“Hiya…the beginning…” – three words, six dots on 15 May 2005. Sixteen years after, he is one of India’s most sought after public speaker, has a million plus followers on Twitter, his podcast is among the most popular on Spotify within weeks of its launch, his Friday night lives on Instagram always leaves people wanting for more, 50,000+ people subscribe to his newsletter within 10 months of its launch, his course on starting up has 10,000 plus subscribers and all along this, he has taken an MBA degree, worked as consultant, founded/co-founded four companies, has been a CEO for two, has been among Fortune India’s 40 under 40 twice, India’s Top 25 Executives below 40, LinkedIn India Spotlight, LinkedIn India Top Voice, LinkedIn India Power Profile, Social Media Entrepreneur of the Year, India’s Most Promising Entrepreneur, he is Ankur Warikoo, a man who lives life in 3-D, or 5-D or may be more.
Good at it, but it doesn’t make me happy
Warikoo is from Kashmir the northern extreme of India, it will be more accurate to say that his parents are from there. He however was born in Amritsar, Punjab and has grown up in Delhi. In his teenage years when almost everyone his age was still figuring out what to do, he had a single minded focus and a three step plan – go to the US for Ph.D., join NASA as a space scientist and be the first man on Mars. He had nursed this dream since grade V when his aunt gifted him a book on space. Such was his dedication, that the science fiction drama of those times – X-files, was his favourite show and Danna Scully the only crush. Possibly, distracted only by Steffi Graf and Seekh Kababs – these two too were to lead him to somewhere in the years to come.
Starting from Don Bosco School, New Delhi, he joined Hindu College for a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, got selected for the Ph.D. program of Michigan State University on a hundred per cent scholarship, was doing exceedingly well there, and was set to be among the fastest to graduate. That’s when he decided that it was something that he didn’t want to pursue. The three step plan that had defined his very being till now was dropped.
Warikoo had sub-consciously believed that destination Mars was a way to find happiness, and for the first time in his life, the paths didn’t converge – Physics was something that he was good at but it didn’t make him happy. At the age of 24, he dropped out of his Ph. D, and decided to come back to India.
Whether this was a decision to be reversed or celebrated only time would tell.
Let’s go exploring
As Quantum Theory and General Theory exploded the clockwork universe established by Newtonian physics, warikoo’s three step plan had given way to a universe of unknown. Possibly while delving deep into astrophysics, he had experienced transcendence – from real to unreal, from known to unknown from certain to uncertain. He had realised that what he knew was at best, incomplete, and would probably remain that way forever. And when there is no certainty, there certainly are no limits.
The world was his to explore.
In this state of confusion warikoo joined the Indian School of Business (ISB) a rather young business school for a MBA degree. In his own admission, ISB was to change him and his life in more ways than ever.
DJ199
DJ199 was one of the names he earned in ISB for being the DJ when the official DJ wasn’t around. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had actually locked the DJ in some basement or washroom, so that he got a chance to try just one more thing. In addition to Photography, Quizzes, Pictionary, Dumb Charades, Frisbee, Cricket, Parties, Friends, Blogging, and what not. One would wonder, did he even study in ISB, seems like he did. Not only did he excel in his Finance electives, he was among the 4 students who were given the ISB Young Leader Awards, in 2006, the debut year of the awards, the year he graduated. Later, in his life, warikoo would be one of the board members of ISB and among the official photographers of its new campus in Mohali.
Opportunities are built from the connections we make
Wow! So you remember all your batch-mates? “330 people in my batch, is less than one person in a year, how difficult can it be to remember everyone.” says warikoo. His first entrepreneurship opportunity like many others in the future came through is ISB network – Accentium.web, an internet based startup, which he co-founded while at AT Kearney, his first job after ISB. For almost two years warikoo managed a job in consulting and building a company – both equally demanding, both asking for 24 hours of his day. This ability to manage his time and focus and to build connections was to become one of his biggest strengths.
