The Brand Whisperer: How Kannan Sitaram Cracked the Code of India's D2C Revolution
From village hair washes to unicorn investments: The remarkable journey of Fireside Ventures co-founder who bridged India's traditional consumer economy with its digital-first future
The boy couldn't have been more than twelve, standing barefoot in the dusty courtyard of a village in rural India sometime in the early 1990s. Kannan Sitaram, then a young marketing executive with Hindustan Lever, had just convinced the child's mother to let them demonstrate their new product. What happened next was pure theater, the kind of grassroots brand building that would shape one of India's most successful venture capitalists.
"We used to catch hold of one of the kids, typically a boy in the village, and find out that his mother was around. And tell his mother, look, we're going to wash this guy's hair now. And open up Clinic Plus shampoo, and wash the guy's hair. Pick up his hair, easy to wash very quickly. And then ask his mother and mother's friends to come and feel that. And they could immediately see how soft the hair was and nice and the hair was shiny."
This wasn't just marketing,it was consumer psychology in action. Touch the hair. Feel the difference. See the shine. In an era before social media influencers and digital marketing funnels, building brands required this kind of visceral, human connection.
Three decades later, Sitaram applies these same consumer instincts to spot unicorns in India's booming direct-to-consumer economy. As co-founder and partner at Fireside Ventures, he has helped create a portfolio that reads like a who's who of Indian consumer brands: boAt, Mamaearth, Kapiva, The Sleep Company, and dozens more. The firm's first $50 million fund produced two unicorns from just 18 investments,a hit rate that makes even Silicon Valley veterans take notice.
But the path from village demonstrations to venture capital boardrooms reveals something deeper about how consumer brands are built, scaled, and ultimately become part of people's daily lives. It's a story that illuminates both the timeless principles of brand building and the unique dynamics reshaping India's $100 billion consumer economy.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Making of a Consumer Mind
Sitaram's journey into consumer marketing was hardly predetermined. Like many ambitious Indian students in the late 1970s, he started as an engineering student at IIT Madras. But something felt fundamentally wrong.
"Before that, I was an engineer and I ran away from engineering. Somewhere I just didn't get it at all. So I was hoping that IIM would be where I would find what I really enjoyed doing, and consumer marketing was it."
That pivotal realization at IIM Ahmedabad set him on a path that would take him through the corridors of some of India's most influential consumer companies. After graduation, he joined Ponds, which was later acquired by Unilever, beginning a relationship with the Anglo-Dutch giant that would span multiple decades and geographies.
What followed was a masterclass in consumer goods that few venture capitalists can match. Sitaram worked across every major category,personal care, laundry, home care, foods,and in markets from India to Bangladesh to Nepal. He lived through the great brand battles of the 1980s and 90s, watching Wheel detergent take on Nirma, seeing Dove break Unilever's own rules by expanding from a soap bar into a multi-category brand.
"I have sold some product or the other to some retail outlet in almost every single state in this country. We're on market visits in Kashmir, literally in Kanyakumari, in the northeast. So it gave me a huge amount of exposure to what India is about, how all the different Indias that are there."
This geographic and categorical breadth would prove crucial later. When young entrepreneurs pitch Fireside with ideas for ayurvedic supplements or audio accessories or sleep solutions, Sitaram draws from a mental database built across rural tea stalls in Assam and urban department stores in Mumbai.
The Unilever years also taught him something that many startup founders struggle with: the discipline of portfolio management. At HUL, brands weren't just launched and forgotten,they were systematically built, measured, and optimized over decades.
"Unilever and Hindustan Lever are very focused on category shares. So we take a category. Let's call it shampoo. And then look at how to segment the market and how to have a brand in each segment."
This methodical approach to brand building contrasted sharply with Dabur, where Sitaram later served as Chief Operating Officer. Dabur took a cross-category approach, leveraging its Ayurvedic heritage across everything from toothpaste to health supplements,a strategy that would later influence how he evaluates modern D2C brands.
