Two 19-year-old Stanford dropouts are writing the A to Z of Q commerce in India with speed, guts and gusto
(L-R) Kaivalya Vohra, CTO, Zepto and Aadit Palicha, CEO and Co-founder, Zepto
Blame it on 19. It makes you cocky. “I was 11 when Grofers started,” says Aadit Palicha, co-founder and CEO of Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app started in April last year. “While they raised $100 million recently, we've been around for five months and raised $160 million,” he says, brimming with brash confidence.
Blame it on 19. It adds swag to your ‘so what’ talk. “We got a valuation of $570 million in five months. That’s double of Dunzo,” he said in an interview to Forbes India in the last week of December. A few days later, Reliance Retail led a $240-million funding round in six-year-old Dunzo reportedly at a valuation of $800 million. A lot of people, lets on the 19-year-old Indian-origin founder who completed his schooling from Dubai, can talk about legacy players who have been there for a while but he says he’s not bothered. “We are doubling or tripling every month in scale,” he claims.
Blame it on 19. It makes you fearless. “Fear is a very irrational emotion,” reckons Palicha, a Stanford dropout and Y Combinator alum who co-founded Zepto with Kaivalya Vohra, a friend of the same age, traits and academic achievements. If one is making a decision out of anger or when one is scared, he explains, then they turn out to be wrong. “The mentality has to be cold-blooded,” he adds. One has to be calculative about the decisions. “We make rational decisions.”
Blame it on 19. It makes you hyper ambitious. “We want to grow 40x and build a $20 billion company over the next couple of years,” says Palicha. “We have hit escape velocity,” he says. Zepto—a name derived from the smallest time unit ever measured Zeptosecond—indeed seems to be defying physics for the time being. It’s present across seven cities, has built 100 micro-warehouses, each with a capacity to do over 2,500 orders a day, and have got backers like Glade Brook, Nexus, Lachy Groom, Y Combinator and Global Founders Capital.
Blame it on 19 because only a 19-year-old can think of looking for a silver bullet from Day 1. The reason is simple: Impact. “I need to get it right in the first time,” says Palicha, who started with 45-minute delivery but very quickly switched to a 10-minute format. The logic of ‘scale fast and fail fast’, he explains, works well in a software business. “I’m not building a bits and bytes business. I am building an atom’s business, which is capital intensive,” he says. The option to fail, he underlines, in such businesses doesn’t exist.