Some of the standard mistakes that we made was we started hiring sales folks a little early than we should have. But YC brought us back into that. One of the interesting examples I remember, in the early days we got funded, we got a series A term sheet from Tiger. And through that we got connected to some of the largest players in the Indian startup ecosystem. So we got into Flipkart, Ola, and so on, and so forth. And this is the time when we had less than a thousand merchants on our platform.

So we started having a chat with these guys. And we felt maybe we can close them. And as an early b2b startup in enterprise space, you generally have agreed that okay, if I get one Flipkart or one Ola, then my year is done, because I’ll get more volume from them, then I will get from thousand startups or 10k startups for that matter, let’s just go and close them. I was spending a lot of time on that. Once I got into meetings and meetings and meetings for the next two to three months, figuring out how to close one of these large enterprise clients. And that point, I think I talked to one of our mentors, and he gave me an analogy that hey, you’re trying to chase after like, it’s a hunting analogy that you are trying to chase after the elephants, but you’re not ready to handle an elephant right now, you should go after the rabbits and deers at this moment.

I think that was very important advice. Because looking back, if we had gone ahead and closed one of those deals, I think Razorpay would not be where we are today. For a short time, it would have given a certain jump to our revenues or volumes and everything. But what would have happened is that serving a large client is a mammoth task. And at that small scale, when you’re like 20 employees the kind of requirements they would have the kind of feature requests they would have, we would just be building for them for a year. So the kind of features that we built that got us that organic traction that allowed us to scale up over time would not have happened and we would end up being a business that serves two or three large businesses. That’s it. And I think today, we realise the importance of being able to scale and the scalable growth that we have been able to achieve has happened because we spent the first years of our journey building for startups and early stage companies. But at that point of time, we couldn’t see that. It took us some time to realise it. But fortunately, we realised that before we made a commitment,

Sanjay Swamy 8:38

That’s awesome. So a combination of being very customer focused, and staying focused on the larger opportunity. Rather than trying to get some quick early wins that may have translated some short term pump. So a lot of this comes back to the founders also having some clear thinking as to where they wanted to be in the long run. And as you all evolved into the middle over phase, where you know, you started seeing some early success, then when did you have this clarity of thought that you wanted to be a sort of a mass market player and clearly over a period of time go up market as well.

Harshil Mathur 9:12

When you start a company you don’t really have a very deep, long vision. You start with, this is a problem that I want to solve. And for us, it was very simple that we want to help startups accept payments. As we started building towards it and as we started talking to more customers, we realised how deep the problem was. And I think it was around during YC. And we met folks like Paul Graham, I think that’s when we actually crystallised that okay, how broad we want to really go. And the problem is pretty broad than what we were thinking of earlier, but I think it’s an evolutionary journey. I would not say that our vision is truly complete even today, and vision evolves. So initially, we’re just focused on payments. And then we went through a couple of years and we realised, payment is just one part of the problem we need to go deeper.

So we said okay, we want to cover all aspects of money flow. And then last year, we got further deeper and said we also wanted to do neo banking, lending. Because until we digitise the entire business finance ecosystem true digitisation of businesses is not complete. Our long term goal is pretty simple that we want to digitise businesses. But the ways and means to make it happen have changed through the years. It was payments only first, it began payments and paid disbursements later, and today it’s payments, banking and lending put together, so the means and opportunities might change. But the goal is to help Indian businesses go digital.

Sanjay Swamy 10:23

So let’s talk a little bit also about team building, and certainly the kind of key management team or senior leadership hires that you bring in, during the very early days. What were some of the key things you focused on to build out the org from two founders and a small number of developers initially to what is now in several hundred people, and much more organised like a structured entity and a more formal organisation, and how do you keep the innovation spirit as you go through these phases and scale up?

Harshil Mathur 10:59

Yeah, team building is one of the hardest and most important problems every founder has to go through. And it is one of those things that can really make or break the company. Because you can make a mistake in business strategy, you can change, you can go in a different direction, and pivot and all those things. But if you don’t build a team, right from day one, it’s hard to fix this once it’s out of your hand. So I think a couple of things that we did well the first is the early hearts are really important. And that really sets up the tone of how your team will look like in the future. The way we got our early hires is for the first 8-10 people were mostly our friends and colleagues from college that we knew well, whom we have worked with, we knew the kind of ideals that they have the kind of trust that they have in us, and in getting them on board early on.

