Two by Two

We have unlocked the full and unedited subscriber version of episode four which we released on August 22 for Premium subscribers of The Ken and on Apple Podcasts. Now you can stream it wherever you listen to your podcasts for free for a few weeks.

Software engineering careers used to be a ladder. You studied for 4 years, got a job as a fresher, and could virtually take for granted a steady career filled with learning opportunities, salary hikes, and role promotions.

In fact being an engineer was so cool that we mocked MBAs and MBA-types – “suits” – for their desperation to find that elusive technical co-founder. The one who would translate an idea (common) into code and products.

Except, that’s increasingly not true.

An NYT story published earlier this week put it best.

“I have a pretty good sense how fast the progress that students should make in a semester should be,” he said. “In 14 years, I’ve never seen students make the kind of progress that they made this year.”

And he knew exactly why that was the case. For the first time, Mr. Ammirati had encouraged his students to use generative artificial intelligence as part of their process — “think of generative A.I as your co-founder,” he recalled telling them.

Many AI chatbots are fully capable of writing code now. So your technical co-founder could be an AI?

Where does that leave engineers? Are we staring at the end of the golden era for engineers?

Welcome to episode six of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix!

Earlier this week, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, my co-host, and I met with Amod Malviya, co-founder of Udaan and the former CTO at Flipkart, and Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha*.

Both Amod and Kailash have been programmers and engineers for over two decades now. They are also both deeply in love with their craft. Naturally, they are passionate about engineering and have strong views on its future.

Additional Reading:

Computational Thinking by Jeannette M. Wing

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for this episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer is the audio producer.

Please rate, share and follow us on your favorite streaming platform. It helps more like-minded people like you to find out by Two by Two.

*Zerodha’s perennial fund Rainmatter Capital is an investor in The Ken.

The fastest growing segment of insurance in India is individual health insurance. It’s growing steadily at a, well, healthy pace of 20% annually. 

But scratch just a little beneath the surface and things don’t appear so rosy. Of the 20% annual growth in revenue, nearly 15% comes from medical inflation. Meaning, existing customers paying higher premiums each year because the costs of treatments are going up.

The growth in the number of customers each year is just around 5-6%. 

Health insurance in India is broken from top to bottom. 70-75% of Indians have no health insurance. Of those who do, the largest chunk have free or low cost insurance provided by the government, followed by usually employer provided group insurance. Less than 10% Indians have their own health insurance. 

Scratch that. It’s more accurate to call it hospitalization insurance, not health insurance. Because the industry has developed in a way that incentivizes catastrophic illnesses and hospitalization and treatment, not health. 

Why, you wonder? 

Because much of the industry wrongly incentivizes, for legacy reasons, all the wrong things. Like, large groups that make lots of claims. High commissions to distributors. Expensive procedures. Expensive premiums. 

Instead of incentivising the right things. Like, getting the young and healthy covered early on. Insuring blue collar workers. Building products customers actually want. And most importantly, staying healthy.

So when hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar sat down to discuss this complex topic, they decided to invite two guests who had the experience and candour to tell them what needs to change. 

Our first guest is Viren Shetty, the Executive Vice Chairman of one of India’s largest hospital groups, the listed Narayana Health. was our first guest. Viren has also been spearheading Narayana Health’s foray into providing its own health insurance, built to address many of the gaps I spoke about earlier.

Our second guest is Shivaprasad Krishnan. Shivaprasad currently runs an investment banking firm, Kricon Capital, but was a part of the founding team at ICICI Lombard, one of India’s first private health insurers. He also has over 3 decades of experience in finance and management.

This episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Sound engineering and mixing is by Rajiv C N.

What you just listened to were just some of the highlights from an almost 90 minute discussion that Praveen and Rohin had with Viren and Shivaprasad. You can listen to full episodes either with a Premium subscription to The Ken or by subscribing to Two by Two Premium on Apple Podcasts.

Of course, you could also wait 4 weeks, because we do make full episodes available for a while after that.

