Why Nestaway is in Satyen Kothari’s anti-portfolio
1 min read 06 Nov 2018, 01:09 AM ISTSatyen Kothari, founder of Citrus Pay and Cube Wealth, didn’t have the liquidity to invest in Nestaway as his liquid assets were invested in Citrus Pay
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Deepak Dhar and I met before he even started at Citrus. And half way through my first conversation with him something clicked in me—this is a very special guy. Humble, confident, determined and intelligent. From that moment on I observed him as he continued building his skills and expanding his functional repertoire.
At Citrus, he initially ran operations. He built out the team, built processes, and even wrote software to automate everyday tasks. When we ran into a jam with our back-end processing partner, he immediately raised his hand and confidently offered to write the spec and even build the core engine. And as Citrus hit scale, he saw the company’s need of the hour and again volunteered to run customer care as we struggled to keep up with merchant demand.
It really wasn’t a surprise when, on a business trip to Delhi, he confided in me that he planned to launch a company with some friends. It was a disappointment from the Citrus perspective, but was the right step up for Deepak.
And I knew that with his skills and determination, the chances of the new company being very successful were outsized. And as he explained the concept, I immediately got the potential as it fulfilled a deep customer requirement.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the liquidity to invest in the new company as my liquid assets were invested in Citrus as the early funding was done by me personally.
Nestaway quickly grew by leaps and bounds, raised a lot of funding from the likes of Tiger Global and others, and continues to grow to this day. Ah well, you miss some. But money and personal victories isn’t everything. I couldn’t be prouder of Deepak and the other Citrus alums that have gone on to start their own ventures.
