Two by Two (Private)

But there’s one company in India with every piece of it refuses to spin it In 2017, Disney walked away from a fortune. It pulled Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar off Netflix, ate the lost licensing cheques, and poured the money into a platform it was building from scratch. The logic was the logic of every integrated media company since — if you own the content and you own the pipe, you don't rent your...

Three things happened in eleven days.  The US ordered Anthropic to cut off its most powerful models for foreign users.  HCL Tech put $150 million into Sarvam.  And Mukesh Ambani told Reliance shareholders that India cannot keep renting its intelligence.  Everyone agrees India needs sovereign AI. And yet, almost nobody agrees on who should pay for it. Most of the money that is moving into AI goes i...

In the 48 hours since Meta announced it was putting $900 million into Cred and taking Kunal Shah to run WhatsApp globally, you've probably read a dozen confident explanations of what it all means. Praveen and Rohin don't have one. That's the point of this episode. Because the people who actually know aren't talking, investors have liquidation preferences to protect. Operators have relationships on...

The newest way to build a new AI product is to say, “X is broken, and we fixed it using AI”. Well, hiring was probably broken, but AI didn’t change the outcome. Instead, it made it into an arms race where candidates are sold AI tools which help them apply to companies and roles en masse in an automated way. On the other side, recruiters who have increasingly gotten tired of the same AI-generated a...

Everything around the Indian economy looks shaky, i.e., a months-long conflict, a sliding rupee, and a government telling people to stop buying gold. Except for one important caveat: India’s market continues to hold on. The Sensex and Nifty have barely moved.  The reason why that seems to be happening is pretty simple — every month, Indian households pour ₹31,000 crore into equity through SIP (Sys...

Emergent, the vibe-coding startup, has a $100 million annual run rate and 6 million users across 190 countries. Plus, it’s backed by the biggest names in the industry—Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. By most conventional measures, Emergent is the most successful consumer AI startup to come out of India, and is one of the fastest-growing companies anywhere in the wor...

There are two ways to tell the quick commerce story in India. The first, and the more conventional way this narrative exists is that quick-commerce is a three-way race between Blinkit, which has pulled ahead with 2,200 dark stores and a roughly half-market share lead, Zepto, which has packed 21 stores per city in a metro saturation play, and Instamart, which sits squeezed in the middle. Every metr...

These days it’s fashionable to have an AI story, no matter what you do.  But in December 2024, Bajaj Finance took it a few steps further. Instead of calling itself "a lender investing in AI," it started to describe itself as a "FinAI company" - a category of one, which it committed to in a five-year plan to FY29.  Eighteen months in, no other Indian lender is putting AI on their slides the way Baj...

In 2017, four ex-Flipkart engineers made a bet that looked seemingly ridiculous at the time. They decided to build a company that let anyone buy mutual funds directly, with no commissions or hidden fees. And then on top of it, they built it as a clean app that made it easy and simple for anyone to start investing. Nobody thought it would work. Well, it worked. Nine years later, Groww is India's la...

The old way to grow as a product designer meant doing the grunt work (button variants, banner sizes, edges cases) until your instincts calibrated. In the new world, AI does the grunt work, faster and cheaper than any junior designer ever could. And the numbers reveal this crisis : UX job postings fell 73% between 2022 and 2023. Less than 5% of tech companies hire entry-level design talent. Rapid c...

Eighteen months ago, Hyrox did not exist in India. Last month, 8,200 people paid Rs 9,000 each to do a sled push at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. Attendees described the event as a “carnival”, and for several weeks, everyone was talking and proudly sharing their Hyrox timings. If you’re wondering what on earth is going on, well, this episode is for you. Fitness as an event isn’t n...

“There is no pride in this. Kya karoon (what can I do), I’m just a delivery boy.” Every time someone raises the topic of gig economy in India, the conversation follows the same script. Side A: this is exploitation. Side B: but employment. And then everyone moves on, nothing changes, and 12 million people keep showing up every morning to deliver your groceries. This episode tries to push past that...

What happened to the company that once understood India better than anyone else?  For decades Hindustan Unilever has dominated kitchen pantries and bathroom cabinets across the country: Surf Excel in the laundry, Brooke Bond in the kitchen, Clinic Plus in the bathroom.  It was the undisputed gold standard of brand building in this country.  Well, until it wasn’t.  Case in point: a couple of weeks...

