Chetan Maini– co-founder and Chairman of Sun Mobility has done a whole lot in his life. He’s been forever a tinkerer as you’re bound to find out if you read his father Dr.S.K.Maini’s book REVA: India’s Green Gift to the World.

Chetan’s raced solar cars, built his own car company REVA and is now building a pay-as-you-go energy infrastructure for a greener future with Sun Mobility. You’ll see in this a proper evolution of owning the chain of control as well.

Well, it has to be said this is not fully intentional. Because in a world where REVAs are speeding down the road left and right you’re not gonna see Chetan going out and building a BaaS, battery as a service business. But it was 2001, and India, and most of the world, was not ready for electric cars.

Chetan, however, persevered even under the shadow of the Mahindra Group and made strides in their electric mobility aspirations before leaving in 2015.

He took a break of two years, observed the EV market across the globe and when he saw the opportunity back home, came back with his expertise and took charge to create what we know today as Sun Mobility. The vision is bigger this time around and time is on his side as well. The only thing left to see out: Execution.

And it must be said they are not pulling any punches on that front either.

Read this edition of Green Margins published way back in late 2022 to understand how here.

Welcome to Season 2, episode 44 of First Principles – A weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

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Full transcript

(The transcript is auto-generated and there may be occasional errors. Please cross-check.)

Rohin Dharmakumar: Chetan it’s great to finally have you on the show. Um, there is this phrase called BaaS or Battery as a Service. Yeah. I mean it’s very interesting because I mean, the last interview that I did was with uh Girish Mathrubootham the co-founder and CEO of Freshworks, which is a SaaS, software as a service company. And and I still expand SaaS when I speak it in a conversation because I don’t assume that everyone understands what SaaS is, right? And now we have BaaS, right? It doesn’t flow off the tongue in quite the same way, but it’s even more interesting. If software as a service was interesting, battery as a service is, I mean incredibly interesting. You’ve built, I mean you’ve been in this space for a long while. You’ve built Reva which was India’s first electric car all the way back in 2001.