1. BHAVISH
AGGARWAL
LEARNS
TOFLY
Heishardat
workpushingOla,
India’sthirdmost
valuabletech
startup,beyond
itsflagshipcab
business.Ifhe
succeeds,he
couldendup
creatingIndia’s
firstmobile
conglomerate.If
not,thiscouldbe
acautionarytale
forourgung-ho
startups.
OLA’S VALUATION AFTER A
$400 MILLION FUNDING ROUND
IN APRIL
$ 2 . 5
B I L L I O N
B Y
K U N A L N .
TA L G E R I ,
TA N M O Y
G O S WA M I ,
A N D R A J I V
B H U VA
Bhavish
Aggarwal,30,
co-founderand
CEO,Ola
P H O T O G R A P H B Y B A N D E E P S I N G H
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3. hatwasjusttoodamnhard!”saysBhavish
Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola,
India’s largest cab aggregator. He isn’t
talkingaboutOla’sangelfundinground—
Rs 1 crore in 2011—though he concedes
that’s right up there as hard things go. He
has since tackled a few chunkier ones: for
starters, jetting around to raise another
$675million(Rs4,264crore)—$610millionofitbetween
September 2014 and March 2015—pushing Ola into the
rarefied world of billion-dollar startups built out of India.
Alongtheway,there’sbeenthebattlewithUber,theworld’s
mostvaluablestartupandtheBigDaddyofcabgigs;testy
civic administrators suspicious of the idea of cabs on tap;
the tense $200 million buyout of the No. 2 aggregator
TaxiForSure (TFS); a recent allegation of obscenity
against a TFS driver in Delhi; and, for good measure,
a messy legal tangle containing the threat of a ban.
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“ T
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No, the memory that brings a grimace to
Aggarwal’s face is from 2007, long before any
of this. That’s when he and Ankit Bhati, just
students at the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT) Bombay, set out on a bicycle tour from
their campus in Powai to hilly Ratnagiri in
coastal Maharashtra—a good 335 km away.
They planned the trip with a rigour only geeks
are capable of, trained for weeks. And around
Diwali, they hit the road.
The two lads were not even 25, and hadn’t yet
dreamt of starting up together one day. Bhati,
who is from Jodhpur, studied mechanical engi-
neering and is now chief technology officer at
Ola. Aggarwal spent his early years in Afghani-
stan and Britain—his parents are doctors who
were based in the two countries—did his school-
ing in Ludhiana third standard onwards, and
came to IIT to study computer science. They
met on day one, shared a mentor, teamed up at
tech fests, and worked on freelance coding proj-
ects to earn some money. But both think back
to that cycling tour as pivotal to where they are.
On the first day of the tour, they crossed Ali-
baug, 100 km away. Then, they touched Kashid,
another 30 km away along the North Konkan
coast, and Murud-Janjira in Raigad district,
shaving off nearly half the target distance. And
then they stopped. “We just came back,” says
Aggarwal. A day later, they were on a bus back
instead of their bicycles, “but we never tell any-
one that”, says Bhati, laughing.
The episode is a reminder for the two:
Turning back isn’t an option this time. Not after
‘Ola’ became a byword for urban transportation
in India; opened up a whole new world of choice
in one-horse towns like Bokaro and Dindigul;
built a team of over 6,000; and rose to be the
country’s most valued tech startup after Flipkart
and Snapdeal—all in the space of five years.
Much of this can be credited to Aggarwal’s
product nous and, more important, his instinct
for scale. Ask startup watchers anywhere in
India to name the digital entrepreneurs they
think will remain standing amid the inevitable
detritus of also-rans. The first two names are
easy: Sachin Bansal, Kunal Bahl. Aggarwal,
who is 30 this month, is firmly nudging that list.
Shradha Sharma, founder of the startup
news platform YourStory and one of the most

4. Snapdeal, Chinese mobile sensation Xiaomi, and payments leader
Paytm.
So far, Ola is repaying the love in spades, if you believe a SoftBank
earnings report. It says Ola’s share “based on available or estimated
data of registered vehicles” is 80%, with Uber’s a paltry 4%. (The
report also says radio taxi pioneer Meru Cabs holds 12%, but most
think it will be a sideshow in the war between Ola and Uber.)
