Why PhonePe bet on UPI when everyone chose wallets | Sameer Nigam | Unstarted

Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe, joins Unstarted for a candid conversation on building a company that now serves over 700 million users.

From a middle-class naval family to a failed music startup (Mind360), an acquisition by Flipkart, and the founding of PhonePe, Sameer breaks down the thinking behind his "asymmetric bets," why he chose UPI when the entire market was chasing wallets, and how the Big Billion Day payments collapse revealed the problem he'd spend the next decade solving.

He also opens up on his 31-year partnership with co-founder Rahul Chari, why he embraces regulators instead of fighting them, what PhonePe's data reveals about how India really spends, and the story behind the IPO that was pulled at the last minute.

A must-watch for founders thinking about co-founders, market timing, building for population scale, and knowing when to cut your losses.

Unstarted is a show about founders, for founders hosted by Avnish Bajaj. 

Chapters

0:00 Intro: meet Sameer Nigam & the "celebrity founder" tag
2:15 Family background: a Navy dad and an entrepreneur mom at early TCS
10:45 Why tech fundamentals still win (and the Google "75% AI code" point)
17:40 First venture: Mind360, the "iTunes for India"
22:10 Why it failed: wrong market sizing and the piracy era
26:00 Acquired by Flipkart and the B2B pivot
34:15 Big Billion Day: when India's payment infra collapsed
38:00 Why wallets were never the answer
41:20 The asymmetric bet on UPI
44:30 Ghar Wapsi: merging back into Flipkart to buy time
47:10 Demonetization: luck, timing, and near-zero competition
50:00 Obsessing over infrastructure and the right foundation
52:30 ICP, population scale, and the "painkiller in the hinterland"
55:40 Incumbents push back: ICICI blocking and the RBI visit
59:00 What PhonePe's data reveals about how India spends
1:05:00 The most anticipated IPO that didn't happen
1:08:30 Final advice: don't be an entrepreneur by FOMO