Writing · Creative Strategy · Fourteen Years
I put words
to work.
Writing that sits at the intersection of brand, business, and culture.
Fourteen years. Agencies, in-house teams, and now venture. The through-line is and has always been question underneath the brief: what does the audience actually need to hear?
I've broken down fund theses for founders who'd rather be building, made campaign films that doubled as product catalogues, written company values that had to survive two rebrands, and built podcast formats that cemented a rebrand. The work is always the same: find the honest thing to say, then find the sharpest way to say it.
AVP Marketing, Z47: India's most storied venture fund, $3.5Bn AUM.
Building the brand, content and narrative infrastructure for a fund in transition.
Previously: PhonePe · CoinSwitch · Hotstar · 22feet Tribal Worldwide (Fastrack)
Recognition
The Writing
Every form the human voice takes. Usually all at once.
Land & Expand
Five chapters on what it actually takes for Indian enterprise founders to win internationally.
The writer behind the work
Madhavi Varanasi. Writer. Strategist. Currently AVP Marketing at Z47.
Fourteen years across agencies, in-house brand teams, and now venture. Writing in every form the human voice takes. The through-line is always the question underneath the brief: what does this person actually need to hear?
Outside the work
Ceramics, specifically the part where nothing goes according to plan. Freediving — the one discipline that demands you be completely still and completely present. And internet culture, consumed at depths that may concern the people around me.
How I work now
Since 2024, AI has changed the velocity of everything. My handy toolkit of AI assistants help me get to a first direction faster, clear the production layer, and test formats that wouldn't have been feasible before.
The judgment about what to keep, what to rewrite, and what to throw away: that part is still mine. It just moves faster now.
Fourteen years
Building the brand and content infrastructure for India's most storied venture fund: from rebrand to content IP to an annual thesis.
Built and led a 5-person content team from scratch. Launched the company's first blog, company values, and editorial programme, through a bull market and out the other side.
Effie-winning campaigns. Har Phone Pe, Faces of Fraud, Unstoppable India, Best to Just PhonePe. Writing at the scale of 250 million users.
Led creative content initiatives across in-app and other channels. Rich, immersive experiences through writing, visuals, and video.
OTT marketing in its earliest form: Torrents Morghulis, Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, and writing the playbook as we went. Two Effies, an Abby, a Kyoorius.
Conceptualised and created customised digital and video solutions for brands across the Condé Nast portfolio.
Agency years on Fastrack. India's first branded music video. Social-first campaigns before social-first was a strategy.
SEO content for a vast product catalogue across verticals. Where the writing habit became a writing career.
"I believe in deep, uninterrupted sleep and the kind of work that earns it."
Let's talk.
If you've made it this far, we probably have something to talk about.
Giving Capital a Voice
A fund's point of view is its most valuable asset. This is what building one from scratch looks like.
Z47 rebranded from Matrix Partners India, one of India's most storied VC firms, in 2024. New name, new positioning, blank page where the voice should be. The first piece of content published under the new brand was written, scripted, shot, and edited by a team of three. One of them me.
Land & Expand
What does it actually take for an Indian enterprise founder to land a first customer in the US and build from there? Land & Expand is a series of playbooks for Indian founders going global. Not theory. Real founders, real journeys, real tactical detail. Five chapters: concept, interviews, writing, editing, distribution. End to end.
“The founders who win internationally aren’t the ones with the best product. They’re the ones who figured out how to be believed.”
10,000 page views & shares + a firm footing for the fund in Enterprise SaaS storytelling.
Future Signals
The brief was simple and impossible: distil the fund's forward-looking perspectives into a document that founders actually want to read. Recap one of the most thrilling years in tech advancement spurred by AI, and lay the ground for what's coming next.
Conceived the concept, scripted the accompanying video, and wrote every word. Four thematic clusters: Where The Money Moves Next / Speed Is The Advantage / Consumption Is Being Rewritten / India Is One Market.
"The moat is the willingness to be accountable for the outcome."
~5,000 views + reads across a multi-format piece: long-form & video.
The Matrix → Z47 brand transition
Z47 had just rebranded from Matrix Partners India. New name, new positioning, no language for any of it. No website that reflected what the fund had become. No voice that spoke to the founders they wanted to back next. The brief: build all of it.
Led the content layer of the brand transition: website copy, positioning language, sector framing, founder-facing communications.
"Founders don't read about funds. They read about what a fund believes. Get the belief right, and the language follows."
A new mission rooted in the same vision that founders could align with. Breathed new life into the brand: colour, voice, intent and transitioned the website into the future.
How this work gets made
Since 2024, AI has been part of how every piece of Z47's content gets made. Not a replacement for editorial judgment. A multiplier for it.
Zodbot: a custom tool built for the workflow
An active content engine meant a production pipeline that needed to move faster than any off-the-shelf tool could handle. So we built one. Zodbot is a custom tool we built to smooth out the podcast workflow: transcription processing to distribution-ready assets in one pipeline. Not a product. A tool built for exactly this problem by the people who had the problem.
A once 20-hour workflow compacted into a couple of minutes. Ready-to-use formats that can be handed off to the next step.
