I was at a get-together Namita Thapar organized for her Shark Tank investee companies. I tried Undhiyu for the first time, and it blew me away. But this post is not about that.

During an open conversation, I said my favorite line: “The only way to gain abnormal returns is by taking a contrarian bet — making a decision that nobody agrees with. Because if everyone agrees with it, it’s already priced in.”

Someone from the audience (a smart founder, for sure) asked, “But how do you hang onto your conviction when everyone is saying you are wrong?” It’s a great question, and as always, I blurted out some nonsense because I didn’t have a good answer on the spot (this is why I avoid the stage at all costs, but Namita is a friend).

But when I thought hard about it afterward (this is why I prefer to be alone in my room, thinking about things — what a loser!), the answer came to me. The answer is: you hold on to your conviction in the face of disagreement when you have an insight/a realization no one else has — at least for the time being — an insight that comes from data or facts, not from ego.

This is the holy grail of abnormal returns — in the stock market, in business, in life. This does not mean that the return will come in short order; it will most likely take a long time, decades, probably, because the return will come when everyone finally agrees with you — which is usually a long time away from the moment you made the contrarian call (otherwise it’s not contrarian).

The tremendous advantage of having an insight that no one else recognizes is that your idea will not attract massive VC money and create 100s of competitors. When an idea is well understood, billions pour into it, and it becomes a mad race of capital and execution, with one or two companies emerging victorious and the others burning in hell. Think horizontal e-commerce, quick commerce, food delivery, ride-hailing. Eventually, someone makes a massive return, but that path probably applies only to ideas with network effects and/or winner-take-all dynamics.

Let me share the insight behind Rebel Foods that helped us stay true to our path over 15 years — through ups and downs, near-death moments, and total misunderstanding from everyone around — including investors, media, and the random bystander. And the outcome is far from sealed, but we are seeing the results. And that keeps us going.

In any business, the real size of the market = Number of users X the number of use cases per user.

Some businesses are built on one/limited number of use cases but serve billions of users/customers. McDonald’s, Coke, Visa, etc. Even Facebook has one use case per side of the marketplace but millions and billions of customers — social media for customers and ads for advertisers. Then there are businesses built on many use cases across many customers — like Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Unilever, P&G, etc.

The unique thing about food is that every user has 3–5 use cases per day, across 8 bn people worldwide, but companies (at least restaurants) have always focused on one or a couple of use cases across billions of people.

Their growth has always come from more users, and not more use cases. Examples include Starbucks, Chipotle, McDonald’s, Domino’s, etc. Some companies moved into adjacencies by acquiring/building one or two or three more use cases (e.g., Jubilant, Yum Brands, etc.). But almost no one has built across many use cases for the same users. This is so different from FMCGs — where Unilever has built around every use case of a household — from detergents to shampoos to soaps.

Why? There is only one reason: in the restaurant business, the use case and the real estate are coupled. You make one McDonald’s outlet, and people come there to satisfy their burger cravings. Of course, as the brand gets stronger, more and more people come, but they still come to eat burgers, or maybe coffee these days.

It’s not that food companies can not or don’t want to make more types of food; there was a time when McDonald’s owned Chipotle (look it up), but every time they wanted to do that, they had to buy/rent and build another piece of real estate. Obviously, some companies focused on it and did it tremendously well, building billions of dollars in value. But for FMCGs, this is different: once a distribution pipe is built, they can drive n # of products, targeted at n # of use cases, through that pipe.

Rebel was built on this insight — if we can decouple real estate from use cases, at least theoretically, we are drawing on an infinite canvas, as long as people eat, through fads, long-term trends, regional variations, festivals, you name it. By definition, this makes Rebel’s TAM larger than any traditional F&B company’s (though that alone doesn’t mean we will be the largest F&B company in the world).

The answer was multibrand smart kitchens — kitchens organized through technology, processes, equipment, and culinary innovations that can support various cuisines and cooking methods. This changes the game because, as we launch new use cases, existing kitchens have operating leverage, and as we expand our kitchen network, our pipeline for new launches gets stronger. In some way, we transformed a monolithic F&B business into a versatile FMCG business.

