Thank you everyone. And thank you both of you. You have much in common and it just struck me when I selected both of you for this. 10 years into building your company, 11 for you or 11 for you, one of the two. Both YC alumni, went public literally five weeks between each other. Both have a market cap of 1 lakh crore and upwards and have doubled from your IPO price. I think Lalith is like, I didn't know of this data. But there is a lot that you represent in the past 10 years of Indian startup ecosystem. But I want to start with, and we have some of our esteemed jurors here today. At the center of the jury discussion this year was when do we stop calling a startup a startup? And Araman, you were part of the jury so you know the discussions were centered around that. So both of you, do you want to give your take on when do you stop being a startup? Does it have to do with age, size of the company, profitability? What is it?
Okay. I think a couple of things. Like I think first thing is of course growth, right? A startup needs, I mean if you're growing that means startup. If your culture DNA is like founder, what is that called, founder mode, then it is a startup. If there is something nonlinearity in your business, that is a startup. If there is some leverage or if you're doing something new, then it is a startup. So I think you can define it in multiple ways.
You know why? I'm curious. We've seen a lot of smaller companies and you are such a large one. You absolutely lap up being called a startup but there are a lot of smaller, maybe even Series B, Series C companies which don't want to be tagged as a startup. What do you think? What is the reason? Is there some negative connotation? What is it that people are sort of defending?
Like when you say this, it just reminds me of when everyone's a small kid, everyone wants to be an adult and everyone as they age they want to be associated with young people. I think it's basically the same behavior. Like when you are a startup, if you are a young company and you call yourself a startup, sometimes people don't take you seriously, right? Sometimes people do not value your opinion so much, so you want to be taken seriously. And as you age, as a company as you age, you have a mature business, you could be doing other things, you start to think otherwise, right? You start to think about, hey, will we start to grow slower than what we were? Will we have less energy in office? Will the culture change of the company? And you want to be a lot more startup as Lalith was saying, I think.
Has that happened with either of you? Has the culture changed at all?
I also feel like culture changes are generally very slow, so you're always late to figure out if it has happened. I'm always very paranoid about it. I'm sure some bit of that is already happening. I can convince myself and say, hey, nothing has changed and we are the same culture as we were 5 years ago. I definitely feel that it's not the same, but it's about like you have to keep resisting it, right? There has to be a very combined effort from everyone, like founders, senior people, the entire company, to keep saying, hey, we will not just become a mature company that just thinks about the next quarter, thinks about predictability, does not take risk, grow slower. We don't want to be in that comfort zone. So I think it's just about you have to keep fighting it. And you have to keep fighting it. You may succeed 10% of the time, but you still have to keep fighting it because if you don't fight it, the answer is much worse.
Lalit, you mentioned that it's obviously got to do with the culture. What is it? I mean in fact one of the jurors mentioned about Grow that when I walk into their office a lot of people who sit on the floor and work. Is that sort of very indicative of the fact that you do not want the company to get into the trappings of a large group or a sort of older company and you've made certain efforts for being that way nimble and sort of agile?
Yeah, to some extent. See, I feel that I think it's very hard to define culture, right? But when you walk into an office, it's like personality, the kind of personality, it's very hard to define how is the person like. That's how all companies are. So if you walk into Grow's office, the vibes will be very different vis-a-vis Meesho and so on, right? Not like anybody's bad or good and so on, but it's different. And I think there is some truth that as companies grow larger, as you hire more folks and so on, there is some dilution that happens. But then as Vidit said, you continuously work hard. And what defines culture, like we feel that what is culture has a lot of small nuances, like what time does office become live, happening, or you can define at very macro themes like what is the value system. So for example at Grow when four of us started, we said, okay, customer first, right? So that becomes like non-negotiable and that is also culture, right? So then you establish some rituals, then you build some, you know, so we have something called Grow Code which is like now let's say if somebody's joining and if it is like hardwritten code that this is how you have to behave, this is how you have to kind of act, this is how you have to decide things, then it becomes simpler, right? And so on. So these are just hacks to kind of intervene and get to where you want to be.
What has really changed for both of you post the listing? And it's going to be almost a year for you and Lalit. With it, anything beyond obviously being part of the quarter on quarter calls and fielding not only the media but analysts? How has life changed?