[This is a highlights episode which you listen for free on Spotify, Amazon Music or YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts if you're not a paid subscriber yet]

If you enjoyed listening to this episode of Two by Two or have some thoughts that you’d like to share with us you can always write to us [email protected]. We’ll be back next week with a new episode for you.

We have unlocked the full and unedited subscriber version of episode four which we released on August 15 for Premium subscribers of The Ken and on Apple Podcasts. Now you can stream it wherever you listen to your podcasts for free for a few weeks.

The Swiggy of 2024 is a shadow of its former self. 

Boxed in by younger, nimbler and hungrier competitors from all sides, it has been defending itself for so long that it seems to have forgotten how to play offense. 

It wasn’t always like this. Swiggy used to define innovation, product chops and “Bengaluru cool”. 

In many ways it pioneered food delivery in 2014 after pivoting from a courier service.

Zomato, originally a restaurant discovery company, got into food delivery a year after Swiggy. It may have started as a late follower, but today Zomato’s market share in the food delivery space is estimated at 56-57% by Goldman Sachs, with Swiggy in second place.

Then there’s quick commerce. In 2020 Swiggy was the first to launch a quick commerce grocery business, which we now know as Instamart. Zomato meanwhile bought Blinkit and rapidly integrated and scaled it across India. Once again, it would go on to beat Swiggy in market share. Blinkit is estimated to have a 46% market share, followed by Swiggy at number 2. 

Underpinning all of Swiggy’s business were its apps and products, long considered the gold standard of user experience and design. They were slick, intuitive, fast, and fun.

But Swiggy’s apps today are a haphazard and constantly changing collection of sub-products, menu items, offers and distinct sections.

How did it come to this?

This week on Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan discuss Swiggy with Arnav Gupta, the Director of Engineering at Jio Cinema, and Deepak Shenoy – the co-founder and CEO of Capitalmind*.

Arnav, who used to lead product and engineering for Zomato's consumer apps, explains how product and teams work within a food delivery company. Deepak runs a company handling 2000 crores worth of investments and is a great expert on how the public markets work. He breaks down exactly what the market wants and needs from Swiggy, and what it needs to do to succeed once it goes public.

Additional Reading:

Swiggy is at the mercy of Zomato for its IPO

Swiggy and Timidity 

1,500 stories about India’s complex relationships with Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto, and Bigbasket

*Both Rohin and Praveen are investors with Capitalmind.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is our lead writer and researcher and our resident sound engineer Rajiv C N is our audio producer.

What did you think of the episode? Write to us at [email protected] with your opinions and suggestions.

It seems like ‘invite only’ is a rite of passage for Stripe. If Stripe entered India with an invite-only step, then it seems reasonable to assume that it’s leaving India on the basis that it’s doing invite-only again. Over seven years, Stripe, the world’s mightiest fintech, currently valued at $70 billion (and at $95 billion at its peak), could not make a dent in India. It had a great product, a massive untapped opportunity in India, and didn’t have much competition. And yet, it failed. Why? 

There’s an internet quip that was quite popular until recently. The Amazon of China is Alibaba, the Uber of China is Didi, and the Google of China is Baidu, the Apple of China is Xiaomi. In India, the thinking was : Amazon of India is Amazon, the Uber of India is Uber, the Google of India is Google, and the Apple of India is Apple. In today’s episode of Two by Two, we discussed why Stripe couldn’t become the Stripe of India.

And to discuss this, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan were joined by two guests.

Arundhati Ramanathan, Deputy Editor at The Ken. Arundhati is India’s preeminent Fintech reporter, and she’s demonstrated it over a career of 8 years at The Ken.

Our second guest is Vikram Bhat. Vikram is one of India’s most accomplished Product leaders, he was in product leadership roles at Myntra, Abof, Ekstep Foundation, LendingKart, Capillary Technologies, Goodworker, and most recently CPO at Setu, which is a fintech company that enables API-based infrastructure for financial services.

Welcome to episode nine of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix!

You can listen to the full conversation on The Ken App or Apple Podcasts

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for this episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer is the audio producer.

Please rate, share and follow us on your favorite streaming platform. It helps more like-minded people like you to find out by Two by Two.