In 2009, he left Kearney to become a full time entrepreneur at Accentium web, an internet based enterprise, which built several websites in the Indian Consumer Space, the most prominent were, SecondShaadi.com (India’s largest matrimonial service for remarriages), Gaadi.com (India’s 2nd largest Car Portal), and StudyNation.com. A year and a half later, in September 2010, he stepped out of Accentium web into new possibilities and no plan at all. He actually had a plan to start a chain of Dessert Parlors, but this one didn’t find any takers. There he was once again, with a plan of no plan.
Wild Card Entry
On 10th August 2015, Warikoo did a management buyout of Groupon India to convert it to Nearbuy.com. He had started the Groupon India business in 2011 as the founding CEO and was also heading its APAC Business. Groupon had entered India with the acquisition of SoSasta.com which warikoo changed to crazeal, because the name didn’t go with his plans (sasta in Hindi means cheap). He had joined Groupon from Rocket Internet GmbH which at that time was also a Rocket Internet investment.
A genius marketing masterstroke defined his tenure as the CEO of Groupon, when he offered a deal of Onions at Rs 9 per kg, at a time when onion prices were skyrocketing in India as high as Rs 60-70 a kg, making Groupon India a household name, causing its servers to crash in a matter of 44 minutes. Groupon sold about 3,000 kilograms of onions, in just 44 minutes. (Onions in India have the potential of toppling governments. They might have sold 22,500/- kgs of onions in the 7 days that the deal was on, but in these 7 days they got 16,500 new buyers at virtually no cost, a twitter trend of 48 hours and unprecedented press coverage – national and international.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/groupon-india–onion_n_3896180
News coverage of Groupon India’s onion deal
The onion deal put Groupon India on the radar, but warikoo wasn’t happy with the speed it was moving. His vision for Groupon India was larger than the parent company’s priorities and that’s when he along with Snehesh Mitra, Ravi Shankar, Sumeet Kapur, and Sachin Kapur, offered to buy out the India business and Groupon agreed. The new company was no longer selling deals, instead its purpose was to make experiences accessible. The new company was nearbuy.
p.s. nearbuy is spelled in small case because they don’t take themselves too seriously, he spells his surname in small case too
his answer about nearbuy in small case on quora
Your world is nearby
Replete with its own peaks and valleys, the nearbuy story was one to be told in the years to come. A company that was ahead of its time, a company that warikoo and his core team built with everything they had. nearbuy retained 65% of the Groupon business within 6 months of its launch and in the next two years, built presence in 35 cities of India across 18+ categories, enlisting 50,000 merchants across more than 100,000 unique locations.
https://www.quora.com/Is-Nearbuy-failing-to-grow
Nearbuy’s business numbers – Ankur Warikoo’s answer on Quora
What stood out about the company was how they built their team. The nearbuy recruitment process was a case study in itself and the India equivalent of Amazon Bar Raisers Programme. Starting with a Culture First approach, they devised their unique way to assess it.
In one of his interviews, warikoo says that he wanted a team he could have a candid conversation with, and with that as a target, the conventional process wasn’t working. Also, nearbuy was now a startup competing with many others and did not have the cool MNC tag, which impacted the quality and quantity of applications. Warikoo found out that the techies were hanging out in Quora – the social platform where people can ask questions. He doubled down on it, answering questions about everything under the sun – nearbuy, his schedule, his life, his love life, the car he drives, the food he eats, at one point he was among the highest followed people on Quora. This along with the Job Descriptions they wrote and Warikoo Wednesdays – his first video byte that was launched on LinkedIn created an unmissable FOMO among job applicants. Soon there were more applicants than they ever needed.
The interview process began with a list of 20 Questions (which is a stuff of legends now), followed by the NRT (the nearbuy recruitment test), may be a case study (depending on the position applied for), a panel interview and a CEO round. He met everyone.
On the 30th day of their joining, people received a mail from the CEO’s office (warikoo’s), asking about their journey so far, he says that 95% of those who didn’t respond to the mail, left the organisation in the next three months or were asked to leave. The filtering never stopped, Manager one on ones were tracked, Amber a chatbot tracked the pulse on the ground and there were initiatives round the year to ensure everyone knew everyone. My favourite is “A Mother’s Day Like No Other”. He apparently didn’t find a HR Head suitable enough for the company and ended up being the defacto Head of HR. His vision of the organisation mirrored the principles he lived by. Respect, Ownership and Performance were the values of nearbuy (he is inspired by the Netflix story). Within two years of it’s establishment, nearbuy was among India’s Top 50 places to work for.
