From a village in Madhya Pradesh to co-founding one of India’s leading investment platforms, Lalit Keshre’s story is one of vision, persistence, and teamwork. In a conversation with CNBC-TV18, the CEO and Co-Founder of Groww talks about his early interest in capital markets, entrepreneurial detours, and the foundations of a fintech company that now serves millions of users.He also shares insights on timing, team-building, and the importance of knowing your co-founders well.Excerpts from the interview –
Q: I mean, it’s really been quite a journey, right from Madhya Pradesh to IIT Bombay, that’s where your love for the capital markets personally started, but it took a while for it to convert itself into a business opportunity.Keshre: I think I am very grateful for this journey. I was in a small village, but there were no schools there, so I studied at my grandparents’ place. I was lucky that, that year itself, there was an English medium school there. It had just started. And, as I progressed, that school also went up to 12th grade, and then I was lucky again to get to know about IITs, even though nobody around me knew about them. Again, I was lucky to get into IIT Bombay.Q: It’s not just luck that helps you get into IIT.Keshre: I mean, I got access to a lot of things as well. There used to be this Brilliant Tutorials in Chennai at that time. They used to send you books and so on. So, thanks to a bunch of these folks, I got in there. One advantage of Bombay was that at that time, there was a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, like in 1999, 2000, 2001. Everybody was starting startups, dot-coms, and so on. And at that time, somehow, I came to know that you can invest in stocks and publicly listed companies, primarily because one of my wingmates got an internship in a listed company. And that’s how I got into the rabbit hole. And then, as I told you, I used to watch CNBC sometimes as well.So, that’s how I got excited about capital markets. I read a lot of books and got excited about it.Q: At that point in time, capital markets was a passion. It was something that you were personally, individually, sort of taken by, but the idea of converting that into a business opportunity didn’t occur to you.Keshre: No, absolutely not. I was just a student, and in IIT, I did a student startup in med-tech devices. Again, I had been very selfish, in that I looked at my own problems. I had this allergy on campus because of some pollen, so I created this device, which was an allergen detector.Q: Isn’t that the starting point of great ideas, where you actually encounter a problem yourself and then try to solve it?Keshre: So, that’s my philosophy- in consumer business I think it’s always better to solve for yourself, so that you have at least one guaranteed customer. The second startup was also similar. I was in a small town, and there were no coaching classes and so on. So, this Eduflix was about providing education for all through the internet, through videos, and so on. And likewise, Groww as well.Q: Before we get to Groww, in the middle, you also went the e-commerce route and ended up at Flipkart, which is where you met your co-founders. Then, in 2016, of course, began a whole new journey with Groww. But take me through that period of being at Flipkart, working in the e-commerce space, and then deciding to go the capital market route.Keshre: So, my startup didn’t work out. We were not able to scale, so we shut it down and returned money to all the investors. Then, it was like, what next? One option was to get into an MNC and do product management, or the other was to get into startups. At that time, I don’t think you had too many choices for aspiring entrepreneurs. Flipkart was the largest one at that time. We got in, and I was again lucky because Flipkart was transitioning from retail to marketplace, and I was one of the first product managers there to help build that. So, I got that opportunity. There, I realised that people ordering things, like a t-shirt from Delhi, would take five days to get delivered. We saw the NPS score across five days, four days, three days, and as the number of days reduced, the NPS score went very, very high. So, we thought, why not one hour? We started this company called Flipkart Quick within Flipkart. It was sponsored by the founders, and they were very encouraging. The idea of Flipkart Quick was to provide everything instantly.Q: You were ahead of the quick commerce curve that we’re seeing today.Keshre: We were ahead, but I don’t think we had so much conviction. I think the timing was probably not right at that time, because e-commerce itself was still taking off. Also, the ecosystem was a bit shaken in 2015, if you remember, because of a bunch of factors. But that was a very crazy experience. And when that didn’t go through, I started thinking about something else. And then I was very lucky to meet my co-founders there, and that’s how we got started.Q: But it wasn’t as if you met and decided that this is what you were going to do. You actually spent some time thinking this through, working together to ensure that you had an idea that was executable.Keshre: So, I’ll tell you a story about how we kind of started. So, I have three co-founders, and we ensured that each of my co-founders was smarter than me. The first two of us came together, and we thought the third one should be smarter than us. And that’s exactly what happened. So, I used to work with Ittiam Systems, from campus I came to Bangalore, and Harsh Jain moved from IIT Delhi. So, we knew each other since 2005. Then, I was interviewing for some product managers, and I saw him on a Zoom call from US. I was like, “now I can’t take this interview because I know you so well.” But somehow, he got through the other interviews and joined the same team. When