We have unlocked the full and unedited subscriber version of episode four which we released on August 8 for Premium subscribers of The Ken and on Apple Podcasts. Now you can stream it wherever you listen to your podcasts for free for a few weeks.

The conventional wisdom is that Bengaluru is India’s Silicon Valley. It’s the cradle of India’s tech revolution. First there was Infosys and Wipro on the IT services side. Then when startups become cool and hip, the default location to get it all started was also Bengaluru. 

Take the leaders across sectors, and you’ll see they belong to Bengaluru — Flipkart, InMobi, Swiggy, PhonePe, Myntra, Ola, Amazon, Unacademy, Byju’s…and much more. 

But of late, it looks like something has changed. There’s now a sentiment that Bengaluru is for people who “want to” build startups, but Delhi is for people who build businesses. 

Delhi companies are the ones who seem to be gutsier, more resilient, and stronger. The list of tech companies that have gone public — Zomato, Paytm, Mamaearth, Infoedge, Delhivery, have one thing in common i.e Delhi. 

Why is this distance so wide? Do cities really influence businesses that much?

Our guests for this episode have stories that might make you agree. 

Our first guest is Prashant Singh, who’s the Head of Product at JAR, in Bengaluru. He’s spent 20 years in Delhi, where he set up his own startup and sold it to Paytm. He’s now in Bengaluru, and he’s not convinced that a city can affect a company’s future…but he remembers the early building days of Delhi – a city with a get-thing-done attitude and massive “ops chops.”

Our second guest is Arnav Gupta, the Director of Engineering at JioCinema. He has also founded and sold his own edtech startup, as well as led the engineering and product for the Zomato app. Arnav worked in Delhi before VCs pulled him to Bengaluru – and now that he’s spent a few years here, he knows what sort of companies only Bengaluru can give birth to, and why. 

Joined by hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, our guests discuss the unique cultural context each city adds to a business, why it’s causing a rivalry, and what this means for the Indian startups ecosystem, going forward.

If you like the episode rate us on your favorite streaming platform. Write to us what you thought about the episode at [email protected]

12 years of schooling is losing out to private coaching as entry into India’s colleges gets increasingly centralized via entrance exams. 

School education is a fundamental right in India. An average Indian child spends 10-12 years in schools. And for most parents and families, the money they spend on educating their child is one of the largest over time.

And yet, school education is slowly becoming (or perhaps being made) irrelevant in the next step that comes after that: college.

The schools-exams-college “chain” is broken. Perhaps because it is now the schools-private-coaching-exams-college chain. And your school education is not going to cut it for you to make the cutoff as millions line up to clear the exam every year.

Private coaching is how you manage to get into the school and your actual schooling is just a condition you have to fulfil to sit in for the exam. It plays no part in preparing you for the entrance exam.

Private coaching, estimated to be a $25 billion industry by 2025, is becoming the determinant of a good quality education. Not schooling. Thus, as entrance exams get centralized, and private coaching becomes the most reliable way to clear them, the results are only accentuating numerous privileges and biases, including central boards like ICSE/CBSE, bigger cities, boys, and families with higher incomes.

12 years of schooling – one of the biggest spends for families – is becoming disconnected from college education and jobs.

And to discuss this, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan were joined by three guests.

Maheshwer Peri, the founder and CEO of Careers 360, a company that helps hundreds of millions of students each explore career plans. Mahesh has been an investment banker with SBI Capital Markets, then was with the Outlook group for 17 years, including heading it for more than 10 years.

Sumeet Mehta, Co-founder and CEO, LEAD Group. LEAD Group offers school edtech solutions across 8000 schools in India, which in turn touch 3.5 million+ students.

Nitin Pai, our third guest and the co-founder and director of the Takshashila Institution,  an independent think tank and school of public policy based in Bengaluru.

Additional references:

How fair are entrance exams?

Welcome to episode six of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix!

You can listen to the full conversation on The Ken App or Apple Podcasts.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for this episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer is the audio producer.

You can also sign up for the Two by Two newsletter for free. Each week you’ll get to read a “storified” version of that week’s episode.

Write to us [email protected] and tell us what you think of the show.

