The journey behind building itilite

Founded by Mayank Kukreja and Anish Khadiya, Itilite is a corporate travel management solution that balances company’s savings and the traveler (employee’s) experience. Itilite is also a Matrix portfolio company and this episode features a conversation between Gourav Bhattacharya (Director, Matrix India) and Mayank (Co-Founder, Itilite) on what it’s like to make the shift from a stable job at Myntra.com to founding your company.

Gourav: Hi and welcome to Matrix Moments. My name is Gourav Bhattacharya. I work with Matrix. And we are here today with Mayank Kukreja who is the founder of Itilite. Itilite is a company that’s trying to solve corporate travel. It is also a Matrix Portfolio company. Mayank, really appreciate your taking the time out. To start off, can you tell us a little bit yourself, your background, and what you are building?

Mayank: Thanks, Gourav. Thank you so much for having me here. So, I will start with quick background. We started Itilite about two years ago. Before Itilite, I worked for about 10 years. Started as an engineer in a startup. After that worked with McKinsey as a consultant for about five years in India, in U.S. Then worked with Myntra for about a couple of years. And then from there went on to start Itilite.

At Itilite what we are building is we are trying to take corporate travel online. We are truly the first player which is thinking corporate travel first. All other tools we you see, first of all they are non-existent. Most of the corporate travel in India today happens offline. So basically, you call up someone or you email someone to get your ticket booked. This is very different from personally when you and I travel where we just go online and book a ticket.

In the corporate travel scenario, it’s still offline. Even when there are some online tools, they are just a replica of B2C tools. What we have done is we have thought corporate travel first. This means a couple of things. First, we offer a very personalized smart travel assistant to you. So when you search, just like a smart travel agent will do, we send you real-time two - three personalized options. Because of this, the whole booking process becomes super convenient.

Second, we have a very unique way of helping companies save cost. Through our platform, companies can incentivize their employees to save money. So as an employee if you are traveling from Bangalore to Delhi and your company allows you to stay in a Rs. 8000 hotel, normally you would stay in a Rs. 8000 hotel. With Itilite if you voluntarily say that I will stay in a Rs. 4000 hotel, you have saved some money for your company. You get a part of the savings which leads to employee starting to think about company’s money and leads to saving.

This is overall way for companies to take their corporate travel online, maintain the same control, reduce their cost by 30%, and make their employees happy in the same way. So it’s a win-win for everyone. That’s what we are doing at Itilite.

Gourav: Thanks, Mayank. This was super helpful. And I know Itilite has created a lot of value for clients. But I want to focus today’s conversation on slightly different topic which is on your personal journey. And the context here is we are increasingly seeing a bunch of people move out of large internet companies and start up on their own. And I would say this is a shift from where we were about two or three years ago when we saw a lot of startup founders come straight out of college.

I think a lot of people listening in would love to understand how you thought about this journey. So to start off with, can you tell us a little bit about the choices that you made? There was McKinsey first. And there was Myntra. And then finally, Itilite.

Mayank: So actually to start with there was a startup before that. And the bug of starting on your own that’s where in that startup it hit me. After I did my first job in a small setup in a tech startup, that’s where I thought this is something which I want to do. This is something - building new things is great. That’s where I think the long-term vision of building a startup came in. But, the conviction was still not there. I think the biggest step before you jump into starting on your own, is you need to have absolute conviction.

So, the first part of the conviction was I don’t know how to run a business. I know the tech side of things which led me to go for my MBA. Then after that joined McKinsey because it seemed like a great option to learn about larger businesses. How large businesses are built. Really loved my time at McKinsey. Joined McKinsey thinking it will be a two-year journey. Ended up being four years across multiple geographies. But then realized, okay, this is a lot of learning but still not now leading towards the startup route. That’s why left McKinsey. Came back to India from the U.S.

Still did not have a co-founder. I need to find a co-founder which takes time. So in the meantime what to do? Myntra seemed like a great option to spend time and learn in the meantime. It was doing very well building a tech first product in a sector where really there was no real competition. The people seemed really good to work with. That’s why joined Myntra.

