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Demystifying GoKwik - building & scaling "kwikly"
In today's episode Chirag Taneja, Co-founder & CEO, GoKwik, walks us through the business building frameworks that have helped him scale and build a fast-growth company.
Rajat:
Hi, guys. Welcome to Matrix Moments. Today i’m excited to host two very special folks, Chirag, founder of Gokwik and Avnish founder of Matrix india. So welcome everyone. For those who don’t know Gokwik is a very fast growing e-commerce enablement company. Avnish and i are lucky to be seed investors. Before we start i’ll give you a quick tit bit on how we got into the company. it was one of those rare moments where we had a very strong ongoing thesis into this space. We were introduced to Chirag through founder friends, some of them were our portfolio founders. And we were able to build conviction very quickly. So, thank you, Chirag, for allowing us to be partners. And really looking forward to this conversation.
Avnish:
i thought we paid the highest price.
Rajat:
That’s what you think.
Chirag:
in hindsight now if you look at it in a very different way now.
Rajat:
But so, Chirag, kicking things off maybe you can start with a quick overview of what Gokwik is building and recap a little bit of your journey and where you are today?
Chirag:
Thanks, Rajat. Gokwik in very, very different ways i think i’ll start from the beginning, i don’t know, i have done this before also in one of those podcasts but i think for viewers --
Rajat:
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Chirag:
A lot of what we’ve done at Gokwik i think i would say a lot of credit goes to my previous journeys whether it was in the content community domain wherein i was doing a food tech company followed by in the commerce domain wherein i used to run online business at Bombay Shaving Company. So i would say combination of those two and then on top of it e-commerce booming, Covid happened. it clearly was visible that an india e-commerce will happen outside of Amazon, Flipkart also.
And i was at the center of being a merchant facing certain problem statements. i thought if this space is going to become big then these problem statements will become meaningful to solve. i go back to 2019-20 there are clearly two camps that in india e-commerce will happen outside of Amazon or not. i think now the verdict is very clear but if you also go back a couple of years i think the answer was hazy. i could see some early data points when Covid was -- first wave was there.
That led to these thoughts and when i started to look at from a consumer point of view also and i liked to give this analogy that if you were born in US or if you were to start to drive car in US and then suddenly if you were thrown to india you’ll suddenly realize that you actually don’t know how to drive. A similar experience was happening that consumers were starting to shop on Amazon, Flipkart but when they went outside to the vertical Marketplaces, Firstcry, Nykaa or a consumer brand such as Mama Earth, Bombay Shaving Company etcetra their experience was not the same leading to losses etcetra, etcetra or not being the same at par experience.
So we started with this thesis that okay, can we be in the business of providing Amazon type of experience on the non Amazon vertical. That’s what at least and we’ve continuously reinforced this that this is what we want to solve for and this also lot of my founder friends had told me that let’s have a very grand vision which we should not be able to finish in ten years. So that was at least my thought when i was thinking about this. And started and launched somewhere in November 2020 we lost a couple of MVPs and that’s when we met you in December. And January we officially launched and since then it’s been no looking back. We now work with close to 250 odd brands doing close to a billion dollars of GMV. Totally we’ve scaled to almost 150 plus Gokwikers now all remotely.
So it’s been a very, very different journey for me from that point of view. i hadn’t built a company or hadn’t thought of building a company remotely. And i think just being glued to what merchant wants has helped us in terms of scaling up. Yeah, that’s what it is.
Rajat:
Yeah, so we’ll dive deeper into some of the nitty gritties, but Avnish from your perspective what makes Gokwik a special investment and there’s lot happening overall in this space globally so why do you think india is different?
Avnish:
So first i would start with what Chirag finished with which is just in our entire portfolio this is the only company being built remotely. Yet i’m not going to compare culture versus other companies, it has one of the strongest cultures in the portfolio. So kudos to that, personally i didn’t know or think how a fully remote company can be built so that in itself is special. i think the only other company that openly talks about trying to do that is Zerodha. But so i think to have that thought process from day 1 is special which i would say also goes to i think Chirag is special.
