Doglapan: The Hard Truth about Life and Start-Ups

by Ashneer Grover

It was a big blow for me, as I missed out on the accolades and the medal that would come to the first rank-holder, despite being one. This incident has stayed in my mind as a big marker, as I see this theme recurring in several aspects of my life. I have been a late bloomer for sure. Well, but perhaps good things come to those who wait!

Overall, whereas I had found people at IIT to be naturally super sharp, the folks at IIM seemed more driven! Importantly, while at IIT people were exploring their potential, at IIM they were driven by the singular objective of landing a plum ‘Day Zero’ job. Clearly, IIM was a zero-sum game and more a placement school than anything else.

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

The one thing that I think worked in my favour, not just with the Prestige Group but with all clients that I worked with, was the fact that I didn’t sit in judgement over businesses. On the contrary, it was my solution-oriented approach that ensured that I offered some very specific resolutions to issues. It helped that I was exposed to a wide range of industries, which resulted in my incisive understanding of the overall market.

Overall, what the stint at Kotak did for me was to boost my confidence tremendously, especially as I came face to face with successful founders.

What I realized was that no one’s business was perfect and that each of the founders had their own insecurities. 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.

Back home, I was also seeing Madhuri’s business family pretty closely, and I realized how there was a difference in terms of the thought process of a service family versus a business family. 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. In hindsight, it was here that the entrepreneurial bug had started to bite me. Somewhere within me I knew that if not now then at some point, entrepreneurship would be my calling.

Another great learning for me at AmEx was that nothing in life is cast in stone. AmEx globally had sold their banking business to Standard Chartered in 2008. Little did they realize that by virtue of that, their Indian banking licence would become defunct, as in India only licensed banks can issue credit cards. AmEx therefore reached a stalemate with RBI, wherein RBI wouldn’t allow credit card issuance. It is folklore that AmEx then sent their master negotiator: a ‘Jaat’ Texan. The guy walked into the RBI office and said that either RBI had to make it work or they would be responsible for the loss of 15,000 jobs, as he would pack up AmEx from India and go back. AmEx today has a very unique banking licence in India, wherein they can’t take public deposits and do not have to comply with priority sector lending requirements.

The lesson that I learnt here: anything is possible as long as you negotiate hard.

Instead, Gopal Subramanium opened with an assertion that caught the attention of the judge: ‘This is the most interesting case of my career,’ he stated with a flourish. He followed this up with an analogy. ‘Sir, a streetside vendor sold you a mango, claiming that it was sweet. You ate the mango and didn’t find it sweet. Will our judicial system allow itself to be clogged by such cases?’ He quickly went on to explain that if the gentleman under question was claiming that he was defrauded, we had to be able to see the property under question to determine if it was indeed a case of fraud. Essentially, he used a technical argument to draw attention to the fact that the police hadn’t preserved the property, the vegetables in this case. Importantly, he was clear that at the level of the Supreme Court, the verdict had to be based on the interpretation of the law and not just on the merit of the case. He was right. To the fact that there was no property, which could prove whether the vegetables were organic and therefore whether defrauding had indeed happened, the judge noted his agreement. The FIR was summarily quashed and the case dismissed.

It is another matter that we had to spend eighteen long months fighting a Rs 500 case while also spending over Rs 25 lakh to resolve it. Interestingly, in this intervening period of eighteen months, every single fundraising meeting that I set up had to begin with an explanation of this curious case, u/s 420 (‘char sau beesi’), on the Grofers founders.

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. Anyone filing any case against the company simply had to pick up the names of the directors of the company from the Registrar of Companies. 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. Besides, with the risk of frequent unpredictable changes in FDI restrictions in multi-brand retail in India, Flipkart had been externalized to Singapore in 2011.

‘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. If you belong to the service class, you will end up taking the first bus, as you would rather be on the path, i.e., doing something all the time.’

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.

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

All my cars are pre-owned (more value for money) and are funded by my savings on alcohol as a teetotaller. So now you know the recipe to own fancy cars—don’t drink or smoke!

know. In hindsight, though, it is not something which I would recommend. 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.

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

As a friend rightly put it once the entire saga had unfolded, ‘You were doing what was right for the business, but tune apni bali chadha di (you became a martyr to your own cause).’

Loyalty is tested and needed in bad times.