Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (00:18): Lalit, thanks for doing this. Thanks for coming. I think we’re seeing each other for the first time on the West Coast, despite the fact that we’ve seen each other all around the world. I think we’ve seen each of you in New York, we’ve seen you in London, if you remember that dinner. Dubai, Missouri, Bangalore, but never the West Coast.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (00:36): Great to see you and thank you so much for having me here.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (00:40): I'd love to maybe start with the beginning. I think you’ve talked about growing up in a village. Did it influence you at all in terms of eventually becoming an entrepreneur or a founder?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (00:54): I grew up with my grandfather, which was in a small city, a very small city, around 50 kilometers from a village. First time I came to know about entrepreneurship was on TV. When I went to Bombay, I came to know about Apple and Silicon Valley and a lot of things. I got this idea that you can build something and so on.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (01:18): Well, eventually you did end up joining Flipkart and looking back now, it also happened to be the first investment we made in India. What are the things that you learned from your experience there, and how did that ultimately lead you to start a new company?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (01:37): I think that was the best experience. I was also lucky I joined at the time when Flipkart was just taking off. Another important thing was customer obsession. Sachin and Binny came from this Amazon background and they were very paranoid about building for the customer. And thirdly, of course, the talent density. Flipkart was the leader not just in ecommerce, but overall in the startup scene in India. It was the pioneer. So it ended up attracting the best quality talent. The customer experience that Flipkart provided, the kind of infrastructure that they built, was miles apart from others. All of us were very obsessed with the customer thanks to Flipkart, and a lot of these learnings we carried on…
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (02:22): …at—
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (02:23): —Groww as well.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (02:24): I mean, I think all four founders met at Flipkart.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (02:28): Yes, yes.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (02:31): I’ve had the pleasure of spending hours and hours at this point with Harsh, Ishan, Raghu and many others on the team, and I’ve always been really impressed by everybody we’ve met. I think the really unique thing about the founders at Groww in particular is that it feels like everybody is very strong at complementary things.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (02:55): To be very honest, I don’t think we thought about this complementary skill set. It just happened. By the way, all four of us are engineers…
(03:03): …and very deep technically. When we started brainstorming, we found that our value systems matched a lot. We wanted to build something leveraging tech. I first asked Harsh. He’s smarter than me. Then both of us got Raghu, who is smarter than both of us, and then ultimately Ishan, who is very sharp with his numbers. I look at product, Harsh looks at business, Raghu looks at tech, and Ishan looks at finance. We were excited about investing, which is financial. We were lucky to see how ecommerce grew, and we saw that we could play a big role in financial services.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (03:42): It’s a very complicated business that you are operating, and to have that level of complexity matched with the talent density you have, I think it’s been really impressive. What is Groww’s mission at the end of the day?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (03:52): We are making investing simple, transparent, and delightful for millions of people in India. India is growing, India’s wealth is growing. There isn’t a platform where people can manage their wealth. It’s quite fragmented. So we come in, we understand customer needs, and we are building this wealth platform for India. Wealth is very complicated. There is a DIY element where customers can come in and invest in mutual funds and stocks. We started with mutual funds and the idea was to keep launching more and more products and build end-to-end wealth management solutions. Mutual funds was super ahead because of the customer experience. There were like 50 other platforms, but Groww became number one. Then we launched stocks, and the same thing happened. Now we’re getting into asset management and serving more high net worth individuals. As customers become wealthier, they need more confidence in what they’re doing, so we are launching this wealth management solution where we advise them and provide more sophisticated products. In short, we are trying to build a full-stack solution where everything about your wealth will be with Groww.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (05:30): How did you think about the cadence with which you expanded into different products? One observation is that everybody wants to become a multi-product platform, but also they want to do it in a way where they can be market leading in any new segment they unlock. When we partnered with you on the stock broker side, I think Groww was maybe number five in the market at the time, measured by active users. You’ve now become number one as of late 2023. What tells you where to go next? And what has enabled you to become a market-leading offering?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (06:27): I would say there are three things, Yoonkee. One is customer understanding, and it’s more like a feeling. There are signals we get, but it's difficult to articulate. The second thing is quantitative data. Within our org we have this framework. One is demand—various channels where customers talk about what they need. Then from a numbers perspective, there is CAC. If CAC is very high, that means you have to push your product too much. But if it’s a pull product, then customers come automatically. Then we look at retention. If customers are coming and churning every month, product is not that good. We say a customer should either love your product or hate your product. For example, when we change the navigation, you’ll see people so vocal—it sucks, it’s bad. And I really like it because that means your product means something to them.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (07:44): They clearly care.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (07:45): Yes. And the quantitative framework includes willingness to pay. Lastly, fail fast. If you launch something and it doesn’t work, shut it down. We shut down one product almost every year and keep learning.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (08:09): Earlier in the journey, was there a moment where you felt like, oh, this is actually working?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (08:18): We started in 2016…