We have an experienced founder kind of a archetype that we keep in mind and we’ll get to some of that later but experience the problems started basis that problem. But the focus on team and culture has been unique, that i haven’t seen typically in the zero to one phase. So then therefore special people attract special people so the whole company obviously but it’s cofounders. So i think we talk about the three Ts, team, TAM and traction. So team outstanding, great to see if you people go on Linkedin they can see the kind of love that’s there and again not seeing that in other companies.
TAM to the point of can’t finish the work for ten years. When we started chatting it was RTO so return to origin, so just stepping back what is still the largest payment mode in indian e-commerce, cash on delivery, people don’t realize that. 55-60 percent and the more you get off Amazon and Flipkart the more prevalent it is. Razorpay you know is a multimillion dollar company which started by solving failure in credit card payments. Gokwik started by solving failure in COD payments which is double to size of credit card payments. So it’s a very large market and i remember at one point we were chatting i think all three of us may have been chatting and then the thought was wow, is this a commerce gateway. So the TAM keeps expanding and i think that ten year thing is true.
And the third is traction, he just mentioned launched in March, Jan then mainly in March of last year and now tracking 2 billion dollar plus. So not seen that before and we’ve been in some rocket ships but i was telling Chirag this is special, enjoy the moment, there will be hiccups also coming but i think those are the factors.
Rajat:
Now so, Chirag, clearly Matrix is not the only investor which is excited about you, i think you raised four rounds since inception in November 2020. So tell us a little bit more about the recent one that you’ve just raised and maybe for founders listening in if you know some tips on what went well or some tips and tricks on how to do this?
Chirag:
i would say that at least we don’t keep count of rounds we do of course remember investors but at least mentally i like to do that after every round or after every milestone take a fresh card and assume that it’s zero or the latest investor is what counts. At least they should be able to multiply the others will of course -- so this round was led by Think investments and we’ve raised 3-4 rounds now starting with a round led by Matrix followed by another round by Sequoia and then this one. And then the first one was angel investors in which a lot of startup angel founders came in. And i think one because the market was what it was in 2021 and two, we were growing very fast and i think in our business it was very clear that we had at least had early stage PMF which quickly moved on to a scalable PMF. Hence the trajectory was very clear that we could we were at least as a company we were able to attract a lot of tier 1 VCs in the company.
Rajat:
Yeah, right. Any tips for founders, what not to do or what specifically to do?
Chirag:
At least from a tips point of view i would say that what is in our control, right, the control is what i said that the vision has to be very, very large so that tactically let’s say if one product doesn’t work there’s a second one will work or the third one will work, the vision has to be -- is in the control of the founder. We can deviate for a couple of years and then come back, that’s one.
So larger vision and of course then it has to be either an established market or a fast growing market. Those things i think are very, very key for a VC fundable business and then of course followed by traction team. i think i maybe you can say that because of past experiences i was very, very conscious, i was still very conscious of building a culture, team. That’s the only leverage we have once you do zero to one. So i think getting those pieces together and getting the narrative right is what is there and i think from a not to do aspect i won’t say that i have at least the right experience of saying not to do, this is what you should not do at least. 2021 was very, very good for us so we have done at least all the right things.
Rajat:
Yeah, good. So you talked about where you got to PMF very quickly but talk about from a product perspective how did the product journey evolve right from zero to one to PMF to now scaling.
Chirag:
So this is a good question, i think i keep telling my team that PMF is one of those things that it won’t come in the sky that this product has achieved PMF, you require a lot of judgment and that’s where it goes wrong. There is a value based hypothesis and then there is a growth based hypothesis, if you do growth before value then it starts to go wrong. And i think we were very able to or i would say we were able to articulate the what is our PMF very early in the journey that if this happens then we know that our product is working. And in terms of scaling up also at least the way we used this framework is that pioneer scalers and then factory owners these are the three type of orgs our people are needed.
i think from a mindset point of view people who are pioneers if you put them in scalers or if you do the reverse they’re bound to fail, very different breeds, you can’t do -- here example being here you’re rewarded for doing more experiments or from a founder mindset i would say what is my KPi, my KPi is can i lower cost of experimentation. Whereas on the other side it’s about scale, i’m now no more in the business of firing bullets i’m now firing cannons. So it has to scale, i have to increase distribution. You can’t in a scaling mode and especially in our type of business you can’t afford or we like to glamorize this that safe to fail.
