E89: Chanakya Hridaya (Co-founder, BlackBuck)

The Desi VC: Indian Venture Capital | Angel Investors | Startups | VC

Chanakya Hridaya is the co-founder of BlackBuck. Founded in 2015, BlackBuck has been a pioneer in bringing the offline operations of trucking online, be it matching a shipper with a trucker or reshaping the infrastructure around trucking to facilitate payments, insurance, and financial services. Today, BlackBuck is India’s largest trucking network, and our robust ‘Freight’ and ‘Fleet Management’ technology platforms deliver reliability, efficiency and seamless experience for shippers and truckers. The company has raised $364M till date from Tribe Capital, Trifecta Capital Advisors, B Capital, Sequoia, Accel and Tiger Global.

In today’s episode, we will cover:

1. How did the idea for BlackBuck come about? (3:05)

2. Disrupting the Indian trucking industry (11:15)

3. Early days of product adoption and finding PMF (19:40)

4. Learning from the growth story of BlackBuck (28:07)

5. Framework for problem solving (34:19)

6. The hardships of entrepreneurship (40:10)

7. Navigating the challenges of marketplace models (47:55)

8. Prioritization as a founder as businesses and ideas grow (59:49)

9. What has Chanakya discovered about himself while working on BlackBuck? (1:07:40)

Social links:

Chanakya Hridaya on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChanakyaHridaya

Podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedesi_vc

Akash Bhat on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhatvakash

Podcast on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thedesivc

Akash Bhat on Instagram: https://instagram.com/bhatvakash