Please rate, share and follow us on your favorite streaming platform. It helps more like-minded people like you to find out by Two by Two.

We have unlocked the full and unedited subscriber version of episode three which we released on August 1 for Premium subscribers of The Ken. Now you can stream it wherever you listen to your podcasts for free for a few weeks. 

In 2021, as the pandemic still raged on and we washed our vegetables and supplies before consuming them, a young delivery startup promised that you can get all your groceries – everything you need – delivered right to your doorstep. In 10 minutes. 

This was pretty crazy, back then. 

Zepto was written off as an ambitious, overhyped startup run by two founders who had barely outgrown their teenage – by competitors and experts alike. 

In 2024, Zepto has now raised $1.2 billion in venture capital, with a valuation on $3.6 billion. Everyone was wrong about this little startup, which seems to have achieved something that retail brands only dream to: changing consumer habits. 10-minute delivery is now the norm – so much so that the likes of the good old retail giants Dmart and Reliance Retail are scratching their heads. Even Flipkart and Amazon are scuttling about, trying to crack the hyperlocal delivery space. 

Who would’ve thought Zepto would be the company to set the cat among the pigeons? 

It’s not random, though. Zepto has tapped into specific advantages – categories, space, speed. And it certainly has timing to thank. All of these aspects have come together serendipitously for Zepto, but the real question is: does it pose a real threat to India’s largest retail brands?

And if it does, what will they do to stop Zepto?

In this episode of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar, CEO of The Ken and Praveen Gopal Krishnan (PGK), COO of The Ken speak with guests Seetharaman G and Arvind Singhal to break down how exactly Zepto managed to surprise everyone, and what this means for the e-commerce space, going forward.

About the guests:

Arvind Singhal is the founder of Technopak Advisors, a 30 year old management consulting firm best known for its insights on retail and consumer goods. Arvind is an absolute expert on all things retail, with 30 years of hands-on experience advising the most prominent retail companies in India and abroad.

Seetharaman G is The Ken’s deputy editor and lead writer on all things retail, FMCG and e-commerce. He’s reported on quick commerce as well as large retail brands in India week after week in Trade Tricks, the Ken’s paid newsletter on retail. 

This is Two by Two, The Ken's weekly premium business podcast – we like to call it your own personal investigative brain. New episodes released every Thursday morning.

You can also subscribe to the Two by Two newsletter for free here.

Write to us at [email protected] with your suggestions and what you thought of the episode.

Google Pay is India's second largest UPI app with a market share of 38%, with 500+ crore transactions a month. It’s one of the world’s mightiest companies, and yet, we argue that it’s possibly in a vulnerable, strange position. By this, we don’t mean that it will disappear overnight, but that all kinds of competitors are coming for it. Already it’s market share has declined from 44% to 37%. It’s an outpost of an empire that’s fighting a global war. And most importantly, the first wave of UPI is over, and the second phase is starting. UPI itself is changing and going through some transitions, and there are questions on whether signs that Google Pay won’t be able to keep up.

Joining hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar in the discussion were two guests with incredible experience in the area of UPI and payments – Abhishek Madan, Vice President of Product at Paytm and Vasisht S Ravichandran, COO at Pop, a new UPI app which is inverting the way we’re looking at UPI and commerce. Vasisht previously also had a stint at Flipkart where he was Senior Director of Customer Loyalty and Retention before leaving Flipkart to start Pop.

And while the conversation was centered around Google Pay, the discussion also went in the direction of understanding the infrastructure on top of which most of India’s most valuable fintechs are built upon – UPI.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for the episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer is the audio producer.

P.S. The Ken podcast team is looking for a talented podcast producer and an audio journalist. If you fit the bill or know someone who does, you can apply here.

[You can listen to the full episode on The Ken’s app or on Apple Podcasts, with a paid subscription! You can, of course, still listen to a 30-minute free version of this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts]

We’re a new podcast so help spread the word about Two by Two by taking a few moments to leave a review and sharing this episode with your friends. Also, follow the show to keep up with the latest episodes. We release new episodes every Thursday.