I moved to Flipkart Quick, he took over what I was doing at Flipkart Marketplace. When he came, his idea was to stay for three to four years, as he was excited about the Indian story. But then, I asked him, “I’m thinking about starting something, what do you think?” The two of us started thinking about it, and this was around 2016. So, the vision was to build a tech company in financial services. We didn’t know what exactly we were going to do, but we thought tech would be the core component. And we needed a very, very solid tech person. Neeraj Singh used to work with me, and I just asked him over breakfast. Within five minutes, he said, “Yes I am in.” He’s that kind of person, spontaneous. Whatever he feels like, he just does it. So, the three of us then started. And I was having lunch with Ishan Bansal. Ishaan used to handle corporate development at Flipkart, and I asked him, “I’m thinking about this. What do you think?” He said he’d been thinking about it since his college days. He’s a finance guy, very passionate about investing, the numbers guy among us. He said, “I’m also excited, but I’ll have to think about it.” He took two days, checked with his wife, arranged his personal finances, and two days later, he came to me and said, “I’m in.” That’s how the four of us got started. We quit our jobs and began working on Groww.Q: One guy is spontaneous, another is a thinker and numbers person. Which category do you find yourself in?Keshre: I think I’m neither. My strength lies in identifying people. That’s my strength. The only thing I did was bring these folks together and form the initial team. Then, I set the purpose, what we wanted to do. But everyone has very crazy superpowers that they bring.Q: But, starting from scratch and building out Groww into what it is today, how many active users do you have?Keshre: Today, we have 14 to 15 million customers on the platform.Q: So, that journey from zero to 14 to 15 million. I’m sure there have been plenty of ups and downs along the way, and plenty of learnings. What would you say has been the biggest learning for you in the last nine years?Keshre: The biggest learning has been that the team is everything. Over the last nine years, we’ve been through so many highs and lows.Q: But the last few years have been largely high, at least as far as the markets go.Keshre: What you see from the outside is very different from what is inside. In 2015, while I was at Flipkart, I was getting term sheets from VCs? I was told to just go out and start. We got out in 2016, and the markets had already crashed. There was no funding available. We raised some angel money from Mukesh Bansal, Ankit Nagori, and so on, our Flipkart folks. But largely, until 2019, we struggled for three years. In hindsight, I think that time was very valuable. We had the opportunity to figure out what we really wanted to build, get a solid team, and bond. Everyone, the initial team members, worked hours and hours together.Q: How many hours would you say you worked together before you actually started?Keshre: So, if you look at it, Harsh and I go back to 2005. Neeraj, about 12 years. Ishaan, 11 years. That’s the kind of history we share. And the initial folks we hired were almost all people we already knew. Even in our leadership team, for example, a lot of them—we had at least three or four years of working or personal relationships before they joined Groww.Q: So, you believe that it’s important to really know and have chemistry and an understanding of a person before you actually hire them?Keshre: I think so, because it’s not a sprint, right? It’s a marathon. You’ll go through crazy emotions, ups and downs, and you really need to know the person well. You also need to enjoy working with them, that’s very important. Because success is not guaranteed, but at least that part of the journey should be fun.Q: But let’s also talk about the landscape you were operating in when you decided to start in 2016. There were already a few players in the market who had done what you were attempting to do. How much were you influenced by what was already out there?Keshre: So, having been in the startup world for so long, one thing I’ve learned—from all the mistakes I made with things like Eduflix, Flipkart Quick, even that medical device, etc, is that one of the biggest factors in startups is timing. The “why now?” So, actually, the fact that there were existing players was a validation for us.When we thought about this market, everything made sense. India is large, the middle class is growing, the country’s wealth is growing. Wealth is moving from real estate and gold into financial products like mutual funds, which had just started taking off at that time. It looked like what happened in developed nations would also happen in India. If you look at the Nifty 50, what’s the biggest sector? Financial services. What’s the biggest profit pool? Financial services. What’s the penetration in India? Very low. Less than 20 million active investors at that time. So, it made sense, but it could easily have stayed like that for the next 20 years. That’s why the “why now?” question became important.And in some ways, the answer became clear. One thing we noticed was that a lot of startups were entering this space, and that’s a signal for me. Like, when e-commerce was taking off, many companies came into the space around the same time. When an idea is ripe, it’s not just one entrepreneur who thinks of it, many people do. So that was a good indication that this was a good time to start.I remember when we were just getting started and figuring out how to build something in financial services. We thought of doing a mutual fund app, and there were already 30 or 40 apps listed on the Play Store. That was a signal.Watch the accompanying video for the entire conversation.
