Yeah. Deep and Sanji welcome to the barber shop. You both are such stalwarts – investor, operator, founders. Let me give you a little bit about the barber shop. It was created as a marketing engine for Bombay Shaving Company. We wanted to be front and center in conversation for young consumers – young shavers, groomers, people going on dates, interviews, in college, first job, maybe getting married. We felt there was a level up that Gillette and Philips were not giving them. For younger consumers with sensitive skin, acne, beard styling, there was a huge gap. That's where Bombay Shaving Company came in. We realized we're a challenger entrepreneurial brand, and to become the center of conversation for these consumers who love startup founders, we created a property around entrepreneurship. So we call in amazing entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, leaders to discuss them and make content out of it. So you guys are creating marketing for Bombay Shaving Company today.
Happy to do that. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, sure.
How do you make sure you're not the 101st podcast around this? There are so many happening.
I'm here because if you had called me we probably would have done it, but if Sanjiv called me there's no way I could not do it.
But there are just so many, and some are really good. How do you stand apart?
We are amongst the first entrepreneurship podcasts that started in this country around 2022–23. We have about 1 to 1.5 million unique listeners. Till date we have gotten roughly between 25 to 30 crore views across the board. All organic – we don't do any performance marketing or media buying for this property. YouTube is the channel, along with Instagram, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. We don't make money off it. A good part about this podcast is that it had a first-mover advantage and we got long-form right. Our average view duration is roughly 16 to 17 minutes. In this world where attention span is that of a wasp, that's true. Our viewers are younger folks on the fence of entrepreneurship. They come to the barber shop for inspiration. If one person switches off YouTube and says, 'I now have the courage to go and do something on my own,' that's the reason.
I've got my answer. But I don't think we have even scratched the surface of content.
This year is a bad year for podcasts because people don't have patience to learn. This is not a year of learning; it's a year of enjoyment. The markets are screwed. Two years back, people were hungry for insights – they wrote long essays on each episode. Now people are looking for entertainment. Even movies go through the same cycle. But Sanjiv, you and I must be unusual because I love long-form podcasts. I've chartered the Empire podcast – done 40 to 50 episodes.
Based on your recommendation, I went to 'Acquired.' It's amazing. I knew you'd love it – a VC's perspective on how every company has a story. The stories of Benchmark Capital, their dinners, their great misses – superb.
For me, that's very relaxing – long drives, flights, walks, even gym. My son thinks I'm crazy for listening to a podcast at the gym. But music is for unwinding, this is for learning. 'Empire' is outstanding and well-researched. Podcast as a format is superb.
We'll take the audio files and we have cameras. This is going to be on YouTube as well. Shall we roll? We are already rolling. But how did you guys meet? I never prepare for the podcast beyond knowing my guests. That was my other question – how long do you spend preparing?
There's probably a 30-minute prep. I create what I call a spinal skeleton – I know the broad areas I want to go into. But I also read about the guests and see what they've spoken about in public forums. I want to figure out how to get stuff beyond that. Now that I have both of you together, the founder-investor relationship is deeply complicated and beautiful. We love that dynamic.
So our story is actually very interesting. In 2006, Helion was our Series B. Before that we had Elevation (then called SAIF). Prior to that, the only person that took individual money after 2005 was Ashish Gupta, co-founder of Junglee. Ashish is a legend. I met him through my investor Ravi Adusumilli on a cold winter morning in the US. He was waiting outside Starbucks. You cannot but love Ashish – he's one of the most lovable people. We had a long chat, and he didn't tell me about Helion being hatched, but he took some of our money. I wanted him on board for product tech side. Soon after, he said they have a fund coming up and would roll it into Helion. I said sure, but he'd stay involved and be on the board. Then Ashish said Sanjiv would be on your board. I gave a little pushback because I really loved Ashish and didn't know Sanjiv. Then he told me very quietly, 'Yeah, he's also my brother-in-law.' I understood the relationship very well. But it was great because Helion and Sierra split the Series B. We liked them both. The Series B was about 15 million. I think we invested 8 million. SAIF also topped up, so maybe 15 to 20. The Series A was 9 million fresh money plus 4.5 to buy out angels. Pre-money valuation was around 30 million. Today it's worth about 10 billion. But most investors sold out at IPO, when it listed at 450 and doubled soon. The best value has come post-COVID.
So therein started the story, and Sanjiv was one of the most dedicated board members, really got into the weeds because he was an operator and entrepreneur.
Yes, he always saw us as an entrepreneur. It's hard not to – he can be both. So that's how we met. Then we had many connections – his partner in Du, our wives became good friends, and now we're neighbors. He lived in DLF Phase One in a beautiful red brick house; I had a nice red brick house in Phase Two. I would see his house and had no idea it was his. Now both our kids have flown, and we've moved into apartments. My roof is his floor. We are simplifying lives.
What was your first impression of Deep in 2006? It's 19 years ago, from an internet standpoint ages back. Already you were a celebrity because you started in 2000 – 25 years in April, congratulations. I knew of the company, but we had never met. Through Ashish, who was an investor in his company, I knew of Deep. This was our first investment. When we met, I had no experience of investing unlike my partners. I was raw, coming from a paradigm that I wanted to help build enduring companies, less focused on generating returns. First impression: superbly humble, and that hasn't changed. It's so easy to access him, same guy as 25 years back. Second piece: very good first principles thinking. I like entrepreneurs who are not from the space – they don't have baggage. The strength of Deep was that he was not coming from a travel agency trying to go online; he was thinking of online travel as a new category. They had marketing, operations, technology, strategy pretty much covered. Also, it was digital delivery – retail going online has friction transporting goods, but travel can be done digitally. These forces came together. But as expected, it was not easy to invest with him – we had problems of plenty.
