I’m Deepak Ravindran, Founder & CEO of Lookup. AMA!

Hi TIA community,

I’m Deepak, CEO & Founder of Lookup!

Before smartphones hit the Indian market in 2008, I dropped out of college to start an SMS company – Innoz, which became the largest offline search engine in the world. Innoz, essentially, provided the Internet to anyone with a feature phone and was profitable on day one. Within 5 years, 120 million people had access to Wikipedia, Bing, Wolfrom, Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter among other things.

Post smartphones domination, I open sourced Innoz. In early 2014, I started Quest, a 500 Startups-backed social Q&A platform. Quest failed to gain traction in US market and I went back to India to start over again. Fashioned along the lines of WeChat, my third company Lookup is an app that connects consumers with local businesses. We focus in India which has the highest shop density in the world with over 40 million local businesses.

Lookup enables local commerce on chat. Users chat with local businesses to shop from nearby grocery shop, fresh produce, chemists, electronic stores etc and get products delivered to their doorstep. Lookup also enables you to make reservations at a Spa or Restaurant and avail local deals and product availability information in the local eco-system. Headquartered in Bangalore, we have launched in four cities in India (Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune). In September 2015, we closed our series A round of funding with Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Impact Fund, Twitter founder Biz Stone, Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Venture Fund, Oliver Samwer’s Global Founders Capital and got featured in the ‘Essential Apps‘ and ‘Best Communication Apps‘ category of Google Play Store and this month we got featured on the Apple Appstore as well.

Here are some topics to get you started :

• About Lookup and Chat economy – Chat is eating the world
• Hyperlocal challenges – Search & Discovery, Payment, Logistics.
• Product management and, user experience challenges & best practices
• How to embrace failure and turn them to learning experiences
• Team building – Building rockstar teams
• Things that are important when you approach a VC

And here is a little bit more about myself:

• I like playing soccer in my free time (We organise football matches on weekends wherein the team unwinds)
• My favourite team is Manchester United
• I like to read about entrepreneurship and the latest in technology

Note from Daniel, TIA’s community manager:
The host may choose at his/her preference to not answer particular questions. The AMA is moderated by the community managers, so let’s keep the questions friendly. 🙂

You can read more about Lookup here:

• Whatsapp killed his last startup. Now he’s made a new kind of messaging app
• Twitter co-founder Biz Stone backs Indian college dropout turned MIT top innovator
• Japanese investors back Lookup, a messaging app for local shopping in India
• College dropout turned MIT top innovator rolls Craigslist and WhatsApp into one app for local shopping in India