S4 Corretora de Seguros

In 2014, Sanjay Sharma left a 25-year banking career, then CEO of the largest housing finance company in the UAE. He walked away from all of it to lend money to roadside tailors. He'd spent a year at Ujjivan Small Finance Bank before that, watching and trying to understand why the bottom of India's economy was still invisible to formal finance. Not invisible because lenders didn't know they existed. Invisible because nobody had figured out how to underwrite them. No credit score. No income tax return. No balance sheet. No collateral. Just a man running a small welding shop in Moradabad who needed ₹1.5 lakh to buy equipment and had no way to prove he could pay it back. 67 million businesses like that in India. Almost none of them with access to formal credit. In 2014, Sanjay and co-founder Vikram Jetley studied 350 micro enterprises across five cities before writing a single loan. What they found: the businesses weren't unviable. They were unreadable — to a bank that only knew how to read documents. So they built a different kind of reading, Cluster-based underwriting. Instead of assessing one borrower in isolation, they assessed the entire industry cluster they belonged to. Shoe manufacturers in Agra. Brass-work businesses in Moradabad. Hosiery units in Ludhiana. Each cluster has its own cash flow patterns, seasonality, default behaviour. Understand the cluster, you understand the borrower. Nobody in Indian lending had done this systematically before. In 2016, demonetisation hit. Aye's entire customer base ran on cash. Overnight, the cash disappeared and repayments collapsed. Most NBFCs let NPAs spiral. Aye Finance Ltd reduced customer instalments to one-third. Kept the relationship alive. Their NPA never crossed 2.7% through the entire crisis. Today: 568 branches. 18 states. 6 lakh active customers. AUM: ₹6,027 crore. Up from ₹2,721 crore in FY23. 42% CAGR in two years. Average loan size: ₹1.8 lakh. Backed by CapitalG CapitalG, SAIF Partners , Falcon Edge, FMO. And this year, it listed on BSE and NSE in February 2026. The name Aye was deliberate. In English: yes. In Hindi: income. In several regional languages: mother. They wanted to say yes to people the banking system had spent 75 years saying no to. India's MSME credit gap is estimated at ₹20-25 lakh crore. Aye Finance has a ₹6,000 crore loan book. The problem they're solving is roughly 400 times bigger than what they've solved so far.

Spoke to 6 tech founders last week. All of them have restructured their tech teams. The hardest hit profiles? Two groups. 1: The visible : Senior talent that didn't scale. Layoffs. Gets reported. People notice. 2: The invisible : Freshers that never got in. Campus offers that dried up. Placements that never happened. Nobody reported it. — Honestly, I’m not even one bit surprised. Tech cos never truly loved hiring freshers. For years, software cos had become training schools for skills colleges should’ve taught. Senior engineers had to spend months training freshers instead of shipping products. They lost time, the company lost speed + cost. But entry-level coding work existed in bulk. Hence freshers were hired. The broken system went on. — But last 6-12 months came AI coding agents. And improved rapidly. Entry-level tasks started moving to AI. Higher quality outputs. Much cheaper / faster. Code generation, debugging, testing, documentation, product workflows - all done. And zero training / mentoring overhead on top. No 6m wait for fresher productivity to kick in. As a result, founders reset the hiring bar. Not by 10-20%. By at least 3x. Freshers are no longer competing against other freshers. They’re practically battling AI / software itself. — The biggest mistake a CS undergrad can make today is preparing for a 2020 job market. 2030 will look nothing like it. The game has already changed. Completely.

One thing I’m slowly starting to understand while working closely with customers in sales. Great products are not just about features. They’re about how simple and effortless the experience feels for the user. The less users have to “figure things out,” the more naturally they engage with the product. And honestly, observing customer journeys, onboarding flows, and user behaviour has been changing the way I think about products lately. Working in SaaS has slowly made me more curious about the “why” behind user behaviour, not just the sale itself. #SaaS #B2BSales #CustomerExperience #ProductThinking #UserExperience #SalesInsights #Growth #ProductManagement #CustomerJourney #TechSales #LearningInPublic #ProductLedGrowth

