#146: Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, Co-Founder and Partner of Upekkha, a B2B SaaS Accelerator, on Helping Startups Achieve Meaningful Financial Outcomes and Profitable Scalable Growth, Creating a Flywheel, and Navigating COVID

Prasanna Krishnamoorthy is a co-founder and partner at Upekkha, a Value SaaS Accelerator working with B2B SaaS startups to get through the valley of death, to a place with predictable, scalable, profitable growth. Whether you want to build a $10M revenue business or the next $1B SaaS unicorn, Upekkha helps you accelerate.

Prasanna previously worked intensely with 120+ startups to make them LARGE at Microsoft Accelerator India and picked the right startups for Investors & Microsoft. As a founder going through his own ups & downs, he helps other founders push through, and has been an angel investor in a couple of startups along the way.

With every startup, Prasanna helps as a full-stack growth driver: from business planning for growth, frameworks for growth, aligning engineering for traction, innovating on product, marketing & sales plans to tactically crafting pitches & one-liners, & reviewing ads. Growing startups is everything he looks to do. In his own startups, he has done everything that needed to get done - development, testing, support, product management, sales, marketing, customer interaction, integration. Prasanna knows a little about a lot of things - technical and non-technical, and knows a lot about a few things - technology, growth, product, and the difficulties of starting up.

Connect with Prasanna Krishnamoorthy

• Upekkha
• LinkedIn

Some of the Topics Covered by Prasanna Krishnamoorthy in this Episode

• How Prasanna was inspired to become an entrepreneur and work in B2B
• The early ventures Prasanna worked on
• Working for Amazon and the Microsoft Accelerator
• How Prasanna founded Upekkha
• The original business model for Upekkha
• Developing a brand and getting their first cohort of startups
• The original 2-year structure of the program
• The theory of constraints and the guidance Upekkha gives their startups
• How the program has changed to focus on the initial flywheel construction and building scalable growth
• The cognitive biases of founders and some inflection points for startups
• What Prasanna has learned about the B2B SaaS industry while building and growing Upekkha
• Prasanna's advice for customer acquisition
• The importance of referrals
• Determining pricing
• Upekkha's team
• Prasanna's role at Upekkha and how it's changing during COVID
• How Upekkha's participating startups rallied together to help each other during COVID
• Prasanna's vision for Uppekha's growth

Links from the Episode

• FusionCharts
• The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
• #132: Ish Jindal, Co-Founder and CEO of Tars, on Bootstrapping from $0 to $1M in ARR with a SaaS Company for Marketers