About Paresh & his company Helping educational institutions & companies leverage the power of their alumni. Paresh is an engineer and started Vaave straight after college! He is “Dreaming” – In Daylight! About the company Team Size – 68 Funding – 25L INR Location – Hyderaba Holding Structure – Indian Entity Top problems in Finance & Compliance Consultants don’t advise on Structuring of transactions, had to figure it on their own! CA is not pro-active, eg: Did not know that something called a FIRC existed, especially when funds were received through PayPal Did not know that the Equalisation levy was applicable to Capttera subscriptions! Constant Late Fees and penalties, despite sending data on time – need lot of follow-ups No proper advocates or lawyers who can advise on terms of Agreement. Time Spent His co-founder (Jaipal Reddy) takes care of the Finance function and spends a good chunk of his time Coordinating with the vendor & Internal Finance team! How does the current setup look like? In house Finance Team for most things! Few of them like TDS filings – Outsourced Using QB right now, will move to Zoho Everything else Initially started with Partnership firm, rather converted to Pvt Ltd Books were not maintained properly in the initial years, but ever since they received funding, they have been compliant. Expense optimisation is rarely an issue, focus is on growing sales! Helping with ESOPs is a good entry point to get into Startups! Would always love to keep Invoicing & AR in-house! (Not outsource) . Control is important there! ‍

About Sriram & his company Sriram is a very experienced & serial entrepreneur. Presently Founder and CEO of Techforce.ai. It is a new category company, enabling organizations to digitally transform by leveraging cognitive intelligence. It is a Delaware status company having operations in the USA (Reston, VA) and India (Mumbai and Hyderabad).   He is also a member of the board in Lazuline and has led companies like Oracle, Satyam. About the company 1. Team Size – 50 2. Funding – Around $1.5M 3. ARR – Around $1M 4. Location – Hyderabad 5. Holding Structure – US + India 6. Indian Entity name – DIGITAMIZE INNOVATIONS PRIVATE LIMITED 7. MCA Status (include other related companies as well)- Prima facie Clean Biggest problem in Finance & Compliance Income Tax in India because of Transfer Pricing, even when the group is at a loss. Solution discovery The company brings in money from the US in various ways Investment Equity (look at Indian Paid up capital!) Debt Sales The reporting is taken care by the operations team What is the time that you spend on the finance function? – Not specified, but he himself manages Carta and loves the free 409A How does the current setup look like?- Having in-house CA and CS (shared with another manufacturing company of which Sriram is a Director) Everything else Enterprise SaaS with ACV 30-50K is the sweet spot to be  in Believes in doing right things than doing things right! The concept of Zuna – 1 vendor for India +US companies looks very good on paper, would be great if you can pull it off in execution! Must have had one co-founder in the US Retention of people is an issue ‍

Robin is the founder of SmartCue which is a sales effectiveness platform that allows enterprise software sales teams to create contextual & tailored demos for every prospect. Before that, he spent over a decade in the US B2B SaaS space as a sales and solutions leader, playing the quarterback between sales and product teams to develop and execute the best solutions for customers and key stakeholders. He has demonstrated success at driving high-value, complex, strategic partnerships with multiple stakeholders and teams in a highly matrixed environment. Finance Related Discussion Any specific reason why you incorporated LLC? We incorporated an LLC initially not knowing the pros and cons. There was nobody to guide / suggest that C-Corp is better wrt Investments, Taxation. Later incorporated SmartCue Inc. Now LLC is closed. Any pain points that you would want to be addressed in FLC?1. Not sure on the list of compliances to be taken care. Focus on Product gets distracted!2.Whether I should have an Indian company given that India is cost-centre (or where the work is happening) – Things like this, blank Something on ESOP?We were about to draft ESOP agreements when we realised we need to get a 409A done, and it costs around 3-4L INR. We don’t have so much money so we are promising orally. Would want a true consultant to tell me the do’s and dont’s rather than me figuring it out myself! How was your experience incorporating the company? Stripe was good. It was just few clicks to get started and quite seamless! Only thing – I wish I knew what needs to be done post incorporation – Like compliances, and also wished if they took care of everything! Otherwise quite good experience Any work carried out so far on legal? Nothing. Recently an enterprise customer asked to share agreement. We never drafted one since our product can be downloaded and used after payment, we thought agreement was never required but enterprise customers are demanding (rightly so)Would want help in such stuff ‍