You can’t be in that safe to fail in our kind of space where you’re there on processing so much amount of GMV and you’re suddenly down. So that thinking is okay in the zero to one phase, that’s where it flourishes, that’s where it should be there. Here it becomes different and i think we’re yet to get to the factory owner stage and at least i believe there i keep telling our team that we’re here to build a large company, that doesn’t mean that we will require numerous amount of people. So let’s build a large company but have a constant focus on and keep raising the bar on the number of people.
Rajat:
Got it. Avnish, maybe this one is for you that while they’re building these world class products a lot of their early growth also happened because of their unique GTM. Can you talk a little bit about that and how we’re seeing that happen much more, right, across our portfolio. So what’s driving that change?
Avnish:
Before i come to that the only person who has more frameworks than me is this guy. i believe i’ve picked up one more, your factory owner all of that, i’m going to use it somewhere. But every time i sit with him i learn something, i was telling him about -- i think people will find it interesting and you should answer this, i was telling him how to structure the finance function between accounting, FPNS1 and so forth and you talked about future and past. Can you share how you think about it?
Chirag:
Yeah. So i like to think that finance is inflow and outflow and one is past and the second is projection, so there should be one person whose responsible for past which requires all kind of taxation etcetra and the one person is future which has to be a little bit of dreamer analysis so that’s how i divide it.
Avnish:
So he said manage the past forecast the future, i said that’s a better framework. So he has very good clarity of thought on these things. Coming back to this you know we’re fortunate to have invested in a bunch of experienced founders and Chirag’s journey i think checks a bunch of those boxes which is experienced a problem themselves, realized that it is a huge pain point but also that a 10x solve may be possible which is what we say. You know, is there a 10x solve that is possible. Didn’t therefore take market risk, right, if you’re not taking market risk then you’re worried more about GTM than PMF because you know the market is very large how are you going to win it.
And you know that in this space there have been other players globally which have some have gone up and some have not gone down, that’s because of the GTM it’s not because of the PMF. They all had some version of the PMF, so i think to me GTM trumps PMF or GTM comes before PMF and can sometimes dictate whether PMF happens or not. And i think classic experienced founder archetype where that was given high priority and then you have to get lucky, you have to think about it but then you have to -- you know, you have anything to add to that.
Rajat:
No, no, absolutely i agree. And i think we’re seeing this for a while in consumer internet at least that people have been at least for the last year started thinking about community or other ways to --
Avnish:
Otherwise it was just plain spend money CAC.
Rajat:
Yeah, it was just plain Google and Facebook driven stuff. And now even for B2B companies like you’re a B2B company today and the pace at which you’ve grown is just testament to the strong go to market based on that RTO thing that you had which is distinct.
Chirag:
They should go to our what not to do this, don’t ignore GTM.
Rajat:
Don’t ignore GTM.
Avnish:
But actually to the point on PMF one thing i will tell you that i observed with this which i then knew there was PMF was we had more inbound requests than we could service. So simple thing if i were to ever start again i would say are my customers beating the door down and am i not able to handle them, you have PMF. You have at least some version of PMF whether it’s scalable or not that also depends on your execution.
Chirag:
Right.
Rajat:
So to deliver all this, Chirag, tech and data science have clearly big things that go under the hood. So talk about some of those, right, and other than the people what are some of the unique challenges you’re facing and how you’re solving around it?
Chirag:
Many, many challenges. i wrote this on the Linkedin post that growth is painful or high growth is painful but is self healing. So it is one of those things that --
Avnish:
See, another framework. i’m taking notes, high growth is painful but self healing. Very nicely put. And it’s a better problem to have than no growth.
Chirag:
At least in technology companies what you also mentioned that GTM or high growth solves for most of the things. it will typically be winner take all or there’ll be 3-4 players at max. So this is the nature of the business, right, coming back to what you were saying --
Rajat:
Tech and data science.
