What does it take to build a full-stack real estate platform in India, a market defined by broken processes, low trust, and extreme fragmentation, without following the traditional VC playbook?

In this Season 4 finale of the Blume Podcast, Karthik Reddy sits down with Tanuj Shori, Founder of Square Yards, to unpack a decade-long journey of building one of India’s most quietly scaled businesses, now moving ~₹18,000 Cr of real estate annually.

This is not a story of blitzscaling or overnight success. It’s a story of risk taken early, course-correction done fast, and patience sustained over decades — in a market most founders actively avoid.

This episode dives into:
- Why Square Yards refused to build “just another” property search platform
- The decision to go full-stack in a deeply interdependent real estate ecosystem
- Why category leadership mattered more than adjacency or incremental revenue
- Hiring co-founders, not employees, and building a 15-person founding bench that’s still intact a decade later
- A capital philosophy rooted in the belief that equity is the most expensive thing in the world
- How retail distribution — not product or tech — became the hardest problem to solve
- Why the team is building with a 20–40 year horizon, not for milestones or exits

From selling their own homes and going all-in, to building an IPO-ready platform designed to outlive its founders, this conversation offers rare insight into what it takes to organise a broken market at national scale.

Timestamps

00:00:00 – From Lehman Brothers to questioning “what is equity”

00:04:24 – Risk appetite, early course-correction, and being “all-in”

00:08:15 – Banking years, hard work, and why competence creates passion

00:14:29 – The accidental entrepreneur and the Square Yards origin story

00:20:20 – Selling personal and family assets to go all-in

00:31:01 – Why search & discovery failed — and full-stack was necessary

00:37:25 – Category leadership as a non-negotiable mandate

00:44:20 – Cracking scale: retail distribution, COVID tailwinds, and growth

00:54:38 – Destiny avenged, IPO as governance, and building for decades

This season is brought to you in partnership with IDFC FIRST Bank and Ultrahuman.

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