You could, of course, argue that every such estimate comes with
an equally imposing counter. For instance, to Ola’s claim that it does
750,000ridesaday,Ubersaysitissettohitamillionridesinthenext
six to nine months. (Ola’s view of Uber, whose latest funders include
India’s Times Internet, is standard: “India is a very different market
and a templated approach won’t work here, be it in transportation or
anything else to do with logistics.”) Then again, you could point out
that “rides” is a rather vague proxy for a company’s real health to be-
gin with. A bit like the opaque “gross merchandise value” quoted by
e-retailers, which has raised a lot of eyebrows recently.
However, on this there is no debate: With a network of over
sought-after mentors in Bengaluru’s startup cir-
cuit, has known Aggarwal from the time he was
just another zealous product guy pitching his
idea. “He would stand in my office all day, show-
ing the early version of the Ola app to anyone
who cared,” she says. “He chose a business that
is not for the fainthearted, and never gives in to
pressure. I’d say he is among the five most driv-
en entrepreneurs in India, any day.”
Sharma says Aggarwal’s standout qualities
are “ambition, aggression, and focus”. Inves-
tors love those traits. Startup scouts from To-
kyo-based SoftBank and New York-based Tiger
Global have locked horns in hot sectors like e-
retail (Flipkart vs. Snapdeal) and online house
search (CommonFloor vs. Housing). But they
seem happily agreed on Ola, and are co-inves-
tors in the company. (They are also co-investors
in Kuaidi Dache, a leading Chinese cab aggre-
gator.) In May, Ola also became a part of Ratan
Tata’s Internet investments, joining the likes of
AnkitBhati,Ola’sCTO,saysthe
inherentvalueofOla’splatformis
thatitsupportsexperimentation.
photogr aph by BANDEEP SINGH

5. 200,000 cabs in 100-plus cities, Ola has a handy lead in the cab
aggregation business. If all Aggarwal wants to do here on is build
a cab empire for the ages, he has to put his head down, keep doing
whatever he has done to get here, do it better, and pray—SoftBank’s
hulking claims notwithstanding—that he can keep Uber at bay. The
big assumption, as it is with all tech startups, is that at some stage
his company will actually start making money.
But that’s not Aggarwal’s style. “Bhavish is pure aggression,”
says Bhati, echoing an increasingly common description of his co-
founder. “He is always dreaming of where next Ola can be, and how
fast we can get there. He is impatient at all the right times.”
Ola turns five in September. In startup years that’s plenty old,
and sure enough, Aggarwal is getting impatient. His next mission:
swiftly launch a series of new businesses, each piggybacking on Ola’s
well-oiled technology platform. Think of a consumer goods giant,
say ITC, which uses the distribution muscle of its cigarettes business
to push soap and biscuits.
If the plan works, Ola could metamorphose into India’s first
mobile conglomerate; in fact, it has quietly dropped “Cabs” from its
name. But if it backfires, it will be a cautionary tale for India’s bullish
venture-backed private companies, accused by naysayers of chasing
high valuations rather than building solid businesses.
The first push beyond cabs came in March, with Ola Café, a food
delivery service. (Uber started testing a similar service, UberEats,
in the U.S., Canada, and Spain last year.) This is a massive market,
estimated at $15 billion, featuring cash-rich players like Foodpanda,
TinyOwl,andZomato.Olaispartnering100restaurantsacrosssome
30 localities in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, and Hyderabad, and to
differentiate itself, it will only offer a restaurant’s most popular dish,
say Spaghetti Kitchen’s chicken penne pasta. At any given time, the
menu will have five items, each sourced from a different restaurant,
and the options will change every 20 minutes between 12 noon and
10.30 p.m. Ola will charge a commission for every order.
In early June came the second launch: Ola Store, a grocery
delivery app covering 16,000 stock keeping
units, in partnership with local kirana stores
and chains like Namdhari’s Fresh. (Again, Uber
started Uber Essentials in the U.S. for essential
household supplies last year.) This is yet anoth-
er sizzling market, slated to be worth $5 billion
by 2030, and Ola’s competition include early
mover Bigbasket, newbies like Grofers and Pep-
perTap, and, slowly, Amazon. Ola is training
drivers and delivery boys for these two business-
es, although the exact modalities are still on the
drawing board.