Chirag:
So i would say we’ve been lucky that i have two co founders who come from specifically those domains and i’ve seen, Vivek has seen much, much higher scale than what we see in e-commerce. And he of course curses me a lot that whenever i’ve told him that this is the target for this quarter we’ve exceeded it by at least from a technology point of view that infrastructure had to be scaled in between to quarter. So it throws away all the sprint plans etcetra, etcetra.
So that’s one and i think our business is one of those where security compliance is an important issue so that we’ve taken care from day 1 right from implementing policies to all the certificates etcetra which are all bank level today. And just a testament of that that we’re not empanelled or now started to work with some of these large giants which have massive such infosec policies such as Unilever. So going live with them so that itself shows that what kind of data security implementations we’ve done.
Rajat:
And on data science because as you think about this RTO problem its as just good as the quality of people and the tech that you build over there. So what’s worked and what’s not worked and even from just data access where do you get all of this to be able to build something?
Chirag:
i think i’ll say what didn’t work in this case is that from day 1 started to think about implementing a machine learning model which Ankush will hate me for saying this but i think we should have gone with the rule based model day 1, decision tree model. And then as we had more data we would have scaled. We day 1 took the toughest path, didn’t do the MVP there so realized quickly and then quickly changed it in the second late part of the second quarter itself. So otherwise from a theme perspective we were very clear that this nature of this problem and i like to give this parallel that credit risk once you’ve given the loan then it’s no more a credit risk problem it’s a collection problem.
Similar in RTO if you’ve given a COD option to someone then it is a delivery problem. Unfortunately the entire problem is attributed to delivery whereas nobody is thinking that is this person worth it of giving COD or not. And it’s not as acute as credit risk, in this one we would say that you’re innocent until proven guilty and then you scale it up. And that’s where data science comes in wherein we’re able to now see across the network we’re now 80 million shoppers across the network who’re able to see what are they doing, how are they behaving across the network. And also have close to now six million plus negative audiences which is let’s say a blacklisted audience, a willful defaulter which we call in credit risk domain, that kind of an audience which now merchants utilize for blocking or not even spending top of the funnel.
So that’s where -- and you will see now, at least we believe that our business the eventual MOT is data science as we move towards personalization, as we move towards of course solving this problem, as we move towards even building about more data based products you will see that data is the -- will become as one of the eventual differentiators.
Rajat:
And last time on this on tech i remember initially we were also dealing with customized implementations, is that still something that you worry about?
Avnish:
Just adding to the question i think Chirag it will be useful for founders to understand that tech implementation struggle at one stage we went to how much customization should we do services, should we not do services and what the solve was. i bet you a bunch of enterprise companies would go through that at that stage.
Chirag:
No, at least in our business we realized that customizations are great, we have to do and e-commerce that’s why e-commerce is hard and it’s different from payment gateways. Payment gateways you build it out for a seamless integration of products. in our case as you move towards SMB mid market and then enterprise clients you will see that they will have products which will require customization which will require difficult modules to be implemented. And that will turn out eventually to be a differentiator also. So now we’ve embraced that and are building that capability that there will be integrations which will take time.
Avnish:
And also the hustle you did at one point where if the client has lack of tech bandwidth then almost being willing to offer your engineers to go and sit there.
Chirag:
That we still do.
Rajat:
And also i guess india is not homogenous, right, it’s not like everybody is on Shopify or Woo Commerce, it’s like custom implementation at their end as well, right, so it’s just --
Chirag:
Even if you’re on Shopify or even if you’re on a tech stack, standardized tech stack platform you have so many different apps which you’re using. So how do they get integrated, payment gateways it’s easier because you’re the last step, we’re in between and the last step is payments. So there are too many combinations you can imagine, permutation, combination would increase.
Rajat:
So, Avi, this one is for you, you built a high growth business in the past, been on the boards of many of these Marketplaces high growth businesses, so what can go wrong for Gokwik or for other high growth companies?
