Perspectives

Amazing Teams Podcast: You Can’t Clap with One Hand: Lessons from 55 Startups with Sanket Merchant

By 
July 15, 2025

In this episode of the Amazing Teams podcast, we sat down with Sanket Merchant, a partner at PeakSpan Capital, who shares insights from his career journey in the software investment space. He discusses the importance of culture, clarity, and support in building high-performing teams and organizations. Sanket emphasizes the value of trust, agility, and gratitude in leadership and how these elements drive the success of entrepreneurial ventures. He also highlights the importance of evaluating entrepreneurial teams based on shared values and mutual respect, and the role gratitude plays in cultivating a positive work environment.

We dive into:

  • How high-performing teams demonstrate accountability, commitment, and coachability
  • Why trust is essential for building strong business partnerships
  • The importance of agility and responsiveness in fast-paced environments

Resources:

About Sanket Merchant

Sanket has worked with growth-stage software businesses throughout his career and has served on more than 12 boards. Today, he is one of four Partners on the team and leads the firm's coverage of both Cyber & Digital Infrastructure and EdTech. Sanket joined PeakSpan just one year after its founding in 2016 as one of the first non-founding team members and has helped build the firm from two investments and $150M in Fund I to more than $2.5B in AUM, backing applied AI and B2B software companies on the journey from $3–10M to beyond $50M in ARR.

Before joining PeakSpan, Sanket worked in the Technology, Media & Telecom Group at Houlihan Lokey, focusing exclusively on software M&A and private financing transactions for $10–50M ARR companies through critical inflection points such as selling, raising capital, or recapitalizing. Before Houlihan Lokey, Sanket was a Global Banking and Brokerage Group Consultant at FactSet Research Systems, where he partnered with investment banking, private equity, and venture capital clients.

Sanket holds a B.B.A. in Finance with a minor in Economics from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Sanket jokes that he's grown up at PeakSpan, having celebrated some remarkable personal milestones while with the firm, including getting engaged and married to his wife, Mansi, purchasing their first home, and welcoming their twin boys, Aarav and Samar.

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