 Good evening. Good afternoon, everyone. Super excited to be here. Introduce you to Piyush, who is the CEO and founder of Lenscard, the largest eyewear brand across Southeast Asia and India. At SoftBank, super privileged to be part of the Lenscard cap table. We invested in 2019. I've been on the board since then. Been, you know, a unique position to see it grow from $100 million of revenue close to a billion. So Piyush, welcome and thank you for coming. Before I get into, you know, the Q&A, I'm not sure everyone knows the depth of Lenscard and what they've achieved. So a little bit of introduction and then we'll get into the Q&A. Thanks, Samira and happy to be here at Slush. So Lenscard is a platform for you to buy loads of eyewear for fashion, for utility, whatever you want it to be. At a surprisingly great experience every time. We're a full-stack company, so we design, manufacture, and ship glasses directly to you. So we also end up saving you a lot of money and give you a lot of choice almost every week now. And yeah, so we've been around for about 12 years. We operate in India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Middle East. We're about 15,000 people now across these markets. We ship close to 25 million pairs a year and touching about a billion dollars in revenue. Profitable and still a long way to go. That's the key word, profitable tech startup, which is amazing. I think the first question for me, Piyush, is you came back from the States to India which had a big opportunity. You had a white sheet of paper. I would have thought you would have gone for horizontal e-commerce, a bigger opportunity. Why vertical? Why not horizontal? And why eyewear? So you know, Lenscard didn't start with a business plan, right? It was, we are missionaries in a lot of ways because it, for me, I used to work in Seattle at Microsoft and Bill Gates invited some of us to his house and he was talking about how he's going to change the world with the foundation after having already changed once already with Microsoft. And I was building new features in Microsoft Office and I was young enough to think that, you know, why am I not changing the world? So, and that's when we came across the whole problem of, it was just accidental that I came across that about 50% of the world today needs glasses, which is about four and only 50% of them have it. So about two and a half billion people globally don't have glasses. And according to WHO and World Economic Forum, they say that this is the biggest health ailment in the world. And on the other hand, I was constantly seeing that the evolution that has happened in apparel shoes everywhere, where the quality of life has improved. You know, I used to run and there's running shoe and walking shoe and flowers, but in iWare, we've kind of stayed pretty boring and non-evolutionary. So I think it was like, let's go change the world, let's transform the way people see. So it wasn't literally a decision between horizontal and vertical. It was like, let's do something that would be worthwhile doing. But you know, early in your journey, and I remember asking this question also when we invested, is big opportunity very focused, but I know you flirted with other verticals. And that's a question I asked when we were investing like, oh man, are you going to be focused on lenses or are we going to do other stuff? Why was that? Why the temptation? Well, that was the side effect of raising money, I think. We raise money and suddenly, I think in the middle, we got distracted and we were chasing GMV, we were working not for the purpose, but for the next fundraise. And we never realized when that happened, because there was a point in time we were reflecting back in a conversation and it just occurred that about 80% of our revenue was coming from non-iWare. And that wasn't the reason we started the company. We started the company to transform the way people see. And it was a tough decision because if we wanted to go back to our purpose, we had to shave off 80% of our revenue, which means no fund raise and growing company to a de-growing company. But I'm glad we took that call. It was a tough one. We shaved off 80% of our revenue, went back to our purpose, and we had all this team which is working on all different accessories. We put them back into iWare and there's no one looking back ever. Okay. That's pretty impressive that you managed to cost correct and accept that there's a change of strategy. I think it's important to write. I think I've realized when we write these things and we can go back to the manual, it helps because we often get distracted. That's true. And so the next question I had for you is, and I think there are a lot of investors and founders here, your cap table is A+, soft bank if I can call it A+, and then you have TPG growth, ADIA, KKR, and one of the few companies in India which is actually given large secondaries to a lot of the investors. I think from your perspective, why, when, which investor, who adds, what do you look for? And I'm sure it's not been a super easy ride. You don't need to tell me here who you want off your board. I'm sure you want some people off your board. But, you know, I think from a founder love to get your perspective on, because you selected them very carefully. So what was the thought process? So first rule I think of the game in my view is that beyond money, you have to have a good chemistry with the person who's going to invest money. And there have been times where you walk out of the meeting thinking everything is good, valuation is good, check is good, money is good, but, and I understand that sometimes you don't have that privilege, but am I going to feel good about working with this person? So that was obviously the benchmark initially. But over the years, I think it was very clear to me that this is not a short-term journey. It's going to take maybe 10, 20 years. And at each stage it's important to get the investor, at least in my view, who's aligned to that stage. And also before signing the final documents, I always used to ask the investors, like, why are you investing? What is in it for you and what is your expectation? I remember once you were about to sign the deal