How Shark Tank India zeroed in on new India’s huge ambitions

Shark Tank 2 judges. (Photos: SonyLIV)

Shark Tank India judge Vineeta Singh is no longer hearing business pitches only in conference rooms. Ever since she began to cut deals on national television, she has been inundated with big ideas wherever she goes: in cross-country flights, in malls, in hotel washrooms and even, quite literally, elevators.

“I meet so many young kids, girls especially, who come up to me and say they want to be entrepreneurs,” she says. “And it reminded me that I always felt such a lack of role models growing up, because at the end of the day, you can only hope to be what you see.”

There are six investors on the panel in season 2 of Shark Tank India—along with Sugar founder Vineeta Singh, there’s Namita Thapar of Emcure Pharma, Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com, Aman Gupta of boAt, Peyush Bansal of Lenskart and new shark Amit Jain of CarDekho. Each of them has their own area of expertise, individual preferences and idiosyncrasies. Yet, all have similar stories to tell about how their lives have changed with Shark Tank India, and the same incredulity with which they tell them.

The thing is, no one expected Shark Tank India to become the monster hit that it did last year. Least of all, the sharks on call: “The idea that people are going to watch business negotiations on prime-time TV was absolutely bizarre to me,” says Singh. But watch people did, and then talked about it at dinner, discussed it in WhatsApp groups and on Twitter, made a gazillion hilarious memes out of it—and, it appears, began to consider the idea of entrepreneurship more seriously.

On the sets of Shark Tank India Season 2

It is the day after the shoot for season 2 of Shark Tank India has wrapped; and five of the judges are on set in suburban Mumbai for some final buffs, B-rolls and press meets. The set, with its gilded arches, the path to the golden door lined with an aquarium built into walls, the backdrop where a metropolis twinkles against a dark sky, looks the same.

So is the format: Like in season 1, the sharks listened to, analysed and battled over 200 business pitches, shortlisted from over 50,000 applications, over 14-hour shoots every day. To celebrate, they had a party that went on till late the previous night—not that you’d know it, looking at these high-functioning individuals turned out in their sharpest suits and pointiest stilettos.

SUGAR Cosmetics' Vineeta Singh says she has invested in 25 ideas this season.

The participants

Like last season, each of them is also finding the pulse of a new India in the course of passing on investments or handing over crores at a time. “There are new ideas, founders from newer cities—especially Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities,” observes Thapar, when I ask what’s different this season. “And founders are better prepared.”

Singh, who invested in 25 businesses this time around, is glad there were fewer pitches from the world of edutech; but notes a rise in brands, food companies and consumer technology and devices. “I was hoping to see more fitness related stuff, beyond food and nutrition; like wearables or accessories. It’s going to be a big trend in India,” says Singh.

“We’re covering the breadth quite well, geographically and demographically speaking. But I’d love to see more pitches that aren’t just about a business,” says Bansal. “Say, a solution to lane-driving, a more efficient traffic lighting system, or how to fix a broken medical system. Look at China—somewhere in the last 10 years, it has changed a lot, not just in terms of the economy, but also in becoming a more organised, liveable place. India will also go through that change, I think. I’d like to see those startups and ideas that aim to evolve the ecosystem.”

“There are two types of people pitching at Shark Tank India,” observes Amit Jain, taking a breather in the green room. “The well-educated, college-going youth and...the people solving problems at the grassroots level. There’s honestly all kinds of entrepreneurship happening in India. A lot of these are people who’ve already set up successful businesses, and are making big profits from their homes.”

Why do they come to Shark Tank India then? “Because they want to build an enterprise, their vision is bigger,” says Jain. “And because we’ve been through that journey—I’ve done this for 15 years—they come to us for guidance, whether it is about building teams, structures, the priorities of a founder or identifying growth areas.”

A cursory look at the fates of enterprises appearing in season 1 would affirm this, whether they curried the favour of the investors or not. “Spandan, the maker of ECG devices; Skippi, who make ice pops; Momo Mami, run by the masterchef who makes her own momos; the ice cream brand Get-A-Whey, the footwear brand Quirky Nari have all done very well,” says Singh, of her investments.