Marketing grades affected warikoo’s overall CGPA in ISB, bringing it down, and it was his marketing genius that sparkled all through nearbuy. One of the initiatives – “lunch with warikoo” was to change him as person forever.
In November 2019, warikoo stepped down from the post of CEO of nearbuy, a company that took everything he had, a company that he had built with all his heart.
Kobayashi Maru
Core Incompetence is a term defined in behavioural science where a person’s signature strength can become their biggest weakness, like it happened in the case of French captain Zidane who almost broke the Italian player Materazzi’s heart, quite literally, with a head butt on his chest, in the 2006 soccer world cup. Zinedine Zidane has always been known for his intensity and the downside of this strength became most evident in the world cup finals. It is probable that France lost to Italy in that world cup, because they were without their captain and one of the greatest players of the game. History has many examples to prove this phenomenon.
Warikoo’s signature strength is his irrational optimism and the belief to achieve what he puts his mind to, that has worked for him. Despite changing course multiple times, he has charted out a life that very few can. However, organisations need a strategy and hope is not a strategy. His irrational optimism and possibly the lack of financial pragmatism made him take decisions that jeopardised the future of nearbuy. At one point he had to make a choice between saving the company that had his heart, or the team that he had so painstakingly built. They had to lay-off 80 people to save the burn, a decision that was one of his hardest. Till date, warikoo considers this as a personal failure.
Awareness is everything
The startup ecosystem in India is yet to mature, there aren’t many people to guide first timers and family businesses which have been around are wary of sharing tricks of the trade, for India happens to be a trust deficient country. This leaves first time start up founders on their own making them commit mistakes that could have been avoided with a little awareness.
Warikoo had no plan after nearbuy, he had stepped into nothing, open calendar, open days. He believes that Storytelling is an important skill for every leader, especially entrepreneurs, and creating content is the only way to own one’s story. Teaching, writing, public speaking was something that he had always loved. He had built a legacy with Warikoo Wednesdays, been writing his blog, had a decent following on Twitter, and there were these occasional talks that he used to do for companies, creating awareness through content was something he had enjoyed always.
Picking up threads from the journey that had started with alienwan.blogspot.com (name of his first blog), warikoo doubled down on creating content. In the last 18 months he has risen to be one of India’s most prolific content creators and influencers, his twitter and youtube has one million+ followers with a 1000+ getting added every day, he has launched a newsletter (already subscribed by 50,000+) that gives you glimpses of the playfulness from his early blogging days and which he says will always be free, he has launched a podcast, a website, started an Instagram live every Friday, his twitter threads which are a treasure trove of wisdom, have been illustrated into 6 books that are free to download, and adds 60 pieces of content every week. His content creation process has been talked about so much that he did a youtube video to share his process.
Authenticity, simplicity and the courage to ask questions have been his trademark. In a world where people shy away from even admitting their failures, he has not just owned up his mistakes, he has created a journey out of each, so that people learn from him. The first of this was in 2016 when he shared his Failure Resume, inspired by Johannes HausHofer, a Princeton Psychology professor.
In the same year, around his birthday, LinkedIn launched the video feature, he posted tagging Jeff Weiner (the then CEO) asking what would it take to get the video feature enabled on his account, the next thing he knew was that the video feature was enabled – ‘if you don’t ask the answer is always no’ and this is what warikoo Wednesdays made a debut with.
A strong proponent for cold emailing and reaching out to people, he believes that if done well, it can unlock a world of opportunities. It for sure did for him. In his early blogging days, he had reached out to Simon Hoegsberg, a photographer whose work he admired, and guess what, he got a response.
