Doglapan: The Hard Truth about Life and Start-Ups

by Ashneer Grover

graduate. With just that limited information, in true Bollywood style, I proclaimed to my friend Ashutosh Mathur that one day I would marry this girl.

She asked Ankita if she knew a guy named ‘Ash-noor’. Well, her feedback has to go down in history as the most unflattering feedback on me: ‘Ash-noor nahi Ashneer. Wo na ainvayi hai, usse door hi rahiyo (He is quite unremarkable, stay away from him.’ These were her exact words.

And get through I did! I was nothing short of euphoric to know that on paper I now had the best academic combination—IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad.

Overall, whereas I had found people at IIT to be naturally super sharp, the folks at IIM seemed more driven!

Referred to as ‘Lala’ in the Kotak circuit, Uday was also known for his understated lifestyle.

I realized that Gujarati was a great language to do business in, devoid of the aggression that many other languages seem to implicitly have.

one of the big learnings I have from Uday is that one must weigh the repercussions of one’s involvement very carefully.

In fact, this was the one time that four generations of the Grovers—my grandfather (who lived till the ripe old age of ninety-six), my father, me and my son—lived in our Malviya Nagar home under the same roof. Life was indeed blessed again.

While I looked up to these founders, I wasn’t in awe of them. Instead, I realized how they had taken the right steps at the right time to be where they were.

my view always was that all of us were incidental and that the real game was being played by the promoters.

but I saw up close that the one thing the businessman was true to was his business.

While a service family was all about discipline and a certain routine, their ability to handle uncertainty was pretty limited. In my own household, I saw for a fact that Madhuri’s ability to handle uncertainty as well as her aspirations in life were greater than I’d assumed. I was also beginning to realize that no one ever became rich by just earning a salary.

I often tell people that in Mumbai, you start life in Borivali with the goal of moving to Bandra, then to Worli and finally to Nariman Point, and then you die.

This explains why when you enter a premium retail outlet, you will notice an ‘AmEx Welcome’ sticker on the outside, but the odds are that if you want to make the payment through an AmEx card, you will be told the machine is out of order.

While this wasn’t a part of my mandate, I loved to unlock value wherever there was any opportunity.

The lesson that I learnt here: anything is possible as long as you negotiate hard. It came in very handy when, much later, I bought over PMC Bank from RBI at BharatPe.

He was quick to get Albinder and Saurabh anticipatory bail from the Saket Court. While this was a relief, it technically only meant that the police would inform them seven days in advance of making any arrest.

Albinder also wanted me to flip the company to a new jurisdiction—in this case, to Singapore. There were several reasons for this, and contrary to popular perception, tax saving wasn’t one of them.

The first was that if the company was based out of India, investors were loath to sit on the board of directors for fear of being dragged into such Rs 500 cases, as in India there is no difference in law between an executive director and other directors in terms of culpability.

There was also more flexibility in Singapore when it came to structuring the shareholding agreement in terms of preference shares and debentures as opposed to simple equity.

The regulations, however, didn’t allow a foreign-owned entity to carry out retail business in India, and the e-commerce regulations were yet to see the light of day. I, therefore, worked at putting together an FDI-compliant structure that would enable us to own inventory and conduct business.

‘There are two buses. One reaches your bus stop first but thereafter, reaches your destination late; the other reaches your bus stop later but makes you reach your destination earlier than the first bus.

What the Naspers model essentially means for an entrepreneur is that he acts as a hired founder without fundraising responsibilities and typically with a 5 per cent uptake.

To my mind, viability and not just valuation was an important aspect of running a business.

One of the many lessons that I have learnt in my entrepreneurial journey is that if you do not position a capable person correctly at the right time, it becomes a big constraint.

I would even go to the extent of saying that agar saamne se saanp aur banker aa rahe ho, toh banker ko latth mar do,

technology being a bank’s Achilles’ heel, bankers will never be able to learn technology as fast as fintechs will learn finance and business.

I knew that the virality of this product would come in part from the fact that at 1 per cent a month, the math was easy to do.

One needs to pitch to 100 investors at least three times to get ten of them to commit.

Clearly, it was the mission at hand that gave me that added boost of adrenalin—I was tiring much younger folks out with my sheer relentlessness.

Secondly, not being in the unicorn club, we could be spared some undue attention from the so-called business journalists whose full-time job now was to ridicule and pull down newly minted unicorns.

The Maybach, with registration number 0007, came just before Series D, and the Porsche 718 Cayman, with registration number 7180, was bought just before Series E.

My experience tells me that you need to keep your management below you fairly and squarely as a founder and that you shouldn’t be in a hurry to institutionalize things.

fact, professional competence cannot outweigh loyalty and the ability to take risks.

While in the US economy an ‘I owe you’ may be enough, in India, I explained, enforcing receivables under legal contracts is a long process at courts. Moneylending in India, therefore, was feasible only when you were in the cashflow of the person you were lending to.

This is because, for an overseas sporting event, an approval needs to be sought from the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. This approval, for some reason, was delayed, for us as well as for Byju’s.

main measured ya politically correct bande ka banda hi nahi hoon, I am not one who puts a premium on being measured over being honest.

The other thing I had managed to achieve was to take the sheen off English as a language for large, organized businesses.

Additionally, you need to remember that you don’t need loyalty in good times—opportunity does the task. Loyalty is tested and needed in bad times.

To expect loyalty from your employees or investors in bad times is to set yourself up for heartbreak.

don’t feel shy of liquidating your stock at every secondary sale opportunity. Cash in the bank will only make you bolder.