The Science of Category Creation
By the time Sitaram reached senior executive roles, he had witnessed something remarkable: the birth of entirely new consumer categories. These weren't just new products, they were new ways of thinking about familiar problems.
Take Wheel detergent, one of the great category creation stories of Indian FMCG. In the 1980s, consumers had two choices: expensive detergent powder or cheap soap bars. Wheel created a third option, a detergent bar that cleaned better than soap but cost less than powder.
"Launching a detergent bar, I mean, it was a powder market or a soap market, and they're coming with a detergent bar and creating a category on that, was again a complete, really great marketing job."
The success of Wheel taught Sitaram that the biggest opportunities often lay in the spaces between existing categories. This insight would later help him recognize the potential in boAt, which created a new category between utility (charging cables) and lifestyle (audio accessories).
But category creation required more than just product innovation, it demanded understanding how consumers actually behaved in real-world situations. During his Dabur years, Sitaram saw this principle applied to an even older product category.
"Dabur came in as a fake ghee. That's how people saw it. Now there was desi ghee and there was fake ghee. And then how do you convince people that you can make tasty food with Dalda? In an era where ghee was scarce and expensive, it was actually a very good substitute. People used to go to villages and small towns and make puris with Dalda. And people would taste it and say, 'Okay, this is good.'"
The pattern was always the same: demonstrate, let consumers experience the difference, then build brand preference through repeated positive encounters. These weren't abstract marketing concepts, they were battle-tested methods for changing consumer behavior at scale.
This hands-on approach to consumer education evolved as technology changed. Village demonstrations gave way to television advertising, which eventually yielded to digital content and influencer marketing. But the core principle remained constant: brands succeed when they help consumers experience something better than what they had before.
"At that time, certainly, a lot of the category creation was show and tell. But then we started seeing the power of TV. Now we are in a very different era, which is about digital marketing. Here, the power of content is really extremely high. When you go into Meta, you go into Google, people are looking to see reviews. People are looking to see what is the content that you have provided."
The Private Equity Intermission
After nearly three decades in corporate life, Sitaram faced a choice that confronts many successful executives: continue climbing the corporate ladder or try something entirely different. The decision to leave came from a growing sense that his accumulated expertise could create more impact in a different context.
"I've done all of this in corporate life and I was getting a bit tired of corporate life. How do I do something more interesting with this?"
The transition to India Equity Partners as an operating partner provided crucial training for his eventual venture capital career. Private equity investing requires a different mindset than corporate management, instead of running a single business, you're helping multiple companies optimize their operations and strategy.
As CEO of Innovative Foods, a frozen food company in Kochi, Sitaram got his first taste of startup life. The experience was revelatory. Instead of managing billion-dollar brands with established market positions, he was trying to build consumer awareness and distribution networks from scratch.
The risk profile was entirely different too. In corporate roles, failure meant missing quarterly targets or losing market share. In private equity and startup environments, failure could mean the complete collapse of the business.
"A VC model is that you do a lot of deals. If you take Fund I, for example, we did eighteen deals. And therefore, there is a scatter in terms of outcomes. Some companies will do very well. Some companies will not succeed, and that's part of the risk which is built into the VC model."
This portfolio approach to risk management would become central to Sitaram's investment philosophy. Instead of trying to minimize downside risk, the goal became maximizing upside potential while accepting that some investments would inevitably fail.
The Fireside Genesis
The call from Kanwaljit Singh came at exactly the right moment. Singh, a veteran of Helion Venture Partners, was raising a new fund focused exclusively on early-stage consumer brands. For someone with Sitaram's background, the thesis was immediately compelling.
"Kanwaljit Singh, whom I know really well from my industrial days, he was raising this fund, and his thesis was about investing in very early stage consumer companies. And somewhere I felt that all that had been through, all that exposure to all the different Indias, the different product categories, working with very small companies when I was with India Equity Partners, it was just coming together in some holistic way."
