‘Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest': Bhavish Aggarwal on Ola Electric going public and future plans for his 3 companies

Sourav Majumdar: As an entrepreneur, you’re used to being the master of your own game. But there is a lot more scrutiny in the public markets. How do you see this change?

A: Our responsibility towards our investors has gone up. So far in the private world, we were dealing with institutional investors, mainly private equity money, which is rich people’s money. But in the public market we are dealing with public money… the money of India’s common man. So, the message I give to my team is that we are investing the common man’s money, so we have to be extra thoughtful about it… And hopefully, we will also focus on making sure that we take long-term bets and deliver long-term value to our shareholders.

Whatever limited time I have spent in engaging with the public markets, [I have observed that] people want a vision… They want to be part of a story, which is building the India of tomorrow. And at Ola Electric that’s our mission. We want to build India as a global EV hub. And in doing that, as long as we are investing wisely, investing for delivering returns, I think the Street and the investors will give us that platform to take long-term bets. And hopefully we can stand up to the scrutiny.

Aayush Ailawadi: What kind of synergies can we expect amongst Ola Cabs, Ola Electric, and Krutrim?

A: Ola is now not a single company [but] a group of companies… I started with Ola Cabs, my first love. Then we got into Ola Electric, and then most recently Ola Krutrim. And each company has a very broad vision. For example, Ola Cabs, which we now call Ola Consumer, wants to create a tech-driven consumption platform to enable access for all. We recently partnered with ONDC. We’re doing a lot of things on electric logistics, automation of warehousing, etc. [Coming to] Ola Electric, the biggest challenge for our generation is to solve for climate change and sustainability. But the world right now is solving for it by selling luxury cars to the West. That is a solution only for a billion people. The other 7 billion need a different solution, and India is a microcosm of these people. When we set out with Ola Electric, we said that we’ll build products relevant for India—two-wheelers, three-wheelers, small cars—and the core technology that will enable those products. That’s why I once said, ‘Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest.’

There’s a lot of thought behind that statement. The products that companies like Tesla build are for the 1 billion rich people. The larger opportunity is to build for the Global South… build for India and then expand to the Global South. That’s what Ola Electric is doing with our products and now our giga factory. We’re the first giga factory in India.

With Krutrim, the opportunity and ambition is to build India’s AI tech stack. For too long in India, we have used global technologies without realising the implication. The global tech industry… is a $30-trillion industry. We in India have been big beneficiaries of it with the IT services boom. [But] the market cap of the IT services industry is $300 billion, which is 1% of the global tech industry. We need to now dream to be the paradigm setters… That’s the vision with which we started Krutrim, to make India the global powerhouse.

And India has a lot of strengths and a lot of risks... The risks are fairly obvious. We use global products… WhatsApp… social media driven by western companies. All our products in the digital world are non-Indian. But the irony is, we generate 20% of the world’s data, [but] only about 10% of that is stored in India. We generate the world’s data given that we are the largest population; almost all of it is exported out of India… it’s processed in global data centres into AI, brought back into India and sold to us in dollars. If you remove the AI here, this whole thing happened 200 years ago. Colonialism… that is what is happening today.

[Among] other ironies, we have the largest developer ecosystem… the largest chip design ecosystem... but no Indian chip. Our digital ecosystem is full of ironies. That’s what Krutrim aims to change by working with the ecosystem.

SM: You’ve spoken against the woke culture. You like to provoke Big Tech, don’t you?

A: I stand for what I believe in. I started as an entrepreneur, fought Uber, came up on top. Then built Ola Electric when everybody said that Ola doesn’t know anything about manufacturing and India doesn’t have an EV market. And look at where we are now... So, in a way, if the founding principle of a business is right, and if your intentions are right, you will find your way. And for me and Ola, our focus is always to leverage this India moment. We are at the most exciting time of our lives… where India is growing, [and] the future is going to be built by Indians.

Specifically on the woke thing, Big Tech and digital tech especially is not just about tech and economic productivity; it’s also about a certain cultural appropriation of a civilisation. Today, because we use global platforms like Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, their debates are increasingly [becoming] our debates… Digital tech is also about conserving and promoting your own culture. And culture is not anything political. It’s how we live every day. What happens in woke culture is, if you go to LinkedIn, it’ll force you to choose your pronoun… our culture traditionally has had a very broad acceptance for all people… This is the western debate that is coming into India through these platforms.

Siddharth Zarabi, Managing Editor, BTTV: What are your thoughts on AI and data protection and protecting the core rights of Indians in the AI era?