Then in July, reports surfaced about a shuttle
bus service that would aggregate tourist and
chartered buses. There was also chatter that the
company is considering carpooling, logistics,
and e-commerce, but it denies anything
concrete in these areas.
Finally there’s Ola Money—a closed mo-
bile wallet that accounts for bill payments for
40% of all Ola rides, and counts Sachin Bansal
among its fans—which can potentially become a
full-fledged payment platform underpinning all
the different ventures.
Things are still very fuzzy, and it is hazard-
ous to guess how any of these will pan out, but
an early pattern is emerging: While Ola Café is
just another button in the main Ola app, Ola
Store, which has the potential to morph into
a full-fledged e-retail platform, gets a separate
app and logo. The company says that the new
businesses will have separate operations, but
the technology platform will remain centralised.
On the face of it, Ola has no choice but to
offer more services and increase wallet share,
given the small pool of Internet users in India
who spend money online: a mere 39 million
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6. Indore, says investors in Silicon Valley still reward focus on the
principal idea. “It will be interesting to see whether the thinking
among investors is changing in India.” There’s also the view that if
Ola’sstrategyistooutmanoeuvreUberbyspreadingoutwide,it’snot
a particulary wise one. “It is better for a well-capitalised company to
build dominance in its core business first,” says a consultant with
a leading global advisory, “especially if it has Uber as competition”.
But Aggarwal says he was clear from the very beginning that Ola’s
core business is not cabs: It is mobility. “We didn’t see this as a taxi
business at all,” he explains. “We started with the idea of a customer
who thinks ‘I will never buy a car.’ What do we need to build for
someone like that? We need cars to be made available in 5-10
minutes.” Now that Ola has ticked that box, he says it can become
“the largest company in the business of on-demand consumption”—
or instant gratification.
“People want their food delivered in half an hour—can we give it
to them in 15 minutes?” Aggarwal’s benchmark is Domino’s Pizza.
“They have solved hunger [through fast, hyperlocal delivery],” he
out of the total Internet user population of 300
million, according to Barclays Equity Research.
No one will discuss this on record, but an
investor tells Fortune India that while Flipkart
may have 84 million web visitors, “I go with
the 50 million to 60 million range, assuming
not all visits are unique.” A serial entrepreneur
adds that while many buyers are lured by heavy
discounts, “conversion for convenience”—the
holy grail for consumer Internet companies—“is
still negligible in India”.
In the cab business in particular, breakout
growth is almost impossible: Goldman Sachs
says India’s car rental market will reach $1.4
billion by 2030, a pittance compared with $16
billion for air bookings and $18.6 billion for rail-
way bookings. Even if you believe that the mar-
ket estimate is conservative, the ticket size of a
cab ride is obviously the lowest across these cat-
egories. Ergo, Ola, with a valuation of $2.5 bil-
lion, cannot be content with just cabs.
While the revenue from new launches will be
incremental, there’s a far more urgent reason
for Ola to do more: keeping drivers happy. Till
now, the battle to acquire drivers between Ola
and Uber has been all about throwing more and
more incentives. (Ola acquired TFS as a hedge.)
At the peak of competition last September,
incentives were rampant: Uber $10 a ride, Ola
$7 a ride, and TFS $2.5 a ride. But as the party
winds down—fleet operators in Bengaluru
and Delhi say Ola is discontinuing or cutting
incentives while Uber isn’t—the only way to
hold on to drivers is to help them get more trips
and reduce idle time. “For us, it is a great way
to solve utilisation,” says Pranay Jivrajka, chief
operating office and senior vice president of
operations at Ola.
Aggarwal says Ola is in a “network-effects”
business. The more customers it signs up, the
more it can reduce fares, in turn bringing in
more customers. But without loyal and engaged
drivers, this virtuous cycle, and indeed Ola’s
ambitious expansion plans, will come to nought.
Not everyone is convinced that the time is
right.RishikeshaKrishnan,professorofstrategy
and director at Indian Institute of Management,
PaytmfounderVijayShekharSharma
hastakenhisfive-year-oldpayments
companytoe-commerce.
photogr aph by REUBEN SINGH

7. says. “That’s why they are the country’s No. 1 food-tech company.”