Fireside Ventures launched in 2017 with $50 million and a focused mandate: find the next generation of iconic Indian consumer brands. The timing was perfect. Digital infrastructure was maturing, smartphone adoption was exploding, and a new generation of entrepreneurs was ready to bypass traditional retail channels.
But Sitaram and his partners quickly realized that capital alone wouldn't be sufficient. Young consumer brands needed an entire ecosystem of support, from digital marketing partnerships to supply chain optimization to governance frameworks.
"We realize quickly that putting money is just not enough. There's a lot of support that a young company requires, even with the best of founders. With the best of founders, they still have large gaps in their understanding of how to scale a business."
This insight led to one of Fireside's most innovative strategies: building direct relationships with the platforms and service providers that startups needed most. Instead of waiting for portfolio companies to figure out Facebook advertising or Amazon marketplace optimization on their own, Fireside proactively created those connections.
"For example, we talked to Meta, and we told them that you guys don't have a human being that young companies like ours can talk to if they have a problem. And when we explained what the business opportunity is, if they were to have a team dedicated to young companies, they saw the business sense. Actually, within a year, they put up a separate SME vertical."
The approach paid off spectacularly. Fund I produced two unicorns,boAt and Mamaearth,along with multiple successful exits. By the time they raised Fund II in 2021, institutional investors were eager to participate.
Decoding the Winners
The challenge in early-stage investing is separating signal from noise. When a company is doing ₹30-40 lakhs in monthly revenue, how do you determine if it can scale to ₹500-1200 crores? The data is limited, the market is unproven, and the founder is still learning how to run a business.
Sitaram's approach combines pattern recognition from his corporate years with intuitive assessment of market dynamics and founder quality. Take Kapiva, one of his earliest investments at Fireside.
"Kapiva is into ayurvedic products, and I've known Amit for a long time. Amit comes from the Bajaj family. I felt that he had what it takes to build a large business. But equally, I was pretty convinced that there was a very high level of relevance for Ayurveda with modern consumers. You just gotta communicate everything very differently, and I knew that's what we were setting up to do."
The investment thesis combined multiple elements: a founder with proven capability, a product category with deep cultural resonance, and a marketing approach adapted for contemporary consumers. None of these factors alone would guarantee success, but together they created conditions for building a significant business.
Similarly, the boAt investment required seeing beyond the immediate product to understand the deeper brand opportunity. When Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta started with charging cables, many investors saw a commoditized accessories business. Sitaram saw a lifestyle brand in the making.
The key was recognizing that young Indian consumers were ready for brands that reflected their identity and aspirations. Traditional audio companies focused on technical specifications and corporate marketing. boAt spoke the language of style, music culture, and personal expression.
"We believe that in the consumer area, you can't build great businesses by just throwing money at problems. This is not an eyeballs game. If your product isn't good, you can create lots of people who buy once and then don't buy again. But if the product is good, whatever it takes, you gotta fix it."
This philosophy, that consumer businesses must create genuine customer love rather than manufactured demand, became central to Fireside's investment approach. The metrics that matter aren't just user acquisition costs and retention rates, but deeper indicators of product-market fit.
The Scaling Playbooks
As Fireside's portfolio companies grew from startup phase to scale-up phase, Sitaram encountered a familiar challenge from his corporate days: how do you maintain entrepreneurial energy while building systematic processes?
The answer lay in developing what Fireside calls "scaling playbooks",frameworks that help founders navigate predictable challenges as they grow from ₹10 crores to ₹100 crores to ₹500 crores in revenue.
The most critical transition happens when founders must evolve from operators to CEOs. It's a shift that requires fundamentally different skills and mindsets.
"The skill set which makes for great founders is actually diametrically opposite of what makes for a great CEO. As a great founder, you are in the middle of all the problems, you're solving all the problems. Every problem comes to you and you know how to solve it the best. As a CEO with a team of several hundred people, you need to get other people who perhaps are more skilled than you in solving a problem, and you need to allow them to solve the problem."
