- The speaker was born in Bombay and moved to Dubai at a young age.
- They and their friend attended the same school and bonded over their fathers being engineers.
- They both started programming at a young age and wanted to make a career out of it.
- They applied to Stanford University in the hopes of going to Silicon Valley.
- Due to the pandemic, they decided to take a year off and started experimenting with delivering groceries through a WhatsApp group.
- They eventually built an app called Kirana Card and started scaling their delivery service.
- They received a 40 lakh investment from a fellowship called Contrary Capital.
- They used the investment to expand their business and started approaching local kirana stores to join as sellers.
- They faced challenges in selling their software to the stores but eventually found success.
- They launched the customer app in 2021 and quickly scaled to 300 orders per day.
- They raised additional investments from angel investors in Contrary's network.

- The company initially raised 20 lakhs from angel investors and later got approached by Y Combinator.
- They launched their app and quickly gained 300 orders per day, but customers expressed dissatisfaction and said they would go back to buying offline after the lockdown.
- They realized their speed of delivery was a problem and decided to pivot to a dark store model.
- They raised a $10 million Series A and within 45 days closed a $50 million Series B.
- The business started growing rapidly, with 150-200% growth per week.
- They raised a $100 million Series C and recently announced their Series E, bringing their total funding to $530 million.
- The founders own about 25% of the company.
- The company's revenue comes from sales, advertising income, and delivery fees, with sales being the core component.
- Grocery makes up a significant portion of consumption in India, with organized grocery accounting for about 5% of the market.

Watch the full episode - https://youtu.be/nGpir4oUfJI?feature=shared

Listen to the full episode on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0JPCua3dy2WblYr1BDCfEd?si=a13df4b365374c7c

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/ep-10-wtf-is-the-next-gen-thinking-nikhil-w-navya/id1677107935?i=1000628553764

Nikhil Kamath - Co-founder of Zerodha, True Beacon and Gruhas

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And then when I was about 5, I moved to Dubai.

And we ended up in the same class in the 3rd grade.

So, growing up, I never thought that I'd be like spending the rest of my life in India.

The school that we went to, the typical path, most people ended up going to either the UK, US or Canada for university.

I started programming when I was like 10 or 11.

And so we would work on a bunch of projects growing up.

Pretty boring to say, but yeah, we used to...

Sort of pushed into that world pretty early on.

KB is always a lot more technical and smarter than I was.

So he built out the actual interesting stuff.

And yeah, but we used to work on things together.

By the time 2 of us were 17, we said, okay.

Like, How do we make a career out of this hobby?

And that's when, I guess when you were 14, 15, we started getting exposed to Y Combinator, a startup school, if you guys have heard of that.

No, this was like an online course that they had.

So basically towards the end of school, we said, how do we build a career out of building?

And we figured that from the Y Combinator YouTube videos and the sessions that we used to see online, we realized that this is a community of people in Silicon Valley that basically build for a living.

We said, what's the best excuse to get there?

What's the best excuse for 2 Indian kids in Dubai to get there?

We figured Stanford would be a good excuse to go there.

that was supposed to be the beginning of the journey.

Yeah, I mean he got in early, I didn't get in early.

I got in through the regular decision cycle.

We were supposed to start in September of 2020.

And we said, okay, we can start our college education online.

But we had like 4 precious years in Silicon Valley.

So we said, if we're going to waste a year sitting on our laptops in Dubai or Mumbai, it's not really worth it.

And, you know, we didn't really have anything planned for that year.

A lot of our friends had internships at Goldman or J.P.

But we were, we just said, let's take a year off, figure out what we can do.

And yeah, that's when we started experimenting.

So we came to Bombay, firstly, when the pandemic hit.

And so yeah, that's basically where we were.

So we were within reach of our family in Bombay.

Your local mom and pop shop was disrupted.

The online guys were taking 7-8 days to deliver.

Eventually we started hitting that limit.

each person could see what the neighbour was ordering?

It was just a bunch of Punjabis in like...

I don't know, 50 years ago, 40 years ago or something.

I don't know, maybe a 100-200 houses there.

And like, there were 3 stores nearby that we would pick up and...

And when it got to a certain point, we said, let's build an app out of it.

And so, We built out the first rendition.

And yeah, it was basically a pick up and drop service.

And that's how we ended up building it out.

And it started scaling over the course of a couple of months.

We were like the customer support executives.

We were the delivery partners, The delivery drivers.

We were the guys that, you know, packed the orders for the store.

And we used to do that for like 60-70% of the time.

And as we were going through that, we interacted with customers so much.

If we really wanted to make something meaningful and scale this...

I mean, we would have to just control the customer experience end to end.

And so, that's when we started experimenting with dark stores.

You know, a dark store is like a micro-warehouse.

Or you can think of it like a supermarket.

In the sense that you've got these aisles.

But unlike a supermarket, it's tucked away in a back alley somewhere.

And instead of having customers moving around those aisles...

...You've got pickers and packers that are zipping around.

I mean, not only did it help us deliver faster...

...Short-term was meaningfully better, quality was meaningfully better, speed was...

Or at least have a better handle on pricing than we initially did.

So how did you go from delivering groceries on WhatsApp?

Where did the money to start a darkstore come from?

So, and when we started getting very early traction, we applied to this thing.

We actually met Will, who was the first investor in the company.

And it was a crazy idea for 2 kids sitting in Bombay.

They basically said, we'll give you 40 lakhs for free.

If you're building something interesting.

a whole bunch of people were taking gap years.

And so these guys said we'll pick 5 teams that are working on something.

So at that point we're like a student focused VC fund.

So we'll give $50,000 to 5 teams that are working on something in a gap year.

know if the fellowship is open, but the fund is there.

In fact, Will, the guy that had invested, he was in India last weekend for the first time.

was our first time meeting him in person Since he put in that money.

Yeah, I mean it was like… We were like 2 kids sitting in a living room… On a WhatsApp group chat.

And someone was like, okay this is 2.5 billion dollars.

And I think initially really… we didn't have much of a plan.

When you get a pre-seed, a cap, and I'm sure you know this right.

So I think this investment happened in...

So, typically with marketplace businesses, you have a Chicken and egg problem.

Without restaurants it's hard to get customers.

And without customers it's hard to get restaurants.

...We would just go to a different neighbourhood in Bombay.

Like 1 day it would be Parel or Pawai or Boreveli or Kulaba.

We just walk into as many of these kirana stores.

And try to convince them to join as a seller.

Over those 3 months, we went to every single neighbourhood.

So neither of us had any sort of background in sales.

But like trying to sell software to like a banyan is probably the best crash course in sales that anyone can do.

Because Out of 10 of them, 8 will tell you to like..

of them will say, Okay fine, I'll download your app.

And by the time you walk out, 1 of those 2 is deleted.

And so, they would give us feedback though.

Would their margins go down versus selling instead?

I mean at that point we were charging 2-3% commission.

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