A: If you see the current direction of the AI world, every Big Tech company is playing God… they will decide what is right and wrong. In my view, that right is only with the law of the land, and the law of the land should be supreme and applicable to whichever AI model, social media company, and digital platform is running in that country. And even more so for a complex country like India, where some of these nuances are very important to protect according to the law… We have to make sure social media AI algorithms are fully subservient to the law and Parliament… Now that will need some policy, global leadership, [and] thought leadership from the Indian government and the Indian tech ecosystem… India through its DPI movement— where digital platforms are for social good, beyond just capitalistic good—can amplify this. But it will need a lot of work.

On data protection, I believe one of India’s core strengths is our population scale… 20% of the world lives in India; we’re also younger. We generate more per capita data than the average westerner or Japanese. This data scale is our strength, and we need to bring strong policy and implementation of policy on data sovereignty, data residency, data management, data decision-making… The whole stack of data management needs to be—through policy and implementation—brought into India.

SM: You’ve disrupted the space with the Ola Electric listing and the EV bike’s pricing…

A: You have to disrupt to create something new… With Ola Electric, in three years, we’ve gone from zero sales to listing the company with $7-8 billion in market cap... It’s because the Indian consumer was ready for a great product at the right price point… The next EV frontier in India is going to be motorbikes… [they] make up about two-thirds of the two-wheeler market… We have, in the last three years, built a lot of our supply chain [and] manufacturing technology for scooters. And all of that scale nicely into the motorbike. The 4680 [or Bharat] cell, for example, is common in the scooter, motorbike, [and] in any other future [vehicle]. A lot of this cost efficiency from the supply chain easily scales into motorbikes. And people should be aware by now how I price my products.

SM: What are the kind of volumes you are looking at?

A: Customers didn’t know about EVs three years ago; now everyone knows about EVs. So, customer education is going to be much faster… People want to see electric motorbikes. They’ve understood the proposition of electric, that it’s cheaper to operate, and now the upfront cost is also equal to an ICE vehicle. People are more ready and willing to adopt [EVs]; we are going to build on top of that.

AA: How crucial is the Bharat cell to your plans of putting Ola and India on the global map?

A: One of the big changes in our lives is that the energy paradigm is going from a petroleum paradigm… [which is] mine the oil, take it out, refine it and then burn it... It’s going from that to renewable generation and energy storage… a technology paradigm. And that’s where India has an opportunity to get into the cutting edge of this technology revolution.

We set up our cell effort four years ago when we started Ola Electric. [Then] we had decided to build the frontier technology in cells... and that was the 4680 format. It’s much bigger, more energy dense, and [takes] much lesser time to charge... And from here on, we can go into solid state cells, etc., which are the Holy Grail of energy storage in the modern world.

The world has about 2,000 GWh of production capacity; almost 90% of that is in China in terms of cells. India has 1.5 GWh, that is mine [Ola’s giga factory]. I hope to set up about 100 GWh through the course of this decade… India for its own energy transition in grid storage as well as automotive, will need about 1,000 GWh by the end of this decade or next decade, and we should aim to build all of that in India, and have more to sell to the world.

SM & AA: How much of a pricing difference will having your own cell make? How is life after the FAME subsidy?

A: The cell is the costliest component of an EV. It’s the heart of an EV… because the cell defines the weight, range, charging speed… and costs about one-third the price of the vehicle. If we make our own [cell], we will be able to make it about 25-30% cheaper.

On FAME, the subsidy has reduced significantly in the past two years and the government has indicated a tapering off… in another two to three years, industry will be able to stand without any FAME subsidy.

Rahul Kanwal, Editorial Director, Business Today: You just became a billionaire. But you claim that you’ve never invested in the stock markets before. Can you explain that?

A: I have never bought a single share in my life. I’ve only built value in the shares through my companies... Whatever money we had taken off the table as liquidity so far was in savings bank accounts, FDs, etc. But now I’m learning the ways of the market. Now that I have some more liquidity, I intend to make some smart bets in the market.

But net worth is just a notional number. It’s not as if the money is in my bank... I still spend, and hope to spend all my weekends in my factory working on new products with my engineering teams, building new things. That’s what gives me satisfaction, and that’s what drives me.

RK: What are you looking to spend your money on?

A: More factories, more data centres, more tech, more AI.

AA: How do you respond to comparisons with Tesla CEO Elon Musk?

A: I am just myself. He’s somebody we all look up to. But I don’t know why he does the businesses that I do (laughs)… I’m serious; I started Krutrim before he started his AI venture. If Silicon Valley people can wear leather jackets and black polo T shirts, why can’t we wear our kurtas and have long hair?

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