This transition often represents an existential challenge for successful entrepreneurs. The very qualities that enabled them to start a company, hands-on problem solving, detailed involvement in every decision, willingness to do whatever it takes, can become obstacles as the organization grows.
Fireside's approach involves intensive coaching and systematic organizational development. Founders work with executive coaches to develop leadership capabilities. They implement governance structures that enable delegation without losing accountability. Most importantly, they learn to channel their entrepreneurial energy into creating systems rather than solving individual problems.
The scaling playbooks also address specific operational challenges that consumer brands encounter at different revenue stages. The ₹10-100 crore journey focuses heavily on product-market fit, channel optimization, and brand building. Companies experiment with different product lines, test various go-to-market strategies, and begin investing in brand infrastructure.
"Once you have that kind of sorted out, then you start thinking about how to focus. And the focus involves two things: what categories you really want to spend more money on and where you want to populate more new products. And the other thing is about starting to think about what is your brand."
The ₹100-500 crore journey requires different capabilities entirely. At this scale, companies must build sophisticated organizational structures, implement robust governance systems, and often expand beyond digital-first channels into offline retail.
"There is an inflection point where the founder himself or herself or as a team are no longer able to manage the entire team. And that's when they need to think about themselves as no longer just founders, but also as CEOs. They're not just doing the business, but they're managing the business."
Reading the Consumer Crystal Ball
Sitaram's unique position, bridging traditional FMCG experience with venture capital investing, provides insights into emerging consumer trends that pure financial investors often miss. His pattern recognition draws from decades of watching how consumer preferences evolve and new categories emerge.
One trend he identified early was the supplements opportunity. Traditional healthcare in India relied heavily on doctor consultations and pharmaceutical interventions. But changing consumer behavior, driven by digital information access, created space for preventive health products.
"The supplements business in India is totally underpenetrated. People of a certain generation relied entirely on doctor's prescription. But with Google and all of that, that has changed. People are getting a lot more informed about nutrition. And therefore, they don't want to go to a doctor. They are looking at what they should supplement."
This insight led to investments in multiple supplement companies: Wellbeing Nutrition, Good Bug, and Kapiva. Each approached the opportunity differently, but all capitalized on consumers' growing comfort with self-directed health decisions.
The pattern reflects a broader shift in Indian consumer behavior. Traditional brand building relied on authority figures, doctors, celebrities, trusted institutions, to validate product choices. Digital-native consumers increasingly trust peer reviews, influencer recommendations, and their own research.
This democratization of information creates opportunities for new brands to compete with established players, but it also raises the stakes for product quality and customer experience. In an era when every purchase can be reviewed and shared instantly, there's no hiding behind marketing if the product disappoints.
"When you go into Meta, you go into Google, people are looking to see reviews. People are looking to see what is the content that you have provided. I think all of that has become the way people are looking to buy into new categories."
The Portfolio Philosophy
By 2024, Fireside Ventures manages $395 million across three funds and has invested in 74 companies. The portfolio includes three unicorns (boAt, Cult.fit, and Licious), one IPO (Mamaearth/Honasa Consumer), and eleven acquisitions. The firm's approach to portfolio management reflects lessons learned from both traditional corporate strategy and venture capital best practices.
Unlike many VC firms that take a hands-off approach after investing, Fireside maintains active involvement with portfolio companies throughout their growth journey. This involves regular strategic sessions, operational support, and ecosystem connections.
As Fireside Ventures charts its next phase, Sitaram sees India’s consumer ecosystem maturing rapidly. Digital adoption, changing lifestyles, and increased health consciousness are creating fertile ground for innovative brands. But even amid this evolution, his core belief remains unchanged: the brands that endure are the ones that deliver real, tangible value to consumers.
