3 failed startups, 1 IIT degree, and a broken Pulsar | OTO Capital | Sumit Chhazed

Sumit Chhazed has started four companies. The first three didn't work.

Solar heating, where he was too young to win government tenders. An edtech platform built with IIT Bombay professors that was years ahead of its market and ended in a modest acquisition. Then a two-wheeler commerce business born out of a second-hand Pulsar that broke down every third day in Bombay.

The fourth is OTO Capital, a lending infrastructure platform for banks and NBFCs in two-wheeler financing. In 2024, mid-growth and mid-fundraise, the round fell through. He and his co-founders stopped taking a salary for twelve months, let people go, and rebuilt the company around profitability instead of growth. They turned down buyout offers along the way.

In this episode of Unstarted, Sumit talks to Avnish Bajaj about how to tell when a business isn't working, building for yourself versus building for an investor, what changes when you switch a company from growth mode to profitability, how to communicate with a team through that shift, and separating conviction from delusion.

Unstarted is a series for founders, by founders, with questions crowdsourced from the audience.

Chapters

0:00 Intro: three startups that didn't work
0:47 What OTO Capital actually does
2:42 Why this business works now and not ten years ago
4:48 Udaipur, a family of teachers, and the business keeda
6:26 Selling chewing gum stickers in 6th standard
7:51 Telling his parents he wouldn't take a job
9:41 Startup one: solar, and poor founder-market fit
12:45 Startup two: CourseWave, and being too early
19:48 Q: How do you know when it's working?
22:44 Q: Can you build without funding?
26:17 The 2024 roadblock
27:12 Choosing default alive over growth
27:56 Letting people go, and how to do it right
31:13 No salary for 12 months
33:28 Why he turned down the buyout offers
36:10 The 2001 Kolkata Test
37:02 Closing: it's a Test, not a T20