And a lot of them still continue to be at Razorpay. All of those have been like anchors at Razorpay for the culture that we want to build, because they have seen the journey right from day one. And they carry those ideals they carry with the vision that Razorpay has. I think during the early days more than skill set, what is really important to look for is the culture and the vision and the beliefs of the early team members. So we didn’t hire for a skill set in early days, or experience. But these are all mostly generalists, people who could switch from one thing to another very quickly. And to put it simply, you need jack of all trades, you don’t need masters in early days.

So our first 10 to 12 hires were all jack of all trades, people who could pick up whatever came their way. And in the early days, because you don’t have very clearly defined functions, it is really important to hire people who have a very first principles approach that they want to solve the problem and they are willing to find solutions. But they will not say hey, I am a sales guy, or I’m an ops guy, or I’m a tech guy or things like that. You need people who would go beyond boundaries or functions and try to make things happen. I think that was one of the most important things that set up the tone for Razorpay. The early team was fairly strong, and was from a fairly diverse skill set. But as I said earlier, the focus is not on skill set anyway. The second thing is that we crafted a very closely monitored hiring process on day one. So even on day one, we had like seven to eight rounds for any person who joined Razorpay. And the hiring bar was pretty high. It continues even today.

And like the hiring process has definitely evolved as we’ve scaled up but it continues to be a fairly strong kind of thing that we’re looking for. We know the kind of people who are and in fact today, we know it better, the kind of people who become successful at razorpay and we very strongly keep our hiring bar to ensure that only those people get in because a lot of people, a lot of startups take the shortcut approach that Okay, let’s just hire fast and in worst case you can fire the person, in my experience in particular the kind of damage that can happen in early days because of a wrong hire is extremely high than any short term wins that the person can bring in. So hiring somebody just because they can help you close one deal will help you close one particular transition or things like that is definitely a recipe for disaster. Because the impact every hire has, especially when you’re like 50 member hundred members is extremely deep on the culture of the organisation.

So it’s really important to ensure that you’re hiring for the long term. And you also keep a constant check on whatever you thought when you were hiring a person has it stayed true. The first two, three months of every hire is really important. And I keep a check even today, in senior executives that we hire the first two three months, I really worked very closely with them to ensure that they get enough time to blend into the culture and ensure that they understand the Razorpay’s culture before they start making any business. So yeah, I mean, hiring the right folks and ensuring that the culture is set in the right form is one of the most important jobs of any entrepreneur.

Sanjay Swamy 14:34

So you talked about culture and hiring and keeping the bar really high there and being very careful. And yet at the same time, you know, every now and then there will be some mistakes made in hiring for whatever reason. How important and how difficult is it for founders to make tough decisions and make them fast, especially in leadership roles?

Harshil Mathur 14:59

Yeah. As a founder, you have signed up for tough decisions. And it’s your role, I think what the barometer that you have to use is it for the greater good of the company? Because as you’re running the company, you’re responsible, not one person or 2 person. You are responsible for hundreds or thousands of employees that are in the company, you have responsibility to the clients, to the investors, and you have to find the right balance. And you actually take a long term view. So a lot of things might look like a quick shortcut than I can do this, and it will give a quick gain. The barometer has to be what is in the long term benefit of the company. And as long as that is the parameter used, decisions are not that hard to take.

And as somebody rightly said, culture is not what you do, but what you actually discourage from doing. It’s not just about setting the right culture or sending the right culture directions, you also have to call out when somebody goes off from it. And you have to take hard calls to ensure that people stick by that culture. Otherwise, culture dilution is very easy and fairly common as the company scales, especially an organisation like Razorpay, which has constantly scaled rapidly, unless you keep calling out when divergences happen, it’s very easy for the culture to get diluted. So those hard decisions are equally if not more important, in setting the right culture, than doing things like announcing what your vision is, or announcing what your culture is, it’s equally important to take the calls when somebody goes against that.

Sanjay Swamy 16:17

So let’s switch gears and talk a little bit more about the middle overs phase, where you had a good start, you said you focused with the startups and you had some some good adoption with them, started getting invited to some of the larger companies and in over a period of time Razorpay has now as I think you yourself had tweeted and in a few other tweets, you know, today when you search Razorpay, you see more hits than the search for payment gateway in India. But that has been a very important phase, obviously, from the company going from a new player, new kid on the block, focused on small companies to suddenly now becoming the primary payment gateway for some very large players as well. So how did the company make that transition and both from a product from a sales experience with these larger finds, how were you able to build the team? And then what are some of the investments in support and things like that help you make that transition and keep both segments of the customers happy?