India’s D2C revolution is just getting started. Which consumer trends do you think will define the next decade? Have you come across a brand that truly gets its consumers like Fireside-backed companies do? Share your thoughts in the comments below, we’d love to hear your take on the future of India’s consumer landscapeThe boy couldn't have been more than twelve, standing barefoot in the dusty courtyard of a village in rural India sometime in the early 1990s. Kannan Sitaram, then a young marketing executive with Hindustan Lever, had just convinced the child's mother to let them demonstrate their new product. What happened next was pure theater, the kind of grassroots brand building that would shape one of India's most successful venture capitalists.
"We used to catch hold of one of the kids, typically a boy in the village, and find out that his mother was around. And tell his mother, look, we're going to wash this guy's hair now. And open up Clinic Plus shampoo, and wash the guy's hair. Pick up his hair, easy to wash very quickly. And then ask his mother and mother's friends to come and feel that. And they could immediately see how soft the hair was and nice and the hair was shiny."
This wasn't just marketing, it was consumer psychology in action. Touch the hair. Feel the difference. See the shine. In an era before social media influencers and digital marketing funnels, building brands required this kind of visceral, human connection.
Three decades later, Sitaram applies these same consumer instincts to spot unicorns in India's booming direct-to-consumer economy. As co-founder and partner at Fireside Ventures, he has helped create a portfolio that reads like a who's who of Indian consumer brands: boAt, Mamaearth, Kapiva, The Sleep Company, and dozens more. The firm's first $50 million fund produced two unicorns from just 18 investments,a hit rate that makes even Silicon Valley veterans take notice.
But the path from village demonstrations to venture capital boardrooms reveals something deeper about how consumer brands are built, scaled, and ultimately become part of people's daily lives. It's a story that illuminates both the timeless principles of brand building and the unique dynamics reshaping India's $100 billion consumer economy.
The Making of a Consumer Mind
Sitaram's journey into consumer marketing was hardly predetermined. Like many ambitious Indian students in the late 1970s, he started as an engineering student at IIT Madras. But something felt fundamentally wrong.
"Before that, I was an engineer and I ran away from engineering. Somewhere I just didn't get it at all. So I was hoping that IIM would be where I would find what I really enjoyed doing, and consumer marketing was it."
That pivotal realization at IIM Ahmedabad set him on a path that would take him through the corridors of some of India's most influential consumer companies. After graduation, he joined Ponds, which was later acquired by Unilever, beginning a relationship with the Anglo-Dutch giant that would span multiple decades and geographies.
What followed was a masterclass in consumer goods that few venture capitalists can match. Sitaram worked across every major category, personal care, laundry, home care, foods,and in markets from India to Bangladesh to Nepal. He lived through the great brand battles of the 1980s and 90s, watching Wheel detergent take on Nirma, seeing Dove break Unilever's own rules by expanding from a soap bar into a multi-category brand.
"I have sold some product or the other to some retail outlet in almost every single state in this country. We're on market visits in Kashmir, literally in Kanyakumari, in the northeast. So it gave me a huge amount of exposure to what India is about, how all the different Indias that are there."
This geographic and categorical breadth would prove crucial later. When young entrepreneurs pitch Fireside with ideas for ayurvedic supplements or audio accessories or sleep solutions, Sitaram draws from a mental database built across rural tea stalls in Assam and urban department stores in Mumbai.
The Unilever years also taught him something that many startup founders struggle with: the discipline of portfolio management. At HUL, brands weren't just launched and forgotten, they were systematically built, measured, and optimized over decades.
"Unilever and Hindustan Lever are very focused on category shares. So we take a category. Let's call it shampoo. And then look at how to segment the market and how to have a brand in each segment."
This methodical approach to brand building contrasted sharply with Dabur, where Sitaram later served as Chief Operating Officer. Dabur took a cross-category approach, leveraging its Ayurvedic heritage across everything from toothpaste to health supplements, a strategy that would later influence how he evaluates modern D2C brands.
