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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? |
As the meeting began, it was stated that a resolution had been passed to |
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