Entrepreneur Speak | Ola Cabs Co-founder - Bhavish Aggarwal | Taxi Services Startup | upGrad

you IIT Bombay I completed my bachelor's degree in computer science in 2008 there and the IIT Bombay experience was really an eye-opener for me and gave me a lot of exposure to

entrepreneur

ship with

entrepreneur

s, you know, people like the Nilekani used to come and give You know, unique conversations and Bombay is actually in the center of the business world, so that gave me a lot of exposure and after that I worked at Microsoft for two years from 2008 to 2010, but as soon as I graduated, I had the itch to want to do something on my own at some point and after two years in my job, my job was very exciting, but I decided, you know, to take the risk and it was pretty early in my career.

I was only 24 when I started so you know I didn't have anything real, there's nothing that stuck me as such. I think first-time entrepreneurs, especially young ones, start from a much more personal point of pain than you know. an Excel sheet or a business financial analyst, kind of approach to setting up a business and that's what we did as well. You know it was a person. We actually started a business called Ola trip comm and pivoted it after six months. All our tabs come and the whole trip was to sell weekend holidays online and it was out of a personal pain of not being able to know the holidays booked in major cities that never went anywhere, but as we were doing it, we realized of the additional problem. of tab aggregation for hourly rentals or outstation trips and that's how we changed from selling trips to selling, you know, to creating a website where you can book outstation limits, let's say from Bombay to Pune or from Delhi to Agra etc, that was the first one.

You know, the first portal we created and then gradually we continued to learn more about the business. We delve into transportation. We learned how big an opportunity urban transportation represents today, where our mission is to build mobility for all of India. I started in 2010 in the middle of 2010, August 2010 and at that time the

startup

was not as attractive a market as it is today and the

startup

was not as socially accepted and I come from a small town called Luciana. I'm not here in town, so my family really reacted. I know they said you couldn't become a travel agent and you know they didn't talk to me for six months after that, so I think things are a lot better today, families are more accepting and they've seen some role models emerge. of the last five six ten years, but I would say that for entrepreneurs who want to start a business, do not wait for the best time, no, you know, there is no best time or the right time to start, the right time to start is when I want you to feel that you want to do something and you want to create a big business and that is the right time and you should aim big, don't try to solve small problems, try to solve really big and important problems.

The Enola Dams, in fact, we saw them. a need of the customer who cannot get quality transportation on demand, it is not easy for you to get it now, it has become like this because we have expanded, but three four years ago it was not easy to book a car to move around the city. or go out of town and that was the inner core that we captured and built around that and today we believe that people don't need to have cars because now cars are available every five minutes on the app and it's much easier to get them.

Now we tour the cities, but that was very different three years ago. Our business model is quite simple. We collect a commission from each driver for each trip we send. We don't own the cars. We work with driver partners who own cars and today. We have between two and a half to 50,000 car owners on our platform and every trip we send them we honor with a small commission. Staying at the forefront is a matter of innovation. The market leader always has to innovate more and continue to innovate products to ensure itself. he is at the forefront and he is growing the market and he is providing a better experience to the customers and we have done this many times in our short history for example we launched auto rickshaws about a year ago or 810 months ago and that was unheard of and So, mag and auto rickshaws are quite a big business for us today.

A few months ago we launched a food delivery product that we launched across the delivery product, this is how you continue to innovate products to continue to build your ecosystem and make sure that you are the first choice for consumers is a series of incremental things that make a product better for local conditions, for example, something we did recently that has had an immense impact on our businesses. We have made our app much smoother on 2g. India is a 2g country, if you go deeper into the type of country, people do not have 3G connections and people work with 2g data and our app, in fact, we have done a lot of optimizations, we have released a lite version that we people can use a lot more easily on 2G networks and that in smaller cities has really increased our users.

When we saw people using us in small cities, we got very excited because you know that

taxi

s can even penetrate very, very deep into India. There's a market. for mobility even in cities like Siliguri or Coimbatore or even in smaller towns but when we talked to users we realized that it is not that easy for them to use data, you know they don't have proper 3G. networks, even the drivers in those cities do not have adequate 3G networks and just a basic solution created for the largest cities will not work there and we listened to them, we listened to them, we did surveys, we understood the magnitude of the problem. and we decided to create a product solution for this very well-posed question about our business.