The Science of Category Creation
By the time Sitaram reached senior executive roles, he had witnessed something remarkable: the birth of entirely new consumer categories. These weren't just new products, they were new ways of thinking about familiar problems.
Take Wheel detergent, one of the great category creation stories of Indian FMCG. In the 1980s, consumers had two choices: expensive detergent powder or cheap soap bars. Wheel created a third option, a detergent bar that cleaned better than soap but cost less than powder.
"Launching a detergent bar,I mean, it was a powder market or a soap market, and they're coming with a detergent bar and creating a category on that, was again a complete, really great marketing job."
The success of Wheel taught Sitaram that the biggest opportunities often lay in the spaces between existing categories. This insight would later help him recognize the potential in boAt, which created a new category between utility (charging cables) and lifestyle (audio accessories).
But category creation required more than just product innovation, it demanded understanding how consumers actually behaved in real-world situations. During his Dabur years, Sitaram saw this principle applied to an even older product category.
"Dabur came in as a fake ghee. That's how people saw it. Now there was desi ghee and there was fake ghee. And then how do you convince people that you can make tasty food with Dalda? In an era where ghee was scarce and expensive, it was actually a very good substitute. People used to go to villages and small towns and make puris with Dalda. And people would taste it and say, 'Okay, this is good.'"
The pattern was always the same: demonstrate, let consumers experience the difference, then build brand preference through repeated positive encounters. These weren't abstract marketing concepts, they were battle-tested methods for changing consumer behavior at scale.
This hands-on approach to consumer education evolved as technology changed. Village demonstrations gave way to television advertising, which eventually yielded to digital content and influencer marketing. But the core principle remained constant: brands succeed when they help consumers experience something better than what they had before.
"At that time, certainly, a lot of the category creation was show and tell. But then we started seeing the power of TV. Now we are in a very different era, which is about digital marketing. Here, the power of content is really extremely high. When you go into Meta, you go into Google, people are looking to see reviews. People are looking to see what is the content that you have provided."
The Private Equity Intermission
After nearly three decades in corporate life, Sitaram faced a choice that confronts many successful executives: continue climbing the corporate ladder or try something entirely different. The decision to leave came from a growing sense that his accumulated expertise could create more impact in a different context.
"I've done all of this in corporate life and I was getting a bit tired of corporate life. How do I do something more interesting with this?"
The transition to India Equity Partners as an operating partner provided crucial training for his eventual venture capital career. Private equity investing requires a different mindset than corporate management, instead of running a single business, you're helping multiple companies optimize their operations and strategy.
As CEO of Innovative Foods, a frozen food company in Kochi, Sitaram got his first taste of startup life. The experience was revelatory. Instead of managing billion-dollar brands with established market positions, he was trying to build consumer awareness and distribution networks from scratch.
The risk profile was entirely different too. In corporate roles, failure meant missing quarterly targets or losing market share. In private equity and startup environments, failure could mean the complete collapse of the business.
"A VC model is that you do a lot of deals. If you take Fund I, for example, we did eighteen deals. And therefore, there is a scatter in terms of outcomes. Some companies will do very well. Some companies will not succeed, and that's part of the risk which is built into the VC model."
This portfolio approach to risk management would become central to Sitaram's investment philosophy. Instead of trying to minimize downside risk, the goal became maximizing upside potential while accepting that some investments would inevitably fail.
The Fireside Genesis
The call from Kanwaljit Singh came at exactly the right moment. Singh, a veteran of Helion Venture Partners, was raising a new fund focused exclusively on early-stage consumer brands. For someone with Sitaram's background, the thesis was immediately compelling.
"Kanwaljit Singh, whom I know really well from my industrial days, he was raising this fund, and his thesis was about investing in very early stage consumer companies. And somewhere I felt that all that had been through, all that exposure to all the different Indias, the different product categories, working with very small companies when I was with India Equity Partners, it was just coming together in some holistic way."
