I am so excited!
Yes, because this is the first Meet The Leaders episode here with Shumi for me
And with a two-wheeler OEM!
And not just any OEM, the most interesting electric two-wheeler manufacturer in the world's largest two-wheeler market
Nicely put, you see the name there?
This is the factory, the assembly line is inside. The bikes are being built
But, we are still going to meet the famous IIT guy.
Tarun Mehta!
Wow! Okay, I can hardly believe that I'm sitting in front of you, Tarun Mehta!
The co-founder of Ather
You've been the pioneer in EV scooters in the year 2013.
That is when we used to hear the name, Ather.
And then, you made it big in the news with teaming up with Hero.
People said it made you a rich man, did it?
I'm not a rich man!
The partnership is not for the richness of it!
Right!
Okay, so let's get started!
The most important question that I've been wanting to ask you
Ever since I saw you on photos, or in newspapers, or on YouTube videos
Which is, what my father was ended up asking me
How does one get to IIT?
Multiple-choice questions
So, basically, you're saying that my 85,000th rank at the IIT-JEE in 1990, whatever
Was basically what I didn't know how to do multiple choice questions?
You were born in the wrong time.
You started with a regular job before you did your entrepreneurship
Yeah, a short while, six months.
I actually left before my probation ended.
So, you are a dropout?
Yes!
I just dropped out of the job
Oh, you just drop...
Okay, okay! I didn't drop out of IIT!
So, for us, taking the job was kind of like a holding thing for a while.
So, Swapnil and I've been calling ourselves Ather Energy since second year of college.
So, it was a two-person startup.
Way before it was actually a startup.
So, if somebody at Ather were to come and take a job with you for the exact same purpose
Because they just want a salary for the time before
For example, like him.
Would you hire this person if you knew this was what was going on?
I think the question that needs to be asked before this question is what kind of qualities do you look for in people?
Now that you have come this far.
That's a nice question! You must be...
That's a nicer question, I told
But that's his job! For example, would you hire him?
My pitch to anybody who's joining like, on the first week of joining
The new employee induction
Is that, the reason you're here
Is because you're going to be seeing a lot of scale stories
And you are going to be seeing a lot of first time in the industry story.
And you want to be part of that.
And your workforce is largely very young, we just saw it. We sat in the cafeteria today.
So, it looks like everyone is giving a board exam but eating instead!
A large part of your workforce is young. Is that by choice?
Or do you find young people more suited for your journey?
And as a 46-year old, I have a very personal reason to get a good answer for this question.
Okay, there are two kind of things you could be doing.
One is more standard stuff that actually needs experience behind it
Doing something, the craft of which is only perfected over like 30, 40, 50 years.
But a lot of stuff that we're doing in EV
Whether it's batteries, whether it's connectivity, all the software
In fact, most of the manufacturing process has got so much newness to it.
The craft of all this is not like, 50 years old.
So, is hiring somebody with Shumi's experience becomes more tricky, right?
It is very tricky, I can tell that, yeah!
So, a lot of folks don't clear the filter purely because either experience is platform design.
It's not design!
It's a lot of just execution.
It's a lot of knowing stuff, as opposed to a lot of building and creating stuff.
You've got to work a lot against that experience to sort of, you know, make that experience worth it.
Absolutely.
And you're what? 32 to 31 years old? 31!
So, you would understand!
Okay, let me ask you an extension to that question since this is not really going my way.
Yeah!
You're talking about people who are looking for a job
And they have the, whatever, need to create me, need to build this bike.
What advice would you give them as they're in college?
I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I'm going to be my own master, my own boss!
Because this is a terrible idea, you will not be your own boss. If you want to be an entrepreneur
You will have your entire team and you're in service to them.
And you will have investors and you're in service to them.
And then eventually, have customers who will call you #chor every day, so you're going to be in service to them.
Right?
So, it's not gonna be fun!
If that's what your starting motivation was.
But, if your starting motivation was I want to build something.
That will still sustain.
