Swiggy Founder On The Winning Pitch Deck Early Days Logistics Moat

TITLE: Swiggy founder on creating a winning pitch deck, early food delivery days, & making logistics a moat CHANNEL: SeedToScale DATE: 2025-07-03 URL: https://youtu.be/RqVYHHaplmY ---TRANSCRIPT--- [Applause] [Music] In 2014, three friends in Bengaluru, Sri Hasha, Majetti, Nandan Readyi and Rahu Jiny launched a simple idea to make food ordering effortless. That idea became Swiggy, a hyper local food delivery startup with just a few restaurants and delivery partners. Fast forward to 2025, Swiggy is now a multi-billion dollar listed tech powerhouse, delivering not just food, but groceries, daily essentials, and more across hundreds of Indian cities. It’s one of India’s most successful consumer tech stories. With innovations like Instamart, Swiggy Genie, and lightning fast deliveries, Swiggy has redefined convenience for millions. But how did it get there? Find out on this episode of Pitchcraft. Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Pitchcraft season 2, where we unpack decks of some of India’s most successful startups. And we’re very excited to have Shrihasha Majetti, the co-founder and CEO of Swiggy. Now today you know him as the CEO of one of India’s leading food and grocery delivery platforms. But we are talking about the time when they were a tiny startup. They had just started up way back in 2014 2015. We will be deconstructing Swiggy’s very first deck and how they put it together and raised their first round of funding. Hasha, is it all very surreal looking at this deck today? Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories. Firstly, thanks for having me. Uh, yeah, it is. I was just going through this myself on the ride uh to this venue. I’m like, okay, I think we actually got a bunch of things on point. A lot of a lot hasn’t changed. So, yeah, I think there was a definite trip down memory lane as I went through this this fun. Right. So Hasha in 2014 and you know that was when you sort of put this deck together. What did you think about you know putting inside how long did it take for you to put together the pitch deck? Who worked on it the most? What aspects did you work on? What aspects did your co-founders work on? So I think uh and my co-founder he worked on most of this. So I’m going to try to get a peak into his mind as of then on how he thought about it. Of course, we did this together. I think it took us 2 three days. As you can see, it was a very short presentation. We had like a few simple insights uh as the reasons why we were doing this business. And uh we just went ahead and put it together. It was a very basic uh deck even visually if you see it wasn’t like thing glowing. We didn’t have any geni tools at the time. So, it was a very very basic tool. It’s all almost all almost all function and no form if you look at uh the presentation right hash you know if I look at the deck as you said it’s more function than form you know whatever is useful whatever basic insights you wanted to put in uh 12 15 pages not more than that so again what were your what was your frame of reference was it a deck made by some startup in the valley uh a deck made by another Indian startup you know which you thought was useful And you know who told you that okay this is how a deck should be made this is why a deck is important before you go and meet investors right so I think uh we didn’t have any frames of reference for our deck per se so we we we didn’t know that many examples but from our friends who uh had raised so many of course like uh few of our friends from Pilani had raised uh money by then so they gave us uh you know the basics of the the deck structure like okay what is the problem you’re trying to solve uh and okay how are you trying to solve the sol the problem uh why is the solution different from what exists in the market so this basic structure we got advice from our circles uh friends well-wishers whoever we met so that was the only content we had so what attracted you to food delivery then I mean Zumato existed then but it was more of a you restaurant discovery platform and then you had a bunch of other platforms like deliver food panda tiny owl I think there’s a slide that talks about it as well so very interesting you know there’s a slide on competitive landscape with just eat food panda tasty kana deliver tiny owl none of them exist today so this market saw such a big churn but again hasha what was playing you know going through your mind because you already have these five players And then you’re going to again pitch another food startup. What would be the differentiator? You know, that’s the first thing that investors would ask you. What’s your TAM? You know, there are already five players. What’s your mode? U how are you sort of going to answer those questions? I think we just felt the differentiation in our bones as consumers, as power consumers. Then we were like this is very different from everything else in the market. Um so we just had that confidence saying this this is different whether this will make the market larger or uh you know whether this will be profitable what are the unit economics all of those were going to be discovered. So our conviction there was lesser. Our conviction on the fact that this is a whole new thing that is different from everything else out there was very very clear to us. And for you what what do you think was the core problem which you wanted to capture in your day? As we even talk about it here right one of the key things even as we did our own research if you see uh I mean even actually we start