Two by Two (Private)

Both Zomato and Swiggy have been aggressively focusing on the 10-minute grocery delivery space for a while now. Quick commerce.  But what sent both of them into a spiral was when Zepto, the joker in the quick commerce pack, started delivering snacks in 10 minutes through Zepto Cafe, a separate app. Suddenly, quick commerce wasn’t enough. Quick food was up for play too. Swiggy launched Snacc soon a...

Business schools are among the most coveted higher educational institutions. Students go through some of the most competitive exams and pay significant fees because they hope that at the end of their degree, they will get a great job. Yet, the onerous process of finding, soliciting and bringing dozens of companies to campuses each year falls mostly on final-year students, who are part of elected/s...

In 2023, two-wheelers and three-wheelers in India experienced growth of around 37% and 66%. Electric four-wheelers also promised to go down the same path because in that same year, there was a significant increase in sales of electric four-wheelers, 113%. Now, of course, this is from a lower base, but the signs were clear. The conventional wisdom or the narrative has been that petrol and diesel ca...

Amazon India has fallen behind in the e-commerce race to Flipkart and now to Meesho as well, in tier-2 and tier-3 markets. It is the last large player to enter the quick-commerce race in India. Everything that made Amazon largely successful in the U.S. has not fully cut it for them in India, even though they understood India is a very different market and the approach they took in the U.S. might n...

It’s time for us to retire the term “Direct-to-Consumer” or D2C. The phrase is, anyway, a bit long in the tooth, having been used since the days of the dot-com boom. D2C used to mean selling directly to end customers, rather than selling through retailers or other middlemen. In theory, selling directly to consumers would allow a company to offer both lower prices and maintain higher margins (since...

Artificial intelligence will affect all facets of modern-day business in some way or another. But it will most definitely go a few layers deeper with the type of companies whose job is to be a record of business’ today – SaaS companies. SaaS as a business model is investment-heavy in the beginning. It’s risky to build, it takes time to build, and it takes skill to build. But if successful, it is a...

Fintech lending was supposed to be the bridge that would enable entrepreneurs, small businesses and even individuals across the country to get access to much-needed credit to build businesses. For millions of small and medium businesses, and even individuals seeking a personal loan, who’d otherwise not qualify for them (usually unsecured ones) from banks, these new-age financial institutions were...

Today’s episode of Two by Two is about how the marketing function has been eating itself from the inside. Historically, in companies, marketing has always been about the long term, while a function like sales was about the near term. Marketing owned the customer—what they wanted, their dreams, their fears, and their vanities. It was supposed to tell stories of customers back to the organisation an...

Dmart, the retail group in India, is absolutely number one on vision, execution, and consistency. Dmart opened its first supermarket in Mumbai’s Powai suburb in 2002. Like Walmart in the US, it adopted a deep discounting strategy, offering its customers low prices every day. Today, it has 381 stores. In spite of offering its customers the deepest discounts, Dmart’s net profit numbers beat those of...

For the last 24 months, the default way in which startups were exposed to venture capital and its effects has been, in many ways, paused. There's a slowdown. Venture capital funding for the first nine months of this year is down 7% over a similar period last year, per Tracxn. There have been news stories about layoffs, company shutdowns, and downrounds at various companies from a time when unicorn...

Ola Electric's woes just don’t seem to be stopping. From angry customers to its mercurial CEO getting into online spats as pressure mounts, many of its problems stretch seemingly beyond its control today for it to make a quick turnaround and change the narrative. And this is hurting its valuation significantly, both in the private and public markets. Just this week, Ola Electric's price fell below...

What happens when the government plays the role of regulator, policymaker, and operator? The government has played a pivotal role in establishing and promoting Digital Public Goods (DPG) and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in the past decade and a half, and there have been a few which have been integral in our daily lives in more ways than one. The reason why these solutions exist is plain and...

Ola and Uber are in a “late stage duopoly”. After spending billions and billions of dollars, they have finally secured pole positions in ride sharing in India. Both of these companies together control 70% of the market and they have created network effects that make it much harder for anyone to enter and compete with them. However, this particular situation is facing some new challenges and just l...

