Siddhartha Nangia, Co-founder of Smytten—India’s largest sampling-based e-commerce platform—remembers a lovely story from his childhood. On his tenth birthday whenever someone asked him what he wanted as a present he said he wanted a badminton racquet. “I ended up receiving seven badminton racquets as presents,” smiles the 45-year-old.
Nangia has been passionate about sports, especially badminton, since he was a child. Today he plays all four racquet sports—badminton, tennis, table tennis and squash, but badminton remains his first love. He plays regularly on weekends and at least twice during weekdays. “Sports is a great teacher and tells you a lot about a person’s character,” says Nangia adding that if he wasn’t in the corporate sector, he would have been “doing something with sports”. He admits that if a person’s CV mentions that he likes to play sports then it piques his interest. “He/she is most likely to get at least an interview with me,” he smiles. “Sports teaches you about your mistakes, your failures, how to get back on track, being a team player. I have not found a single sportsperson who is not a great team player,” says Nangia.
Nangia plays at least two games of table tennis daily in office with colleagues before leaving for home. “Playing a sport helps me release pressure. It’s a way to de-stress.”
Smytten promotes sports culture and organises a sports day for the employees every couple of months and everyone is encouraged to play. The company has some serious sportsmen as well. One employee is trying for IPL while another has played cricket for West Bengal.
While Nangia feels that golf is too slow for him at present, he hopes to pick it up in the future. But a sport that has taken his fancy currently is football. “I played it a few times and I would definitely like to play it more,” he says. Nangia’s love for sports is not restricted to just playing but also watching it on television. “I can watch the highlights of the 1996 [Cricket] World Cup again and again,” says Nangia adding that he loves cricket and at most times some sport or the other is playing on the television in the background even when he is working.
Smytten was set up in 2016 to help brands reach out to customers at a significantly lower cost than traditional methods. “We are sitting on a lot of rich data on the pre-purchase side of it. So if a brand today wants to know what a person could potentially buy, I can tell them,” says Nangia who previously worked with Unilever. Nangia wants to get into the offline space and also go international. Smytten has received five rounds of funding till now.
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