Ask Me Anything with Srikant Sastri
A conversation with Srikant Sastri — Chairman of i3g Advisory Network, Co-Founder of Crayon Data, and Co-Lead for the IIT Kanpur Ventilator Consortium
On a quiet Saturday evening, a group of passionate biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and leaders, gathered together on the popular meeting place that has dethroned Starbucks, Zoom, to participate in India Biotech Leaders of Tomorrow’s (IBLoT) ‘Ask Me Anything + Networking’ event with Srikant Sastri, hosted by Shanthinee Ravichandhren, Associate Product Manager at SigTuple.
An alum of IIM Calcutta and IIT Kanpur, Srikant wears many hats. He’s the Chairman of i3g Advisory Network, a boutique advisory network focused on ‘Accelerated Business Transformation in the Post-COVID era’. He co-founded Crayon Data, an ambitious big data & AI start-up based in Singapore and India. As the co-lead for the IIT Kanpur Ventilator Consortium, he created a world-class ventilator during COVID-19 pandemic and brought it to market, all within 3 months! He even co-authored the book ‘The Ventilator Project’, chronicling this success story of rapid innovation that created growth.
Although Srikant Sastri cuts an imposing figure, surrounded by books, a hallmark of his impressive education and accomplishments, he started by insisting no one called him ‘Mr’ or ‘Sir’, putting everyone at ease and eager to listen to his thoughts and experience.
The following is the conversation between Shanthinee and Srikant during the event, edited for clarity.
Srikant: I got used to biotech as a space only as recent as 2017. But the last four years have been fascinating because I’ve got to see this sector at close quarters, both the opportunities and the challenges. While the pandemic is horrific for all of us and the people around us, for those of us who are biotech entrepreneurs or innovators, I think it just throws up many more opportunities. It’s the wrong way for opportunities to emerge, but some opportunities are coming up in this new virtual world.
And without getting into detail, I would just like to say that it throws open global markets for startups, makes global mentors available, and makes global investors more accessible. To that extent, I think it just opens up a world of opportunities.
One of my pet themes, which is in my book also — I call it ‘Silicon Valley Reinvented’. I genuinely believe that if you go back and look at what Silicon Valley is, it’s just a 120 square kilometre area south of San Francisco. What makes it so hot? It’s a small area where academicians, researchers, scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, and mentors are all brought together. They engage with each other over coffee, on university avenues, over breakfast, and at lunch. Ideas get tossed around and that intense osmosis is what builds great companies out of early-stage ideas.
Now that paradigm has been changed because of the pandemic. It changes in two ways — one is that it’s no longer easy to get people to meet you face to face, even in Silicon Valley. People don’t want to do it because of the pandemic. And therefore that competitive advantage that Silicon Valley had with everyone living and working nearby is no longer as important. Now, you could be an entrepreneur and a person working on ideas in Mysore, Trichy, Guwahati, Kanpur, wherever it doesn’t matter. You have access to the same type of mentors, investors, co-founders, etc, because we have got used to working virtually, and geography or location is no longer a disadvantage. We saw that in the ventilator project, where one of our biggest product R&D advisors was based out of New York — it did not matter. He’s the R&D head for a 12 billion dollar med-tech company, but he mentored us.
Likewise, in the oxygen concentrator project, our chief scientific advisor is in Alberta, Canada. He’s very happy to mentor us. I could not have imagined that we would have even reached out to him in the pre-Covid world but suddenly your mind just opens up. This is why I believe it’s a great opportunity for all of us, certainly in India, but anywhere in the world to say — you know what? I can create a new model of Silicon Valley, this whole ecosystem in a virtual world — space or time, nothing is a bar any longer. So I think we have a unique opportunity, particularly for biotech, which has challenges about not having too many investors here, not having too many mentors in your city or your street.
For me, I consider it a bit of a tragedy that this action and fun is happening now. I wish I was 30 years younger, but I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that ’50 is the new 30’, and I truly mean it, because all the time I spend at incubators or colleges across the country, or at groups like these, is where I derive all my energy.
