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The Collection Wed, 22 Jan 25 |
Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time—every week. |
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Among the many iconic hits of late singer Lata Mangeshkar, there’s one that holds a particularly cherished place in my heart. This melancholic 1950s song, penned by late lyricist Prem Dhawan, begins with the eponymous line:
“Badli teri nazar toh nazare badal gaye.” (Once your perspective changed, the entire scenario changed.)
This edition of The Collection, our second, is about people who changed their nazar (perspective) to see a completely different nazara (scenario).
At The Ken, we’ve explored how such shifts in perspective are utilised to great effect by leaders across the spectrum—by people who chose to see the world around them differently, and thus strayed away from conventional paths to realise unconventional wisdom.
Take Amrish Rau, CEO of payments company Pine Labs, who said in one edition of First Principles that he didn’t believe in creating products that customers asked for. Why? Because looking to the market to figure out what to build would only end up creating me-too products.
Rau took the opposite approach, and gained tremendously.
If everybody is copying each other, what is the lasting effect of building differentiated products?
“Competition will always chase you. But you have to keep trying to build differentiated products that even consumers don’t know they want yet, which allows me to charge even Rs 100 (US$1.20) more. If you build products which bring in more business via consumer footfall, or deliver timely oxygen to survive via loans, customers will pay for the service,” he says.
Does he have examples?
“We are one of the largest instalments (equated monthly instalments, or EMI) providers for appliances like televisions. We facilitate zero percent EMIs. Eighty-five to ninety percent of such transactions happen on a Pine Labs terminal.”
That market share was the result of understanding an unstated customer need, says Amrish.
‘Don’t build what customers are asking for’, April 2023, First Principles by The Ken
You can read the full newsletter edition or listen to the podcast episode to learn how Pine Labs—and Rau—cracked the payments market.
There’s also Tarun Mehta, CEO and founder of IPO-bound Ather Energy, which operates in one of the most highly contested spaces in the Indian economy and counts EV makers such as Ola Electric, TVS Motor Company, and Bajaj Auto as its rivals.
But Mehta doesn’t really like “the idea of competition”, because that would mean the rules of the game are defined around your competitors’ strengths. Mehta would rather play to his and Ather’s own strengths.
“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.”
Tarun Mehta in ‘Don’t compete’, Aug 2023, First Principles by The Ken
You can read more about Mehta’s philosophy and how it helped Ather become an electric two-wheeler pioneer here.
We’ve covered many other leaders on the First Principles newsletter and podcast who took counterintuitive approaches to grow their businesses.
Here are just a few:
– Shan Kadavil killed things at Freshtohome when they were working.
– Amagi’s Baskar Subramaniam believes ignorance is a strength.
– Homelane’s Srikanth Iyer decided to accept that he would be bad at some things.
– Edelweiss’ Radhika Gupta doesn’t believe in looking at “categories” to come up with new products.
– Mensa Brands’ Ananth Narayanan thinks the best decisions aren’t reached logically.
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Rahul leads the promotion and distribution efforts for the journalism produced by The Ken. He works at the intersection of the publication's editorial and business operations.
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