“My solo investment in Rare Planet is the biggest success story of Season 1,” says Thapar, adding that about half of her portfolio companies are in various stages of raising their next round. “When Rare Planet pitched, they were at four stores and Rs 70 lakh sales per month,” she says of the online retail brand that connects terracotta and copper artisans across the country with buyers. “Since then, they have scaled 8x in store count to 32 stores, and their sales have grown 6x to Rs 4 crores per month. This business proves that social impact and profitability can co-exist.”

Bansal says he'd like "more pitches that aren’t just about a business". (Image via LinkedIn/Peyush Bansal)

Winning formula

It also proves that taking huge decisions like these in what seems to be mere minutes in on-screen time is no sleight of hand. Each shark has their own formula, and follows their sharply-honed gut instinct. But most of them look at the person behind the enterprise first.

“I assess the value system (humility, integrity), skill set and superpower of a founder before checking if their business has identified a white space, whether it’s addressing a real problem, whether a lot of people will want it. I invest in people who have strong customer connect, and are able to renovate their product accordingly,” says Jain. “Pehle banda, phir dhandha!”

Thapar has expounded on her ‘4F investment framework’ —Founder, Foundation, Financials, and Fit—in her book The Dolphin and The Shark. Meanwhile Singh looks at perseverance in the founders she likes to work with; and if the market has the capacity to grow over the next 10-20 years. “I have a formula in my head for the entry valuation,” she admits, “because at the end of the day, your IRR (Internal Rate of Return) calculation is on the basis of the valuation that you get in.”

Anupam Mittal (Image credit: Photo tweeted by @AnupamMittal)

Ideas of India

What Singh and her fellow sharks find themselves reevaluating—over the course of shooting for two seasons of Shark Tank India—is their preconceived notion of India itself, and the idea of entrepreneurship within it. “Someone came in with a pitch to produce taps that ring as a siren when water comes—because there are so many parts of the country where water supply is limited,” says Singh. “Someone else was trying to come up with a way to make tractors affordable, because they aren’t, for most Indian farmers. People are solving problems around crafts, diabetes, how to pee when you’re in a wheelchair. These are problems we didn’t know existed, forget finding a solution.”

For Bansal, there’s another insight: “The idea that all consumers are the same has also changed. Consumers have started finding, very rapidly because of social media, groups of people that they associate with. These are the micro-communities. If you went to a consulting firm earlier, they’d break your market down into segments—comfort or fashion wearer, middle class or luxury. Now there are a thousand distinctions. ‘Hip hop’ can be a category; so can ‘Gen Z’, and within that, you can come up with 50 more siloes.”

The one-size-fits-all approach may not work anymore; but the sharks say that in this fragmentation—and the churn of new technology with 5G, Web3, metaverse, machine learning, AI and more—lies abundant opportunity. “The evolution of tech will keep happening,” says Jain. “All that happened with Web2—e-commerce, online shopping—will come again in a new avatar. But the opportunity is to catch the trend early, and innovate around that.”

Thapar concurs. “Technological breakthroughs increase TAM (total addressable market) and business opportunities in general. But the fundamentals of the business remain the same. Investors are keen to invest in hungry, humble founders who are out to solve real problems.”

Later, while the sharks meditate on their relationship with money as part of a group panel interview, an executive from Sony Pictures Networks tells me, euphorically, that Shark Tank India is already their most successful project, after Kaun Banega Crorepati. While KBC was launched in India in 2000, two years after the original Who Wants to Be Millionaire took off in the UK, Shark Tank India arrived on TV screens a full 13 years after the American edition (itself a spin on Dragon’s Den) took off.

There’s something to be said about the timing of Shark Tank India: arriving at a time when most of the country’s population has at least a 2G connection; and at the bleeding end of the pandemic, by which time the idea of home businesses had also somewhat taken off. That aside, both reality shows run on a potent mix of relatability, authenticity, opportunity, and entertainment.

It’s also not coincidental that both KBC and Shark Tank India are about getting rich, either through your general knowledge and trivia skills, or through your business acumen. This is real life, with high stakes and, in a sense, the dream they’re selling seems more attainable to the average Indian than, say, reaching the pinnacle in an art form like Mallakhamb. Or as Bansal says with a slight shrug, “everyone wants to be an entrepreneur in India. It matches our cultural DNA.”