My guest for Ep218 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Nipun Mehra.

Nipun has had an incredible track record in his career. At Amazon he launched their first ever real time inventory management system, was an early team member at Flipkart helping build and scale one of India’s most successful and iconic startups before joining Sequoia India as an investor.

In 2020, he Co-founded Ula, a B2B e-commerce platform that set out to modernise retail supply chains for millions of small businesses starting in Indonesia.

Ula quickly become one of South East Asia’s fastest growing startups. They went from $0 to $300M in revenue within 2 years. Ola also raised over $140M from leading investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Tencent and even raised capital from Jeff Bezos himself, his first investment into this part of the world.

But in a candid and deeply honest conversation, Nipun shares – for the first time publicly – the full story of what happened behind the scenes from Ula when he decided to shut down the company and return the remaining capital to investors.

From hypergrowth to hard calls, this episode dives into the reality of building a company at scale and the weight of leadership at challenging times.

In this episode we cover:

• Nipun’s lessons from his time with Amazon, Flipkart and Sequoia
• The hypergrowth journey behind Ula
• Why he decided to shut down Ula and return the capital vs find another path
• Coming to terms with the ups and downs of the journey
• & much more

I’m also excited to announce that Nipun will be joining The Komo Club as a speaker for Cohort 2. The program is the world’s first human accelerator, designed to help high performing founders and executives implement the right system and frameworks to help them succeed in business and all areas of their life. You can find out more at thekomoclub.com

Timestamps:

• 00:03:08 Nipun’s background: Early entrepreneurial drive
• 00:07:00 College startup attempts and discovering India’s nascent internet scene
• 00:14:47 What Amazon & Flipkart taught him about audacious targets and culture
• 00:20:38 How to set “aggressive but achievable” goals without crossing into folly
• 00:29:23 Why Indonesia? The leap of faith that launched Ula in Southeast Asia
• 00:38:37 Securing Jeff Bezos’ first SEA investment and the six-page memo that closed the deal
• 00:41:31 Scaling to ~US $300 M GMV in two years during COVID
• 00:43:20 The decision to shut down Ula and return the remaining capital to investors
• 00:55:13 Lessons on investor alignment
• 01:04:45 Nipun’s new venture, lessons from Ula he’s applying

Our partners:

Thank you to Karl Noronha, Ganesh Rengaswamy and Prithvi Rajaram for their help with research for this interview!

A big shout out to our long-term partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
The Startup Playbook Podcast listeners get access to an exclusive offer of USD$1000 off their plans. Head over to vanta.com/podcast to get access to this exclusive discount.

Links mentioned:

• The Komo Club: The world’s first human accelerator

Nipun’s links:

• Nipun on LinkedIn

People mentioned:

• Jeff Bezos
• Larry Page
• Marissa Mayer
• Elon Musk
• Karl Noronha
• Ganesh Rengaswamy
• Prithvi Rajaram

Companies mentioned:

• Ula
• Amazon
• Flipkart
• PhonePe
• Sequoia Capital India / Peak XV Partners
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Boston Consulting Group
• Tiger Global
• Tencent
• Prosus
• Bezos Expeditions
• Udaan
• Shopee
• Mercado Libre
• Coupang
• Google
• Meta
• Reliance Jio
• Reliance Industries
• Gojek
• Tokopedia
• Playbook Ventures

Feedback/connect/say hello:

• Rohit@startupplaybook.co
• @RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
• /rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
• @rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
• My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

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