258: Started with ₹8 Lakhs and built a Billion Dollar Company | Abhishek Bansal, Shadowfax

What happens if you fail with everyone's money?Abhishek Bansal never let himself ask and he thinks that's the only reason Shadowfax exists. He's the first public-company CEO on Unstarted: a middle-class kid from Meerut who quit his job without telling his parents, asked a VC for $5 million with zero orders, and was the only one still standing after the year every competitor died. In this conversation with Avnish Bajaj, they attempt to answer:1. Should you have a co-founder and how do you actually pick one?  2. What should founders look for in a VC when there are multiple offers? 3. How do you tell your team you're failing? 4. Sustainable growth, or aggressive scaling?By the end, you understand his test: accept the failure, name the core problem, tell your team. Because teams don't break on failure — they break on how you behave in it.Chapters0:00 Intro: our first public company CEO 1:19 Meerut, a middle-class home, and IIT Delhi 4:04 Parents didn't know he had quit his job 7:50 Q: How do you choose between VC offers? 8:47 Why he wanted a co-founder, not a skills match 11:03 Why not bootstrap? 11:28 Asking for $5 million with no product 12:23 The ₹8 lakh phone call 13:28 The angels who never sold: 1000x and counting 14:31 Three offers: $2M, $5M, $9M 17:19 Q: How do founders bounce back from failure? 17:46 The 2015 crash: five funded, one survivor 23:07 Knowing the core problem is the hardest problem 28:07 The offsite: profitable in three months 28:32 The retention numbers behind the culture 29:20 Q: Aggressive scaling or sustainable growth? 29:56 "In India, no idea is unique" 32:14 The guardrails: unit economics and 50-30-20 37:26 The CAPEX model that ran 100 iterations 39:07 When the HR team built its own hiring tool 40:20 Closing: teams compound, individuals don't