just before SoftBank with someone, and I asked him the car, we are so expensive, where do you see? And every time I felt that that is misaligned, I won't take the money. I remember in SoftBank case, we took what? Six months to align on what we want to do with Lenscard and what SoftBank wants to do in Lenscard until that alignment happened. And then, so SoftBank, we took money literally when, about after five, six years, we swelled that we have a product market fit. And there was a big debate between the co-founders saying, if we take this much capital in the company, because it was pretty much more capital than we had raised over the last six years collectively, would we be able to justify? And so the idea was, okay, if we have this capital, let's invest behind talent and technology and see if we can make it big. So that was the purpose of the SoftBank round. And I think, in hindsight, that was a very good decision and allowed us to take some of the big bets. We never ended up consuming that capital till we did this acquisition recently, and so it was helpful with that. And then once we started sort of seeing profitability, we wanted to get investors who don't have a short time horizon. So we went with sovereign funds like Aadiah and Temasek who can stay invested pretty much lifetime in a company, or at least 10, 12 years, as long as you're going and delivering what you want to deliver. So, yeah, I think we have been fortunate to have that. But if there's a expectation mismatch, I think things go wrong. So you have to be very careful about the partners. I have often gone with a lower valuation, with the right partner versus a higher valuation, but maybe not the best fit partner. And I've also seen that if the value system between the partner and you are not aligning, there'll always be a problem. That's perfect. But I want to ask you, why did you, I mean, why did you guys invest in Lenskart? Because in those days, we were not so big, we were not so, maybe not so tech-first, as SoftBank would call it in terms of your equation. We were not the platform business. So what was in it for? No, so I think two things. So I think one is, you know, you do the model, you do the mathematical. It's a very high margin business. You were definitely the leader there. But I think more for us was the way you and the team approached the business. They were truly focused on this single mission. The time for us was big enough. And I think the fact that we got a good feeling that you're not going to get distracted, really excited us. You can build a retail business. A lot of people can build it. But I'm not sure how many people can build it by being tech-first and that paranoia about consumer excellence. Everyone kind of, until you, until you don't have that, I don't think you're going to build a really kick-ass brand. And with Piyushan team, we said, every time we spoke to him, he didn't talk about valuation. He didn't talk about, you know, kind of how big this company could become. And that's our job. But he spoke about customer obsession and I need a really good team around me. And I think that really excited us to say, okay, this is someone and the team we would love to back. Two questions I had while you built Lenskart to this scale. And I think the two questions which worried us a lot. One is, I know you used to get a little bit annoyed every time we said, oh, you're like the Warby Parker of India. Trust me, everybody asked me what do you do. And I said, we run I-Ware company. Like, oh, like Warby Parker. I think they've definitely done, it's a good thing, I think, because it allows, it's a good starting point. It's not the best starting point. Yeah, but it's a Warby Parker with, I think, 5x the revenue and 5x the value. But so I know you get, you like, don't compare me to Warby Parker. But I think the most important point for investors and coming into, I guess until maybe two or three years ago is, how would you compete with Amazon and Flipkart? The question was, Amazon is in India is doing extremely well. They can enter this segment any time and with the might of technology, capital, etc. So how did you keep, Amazon never even tried messing with Lenskart, if I can say that. How did you manage that? Well, I never say never. I think though, I think by staying grounded and staying core to our proposition, not getting distracted, learning from our mistakes, solving the tough problems, knowing that if someone came with all the money and all the might, you would still be able to deliver a great surprising experience all the time to customers. I think it's all about staying super focused. And yeah, I mean, we have to be prepared. I won't say you can just assume that they would not do it. We have to be prepared. We have to know our customers better than they would know this category. We have spent 12 years in it. And if we don't do that well, like one of the things I would say is, as the company grows, the amount of, I used to spend like 200 days with customers earlier. And as the company grows, that time reduces. And I think what we need to do is go back to the basics. Go back to the basics. Spend time with customers. No, if we know our customers better, then we can... Now, I guess, you know, with the amount of founders, etc., in the room, 25 million prescription glasses a year, 25 million customers, I think you're going to get close to a billion dollars of revenue. What were the biggest challenges scaling? Normally, companies get stuck at the 200-odd million. You're going to be 5x of that and profitable. Top three learnings or top three issues founders should keep top of mind? Yeah, I... To be honest, when we were at about that 200 million dollar number, we were worried. And those were the time we were growing at maybe 25, 30% a year. And people used to come and tell us, why didn't you not grow faster? This is not the fastest growing startup. And what I realized was that, you know, while the initial years of the company was about customer obsession, to go beyond this 200 million dollar, we had to do something different. And that was, we had to now create a team and a culture which can deliver that customer obsession versus doing it ourselves. I think this doing versus