I think it has changed in many ways. Some I thought would change and some are very surprising to me. So I'll tell you one anecdote. Last month was our first AGM as a public company and then as part of the AGM suddenly we have few of these retail investors stand up and ask these questions. And these are retired people, like a retired couple stands up and asks a question, and then they give you blessings and they're like, hey, we are putting money from the money we saved all our life into your company, please do well with this, right? So this is like first for us. I don't think we ever had retail money with the company. And that day, many of such retail investors asked me that question. And even though you know you have retail investors, you feel it that day. You can emotionally feel it that now you are responsible for their money and you have to behave differently than what we were doing earlier. Like 5 years ago, I don't think that responsibility used to guide our actions. Our actions were about, hey, we need to move fast, we need to innovate, we need to challenge the status quo, we need to do something which is aligned to the mission statement of the company. But now there's a new angle to it and I'm still trying to basically make peace with how do you run the company knowing this somewhere in the background because this is also important. The mission statement of the company is very important, continuing to innovate is also very important. You have to do it. The second aspect, which was more predictable and I'm still seeing it play out, is the second order effects of bringing predictability in a company, right? So now we have to give quarterly goals, right? And we are a business with lots of moving parts. It's a large platform, lots of users, lots of sellers. Like earlier, I don't think we ever thought about like we have to basically do something every quarter. Now there's a slightly higher expectation from everyone in the team to do that. But when people have this also in their back, like people have certain goals to achieve. But when they think about predictability, how do you bring this balance between predictability and innovation? So I've been trying to kind of make certain changes in how we do planning and how we decide our goals so that most of the team does not have to think about it. To me, a good goal would be like apart from me, no one ever thinks about a quarterly goal. If we can do that, that's excellence. But can I do that? That's basically WIP. I knew it would happen and I basically took it as a challenge that we will figure out an answer. I would say I'm somewhere in the middle yet.
Now, I know you kind of talk about not looking at your stock price and that's not something that you're watching, but does that at all determine what your targets and your goals would be, whether it's a quarterly target or your annual targets? I mean, that does seep into your decision-making, right?
No. But before that, I want to answer the first question, the question before that because I have a good answer for that. So one thing that has changed for us, nothing much has changed, like we work in the same way, but one thing what has changed for us is that our customers also became our investors. So now it's like lesser conflict, like we don't have different shareholders and different customers. It's a very unique case for us. Coming to this, I don't think like we have this, like we still work long-term to answer your second question which is about quarterly stuff and so on. See, before going public also we had a very solid rigor within the company. We have like this monthly cycle, monthly review cycle, right? So the philosophy is that you think long term but you execute short term, right? You know, you can't just say, oh, we'll do this long, we'll launch this feature like in 3 years and you don't have any result in like 1 month, right? That does not work. So before going public itself we had very solid rigor on delivering things.
So you're saying you need to stick to your guidance as a public company far more than you would when you were private?
I mean we don't give guidance, like you know we, as in, the key is that whatever our long-term story is, we clearly laid out when we went public, right? And good thing is that it has remained consistent the day we started. Like if you look at what we started with and it continues. So it gets boring sometimes by the way if you attend our calls also. Like if you look at last 10 years what we have spoken, right, it's so like it's very boring, right? It's the same thing, like we want to democratize wealth building in the country. And you keep doing that and then you keep launching multiple products and then there is some visibility of the products for let's say next one year or 18 months and then more visibility will come in future. And that's what it was before going public and that's what it is after going public.
A bunch of founders who've taken their companies public also mentioned that it's actually easier to handle the investor set compared to when they were private and they had a lot of VCs sitting on their boards. Is that something that you guys also feel, it's easier now?
I do feel it. I do feel it because I think both about like meeting as many existing investors as well as like future potential investors, all of that goes away, right? And all of us to some extent used to spend enough time there. Now like a lot of the fundraising... yeah, absolutely correct, so none of that is there anymore. A lot of public market investors are very happy to meet like the investor relations team and the CFO, where that does not happen in the private world, right? Like in private everyone wants to meet the CEO, right? So they will take your time. So that used to consume a lot of time. Everything else I feel that's definitely true, that you get to basically focus a lot more of this, but again it comes also along with certain responsibilities.
Nothing to do with the nature of VCs in India?
I don't think so, like my opinion is I don't think so. I think you feel more accountable now because of like you know you are managing, you are kind of like shareholders are different. So you can blow up VC's money, right? Okay. You can't burn the retail investors and the institutional investors' money.
Yeah. There, I'm going to ask you both. In the past couple of years there's been a little bit of an over-reliance on public markets for Indian startups because private funding has, especially the large rounds, have stopped. And so anybody who's raising a 100 mil or 200 million, this is their only way to kind of raise capital. Do you think it's, you know, is it a good thing? Because if you look, while the initial cohort of companies which listed got valuations which were a little ahead of them, in the past year or two there's been a lot of correction. I mean you both are obviously not part of that cohort, but there have been a lot of companies, younger companies who have gone public and or have actually had to stall their IPO because the pricing was far lower than what they expected. So mutual funds are looking at tech companies and startups with far more tighter, I mean they're far more cautious in terms of, you know. So what is your view? I mean when is a company ready to sort of go public and how do Indian startups sort of cope with the fact that there's not enough private market funding at this point and therefore the reliance on public markets? Lalit.
So I don't have any strong opinions about whether, because we are now not raising any money from private market so we are out of touch.
So you're happy about that?
No, I mean, I think what we have learned is that there is, for the, so where I think capital is available where capital is needed. Now what happens is how do you value? And I think also like at certain stage valuing an asset is very very tough. And like in private markets, two parties are deciding. In public markets, there are a lot more parties that are deciding and so on, right? So it's kind of different and I think capital is available to founders.