His content centers on what he has learnt from life, creating awareness, opening doors. Through his legendary Two by Two Matrix which makes everything so simple, he talks about startups, entrepreneurship, personal finance and life in general. The Future Founders Conference – a 16 hour, 8 chapter course that he launched for startup founders has 10,000+ subscribers in less than a year (It is called The Complete Guide To Starting Up now). And his Time Management course that encapsulates his envious time management skills has had 3500+ downloads. He has recently launched a course of Public Speaking and Writing. And there could be a book in the waiting.
Brand warikoo aims to be the big brother for those in their 20s and early 30s helping them navigate through their lives. A team of interns that he has built for content creation proudly calls themselves Waricrew, a team that many want to be a part of.
When we go for ‘nothing’ we begin to see what we had closed our eyes to – a world of possibilities, and the last 18 months of warikoo’s life, possibly his entire life has been a testimony to that.
The person behind the persona
One would wonder about the person behind this larger than life persona, someone this capable has to be extraordinary, super smart.
But in his eyes he is just another guy working hard, trying hard, stacking up consistency day after day, every day. He obsessively controls his time and manages his calendar himself. In 2013, his friends Akhilesh Bali and Ankur Singla gifted him a poster – Do Epic Shit. He loved it, made his own definition of it.
The dreamy eyed teenager who had impossible dreams, reached out for them, achieved extraordinary success and failed at many.
His journey has been an adventurous one, and throughout the peaks and valleys, his wife Ruchi Budhiraja Warikoo, whom he met in 1999 as a student of Delhi university and married in 2007, has been his rock. He credits all his success to her. Together they have two children, 10 year old Vidur and 3 year old Uzma.
His letters to them which he published as a twitter thread sometime last year, was the most adorable thing I would have read in the 2020.
His love for his wife is only rivalled by his love for Chole-Bhature (an Indian recipe of deep fried flat-bread with chickpea curry) and Meethi Lassi (a sweet Yogurt shake). There is Rajma Gogji (Kidney Beans and Turnip curry) and Peela Paneer (Cottage cheese curry) from Kashmir and Pizza Margherita for competition, but Chole Bhature trumps all. At some point while growing up he turned vegetarian and seekh kababs were replaced. He doesn’t smoke or drink, except for the occasional Nimbu Pani (Sweet lemon water) not even tea or coffee, all of this work is on sheer adrenaline and love of life.
The three turning points in his life has been dropping out of Ph.D. from MSU, joining ISB and taking control of his health and fitness. An unexpected medical condition got him bedridden in 2012. He took upon himself to win life, achieve the impossible, and so he ran the half marathon within the next 12 months and built six pack abs in the next 5. Now the world had a physics nerd who looked liked a supermodel, check out the pictures yourself. Life sure can’t defeat the ones who refuse to give up.
The love for fitness graduated to a love for Tennis, the Steffi Graf connection shows up here, and all his sportswear is Nike. (I’m surprised, Nike hasn’t made him its brand ambassador yet)
Warikoo is an avid reader, reads mostly non-fiction (Ayn Rand’s fountainhead ruined fiction for him forever) makes a list of his best reads every year and likes to gift books with personal hand-written notes. He writes with a fountain pen.
He is genetically colour-blind but clicks the most splendid pictures. There is an interesting story about one of his winning entries. He had missed his connecting flight from Amsterdam to Delhi because the Seattle Amsterdam flight was delayed and the next one was after 16 hours. Instead of the meal coupons and apology he asked for a 24 hr visa, spent the day clicking pictures, and ended up sending one of those clicks for a photo contest in an inflight magazine. He won the first prize. Life is about the choices we make.
One can’t help but gape in awe, listening to his stories, but for those who know him, he remains the most humble, relatable, approachable human one can meet.
While writing this story, I wondered what if he hadn’t dropped out of his Ph.D., the world could have had a Physics teacher who makes people fall in love with the subject, but he wouldn’t have wanted to devote his life to a single pursuit, the world was to be his oyster. As they say, brilliance is found on the intersection of humanities and sciences. Stepping out of the world of physics he found possibilities that even he hadn’t known. And none of us can predict where is he headed next, may be another organisation, may be a creator, a teacher or may be the first entrepreneur on Mars, with him you never know…
…his story continues…
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