With the Bhagwant Mann-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government assuming the reins in Punjab after a bitterly fought assembly election campaign, it’s time to talk business. Well, four young baniya entrepreneurs from Punjab, with degrees from the venerable IITs, have become role-models for those keen to make their mark in the business world. They are hungry for more success and are in no mood to rest on their laurels. Well, the similarities among them are very uncanny.
Gurugram-based, Punjab-born Zomato Ltd. founder Deepinder Goyal, remains in the thick of news. The son of two teachers who founded his company, Zomato, in 2008, Goyal is a multinational restaurant aggregator helming the food delivery company. A bad experience with a pizza order gave him the idea of starting an online service while he was a math and computer science student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). His resolve strengthened once he graduated and joined Bain & Co., where he saw colleagues in the company cafeteria skimming the limited menu and talking longingly about food at nearby restaurants.
Deepinder Goyal and colleague Pankaj Chaddah started uploading menus of neighborhood cafes and restaurants onto the company intranet, with the phone numbers. That became a huge hit with co-workers, driving a weekend venture they christened foodiebay.com. After his wife got a teaching job at Delhi University, Deepinder Goyal decided to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. Those close to him say Deepinder Goyal, who completed his graduation from IIT Delhi in 2005 with mathematics and computing, is not ready to accept failures and that is the key to his steep rise in the highly competitive business world.
And 37-year-old Bhavish Aggarwal’s quench for more and more success is really mind-boggling. A founder of Ola Cabs, he was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2018. Aggarwal was born and brought up in the bustling Ludhiana. A topper in his school and college, Aggarwal completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008. He started his career with Microsoft Research India as a research intern and later got reinstated as an assistant researcher.
Kicking off his career with Microsoft, where he worked for two years, he filed two patents and published three papers in international journals. In January 2011 he founded Ola Cabs in Bengaluru. Once in an interview, he said that the idea for a cab company came to him when he had a bad experience with a taxi, which led him to establish Ola Cabs in 2010.
Ola Cabs has become the largest network of transportation option in India and has emerged as the most popular choice for many consumers in Indian cities. Yes, COVID-19 has hit his company badly and he had announced a layoff of around 500 employees in a move to survive the economic repercussions of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Bhavish Aggarwal established electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Ola Electric as well. It is now producing almost 1,000 scooters a day. The company has set up its manufacturing unit, Ola Future factory in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, on a 500-acre land for the production of Ola’s two-wheeler EVs. It is said to have the capacity to produce 1 crore electric scooters per year.
And you simply cannot write off Sachin Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart. Chandigarh-born and again an alumnus of IIT, Delhi, Sachin Bansal is in news these days. Three years after starting Navi Technologies, he is preparing for a big-bang initial public offer of the tech-driven financial services start-up which turned profitable in FY 21. Founded in 2018, Navi Technologies turned profitable in 2020-21, reporting a consolidated profit of Rs 71 crore. The company also saw a spike in income, as revenues grew to nearly Rs 780 crore in FY21 from Rs 221 crore in FY20. Bengaluru-based Navi Group is a financial services company which provides personal loans and home loans through Navi Finserv, and health insurance through Navi General Insurance.
And if you talk about Sachin Bansal, can you omit Binny Bansal? No way. Both Chandigarh boys – not related to each other, mind you – established Flipkart in October 2007. Like Sachin, Binny Bansal is also an alumnus of IIT, Delhi. Both are former Amazon employees. Their company, Flipkart, initially focused on online book sales with country-wide shipping. Flipkart slowly grew in prominence and was receiving 100 orders per day by 2008. In 2018, Bansals exited Flipkart following the Walmart deal. After selling their stakes in Flipkart to the US giant, the Bansal duo had earned more than Rs 6,700 crore each.
Binny is currently an anchor investor in the venture firm 021 Capital which focuses on investing in the fields of biotechnology, agritech, and the internet. It is said that he would be making a big-ticket announcement related to his brand-new venture sooner rather later.
Finally, after becoming the chief minister, former stand- up comedian, Mann, looks sombre and serious. Now he knows his state is badly debt-ridden and needs urgent action. For this purpose, he has to invite the likes of non-resident Punjabis like Deepinder Goyals and Sachin Bansals to invest in their home state. That is the only way the gloomy economy of Punjab can see some light at the end of dark tunnel.
Featured/top picture of Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal provided by the author Vivek Shukla
