How To Unlock Startup Potential: A Conversation with Bhavik Vashi, MD of Carta

Aspire: You've been with Anaplan when enterprise management (EPM) software was still nascent. How do companies and founders gain traction, particularly regarding new or obscure business ideas?

Bhavik Vashi: When building a company, you’re either creating a new category or participating and competing in an existing category. That's an important differentiation right off the bat.

People think creating a new category is what you have to do, but that's not true at all. If you want to build a better CRM or BI tool, the chances of success are a bit higher as there's already a market for it. All you need is a legitimately better product and to execute effectively.

Creating a category is a whole different ball game. You must first educate people about something they haven't previously thought of as a pain point to solve. Then you can fill the void with your product and offering. That’s a longer journey but more lucrative if you actually tap into something. Think Airbnb and many other marketplaces. Carta is another good example.

So I break it into those two categories. Once you know which one you're in, the playbooks will look quite different. But you can start to figure those out.

Aspire: How different is the B2B SaaS space in Southeast Asia compared to the US, and what do you think are the top 3 concerns businesses entering this market should address first?

‍Bhavik Vashi: I don't think the fundamentals of the business are too different, whether it's Southeast Asia, the US, or Europe. At the end of the day, if you're in B2B, it means you've identified a pain point or a problem that you want to solve for other businesses. Businesses globally have the same objective – to profit. If your product will help them do that directly or indirectly, you've got a great chance at being successful.

You can put an American founder in Asia and an Asian founder in the US. The differences have less to do with B2B and more to do with general cultural market differences – language, norms, things people value, things people don't value, how they like to be talked to, or how they prefer to be sold to. But those are true in every business model - it’s not specific to B2B.

The real difference is the total addressable market and therefore the size of the opportunity. The valuations, the success, and the traction that an American B2B can have selling to American businesses is difficult to be matched in Southeast Asia, where you're selling to Southeast Asian businesses, maybe APAC businesses.

The other piece of it depends on the nature of your product. How much of it has anything to do with things that are defined by geography or nation-state boundaries? The US is a homogenous market. If you want to capture a similar TAM (total addressable market) in APAC, you've got to build for 12 countries. The two biggest TAM markets in APAC for B2B, lifted primarily by volume of legitimate enterprise accounts, are Japan and South Korea. Those countries are super difficult to execute in, because of the language, the culture, the deep localisation required, and the distribution channels being primarily partner-first.

These are the challenges that B2B founders in Southeast Asia face. The market size, which is linked to the issue of market fragmentation, and the difficulty of execution, is what will ultimately differentiate success.

Aspire: In a previous interview, you mentioned the challenges startups and VCs face in managing fund administration and capitalization tables, particularly in Southeast Asia. For founders navigating these complexities, what would be your top advice to ensure they establish robust financial management practices early on to support future growth and scalability?

Bhavik Vashi: My advice to founders is a fewfold. First - and this might be surprising to hear from me, given my role at Carta - is that most of this stuff doesn't matter if you build an amazing business and have amazing traction. Because as they say, growth and success solve all problems. If you find product-market fit, have high growth rates, and are able to tell a great story about the opportunity ahead, you will attract fundraising, whether your cap table's sorted or not, or whether you have great financial management and discipline.

But that's only the top 5% of startups. There's also a bottom 20%, 30% where it doesn’t matter whether your cap table is perfect and your financial discipline and budgeting is amazing because you just don't have it. And then there's the large “messy middle” percentile where it does matter. If there are two companies with similar growth rates, and both have huge TAMs, early-stage investing is really a bet on the founder, their business idea, and their ability to execute.

If you've got your house in order, budgeting and planning discipline, thorough cash management practices, and your cap table looks clean and attractive to the new investors, that’s where it will tip the hat in your favour when it’s a 50-50 tie or a 60-40 decision in a fundraising scenario.

Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to investing a little in some of this infrastructure because it'll pay itself off very quickly. An additional round is basically life or death for a company. So I think it's worth it.

Aspire: With the rapid diffusion of AI, proprietary data sets are now a premium resource for companies. What advice do you have for businesses looking to build and leverage their data assets such that it impacts their business positively?

Bhavik Vashi: Somebody said with AI, data is the new oil in business, where it’s a very precious resource. It’s become more true now than it was ever before. Now with LLMs (large language models), it’s reached the next level because the models are all converging towards similar levels of performance. The differentiator is what you train them with – data.

Publicly available data is commoditised. It's on the internet. So then proprietary data comes in, that’s something only your company has. That's where you can have a really incredible competitive advantage and a moat.

What do you do with that data then? There are external and internal use cases. External use cases are anything to enhance the customer experience and partner experience. Those are the most powerful ones because they're revenue-driving. On the other hand, internal use cases are usually efficiency gains. It’s where many people are starting right now because it’s easier to test things, iterate and mess up. You figure out how to make internal operations more efficient by leveraging data, i.e. how to do more with the same amount of people or do the same with fewer resources.