immediately with the current issues with uh food ordering there were a bunch of players at the time but I think the basics were that the real restaurants that we all wanted uh weren’t available on these platforms. That was the one big problem either because these platforms didn’t build their own delivery fleet. They just say we’re a tech platform. We connect restaurants with consumers. But that’s not what consumers asked for. A tech platform connecting restaurants and consumers. Consumers asked for my favorite restaurants delivered fast. So there was a big difference. So we just solved for that. So in fact, Hasha, two slides in the deck, you know, clearly mentions Domino’s. One talks about how Domino’s remains the only frictionless ordering choice and about how it works, your own plan. It talks about building a Domino’s layer over every restaurant. That’s right. So I think that was a very clear inspiration for us. What part of the reason why we got into on demand delivery itself was on demand mobility which was exploding at the time. Uber, Ola etc. So they were really starting to like grow in a big way and we were in the bundle or the ecom aggregation logistics ourselves and the first aha moment was okay if you can push a button and make cars move on the road super fast you must be able to you know push a button and make things move super fast on the road. That was the original genesis of going into on demand delivery itself. And you know it’s interesting because you everything today is different right from the logo to the design. I mean then it was this red scroll white scroll in red swiggy and now it’s orange and white. But how did you come up with the name Swiggy? M actually we had an Excel sheet where we thought okay should we do something with instant delivery food this thing eventually we didn’t like any of those uh and there was already a deliver um we I mean there was a deliver there was a delivery we didn’t worry about it that much actually at some point we also said we don’t even know if we’re going to be only about delivery so why don’t we just do a short catchy name and over some beers we just said let there be sweetie not that much logic after a point and in terms of you know you spoke about the friction then that you wanted to address and I think that’s what the first one of the first slide addresses right I mean after talking about the team and your whole I am Kolkata and IIT and bits fani uh the academic creds you come you straight away you straight away came to the current issues with food ordering Yeah. The main thing that was missing was the logistics piece which you wanted to own. That’s it. I mean, so we did come at it that way because of the background in bundle etc. We want to do something in logistics and then found like an interesting consumer opening through logistics. We didn’t start by saying food ordering is broken. And how many of your assumptions were right? How many were wrong? What did you get right? Because there’s also this interesting slide on unit economics. you know current 50 which was in 2015 and earnings for delivery 85 at scale you said it’ll be 40 and 100 so how have those assumptions played out I’ll talk about the number of things we got right in the first few slides is if we talk about a business model commission of 15% on every order paid by the restaurant will go up to 20% still hasn’t gone up to 20% but it’s close very close so uh that is one part the other one is the delivery charge which is also similar uh to what it actually is today. Um so that I think we got right. Then if we go into let’s say the how do you make those assumptions 15%, 20%. Be honest this is 11 years back. So uh it doesn’t keep in mind all of the inflationary changes that have happened and when we pitched we must have pitched it for 3 years later. Who who would have thought that this would be like a multi-million uh order per day business. I think when we pitched we were I think we had to do the sheet over multiple times because the investors believed in the numbers more than we did. I think Anna and Sumeir all of them said boss I think you’re just underalling why don’t you just put one zero extra times and I was like okay that seems wild but okay who knows maybe it’s true. Yeah. So we got the a bunch of these right even if you look at the cost the unit economics the cost per delivery what has changed is we didn’t know that when we started we were delivering only within like a 3 4 kilometer radius and there were there used to be fun anecdotes around consumers changing the pin like a little bit to be able to get restaurants that that were otherwise not available etc that used to be like an hack so since then it’s changed dramatically today We deliver up to like 18 kilometers uh in a bunch of the big cities. So that has changed. But if it were actually at the same last miles that we were delivering at, we would be absolutely at the cost per delivery despite like the inflationary movements that have happened 7 8 years more than what we would have expected. So it got a lot more efficient than we thought it would be. The other slide that I thought was really interesting was the leveraging technology slide where you spoke about you know ordering channels it will go to mobile app uh payments interestingly you know this wasn’t even the time when UPI was present uh which is why it’s it’s not there and you also had 15minute deliveries then yeah I I did not remember this which you launched just last year with Bolt right I mean it that also played out 10 years too it. We did not think it was at that time. We thought it would be