Whether it's your own company or somebody else's company.
Right.
So, if you're in college, find something that you really love building.
Right? And just start building it!
You speak of vertical integration, without really making this an entrepreneurship lesson.
Can you tell our audience what it means?
Automotive companies typically are great assembly operations, right?
You've got your entire supply chain around you.
Brakes, suspensions, engines, transmissions, and you kind of
These are such wall pieces that you just take them and you integrate them
The job of the OEM is super easy because
You want to launch 180cc bike?
Brilliant, right? You'll get everything! Transmission, engine, throttle, seat, seat cover, and a whole lot of accessories for it.
But, the minute you transition to electric
You do not even have a motor first made for a two-wheeler in India.
So, what I felt really early on is that if you want to snap out of that really complicated loop
You got to go deep and control all these parts
And just start building them yourselves.
30 years later, I think we'll just end up spinning off a lot of these businesses
Ather batteries - a different company or Ather electronics - a different company, right?
So, does that also mean that you have like a 5-year, 8-year window before the big OEMs
Figure out how this thing works and they enter the EV space well and compete directly with you?
That's what seems to be happening, right?
So, you will be even further ahead in the cycle. In terms of product evolution by the time they reach where you are now?
I think, pretty good shot!
But they will immediately be able to bring far larger distribution, for example, to the board if they were to get serious about it.
Yeah, 100%!
So, is that a threat to your future business?
It's not a threat!
It's not a threat, it's their advantage. That doesn't mean it's a threat to us.
Of course, you're from IIT!
Can we call it a performance e-scooter?
Yeah, definitely, yeah!
Yeah? Why is it that you went this route?
The question is that you had the choice of making a cheaper version of this scooter
Instead of this one, and selling it to a much larger number of people
But you chose to make a slightly more aspirational product.
Aspirational product, sorry. And in that process, you became the purple cow.
I don't know what's a purple cow?
Yeah, me neither!
You are walking on an Indian street and you see cows everywhere.
And after a while, it's saturated, you don't want to see any more cows.
What if there is a purple cow on the street?
You're going to take a look!
I think the EV guys call that a unicorn!
That's what Ather managed to do, yeah, unicorn!
You could call it that.
That sounds like a good thing, right? If we had the purple cow
Is this the direction that you chose consciously? You said no, we don't want to do mass?
So, aspirational was a very very conscious choice.
It always has been, we have been very vocal about it.
It's actually a very simple reason, and honestly, we've learned from Tesla.
And those guys were pretty right about it.
New technology, you're gonna have early adopters buy it.
It doesn't matter what you price it at!
Think of somebody who's your mass-market Activa buyer, right?
They're actually like, contrary to what people might imagine
They're not making the cheapest purchase, they're making a safe purchase.
In fact, they are so used to making a safe purchase that even if you discount an alternative scooter
They'll still buy an Activa!
Okay? On the other hand, early adopters are happy to buy it
They actually want to buy this, right?
But you've got to solve their problem, which is, they want something special.
They don't want to look like a dork riding this vehicle, right?
They don't want to feel
You like that phrase, look like a dork, right?
You've used it in multiple places.
He has seen you on a motorcycle far too many times.
Before we started Ather
We left our jobs and then for over 9 months, we were just basically sitting in the campus of IIT
So, in those 9 months, we bought 3 or 4 electric scooters
It was so embarrassing to ride them, I was like if I had money
What would I not like?
I would rather walk!
So, these were your character building 6 months?
Absolutely!
Activa is 75k. I'll pay you like 20-30-40-50% more, right?
Just give me something that makes me feel nice.
Since you were talking about premium early adopters, why didn't you do motorcycles instead?
Honest answer, first before that, neither of us as founders really work good motorcycle drivers
And I growing up in Ahmedabad only could drive scooters.
We had like 4 scooters and a family of 4.
I've a Jupiter, a Wego, a Kinetic Honda and a Bajaj Chetak Cub
And I had a Chetak 150!