And the two-year journey at Myntra was great. But in that time found my co-founder, got the conviction and took the jump to start Itilite.

Gourav: Mayank, you spoke about your co-founder. And I know a bunch of people who will have this question. How did you choose your co-founder? And I also know that Anish who started the company with you has a pretty similar background to yours. Was that something conscious or something that just happened?

Mayank: So this question actually has a slightly different take from my side. I have been asked this questions by many friends who are thinking of starting on their own. We have been asked this question that you have similar background. I think more than background there is absolutely more important thing to choose a co-founder which is trust and mutual respect.

The first thing, are you both or multiple people trying to achieve the same thing in the long term. That has to be absolute non-negotiable. Based on my experience where I have seen things not go so well, it was because in the beginning people were looking for different things. So with Anish at least that was fully aligned. We actually spent about a month just talking about what do you want to achieve. At least that’s when it was fully aligned, okay, long term we are looking for the same thing. That’s the first thing. So, that’s absolute non-negotiable; first to think about.

Second thing which I say is trust and respect is you need to believe the other person is also trying to do the right thing. Because in this journey, there will be absolutely many many moments when there will be fights, arguments, debates, and they can get ugly. But at the end, you have to go back to the baseline that is that person also trying to do the right thing for the company. Do I believe that?

As long as we believe that, next day you are perfectly fine. If that belief or trust is not there, it can lead to hard outcome. So trust and mutual respect is absolutely non-negotiable.

Then comes the second part, what is complementary. So, no one answer there. Either you can complementary skills where one person brings product, one person brings sales, that’s great to have. Or, you can bring complementary attitude to approach things, which is what I think Anish and I have been. Although we have a similar background, both of us have worked in McKinsey and Myntra, what we have worked in and how we approach things is very different. So whether it’s a mix of aggressive attitude towards things versus calm attitude things, whether it’s a mix of looking at things very very analytically versus looking at things from the people angle first. We bring complementary view of looking at things.

And that’s what actually the people who know both of us when we said that we are starting together, their intuitive answer was this is great because both of you are very different. So either you can look at complementary skills or attitude. That’s I think is secondary. You need to have the first part which is trust absolutely nailed down.

Gourav: Mayank, so I want go back a little bit to your stint at Myntra. And tell me little about how that helped you in your startup journey. And was the unlearning that you had to do?

Mayank: So from the Myntra time, I would layout at least three things. Actually, there are bunch things we learnt. Bunch of things which are still helping in the startup journey. And I think as we grow there are lot more things we can draw from there. But, if I had to put it buckets, three big buckets. The first bucket is just the mindset. Coming from a consulting setup where you are dealing with large companies relative incremental change to a company which is saying we are at large base but think still 5x in a year. Setting those audacious goals and going after them. That’s one mindset which definitely Myntra helped start.

The second thing is network. And network in multiple ways. Network in the startup tech community of India and Bangalore where network being now there is almost a Myntra mafia. There are bunch of founders who are ex-Myntra who have started their companies, who are at the same stage as us. So networking with them is really helpful. So that network is very very helpful.

The third thing which I think in our case we didn’t take some much is the idea. I see a lot of companies if I take the same Myntra mafia where the functional idea or the skill was just carried over to a startup idea. In our case, with Anish and I it more the last straw. We saw a travel being broken in a tech first company like Myntra as well. And that was more a proof to us that is broken across everywhere. So more than the full idea, it was just a last straw for us which helped us. So, these three things are definitely helpful.

Gourav: Got it. Okay. How did you go about narrowing down what you wanted to do?

Mayank: So I actually used to maintain a running list of idea that I wanted to work on. I told you 10 years ago, the bug bit me. From there I used to maintain a list of ideas which are interesting which I think a lot of people have. And from there to moving which idea, how to build that conviction, there are a few non-negotiables. And the criteria - I would rather lay out the criteria to evaluate the idea.

The first was it should be a large problem to solve. And hopefully, it can be solved by tech. That was a personal preference. LARGE problem which can be solved through tech. So, travel definitely is a very very large problem. And when we went about talking to some people validating idea about Itilite, what we heard was almost every company saying, yes, my corporate travel agent or a desk works. We are not really happy about it. And as you can imagine the size is really really large. So it is definitely a large problem which can solve through tech.