Among the various hats that I wear, biotech is what excites me for the future, and specifically within biotech, I’m interested in healthtech and agritech. I just believe that there’s a lot that can be done in India, and a lot that can be done between India and other markets in the world, and that’s what excites me and those are where a lot of my initiatives are being driven.
The other thing that I am closely focused on, particularly in my role as president of TiE Delhi-NCR, is to take entrepreneurship to the grassroots. For too long, 80% of Indian startups have been in Bangalore, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai, but I just believe that entrepreneurship in India has to go down to the grassroots for it to create employment, job opportunities, etc. And when I say ‘grassroots’ I really mean ‘grassroots’. One of my most favourite startups is something that we invested 25 lakhs out of the IIM Calcutta Innovation Park where I’m on the board. It’s a young startup out of a rural village in Bengal. It’s called ‘Sanjevani Goats’. The founder created an artificial insemination technique for black Bengal goats working with a government lab. That was the smallest part of the innovation.
The bigger part of the innovation is that he created a distribution channel by bringing on board 3000 unemployed young men and women from the villages, who became micro-entrepreneurs. They’ve been trained on the artificial insemination technique. They go to a village, work with the goat farmers to actually deploy the artificial insemination technique as a result of which you get healthier goats. These 3000 people now earn 10,000 rupees each month. Look at the downstream effect of a 25 lakh investment, and it’s very unlike the 100 million dollar fundraisers you hear of in bigger cities, but look at the downstream impact. That fascinates me. The socioeconomic impact of grassroots entrepreneurship like this fascinates me.
Shanthinee: Mentorship, as we all know, is key to any company staying on track and achieving all its milestones. In the book, you’ve mentioned that about 10 mentors from the medtech field, specializing in Funding, Supply chain, Manufacturing, and Sales, were available to Nocaarc to help them realize their product. Now how would you recommend start-ups to find the right mentors?
In the case of the ventilator project, we needed all these mentors to come together at the same time because we had an accelerated time frame in mind. Whereas in a normal course, you are not going to try and get things done on a crash basis like this so you probably have more time on your side. So you don’t need so many mentors to come together at the same time. What’s likely is that if you are a biotech startup, you are going to need initial mentoring more on the R&D and the product, because that’s where thinking is happening. Mentoring for things like sales and manufacturing comes much later down the line.
But at the same time, one of the mistakes that startups make, from any sphere, particularly in India, if you want to make a reliable and affordable product, you need to think about how to deliver high quality at an affordable price. So you need to design your product keeping both high reliability and high affordability in mind. Very often, people realise too late that the product is now not affordable for most people, and therefore you don’t have a market.
As you move forward, you need experts who can tell you what’s the best way to navigate through the regulatory maze and as you move forward, you need mentors who can talk to you about manufacturing, whether you should manufacture it yourself or license it out.
And most biotech startups also struggle because the founders are invariably PhDs who are very highly qualified but have no clue on the market side and therefore there is a reluctance to bring in someone from outside at a senior level and make that person a cofounder. But in each of these areas, you will sequentially, sometimes parallelly, need to bring in mentors rather than at the same time as we did. The only words of advice I would give you are a couple of tips on where to find mentors.
If you need mentors on the technical side they could be former professors, if you have done a Ph.D. or a master’s. They could be former senior colleagues or classmates who are now working in companies. I would also look into one more source that we normally do not do. There’s a huge talent pool available of people in their late 50s and early 60s who are about to retire. Look for people retiring in the kind of companies you think matter. So the four mentors we had from the Medtech industry are people in their 50s and 60s who retired or are about to retire who want to continue to remain engaged. And they are so happy to be brought in because their time is being used, they are getting bored in life otherwise, playing golf. Bringing them back is so fulfilling for them.
One of the people in the project team was brought in to manage the public sector manufacturing partner relationship. He just retired from Tata Power. We brought him back on the project and you know what, he’s joined Nocaarc full-time as the Chief Operating Officer and he’s having the time of his life right now. So look for a pool of people in their late 50s and early 60s who have the expertise and are delighted to come in as mentors.
India has seen a wide network of incubators popping up over the past decade. These incubators have had a mixed track record in terms of genuine value addition. In this context, could you tell us about SIIC — Startup Incubation and Innovation Centre at IIT Kanpur and the PVCE (Post COVID Venture Enterprise) started at IIM Calcutta Innovation Park?