Aggarwal’s choice of food and grocery delivery is a no-brainer;
both are large markets built around the idea of transport. He has
also experimented with movie tickets, IPL tickets, and Diwali gift
deliveries. But it’s an experiment days before we went to press that
offers a sharper clue into just how wide he is planning to fan out:
From 11 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. on a Sunday, Ola ran a first-of-its-kind
fashion-delivery tie-up with Myntra, allowing users in five cities to
book a makeover by a personal stylist through the Ola app.
The big opportunity is to replicate that template and become a
last-mile partner to all kinds of services, such as in-home medical
care, a booming market that can reach $15 billion in India by some
estimates. Or hyper-local home services, a sector that caught fire last
year with over 70 startups opening shop, per research portal Traxcn.
Many like Raja Hussain, the ex-Silicon Valley co-founder of
Chennai-based mobile app marketing startup Airloyal, see a clear
imprint of Valley-style aggression in Ola’s moves. “You want to send
out a strong signal to the market, and then focus your best resources
to grow your user base,” he says.
Raghunandan G., who sold TFS to Ola, echoes that. “If you try to
sell a standalone service in India, it takes time to generate volumes,”
he says. “But imagine all the services you can get into once you have
a captive audience. Merchants will work with anyone who gives
them reach.” Equally, entrepreneurs like Bansal, Bahl, and Aggarwal
want to be ready before a disruptive force like 4G networks opens up
all kinds of markets. Being unprepared is not an option in the face
of competition from Amazon or Uber, known for conquering new
markets at lightning speed.
Affinity for speed is the reason why sectors like online retail,
search, community content, and messaging have been the dominant
investment themes in the U.S. and China, with transport and pay-
ment rapidly emerging in recent quarters, says a Bengaluru-based
venture capital investor. “The valuation frenzy in India is driven by
the race to find the four or five leaders in each of these themes,” he
adds. So while Amazon and Flipkart battle it out in e-commerce,
Paytm tops payment, and Ola is seen as the leader in transport.
Ola’s grip over mobile gives it a big edge in this race. Aggarwal
and Bhati sniffed the opportunity early, in 2011, when they built a
mobile website over a weekend to see if users would book taxis on
the phone. The response was encouraging, and in July 2011, it was
ready with a consumer app, which it branded aggressively. In con-
trast, Flipkart was busy building its marketplace model; it started
focussing on mobile only in the latter half of 2013.
The early start means Ola is one of India’s few high-scale mobile
Internet businesses, a list that includes Zomato and entertainment
ticketing company BookMyShow. It claims that 99% of its bookings
now come from the mobile app, and it will accept bookings only
on the app from September. That’s a vital step in a country where
mobile Internet users account for 65% of the online population,
against 30% in China and 22% in the U.S.
The mobile bet will yield bigger returns as
and when Ola expands its fleet in the non-metro
hinterlands. Currently, such regions account for
only 10% of its cabs. But with mobile commerce
expected to be a $19 billion bounty by 2019
according to market research firm Zinnov,
predicated on a consumption boom in tier II
and tier III towns, that number might change.
Phanindra Sama, who founded India’s first
online ticketing company redBus in the pre-
smartphone era, says mobile is also a game
changer in managing productivity. “We had to
hire a 20-member team to convince bus opera-
tors to come to our platform. There was an elab-
orate backend to deal with customers.” But with
smartphones, inventory procurement and cus-
tomer care can happen with much less resourc-
es, and in real time. Sama adds that Ola can
launch multiple services because “it has the dis-
tribution”—and the routing algorithms—to pre-
dict and optimise the use of its cabs.
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8. Ola would appear to be merely diversifying, that is, extending into
related businesses.
But Krishnan points out that this homogeneity is true of even
a pioneering, listed Internet business like Info Edge (flagship
Naukri.com launched in 1997), which is recognised as a bona fide
conglomerate with interests in education (Shiksha.com), executive
search (QuadrangleSearch.com), matrimony (Jeevansathi.com),
and real estate (99acres.com). Most of these businesses were built
on the same core domain: classified ads. This holds good for other
early starters, including People Group (shaadi.com), which built
real estate portal Makaan.com (sold to PropTiger), and Consim
(BharatMatrimony.com), which started IndiaProperty (hived off as
a separate business in which founder Murugavel Janakiraman has
a small stake). Krishnan says this is where Internet companies are
different from, say, the Tatas, and closer to ITC’s model of building a
conglomerate of contiguous businesses.