Harshil Mathur 17:18

Yeah, overtaking the payment gateway term as a leader in search volume was important basically from a simple perspective. For consumer companies it is fairly common, you will have words, such as for one plus or iPhone, then you would have for mobile phones. The reason it is important in the payment space is that the first day we launched there was a general perception that this is a very commoditised space like that people care about getting a payment, really, they don’t care who is the payment gateway. And it was true at that point of time, the space was commoditised as everyone offered similar features at similar pricing. And people didn’t care which service you use, as long as you found one service that worked with you.

I think Razorpay as a search term overtaking the search term payment gateway is important it just proves that we were able to establish a brand which means that we were able to prove the payment gateways payment acceptance is not a commoditised space, because if you can build the brand in the space, then definitely people are looking for something more than just utility. And what’s that something more for Razorpay would be different for anyone else. But for us what that something more from day one was that when people said that it is a commoditised space. For us, we thought we could build a brand in space because we realise product and tech differentiation could be that something more because of which people will seek out one player over the other. And with that thesis, we went in, and from day one, we focused on building a lot of product and tech innovation that was non existent in the Indian market.

So we were one of the first ones to have the kind of API’s that have the checkout form that today supports more than hundred instruments. I don’t think anywhere in the world you have any player has built a single checkout form that supports more than hundred instruments, right on the merchant side. Similarly, when new instruments came in, we were the first payment gateway to launch support for UPI on day one, and we remember Mr. Nandan also tweeted about it because it took at least four to five months for any of the players to match it up. A lot of customers came to us because we were the only one supporting UPI at that point of time. Similarly when we saw that refunds is a big problem, we launched instant refunds for merchants and again we are still one of the only players that provides instant refunds as a standardised offering to reduce the pain. So this constant innovation of launching new products and new features and new services before everyone else in the market was really important. And that is something that built a very strong brand for us.

Today Razorpay is known to be one of the most innovative companies in the FinTech space. And the reason we are known as such is because we constantly launched more features and more products than anyone else in the market. Last year in our FinTech conference, we launched more than 7 products. We launched things like neo banking, things like corporate cars, again, none of the payment gateways do any of this and we could always have taken the call that we’ll stick to what we do, and we’ll just keep doing it. But one thing we realise is that like if payments is just one part of the problem, the larger problem we’re trying to solve is digitisation of businesses. And unless we go All the way in to help solve that we are a very small layer of that journey. And I think that focus on ensuring that we keep building products and services and tech to ensure that we help businesses solve more and more problems every day. And that helped us build a very strong brand in that space and continues to hold true for us today. I think all of those things went in together to make that happen. And I think all credits to the team that made

Sanjay Swamy 20:24

Tell us a little bit more about the large customers because startups kind of struggle with saying, Look, I’m either going after the small, long tail of customers, or I’m going after the enterprise customers, but you know, very few succeed at doing both. And you guys are now doing both, you know, quite successfully, what does it mean internally for the company? Is it like running two organisations? Or is it really something that can be done smoothly and seamlessly?

Harshil Mathur 20:53

Yeah, it is kind of like learning to organisational cycles, SME and enterprise customers behave very differently. And from day one, we realised that okay, like, these are two different buckets. Initially, our focus was just on SMEs. And the way we scaled up in that journey is that we started with very early stage companies. Some of these grew up to become a series A companies. So now we target all series A+ companies, then some of them scale up to become serious B,C companies mid stage, we started targeting all mid stage companies. So the evolution happens as our customers evolved, we evolved with them, to cover larger and larger players of the market.

When we started, we wanted to be the de facto choice of startups in the country. And we don’t want to lose any customers as they grow and become bigger. And just focusing on these two things help ensure a very strong journey for us. And over time, some of these companies became enterprises. So we had to add enterprise features to ensure that we don’t lose these customers. And as we added those enterprise features, we could now target other enterprise companies. I’ll give an example, we onboarded Nestaway when they were fairly young, they were like series A plus company. And we onboard them, they grew up to become series B, series C companies. And as they grow big, we have to keep adding features to ensure that we don’t lose them. And we’ve added more features and services we realised now we could serve more companies within their bracket, we went after all other companies in similar brackets with them. And that expanded our market size that we were able to reach out to. Today, if you look at it organically, it has evolved. But today, our enterprise buckets run independently.

