IMO founder is the biggest positive as well as the biggest risk for the company. It takes extreme believe and courage to build a 2-wheeler company from scratch, and then go on to capture 38% of the growing market within couple of years is just unbelievable! Kuddos to Bhavish Aggarwal(BA).
Risks:
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How BA treated investors and employees at his previous company – Although Ola Cabs fought well with Uber in India, company is still struggling to make profits and losing market share to its newer competitor(I don’t have enough data on it, just intuition). Ola cabs raised billions of $ and BA moved on to build another company without existing investors/employees getting any significant returns of their investments/ESOPs. I don’t think BA has any regards for investors.
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Too many companies – BA has founded too many companies(Ola Cabs, Ola Electric, Food delivery, Grocery Delivery, Ola Maps, Krutrim AI, Krutrim Cloud, Ola financial, etc), and most of these needs extreme R&D / operational excellence. It’s baffling to even think how someone will focus on so many diverse areas where there are already established players.
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Attrition rate – For high R&D companies, employees staying at the company for a long-term becomes instrumental to the company’s success. I have heard from a source (someone related to an Ola Electric’s employee) that company is spending a lot on employees and their trainings. But with ~50% attrition rate, it won’t be a moat. Attrition rate was very high even in Ola Cabs – and that doesn’t give me any comfort on why it will improve in the future. This seems like a culture issue to me.
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