There’s another, unobvious parallel from farther back in history.
Many of India’s bellwether conglomerates were born as the only way
to outgrow the production caps imposed across industries during
the Licence Raj. Dwijendra Tripathi, retired professor of business
history at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, writes
in The Oxford History of Indian Business that the Birla Group, for
instance, steeped in textiles and composed of 13 major companies
in 1947, had swelled to 200 companies by 1985. Similarly, the
Licence Raj saw the Bajaj Group grow from sugar mills to electrical
appliances and two- and three-wheelers. The limitations on growth
that Ola is facing with India’s small base of online buyers—and the
pressures on it to break free—resemble those odds.
With Ratan Tata on board, it is tempting to assume that Ola
is getting a crash course in conglomerate building. But Anand
Subramanian, senior director for marketing communications at
Ola, says most of the company’s discussions with Tata have revolved
around “the future of mobility, and how Ola can impact it. We also
delved into the kind of socio-economic impact this would have on
driver entrepreneurs.”
The trouble is, Ola’s grand plans have coincided with big chal-
lenges in its bread-and-butter cab business. First: tackling a regu-
latory can of worms that has lain open since the alleged rape of a
female passenger by an Uber driver last year. The incident, which
ended up revealing that cab aggregators cannot be regulated using
the existing frameworks for radio taxis, led to the spectre of a blan-
ket ban on aggregators. While Uber has been hit the hardest, Ola
too is battling a possible ban in Delhi for running diesel cars in con-
travention of rules.
Subramanian says as a self-regulatory move, the company is in-
vesting in driver training, verification, and extra layers of GPS track-
ing in its cabs. It also engages regularly with road transport officials
If Ola can master this model, it would have
created a whole new kind of company. Think of
it as a conglomerate tailored for the burgeoning
on-demand economy, which can rapidly expand
into scalable businesses off an agile technology
platform. “The inherent value of Ola is that plat-
form,” says Bhati. “If it cannot support experi-
mentation, then it’s not much of a platform.”
A caveat is necessary here. A classic
conglomerate is often made up of businesses
that are unrelated but feed off the parent brand.
Take TCS, Tata Chemicals, Tata Motors, and
the Indian Hotels Group, which are part of
the Tata Group and took decades to build. “In
the digital world, Amazon is a great example,”
says Krishnan of IIM Indore. It started with
e-retail and moved into videos (Amazon Prime),
devices (Kindle, Fire), and cloud computing
(Amazon Web Services). Seen through this lens,
InfoEdgefounderSanjeev
Bikhchandanicreatedanonline
conglomerateofclassifiedsbusinesses.
photogr aph by REUBEN SINGH

9. and state transport ministries. “We want to be proactive in indus-
try practices as regulations for the digital economy take shape,” says
Subramanian. The digital economy is currently a blind spot for the
government, as evidenced by its reported troubles in even locating
the Uber office in the National Capital region after the rape. “The
government shouldn’t notice Ola for the first time because of a bad
incident,” says Pallav Singh, CEO of TaxiForSure and senior vice
president (operations) at Ola.
Then there’s the question of retaining drivers without incentives.
An independent fleet operator in Bengaluru says, “Both Uber and
Ola have brought in customer convenience, but drivers joined them
only for the incentives. The moment that stops, drivers leave.” To
compensate, Ola is helping drivers with medical and accident in-
surance and has tied up with State Bank of India to offer them car
loans, but “many drivers are moving to Uber because it is giving bet-
ter deals,” says the operator. Uber also offers lower fares than Ola in
many cities. However, Subramanian says Ola has at least a two-year
advantage because of its headstart over Uber.
When Singh discussed the new ventures with drivers in January,
they were surprised. “Their questions ranged from ‘Why are you do-
ing this? Ola is a taxi service, isn’t it?’ to ‘What’s in it for me?’” Ola’s
effort is to get drivers more engaged and loyal to the brand. But that
might be a tall order, given old habits.
It also has to find a way to deal with hostile taxi unions that see
cab aggregators as a threat. In July, taximen in Mangaluru protested
before the city administration, alleging Ola was trying to monopo-
lise the business. In fact this is one thing that unites it with Uber,
which has been flayed by angry cabbies across the world, from Lon-
don to Paris to Mexico.