creating a system which can deliver, which can take decisions was a big shift. I would say that we were only customer obsessed. We were not talent obsessed. And so I, as you know, I took the role of chief people officer for two years. Well, I wanted to get deep and we just kept raising the bow. We knew one thing very clear that if we don't cross this, it is something internal. It, because the market is there, the problem is there. I mean, in India alone, there about 700 million people who are without glasses right now. So it has to be execution. And so we stayed persistent. It wasn't easy. We failed many times. But I think we kept at it. And we were very clear if we are failing, it is internal. And we kept raising the bar of talent and kept learning from the Googles and the Amazon and how they are, even from deciding how to attend a meeting, how to write a meeting note, how to document it, what kind of talent needs to bring in, how do we need to, how deep we want to go into the problem. And I think that's probably paid off. And then a lot of people say that the first eight years of Lenscard, we grew at 30% and last three years we grew at 60%. I think it's to do with people and culture. And I think when India was humming, and by far the leader in the country, you said, okay, this is not enough. Let me go and expand to Japan and Southeast Asia. And Lenscard bought a company in old days, which is the Japanese based company, but operations all over Southeast Asia, a large check acquisition. I mean, what gave you the confidence that you could, I mean, I don't know if you speak Japanese, but what gave you the confidence? I understand when a Japanese says something in Japanese what they really do. Okay, fine. If they don't give you a meeting, means they don't like it. But, you know, why do you think the company was ready? You could have, I think even without old days, Lenscard would be a 8, 10 billion dollar outcome. Where did that confidence come from? I know you chased the founders. They said no to you, I think five to six times. Why that perseverance? And what was the learning there? I think this was about the time that I think we had pretty much become very obsessed about our mission, more obsessed than we were in the first eight, ten years where we had clearly said that we are not in for the IPO. We are not in for the outcome. We are here for the impact. We're going to impact X number of lives. And Southeast Asia has about 80% myopia today. When you go to Korea and Hong Kong, it's 90%. Singapore is 80%. And by the age of kids gets to 18, they are 80% kids are myopic in India, teenagers. And so for us, we were doing a lot of tech in India now and at a scale. And we wanted, we knew that we could extend this. And we could, we're looking at markets, but this seemed like a market which needed it the most. So I think we went back to our purpose. So that's why Southeast Asia, largely, and it was again, you know, we just turned profitable. It was a big bet. And I, you know, the conversation at the board was like, if you want to do it, we'll support it. But if you don't want to do it, there's no pressure. So it was a big bet. I think my neck was on the line more than anything else. But what gave me the confidence was again the mission. And the second part about why Japan and why, you know, again, there's a risk there and why, you know, we, we made by about five offers. And then we made the sixth offer. So we were very persistent. I think this was the time when I had taken the HR role, right? And I kind of started figuring out that what works at Lenscard, right? What, what, what kind of things work? So what I realized is that the relationships that work at Lenscard are the one where there's a, whether it's investor, whether it's employees, whether it's vendors, where there's a commonality of cultural values, right? We've often seen that we mean, we can hire people who may not have done that before. But if we hire people who sort of align with us the way we think in terms of obsession, 10x thinking, agility, discontentment, that then that relationships last long. And M&A is always like the success rate is what 1% maybe 2%. So the chances of failure was higher than success. And so to me, you know, I've known these founders and every time I go back and I used to visit, we had the same values, customer obsession, frugality, agility, you know, collaboration, the, the thought process on how you're taking decisions. And I kind of felt that while we may get other opportunities, you may not get this alignment. And then the risk is higher. So it's okay to pay that premium. And I think we stayed persistent. It took a lot of convincing. I literally live in Japan for a long time. And I'm glad we got it done. It's been one and a half years, phenomenal journey. I think we have now 13 cultures at Lenscard from one Indian company. And we have 13 cultures. So it's been an amazing learning about diversity, inclusion and how to And what have you learned from old days? Obviously the Lenscard cultures is good. What have you benefited from their culture? You know, the Japanese planning and excellence in customer experience. I think we do a lot of things with technology. They do just a lot of things with culture. And the training and just the planning. I mean, we, I think we think we plan, but I think where our planning stops, it starts. But I've been to events. I know the meticulousness with which and we are bringing a lot of that now into Lenscard in India and Southeast Asia. Got it. And I think a little bit I do want to focus on. I don't think people maybe here don't appreciate the volume of I wear that you ship. And the remote parts of India where you've promised next day delivery. I want to talk. I just want them to appreciate and just talk a little bit about the new manufacturing plant you've built and how you manage to ship 25 million glasses a year and next day delivery in India where the infrastructure is not the best. I think you ask this question about that tomorrow if Amazon comes into this business, what would you do? I think the answer lies there. We have to solve the tough problems. You know, the easier problems everybody can solve. Eventually, I do feel that as