possible. We were doing like hundreds of things. If you go back even in 2015, there are articles with Nandan talking about 15-minute delivery with cloud kitchen brands that don’t exist today. Uh so it’s yeah, it’s quite funny. We used to think about 15-minute deliveries at the time. Even the Swiggy idea itself uh I learned later that uh we used I had this as a college project and forgot about it and then came back to Swiggy again. So it’s kind of similar sometimes this was bitani I mean you thought about the idea and thought about it uh five six years before five years before thought about it forgot about it then did the same thing all over again went on to do on another startup and then came back. Yeah. So it’s it’s weird sometimes how things connect back. So even this is something like that. I think the one slide on this though I must say Anan wasn’t very happy about was uh mobile wasn’t the most important part of this deck like web mobile app and even phone in brackets uh was at a time when others were uh bunch of other platforms were taking orders on call. M so we had the ordering channels in the future as people calling and placing an order that part didn’t play out thankfully but you never had a call to we never did we never did that’s why it was a part of the future that never came what gave you conviction hasha to just go all in on app um we anyways had when you say all in it was where the consumers were part of it is actually our business would not exist today if it weren’t for the app at least on the rider driver side the delivery partner side if they didn’t have an app I think our business won’t exist so by our time it was a lot more obvious that this was the way forward and we didn’t have that much of a large business to have any innovators dilemma around like okay our desktop business will this thing it was just like few months old when uh mobile took off it was obvious and you know there’s a slide that talks about traction revenue growing 20% week on week the number of orders growing 20% week on week. So from the time you started up to when you first started pitching to investors did you have a number in mind that you know when my revenue hits this milestone or when my order hits this milestone that’s when I will raise my first round of funding I might need money then honestly no we didn’t have any such number milestones neither did we get any feedback that come back at this orders or this thing so when did you decide to start putting a deck together and start raising within months of starting up. No, we made a deck only when we had a meeting. We tried for meetings early on, but we didn’t get a bunch of them. Uh so for our first meeting, we took a couple of days out and said, “Now, let’s make something.” Yeah. Otherwise, uh I mean, we kept knocking on a few doors. Some of them we’d uh met in in the bundle time. Uh sometimes things move super fast. Uh they weren’t moving at all for a while and then they moved super fast. Usage pattern how has this moved? Average order size 320 monthly spend,400 conversion rate. Size has moved only 30% in 10 years. So sorry let’s look at that. It was at that time when we had like a pretty hefty delivery fee. But actually a whole lot of it is again true. Like if at on an average what has played out is at this time it was still a very early user base that was repeating if you look at it close to four times a month. Yeah. Our repeats are to this day close to four times a month after 100 million users have tried out the service. So what played out is that we thought and these are early adopters right so they will be more of your core users. What’s happened is that the core users operated at an even higher frequency uh than we would have budgeted for and there were a lot many more low frequency users but it all netted out to four roughly all over again you know if founders today have to make a deck a should they make a deck is it still relevant I was talking to one investor yesterday who said you know now some founders just send us like a one-page memo where they have questions and answers and pretty much answered everything. So, how useful is a deck? Does it help you think through the business, think through what investors might ask you? What what would you say to a founder who’s maybe planning to make a deck or trying to put one together? Mostly the deck is just one form factor to be able to serve the same job to be done, right? What is the job to be done? For anyone who doesn’t know about your business, be able to explain why it’s an exciting business to do. Uh so there must be many other ways to do it. Uh the deck is one way you can do a Q&A format. I’m sure you can put up an ocean in the new world. Maybe you can even like answer the questions or maybe have like an AI agent uh generate a bunch of these and it’ll be like five 10 minutes of engaging this thing. Yesterday I saw something interesting where the you know very basic but Google lets you take a doc and basically convert into almost like a podcast notebook. Yeah it’s just a report that you submit that that becomes a podcast in half a minute to just make it engaging. So I’m sure with the tools available today there are 10,000 more ways to make it more engaging to use the same function but to make it 100x more engaging. So I mean the deck is one way. What would you tell founders? What should they put? What should they not put in a deck and how long should it be? I would say the shorter the better for the first set of investors you’re meeting. If you’re in a very specialized category and you’re only going to specialized investors, uh then you can go deeper. But if you’re sending the deck around to a bunch of places and you want someone’s attention, then I think the shorter the better. 