Two by Two

“If you had to pick out of all these patterns and themes that we spoke about, which one are you the most sure about for the next season?

Two by Two is taking a short break before Season 3 starts in November, and for the season finale, the table gets flipped. Snigdha Sharma, who hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily news podcast, went back through both seasons of the show, pulled out the themes it keeps returning to, and put Praveen Gopal Krishnan in the guest's chair.

He discusses some of the themes India will see play out in the next couple of years, like how duopolies across quick-commerce, ride-sharing and food delivery will face pressures and continue to innovate to hold out. Or how legacy companies like HUL and Bajaj Finance tell us about our understanding of assets, and how that’ll play out. And of course, what exactly is the new urban Indian, and how will they continue to shape culture, cities and much more.

Two by Two will be on a short break, and will be back with Season 3 in November.

All of it leads back to a concept Praveen first wrote about six years ago in The Nutgraf: India’s California users, a group of roughly 10 million people whose habits shape the country's consumer tech, its startups and its culture. 

Sometime last month, the world got its first real encounter with AI agents with Instinct, an app you can text on WhatsApp that can go and do things like cancel subscriptions, book a trip, buy the groceries. Investors valued it at around $2.5 billion within weeks. Last week, Meta followed with Muse which is taking over the US right now. 

In today’s episode, Praveen argues that the personal assistants story should have been an Indian story first. India has UPI, WhatsApp on every phone and a culture of delegation from drivers and cooks to RTO agents, CAs and the cousin who knows someone at the passport office. 

And yet personal agents haven't taken off here.

To understand why, he has two returning guests on the show. 

Shreyas Srinivasan, co-founder of Alt Inc, which is building a social layer for AI so people can find others like them through how they use it. Founder of Insider, which Paytm acquired and later sold to Zomato, and former Chief Product Officer at Paytm.

Dharmesh Ba, founder of 1990 Research Labs, a consumer-intelligence lab that helps companies with engagement and retention problems through primary research. Previously built Business Hero, WhatsApp automation for small businesses. He also writes the popular substack titled The India Notes on Indian consumer psychology. 

Both of them are power users of AI assistants. Shreyas runs OpenClaw, Hermes and Instinct and says he's "dated all of them", yet struggles to find uses for them. Dharmesh uses his in-between his therapy sessions and to mine eight years of Indian consumer interviews. Praveen surfaces The Ken's The Great Rewiring survey, in which subscribers listed the chores they want gone: "Madam, OTP?", telling the cook what to make, the school's Friday dress-up theme, managing parents' health. Shreyas argues most of these are solvable today on a general-purpose model, that power law will leave three or four general agents standing, and that UPI gives India no real edge over credit cards. Dharmesh argues that in India trust sits with people, like the hardware-store owner in Erode taking ten calls an hour, and that specialists will win wherever social standing is at stake.

In the end, they also talk about the companies themselves. If an agent has no attention to capture and no friction to charge for, what happens to India's marketplaces and startups?

Everyone has a theory, to listen which one you agree with, listen to this episode.

On 22 August, a hospital in Bengaluru hosted a “rave party” in its corridors, with kombucha and hospital props. Enough people were bemused and outraged. A week later, a "peptide party" was cancelled the day before it happened, after Karnataka's drug regulator asked what exactly was in the mocktails and later conducted raids. These are just a small flavour of the kind of strange, unusual events that are happening in the city. There are others : like invite-only house parties with AI-generated cocktails, people opening up their living rooms for strangers to come in and listen to music, running clubs, and people who make a habit of sitting in Cubbon Park reading different books, together, without speaking. 

This summer, a new kind of Bangalorean has come to the forefront - they want to be around people, but never with people. 

And brands have noticed.

This episode is about what happens when people who crave ambient belonging meet brands  that are ready to push the envelope to find noise. The hyperindependent Bangalorean has moved here for a job, lives with flatmates they found on an app, is self-reliant to a fault, and is yet lonely in a very specific way. They will fill in a Google form to attend a party but won't accept an invitation to one. Then come the brands, who have discovered that fifty solitary attendees who are ready to experiment with something bizarre are worth more as a story than actually doing the work of crafting an event that’s worth their money and time. 

Praveen puts this theory to two people who have spent years building events and curating spaces in Bengaluru. 

Karthik Balakrishnan runs Underline Centre, a community space in Indiranagar that hosts a film club, improv, board games and origami meetups, and which he describes as "a daycare centre for adults". 

Arpan Peter is the founder and CEO of Foreward Lifestyle and Experiences, a culture IP house behind the India Jazz Project and The Shift, a bar-culture platform whose ₹4,000 Secret Shift evenings sell out before anyone knows where they are.