Avnish:
i didn’t build a high growth business, i didn’t get PMF for two years, it was a struggle and then we got some tiny early PMF, market wasn’t there. But i’m going to use Chirag’s framework, growth before value. What can go wrong is what goes right in the beginning is exactly what can be a rate limiter for the growth of the business. So even if you take a analogy of athletics for example, hurdles, i think you’re running a hurdle race from zero to one. Actually the same people win the sprints also but they use a different approach. But the same people won’t win the marathon, they may at best last till 400.
So i think recognizing, we have this and Chirag and i have discussed this also in the past, we’ve another i think a podcast where we talk about different stages of organizations, he used a different framework where factory owners were the last one. i think and we’ve discussed this in the corporate governance piece when you’re rapid scaling zero to one, one to ten and ten to infinity blurs. And if you were not slow scaling but normal scaling you would have arrows below saying yaha pe yeh karenge, in the speed all of that is lost. i mean look at the velocity of the rounds, who would have thought that you would have done four rounds.
So that’s the risk and it’s important to recognize and then slow down and say which is the -- we were discussing internal audit, i mean again Chirag generally you’re learning so he himself was saying aise karna, waise karna hai, whatever so it’s not something where we’re saying lagana chahiye but those are the kinds of things they can get left behind. This is a very tech thin stack data business which is actually easier, in other situations people can get into serious trouble and you’ve seen some of that narrative playing out.
The other part not to talk about the flavor of the day but crypto is a lesson, growth before value. So is it a permanent game changing technology, absolutely, but growth got ahead of value and then growth became speculative. So i think i love that line so i will use it more.
Rajat:
So, Chirag, just from that point as you build this org take our listeners through how you’ve gone about doing that especially in this remote setup?
Avnish:
And what practices are different, we’ve discussed this, you’ve talked about management team needs to behave differently travel, bring out the flavor.
Chirag:
i think we’re also learning but i think first comment on what you said i think it’s very hard for what you gave an analogy that first you’re a 100 meter runner and then you become a 400 meter runner. it’s very hard for and especially when you do it in a year or 15 months for teams to keep unlearning as well as learning new skills, it becomes really hard. And i’ve seen people in our team go through this mental trauma that they had performed well and now the expectation is this and now they have a new boss who is saying now this is the level. So the expectations keep changing and they’re always thinking that we have to prove again which is of course they’re reskilling but it’s very hard.
Only time will tell how we’ll be able to do this but at least we’re investing in those people, at least i’m fundamentally believer that they’ll overskill so keep investing in people who have demonstrated, who’ve been with us day 1 invest in them and they will take us forward. That’s there, but coming back to --
Rajat:
But just as people reskilling i remember there was a problem back in the day where you’re first early reports as you scaled and brought in a middle management they faced challenges. So how did you think about that, solve that problem?
Chirag:
i think we’ve taken at least the early team with us whenever we’ve got senior people in also we’ve mostly taken their opinion and they also recognize that they’re not the best people when it comes to scaling in specialized fields. So we will do injustice to their knowledge expertise if we continue to lead them. So that led them to -- and i like to tell this that i used to think that i was doing product management in the at least the first 6-9 months till the time Kunal joined in. And then Kunal joined in, he said that this is not product management and everybody was in for a shock that okay, we were thinking that -- and i think in Amazon this is more like program product management middle path wherein people do this and then move to product, this is not the classic product management.
And i think he changed it in the December, January, February and he freed all of us in terms of let’s not do this, do that. So i think it came from teams also sometimes that they were feeling that we were not able to give too much time and neither we had the capability of seeing a world class product scale. We had our insight when we built the product but now it is about scaling it to many, many merchants. So that’s where i think teams also understood.
Avnish:
The original question was what is your view when you said -- so you’ve had a very clear view of culture and how you wanted to build this so what was that thought process given that you’ve been in different companies and a founder before and then how did this remote thing come about and how does that affect how you built?
Chirag:
i think remote thing came about because of Covid, i had previously done some amount of this at Bombay Shaving Company and then when Covid happened we were at Bombay Shaving Company. That’s where it started and i think i clearly realized that this is one, this is future, two, the advantages over disadvantages i think are tilted in favor of being in remote.