10 to 12. Yeah. because uh for you it’s your only company. For them it’s probably one of thousandx that they get in a year. So to whittle it down to the basics and still be able to get investors excited is important. So to be short and exciting is what I would choose any day. And if it is someone who’s seen it and then wants to meet you then you probably can keep adding progressively uh to add richer context. As an angel investor, do deck are decks important for you when you make an investment or is it based on relationship? Swiggy Mafia X Swiggy maybe 30 40% of my investor investments are Swiggy Mafia for the rest actually it is just the deck a lot of it just the deck and I don’t get that many I don’t actively do it but the deck is an important filter the clarity of thought is important again order of the slides did you guys have a lot of discussion first let’s put the team then let’s put problem maybe we will put the team Yeah. I don’t have a strong preference over here because if you were better uh suited in any way to do this business than others then it’s a then it’s an interesting thing to like do it in the end but I don’t think we were any more prepared for this business than any other set of folks who were building it at the time so we didn’t have any street cred per se actually a lot of it I wouldn’t change it is simple basic uh Current issues with food ordering, how it works, how are we doing it, what is the unit economics, differentiators, what next? So yeah, very little I would change. Great. So um you heard out from Harsha on his perspective, what was going through his mind, his co-founders minds as they put this deck together. But uh on the other side of the show, we will bring in uh one of their very first investors, Anand Daniel, partner at Axel, who decided to back Swiggy back then in 2015 uh in their very first seed round where they raised $2.5 million. We will $2.5 million. We will be in conversation with Anand Daniel of Axel. [Applause] [Music] Anend welcome to the show. Uh, you know, Harsha is one of Harsha’s very first investors. Swiggy’s very first investors. Um, today all of us take um, you know, food delivery for granted, grocery delivery for granted. You go on the app, you expect something to come to you in 15 minutes, 20 minutes. But this wasn’t the case in 2015, right? Right. I mean um so for you to back a a startup promising food delivery in I think 45 minutes 30 minutes um how did you sort of get convinced? What convinced you about the deck about hasha? Uh and also the unit economics because there was a lot of skepticism. Will this work? Um you know how will the costs happen or you know does it have to scale to a certain point get some operating leverage before they start making money. How did you think about it and you know just talk us through that how did you finally write that check for Swiggy in 2015. Yeah, thank you. Thanks Chandra for having. So I think today we take all this for granted. At that time it wasn’t very obvious. I was coming off a journey with taxi for sure. Uh where I was closely involved from seed stage all the way through to exit. Uh it was on on demand to Ola right on demand mobility and we doing a deep dive on food. So we had met every company listed here and more. This is the platforms. There were also cloud kitchen models even then right. So we met all the food related probably 15 plus companies we’re doing what we call a prepared mind a thesis around uh food right so um at that time it wasn’t obvious that the unit economics will work so let’s compare cabs to this in cabs if the platform makes 20% all that goes to the platform whereas here if you mention 15% as the platform fee but you have to pay the delivery person after that so how do you make that work wasn’t very obvious uh that all of us eat multiple times we’ll order out is all clear. The pain point was screamingly clear because if in those days you order from any of the platforms that are listed here outside of Swiggy you could bake wait anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours and might get the food might not get the experience was horrible. So the need for the platform was there right and it could become sizable was reasonably clear market size and all which wasn’t even mentioned here but we did some work as VCs we’re convinced that was there and the unique way of solving it the dominoes for India was very very clear so I think those were the things that worked but there were a lot of questions and doubts will this scale will it’ll scale but will it scale in a unit economics viable way was a big question um but just going through this journey. We had met them once like early in in their fund raise journey. Then we had met everyone else and then came back met them and and and decided to invest and sometimes this is uh like it’s good fortune that we were able to partner with Harsha and team from very early days. Right. Right. You know this was also the time as you said you built a thesis around food and you were looking for startups in that category and uh you know I mean there were five other uh food delivery startups so-called just eat food panda tasty kana deliver tiny owl um and there were a couple of logistics player as well so why swiggy yeah see I think the simp like the clarity of thought saying that like luckily they were in korangla at that time you could order also if the clarity of thought of Harshan and Rahul at that time was to say we’ll pick only very