And then the SME bucket runs independently mainly kind of features that an SME looks for the kind of services that msme looks for is significantly different from what an enterprise looks for. An SME, like onboarding time, easy onboarding, quick sign up quick go live, all of these things are significantly more important than anything else. They need things like no code integrations, like payment links, and payment pages are really important for them, versus when you go to enterprise, things like success rate having the best metric, capability, performance, availability, all of those things are more important. So those things vary and the kind support required, kind of work experience required, are all significantly different. But we didn’t take a call on day one, like it happened organically automatically as we kept onboarding customers, internally, the organisation was diverse because the kind of things that we had to do for enterprises was different than the kind of things that you do for SMEs.

And to strike the balance, you have to take a call on what is more important, and what is more important in different areas of the company. But for us one thing stayed true. We are building for masses. So SMEs take the first priority and it’s a harder call to make. Because a single enterprise gives you a lot more volume, a lot more revenue, and again, goes back to the same story that I told earlier. And while that is important, you don’t want to build a company. At least we didn’t want to build a company to serve 10 or hundred enterprise clients. We wanted to build a company to serve million SME clients. And that is the core direction that Razorpay wants to take.

Sanjay Swamy 23:38

So now let’s look ahead, you have come from scratch being the player in the space to becoming the leader to becoming the category leader for sure. And also now, you know, really defining as you said, you know, search volume for Razorpay defining Razorpay as a brand. And now you’re going to carry the responsibility of being the leader. And you know, there’s a lot of things around that in data security, privacy becomes a lot more important over the last few years for sure. And then there is also the part of startups looking at Razorpay. And looking at, you know, maybe I can do this part better as we start seeing these phenomena happen in how does one defend against that? How does one encourage that in some ways, or does that push you? What do you look forward to over the next few years as you’re going ahead? And how do you stay ahead of the game by being the incumbent?

Harshil Mathur 24:31

Incumbent term sounds scary when you use it for us. Also, I think incumbent or startup is more about mindset than the stage the company is in. I think from our perspective, and this is my message to you when we announced that we’ve become a unicorn is that like, our journey is very, very early right now. We are as and in the larger scheme of things. We are much closer to the start of the journey then we are close to the final stage that we’d want to be. This is a long journey ahead of us.

And from a mindset perspective I don’t think we have the incumbent mindset. We don’t believe that we are impenetrable. I think the reason Razorpay has been successful. And the reason we have been able to constantly get business and traction is because we have stayed ahead of the curve. We are constantly innovative, constantly building new products, we’ve constantly done things better and faster than anyone else in the market. And the only way we will maintain that position is by constantly keeping doing that. The day we stopped doing that. And we feel that, okay, we have established ourselves, we will be the largest player in this space, no matter what happens, I think that is the day we will start our downfall.

So it’s really important for us to realise that I mean, just from the overall context I like today, the digital economy is still 3% of India’s GDP. So if you talk about us being bigger than a competition, probably, but if you look at from the overall Indian ecosystem perspective, this journey is hardly complete, our biggest competition is still the traditional ways of doing business, the traditional ways of accepting payments and the traditional way of doing banking. And that is the biggest competition.

And if you look at it from that perspective, we are still a very young startup trying to fight this large behemoth of traditional banking, traditional finance. And I think from that perspective, there’s a long way ahead of us, we have to keep innovating, keep building new products to ensure that we can keep competing with the traditional world of finance, and we can increase India’s digital economy significantly more from the 3% mark where it is today. And until that happens, I don’t think we have achieved enough to call ourselves an incumbent.

Sanjay Swamy 26:21

Well said. Absolutely. So having said that, one last thing I wanted to discuss briefly with you, as you know, the payments industry has evolved quite a bit. And you also talked about UPI and things like that a lot of things in India were also involved as the country’s evolving in a lot of regulations that keep changing. We recently had topics like zero MDR, UPI has come and changed the business model quite dramatically. How does a company like Razorpay which clearly some of these things may or may not have impacted your business directly? But how does one see opportunity when some of the, you know, like when the rug is being pulled out from and how does one adapt?