5 scooters, sh*t!
So, the motorbike was not obvious
And I'm very strong believer that you can't put hat of a customer!
It's just too damn hard.
Okay, you better be the customer. And if you're not the customer, don't build it!
It's just not worth it, okay?
So, will you make motorcycles ever?
I do, right?
But I think now, we're large enough that I think we can attract great talent that does, right?
I think I have a lot of respect now for how hard it is to build good performance bikes.
Like that extra delta to go from our 80 to 90 or 100, it's not like, oh it is just 20-30% more top speed!
That transition from 80-100, it'll probably mean 10x more testing, right?
Like sh*t falling apart at 100, sh*t falling apart at 80 and sh*t falling apart at 60 is like, just three different worlds.
Yeah, absolutely!
So, we thought, okay, could we just build this in a bike format?
Like just a 125 or 150cc bike?
But I realised, well, that's not fun. It's almost mass market.
If you want the early adopter crowd to buy this. You're suddenly moving towards the 250-300cc segment.
That guy's probably going to be spending like 3 lakh rupees on his motorbike, you're not gonna get subsidies.
You don't wanna just use the 3 lakh rupees motorbike to go from Kormangala to HSR
But you want to use that motorbike to hopefully do the Lonavla ride, right?
Or to like, go from Hyderabad to Chennai once in a while, right?
Suddenly, your battery size starts blowing up.
Okay, so you're like, Oh, now I can't get away with like a 5 kWh battery pack or a 6 kWh battery pack.
I'll probably need a 20-30-40 kWh battery pack.
If I've got a 40 kWh battery pack, this sh*t is no longer 3 lakhs, it's actually 10.5 lakhs.
Okay, how many people in India could buy a 10.5 lakh rupee motorbike?
The thing is, he's answering all questions very smartly, because he's from IIT
We need to come up with tougher questions.
All this is just
Okay, you want tougher questions? Got it!
Big question, today is a big day for Tarun. Today, I believe you have a town hall in an hour's time.
So, we're also going to have to rush this.
Are you going to tell your team that you guys are going IPO sometime soon?
That's a tough question!
No, they're not. We're not going IPO anytime soon.
It's a while away, still a while away. The business has just begun.
But no, my question is
We've not been selling this October last year., right?
Until October last year, we were like we will sell you, maybe.
So, when you have a startup and people invest in you
After that you can just spend the money however you want to, right?
Yeah, absolutely!
No, seriously?
Okay, depends on the state of the company.
At a very early stage, actually, nobody knows anything, right?
Your investors don't know what you will spend on, you don't know what you will spend on!
So they give you a bit of money, right? Like maybe 5-7 crores.
And you got to try something.
If you're hiring 30 people, that money's gone!
So, when you got your first round of funding, you didn't immediately buy yourself a fancy house or a car or anything?
No, I bought a car like, last year!
Is there a number or a plan that by year 2024, I'll be selling these many e-scooters?
Any number like that?
Yeah, we've those. We've got a lot of excels. But I think they're pointless.
You always get them, like, either extremely overestimated or extremely underestimated.
So, the plans don't make any sense for this conversation.
Let's just skip all of them!
Yeah!
What we're hoping
Basically, he refused to answer your question.
If you stack up energy use cases in the industry, okay?
Agriculture, industrial, commercial. Transportation is like number 2, number 3, depending on the country, right?
But every other segment usually has an energy efficiency of about 60-90%.
Because they're all using electricity, right?
Nobody's basically throwing like wood into an oven and like running their industry.
Like automotive is the worst of the worst of the worst!
And like a 50-year plan for us is to actually make a meaningful difference to the cost of energy.
And energy access in the world.
Actually, the metric that I've been using internally is, kilowatt-hours powered by Ather.
It's not even like the number of vehicles sold, market leadership
All that is a derivative of it, kWh powered by Ather.
This is how much energy the transportation segment is using.
How much of this we are able to transition from like 20% efficiency to like 75-80% efficiency, right?