few restaurants we want to make it the fastest experience you come in order quickly so we’ll pick the best restaurant in Koramangla for example at that time and then we’ll also show the top dishes there not every dish sells fast so they had gone and somehow figured out right like it’s not data science and also some sat we should ask them how they figured it out so these are the five best dishes they took photographs I don’t know if photographs were there. Even original website also they only had photographs photographs, right? So nothing else. So it was a fresh new approach saying you come here you find they launched with junior kupana supposedly one of my favorites at that time right so the best dish is there you go order and we’ll deliver in 30 like they promised 45 minutes or whatever but it came around 30 minutes they were maniacally focused about that. I think that kind of customer cl and when we pushed them to say why don’t you add more restaurants why don’t you do this they very clear no we want to make it fastest why don’t you add reviews that used to be a longest thing say no the customer already knows what they want right most of the time so I don’t want to waste their time with all this this is not for discovery but for quick so there were some design choices made right or wrong the clarity of thought was there and they were datadriven to keep adjusting that so that all datadriven portion and all I realized much later but the clarity of thought and the passion with which they wanted to solve the consumer problem consumer back and saying I’ll figure out the unit economics right but we have to solve this was what made us write the seat check yeah so again hasha clarity of thought the datadriven approach where did that come from was it from your previous startup experience is that how you’ve always been as a person I don’t know I think that clarity of thought I can’t explain if it was always this way we were If it is not different then why should we be doing it was a very clear thing for us because we weren’t building it because someone will fund this or this thing we were like okay if there is a problem then you need to solve it uh and yeah I think in general we’ve had strong opinions weekly held and again Anand anything about the deck that really worked for you you mentioned clarity of thought and did that come through in the deck as well what’s the problem you’re trying to solve. How will we go about it? Who are our competitors? You know, this is how we will make money. Yeah, I think deck to the earlier discussion is a tool, right? It could be a deck, it could be a notion page, one form factor, form factor. The key is what are the main things you’re trying to put it out there, right? So, and keeping it very short, right? So, that if you look this is 12 odd pages, right? in that they’ve conveyed everything that needs to be conveyed about the business and most of this still holds true today in the the format after 10 12 years right so I think that speaks for itself so whether it’s a deck or a word doc or a notion page or whatever you want like have you answer the key questions have you convey the most amount of information in the least amount of time that is very important because any investor gets so many ideas so can you get their interest to take that first meeting and in that first meeting the shortest time make them want to spend more time with you. I’ve I’ve shared this even last season the pitch crab. I think that’s the key and that this deck did perfectly. And what data points were you looking for because you know they have included numbers on the revenue growth uh number of orders growing week on week uh also the uh retention metrics right the usage patterns the conversion rate the repeat usage patterns which of these data points was very important to you as an investor looking in hindsight I was moved by uh like the week growth retention, repeat and all that. I’m saying in hindsight because at that time I definitely was. But I would say today that these are all early numbers, right? I’ve seen startups have this early on and then not hold later on, right? So I think uh it was great that they had all this like 20% economics on the growth and 20% week on week and the retention and that they had repeats is not here. It was probably 3.4 close to four at that time. All those things were really good but very small numbers is my whole point. So it’s tough to go by like as an investor invested when we were doing 70 orders a day. Yeah. Right. Sure. Right. So it’s tough to say because I’ve invested post that right in companies that have done more number of orders and shown good thing and which might not work out. So we can’t go too much by this. It’s more it’s a gut call also right. So is this a problem that will remain and is this is this a solution that can sustain right those are the questions the tough part here is what has made them sustainable which is to crack this unit economics and everything and and and there were not too many believers that logistics led food delivery could work. What were your questions when you met Harsha and Nandan and Rahul or was it only Harsha? All three, right? All three. I think it was mostly this and I tried pushing them on some of the things which Harsha nicely said no to and then like that mobile and all that, right? I he wanted you all to go mobile or he wanted you all to have No, I think he was already seeing enough trends that this was the only way to go. So he wanted to push you towards No, he was expecting a lot more mobile strategy at that time. Having an app and having the app that