This week on Two by Two, hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar dissect Meesho's strategy with Adarsh Menon (partner at Fireside Ventures and former head of Shopsy at Flipkart) and Ganesh Nagasekar (founder of GSN Invest).

Fresh off filing its DRHP, Meesho has gotten here by doing everything differently. Zero commission when competitors charged fees. Optimizing for cost when others raced for speed. Building a logistics arm that slashed delivery costs. All while serving 210 million middle-class customers that Flipkart and Amazon had largely ignored.

The conversation explores what actually sets Meesho apart—is it the data science powering three-quarters of its orders, the seller economics that let merchants triple revenue in a year, or something else? And more importantly, where does it go from here? The group debates whether Meesho should push deeper into logistics, experiment with content commerce, or solve the cash-on-delivery mess that's creating hidden costs across the business.

Sections:
1. What makes Meesho different?
2. The zero commission bet 
3. Valmo: Building a logistics business from scratch
4. Where it goes next
5. Meesho as India's Walmart

This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, family and colleagues who would be interested in listening. And if you have more thoughts on the discussion, we'd love to hear your arguments as well. You can write to us at [email protected] or comment below.

Tenneco Clean Air, the manufacturer of auto components, went public last week. Aside from being an important moment for the company, that instance was an important outlier.

It listed with a premium close to 27% at a time when many Indian firms backed by private equity have had weak debuts. Its anchor book—pre-IPO share allocation to major institutional investors—was oversubscribed by 170X.

The US parent of Tenneco Clean Air is owned by Apollo Global Management, an asset management firm based in New York. 

Other companies with similar PE backing haven’t fared so well in recent times. Sona Comstar, for instance, went public in 2021 with a P/E multiple of 79—far higher than Tenneco’s 29—courtesy of its backer Blackstone. The stock is currently well below its peak, which it hit in six months after going public.

Here’s a fact: private equity has underperformed the S&P 500 index over one, three, and five years, according to McKinsey & Company. This category of investors in India extract value from their portfolio companies before they head to the bourses, leaving little opportunity for public investors.

The Ken editor Seema Singh shines a light on the situation in this week’s edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.

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Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/can-a-pe-firm-not-be-greedy-a-us-firms-india-ipo-offers-a-clue/ 

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Join The Ken as a Podcast Producer and work with India's most ambitious storytellers! We’re creating a podcast about India’s biggest companies, with each episode backed by weeks of deep research. You’ll lead the workflows that turn that research into exceptional narratives and bring the show to listeners around the world. Join us to help shape something exceptional. Check out the details and apply here. 

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.

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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

Sections:

00:00 – The ‘Reverse engineering’ experiment

04:36 – Are telcos becoming just dumb pipes? 

13:14 – The gold rush for subscribers 

29:51 – How these deals are actually structured 

47:38 – Why OpenAI resisted these partnerships 

58:09 – Will users actually stick around?
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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, family and colleagues who would be interested in listening. And if you have more thoughts on the discussion, we’d love to hear your arguments as well. You can write to us at [email protected] or comment below.

The popular narrative often blames Gen Z for a lack of ambition, but is it the millennials who are truly suffering from “ambition fatigue”?

This week on Two by Two, the conversation takes its lead from The Ken’s deputy editor, Arundhati Ramanathan’s recent and concerning article, “Indian Tech Companies are Spawning an Ambitionless Generation”.

Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan sit down to discuss how to solve this cross-generational problem and bring the “fire back in the belly”, with or without burning the midnight lamp. 

They explore the striking ambition gap between driven founders/CEOs and their often-indifferent employees. Is this growing apathy a fault of the corporate environment and a lack of opportunity, or is the responsibility for finding purpose solely on the individual?

Can the corporate world reignite ambition, and can it truly rise from the dead? Joining the hosts to tackle this multifold issue are three experts:

Gaston Schmitz 

Gaston is a partner/executive and founder coach at the Asian Leadership Institute, guiding senior executives at Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startup founders across 30+ countries. With over 20,000 hours of experience, he employs a personalised approach rooted in mindfulness and neuroscience to help leaders expand their perspective and identify blind spots. 

Vipul Nanda

Vipul is the director of product marketing at Databahn. His professional history includes significant roles at major fintech platforms, including a tenure as director of product marketing at Cashfree Payments and product marketing manager at Razorpay. Additionally, Nanda is the co-founder of the GoPMM community for product marketers in India and holds an advisory position with Antler.

Arundhati Ramanathan

Arundhati is the deputy editor at The Ken. Based in Bengaluru, she is a seasoned journalist who focuses on in-depth, long-form stories about India's startup ecosystem, entrepreneurship, and the fintech industry. Her work often explores the significant trends and challenges impacting the tech landscape, such as venture capital, founder strategies, and shifts in workforce dynamics.