A quick word about the mixed track record of incubators in the country — I think it’s their natural evolution. India’s done a great job, there are 60 bio incubators across the country. You have 150 technology business incubators across the country. So the critical mass has been built up. What have they done right? They have decentralized entrepreneurship. Every state has a technology business incubator, if not more.
Secondly, they’ve been a good channel to disburse government funds as seed capital for startups. Otherwise, it’s not available. So they’ve done two great things.
Where they’ve not done a good job is to provide value addition through high-quality mentorship, guidance, etc. That’s where the next phase needs to be, and I think what we saw in the ventilator project is what we need to replicate across all incubators. That is, how can we find the right set of mentors for each startup in a personalized manner. It’s not the same one-size-fits-all for every startup.
And after we did the ventilator project, we asked if we can replicate this model during ‘peace time’ as opposed to ‘war time’, if I call the pandemic a war. So at IIM Calcutta, what we did last year was pick the best 5 startups which were already there in the incubator, and then we asked if we could accelerate the transformation of the startups in the next 6 months. Can we make them investor-ready? So for each of these five startups, we put together a team of 6 mentors — 3 alums, 2 current MBA students, because they could do the research, analysis, and heavy lifting, and one person from the incubator. So a 6 member task force, working with the founders, met at a fixed ritual for 1 hour every Saturday, and after one month we made huge progress in terms of transforming that startup.
We’ve started something similar at IIT Kanpur also since we have 40,000 alums across the world. Can we find the right set of alums to mentor the startups? There are enough mentors available globally. How do you do the matchmaking, how do you keep the momentum going — that’s where the magic happens.
Like in the case with Noccarc — the company which built the ventilator and AVI Healthcare which manufactures them, could you tell us how this synergy model played out for them and how other startups who are looking to scale up seek this kind of synergy?
So here’s the dilemma. I’m guessing for most of you, what you’re excited about is the innovation, the R&D, and the invention. Manufacturing is as it is difficult, and manufacturing in India is even more difficult because you’re managing land, labor, registration — the three Ls as they’re called, and it can drain your energy. Why would you want to do it? There would be other people who would be happy to do it.
You can license your technology and generate revenue. But unfortunately, in India licensing has still not become the mainstream option. Most people want to build scale because everyone’s hung up by scale. Particularly if you get VCs as investors, for them the only word they understand is scale, and if they want to push you for scale, they want you to become bigger and manufacture hundred million dollars of revenue. By licensing, you never get that top-line growth. You get very profitable growth and licensing revenues, but you don’t manufacture and sell yourself, so investors will try to push you in that direction, and that’s the contradiction fundamentally.
Under what circumstances should startups think about licensing strategy and start looking for licensing partners?
I think for both these situations, if your gestation period is long to get to market, and your entire cycle of R&D, clinical testing, etc is going on, and you are not going to be in the market for many years, not too many investors in India have the patience to wait for so long, and therefore as a startup, you are under pressure to generate money from somewhere. Your stream of grants and other funding from government or angel investors will not last you for years. In a situation like this, if you have a great IP, then it makes sense to look for a licensing opportunity.
I think one of the things that investment bankers need to do in India is to look for licensing partners, as investors and customer revenue is not going to come soon. This is one situation.
The second situation is if you want to be running a simple clean operation, you want to spend time doing R&D in your lab or front of your computer, you don’t want to go out and stock inventory and run factories, that’s the other situation I would recommend licensing.
When you try to sell an Indian product to a medical community, you automatically place an elephant in the room — which is ‘Acceptance’. Most commonly the decision-makers ask for FDA or CE certification which is expensive. How did Nocaarc and the team solve this issue of acceptance by doctors?
In the Nocaarc situation, because there was a pandemic and hospitals and doctors needed ventilators, they did not insist on an FDA or CE certification as an indication of quality. They were happy to perform their tests and do validation. We had some advantages as a ventilator task force. We had four ex-medtech CEOs who have great relationships with hospitals and top doctors across the country. So when we started working on the project, even at the design stage, they had alerted their friends at hospitals. So getting a meeting and a foot in the door was never a problem for us.
