Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat

Razorpay is India's largest payments platform, processing over $180 billion annually. They were also the first Indian company YC ever invested in, and went through the W15 batch. In this fireside at Startup School India, co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur sat down with YC's Jon Xu to talk about the early days of building a payments company in India, the near-death moments that shaped the company's culture, and what he's learned about staying in founder mode ten years in. Chapters: 0:00 – Intro 1:11 – Discovering the payments problem 3:47 – Pivoting from education to startups 6:49 – Building in a regulated market and the one-year wait 9:10 – Losing conviction and finding it again through customers 11:10 – The bank pulling the plug two weeks after Demo Day 16:11 – Betting early on UPI before India's biggest banks 23:50 – AI, founder mode, and what it takes to build for 10 years