Subscribe to the Two by Two newsletter for free here. You'll get a storified version of each week's episode and get to participate in The Ken's subscribe-driven initiatives.

You can also reach out to us at [email protected].

Software engineering careers used to be a ladder. You studied for 4 years, got a job as a fresher, and could virtually take for granted a steady career filled with learning opportunities, salary hikes, and role promotions.  

In fact being an engineer was so cool that we mocked MBAs and MBA-types – “suits” – for their desperation to find that elusive technical co-founder. The one who would translate an idea (common) into code and products.

Except, that’s increasingly not true.

An NYT story published earlier this week put it best.

“I have a pretty good sense how fast the progress that students should make in a semester should be,” he said. “In 14 years, I’ve never seen students make the kind of progress that they made this year.”

And he knew exactly why that was the case. For the first time, Mr. Ammirati had encouraged his students to use generative artificial intelligence as part of their process — “think of generative A.I as your co-founder,” he recalled telling them.

Many AI chatbots are fully capable of writing code now. So your technical co-founder could be an AI?

Where does that leave engineers? Are we staring at the end of the golden era for engineers?

Welcome to episode six of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix!

Earlier this week, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, my co-host, and I met with Amod Malviya, co-founder of Udaan and the former CTO at Flipkart, and Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha*.

Both Amod and Kailash have been programmers and engineers for over two decades now. They are also both deeply in love with their craft. Naturally, they are passionate about engineering and have strong views on its future.

[You can listen to the full episode on The Ken’s app or on Apple Podcasts, with a paid subscription]

Additional Reading:

Computational Thinking by Jeannette M. Wing

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for this episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer is the audio producer.

Please rate, share and follow us on your favorite streaming platform. It helps more like-minded people like you to find out by Two by Two.

*Zerodha’s perennial fund Rainmatter Capital is an investor in The Ken.

The Swiggy of 2024 is a shadow of its former self. 

Boxed in by younger, nimbler and hungrier competitors from all sides, it has been defending itself for so long that it seems to have forgotten how to play offense. 

It wasn’t always like this. Swiggy used to define innovation, product chops and “Bengaluru cool”. 

In many ways it pioneered food delivery in 2014 after pivoting from a courier service.

Zomato, originally a restaurant discovery company, got into food delivery a year after Swiggy. It may have started as a late follower, but today Zomato’s market share in the food delivery space is estimated at 56-57% by Goldman Sachs, with Swiggy in second place.

Then there’s quick commerce. In 2020 Swiggy was the first to launch a quick commerce grocery business, which we now know as Instamart. Zomato meanwhile bought Blinkit and rapidly integrated and scaled it across India. Once again, it would go on to beat Swiggy in market share. Blinkit is estimated to have a 46% market share, followed by Swiggy at number 2. 

Underpinning all of Swiggy’s business were its apps and products, long considered the gold standard of user experience and design. They were slick, intuitive, fast, and fun.

But Swiggy’s apps today are a haphazard and constantly changing collection of sub-products, menu items, offers and distinct sections.

How did it come to this?

This week on Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan discuss Swiggy with Arnav Gupta, the Director of Engineering at Jio Cinema, and Deepak Shenoy – the co-founder and CEO of Capitalmind*.

Arnav, who used to lead product and engineering for Zomato's consumer apps, explains how product and teams work within a food delivery company. Deepak runs a company handling 2000 crores worth of investments and is a great expert on how the public markets work. He breaks down exactly what the market wants and needs from Swiggy, and what it needs to do to succeed once it goes public.

[You can listen to the full episode on The Ken’s app or on Apple Podcasts, with a paid subscription]

Additional Reading:

Swiggy is at the mercy of Zomato for its IPO

Swiggy and Timidity 

1,500 stories about India’s complex relationships with Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto, and Bigbasket

* Both Rohin and Praveen are investors with Capitalmind.

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P.S. We're hiring! Our podcast team is looking for an audio journalist and a podcast producer. Apply here.

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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is our lead writer and researcher and our resident sound engineer Rajiv C N is our audio producer.

What did you think of the episode? Write to us at [email protected] with your opinions and suggestions.