My guest for Ep218 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Nipun Mehra.

Nipun has had an incredible track record in his career. At Amazon he launched their first ever real time inventory management system, was an early team member at Flipkart helping build and scale one of India’s most successful and iconic startups before joining Sequoia India as an investor.

In 2020, he Co-founded Ula, a B2B e-commerce platform that set out to modernise retail supply chains for millions of small businesses starting in Indonesia.

Ula quickly become one of South East Asia’s fastest growing startups. They went from $0 to $300M in revenue within 2 years. Ola also raised over $140M from leading investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Tencent and even raised capital from Jeff Bezos himself, his first investment into this part of the world.

But in a candid and deeply honest conversation, Nipun shares – for the first time publicly – the full story of what happened behind the scenes from Ula when he decided to shut down the company and return the remaining capital to investors.

From hypergrowth to hard calls, this episode dives into the reality of building a company at scale and the weight of leadership at challenging times.

In this episode we cover:

I’m also excited to announce that Nipun will be joining The Komo Club as a speaker for Cohort 2. The program is the world’s first human accelerator, designed to help high performing founders and executives implement the right system and frameworks to help them succeed in business and all areas of their life. You can find out more at thekomoclub.com

Thank you to Karl Noronha, Ganesh Rengaswamy and Prithvi Rajaram for their help with research for this interview!

A big shout out to our long-term partners for the show:

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Music: Paycheck

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The post Ep218 – Nipun Mehra (Co-founder & CEO – Ula) On Ula’s hypergrowth, Bezos backing & the hard call to shut down appeared first on Startup Playbook.