Srijana Bagaria got a UTI on a road trip. They'd used the best facilities available but it didn't matter. She and her husband, Vikas Bagaria looked into it. 10 million Indian women contract UTIs every year. Most from public toilets. No product in the world was categorised as a toilet seat sanitizer spray. So they made one. Three years testing with friends and family. By 2016, it was selling — but slowly. An investor offered ₹50 lakh for the entire brand. They said no. They had a bigger vision. April 2017, Pee Safe officially launched. Most people know the toilet sanitizer. Fewer know what came after. Menstrual hygiene. Intimate care. Sexual wellness. Maternity products. Each one the same underlying observation: women's bodies have hygiene needs the market has mostly pretended don't exist. Now, ₹150 crore annualised revenue, profitably. And that's been possible because it is repeat purchase driven - women coming back because the product works, and not because of discounts. January 2026. Pee Safe raised $32 million Series C, led by OrbiMed Partners LP . OrbiMed has $20 billion under management. They back biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics, clinical biotech. In 37 years, they have not written a cheque like this into Indian women's hygiene. So why now? Because Pee Safe stopped being a hygiene brand somewhere along the way. It became the company Indian women trust across their entire health lifecycle - first period to menopause. That's not a consumer brand anymore. That's infrastructure. That's what OrbiMed funds. Pee Safe almost sold for ₹50 lakh in 2016. This January it raised ₹290 crore in a single round. Nine years.

I was 28 when I first met a VC partner. Students at Polaris School of Technology are doing it at 18. And not just any random VC, but the OG Y Combinator :) — It is not everyday that someone as cool as Jared Friedman walks into your campus. Harvard dropout. Co-founder of Scribd. Now a partner at YC. Backing the next gen of superstar founders. Funny thing : I remember using Scribd back in college in 2010s, just didn’t know I’d accidentally meet its creator in 2026 :D His stage session was obv electric, but the best moment was afterwards. Saw some students getting a 1:1 chance to chat / ask him all things about building a startup. Raw and unfiltered. And that's the most real learning one can have. Beyond classrooms / textbooks / Youtube. At 18, having someone like Jared tell you "this is how it works" - that hits different, and is absolutely invaluable :) These learnings can only come by being around right people, in the right room. Polaris kids are in such a room today. — And then some of them got a cool pic around him, a sureshot lifetime memory. One that will inspire them for life, and make them dream even harder. Somewhere in that conversation today, a future founder got a nudge / advice / fanboy moment that will compound for years. And that's exactly our bet at Polaris : Put students in the right circles early, and let compounding do the rest. #technology #startups #growth #students

Over the past 12 years of leading large, crossfunctional teams across industries, one principle has consistently proven true: sustainable impact is never accidental it is designed through clarity, discipline, and intent. At its foundation lie two critical pillars: People and Process. Leadership, in its truest sense, is a dual accountability system. You are entrusted by the organization to deliver outcomes, while simultaneously carrying the responsibility of enabling your people to grow, perform, and find meaning in their work. The most effective leaders understand that people are not just resources they are value creators and value creation is only sustained when individuals see growth, purpose, and direction in their journey. This is where structured thinking becomes essential. Borrowing from time-tested Japanese management and operational philosophies like Kaizen (continuous improvement), Genchi Genbutsu (go and see for yourself), and Hoshin Kanri (policy deployment and strategic alignment) leadership evolves from reactive decision making to intentional system design. - Kaizen reminds us that small, consistent improvements in people and processes compound into transformational outcomes. - Genchi Genbutsu reinforces the importance of staying close to reality, understanding challenges at the ground level rather than leading from assumptions. - Hoshin Kanri ensures that organizational goals are not just defined but deeply aligned across every layer of the team. In parallel, process acts as the stabilizing force. Without process, even the most capable teams can lose direction and coherence. With the right processes in place, organizations gain scalability, predictability, and operational excellence. However, beyond people and process lies a deeply underrated yet defining principle: (Emaan)faith, trust, and ethical integrity. In an era driven by performance metrics, cost optimization, and competitive intensity, integrity often becomes negotiable but it should never be. Leaders who operate on behalf of organizations must recognize that trust is not a soft value; it is a strategic asset. Every decision, every action, and every resource utilized carries an ethical weight. Even the smallest compromise made in personal interest, while representing a larger institution, eventually erodes credibility and in leadership, credibility is currency. The convergence of these elements defines modern leadership excellence: - Empowered people who are continuously growing - Robust processes that enable scale and consistency - A strong ethical foundation that builds lasting trust Because in the long run, organizations don’t just scale on strategy they scale on systems, culture, and integrity. And that is how mountains are truly moved. #sales #hiring #salesleadership #startup #makeindia #learn