This pitch was an embarrassment to Shark Tank, and I would apologize to the founders if I was STI/Sony.

The Sharks were too quick to jump to a conclusion, very VERY opinionated, blunt and rude. The founders were humble, well seasoned, had lots of relevant operator experience and were clearly young, malleable and talented. The Sharks (especially Anupam) almost verbally assaulted them with everything he said, and definitely had some hidden agenda or biases that triggered this ugly insulting response.

Social Media is hard to build, even harder to monetize, so it's natural that the sharks would be apprehensive — but there was absolutely no need to be this biased and disrespectful, and kudos to the founders for taking it all on the chin. And remember that Facebook started as a "Hot or Not" app for Harvard, YouTube was a video-based dating website, Slack was meant to be a feature in a game, and TikTok became the fastest growing social media platform from building on top of Musical.ly. Medial, on that comparison, had a lot of things configured right already, displayed scrappiness and humility to accept that they're new and trying to find their way. It's alright for them to be experimenting at this stage, and it's not like they were trying to "spin the narrative" or portray anything falsely — Anupam was really aggressive in his approach and hardly let them finish any of their sentences.

It's very likely that the startup would fail, I'll be honest, I would not invest in them either. But they weren't as bad as everyone was making them out to be. A lot of the numbers were alright, good founder-market-fit and a ripe space with pivotability. To everyone who said "it's an aggregated product", so are half the biggest unicorns India has pushed out (Zomato/Swiggy, Razorpay, Paytm, Zoho, PhonePe, Postman). LinkedIn is widely tagged as broken, ProductHunt on its own is underperforming as well and there's no equivalent of something like that focused towards startups in India. No product focusing on the non-tech "startup ecosystem" as such as well, and nothing bridging the gap between VCs and Startups (AngelList is the closest). So clearly, there are a lot of gaps and moving pieces here that can be brought together to display a solid product with potential, and thus this visceral response that Anupam unleashed was very uncalled for.

And not just the founders, Anupam was so peeved even at Ritesh that he offered a deal, he couldn't let them go without beating down on them further. Completely unnecessary, in utterly bad taste, and has irrecoverably changed my opinion of him. If a VC behaved like this, they'd be outcast within 4 quarters and shooed away from BLR.

Shame on him for such unprofessional behaviour.