Fireside Ventures launched in 2017 with $50 million and a focused mandate: find the next generation of iconic Indian consumer brands. The timing was perfect. Digital infrastructure was maturing, smartphone adoption was exploding, and a new generation of entrepreneurs was ready to bypass traditional retail channels.
But Sitaram and his partners quickly realized that capital alone wouldn't be sufficient. Young consumer brands needed an entire ecosystem of support, from digital marketing partnerships to supply chain optimization to governance frameworks.
"We realize quickly that putting money is just not enough. There's a lot of support that a young company requires, even with the best of founders. With the best of founders, they still have large gaps in their understanding of how to scale a business."
This insight led to one of Fireside's most innovative strategies: building direct relationships with the platforms and service providers that startups needed most. Instead of waiting for portfolio companies to figure out Facebook advertising or Amazon marketplace optimization on their own, Fireside proactively created those connections.
"For example, we talked to Meta, and we told them that you guys don't have a human being that young companies like ours can talk to if they have a problem. And when we explained what the business opportunity is, if they were to have a team dedicated to young companies, they saw the business sense. Actually, within a year, they put up a separate SME vertical."
The approach paid off spectacularly. Fund I produced two unicorns, boAt and Mamaearth, along with multiple successful exits. By the time they raised Fund II in 2021, institutional investors were eager to participate.
Decoding the Winners
The challenge in early-stage investing is separating signal from noise. When a company is doing ₹30-40 lakhs in monthly revenue, how do you determine if it can scale to ₹500-1200 crores? The data is limited, the market is unproven, and the founder is still learning how to run a business.
Sitaram's approach combines pattern recognition from his corporate years with intuitive assessment of market dynamics and founder quality. Take Kapiva, one of his earliest investments at Fireside.
"Kapiva is into ayurvedic products, and I've known Amit for a long time. Amit comes from the Bajaj family. I felt that he had what it takes to build a large business. But equally, I was pretty convinced that there was a very high level of relevance for Ayurveda with modern consumers. You just gotta communicate everything very differently, and I knew that's what we were setting up to do."
The investment thesis combined multiple elements: a founder with proven capability, a product category with deep cultural resonance, and a marketing approach adapted for contemporary consumers. None of these factors alone would guarantee success, but together they created conditions for building a significant business.
Similarly, the boAt investment required seeing beyond the immediate product to understand the deeper brand opportunity. When Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta started with charging cables, many investors saw a commoditized accessories business. Sitaram saw a lifestyle brand in the making.
The key was recognizing that young Indian consumers were ready for brands that reflected their identity and aspirations. Traditional audio companies focused on technical specifications and corporate marketing. boAt spoke the language of style, music culture, and personal expression.
"We believe that in the consumer area, you can't build great businesses by just throwing money at problems. This is not an eyeballs game. If your product isn't good, you can create lots of people who buy once and then don't buy again. But if the product is good, whatever it takes, you gotta fix it."
This philosophy, that consumer businesses must create genuine customer love rather than manufactured demand, became central to Fireside's investment approach. The metrics that matter aren't just user acquisition costs and retention rates, but deeper indicators of product-market fit.
The Scaling Playbooks
As Fireside's portfolio companies grew from startup phase to scale-up phase, Sitaram encountered a familiar challenge from his corporate days: how do you maintain entrepreneurial energy while building systematic processes?
The answer lay in developing what Fireside calls "scaling playbooks",frameworks that help founders navigate predictable challenges as they grow from ₹10 crores to ₹100 crores to ₹500 crores in revenue.
The most critical transition happens when founders must evolve from operators to CEOs. It's a shift that requires fundamentally different skills and mindsets.
"The skill set which makes for great founders is actually diametrically opposite of what makes for a great CEO. As a great founder, you are in the middle of all the problems, you're solving all the problems. Every problem comes to you and you know how to solve it the best. As a CEO with a team of several hundred people, you need to get other people who perhaps are more skilled than you in solving a problem, and you need to allow them to solve the problem."