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Additional reading:

‘Indian Tech Companies are Spawning an Ambitionless Generation’ by Arundhati Ramanathan
https://the-ken.com/story/indian-tech-companies-are-spawning-an-ambitionless-generation/?t=251112092335

Last episode Gaston was in- ‘Where AI can and can’t replace human coaching’
https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/where-ai-can-and-cant-replace-human-coaching/

Warren Buffet’s shareholder letters
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

Marshall Goldsmith’s 6 daily questions
https://www.marshallgoldsmith.com/post/six-daily-questions

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers by Patrick Lencioni
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/749937.The_Three_Signs_of_a_Miserable_Job

Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infinite_Games

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This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, family and colleagues who would be interested in listening. And if you have more thoughts on the discussion, we’d love to hear your arguments as well. You can write to us at [email protected].

What is the “listing pop” that everyone is chasing, and does it still matter six months later? This simple question is the starting point for a deep look into the current boom in the Indian Initial Public Offering (IPO) market. Despite a massive influx of investor wealth, the standards for companies going public have significantly dropped. 

In this episode of Two by Two, co-hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by their colleagues, The Ken’s finance editor, Anand Kalyanaraman, and deputy editor, Seetharaman G to explore how the initial “IPO event” relates to a company’s long-term performance. They discuss how high valuations from private investors are merely being validated at the public listing. They also examine the rise of “flipping”—the practice of quickly selling IPO shares for a profit—a tactic now accepted by many large institutions as just part of “the game”. 

The episode of Two by Two was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, particularly what IPO companies did we miss out on that you know are living happily ever after, write to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

What’s the dumbest thing about hospitals that we still tolerate in 2025? This simple question kicks off a deep dive into the broken core of the Indian healthcare system. From confusing X-ray pricing and misaligned incentives that prioritise “sick-care” over healthcare, to the irritating experience of endless queues and fragmented records, the problems are deeply entrenched in the system. 

In this episode of Two by Two, co-hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar talk to two founders who are not just trying to patch the system, but rebuild it from the ground up. Varun Dubey of Superhealth and Mayank Banerjee of Even Healthcare are both creating smaller, hyperlocal, and experience-focused hospitals. They break down how they’re unbundling the bloated cost structures of traditional hospitals, redesigning the patient journey, and realigning incentives by putting doctors on full-time salaries with ESOPs. 

The conversation explores the difficulty of disrupting the current healthcare system and the challenges of scaling innovative models that prioritise patient well-being and affordability. 

This episode of Two by Two was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

In this episode of Two by Two, we map out a viable AI strategy for India that plays to its unique strengths, not its weaknesses. Co-hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan sit down with Chaitanya Chokkareddy, co-founder and CTO of Ozonetel–a cloud-based communication platform providing call-centre solutions—who presents a contrarian view: India’s current focus on acquiring GPUs is a flawed, capital-intensive race it cannot win. Instead, the real, defensible moat lies in India’s cultural and linguistic data.

We dive deep into why a “data sets over GPUs” strategy is crucial to prevent the cultural exclusion of a billion people, how it impacts the very way we learn and feel, and why India’s massive IT services industry is sitting on a goldmine for building the next generation of AI agents.

This episode of Two by Two was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

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Additional reading

Airtel fights spammers. And Truecaller's business model

In this episode, we sit down with Ishendra Agarwal, founder and CEO of Giva, to unpack his mission to democratise fine jewellery in India. We look at how Giva is rapidly scaling its omnichannel presence with over 270 stores and targeting Rs 850 crore in revenue, all while catering to the modern consumer’s desire for accessible, fashionable pieces. 

Co-hosts of Two by Two Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan take a deep dive into the transitioning shift caused by lab-grown diamonds (LGDs). The conversation tackles one core industry debate: can LGDs, dismissed by some legacy players, ever hold emotional value as heirlooms, or are they purely a fashion statement? Ishendra also makes an emphasis on the importance of brand and design and how they will be the ultimate differentiators in a commoditising market. 

We also explore Giva’s operational innovations, from using AI in design to their “Giva Go” quick-commerce model for last-minute gifting. For anyone interested in consumer brands, market disruption, and the future of the jewellery, this is an unmissable discussion.

This episode of Two by Two was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

India’s fintech-based NBFC lending sector offers many lessons. Three early pioneers—Capital Float (now Axio), Zestmoney, and Lendingkart—raised significant amounts of venture capital, built solid momentum, and achieved growth and penetration. They pivoted, explored multiple opportunities, and yet, ultimately had to sell out. 

In this episode of Two by Two, co-hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by guests Shivashish Chatterjee, co-founder of DMI Group, and Arundhati Ramanathan, The Ken’s deputy editor. Together, they discuss the business models of these lenders—including balance sheet lending and the rise of “buy now, pay later”—and what lessons can be learned for the future of India’s fintech lending ecosystem.

This episode of Two by Two was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Additional reading

Axio—a fintech dream comes to an end https://the-ken.com/kaching/axio-a-fintech-dream-comes-to-an-end/