Together, they try to answer the question of what happens when the hyperindependent Bangalorean walks into a hospital rave party. 

In February of 44 BC, Mark Antony offered Julius Caesar a crown in front of a Roman crowd, and Caesar pushed it away. Antony offered it again; Caesar refused again. One more offer came from Anthony and Caesar refused it for the third time, yet again. Rome cheered. 

Uber has been offered a way out of India three times in eight years. By SoftBank and Ola in 2018, by a phantom acquisition-merger with Ola in 2022, and by Rapido this May, and three times it has refused. Each time the objection was the same: Uber would not become a minority shareholder in a business someone else runs.

Praveen tells the eight-year story through two conversations recorded before the Rapido talks with Uber: Two by Two's own September 2025 interview with Prabhjeet Singh, then president of Uber India and South Asia, who explains the "number one or number two" doctrine, declines to disclose India's numbers, and describes a market where "a certain dollar amount has to be redistributed"; and Nikhil Kamath's August 2025 interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber explicitly acknowledged Rapido. 

Uber calls India a must-win market. 

The question we ask in this episode is what does Uber really want in India

References 

Uber India has run the race and stayed the course. Can it change the game? : Episode 58, the full conversation with Prabhjeet Singh.

Uber, Ola, Rapido — the 3 wheels of India's post-Covid auto race

Inside Myntra, there’s a spreadsheet that lists the competitors it’s tracking closely. Nykaa Fashion is not on it.  To find it, you open a dropdown called "others" and scroll past Shoppers Stop, LimeRoad and Club Factory. That is where India's biggest fashion platform files Nykaa's fashion business, eight years after Nykaa promised its IPO investors that fashion would be the second engine.

Except this past quarter, Nykaa Fashion made money for the first time in its existence. Its GMV grew 30% last year and crossed ₹4,900 crore, H&M chose it for a marquee launch and became the platform's number one brand within months, and Nike handed it something almost no global brand hands anyone — its entire India digital storefront, run end to end. And finally, Nykaa was profitable, but just about. 

How did this happen?

Nykaa decided to stop competing with Myntra altogether: walk away from the discount war, wind down the private labels, and go premium.

Praveen tells the story of Nykaa's two acts in fashion through two conversations — with Aalok Dubey, who has spent thirty years building brands in India, on what premium actually means and why platforms keep falling for private labels; and with Nuha Bubere, who reported The Ken's story on the turnaround, on what Nykaa changed and why Myntra still isn't looking. 

And together, the story is about Nykaa - which has chosen a different path for itself, and what comes next.  

References

Nykaa finally fixed fashion, and investors came rushing back. Myntra still sees no reason for panic — by Nuha Bubere, The Ken.

Ather took eleven years to sell its first half-million scooters, watched Ola raise more money and build bigger factories, and cut its own valuation by 44% to get its IPO away. Since then, it’s been on a tear, building factories, scaling, and now it’s at the point where it’s ready for the biggest challenge yet: this week it’s launching a new platform aimed at the ₹1 lakh scooter mass market. 

There’s a reason why nobody has gotten this far. TVS leads the market. Bajaj is second and already makes money on electric. Both entered EVs once Ather had proved the demand, and between them they now hold about half the market, funded by profitable petrol businesses. 

So Praveen asks his two returning guests the question: what happens when Ather takes the fight to TVS and Bajaj’s home ground? 

Kunal Khattar, founder of Advantage, an early-seed fund that has spent a decade betting India's EV transition will be won by startups and Narayan Sundaraman, independent strategy and brand advisor, most recently head of marketing at Bajaj Auto, are surprisingly optimistic about Ather’s chances — but with caveats. 

Together, they discuss how Ather got here, how it found the resilience to stay where it is right now, and what lies ahead for India’s most promising EV company. 

References: 

https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/ather-energy-was-a-pioneer-can-it-also-be-a-leader/

No new episode this week, we're on a break. So, here's one from November 2025 that just became relevant again: Perplexity's free year with Airtel has begun expiring, and the numbers are just being reported:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/perplexitys-free-ai-offer-left-it-with-millions-more-users-in-india/

Listen back to what we predicted and how things panned out.

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This week, Two by Two debuts a new format: “Reverse engineering the playbook.”

Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan attempt to crack the math behind this recent wave of AI-telco partnerships in India. Why are companies like Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI racing to bundle their expensive premium subscriptions with Airtel, Jio, and Phonepe? 