comes out fast was like was just few months when it felt like app everything app just was another channel you needed to be there but it was at that time where it was like this is going to be like the internet almost it wasn’t as big as the internet it was big it’s like today and no one’s talking about AI startup pitches right in in tech it’s a like so it’s happening right so it’s it was like that in mobile So was that are you motivated to do that because they had put phone number also within parenthesis you know you didn’t want to go back in time and make it phone order but you want to go forward in time and make mobile orders or why don’t you do more review like it was not any game changer but to test the conviction and see that they like convinced about what they’re doing it was very exciting. Hashab, you know, how did you go about building feature by feature? I think Swiggy was one of the first to have live tracking within months. Uh, and then to keep adding features on top of that that, you know, customers will find exciting. Their orders getting accepted, it will be delivered in this much time. They will exactly, you know, know where the delivery partner is, how he’s traveling, when they will get it. Was it on the go? Was it intuitive? Yeah, a lot of it. Do you spend a lot of time just looking at the app to figure out what can be better? Yeah, but I think it was in the beginning it is easy because we were like power consumers and there were only power consumers. As you’re going to more cities, this thing it becomes challenging. You’re shooting from the hip acting like a consumer doesn’t work. But in the beginning, it was fairly obvious what needed to be built, right? I think as I was mentioning to you in the beginning, um there was neither a consumer app nor did our delivery partners have apps. they only had feature phones. Uh so we made use of the tech that existed at the time. So to let consumers know what their order status was, we gave phone numbers, four phone numbers to the delivery partners to give missed calls on each of the phone number if they give missed call that was a status change whether it it was a confirmation whether they reached the restaurant they picked up etc. which were mind you significant advancements in the experience at the time and as let’s say the app came out like in 7 8 months of our launch etc then I guess by now we had already gotten accustomed to uh mobility where you could on your Ola or Uber you could see the uh the car come to you so that was starting to become table stakes we were like if if the tech exists why wouldn’t you show it and calm nerves even more all of this time the version of what we were didn’t exist globally that much. Even if they did like it was too early to start taking inspiration from uh someone else because most of the companies globally were doing pure marketplace uh first which meant that they were just passing orders on to restaurants. That experience was not directly transferable. Even today sometimes you see drivers are busy so we can’t deliver to you etc. These flows didn’t exist in food delivery in 2015. But we started with like to to this day we call it banner factor or something like that basically but because on day one our thought was if there are only two delivery partners and we get three orders how will we do it? So we had a feature saying if the if you’re getting two orders live and two delivery partners are engaged a yellow banner used to show up on the website saying we can’t take orders right now because but nobody told us like it would be uh like this. There was no frame of reference. Some of these were just some just intuitive thinking on what what what we wanted as consumers. Just to be clear, it’s all consumer back thinking. It’s easy to say I’ll take the order and then figure it out. Yeah. But they said no, let’s be transparent with the consumer and say we don’t have that like we can’t take your order now or even that using phone to let consumers know before a mobile app that your order has been picked up. All these were customer wav moments. So they were always continuously thinking about the c how do you make the consumer happy? I think the customer obsession uh still continues on hasha there’s one thing and and team right one thing that they focus on is how do we continue to delight with all the new offerings and everything I think that’s key and I would say the other thing is I’ve talked about it the uh the leadershifting nasha and everyone else or are still the same like humble people that uh I feel we Hont a decade ago like or Nandandy and everyone or people who are very relatable and and thinking uh from with a firm feet on the ground on what needs to be done for the business and and solving that. So that is the passion with which they do that even today I think is great to see obviously companies scaled and and all that the product lines have expanded multiple the obvious things have happened but these are some of the the level five leadership that we talk about I think that’s the key that has got them here and hopefully takes them much further right and how do you think you’ve changed as an entrepreneur from running a a startup funded by Axel and others to running this publicly listed firm that has such a wide range of stakeholders, right? You have retail shareholders and institutional funds and analysts you have to answer to every quarter. How how have you changed or adapted to that new normal? Luckily, it’s been a gradual one. We didn’t go from like private to public in two three years. Over time like the shareholder base was um I think 50 plus even before let’s say we went public. So there was a gradual process of getting growing up and constantly like keeping pace with the growth of the category or the company etc. So I would feel like it’s a logical extension of uh the overall journey. I think we’re very excited about having you know made the next milestone of being a public company. I think it makes you I don’t know. I mean like I in the first two years we you feel like you don’t have a lot to lose as a as an entrepreneur like you’re you’re just fighting death as a as a startup. 