There are a lot of macro trends in India right now, not just for our business but for the entire internet mobility business. Of those trends, our India is experiencing immense growth. Mobile Phones People in India have never had access to a screen that is in their hands like mobile phones and not many people had desktop computers in India. Television is a one-way medium and mobile phones have really opened up this interactive medium for the first time among Indians and that will open up consumption across all verticals and companies like ours, like e-commerce companies, will have to innovate for that platform. , the hardware is there now and it's getting cheaper and cheaper data costs are coming down, data is gradually improving. 4G is The data costs that are being implemented are going down and that again allows all the consumption of these mobile phones, the capital to be available for smart entrepreneurs to build very local business models and all these things in all this technology, you know , the growth is happening in parallel with this interesting thing that I do of the collaborative economy globally right where people can now have more flexible work schedules, people can have more flexible work options and this also has a very deep interaction with the type of regulations that must be built around this entire collaborative economy and these new mobile users.

Learn about mobile ecosystems so you know that startups have to span all of these worlds. You know, regulatory economic technology, social impact, and it's important to bring in stakeholders from each of these verticals, for example, we work very deeply with central and state governments in cities. We need to make sure they understand the value we bring to society. How we help drivers or business owners live a better life. How we are building an urban service for consumers. It is much better for the city if people use shared

taxi

s. service instead of buying your own cars and there is a search that says that one taxi takes 15 personal cars off the road and this is important to develop these products, it is important to make sure that all interested parties are fully aware of what you are trying to build. they see value in what you are trying to build and it is important to communicate very openly with the entire ecosystem.

Personally, I don't have a car. I no longer feel the need to have a car. Many of you know I am. I see a lot of people around me who don't buy their first car. They also know my employees, other people who would have already bought a first car and actually regress at a macro level if they look at India. India has only five people owning cars and our public roads. The infrastructure is also overcrowded and overwhelmed, you know, completely, unlike the West where there are 70 people who own cars and the infrastructure is much better, so India cannot have a mobility paradigm where everyone owns a car ;

It's just not going to happen and the paradigm for mobility is going to be a shared service for coal and I see that around me or everywhere people don't use cars if they have a car they don't buy second cars many people like me don't even You buy your first cars so I think it's going to change a lot faster than most people expected, the biggest mistakes when creating a budget is not clearly expressing and understanding your assumptions and knowing the different levels of the company, this error keeps coming back because there is no if it doesn't.

If you don't try hard enough to model all the assumptions and understand your business very deeply, you will be either under or over budget, which in hindsight you will realize later, so it is important that you know how to be very detailed when It's about budgeting and planning. it's important to understand all the levers, all the assumptions clearly state or state your assumptions, clearly state your risks, model them in financial terms and as you execute that plan, once you've planned it and once you execute that budget, it's important to you. periodically, in a structured way, keep reviewing those assumptions and keep validating those assumptions on the positive or negative side, that is something that we have learned from experience, there are so many mistakes that we have made that it is not even difficult to remember any of them. one specific one worth every step we've made so many mistakes we know that so Ron in hindsight I learned from it let me think about you know something I think we used to do we never really understood our marketing spend until recently and we used to confuse a lot of brand marketing with customer acquisition and, in retrospect, they know it.

We've learned how to separate those things, separate budgets for different goals, and have clearly defined metrics, even for, say, a brand-building campaign. I think the whole structure is a good question for many. Each company has its own organizational style. We like to be agile. We like to, you know, build organizational structures for six to nine months and then review them because the business is growing so fast that the context changes and every six nine months. We have reorganized and you know some sums as we grow, we have gone deeper and deeper into our work Prada resin once we were small, when because we were smaller we had broader roles, many more generalists working in broad areas. paths as we've grown, we've gotten specialists who go deeper and deeper into every problem we have, but the core of the way we organize ourselves is that we're agile, but we want to make sure we take a six nine months.

The most important thing for us is attitude. Experience is important in some verticals, but it is not the only factor. We hire a lot for attitude. You know, we had a lot for culture. The startup again has its own unique culture, it's important to understand that culture and make sure that you can clearly communicate what you know and objectively and compare candidates to that list objectively, so we focus a lot on you know, ambition, much much. in passion and aggressive execution, a lot in, you know, obviously, intellect and problem-solving skills in our house. Oh lies about being first principles, we don't like to work from a I've done this before it's been done approach.

