Welcome to the very first edition of Two by Two, The Ken’s brand-new weekly newsletter.

Starting now, every Friday morning, we will take off from the latest episode of The Ken’s premium podcast of the same name, where my co-host Praveen Gopal Krishnan, our guests, and I break down the most important business stories around us. All of it visualised as a 2×2 matrix of players, stakes, and winners.

This week, that story is Swiggy.

The Swiggy of 2024 is a shadow of its former self.

Boxed in by younger, nimbler, and hungrier competitors from all sides, it has been defending itself for so long that it seems to have forgotten how to play offence.

It wasn’t always like this. Swiggy used to define innovation, product chops, and “Bengaluru cool”.

In many ways, it pioneered food delivery in 2014 after pivoting from being a courier service. In fact, Swiggy’s origins and ambitions in logistics ended up becoming a powerful competitive advantage even in food delivery, where professionals and experts praised its operational excellence. The old Swiggy delivered meals faster and better than anyone else.

Zomato, originally a restaurant-discovery company, got into food delivery a year after Swiggy. But initially it worked—and struggled—with partners Grab and Delhivery. Because what Swiggy was pulling off was incredibly challenging. So much so that within just a year, Zomato was shutting down delivery operations in four of the 14 cities it operated in—Lucknow, Kochi, Coimbatore, and Indore.

It may have started as a late follower, but today, Zomato’s market share in the food-delivery space is estimated at 56–57% by Goldman Sachs, with Swiggy in second place.

Then there’s quick commerce.

In 2020, Swiggy was the first to launch a quick-commerce grocery business, which we now know as Instamart. Its promise—groceries in 15–30 minutes—was quite radical then. It led the “dark store”-enabled retail revolution in India, even betting US$700 million from its 2021 US$1.25 billion fund raise on Instamart.

Grofers (which pivoted to Blinkit), Dunzo, Zepto, and Bigbasket Now were all—in a sense—late adopters of a business model Swiggy pioneered.

But then, Zomato bought Blinkit and rapidly integrated and scaled it across India.