Second thing is somehow you should personally identify with the problem. And that’s where the consulting days come in. I used to spend on an average 200 nights on the road for those four years I spent at McKinsey. So, corporate travel is something which I have done a lot. So, I have gone through the pain of corporate travel, booking it, managing it, changing it. Also, I had worked with a lot of companies on their cost initiative as a consultant. So, I had seen the business side of it. How companies struggle with controlling the cost. So, there was definitely a personal identification here.

The third thing is do have a unique insight how you want to solve this problem. That’s where the starting point for us was this incentives or rewards to reduce cost. One insight which we had was as consultants we used to help companies reduce cost through processes, tighter processes, cheaper policies, but that used to go away four months after McKinsey was gone. That’s where this idea of how do you sustainably solve this and align incentives of people by incentivizing employees to save money. Looked like a very unique insight where there is absolutely no reason someone should not do it. So a combination of this large problem, personal identification and a unique insight helped us narrow down to this idea.

Gourav: Very helpful. And Mayank, who did you go to for advice in the early days?

Mayank: So, not as many people as we would have liked. That’s the short answer. The people we went to we have a good set of angel investors with us. They were really really helpful. Second interesting set of people we went to is our customers. And I would lay out customers in a very different light in our experience. Some of our early customers were mid- to-large size startups which have already gone series B+

When we went to these companies, we realized the senior people there are more than happy to help the new startups. So we would sell to them, then we would go to the CXOs for advice. And they would be more than happy to sit with us and help us navigate how do you build a org, how do you solve a problem. So, that was really really helpful.

An interesting way to think about who do we go advice. We almost think of it as college. In college, you go for advice to your next year seniors, super seniors and alumni. I think we went to alumni by going to our angels. We went to super seniors so these customers. What we missed was our direct seniors who would give us tactical advice. That’s what we have started doing now. Going to companies who are maybe a few years ahead of us and the tactical advice there is really helpful.

Gourav: Mayank, you mentioned your angels. And I know you have a lot of very helpful angels on the cap table. One of the questions that people making this transition always have is how to navigate fund raise conversations. So, any advice there and any learning?

Mayank: So one of the early things we thought about is do we want to raise money. And if we want to raise money, we want to raise money from angels or institutional investors. As you know even the first round we raised was with Matrix with involvement of few angels. The way we thought about it is with angels we can definitely raise a round. It will be a small round. With that, we can go to certain level.

We chose to go a different way where we said that for the money we want to take a bigger bet. So, we would rather go a bigger round with our institutional investor. But, we still got some angels in. The way we thought about angels was these were people who we definitely need for help. The help you get from an angel investor versus an institutional investor are very different. There is subject matter expertise. There is certain different kind of network which an angel investor can come.

So we chose people who we wanted to help us regularly. And we made them our angels so that they have some skin in the game, so that we have right to keep going back them more regularly.

Gourav: Mayank, my last question. If you were to give the Mayank of three years ago advice on how to think about this transition and what are the mistakes to avoid, what would it be?

Mayank: So, one thing which definitely would have been helpful to learn earlier is it’s a long journey but still a sprint. And I read this somewhere recently that people keep saying startup is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s actually a sprint, but for a very long time. So, you have to run very fast on a daily basis. But, you have to be very very patient that there will be ups and downs, and it’s a long-term journey. Actually the best marathoners in the world are actually running at a very high speed throughout the marathon. That’s what it is. But, we didn’t realize that so early on. So, we would work very hard and expect quick results but things take time. So, just having the patience and perseverance and having that mindset early on would have been super super helpful.

Gourav: Mayank, thank you very much for doing this. And I think people will find this very useful. Thank you also to all of our listeners. You can find more updates about Matrix Moments on our Twitter and LinkedIn handles.

Mayank: Thank you so much for having me here.

Salonie: Thank you for listening. And you can find the transcribed version of this podcast on matrixpartners.in. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more updates.