23 years old and raised $45M in series B to build Pronto | Anjali Sardana | Unstarted

Anjali Sardana grew up in northern Virginia, studied biology at Georgetown, worked at Bain Capital — and then, without telling her parents, flew to India and founded Pronto: a platform building the world's largest labor organization network, starting with home services.

In this episode of Unstarted, Anjali breaks down how she picked an operations business over a product business (and why), why she sees India's informal labor market as a trillion-dollar opportunity, and the founder mindset that got her through the messy, chaotic, sleep-deprived early days.

She also gets brutally honest about faking confidence, hiring missionaries not mercenaries, and why she thinks most human limitations are completely made up.

Chapters

0:00 Intro — Meet Anjali Sardana
1:20 Growing up in Virginia, studying biology at Georgetown
3:10 The evolution framework that shaped her business thinking
5:00 Product vs. operations vs. distribution — how she chose
8:30 Why India? The labor-market thesis
12:00 Moving to India with zero experience — and hiding it from her parents
15:40 Fake it till you make it: raising a seed round at Bain Capital
19:15 Running pilots, vibe-coding the app, and getting the first bookings
24:00 The Kapil story — recruiting 30 workers in one afternoon
28:00 Operating 24/7 with 5 people, sleeping in shifts
31:30 Building culture: missionaries vs. mercenaries
36:00 Urgency as a core value — actions beget information
39:30 Conviction vs. market signals — how to balance both