Doglapan: The Hard Truth about Life and Start-Ups

192 Pages·2022·3.271 MB·English

by  Ashneer Grover

ASHNEER GROVER
DOGLAPAN
The Hard Truth about Life and Start-Ups
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Prologue
1. Malviya Nagar: Where It All Began
2. ‘Teri Hawa Kitni Hai?’
3. Mads: The Love of My Life
4. My Naukri Days
5. Grofers: The Beginning of My Entrepreneurial Journey
6. A Dark Phase
7. BharatPe: The Genesis
8. The Building Blocks
9. The Stairway to Success
10. Souring Relationships
11. Martyr to One’s Own Cause
12. Shark Tank
13. The Nykaa IPO and Kotak Saga
14. The Ultimate Deception
15. Truth Is Stranger than Fiction
Epilogue
Follow Penguin
Copyright
This book is dedicated to my wife, Madhuri Jain Grover,
my parents, Neeru and Ashok Grover,
and my kids, Avyukt and Mannat.
Thanks for making me whoever I am today!
Prologue
25 January 2022, 4 p.m.
‘Joining back on 1st Feb’. That was the subject line of the email I had shot
off to the board of directors that cold January evening. Earlier that month, I
had been coerced into going on a voluntary leave of absence from BharatPe,
a company worth US$3 billion (over Rs 20,000 crore) that I had built
painstakingly at an unprecedented pace over the last three and a half years
as its founder and managing director.
The whole of January had been a blur—I was hit relentlessly by one
controversy after another. What started with a ransom call became a leaked
audio, and then became leaked legal notices and arbitrary statements by
Kotak bank. While the nation was enjoying Shark Tank India and
celebrating the new wave of entrepreneurship that was taking the country
and millions of TV screens by storm every weeknight from 9–10 p.m., I
was personally fighting a bloody board battle aimed at wresting control of
BharatPe from me. During the last week of the month I was preoccupied
handling deceit, betrayal and politics by my own co-founder, hired
management and thankless investors at BharatPe.
Once I proceeded on the so-called voluntary leave, I found out that the
locks at BharatPe’s Malviya Nagar office had been changed, the CCTV
cameras had been switched off, my office and desktop had been broken into
and bouncers had been stationed there. Not only were the events absolutely
bizarre, but my writing to the board seeking an explanation for this gross
overreach was met with absolute silence. Clearly, I had a lot to deal with.
But for the time being, I was relieved that the issue with Kotak hadn’t been
escalated further and that the bigoted press had lost interest in it. It was time
for me to resume office and focus on the next phase of growth for the
business, or so I thought as I sent out that intimation of rejoining office.
25 January 2022, 4.52 p.m.
Sitting at my desk at home, with the light January sun falling over my
shoulders, I was thinking through the many problems I needed to solve,
especially as we had to operationalize the newly acquired banking licence at
Unity SFB, the first-ever licence granted by the Reserve Bank of India
(RBI) to an Indian fintech company, and complete the impending takeover
of the beleaguered Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank. That
it wasn’t VSS, or Sachin Bansal, but Ashneer Grover who had won the first
and only bank licence given to a fintech was no mean achievement—one
that, I was certain, would take the company to even greater heights. But it
was also a great responsibility, as we had to first give 10 lakh depositors
access to their capital, which had been stuck in their PMC bank accounts
for almost two years.
My thought process was broken with the ping of an email hitting my
inbox. ‘Shorter Notice for 11th Board Meeting’, its subject line read. To my
surprise, within less than an hour of my informing the board that I planned
to resume office, I was sent a mail from the company secretary at BharatPe,
informing me of a board meeting being called at short notice, within the
next three hours. We were to meet at 8 p.m. the same day on Zoom. A
bigger shock awaited me when I clicked on the file marked ‘Agenda’. Item
number 5 stared at me; it said, ‘To consider & accept the recommendation
of the review committee to require Mr. Ashneer Grover to be on leave till
March 31, 2022.’
25 January 2022, 8 p.m.
‘My name is Ashneer Grover. I am attending this meeting on Zoom from
New Delhi. There is no one else in the room with me.’
The mandatory roll call, in hindsight, was perhaps the only predictable
part of this meeting. The chairman, Rajnish Kumar, joined ten minutes late,
and his first order of business was to ask the Shardul Amarchand
Mangaldas (Shardul Amarchand) and Alvarez & Marsal team to leave the
virtual meeting. Why had they been invited in the first place to a board
meeting if they were supposed to leave? Wasn’t the chairman privy to the
list of invitees to the meeting?