99% of startups die anyway. Yeah. So you don’t think like your odds are that high anyway. So you can be a little bit more cavalier saying anyways main job is to die. Let’s see if we can avoid that. Uh so after that it changes and then suddenly you at some point you become big enough saying okay now this can’t die. It’s taken a life of its own. Correct. But even that happened earlier of course like you know we are as responsible towards this like very large base of shareholders as we were even before. It’s a different one because not all of these shareholders know the company as intimately as let’s say maybe investors would. So it’s a new thing for us. For us that job is to just communicate and explain our strategy and business as best as we can. It’s just a new phase. But if you like zoom out going public in the end is like adding another ride in the amusement park of building a company. It is a difference but as a as a company as an entrepreneur you’re going through change every few weeks. This is another change that way. It’s a huge responsibility but probably before going public you make it to be like an ultra different thing like you’ve never seen before but I think in the 10 years we’ve seen a pandemic we’ve seen so much competition we’ve seen near-death experiences we’ve seen things that we didn’t think we would see uh it’s all just adding up to that experience of building startups right an in 2015 when you got that first check did you think 10 years later this the end state will be IPO. What what was going through your mind? See investors very long-term business. No, see I think when I initially underwrote like so or to his point he would have thought 10,000 orders per day. I I would have said maybe let’s shoot for 100,000 orders per day. Right. So a million more than much more than a million. Right. show I think that um like uh Girish you had on the show I said so founders sometimes can dream in installments you talked about that I think that’s it so we we thought I I had thought through 100,000 at that time in investing and obviously some of these things we tend to underestimate the long term and right and in this case luckily the long-term food itself has grown much lower like I was looking at our original investment memo we said the market could be $700 million or something like that we we’re precise about it but many a time there’s a like bare minimum if that exists and the consumer appetite only keeps growing these can be much larger in the consumer platform side and obviously hasha and team have innovated across that and now quick commas and everything so yeah it’s a it’s been a dream run yeah so hasha 5 years down the line what will spiggy look like see I think the company’s mission statement is all around delivering joy to consumers through convenience And I think that’s what uh we’re going to be doing 5 years later as well. I think we have so many exciting changes happening in all the businesses that we’re in. Uh and now so many trends changing in the world. Food delivery itself. You have so many subsegments, right? I mean you have 15 what folks may call mature business uh is also seeing like interesting trends overall this year with like quick food and what what new changes. So quick food will that be a big gamecher going forward to just launch snack. Correct. Correct. Correct. It’s early days but uh we feel that this this this is going to create consumption that will grow the food delivery market. So it’s important. Will quick food sort of be the trigger for you know food delivery to come back because there is a sense that it’s you know slowed down all around. So will that sort of be um the short in the arm that the sector perhaps needs because it’s sort of plateaued and you know what I think overall food delivery is fine. I think it’s very very early days for the category in India still and I don’t think like you when you think about any category the underlying rails are themselves going to grow at a at a good clip if you play it out over a 10 15 year time frame. uh because I think the restaurant if you believe the India GDP per capita story then restaurants are going to grow faster than any other underlying rails uh and our job is to grow faster than that business. There may be one quarter here, a couple of quarters there at a category level. But honestly, in the medium long term, I think it’s going to it’s it’s a brilliant category. It’s not a saturated category. I think far from it. If you look at the US, the you know the restaurant industry was larger than the grocery industry about 10 years back. Here it’s like 30x the restaurant industry today. the grocery industry and every country that goes through its GDP per capita story sees an expansion of this whole lifestyle. So yeah, I think it’s fine. Thank you so much Harsha and An. And with that, it’s a wrap on this episode where we featured the Swiggy pitch deck. You heard out Harsha and Anand deconstructing that for you, but you can also download the entire deck, go through every slide on seattoscale.com. Check it out. [Music]