Lots of companies have built their own tools, AI bots, and agents and they are synthesising information and building capabilities for their customers. It's a super interesting space. We're doing it as well. That's where everything is headed.

Aspire: Aligning sales with customer success (CS) is often fundamental for growth. How can startups do this effectively while pursuing high growth?

Bhavik Vashi: It’s easier at startups because the teams are smaller. The problem is way more evident at bigger companies, where you start building out these huge organisations, and they start getting more specialised. The next thing you know, you've built 10 or 15 different sub-teams across these broad umbrellas of sales and CS.

We used to talk about the healthy tension between sales and CS which, in reality, probably became mostly unhealthy after a while. Now I see the two converging again. Most big companies are tucking CS back into sales. And honestly, that's probably the right move. Ultimately, CS, and sales, are both driving revenue - they’re just focusing most of their time on different kinds of revenue. You're either securing new revenue from sales, retaining existing revenue from CS, or creating expansion revenue from a strong collaboration from both.  Ultimately they are all interdependent, which is why having them working together, under an overall go-to-market leader, makes sense.

Startups, frankly, are way easier to drive alignment because there are maybe only 10 people. So you have engineering and product teams and the business team. It's so abstract. And sales, marketing, CS, and partnerships are just part of the business team. You don't really need to align them. My advice to founders is to keep all that together as long as you can. The longer you can keep them together, you will become naturally aligned and change the way you’re working.

Another thing is to keep hiring people who understand the mission and vision overall. Then the CEO's job is to keep everyone super aligned on what the priorities are. Sometimes it might be growth. And there may be a quarter or two at a startup where, all of a sudden, it's not about growth. Maybe you outgrew your capacity and it's now about keeping your existing customers happy. It’s fine and expected for priorities to change - often constantly at a startup - but it’s super important everyone knows what they are at any given point in time, so they can stay aligned on what exactly they are meant to be optimizing for.

Aspire: Amid business uncertainties, threat of disruption, and better employee mobility today, how can companies instil a culture of stability?

Bhavik Vashi: Obviously, there's no silver bullet for this. What's most important is to have clarity as a startup: What is your culture? What comes naturally to you? Are you someone who is naturally in the office every day? Are you someone who wants to be working from anywhere, having a tremendous amount of flexibility?

As a startup founder, you get that choice.

And if you do what makes sense to you, you will attract employees who have a shared vision, a shared set of values, and a shared set of preferred working norms. So don't worry about what other people are doing. Do what feels right for you. Let that become your culture.

One important thing that I think startups don't do as much as big companies is to put pen to paper. Once you define what you want and don’t want your culture to be, write it down. Find your set of values, operating principles, identity traits, whatever you want to call them, jot it down, put it on your careers website, and make sure that it's imbibed into your recruiting process so that anyone joining has no surprises about what they're signing up for.

Then obviously, take a step back every six months and just revisit it. Because it's an evolving organism. Your culture will change as a result of the people you hire. And that's okay, too. Collectively, at each phase, you have to decide what you want your workplace to be like. That's the best way to maximise retention and continue to attract people who enjoy working in that environment. Your culture at 10, 25, 50, or 100 employees is going to look different.

Aspire: What is the single most important factor that has contributed to Carta's success in APAC?

Bhavik Vashi: Focusing on what we can control. I joined Carta at a time when fundraising for both startups and venture capital was approaching record lows on a five-year timescale in the region. So I joined at the worst time. Almost by necessity, it forced us to focus on what we can control.

We can't control how many startups are being formed. We can't control how many new funds are being launched. What we can control is the quality and the caliber of service and the product that we put into the hands of the startups and the funds that are successfully launched, and that we delight them to an extent that they go out of their way to recommend us to others – as simple as it sounds. That's all we can control.

That was truly a blessing in disguise. Because when things are growing, you can develop bad habits and still do well. The KPIs look great, new signups, revenue, whatever, because startups are booming, VC is booming, money is flying, so you're riding the wave. When things are bad, you have to be precise. You have to be really targeted and solve real problems. We stopped doing a lot of things. While they were all good things, they weren't necessarily the most important things. They were not the top 3 or top 5 things that we would do, especially if you're measuring the worth of doing something by the outcomes and focusing on the ROI of your activities and input. 

So we started tweaking our metrics, our goals, the regions and segments we're going to pursue, how we want to sell, all of that. Just doing less but doing it much better. That’s what's made us really successful despite being an American headquartered company and some of the stigma associated with that. We have that global power, global scale, and global brand, yet we've been incredibly regional, localised, precise, and targeted about what we want to do in this region. And that's working.