E111: Beerud Sheth (Co-founder & CEO, Gupshup)

The Desi VC with Akash Bhat

Beerud Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 30K+ developers and handles over 4.5 billion messages per month. The company has raised more than $480M from marquee investors such as Helion Venture Partners, Tiger Global, CRV, White Oak among many others.

He was previously the co-founder of Elance (now Upwork), the world's largest online services marketplace, which went public in 2018. Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and before that at Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning software agents for personalized news filtering.

Beerud earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology & a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay.

Episode Notes:

1. What made Beerud an entrepreneur? (3:48)
2. A Retrospective on the entrepreneurial journey (13:13)
3. Unpacking the drive of serial entrepreneurs (20:15)
4. The evolution of Beerud's entrepreneurial career (23:23)
5. Navigating the pressures of entrepreneurship (28:30)
6. Insights and guidance for first-time founders (32:40)
7. The distinctive traits of exceptional founders (40:52)
8. The founder's role in business pivots (43:50)
9. Words of wisdom for his younger self (51:11)

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Social Links:

Gupshup on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gupshup

Beerud Sheth on Twitter: https://twitter.com/beerud

Podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedesi_vc

Akash Bhat on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhatvakash

Podcast on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thedesivc

Akash Bhat on Instagram: https://instagram.com/bhatvakash