But that’s not a sufficient condition, you needed to go in with a great product. So once we had a great product, once the Director-General of health services had certified the product, we had one doctor and one hospital in Pune, Ruby Hall Clinic, and she became a close working partner for us in Pune. When the first version of the product was ready after the IC testing was done, she first insisted on endurance testing for 28 days, it kept running on an artificial lung and that worked. Then she tested on a healthy patient.
After that, it went on to a covid patient also, but she was watching very closely. Once the government certified it, our task force members said okay, now you can go to Medanta, now you can go to Artemis, now you can go to Defence Base Hospital in Delhi. So the task force enabled it, but the prime condition was the main product.
How do you solve this prominent issue of mistrust at a global scale?
Till about 18 months ago, no more than 32 kinds of medical products were regulated in India. A ventilator was not a regulated product. But just before the pandemic broke last year, the government had already announced that almost every medical device would now be regulated and they prescribed an eighteen-month window for registration which has been slightly shifted because of the pandemic. So there is regulation, which is on its way.
Once there is regulation and there is a formal certification, I think that becomes the basis for doctors in India to say confidently — I can buy this. That still presents a challenge when you go to global markets, you will need an FDA or CE. But on the other hand, if you build an affordable, high-quality product, there are over 100 countries in the world that are non-regulated markets like India. Parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where once again it is the doctor, hospital, and their judgment which will decide whether to buy your product or not and not having an FDA or CE will not be an issue.
By the way, one of the project I’m working on is to create an Indo Canadian corridor, where Indian startups can make Canada their North American base, either Montreal or Toronto, and be housed there, and from there they can target all the North American markets, get recertified and also have a global presence.
We understand that products from India don’t necessarily have to be 100% indigenous, but we aim for most of the value to be locally captured. So in different sectors where are we on moving away from China and being independent. How do we need to plan to achieve this?
If I go back to the ventilator last year, some of the key components — the pumps, the power supply, the oxygen sensors — none of those were readily available in India. Pumps were available, but not for the specs that we wanted. There are no domestic oxygen sensors because there isn’t enough demand in the market and so it’s made by people like Honeywell or Chinese companies. We had no option but to scramble and get, whether from Europe, or the US, or China. And I must tell you, we had a bad experience with Chinese components.
When you ask them first for samples, they send you great samples. The actual consignment is at least 30% more interior. This time, when we started the new project for oxygen concentrators and oxygen plants, once again there were two components because everyone in the world or certainly in India wants oxygen concentrators, two things are in short supply — compressors and zeolite molecular sieve which separates nitrogen from the oxygen. I gave a challenge to the many manufacturers who had come to design and make this — I asked them to come back to us with a design that has no Chinese component.
The team took the challenge, and actually, we now have a situation where I think we found both compressors and molecular sieves which are there in India. And by the way, I must tell you this, there are unknown gems sitting in small towns in India — manufacturers who are making such products and making good products, but they remain small because the demand is not there.
We are raising 20 odd crores to give them money to simply scale up in the next three weeks. So, I think there are collective efforts, the world is trying to move manufacturing away from China and I think certainly we’ve set a goal for that ourselves.
There are people who are passionate who do not know the grassroot-level innovations that are currently happening. Unless we are VC investors or work in their companies, we actually don’t have the motive to learn more about what these companies are. Is there a way to actually put them up on the mainstream where people can also decide what kind of companies they want investments going into?
I think that’s certainly a need, but honestly, there already is a starting point. If you go to the website of BIRAC, and the surprising thing is not everyone has heard of BIRAC. Even in the biotech industry, most people have, but BIRAC is something that you should look at. They have a page that has listings and pictures of all the products that have been built out by Indian startups, and there are hundreds of products that have been built out.
There are 60 bio incubators across the country, and there are products that are there, but BIRAC could do a better job at showcasing this. Once or twice a year, they create this brochure with a listing of these startups, but I think we need to bring a lot of show and tell to the products that have been built, not just to the audience but outside. At the end of the day, when the pandemic hit us last year, we had no diagnostic kits, to begin with, but suddenly Y labs and other people quickly ramped up and the basic ingredients were there. How do you bring them to the attention of investors? So one of the things, as part of my own effort over the next couple of years is going to be to get more investors to look into these products. Thankfully, though thankfully is the politically incorrect word to use, because of the pandemic, investment in healthcare and biotech is going up right now.
