Pranay Gupta: Cofounder of 91Springboard & Angel Investor
with Pranay Gupta — Cofounder
Pranay Gupta, Co-founder of 91Springboard, shares the incredible origin story of one of India's largest co-working companies. Learn how a failed attempt to start a micro-fund led to a necessary pivot that built a billion-dollar business.
5 Things You'll Learn from This Episode
- Pivot out of necessity by identifying revenue streams in your existing assets, just as 91Springboard used its office space to survive.
- Prioritize a management information system (MIS) over just cash flow to make smarter capital expenditure decisions, like investing in ACs to reduce customer churn.
- Scale an operationally-intensive business by creating detailed playbooks for everything from design and layout to sales processes.
- Leverage partnerships not for immediate revenue but as a customer retention tool to create a value-added flywheel effect.
- Understand your market type; co-working isn't a 'winner-take-all' market, making early profitability more critical than growth at all costs.
About the Episode
Pranay Gupta recounts the journey of 91Springboard, which began as an ambitious plan for a Y-Combinator-style micro-fund in India. He shares the candid story of their fundraising struggles and the pivot to co-working, born from the need to cover rent, which ultimately became their billion-dollar core business. Pranay offers deep insights into the operational challenges of scaling a physical space, the importance of profitability over hyper-growth, and how they built a community-led incubator.
Timestamps
- 0:00 — Introduction to Pranay Gupta
- 2:15 — The Origin Story: From Micro-Fund to Accelerator
- 7:02 — How Deepak Sharma (ex-Citi) Joined as a Co-founder
- 11:45 — The Underestimated Challenge of Raising a Fund
- 18:30 — The Accidental Pivot to Co-working
- 25:11 — Scaling from One City to Many Locations
- 32:50 — Learning from Early Operational Mistakes
- 38:45 — The Air Conditioning vs. Cash Flow Lesson
- 47:30 — Space Design, Community, and Collaboration
- 54:15 — Using Partnerships for Customer Retention
- 1:01:05 — Why They Didn't Trade Space for Equity
- 1:08:20 — Winning India's Best Incubator Award
- 1:14:55 — Profitability vs. Growth in the Co-working Industry
About Pranay Gupta
Pranay Gupta is the Co-founder of 91Springboard, one of India's pioneering and largest co-working space companies. Before his entrepreneurial journey, he ran the incubator at IIM Ahmedabad, one of India's premier business schools. Today, Pranay is also an active angel investor, supporting the next generation of startups.
Co-founder at 91Springboard
About the Host
Nataraj Sindam is the creator of The Startup Project, a podcast featuring founders, investors, and operators building the future.
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