That's a metric you care about, right?
If you're gonna have a massive impact in this, for that vision.
You want to have massive distribution first.
And two-wheeler is the best business model to, right?
And in two-wheelers, scooters is the best business model to do that.
And in scooters, premium scooters is the best way to get started, right?
That's what we are trying to do.
You see how excited he is?
I love it, I love it, I absolutely love it!
Has anyone ever told you? You speak like Elon Musk!
And I think the vision that you just told is, you're gonna make a difference even to space travel or something?
You're gonna be building rockets?
No, but it's gonna build
But, I was told that he's a little bit more free on Twitter than his organization likes it.
So, he's definitely like Elon Musk in that sense, yeah!
That's easy.
You wanna say on Twitter, subscribe to PowerDrift?
We're gonna speed this up.
You're a gamer at heart, I've heard stories about you playing Counter-Strike
Do you still play Counter-Strike?
Gamer is a higher calibre definition than I should qualify for.
But yeah, I do play CS:GO
CS:GO?
Yeah, I was an international gamer!
Yes, I used to play Company of Heroes but this is not my interview!
Okay, climbing up the success ladder, as you become rich, any
Why do you keep thinking I've become rich?
Any Wolf of Wall Street?
No, but after series A funding, you obviously have a salary, right?
And it must be a substantial salary so you have to be rich!
It's actually no!
I don't, not yet!
When will we get a faster scooter?
So, thinking of it, 100%
A lot of respect for getting quality right.
As I said, the journey from 80 to 100 is not a small one.
But top speed for the 450 product line, I think there is an opportunity.
But it's not one that I would say, ah 6-9 months out!
Sure, we could build something, but it's a prototype!
What's the movement with the creation of actual charging infrastructure, from the perspective of geographical coverage?
We've been rolling out the Ather grid at an increasing pace now.
So, we had like 40 charging points, fast charges in October last year or November last year.
We now have 150.
And this was also delayed for two months because of COVID.
We're adding a fast charger roughly at this pace of one fast charger a day right now.
It's only going to keep accelerating.
So, we should end the year with about 400-500 Fast-chargers.
When do you think India will become an EV majority country in terms of sales?
Two-wheelers and everything else.
No, I'm only asking because he has a super macro view of what's going on.
So, his answer will be more accurate than most people who will just pull a number out of their head.
I think two-wheelers in the next 7-8 years, the majority could be electric.
And the reason I say could be is primarily because I'm still to make up my mind on how quickly bikes go electric.
But I'm hoping 2030 is not a bad estimate for the majority will be electric.
Usually, takeoff happens at around 10% transition.
So, if 10% market goes electric, the 10 to 15%, they take like two years more.
So, it's a little hard to predict that exact time.
Cars, I'm a little bit more sceptical
But I kind of hope that it's not more than 10 years away.
Trucks, if good companies come in, is I think a 4-5 year journey.
So yeah, actually, if I put all this together, basically, I'm talking about a 10 years timeline.
For almost every segment.
Yeah, I'm not saying ICE stops existing.
I'm saying majority goes to electric.
What's the next technology breakthrough that will really unlock EVs?
What are you waiting for?
I don't think we need any technology breakthrough for EVs to go mainstream now.
It is mostly just engineering work.
Good old-fashioned, million hours of engineering.
Knocking down the cost of every godd*mn thing.
Keep doing this, a product like 450X could almost become a mass-market product, right?
Even without subsidies eventually.
I don't think EVs need any discoveries to happen.
What have you learned from all the data that you've collected from the customers
That surprised you in terms of how they use their Athers?
Most of the learnings are actually now popping up around the software side.
And the entire connectivity experience.
What about data privacy issues in a country that barely has any data privacy laws?
How do you deal with the questions as well as how you actually collect and use data?
So
We give you an incognito mode.
So, the most personally identifiable data is usually on GPS.
So, we give you an incognito mode option.
That I think if I'm not wrong, now stays on.