Let’s talk about Atma Nirbhar Bharat — This mission requires innovation at the grassroots level but there’s no clear framework to capitalise on the current talent. So how do we give challenges and incentives to engineering students — bright and young talented individuals to work towards this goal?
I think that the basic fact that there are 60 bio incubators is a good starting point. What needs to happen next is a clear set of problem statements to be put out by these incubators. I’ll give you an example. For instance, if you take agritech, one clear problem statement is the perishability or waste that comes by the time something moves out from the farm and goes to the warehouse or from the warehouse to the store. Now, that’s a clear problem statement. The second problem statement, for example, could be for small marginal farmers, who own less than an acre — how can you increase productivity, because the big methods like precision farming don’t exactly work in a small acreage.
Likewise, if I take health tech, in the Covid situation itself, I know someone who is working on an alternative to RT-PCR, and asking if they can do something as an alternative to RT-PCR that is quicker, cheaper, and more accurate, for example.
So I think clearly articulated problem statements are what can fuel targeted innovation. Because historically, there’s been a lot of “R&D” happening at labs across the country. But it’s been kind of ill-defined. It’s not a response to a problem statement because of which no one comes and takes those inventions and takes them to the market. It’s only the delight of the inventor, the scientist is probably very happy. He/she publishes the paper, but it doesn’t lead to a product or revenue. So clear problem statements are important.
The great thing is, parts of the government are also realizing this. Two years ago, if you went to the defence ministry’s website, they actually put up problem statements in 11 areas, ranging from applications of AI to UAVs, and so on. So I think articulated problem statements are the starting point and that’s what can drive inventions and innovation, funding can keep pace with this, and those products could then go to the market.
In IIT Kanpur, to get the problem statements, medical specialists from different fields are invited to come and tell us problem statements for people to work on.
So many young graduates from India went abroad to pursue higher education and are now willing to come back to thrive in the Indian bio-economy. Which sectors do you think are booming with opportunities now? Where can they get their funding from and where can they test their ideas?
You’re absolutely right. There are so many PhDs and masters who are coming back from great universities in Europe and North America, which is fantastic. I think clearly healthcare and agritech are two great spaces. Cleantech is the other one. So I would certainly pick these three. Apart from that, because we are talking about “technically” qualified people, I am not getting into routine consumer internet stuff. Instead, I’ve picked three areas where biotechnology has a key role to play.
Healthtech, agritech, and cleantech are three areas that I would say are important from all standpoints. The country needs it to solve big problems. These are sectors where if you come up with good solutions, it can lead to downstream manufacturing and employment and it has benefits like clean air and so on.
Our incubators are a great place to get started. And obviously, besides those incubators, we have the traditional method of saying, few of you get together, toss some ideas around, and get an angel investor. But I think incubators provide a place where you can do it, you can engage with others, there is an ecosystem, which is why I like the fact that we have incubators across the country.
From a pandemic recovery perspective for India, what would be the range of unsolved problems you’d be looking at and why?
I think of the biggest problems I’m going to be looking at, one is very clear — can we create a range of healthcare products that can be made domestically? Remember, close to 30,000 plus crores of medical equipment is imported each year. 80% of India’s medical equipment is imported. Why should that be the case? When a pandemic or a crisis hits us, we scramble to bring container loads of supplies. Why should we bring it from a country with which we were at war the previous year? To me, that is shameful, and therefore creating a manufacturing base here is the biggest priority. That’s why the oxygen concentrator project and last year’s ventilator project are close to my heart and other people in the task force. So that’s going to be the single biggest priority honestly. Picking up areas within healthcare, where we need local manufacturing capabilities that can improve the local healthcare infrastructure — that to me is the top priority.
About the Author:
I am a fourth year undergraduate student of Biological Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, pursuing a specialization in Computational Biology, whose interests lie in sustainability, public policy, poetry, and neuroscience. I am also the Community Manager for India Biotech Leaders of Tomorrow (IBLoT). Reach out to me through my website!
