Ola

“So I see now the tougher competition in India is Rapido. You know, they're the upstart. They got into two-wheelers and three-wheelers really aggressively. Super simple model, just kind of the subscription zero commission model. Very scrappy as well. And they h…”

“So we have one fund, Razorpay, Ola, five-star, off business. Two hundred and fifty million. So that's a, you know, a very strong multiple, but our next one will be even higher multiple than that.”

“I mean, that's an easy one. Just Bhavish given all that he has gone through his Ola pretty much shut down during COVID. He fought Uber. I mean, there are so many different examples, but it has to be him.”

“Every time we have violated that principle, it's our anti-portfolio. Every time we have followed that principle, it's a great hit in our portfolio. So Ola, we didn't believe in the market. We believed in the founder. So we have a line internally when somebody …”

“Before it became our customer, and we actually kind of now track these pages down, the minutes I want to register some of these pages, the minutes I want to register some of these phone numbers, we help Ola take these things down proactively so that bad good p…”

“We've had some companies, which, you know, is out there in the media, which have done, done a great sort of great hundreds, as they say, a hundred X plus returns, whether it's an Ola or an urban company or a Credgenics, Hoff Business, Mamark.”

“So I think what we didn't do is read the market Sentiment well. Like we kept talking unit economics and more conservative on our growth strategy compared to the competition.”

“So I jokingly tell people that there was a period of about a year when we were actually making more money out of an Ola ride than Ola itself. So roughly they were doing about 2.2 phone calls per ride because nobody knew how to use this app, some new flashy, sh…”

“70%, 80% of our revenues were still coming from. On the back of a venture capital enabled companies in the B to C space. So we were really supporting Flipkart and Ola, Uber and Swiggy and Zomato and all of these guys.”

“When I joined, he had already invested in Ola, Urban Clap, and Razorpay out of six unicorns in our portfolio. Three, he had already invested. They started investing mid 2011 Agrostar and Ola were first investments.”

“His job profile in 2011 12 was to create presentation for Ola to raise their seed round, and their office was in Dreams Mall Bombay. And I used to discuss with him, they, it took them four, five months to raise their, that Indian engine network, Rihani R. Khan…”

“If you move this for an electric two-wheeler, for argument's sake, it is an Aether or Ola two-wheeler, you will notice that for personal use case, the TCO is already positive.”

“Gagan there used to run Pawai Lake Ventures, which was like this, you know, network of founder angels from IIT Bombay who were reinvesting in founders that graduated from IIT Bombay. And that really worked. They ended up backing, you know, Ola, Housing, Topper…”

“Private mobility or when you're commuting to work in your own four-wheeler used to cost about three to 400 rupees a day, back and forth. Uber or Nola at that time, in spite of being highly subsidized, would also cost somewhere around that price point. And pub…”

“Chalo is doing exceptionally well, managing over 10, 12,000 buses already. A huge space in India. Buses are a sixty billion dollar market as opposed to, you know, cars, which Uber or Nola, which is like a ten billion dollar market.”

“I was the first investor in Ola. Very interesting investment in Ola. A lot of people don't know this, but, ah, the Ola investment was actually a pre Uber investment. Uber didn't actually exist when we invested in Ola. So, a lot of people always think Ola was a…”

“Very often when we invest in companies, including Ola and Druva, right? We had to do multiple rounds of funding before the next round of investors would come in.”

“I think the biggest reason, and this may seem like an odd one, is that I feel people who build big businesses or people who are successful in life don't take offense. People who take offense, you know, or something has happened to me, those people get stuck in…”

“There was a cab company in in Bombay, which sent, like, gundas to the office to beat, beat these guys up, and they broke, like you know, they broke, like, glass walls and all with hockey sticks, and these guys stuck it out through that.”

“Somebody had got an FIR filed against them, against the founders in the RTO for operating illegal services, so they had to deal with that.”

“I remember when I was syndicating the Ola round, and I was trying to get other people into it, and nobody wanted to invest. People were like, yaar, ye kya Bekar company layo, I can wave my arm and get a cab. Right, Bombay. Right, so who's going to order these …”

“See the reason I think the reason Ola won in India versus Uber, they never, they were never a copy of Uber. It was an original idea. That the OLA team had that there are a million tourist vehicles in India and I can aggregate them.”

“Sold the company for two hundred million dollars. We didn't have money to pay salaries two months down the road. And we would have shut shop if Ola had decided not to buy us, but there were some circumstances which forced Ola to buy Taxi for sure because other…”

“They didn't go with Uber because Uber wanted to lay off the entire tech team, whereas ULA was willing to absorb the entire team, including the tech organization. So they did the right things. They got every employee a two month bonus payout, two month salary a…”

“And to add to that, Didi also invested in Ola recently in their latest round, and so this just goes to show how a player in China also has, you know, global ambitions, and it's no longer just the U.S. Companies trying to enter the various markets.”