If you are a Product Manager, especially in India, you’re probably going through a crisis of faith and existence. As a career, Product Management in India has gone through multiple eras — in the early days, PMs struggled to explain to people what they actually did. Think about all the people you’d imagine who work at a software company. Marketing. Engineering. Sales. Analytics. Design. You can exp...

Ather Energy is the third largest seller of electric two-wheelers in India. Founded in 2013, Ather Energy is known to have kicked off the electric two-wheeler wave in India. They came in with a great product which offered the best of software and hardware on a two-wheeler. And over a decade of its existence Ather has delivered on its promise of a great product which will create a “magical experien...

Netflix is trying hard to crack the Indian market. Ever since the US streaming giant entered the country it has been hard at work to make an impact. And over the years they’ve learnt a thing or two about how the Indian streaming space functions. Netflix is also not shy about expressing how it sees India as its last growth market. Most of the other geographies it has saturated its reach to a large...

The fastest growing segment of insurance in India is individual health insurance. It’s growing steadily at a, well, healthy pace of 20% annually.  But scratch just a little beneath the surface and things don’t appear so rosy. Of the 20% annual growth in revenue, nearly 15% comes from medical inflation. Meaning, existing customers paying higher premiums each year because the costs of treatments are...

It seems like ‘invite only’ is a rite of passage for Stripe. If Stripe entered India with an invite-only step, then it seems reasonable to assume that it’s leaving India on the basis that it’s doing invite-only again. Over seven years, Stripe, the world’s mightiest fintech, currently valued at $70 billion (and at $95 billion at its peak), could not make a dent in India. It had a great product, a m...

12 years of schooling is losing out to private coaching as entry into India’s colleges gets increasingly centralized via entrance exams.    School education is a fundamental right in India. An average Indian child spends 10-12 years in schools. And for most parents and families, the money they spend on educating their child is one of the largest over time. And yet, school education is slowly becom...

Google Pay is India’s second largest UPI app with a market share of 38%, with 500+ crore transactions a month. It’s one of the world’s mightiest companies, and yet, we argue that it’s possibly in a vulnerable, strange position. By this, we don’t mean that it will disappear overnight, but that all kinds of competitors are coming for it. Already it’s market share has declined from 44% to 37%. It’s a...

Software engineering careers used to be a ladder. You studied for 4 years, got a job as a fresher, and could virtually take for granted a steady career filled with learning opportunities, salary hikes, and role promotions.   In fact being an engineer was so cool that we mocked MBAs and MBA-types – “suits” – for their desperation to find that elusive technical co-founder. The one who would translat...

The Swiggy of 2024 is a shadow of its former self.  Boxed in by younger, nimbler and hungrier competitors from all sides, it has been defending itself for so long that it seems to have forgotten how to play offense.  It wasn’t always like this. Swiggy used to define innovation, product chops and “Bengaluru cool”.  In many ways it pioneered food delivery in 2014 after pivoting from a courier servic...

The conventional wisdom is that Bengaluru is India’s Silicon Valley. It’s the cradle of India’s tech revolution. First there was Infosys and Wipro on the IT services side. Then when startups become cool and hip, the default location to get it all started was also Bengaluru.  Take the leaders across sectors, and you’ll see they belong to Bengaluru — Flipkart, InMobi, Swiggy, PhonePe, Myntra, Ola, A...

Welcome to another episode of Two by Two, a premium business podcast from The Ken. If you’re a premium subscriber, you can now listen to the full, uncut episode on your app – just click on the player right below the title! In 2021, as the pandemic still raged on and we washed our vegetables and supplies before consuming them, a young delivery startup promised that you can get all your groceries –...

Welcome to the first episode of The Ken’s brand new premium business podcast: Two by Two! In this episode, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar, CEO of The Ken and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, COO of The Ken, sit down with Professor R. Srinivasan and Srikanth Rajagopalan to discuss Flipkart and Phonepe – both owned by the American giant Walmart – are stepping over each other’s toes in an effort to create more avenu...