To decode the economics, they are joined by two industry experts with firsthand experience managing these exact types of deals:
Chandrashekhar Vattikuti (ex-CPO of Inmobi and SVP of their Telco Cloud business) and Prakash Deep Maheshwari (head of product at Grab and former director of growth for Netflix in India and Southeast Asia).

The group explores whether Indian telcos are desperate for differentiation or simply cashing in on a gold rush where the smartest move is to sell shovels–or in this case, subscribers. Prakash argues this is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: once one telco bundles an AI service, the others have no choice but to follow.

They also break down the actual structure of these deals, from minimum guarantees to the marketing halo the partnerships create. The conversation gets into why OpenAI likely entered these deals “kicking and screaming” to protect its platform ambitions, while Chandra offers a reality check on whether these massive user numbers will actually stick around once the free periods end.

Episodes referenced in the conversation:

1. ‘Do we even need product managers?’– Two by Two episode 13 with Chandrashekhar Vattikuti
 
2. ‘Threat models, using taste to defend margins, ChatGPT’s ‘collab’ with Phonepe’- Zero Shot episode 9

For six years every UPI payment in India was free. This was because a rule from January 2020 said nobody could charge a merchant for accepting one. Then on the afternoon of 6 August, the Lok Sabha removed that guarantee by voice vote. The details of the rules haven't been framed yet, so nobody knows what a UPI transaction will actually cost, but what's clear is that the arrangement India's payments ran on for six years has ended and a new one is being written. The pool of the money involved is large enough to redraw who wins in Indian fintech.

In this episode, Praveen is joined by Pranav Gundlapalle, Director and Senior Research Analyst at Bernstein who has been closely tracking India’s payments landscape for years, and with Bhavik Kaul, former Chief Product Officer of Supermoney, Flipkart's fintech arm and the fifth-largest UPI app, who before that spent several years across Indian fintech including running LazyPay and PaySense at PayU Finance. Pranav brings the perspective of the ecosystem from outside it; and Bhavik presents the product view of someone who has built inside it, in a world where MDR always existed.

All of them work through a series of assumptions to derive the new UPI equation — who was paying for it earlier, and who will be paying for it in the future? How much? And what are the second and third order effects of this UPI rearrangement? 

Today's episode of Two by Two is about Zepto’s decision to pause its IPO and how things will play out next. 

For years, Zepto has told one story — about its potential: for growth, for profitability, for making money for everyone from investors to employees. And to be fair, Zepto executed at a blistering pace. But the story always ran on momentum, on a sense of inevitability. And the reason why Zepto told that story again and again, with bluster, is because the company always knew the truth: there was exactly one destination.

For Zepto, going public wasn't a milestone. It was the endgame. And it came within inches of pulling it off.

Now, Zepto and everyone in and around its massive orbit — shareholders, vendors, delivery partners, employees — will acutely feel the gravitational pull of the same momentum that propelled it up. And the way down, like the way up, will be driven by narrative. Except it'll be a counter-narrative this time, and perhaps just as irrational. The confidence narrative has two sides: thus far, Zepto has been climbing ladders, and now it's going to encounter snakes one after another.

This episode is a bit different from Praveen reading out the special newsletter edition he published last week, with some help from Snigdha, who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken's daily news podcast. 

In this episode, Praveen plays out what the way down looks like — why India's largest mutual fund houses took one look at Zepto's valuation and financials and passed, why brands and creditors will become a lot more unreasonable, and the three outcomes from here, all of which look tricky. And after he published the newsletter, he got a wave of theories from subscribers — founders, leaders and executives among them. He reads some of them out.

The market has learned. Now we find out whether Zepto can.

This is a special one. 

For the 100th episode of Two by Two, we've brought Rohin back to the podcast, after all, he co-hosted the first seventy-three episodes with Praveen. Also we decided to switch the host completely and handed the microphone to Rachel who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily podcast. She's here to spin the tables: for once Praveen and Rohin are the ones being questioned.

The format is what the show has done for the last 100 episodes. Rachel takes some of India's best and biggest companies, themes and sectors like Swiggy, PhonePe, Reliance Retail, Netflix India, the India AI mission, the Indian software engineer, and a dozen more and asks the two of them to place each one on a single 2x2. One axis: master of its own fate, or hostage to someone else. The other: best years ahead, or best years behind. 

Across a hundred episodes of shared history, Praveen and Rohin don't agree on all of them.

The full map runs in this week's newsletter, and Praveen has made some promises he must keep before for episode 200, so just like him, we hope you listen to this one, and come back to listen to the next hundred as well.

Thank you for subscribing to Two by Two. If you enjoyed the episode, drop us a line about your favourite episode at [email protected] and we’ll cover it in the newsletter.