consumers, we are used to these great experiences in all other categories. We are getting spoiled every day with selection with choice, 10 minute delivery. But in Iowa, we kind of don't expect it. So somebody's going to do it. And so about when the whole COVID period started, we did a vote in the company and we asked if we could deliver glasses next day which nobody has really done from a centralized ecosystem. What do we think our business would grow by? And the minimum answer I get was 50%. And the highest was like 10, 100%. And so we had all the money that SoftBank had given us which we did not consume. So we said, let's build the largest factory in the world. Let's put all the automation and work backward to say that if a pair of order comes at 9pm in the night, can I get it delivered next day? And on the paper, it looked impossible. So I think we put in $100 million of cash in building a factory and with a clear purpose. And now we are delivering glasses next day. We recently did a survey. There's nobody else in the world who's able to do this. But eventually what I have seen is that the tough problems are difficult to solve. And it's the basics that you need to get to. And I remember the journey we were about 14 at promoter score. We went to 50, we went to 60, we went to 70. All happened every year. But then we were stuck at about 71, 72 for four years. And it won't move because it was good enough. I mean we were at 60% promoters, 10% detractors, 10% passive. What's wrong? And then when we build this factory, we started delivering next day. Now we just recently crossed 80. Oh wow. Okay. I think we don't have time today but I think the other story if you ever meet Piyush is how the company, India went through a very strict lockdown overnight. And we have 2000 plus retail stores and how Lenscard cope with that. Both morale for the organization as well as keeping costs under control was just remarkable. I don't think you have time to go through that but that was exceptional. We're sitting in Europe. Ondes is going according to plan. You have, I know your balance sheet extremely strong. You have lots of investors knocking on your door. When is the M&A in Europe? You've done a small one in France, I know. But is Lenscard going to be seen on the streets of Helsinki and London? Well, you've made a little bit of start with Paris. We just invested in a brand called La Petite Lunitaire in Paris. We have a lot on our plate, to be honest. And I want to make sure that we are able to, you know, we only bite as much as we can chew. But, you know, with the vision that we have to serve a billion people, we'll eventually get it. What do you think? I mean, you manage both India and Europe. I think the quality of your glasses, the design, the price at which you offer them, I think the market is wide open. And I think, just like any other country, I think the retailers here are still more offline than online. And I think you can really shake that up by being, you know, online-first mentality. And if you offer next-day delivery of prescription glasses, that's going to be phenomenal. See, I think as this culture of multiplies, of being able to take decisions, you know, in multiple geographies with the same mindset, it becomes much easier to scale. Correct. I'm going to ask you, I guess two questions. One, I do have to ask you about AI. I know you are a very tech-first brand. But where do you see, or what is your vision for AI for Lenscard? Right? Let me spend 30 seconds on that. But more importantly, what's the next five years for Lenscard? You know, and where do you see it in scale, in geography? And do you have the, I know you have the capital, but what will be the biggest constraint to get there? So, look, I, when I was at Microsoft Bill Gates, used to speak about AI, right? And I always believe that technology and AI is not, it's a means to an end, right? You have to have the, you can't start with saying, okay, let's do AI. You have to say, okay, this is the problem. And what can technology do and what can AI do? I'll tell you, I mean, we do facial recommendation. Now, we've been doing it for 10 years. And it got better and better with AI. But I'll give you a use case which probably is not as common. We open now 50 stores a month. And I used to sit in those meetings where, you know, everybody would present a property and people would say, okay, this location will do this much revenue. This location would do this much. And we used to get it wrong 50% of the time. And then we started building a machine learning model based on our existing locations. And today, nobody makes a decision. We have been opening. We opened 400 stores last year. We open 400 stores the year before. We can today, with 95% plus accuracy, predict the revenue of a store before we open it. And we can deliver payback in eight months. So this is good use of AI. And what is, what Generative AI is doing is it's open doors now for vision connection on the phone. So that's what I'm excited about most. And I think, so doors are opening, but I think you have to start with the problem. And the problem has to be big. Where I see lens card, firstly, I don't think five years. I think I'm sorry, I'm investor. I look at five years actually. Yeah. And which is why we now have Aadia after you come in, because they think 20, 30 years in Temasek. Two things, right? We want to serve a billion people. There are two and a half billion people without glasses. If we can serve a billion people, I think that would be, we internally call it vision for billion. And the second thing I think is it has to become self propelling. Like I'm a big fan of what Amazon has built in terms of an ecosystem, a culture which can replicate and you can continue to grow consistently and make the impact. So I think it has to become an ecosystem and organization which can keep solving the problems and transform the way people see and experience the world. Fantastic. I think my timer is blinking. I hope you guys enjoy the session. For me, we've been associated for five years, known each other for six to seven years, as exciting and thrilled to always hear Piyush, what he's built and what he's continued going to build. Thank you. Thank you.