This transition often represents an existential challenge for successful entrepreneurs. The very qualities that enabled them to start a company, hands-on problem solving, detailed involvement in every decision, willingness to do whatever it takes, can become obstacles as the organization grows.
Fireside's approach involves intensive coaching and systematic organizational development. Founders work with executive coaches to develop leadership capabilities. They implement governance structures that enable delegation without losing accountability. Most importantly, they learn to channel their entrepreneurial energy into creating systems rather than solving individual problems.
The scaling playbooks also address specific operational challenges that consumer brands encounter at different revenue stages. The ₹10-100 crore journey focuses heavily on product-market fit, channel optimization, and brand building. Companies experiment with different product lines, test various go-to-market strategies, and begin investing in brand infrastructure.
"Once you have that kind of sorted out, then you start thinking about how to focus. And the focus involves two things: what categories you really want to spend more money on and where you want to populate more new products. And the other thing is about starting to think about what is your brand."
The ₹100-500 crore journey requires different capabilities entirely. At this scale, companies must build sophisticated organizational structures, implement robust governance systems, and often expand beyond digital-first channels into offline retail.
"There is an inflection point where the founder himself or herself or as a team are no longer able to manage the entire team. And that's when they need to think about themselves as no longer just founders, but also as CEOs. They're not just doing the business, but they're managing the business."
Reading the Consumer Crystal Ball
Sitaram's unique position, bridging traditional FMCG experience with venture capital investing, provides insights into emerging consumer trends that pure financial investors often miss. His pattern recognition draws from decades of watching how consumer preferences evolve and new categories emerge.
One trend he identified early was the supplements opportunity. Traditional healthcare in India relied heavily on doctor consultations and pharmaceutical interventions. But changing consumer behavior, driven by digital information access, created space for preventive health products.
"The supplements business in India is totally underpenetrated. People of a certain generation relied entirely on doctor's prescription. But with Google and all of that, that has changed. People are getting a lot more informed about nutrition. And therefore, they don't want to go to a doctor. They are looking at what they should supplement."
This insight led to investments in multiple supplement companies: Wellbeing Nutrition, Good Bug, and Kapiva. Each approached the opportunity differently, but all capitalized on consumers' growing comfort with self-directed health decisions.
The pattern reflects a broader shift in Indian consumer behavior. Traditional brand building relied on authority figures, doctors, celebrities, trusted institutions, to validate product choices. Digital-native consumers increasingly trust peer reviews, influencer recommendations, and their own research.
This democratization of information creates opportunities for new brands to compete with established players, but it also raises the stakes for product quality and customer experience. In an era when every purchase can be reviewed and shared instantly, there's no hiding behind marketing if the product disappoints.
"When you go into Meta, you go into Google, people are looking to see reviews. People are looking to see what is the content that you have provided. I think all of that has become the way people are looking to buy into new categories."
The Portfolio Philosophy
By 2024, Fireside Ventures manages $395 million across three funds and has invested in 74 companies. The portfolio includes three unicorns (boAt, Cult.fit, and Licious), one IPO (Mamaearth/Honasa Consumer), and eleven acquisitions. The firm's approach to portfolio management reflects lessons learned from both traditional corporate strategy and venture capital best practices.
Unlike many VC firms that take a hands-off approach after investing, Fireside maintains active involvement with portfolio companies throughout their growth journey. This involves regular strategic sessions, operational support, and ecosystem connections.
As Fireside Ventures charts its next phase, Sitaram sees India’s consumer ecosystem maturing rapidly. Digital adoption, changing lifestyles, and increased health consciousness are creating fertile ground for innovative brands. But even amid this evolution, his core belief remains unchanged: the brands that endure are the ones that deliver real, tangible value to consumers.
India’s D2C revolution is just getting started. Which consumer trends do you think will define the next decade? Have you come across a brand that truly gets its consumers like Fireside-backed companies do? Share your thoughts in the comments below, we’d love to hear your take on the future of India’s consumer landscape.
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