The 25-Year Grind Behind India’s Travel Revolution: The MakeMyTrip Story | S4 E4 | Destiny Avenged | [Weekend Episode]

Revenue drops 96%—overnight. Rival complaints try to derail your IPO at the 11th hour. SARS, 9/11, and the dotcom bust threaten bankruptcy. Competitors burn cash to steal your market share. Most founders walk away when faced with even one of these. Deep Kalra and Rajesh Magow didn’t flinch. In this weekend episode of the Blume Podcast, host Karthik Reddy sits down with Deep and Rajesh, MakeMyTrip’s co-founders, to dissect the habits and decisions that forged a generational company. Each crisis forced them to reinvent the company. When rivals unleashed aggressive hotel discounts, Rajesh and Deep faced a hard choice: match the losses and jeopardize the P&L, or hold firm and watch market share slip away. Instead, they rewrote the playbook—leveraging their balance sheet to acquire Goibibo and redBus, shifting the battle from pricing gimmicks to market leadership by scale. When COVID wiped out 96% of revenue overnight, the easy path would have been to lay people off. Instead, they kept their team intact and focused—incubating products like Ad Tech and a new Homestay platform to be ready for recovery. They even pitched in to help build Aarogya Setu for the government, keeping employees engaged, and purposeful despite unprecedented disruption. While others pulled back and went on defense, Deep and Rajesh seized the moment—doubling down on investments, driving fresh innovation, and using every crisis as a springboard for transformation instead of retreat. Their journey is a masterclass in resilience—a blueprint for building a Rs 60,000 crore internet powerhouse against all odds.

00:00:00 Origin and courage to start MakeMyTrip00:12:58 Early India internet reality and liberalization context00:22:56 Early funding rounds and capital discipline00:27:53 Picking metrics that matter (conversion focus)00:40:20 Deciding to go public and post-IPO reflections00:43:28 IPO comps (Expedia, Ctrip) and sprint to listing00:51:15 Pre-IPO hurdle: competitor complaint to the SEC00:59:56 Strategic shift: Goibibo and redBus acquisitions01:11:16 COVID shock: revenue down 96% and survival playbook01:30:14 Closing insights: repeat rate and retention as north stars

Partners: IDFC FIRST Bank and Ultrahuman (Blume portco)

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