Alok Mittal is a serial entrepreneur. He has built three businesses, if you were to count his nearly decade-long stint as Managing Director of Canaan Partners from the ground up. Alok founded JobsAhead, a job listing platform, which he started just around the time of the dot-com boom in 1999. He sold JobsAhead to monster.com in 2004 and then went on to become a VC at Canaan Partners in 2006.

A decade later, Alok was back to being a founder, now with the thought of digitising lending with Indifi in 2015. He set out with a mission to lend to businesses that are usually overlooked by most traditional banks and NBFCs – Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs.

Back when Indifi began operations in 2015 they started with travel agencies and HoReCa(Hotels, restaurants, cafes) categories. Both of these categories are very volatile businesses and that’s why the big name lenders tend to stay away from them.

But Alok arrived at solving the problem not just with technology but also business strategy which shaped up over time. And today Indifi is solving not just for the travel and hotels segment but for sectors like e-commerce and retail as well.

Indifi over the years has enabled a lot of SMEs to have access to credit. Indifi does the hard work of assessing individual businesses and giving them the monetary means to keep their business running or renovate their establishments.

A thing to take note of is that many of these SMEs were receiving a line of credit for the first time because of Indifi. And this opportunity would allow them to grow their business or even reshape their businesses in ways they couldn’t before due to the lack of credit.

In this episode we also got Alok to open up on certain facets of his professional journey which are very fascinating because he’s been in both the shoes of a VC and a founder which is a first on First Principles. Also, it’s always interesting to learn something new and something that’s not largely talked about a founder’s journey. For example, among other things the journey of JobsAhead, Alok’s first startup that came about from ZipAhead, is very fascinating. Listen to that and a whole lot more in this Part 1 episode of our conversation with Alok Mittal.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

If you love listening to First Principles, you are sure to love The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business publication. To discover the deeply-reported stories that we publish everyday head over to our website and subscribe to The Ken’s Premium subscription.

Alok Mittal of Indifi on why org culture should not be defined but discovered

First Principles