In the near term, Ola faces another daunting ask: filling a slew
of new management roles. It can learn from Wipro, one of India’s
early conglomerates, which transitioned from making vegetable oil
(in the ’40s) to consumer products and industrial hydraulics (’70s),
before entering the personal computers market—eventually grow-
ing it into the IT services flagship—in the ’80s. “We had to explain to
everyone what we wanted Wipro to be,” recalls Pratik Kumar, CEO
of Wipro Infrastructure Engineering and former group HR head for
Wipro. “The top managers had to chase a new breed of talent—en-
trepreneurial persons who could take ownership and run. Chairman
Azim Premji himself spent a lot of time hiring managers across lev-
els,” recalls Kumar, who finishes 25 years at Wipro next year.
Ola’s journey to build a management team beyond its founders
has just begun. In February Aggarwal poached Sunit Singh, head
of design at ClearTrip, a company he admires for its user experi-
ence. He also snagged Amit Mathur as head of talent acquisition
from VMWare to focus on tech hires, separating it from business
staffing under Rohit Munjal who came from GE Healthcare. Both
Mathur and Munjal report to Yugantar Saikia, an experienced hand
from software analytics firm FICO. Then there’s Arvind Singhati-
ya, formerly of Metro Cash Carry, who joined as head of public
policy, government relations, and legal. Anoth-
er star hire is Sundeep Sahni, former managing
director of Lazada Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s
top e-retailer.
But luring talent is a relentless, high-stakes
game where Flipkart and Snapdeal have proven
hard to beat. And unless Ola can build a con-
tinuous stream of leaders for the new services,
things will slow down. Already, the rollout has
been fraught with delays. In parts of Delhi, for
instance, the Café button on the app has been
promising delivery in “15 minutes” since its
launch, but upon clicking, you are told that the
service is still not operational.
These concerns segue into the core
competence vs. diversification debate. In the
startup world, the sacred norm is going after
a niche rather than spreading too wide. That’s
why Internet pioneers like Info Edge launched
new businesses years after strengthening their
main business. In an unrelated interview (see
page 34), Intel’s South Asia managing director
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10. investors were not pumping in money at the same pace,” says an in-
vestor who doesn’t have a stake in either Ola or Paytm. “While Pay-
tm has been dominant in payment, its attempt to crack e-commerce
was seen as a crazy move less than a year ago, but not any more.
Similarly, over the next few years, one successful experiment could
give a quantum boost to Ola’s growth.”
In fact investors in mature public companies seem to appreciate
the idea of cross-pollinating businesses. The philosophy: It’s better
to re-invest money than let it idle in times of growth. For instance,
last July, when Info Edge announced that its board had approved a
qualified institutional placement (QIP) worth Rs 750 crore to in-
vest in 99acres.com, the share price closed at Rs 697. A month later,
when an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders approved
the QIP, the share price had inched up by 12.24%, Rs 782.51. And
finally, on the date of the QIP announcement, the share price closed
at Rs 888.11—a juicy 27.39% higher than July and 20.02% higher
than the QIP issue price.
What does Aggarwal make of all the frenzied attempts to predict
the future of his unicorn? From his boyish countenance, it is difficult
to say if he takes any of it seriously. “We are still a startup,” he says
matter-of-factly, “we need to do many more things.” The memory of
the aborted cycling trip should keep him in line.
Debjani Ghosh sums up the risks. “India is like
a toy shop” for tech companies given the sheer
number of addressable challenges, says Ghosh.
“How do you prioritise where you want to play?
That’s going to be one of the toughest questions.”
To be sure, Ola is not the only startup on
an expansion spree. Far smaller ones, like gro-
cery-delivery players Bigbasket and Grofers,
have started dipping into niches such as elec-
tronics and personal care. The closest com-
parison for Ola is possibly Paytm, another
five-year-old unicorn. Founded by Vijay Shek-
har Sharma and backed by Alibaba, it claims
80,000 users in its mobile wallet business,
and forayed into m-commerce last year. Shar-
ma says as of June, users bought goods and
services worth $1.5 billion in gross value from
9,000 active merchants.
“All this was not possible in 2011-12 when
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backend.
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