PEAKLIFE

Huddle not only incubates startups, but ensures the founders are backed with the three pillars of capital – financial, social, and intellectual. Four companies in the Huddle portfolio have raised capital recently, and many others are still completing their rounds at a time when everyone is expecting investments to slow down.

Huddle founders have also created revenue streams by supporting other founders during this period of COVID-19.

Here’s PEAKLIFE in conversation with the duo themselves…

What motivated you to start your company?

India is a land of opportunity, with a new customer base growing each day. The scope to innovate and disrupt industries of the past, with business models of the future, requires much more than capital and hence, we chose to establish Huddle as an accelerator that can work to create business models at scale, by enhancing each founders journey through dedicated and contextual support areas, in the form of tangible and intangible infrastructure provided to them. The access to capital a venture needs becomes easier once you provide the venture with support functions they end up spending the capital in purchasing. Hence, creating a collective of offerings for each venture, Huddle is a dedicated resource pool that accelerates early and pre-seed ventures to become leaders in their respective industries.

What made you choose the name HUDDLE?

In a sports team when you form a Huddle, each person to your left and right, is relevant to a common goal of the team. Each person comes with strengths and skillsets that enhance the ability to win. At Huddle, from the very first day, we aimed to make each person near our teams relevant for the growth, in a manner that makes every stakeholder and partner engaged and responsible for tasks that simultaneously take place, in order to create a Huddle per venture, from one milestone to another.

Our team consists of sportspeople both by passion and mind, and hence the name was very important for us to remember each day, what our principle and mission is.

What was the inspiration behind the success of Huddle?

No startup is the same and neither should be the way we engage them. This has been a mantra of ours since day one, to view each company’s needs separately and hence, creating a differentiated offering from them from the day we accept them at Huddle. Our method of creating thesis areas to focus on, then building core offerings and services, only after which we go out to find the right founders and teams to work with, has enabled us to ensure we work on building ventures with accuracy rather than a probability of accumulating several ventures, with the hope a few do well. Success is subjective in our ecosystem, and therefore, we wanted to ensure that while building highly fundable ventures, we are also creating businesses that have a path to profitability, whilst making a positive impact for the customer they are serving.

Could you please tell us about your journey as an Entrepreneur

Sanil Sachar- To sum it – each day I have learned something I was wrong about, and each day that helps me get stronger. The journey of being a part of over 40 ventures having scaled across sectors, has helped me learn that patience is about making things happen faster and for this, the willingness to fail fast is a key acceptance one should be able to make. I’ve been a part of failed ventures, and fortunately, those that are deemed successes, and the only difference between the two is that the successful ones are catering to a need of a customer, and not just a want or desire. Being an author, and having invested in ventures, both are entrepreneurial tasks that have inculcated the learning that whilst everything we do is backed by our knowledge of what we can do with it, gut and perseverance to constantly deliver, once met with the energy to create a change each day, is what helps you grow as a person, and as an entrepreneur.

Ishaan Khosla- Over the months and years, each day I look forward to learning something new. From the launch of my first venture whilst I was in university in 2010, to frequent interactions with budding entrepreneurs which led us to build Huddle as a platform to help other entrepreneurs build, it has been a constant learning curve and journey of tremendous personal development. Each day presents an opportunity to learn and improve and has reinstated the need to be go-getters in this market. With how fast-paced the world is moving, I could not have asked for a better platform to learn and grow each day.

Why sector agnostic incubators & accelerator are important to small start-ups?

Creating a team of experts from the get-go is a must to diversify perspectives, network and bandwidth. For early-stage startups, now more than before, the competition to scale and succeed over the competition is getting more challenging as there is a larger competitive landscape that threatens venture growth, due to ease of customer access across online methods or multiple alternatives across geographies. An accelerator, therefore, becomes a propeller to speed work as well as ensure that when mistakes are made, the pivot to a successful strategy is swift. Furthermore, there is a learning curve that comes with experiences, which accelerators offer as part of strategic inputs and resource pool access, which enable startups to experiment at a cost-effective manner and be a few steps ahead with faster adoption, through the input of a team, who we like to view as being non-operational partners to our ventures.