Empty Pendrive, Full Auditorium

Five thousand MBA students. Twenty-one years as a visiting faculty. Yet as I walked on stage at KREA University, I was nervous, as though it were my first outing.

Strange, isn't it? Experience is supposed to calm you. Then it struck me. 

When a pendrive is empty, it can store more. The human brain is no different, except that the mind carries its load of past information in the intellect. 

Perhaps nerves are just the mind making room.

The topic was quick commerce and its impact on the distribution channel. The room held over 100 students, 20-somethings who have lived on ten-minute delivery since Covid. They did not need an explainer. They needed a story.

So I told them mine. In October 2015, I started OyeThere in Chennai. The promise: delivery in 30 to 300 minutes. 

We began with tender coconuts bought from a roadside vendor, then added groceries, books, baby products, Rajinikanth T-shirts before Kabali, and clay Ganesha idols at Chaturthi.

The seed money came from a few friends, and it lasted about two financial quarters.

Four delivery boys. Up to ten orders a day. 25 different retailers whose goods we delivered. Expenses covered with the seed capital from day one, with no marketing dollars to burn.

Investors who had promised immense support backed out after the initial tranch, citing market conditions. We went dry in less than 18 months. New Investors asked, "Why so fast? What is the hurry?" 

We had traction and break-even, but no one willing to wait.

I was ahead of my time, and I had no patient capital. Quick commerce, as I realised much later in life, needed years of losses before the habit forms. 

On 1 November 2016, I suspended operations. 

Failure? I call it tuition, self-funded and worth every paisa. While I learned a lot earlier this year at Harvard Business School with my year-long Senior Leadership Course, the ground learning remains unmatched. 

Today the same habit has over 60 million monthly users in India and about USD 9 billion in sales in half a year, according to Redseer. 

India's dense cities, UPI and kirana habit gave the idea a home. Timing matters. So does geography.

But the rest of the West is unable to catch up - Getir shut its instant delivery in Europe and the US in 2024. 

The auditorium answered with energy. 

The 100-minute session, with its Q&A, was clearly enjoyed, and the students' kind acknowledgements and network requests on LinkedIn afterwards said so.

I walked in nervous and walked out lighter, like an empty pendrive, ready for more.

Thank you, KREA University. You taught the teacher.

Trust Is Built One Promise at a Time

On the evening of 28 Oct. ‘26, at the Andhra Chamber of Commerce in Nandanam, hosted by the Madras Management Association, I spoke on a question I keep returning to: why do Indian shoppers trust DMart so deeply?

The answer is not in a campaign. It is in a price tag, a weighing scale and a bill that add up every single time.

Radhakishan Damani came from the stock market, yet chose to own shops and compound them patiently. The first DMart opened in Mumbai in 2002. 

Today there are 518 stores, 86 of them added in the last twelve months, and the count has doubled since March 2021. Quarterly revenue reached INR 19,206 crore in Q2 FY27, up 18%. 

Nothing flashy, just one promise repeated, cluster by cluster.

Harvard's Frances Frei and Anne Morriss describe trust as a triangle of authenticity, logic and empathy. Retail tests all three at the billing desk. 

Our shopper doubts hidden charges, inflated MRPs, short weights and being treated like a number. She rewards the same low price every day, a full shelf and an honest bill. Every doubt is really a design brief.

I walked the room through seven pillars of trust, using the RetAil KAVACCH™ lens. 

Know the truth about your shopper. Predict disappointment before it happens. Price honestly by engineering cost out. Choose your assortment with care and say no often. Serve the job she hires you for. Deliver without waste. 

Finally, let people keep the promise, because systems set it but a person at the shelf delivers it. AI predicts; people care.

The most debated part was the contrast with quick commerce. 

Dark stores sprint, adding thousands of outlets in five years, while DMart compounds with a few hundred large ones. 

Neither is wrong. 

They are hired for different jobs: urgency on one side, the planned monthly shop on the other. Trust comes from doing one job reliably.

I closed with a simple 90-day plan any business can start on Monday. 

Know, in the first month: pick three numbers about your customer and watch them daily. Fix, in the second: cut one cost she never notices and prune the tail of your range. Keep, in the third: train your people on the promise, then publish it and hold yourself to it.

I left the room reminded of how much a small business can borrow from a giant. 

Trust is not a budget line. It is a habit, practised one bill at a time, and any retailer willing to practise it can build it.

Which of the seven pillars is your weakest? Start there.

The Airport That Taught Me to Travel as a Student

On 24 May 2008, Bangalore's new airport opened its doors, and I stood in a terminal that had been built, shop by shop, from an empty plan. As Head of Travel Retail at BIAL, I had spent two years answering one question: what does a passenger in a hurry actually want to buy? 

Nobody in India had the answer then. We had to learn it on the floor.

That habit of learning on the floor never left me. Through Royal Enfield's dealerships, Levista's distribution and the shelves of Indian Terrain, I kept returning to the same classroom: the shop itself. 

So when I finally took my maiden trip to the US this August, it was no surprise that I carried that classroom with me.

Strangely, the trip had waited long. Opportunities to travel had come my way several times, and I had refrained. 

Then things moved swiftly: my decision to join Harvard Business School, the funding arrangements, the visa process. Before I knew it, I was on a flight to Boston.

I landed on a sunny afternoon, excited like a kid. By the time I reached the campus, the excitement had turned gentler. I felt like a child on the first day at a new pre-school: wide-eyed, slightly nervous, wanting to touch everything.

For three weeks, I walked the corridors of the various buildings, the Baker Library, our hostel rooms and, most importantly, the classrooms. 

Each step carried the thought that legends have lived and walked here. Some places make you quieter, and they make you want to deserve the seat you sit in.

Yet my fondest memories also lie outside the campus walls. The evening walks. The train and bus rides. The retail explorations across town, where every store was a case study and every queue a lesson in design and patience. 

A retailer never travels as a tourist. He travels as a student of the shop floor.

What struck me was how the two classrooms spoke to each other. The case method sharpened my questions in the morning, and the shop floor tested them by evening. Frameworks without floors are just theory. 

Floors without frameworks are just habit. Real learning lives where the two meet.

Sitting on the student's bench after decades in the industry was humbling. I have taught in business schools since 2005, yet listening more than speaking reminded me how much remains unlearned.

A month after returning, I still reminisce about those good times, and the lessons keep surfacing in ordinary moments.

Perhaps that is where it all began, back in 1997, behind a Baskin Robbins counter in Chennai, learning to scoop. A good scoop is never about the ice cream alone. It is about the right portion, the customer's smile and the patience to get it right, again and again. 

Twenty-nine years and a Harvard classroom later, I am still that beginner with the scooper in hand, and I hope I never outgrow it.

Boston, thank you. You have changed how I look at everything that comes next.