So, you don't have to turn it on every single time. Right? So, it just stays in incognito forever.
The good news is, we don't have a database business model.
Just like Apple likes to say, right? We don't need to make money off selling your data!
Luckily because you buy a good expensive product so that gives us enough money.
Just pure business rationale.
Trying to make like 10 rupees a month off selling your data is just not worth it.
No huge props!
To me, the biggest issue that bothers me about Android phones
Is the idea that they don't respect my data
And I have to do a lot of work to keep my data to myself.
And that's why I would prefer the other brand.
Okay, can we move on Shumi to rapid-fire questions?
Rapid fire questions?
Sure!
Coffee or tea?
Coffee!
Hardware updates or software updates?
Software updates.
Hydrogen or electric?
Electric!
Why not hydrogen?
It's a sh*tty idea!
Do you realise that the problem we want to solve is basically take this sector from 20% efficiency to 80% efficiency?
Hydrogen basically does nothing!
Comfort or performance?
Performance!
Ride quality or handling?
Handling.
I like the fact that these are basically the qualities of the 450X.
Think about it!
Charging for free or pay for charge?
Pay for charge!
But you're offering charging for free through the whole city!
Today!
That's your way of rewarding your early adopters?
No, I think it's just a way of running the business.
Subsidies or price competitive?
Subsidies!
Basically, if you pull out subsidies today.
You will see far fewer product launches.
You will see suddenly us get conservative
We'll start thinking like the way every other two-wheeler companies thought in the past
We will think in terms of 20 years to stabilise this product line.
And that's gonna be bad for the industry.
Work from home or ?
Office!
Import and label or build yourself?
What?
I think we're done with rapid-fire, Tarun!
But nothing is complete without getting to know what your day looks like?
And is your wife fine with you working so hard?
I don't think I work that hard!
Yeah? No?
Are you the typical 4:30 AM club guy?
6 typically, 6-6:30. Read the newspaper.
Exercise a bit, yoga maybe.
Typically start by about 8-ish, 8:30 maybe!
Start my meetings around 9:30.
Cook lunch.
So, either meet somebody at a cafe or meet somebody at the office.
Come back by about 5-ish or so
Take a few calls till about 8-ish or so.
Cook dinner and on the side.
Then 8:30 catch dinner.
Watch something on some channel, some platform.
In the night, if we've got somebody over like family
Then play board games!
I heard monopoly is your favourite board game?
No, it used to be!
Then I fought everybody and destroyed all of my relationships.
I would actually make equity investments!
So, I would actually buy a player out, partially
So, what I would say is, I'll give you money, you build hotels
But because now I'm an equity partner, I will not pay you if I land on your property.
But, we'll split profits 50-50.
And the guy realises after a while
That holy sh*t! I'll never pay you but you will still pay me, so you've already lost the game!
So, I stopped playing monopoly.
Who is your inspiration? I'll just have that asked so that.
Yeah. Actually, I don't have a good answer!
I think 10 years later, I will discover somebody and then I'll connect all the dots and say
Yeah, that guy was always the inspiration.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah, I think I've got most of... all of my questions, sorted!
Can I ask my final question? I've been waiting for this!
Yes. Yes, please.
This is the question I wanted to ask him since forever!
I want to ask you integration of cube root of 10x!
And you've to give him a few multiple choices!
Then I'll be able to crack!
This is perhaps one of the most, like the smartest conversation or interviews I've had!
I think you've come closest to being as blunt as possible!.
No, really kudos, Tarun, to Ather!
And kudos to you, your team!
I'm sure they're all working hard towards a common goal.
And we wish you all the best for that.
Yes. Really good talking!
Thank you so much. Best of luck. Your scooter is currently the best in the country!
I think it can be a lot better.
Always!
I will always want something faster, something that will lasts longer in terms of range.
I can't believe you said that!
Shumi, I'm sure we've recorded that. We'll just play it in our adverts.
No!
Not yet, not till you get to 100!