Avnish:
Say more about that.
Chirag:
So i think, one, for example there is no value to showing up. in offices you just show up and in Startups although it is said that perseverance is about showing up but at least in remote what happens is you have to seek out or reach out if you’re stuck. Otherwise it’s assumed that you’re on track, the talk is about objectives, delivering results, which is great. But the problem is that i think the answer is not fully remote, i would say that also. Answer is somewhere between, right, the amount of time we waste in the office world commuting etcetra, etcetra is just too bad for a startup, we can’t afford that.
And so the answer is hybrid and i think with seniority you need to meet more so it tilts more towards meeting in person and if you’re juniors if you’re more on hands on executors then it tilts towards more let’s say you can meet once a quarter.
Avnish:
Which is counter intuitive in some ways, one would have thought seniors -- actually it increases the burden on the senior people. You were saying they should travel to the different locations more often, they should go to the offices.
Chirag:
So seniors should meet more.
Avnish:
Yeah. I’m saying that actually increases the onus is on the seniors more to make this culture work.
Chirag:
Correct. So we like to put this as the seniors are responsible for direction, juniors are responsible for bias for action which is the velocity.
Avnish:
Alert, framework alert.
Chirag:
This is physics.
Rajat:
No, but conventional wisdom was that the highly motivated folks --
Avnish:
Would want to win the others.
Rajat:
No, can actually work remotely, they don’t need to be monitored and so on.
Avnish:
That’s a good point. And you’re saying that junior people are doing reasonably well in that.
Chirag:
I think junior people just need good clarity direction, the problem happens when senior people have a lot of dependency on each other in terms of alignment etcetra. That’s where they need to be in the room for that they’re aligned and I think that’s where it starts to break that if senior people also don’t meet so I’m yet to discover a mode wherein we can do this also online.
Rajat:
So then how do you drive everybody towards the same vision especially among the junior folks, senior folks I can understand.
Chirag:
It was easier in a 20 people team that I could do one presentation, lay out the goal, OKRs for this year and also I think I remember a lot of people in the team has said that I used to do this presentation where Ravi used to list down that this is what we’re not and that used to help people a lot ki hum yeh nahi hai, And now of course it has become a little tougher with a 100 people odd. Hence a formalized OKR exercise we’ve now started and mostly from next quarter onwards we’re going to roll out at least openly to everyone with the idea being that everyone should know if you’re not contributing to this then there is a problem, it’s action versus movement.
Rajat:
Yeah, cool. So moving to the last section which is largely around what’s happening in the overall environment and maybe implications on org and so and so. Avi, for you obviously lots of companies raised capital at very high prices last year and now this year valuations will connect. Some of the values of ESOPs may not be what they were, so how should a, founders think about building teams now and b, for even advise for employees as they think about joining startups.
Avnish:
Yeah. When was Google started?
Rajat:
‘90s.
Avnish:
2002. It was at the absolute bottom of the dotcom bubble. Apple by the way was almost bankrupt anyway by 2000 but their entire second innings started in the early 2000s. So Microsoft had gone sideways like I can give you a hundred examples, Facebook started and --
Chirag:
Is there a survivorship bias there?
Avnish:
Sorry?
Chirag:
Is there a selection bias or survivorship bias there?
Avnish:
Probably but therein lies the answer itself that the largest companies did get created. And I think it’s an easier environment to build companies, right, less competition for talent, less competition for capital. So let’s step back. I was actually thinking and obviously talking sometimes to the investors and not to pick on crypto but if you look at the gap between what did you say, value and growth. So if you look at the gap between utility and value in 2000 utility of the internet was here and the value was here. If you look at 2021 crypto that’s exactly the case.
If you look at 2021 internet that is not the case. The utility is here, value went here, it’s correcting. You could argue that in some cases it’s gone below and I’ll maybe digress for a second just so that people understand, maybe Rajat you’ve been jumping at it a little bit, why are things correcting so much. We’ve discussed this in a different podcast and we should include this Harry Stebbings podcast that you’ve sent about what is happening in the world.
