Uber

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“In some of these businesses, whether you look at Uber, or you look at Lyft, or you look at some of the companies you've gone public, they don't have a unit economic model, which is very resilient. If you look at it, right, they don't have that.”

“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.”

“We scaled to about one 50 K applicants. We had more than four million requests in 2016. We worked with 1500 recruiters, including Uber and Swiggy. We were doing like a hundred K revenue.”

“No matter how build an organic lever you build, right? Unless you have true PMF. Like when I say true PMF, I don't mean your great retention numbers and all. For me, true retention is if I shut my product down today, will 25 people line out outside of my offic…”

“We should have, as in we were the first ones to do hyperlocal stuff, right? So we could have done a Dunzo, we could have done a Swiggy, we could have done all the groceries, delivery startups, all that put into one company is valuable. Right? Like, in Southeas…”

“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.”

“Uber, for example, is known to have a virality coefficient when they launched of 2.4 because of the referral programs they had with drivers and they are with riders.”

“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.”

“One of the founder of Uber, he visited Varkala, and his team stayed for several weeks. From Varkala, that is one of the famous beach of Kerala. From Varkala, they wrote this program of Uber.”

“Currently not, no, they're still all there, and the biggest one has 300 employees makes seventy million revenues with a SaaS model, and serves the likes of OpenAI, and Uber, and Nasdaq, and UPS in brand management”

“Pick a market with weak competition. Like ideally not competition that's other big tech companies or other AI labs. Like don't pick a market with Weak competition or analog competition. For example, Uber competed with taxi companies, analog competition, not a …”

“We had worked on the feature store at Uber, and we had built the world's first feature store, and we literally coined the term.”