"Of course BHIM is giving crazy cashbacks. That's where I pay my bills." That's not a BHIM fan but a product head at a competing UPI app. After demonetisation hit in 2016, India desperately needed a way to go cashless overnight. UPI existed but barely anyone was using it. Banks were dragging their feet and private players were too small and too few. So, NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India...

"This is our Frankenstein. We made it. And now it's left the room."  A cricketer said this about the IPL and our guest, Sharda Ugra, India's most respected cricket journalist with thirty years of covering the game, brought it to our studio. And honestly, we couldn't think of a better way to open this episode. Last week, RCB and Rajasthan Royals sold for nearly $3 billion combined. With private equ...

Last week, Rapido launched Ownly, its zero commission food delivery app and went straight for Swiggy and Zomato's throat. This is the same company that dismantled the Uber-Ola duopoly with just a simpler model, cheaper rides, and a very different idea of what India actually needs. Their weapon this time is zero commission. They're betting on restaurants that are fed up, customers who want cheaper...

Last year, when Trump's tariffs blindsided the world, we called Mohit Satyanand . He made sense of the chaos before most people had even figured out what to panic about. This time, we didn't wait. A war broke out in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and within days India was rationing cooking gas, cancelling flights and watching the rupee slip. Everyone has an opinion, but Mohit has so...

Most businesses die quietly. They miss a wave, lose relevance and fade out. Healthify nearly got hit by two in quick succession. First, AI that could do what took the company years to build. Then, a drug which meant you didn't need the discipline anymore. So Rahel Philipose and Praveen Gopal Krishnan asked Tushar Vashisht , Healthify's co-founder and CEO, the uncomfortable question directly: if an...

"They are not disloyal. They are unforgiving." Sector by sector, a new generation of brands is doing the same thing by ignoring millennials entirely and going straight for Gen Z. Zepto did it to Blinkit. Snabbit is doing it to Urban Company. The thesis is simple: Gen Z has no loyalty to the old guard, so steal them first and use them as a wedge to crack the rest of the market open. But is that act...

Quick question: Would you give someone your money for ten years if they promised you'd get back roughly what an FD would give you? And they'd also take 2% of your money every single year, no matter what happens, plus 20% of any profits at the end. You'd laugh them out of the room, right? Well, that's venture capital. Peak XV lost three of its partners. Ashish Agarwal who backed Groww, Ishan Mittal...

If you are in your 20s or 30s in India right now, things probably feel a little weird. The headlines say the country is a rocket ship, but your reality might be hiring freezes and stagnant salaries. To understand why, we sat down with someone who actually moves the money. Since the 1990s, Rohit Chopra , portfolio manager/analyst at Lazard Asset Management, has managed billions of dollars across em...

Last week, nearly ₹2 lakh crore vanished from Indian IT stocks in just four days. A big reason was Anthropic's new product, Claude Cowork. Suddenly investors were confronted with an unsettling reality: what if the work Indian IT has long depended on is now the easiest to automate? For almost 20 years, India's IT giants have been unstoppable compounding machines. They built empires worth hundreds o...

Software engineering as we knew it is over and the entry-level job has vanished. So what do you tell someone graduating today? This question splits even the experts. Arnav Gupta , Engineering Manager at Meta and co-founder of Coding Blocks, argues the knowledge must compress. He says that the future belongs to those who adapt fast and embrace the AI tools. Meanwhile Abhay Saraf , Director at Bushe...

PhonePe leads nearly half of India's UPI transactions, but as it gears up for a $1.3 billion IPO, a tough question looms: can a company built to defend its lead ever learn to make real profit? In this episode, Rohin Dharmakumar argues that PhonePe's dominance might actually be a strategic trap. With zero-margin transactions and shifting regulations, the next ten years cannot look like the last. To...

Swiggy has launched Noice, a private label brand that's popping up across categories on Instamart. But is this a genuine brand-building play or just another experiment destined for Swiggy's product graveyard? In this episode, co-hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar are joined by Sandeep Nair , co-founder of brand strategy consultancy David & Who and former Swiggy marketing direct...