Harshil Mathur 27:02

I mean, the basic problem goes down to that, how much value are you giving to customers? So for example, in UPI, zero MDR. Our first question was what are we offering to our customers, and are they aware of what they’re paying? So it’s not about the MDR, let’s set the MDR aside, let’s say we earn 20 basis points per transaction on top on top of that MDR, our customers are very strongly we have because we are working with internet customers, they are very smart, they are actually aware that they are paying 20 basis points to Razorpay for the services we provide, if they go to a bank or they go to a traditional finance, they can see this. So they are paying 20 points basis points, because they know the value that Razorpay brings in and they know that it is worth 20 points at 20 basis points as long as that is clear, then you can always find ways to structure that in some way or form.

So if MDR becomes zero, you can charge a platform fee, you can charge an annual maintenance cost, you could provide additional value add services. As long as it is clear that you are providing a service and which is worth X amount of money. And the business agrees that it is worth X amount of money I’m willing to pay, structuring it in a particular way or, or ensuring that you follow the regulation. But as long as a business is willing to pay, you will be able to provide additional services on top that they will be willing to pay for, for example, today, we provide payment links, payment pages, and all of these platforms that businesses use. And they know that that is worth more than just payment processing. So if they go to a traditional processor, and they just do payment processing, they might be able to do it for free.

But they will have to spend a lot of time building these things, versus going to Razorpay they get all of these ready. They are willing to pay a price for that. So as long as that relationship is very clear and transparent. And in a b2b space, the kind of space we operate where our customers are extremely smart and aware of what they are doing. It is not very hard to build that out. I think the threat of these changes happens when your business model is built around opacity. And our business model is not built around the fact that you earn money because regulation allows you to or you earn money because of the regulatory imbalance. And those business model will keep getting threatened by changes in the regulatory ecosystem. Fortunately for us our model and our structure is very clearly built around providing additional service to the customer for which he’s willing to pay for. And as long as building around that these things hardly change the game. Again, you might have to go through some short term pain, find alternate ways to charge, build other products to charge for as long as the business is aware of what he’s paying for. It’s not very hard to handle all of these changes,

Sanjay Swamy 29:17

Actually it is a very important point. I have seen this time and time again, where companies, you know, people say, the Indian customer is very cost conscious. And I’ve always maintained, that’s not true. It’s really that they’re very value conscious. And if they see the value, and they will just make a judgement, is this fair value or not? And then they are actually very quick and happy to pay if the value is real. And I think that’s something that’s kind of what you implied as well, when you said, you know, make sure there is fair value and you’re transparent with the customers to how much you’re monetizing that value. It’s been terrific chatting with you. We can keep going on and on and certainly dive into the payment space. One closing question, which is sort of also a question for younger entrepreneurs. What would you be telling yourself if you could rewind the clock to 2014?

Harshil Mathur 30:10

Except for not getting into payments because it’s a pretty tough space. I think one of the things, I think there are a lot of times in the Razorpay journey where we questioned and sat with me and Shashank sat with each other and had a discussion on, is it worth going in? Because there are times when it’s really tough. I remember in the earliest days, when we’re not getting a banking approval and business was not scaling as we had hoped it to. There are times when you have this thought that should we pull the plug and think about something else, I think, entrepreneurship is a journey of perseverance.

Like there will be tough times there will be hard times. And it’s a pretty long journey, I think you have to be really clear on what your vision is, what you’re solving for. And the thing that got through us in those times is that we were talking to our customers and our customers were saying that Razorpay solves a problem for me that nobody else does. And as long as you keep hearing that, when your customer keeps telling you that yes, you solve a problem for me. And the only person who needs to care if Razorpay didn’t exist tomorrow is the customer, as long as your customer is saying yes, I care that you exist in the market and I would be affected significantly if you’re not there in the market. As long as you have those things, then everything else can be sorted for. So growth will come, funding will come, hiring will happen. All of those things will happen as long as you have a problem that you’re solving for the customer. And that is the only thing that you need to seek out for to build a startup.

Sanjay Swamy 31:00

Very well said, Harshil, thank you so much for taking the time. And I look forward to tracking and cheering for the success of Razorpay over the years. It’s been great exchanging information and brainstorming with you from time to time and all the best in the next phase of your journey.

Harshil Mathur 31:46

Thanks Sanjay, it’s really nice talking to you.

Sanjay Swamy 31:50
 

Thank you

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