Before this way we liked to reimagine things and build from first principles. We like to focus on the big problems and be ambitious about what we want to build and I like to think that we work very, very hard on those problems. I think these three things. They are named with each of the values ​​of each employee, they are populated and sustained if the leaders display them and if they are followed every day, you know that they are not sustained by having something on the wall or having the pillars painted in the office. I think that's very ephemeral, it's about senior leadership, middle leadership, you know, middle management exhibits those traits every day and in every meeting or in every aspect of the life of the company and the way to institutionalize it is to have that part of the performance management structures that have made me secure as a

founder

. down,everyone is reflecting that every day Ola means hello in Spanish and it's a very nice youthful energetic expression and that's how you know we just took that and thought of making it a very nice and youthful brand in India, nothing that we follow in that journey, but that thought remains because we are essentially a very utilitarian service, we get a lot of word of mouth and we've done a great job of institutionalizing that, you know, accelerating that word of mouth through a referral. program, so our referral program is quite large.

We've gotten a lot of our customers through it as we've grown, although our brand has gotten stronger and customers you know are drawn to us because it's the biggest brand in the space and that scales organically. What helps is that if your brand is good, if your brand is big, you don't have to spend so much on paid marketing, digital SEM marketing or rap marketing etc. but that's all because the mobile app industry in India is very incipient and continues to be a great opportunity for growth. We invest significantly in paid marketing. Also, we started, let's say three years ago, doing a lot of web marketing and a lot of SEO stuff that has completely disappeared now because I had a mobile business, first mobile only, now, you know, from a website to you know, ago Two years we created a referral program and that began to expand very well because it was a way to accelerate word of mouth until the end of last year.

We started doing brand marketing. You know, we did a big TV campaign and over these three years, mobile app marketing on mobile platforms has increased significantly over the last 100 years. Our share of the budget in the mobile app ecosystem has increased significantly. higher than most other paid channels so it's actually very simple, if I am an Ola user, I can refer my friend once he joins, he and I, with 200 rupees or a lot of money, so which is a great way to reward users for recommending. your friends towards you and you know they say "like baguettes", so one good customer brings another good customer and it's a great way to make sure you have the right type of customers on your platform.

It is very important to ensure that the investor is aligned for the long term. term with the vision they want to develop and they have all been very lucky to have a wonderful set of investors who understand the Internet space globally, who are focused on the very long term and who are excellent partners for the entrepreneur and the team at management we have. excellent nurses at Tiger global at Softbank at Sequoia Matrix, all of these people have really helped us leverage their learnings and have also been great partners in the final vision, so the most important thing for me is that they know how to ensure that the bottom line and the part specific partner in the The fund understands a long-term vision and really believes in that.

We started in 2010, so it was a very slow start for us, it was not a time when there was much excitement in the Indian startup scene and we had to start the process. We also didn't have much capital in the business so I remember the first month of January 2011 when she switched to Ola taxis, we took one trip for the entire month and I was very excited and the next month we had four trips, one a week and again I was very excited, it was a very, very slow start because capital was a big constraint for us from the beginning, but the whole time we knew that we were solving a very big problem and we knew that once we had a certain scale we should start to reach the investors. and take the money, so sometime in late 2012 we restarted Lea and left a global Lea Tiger and he got very excited about the opportunity and gave us money.

I think now is a very different time, it's important to make sure you don't take money too early, it's important to build a prototype, build and get real customers to make money if you're in the business of making money right away, if that's the product that you have, make sure you have a prototype, expand it as much as you can. Invest your own money and then go into a fund so you can talk to them from a position of strength in India for two years and when Uber came to India we were very small. I remember we had less than half a million dollars. in the bank when Hoover entered India and we were doing like 2000 trips a day, which is nothing extraordinary and Ola has evolved quite in parallel in India, we have done a much better job of creating a much more local product and if We look at how a local company can maintain its leadership in the market and increase its market share, it is about being more local, fundamentally, it is about being more local in everything related to the product that it is building.

Different geographies and different cultures require different features in the brand that In our case, we are building on both the driver and consumer side, and you know the partnerships and the integration with the ecosystem because you are local, you can do these things Too much faster. The user experience is getting a car in less than five minutes and getting into a car that is clean and the driver is courteous and you can pay without problems for that ride and this experience should be done on multiple modes of transportation different people prefer different modes of transportation Different transportation for different use cases, for example, we have three types of taxi

services

, we have Jack taxi pusher, which is an economical option, we have an auto rickshaw service, we will be launching a bus service quite soon, so we consider that we offer options between different modes, all those modes should be accessible very quickly in less than five minutes. and you should have a good experience on the trip and the payment should be smooth, it's important to just get into the fire, don't wait for the right moment, don't wait for money, don't wait for a team you know, etc., if you are passionate about it, just get into it, this is the time when India has many opportunities for budding entrepreneurs, there are multiple, everything related to Indian consumption is being reinvented using modern technology especially mobile, just get in and you will discover the rest. by the way