I also use ChatGPT, Claude, TurboScribe, Canva, Notion AI, on the daily. They help compress the distance between a brief and a first draft, to transcribe and structure interview material at speed, to test formats before committing to production, and to operate at a scale that used to require a larger team.
The judgment about what to keep, what to cut, and what to rewrite entirely: that hasn't changed. It's just faster now.
"I don't use AI to replace the work. I use it to multiply what's possible."
Making Money Make Sense
Finance is one of the most anxiety-laden categories in a consumer's life. The writing that dismantles that: at scale, without condescension.
PhonePe
PhonePe had hundreds of millions of users. The brand had become infrastructure. Everyone used it, but few felt anything about it. The brief wasn't awareness. It was warmth.
Har phone pe PhonePe hai
Document PhonePe's ubiquity in the lives of 250M+ users. Cultural portrait, not brand film.
"When a product reaches everyone, the story isn't about the product anymore. It's about the people and how they use it."
Views in the millions + an ear worm you shouldn't shake + media mentions.
Faces of Fraud
Make digital payment fraud education genuinely entertaining. Ten episodes, ten scenarios.
"Leverage mythology in helping people understand the true threats of payment frauds."
Still in circulation + institutional acclaim.
Unstoppable India
In the throes of Covid, a film that demonstrated the platform's utility in helping a nation raring to get back.
A film so well crafted, then-brand ambassador Aamir Khan insisted on lending his voice to it.
Best to Just PhonePe
Twelve 15-second films to help the brand stand out in overstimulating IPL ad-breaks. Each one aimed at a different skeptic, in different moments.
"You don't need words to know the answer was always: just PhonePe."
One of the year's best — as evidenced by Exchange4Media.
CoinSwitch: demystifying crypto without talking down
Crypto in India was a category in chaos: regulatory uncertainty, a volatile market, and everyone watching to see what happened next. The writing had to hold all of that lightly. And: build a team from scratch, launch the company's first blog, and do all of it through a bear market.
Adventures in Video
Scriptwriter, producer, occasional songwriter. Building content IP before branded content was a safe bet.
Keep Trippin'
Fastrack's first ever music video. The ask: make something young India would watch even if Fastrack didn't exist. A shoppable experience disguised as a film. My first tryst with songwriting.
"If the product has to earn its place in every frame, you stop thinking like a brand and start thinking like a director."
2 min 30s average watch time with 20% better conversions than traditional media.
The Fastrack music video "Keep Trippin'" was one of the first branded music videos in India built as a fully shoppable experience, every frame a product catalogue in motion, before shoppable video existed as a category.
Faces of Fraud
A festive video series on digital payment fraud, scripted as cautionary tales. Ten episodes, ten scenarios, ten different registers. The idea was simple: make fraud education genuinely entertaining.
"You can educate people or you can entertain them. Doing both at the same time is the harder brief."
Youngstirs
Four portraits, four personalities. Each one a different argument for what it meant to be young and uncompromising.
"The product was a watch. The series was an attitude. Not the same brief."
HeadOn
A Fastrack helmet. The brief: make people want to wear it.
"Safety gear only sells when you stop selling safety."
Hotstar's Weekend Watchlist
Repackage Hotstar's vast movie library into shorter bingeworthy parcels. This one was about reboots.
Har phone pe PhonePe hai
250 million users. Mark this as a cultural moment, not a press release.
"At a certain scale, a product stops being a product and becomes part of how a country lives."
Born to the Internet
A decade at the intersection of culture and brand, starting before "digital first" was a strategy.
Torrents Morghulis, the GoT anti-piracy campaign, won two Effies. The brief was essentially "get people to stop stealing Game of Thrones." The insight that won it: people who pirate don't think they're doing anything wrong. So tell them it's uncool.
Hotstar: writing for the internet at its most chaotic
Torrents Morghulis
GoT Season 7. Pirates were taking more viewers than the platform. Stop piracy without moralising.
"Piracy is a distribution problem dressed up as a moral one. The campaign that worked spoke to the fan, not the criminal."
Effie Silver + Effie Bronze + Kyoorius 2018. Actual threats from real tormenters that put the legal team on guard.
Fastrack
Make Fastrack feel dangerous and desirable to 18-24 year olds. Social-first. Culture-first. Trending before trending was a KPI.
2015 Here I Come · #GetHardOnFastrack · #Cheatsheet · Toychest
"The brief was always: make something the audience would share before they remembered it was an ad."
Writing for Organisations
The words a company uses internally are the words it becomes externally. Writing them right is underrated work.
Zen Ten
A new fund needs a shared language before it can build a shared culture. Ten values for how Z47 serves, operates, wins, learns, and engages. Precise enough to shape a hiring call. Memorable enough to survive a town hall.
Building Blocks
No blog existed. The standard I set: every piece had to be worth reading even if CoinSwitch didn't exist. Concept, launch, ongoing editorial direction, including scouting storytellers across the company.
"Brand publishing through a bear market is an act of institutional honesty. Going quiet is not a neutral choice."
A Voice for Leaders
In the wake of a catastrophic year for crypto, I initiated a monthly dialogue between the senior leadership and users, an effort to reinstate trust and credibility.
"When the chips are down, it's important to speak up."