First people have to understand all companies, tech or non tech they’re valued as a present value of future cash flows. Numerator is cash flows, cash flows are profits and growth, denominator is very simplistically interest rates. Interest rate is 1 a company that is worth let’s say after ten years in cash flow will be worth billion now. Interest rate is 10 that company that is worth billion in ten years will be worth 200 million now or something like that. So interest rates people don’t understand have a massive correlation and we will say 40 bips but 40 bips ka base kya hai the EMI has gone up by 10 percent by that 40 bips.
That is life changing for people in a negative way, it has a cascading effect. So interest rates are in the denominator, every 1 percentage point you should assume valuations drop somewhere between 15-20 percent. In the numerator you have cash flows which are function of growth and profits, if you don’t have profits and don’t have growth what’s the value of this business.
Rajat:
Zero.
Avnish:
It’s zero. Most of the value of unprofitable business is in the terminal value. Interest rates go up, that becomes more sensitive. So what is happening is actually very rational, it is extremely rational. What have we seen in the US, suddenly all these Peloton, Zoom, all of them are dropping off a cliff, why, growth has gone to zero. If growth goes to zero profits don’t matter, it matters but at least profit divided by that interest rate is your value. So it’s all very rational, it will all change.
You know, I’m more optimistic, now when you apply that to in that podcast with Harry Stebbings he gives 20, 60, 20 as probabilities. 20, disaster, 20 optimistic, 60 this is the dotcom downturn, it’ll take that long. I think India is different, I don’t see -- last time in February I see disaster now I’m saying I don’t see more disaster. It will be bad but I think so can the market go to 45,000, sure. But the tech inflection is real, if the tech inflection is real this is the time to build, this is the time to get into the market, this is the best possible time to do this in India. Actually in the other markets that’s not necessarily the case.
What happened in the US you saw during Covid e-commerce penetration 16-26 percent and if it had gone normally by 2023 it would have been 20 percent, it’s come down to 21 percent. What is happening in India, the inflection continues. Why, the headroom is so much, our penetration is so tiny. So, his business, I think the last three months actually maybe right from the start maybe last 9 months we’ve continued to beat the forecast sometimes by a 100 percent. So India is a growth story, I’m optimistic, I’m actually -- economists by the way sometimes that’s scary when economists put something on the cover that jinxes it but it has said India’s decade. Last time the date was 2004 India Shining. That’s a long answer but super excited, I’m as an investor, as an entrepreneur would have been more excited about this environment but global linkages are very strong. So can capital disappear for the next year, maybe. So built accordingly but I’m super excited because digital inflection we can see around us it’s real.
Rajat:
Yeah. That makes sense. And I guess the answer is clear that focus on core intrinsics of the business get your unit economics etcetra in place.
Avnish:
Numerator and denominator. Denominator you cannot control, control the numerator.
Rajat:
No, makes sense. Thank you. So, Chirag, any last closing thoughts from you on how you think the next 12-24 months will go for you?
Avnish:
And in this environment how are you thinking, any change in plan versus the environment?
Chirag:
I think at least our business I would say that there is lot of still headroom in terms of growth till there. So we’ve just started and both we as a company and India what you said we’re in the early stages of adoption and if you look back at numbers 2014 we were at 5 billion dollar e-commerce, 2021 we closed at $55-60 billion, that’s a 12x growth. If you take that into account and then look forward you will see that we’re projecting ‘27-‘28 to be around $350 billion. Perfectly doable, in fact the first ones are usually very hard.
Avnish:
I think we’ll exceed.
Chirag:
So look at the opportunity for growth. And our business more so is unique, all tech businesses that way that our initial fixed costs are very high because of the kind of products we make. And people will be our number one cost. So we will continue to invest there, we will in fact if you ask me we should be doubling now on our strategy and going very, very aggressive on really enabling merchants to deliver more GMV, that’s how I look at it.
Rajat:
Super. I think this has been a fabulous conversation. So thank you, Chirag and Avnish. Hope our listeners got something interesting out of it as well including all your frameworks.
Avnish:
At least ten of his frameworks I got, so super. Thank you, Chirag, for doing this. Really appreciate it.
Chirag:
Thank you.