About Kaiz & his company satisFIND is a Trust Experience Management platform connecting brands with customers to find opportunities and solutions that lead to their 360º success in customer experience and employee experience continuous feedback and Employee Upskilling. Top problems in Finance & Compliance Multiple POCs from the same CA firm + Telugu is the only language the audit staff speak! Different FY in different countries! CA does not understand the complexity of the business / different models Does not have access to any reports – Would love something like the Forecast vs Actuals Expectations Pay the taxes due and Sleep well 🙂 A compliance calendar would be super helpful! Using RazorPay X to the fullest What is the time that you spend on the finance function? – 2 days a month ‍

About Vamshi & his company Serial entrepreneur – Founder of multiple companies like Ask Your Deal Procurement and PeopleCart (looks like many of them were funded) Mentor and investor in various startups too Worked as National director of EY’s IB Division!! PossibleWorks is an OKR-based Agile Performance Management System for Performance Reviews, Performance Appraisals, and Continuous Feedback. They do this by aligning employee goals to company priorities Top problems in Finance & Compliance Hiring a finance guy in-house Regardless of how good he is, he can never be fully equipped and will always need external consultants for something or the other. Overspending Since his earlier startup got a good exit, the company had enough liquidity, so they spent a little more than what they ideally should have! Best Practices Outsourcing everything to an ex Big-4 CA who is starting his practice The advantage of this is – Expertise @ affordable price Using Zoho Books + Customer Success Box + Contract Book to get reports Since the number of customers is in double digits, the CEO knows what exactly is happening wrt a particular customer. By default, a lot of SaaS Metrics become irrelevant or redundant! (though they might be relevant for many other startups) It’s important for founders to keep linking each element of cost to corresponding revenue! Time Spent 1/12th of the time (around half an hour a week reviewing the excel sheets/reports prepared by the Customer success, HR or other teams! ‍

oyneel and the impact he’s creating! ♥ ⏱️ This is not just Joy’s journey. This is the story of a lot of entrepreneurs like Joy who have had to pull out a “fight” to convince their parents to startup. Now that things are going well, he’s glad it all happened. ‍ ‍ Intro Joyneel is a BITS Pilani & IIM-C Graduate who also likes quizzing, running and playing basketball. His journey from scoring 99.99 percentile in CAT to getting into an entrepreneurial journey with the potential to create a lot of Impact has not been easy but definitely is inspiring! Path to NirogGyan Joy has worn multiple hats before NirogGyan happened He started as a trainee at GSK Consumer Healthcare India where he learnt his first lessons in Sales & Marketing along with domain expertise. However, he felt he was not doing much in this role, also because he was a software engineer by qualification & by heart. He spoke to his friends and a few others and figured out that he wanted to start up! He wanted to start up alright – but this was 2016 – much before starting up was considered cool. A logical step then was to be an employee of a startup and experience what it takes! So he joined as the 5th team member at Galytix. He managed Data Science & Product for around 2.5 years there, where he worked from the MVP stage and saw the startup acquire global clients! He experienced the entire gamut of tasks required to be done for an early-stage (pre-funding) startup which evolved to a late-stage (seed funding) one. This experience helped him and gave him the confidence of starting up something on his own & that’s why NirogGyan happened. It wasn’t easy, Joy started off with just the problem in the diagnostic industry and believed that it wouldn’t need a Google or a Microsoft to change the lab test report – Probably a few engineers and designers could do it! That’s how he started and slowly he built that tech around it so slowly and now it’s fully B2B. About NirogGyan NirogGyan offers the diagnostic test ‘Smart Reports’ where all terms are explained in simple language with interesting content and world-class design. While a normal test report is just an A4 sheet with terms & measurements on it, these Smart Reports are comprehensive and concise at the same time. NirogGyan’s Patient Engagement SaaS for Healthcare Providers enriches patients’ experience with comprehensible and manageable medical records Challenges in Finance & Compliance Joy has tried different vendors (and part-time employees) for bookkeeping & compliance but he still feels that this area is underserved, mainly because the consultants don’t understand the B2B SaaS space as much as they should. The advice given in most cases is generic since the consultants deal with 100 other companies across the spectrum across different sizes, and fail to understand the nitty-gritty of this space. At times, Joy finds it difficult to understand his unit economics since he’s unable to allocate costs at a customer level. Since NirogGyan is still in its early stages, Joy feels that the customer contracts must also be improved upon so that they are foolproof and enforceable legally. How can a consultant differentiate it from others? The consultant must guide the founders with SaaS Metrics & insights into the business. This is possible only when the consultant understands the business in depth Joy also feels the need to implement more tech in the finance function, like the auto-generation of payslips which will save his bandwidth. Develop SOPs and proper systems around Finance & Compliance so that the founders’ bandwidth is saved and he/she can focus on growing the business Tracking Expense metrics and analysing the differences between the forecasts & actuals. This will help the founders, especially bootstrapped, to have better visibility into future growth, runway etc. ‍