(08:22): …and we built some product. It was good and engaging, but customer acquisition was not happening. Then we came up with some insights and relaunched the product in May 2017. Until then we used to have 20 to 30 customers a month. It was very slow. When we relaunched, we thought if we get 100 customers this month, we’ll be happy. We got 600. That was one aha moment. The numbers were small, but you could feel the word of mouth. Before launching stocks, we put out a teaser, and the excitement was unlike anything I’d seen in my consumer product career.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (09:30): One observation I’ve had is that you all take a lot of pride in the customer and product experience. When you get something out there, you're proud of it and it resonates. And on the other side, you test, iterate, and launch things that may not work, but you’re objective—if it doesn’t work, move on. You have to have failures to have meaningful successes. What are some challenging moments you reflect on, and how have you and the team pushed through?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (10:25): Groww is so large now. About 30 percent of investors in the country are on Groww. If something happens for even five minutes, it becomes national news. That creates high anxiety. One phrase we use all the time inside the org is never let any crisis go to waste. We had a couple of downtimes in 2023 because of very crazy growth. They were small, but during that period when systems were breaking, we invested heavily in infrastructure. So far we’ve been grateful for customer trust. If challenges don’t come, you become lethargic. But when something happens, everybody gets into a war room. If there is no harm to any customer, everything is good.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (11:26): You’re focused on the customer. Building a trusted brand and ensuring they’re taken care of long term has always been consistent. You and the team have written two books so far, but more to come. Welcome, which you’ve been kind to gift me every time I visit in Bangalore. The team has also built a strong following on various channels, especially YouTube, with educational content. What do these initiatives mean to you and the company?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (12:06): When we launched Groww, it was a DIY platform where customers could pick mutual funds and stocks. Because we weren’t advising, we realized people needed help. So we started giving this help through content. We collated links across the web and shared them, which eventually became our own editorial. That became Groww Digest, which is the highest-read newsletter in the country today. The books are based on those digests. Then we did video. Co-founders Ishan and Harsh used to put videos on YouTube, and we saw very strong engagement. Customers asked a lot of questions, so we built a bigger team. Now we have a solid engine there. It became part of our DNA. We also started doing offline engagement. We call this India Tour. Every month we go to five cities and talk to customers.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (13:19): It’s very consistent.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (13:20): Every week there is a schedule. One or two cities every week. This also helps us understand customers better.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (13:28): As you look ahead now, what keeps you motivated by the mission of Groww? What are the biggest opportunities you see?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (13:38): India is a very large country. What Groww manages today is very small compared to the total wealth. And the wealth has not yet touched millions of people. Mutual funds plus stocks together would be like 70 to 80 million, less than 100 million. But the Indian middle class and HNI segment is large. A lot of customers will get into wealth management. A lot of wealth will get accumulated. We will contribute to this growth and lead it. Every year is a challenge. Every time you think if we do this we’ll be good, then we do it and realize there is another thing. If we keep having these challenges, we’ll continue growing, and that’s what excites me.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (14:48): We've been partners since 2021. It has been one of our biggest pleasures to be along this journey. Anything in particular that you’ve valued from our partnership?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (15:02): Many things. One thing is we look at you also as an inspiration because in one way you are managing wealth. We would like to give the same level of service to our customer if we can. So you asked what keeps us motivated. One is number of customers, their wealth, but also the quality of service. A lot of times we discuss how we can build the ICONIQ of India eventually. Secondly, you get what we are doing. What we are doing is very complicated and our philosophies are slightly different from how things typically happen in the industry. And I think you get it beautifully. Connecting us to the right folks and giving the right advice.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (15:54): On philosophies, this video series is called Uncommon Path, and no two stories are the same. What makes one company special is different from what makes Groww special. You have your own philosophies, your own way, with a singular long-term focus. Maybe last question: knowing what you know now, if you could go back and talk to 2016 Lalit, what would you say?
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (16:37): I’d say be confident. In 2016 there were some large fintech companies. When I pitched to VCs they would say, they are doing it, they are very large. You would feel a bit underconfident. I would tell myself, and I tell myself now, past success does not matter. Five products became successful, five failed. Our future depends on the next set of products. If we don’t succeed at them, we are not going to grow. And being paranoid helps.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (17:24): Yeah, you are very paranoid.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (17:26): I’ve learned over time.
Yoonkee Sull, Partner, ICONIQ (17:28): Certainly served the company well. Thank you for doing this. This was incredible. Thank you for sharing this story with us. We are lucky to be partners to you and the entire team.
Lalit Keshre, co-founder and CEO, Groww (17:43): Thank you so much.
