Santosh Panda

A new way to build and scale your startup. Foundership supports startups to accelerate growth through coaching, raising capital and the founders' network. Coaching: We coach the seed/pre-seed stage & early-stage startups to build initial growth with our Seed acceleration program.We run cohort programs for early-stage founders to solve business challenges.We host office hours to help founders to share their challenges and specific advice they need. ‍ Capital: We bring Founders & Leaders to get startup funding signals via the Foundership Signal - A system for Funding.We invite our funding partners to participate in Seed Acceleration Program to work with startups and choose to invest. ‍Connect: We connect startups with incredible Founders & Leaders to get help and also expand their network.We help startups to grow via partnership and market access programs.

Explara is profitable. FY 19 & FY 20, It will also be profitable in FY 21. I am advising team Explara whenever they need it. Team Explara, led by co-founder Ashok will continue to shine.

Explara was an early entrant in online selling software in 2008 with the first product for event ticketing/registration software. Explara’s success in helping 100,000s of small & medium businesses to grow their revenue and solve business needs influenced Explara to expand to a multi-product SaaS business serving Event registration & management, Community membership management, Online payment collection & Crowdfunding. Key Achievements: 1. Bootstrapped Product-Market Fit, grew the business to $1m gross payments volume in 24 months. 2. Secured 3 rounds of funding for the business from Angels and VCs from India, Singapore, and USA. 3. Led the company to achieve growth and reach operational-break-even. In FY19, Explara’s gross payments volume reached ~$11M and ~$250K in gross ARR. 4. Navigated the company on continuous growth even with a shoe-stringed opex budget. 5. Won 1000s of customers to Explara on own sales effort using social media outreach and outbound approaches. 6. Retained customers (65%+ repeat customers) who have been using the Explara platform for more than 7 years. 7. Owned product strategy & engineering to design product-led growth and value for the customers. 8. Expanded business to Singapore and led direct sales on own to win early customers. 9. Established excellent relationships with media, PR and overall ecosystem for huge word-of-mouth and goodwill for the business. 10. Designed the workplace with high trust among remote working team members during the starting phase and growth phases. 11. With the ability to manage a team of any size, lead a team of 43 people during the peak of business growth. 12. Handled downsizing without any issues, managed team morale and navigated the business during the toughest times.

Guide & Mentor for Target Innovation Program: https://targetaccelerators.com/

As an independent software consultant, worked to architect software products, build and manage engineering teams for Startups and FTSE 100 companies. TouchNote (www.touchnote.com) - TouchNote is a mobile app for smartphones, tablets and websites for sending printed, personalized postcards, greeting cards and other photo products. ComicRelief (www.comicrelief.com) - The ComicRelief Fund Raising Operating System (FROST) is a bespoke platform that powers Comic Relief’s fundraising and campaign services for their flagship event ‘ComicRelief’ and ‘SportRelief’. News International Digital Subscription Paywall (www.news.co.uk) - The purpose of the ‘Digital Subscription Paywall’ is to create, manage and integrate News International’s consumer subscription across all properties such as Times, Sunday Times, Sun and more. DMGT TeletextMobile (www.dmgt.com) - CMS platform for Daily Mail Group to manage & publish content on TeletextMobile site, and also organize iPhone/Mobile application development competitions and social media campaigns. McGraw Hill Customer Self Service (www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk ) - CSS product enables McGraw Hill's Business customers to self-service the entire service range online. CSS is designed to replace the traditional method of inventory management, sales process, purchase, payment handling and after-sales support.

Lead a product team to develop minimum-viable-products and successful extensions using eBay APIs for UK & EU markets. I worked with the cross-functional market research team to interview customers and developed several MVP products for eBay Motors, eBay Seller Rewards, and also created productivity tools and integration using Skype API & Paypal APIs.

iPlayer Product Development. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ BBC iPlayer is an internet streaming, catchup, television and former radio service from the BBC. As a part of a 25+ member team, I was responsible for developing iPlayer software for media asset management, media streaming workflow, components for Transcore and various recording workflows.

Part of the initial team to set up AnswerDigital (earlier UPCO) consulting team in Guildford. Responsible to work with Director of Sales to offer software consulting services (architecture, product development and tech strategy) to key stakeholders/managers (CXOs) for the leading organization such as Allianz Cornhill, Vodafone UK, William Hill and Voca. Developed Allianz Cornhill’s iMarket insurance e-commerce portal and specification as a way for insurance brokers and other intermediaries to trade with them electronically Worked with the Vodafone Service Delivery application platform for managing the supply chain of channel partners worldwide across 27 countries. Worked with WilliamHill’s “NextGen Betting” platform team to develop the core betting platform with football and American Horse racing.

As part of engineering team developed ExSEL product for CIBER, UK that catered towards e-governance and could also be used as a CRM application. It enabled organizations/councils in UK to provide services to citizens to participate in a multi-partner exchange of information with ease and safety.

I joined CoreObjects when it was a 7-people company. I worked with entrepreneurs to launch their products from MVP to funding and subsequent growth phase. During tenure, developed and delivered several products: Cyclone Commerce Transaction Director - Scalable and real-time Electronic Data Interchange Platform Spoke Enterprise Referral Management - One of the earliest Social Networking enterprise tools to leverage professional contacts to generate referral sales leads. OnStation Enterprise Solution - Application service provider software platform that enabled automobile service, sales and distribution channels to collaborate.

Part of the core research group tapping into upcoming opportunities using technologies such as Java, Javascript and other web technologies. Part of the team that was a JV between Sonata and Terranova in Finland which developed Endreo Content Management solution. Part of the product development team that developed the ConAgra Warehouse Management System.