Till 2005 we couldn't get anyone. Our real tough years were pre-2005 – the dark ages. No one was ready to buy online, drop a credit card. We had an abysmally low number – maybe 1 million buyers, and they were only buying free stuff from Rediff, Indiatimes. I give credit to IRCTC because it solved a very painful problem. People used to line up at train stations and reach the end with no seat. IRCTC took away that pain. People trusted the government, dropped their card, and it was safe. That changed the game. We doubled down in India; till then we were just doing NRIs coming to India by default because no one was buying in India. We funded a pivot from global to domestic. The original business plan in 2000 was to be the preferred portal for people traveling to, from, and within India, but only within was working. Our NRI brethren were comfortable buying online because Expedia and Amazon had credit card protection. In India it wasn't the case. We went through trial by fire – very little money, periods with no salary for 18 months. We had E-ventures in 2000, but they wanted their money back. So we were entirely management-held with some angels from 2001 to 2005.
Would you say that every company goes through a near-death experience?
You're lucky if you do, and if you do early and come out of it, it strengthens you. Otherwise, I don't think we would have lasted those early years. Then the domestic airline industry was imploding – Kingfisher went bust. And of course, COVID was the most recent big crisis. How you deal with that builds muscle memory. After you've seen one really tough one, you know freaking out won't help. The first time is crazy. We once had one month of payroll and rent. That's scary because you're leading a pack of people who believe in you. That gives you sleepless nights – people issues. I've seen that every successful company in our portfolio has gone through a near-death experience.
It requires disproportionate courage and optimism, almost irrational to outsiders. But as an investor, I know you come with a rational mind and bottom-up thinking. What do you see common in founders who pull through?
Special situations differ. In one case, it's a winner-take-all market with money running out. Second is that someone wants to buy you, and the money is life-changing, so you can't resist. Third is a pivot driven by a business model – for example, Big Basket moved from slotted delivery to quick commerce, changing engines while airborne. All these founders draw upon that extra reserve. Their resilience and ability to dig deep when they see an inflection point separates men from boys. If you haven't gone through a near-death experience, you haven't built a company.
We had a tough time with Amazon as our first customer. We used to run customer service for Amazon. For a startup to get amazon.com as a customer was amazing. We had about 200 people ready to service Amazon customers during the Q4 spike. We were not able to make the connection between our client and their infrastructure. They said our entire customer service is predicated on this working. If we hadn't done it by a certain hour, our contract would have been cancelled – they were our only customer. It was trial by fire. The good news is that entrepreneurial companies buy from entrepreneurs. Amazon was a small company within a big company. There was a guy there – Bill Price, the god of customer service. He taught us so much. Every other customer after that – Hewlett-Packard, Aetna, Sprint, Citigroup – was a roster of Fortune 500, but Amazon taught us how to run customer service. They said you don't have to answer the question that's asked; you have to anticipate the next question and frame your answer so there is no next question.
Amazon's customer centricity is gold standard. If you serve Toyota on supply chain, you become an expert. What is the evolution you saw in Deep, and Sanjiv as an investor and board member who stayed till IPO?
Sanjiv always pushed us to build an enduring company. He focused on scaling with process – where is your plan? He forced us to think harder about process. It wasn't my second nature. Those nudges showed me the mirror about clear gaps. I loved our board. When we IPOd, we had three investors – Sanjiv from Helion, Tim Guleri from Sierra, Ravi Adusumilli from SAIF/Elevation. Tiger never had a board seat by choice. We had three independents – Bitu Sanjiv Bik Chandani, who was phenomenal. I learned from working at ABN Amro, then an entrepreneurial thing, then at GE. I learned how to run board meetings. Good board meetings have all data present, assumed to be read. No discussion on validity of data – only on high-impact decisions: whether to go retail, hotels, international, how to build the management team. Deep would give data and then four or five key strategic points. That's what good board meetings are. It wasn't like that at first – I learned over time.
One thing to learn from Deep is how to build a board. He was not a domain expert, but he got two domain experts on the board – one from Expedia, one who ran a market research company in travel. That helped the pivot from airlines to hotels. Both were forever saying airlines are a commodity; eventually you won't make money. They were prescient. Fragmented market is where you want to be – both customer and supplier sides fragmented create a marketplace business model. When you have few suppliers like airlines, you're at their mercy. Railways is an extreme. Fragmented markets like hotels, homestays, villas are huge post-COVID. And bus – Redbus, which Sanjiv knew from before, we bought it from Naspers.
In your case, retail customer is fragmented, but B2B with large corporates is a mug's game – race to the bottom.
We've been on the other side. We try to get shaving kits in hotels. It's a 15-rupee price point, and the procurement guy says it's 1000th on his priority list. We had to match price, reduce it, have a seriously better product, and get tested by all GMs. We now do almost half a million shaving kits a month for Taj, our biggest one. If you crack Taj, the rest will follow.
I love hotels that give shaving foam on demand. When you travel, you carry a small one, but sometimes you forget it. I saw a hotel in Thailand with a bedside adapter that had every kind of socket – USB, USBC, Android – hardwired so you can't take it. That should become standard. You should develop a dispenser for shave gel, like shampoo dispensers. The hotel will be happy to have it. You can put your brand on it. Taj might put the brand. I'll introduce you to them. Bombay Shaving Company in Taj would anchor the brand by association.
We want to do that. The issue is they've asked us to pay royalty. But if you get a sexy casing and give them enough money, they'll put the brand. Taj might, and Lemon Tree might do it for you. It's huge for marketing.
