Neighbour asking for ladder turns out to be Rapido co-founder Aravind Sanka, Bengaluru man’s WhatsApp messages go viral

Produced by: Bhoomika
Designed by: Mohsin Shaikh

It’s not every day that you find that your neighbour is a co-founder of a famous start-up. But anything can happen in Bengaluru, which is a hub of start-ups. Here’s what happened when a man in Bengaluru found his neighbour was the co-founder of Rapido, a bike taxi aggregator

Akashlal Bathe’s Rapido
post goes viral

Akashlal Bathe, an iOS developer and Udemy instructor, shared a WhatsApp conversation with a neighbour in his society who was looking out for a ladder. He asked the person if he is “into photography or something” while commenting, “Looks like a good podcasting background,” on his WhatsApp DP

Akashlal Bathe’s LinkedIn
post on Rapido 

Curious still, Akashlal looked up the man’s WhatsApp bio which mentioned Rapido and he asked, “What’s with Rapido?” He immediately Googled the person and found out that he was talking to one of the co-founders, Aravind Sanka

Rapido’s co-founder
Aravind Sanka

Aravind Sanka along with Rishikesh SR and Pavan Guntupalli founded Rapido in 2015. Aravind is an alumna of IIT Bhubaneswar and had worked with Flipkart. He resides in a society in a Bengaluru

Who is Aravind Sanka?

Akashlal Bathe, who had a chance interaction with the co-founder of Rapido, messaged him further, “This (conversation) is going up on my LinkedIn” and soon after he posted it on his account. The post went viral with over 15,000 LinkedIn users liking it and 63 people reposting it. It fetched around 246 comments as well

Viral LinkedIn post on
Rapido co-founder

Many LinkedIn users commented on the post and some of them even advised Akashlal Bathe to ask for a job in return for the ladder. Other users recounted similar experiences with start-up founders in Bengaluru

LinkedIn users react to
Rapido viral post

A user named Kejal Shah shared her experience and commented, “I also had a somewhat similar chat with the co-founder of Razorpay. Only, he is not a neighbour but wanted to get his wedding card made.” She did not mention if the other person was Harshil Mathur or Shashank Kumar

When a LinkedIn user
chatted with Razorpay’s
co-founder

Rapido is an Indian bike taxi aggregator and logistics service provider based out of Bangalore. The company operates in over 100 cities across the country

About Rapido

Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal gave his nod to Delhi’s new cab aggregator policy in a relief for bike taxi operators like Rapido, Ola and Uber but there’s a catch. Bike taxis can ply in Delhi if they convert their fleet to electric bike taxis

Rapido, Ola, Uber
bike taxis in Delhi