What sports taught the Head of Spotify India about building a business | Unstarted

Can you be a founder without ever founding anything?

Amarjeet Batra has spent 25 years building other people's companies, first Baazee, eBay, OLX, and now Spotify India, and never once thought of himself as an employee. He's what Avnish calls "professionally unstarted": a founder from within.

Avnish and Amarjeet get into the questions most operators never say out loud:  

1. If you have the skills, the confidence, and the network, but not the one big idea, what do you actually do with that? 

2. Is raising a fund a solution, or a responsibility you take on before you've found the problem?

3. Why would you choose 1% of a billion-dollar company over 100% of a ten-million-dollar one? 

4. How do you build a category when ten players already exist and you've arrived last? 

5. When is a difficult problem worth solving, and when does the market simply not care enough to pay?

6. This is a conversation about range over specialisation, ownership without a cap table, and why some of the most entrepreneurial people you'll meet never start a company of their own.

Chapters

00:00  Cold open
01:30 The professionally unstarted founder
02:55 Baazi, the born-again moment
05:10 Why I broke every rule of specialization
08:30 The eBay epiphany: time to do something bigger
09:43 China, and the scale that humbled me
18:26 The power of moving last
20:05  Building the category nobody built
21:15 Is there still a marketplace to win?
22:56 Disruption, distribution, and the AI shift
23:58  Q: How do you actually scale an events business?
26:15 Q: (cont.) Why your event might be the wrong product
28:14 Q: Should we build a place to apprentice under founders?
31:32 How to actually reach a busy operator
34:20 Q: Difficult problem, or one nobody will pay for?
35:09 Problem-first, and the willingness-to-pay test
36:37 Vitamin or painkiller
39:01 Play-front music: a business model flips
41:09 Why success looks overnight