“I don’t like the idea of competition,” says Tarun Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy, makers of sleek and premium electric scooters. 

It’s an odd answer to my question about his favourite mental models or First Principles. We were speaking on the phone earlier this week. 

I first met Tarun last December for episode 10 of the First Principles podcast. But before that, he had shared with me four internal blogs he had written on Ather’s evolution for his colleagues. The theme of his posts was “Building a company”. Written between August 2020 and October 2022, the blogs were titled “The Matrix”, “Sales”, “Going Public?”, and “Build”. 

They offered me a window into the mind of a young (he was 33, and had started Ather nearly a decade ago) founder-CEO as he worked to proverbially “build an engine while flying the plane”. Tarun came across as intensely First Principles-driven, even for small details most would overlook. He was also a contrarian, prone to doing things that were harder, less obvious, and often risky.

“I don’t like the idea of competition. It’s a terrible idea. Because the way it works is that some competitor launches a product, and your reaction is to compete and do the same thing but better,” he said on Wednesday morning as we spoke.

Instead, he told me, his framework was to double down on your own and innate strengths, instead of fixing weaknesses. “Such a framework forces you to think differently. Because it’s unlikely your competitor is playing a game built around your strengths.”

I ask Tarun for an example.  

“In the early days of Ather, as we were trying to figure out what kind of product we wanted to build, it was obvious to me that we shouldn’t solve for our weaknesses. Meaning, we wouldn’t win any battles with rivals who had the largest manufacturing, best distribution, quality (Honda has been working on quality for decades), or price (the Hero group are the hardest negotiators). Instead, we decided to build the largest R&D setup and focus on product. While everyone else thinks automobiles is about scale, we focused on product,” he says.