Part of why this worked in India, and why there is no Rebel Foods in the US, is not any brilliance of ours but a pure economic reality. In the US, labor costs are very high, and real estate is cheap; in India, the opposite is true, so something like Rebel Foods can only be built in places like India where delivery economics can work out (or maybe the Middle East, where both labor and real estate costs are reasonable). For this reason, the original Domino’s business succeeded in India ahead of every other QSR. Even today, only 5% of McDonald’s revenue in the US comes from delivery — in India, that number is ~50%.

But our model required upfront investment in tech, culinary processes, brands, and the supply chain — all hard and expensive work. But eventually, the wheel started turning, with a very high ROCE (the real metric for any business in the end). From the outside, it looked (and still does) wrong for a long time because people didn’t get it; they measured this different animal by existing yardsticks.

When you see something like this, your conviction stays steady even when no one else agrees with your idea because they can’t see what you see. But, admittedly, you still need to survive long enough for the day the world suddenly wakes up and says, “Aha!” But who said building something lasting is easy?

The team asked me to lead a session on Rebel Foods’ bold bets over the years. The preparation took me down memory lane, almost literally, as I scoured Google Drive for slides and docs that captured the exact moments when some of these decisions were made. Hindsight is an amazing thing — the docs looked like they were made with the calm of a stoic team, but the truth is they were all made with trepidation and, in many instances, with the mortal fear of going out of business.

Below is an excerpt from that session (a few things greyed out as not everything can be made public :) ):

Rebel’s fifteen years are an aggregation of “bold” bets (sometimes made with a lot of fear). Today, I am going to talk about the 10 biggest. I know that sounds like an awful number of big bets for a young company — but the fact of the matter is that bets usually come early, and the size of the bets is always relative to the size of the company — the same bets look smaller when the company is bigger.

Bet 1: Like many things in life, Rebel’s first bold bet was hatched in an offsite in Goa. Doug Leone — the head of Sequoia at the time — spoke at that event and said the founder’s main role was to remove obstacles to growth (he used rocks in a flowing river to illustrate the point). It got Kallol and me thinking, and that evening, when we were thinking of why, despite our best intentions and the herculean efforts of our teams, we were not making money, it dawned on us — the real estate rent on the high street was killing us — it was the friction, while our delivery % was growing at a fast clip. We decided that night to move the outlets to delivery kitchens. Those were the days when things could move super fast, and within a couple of weeks we had our first kitchen in Marol, Bombay.

Bet 2 and 3: Bet 1 worked like a charm. The thing that would eventually be called a cloud kitchen ticked all the boxes a small business could dream of: high productivity, great quality, happy employees, strong growth, and a decent bottom line. But, like always, we got ahead of ourselves and started thinking about how to scale the thing super fast, and we made two bets one after the other.

First, Wildfire (we were always good at naming things), where we will give our brands to other underutilized kitchens (in hotels, catering spaces, etc) and scale super fast. And second, CBLD (Curated Best Local Dishes): now that we are building delivery muscle, we will also deliver the best dishes from other brands near our kitchens. Both bets failed miserably: the first because we lost control before we had built a strong system, and the second because we underestimated the complexity of coordinating multiple dishes from different restaurants.

Bold bet 4: But the demand generated through CBLD taught us something: that, in food, the customer use cases are incredibly varied. And we had kitchens, not storefronts, which meant we could cater to all these use cases without replicating the infrastructure. Below is the original slide (clearly, Claude was not there to make slides back then) when we actually made that connection:

Some of the brands worked, some did not, but we discovered an infinite canvas to draw on through this bet. This was the bet that changed our company forever.

Bold bet 5: Thankfully, for the next 3–4 years, we did not have any new brainwaves to derail us from the path, and we executed like maniacs. Things looked beautiful — the startup dream was coming alive.

And then it was time for COVID. And our sales dropped by 60% (I always thought it was 80% before I went back and checked the actual data — so the impact on my mind was bigger than the impact on the ground), as everything came to a standstill, with no one having any idea about the future. We had 4,000 people on the rolls and 300 kitchens across India and the UAE. We were truly F****d.

The team showed us the way; they said in unison that we should not lay people off; instead, all of us should take salary cuts to weather the storm. But the even tougher decision was not to shut the kitchens, but to hibernate them for the time being — so that we can come roaring back should the situation on the ground change. This was the boldest call we ever took in our company, and the results can be seen in the original slides below

There are three types of companies (or anything, for that matter) in this world: glass-like (shatters under pressure), elastic-like ( resilient, comes back to shape when pressure is withdrawn), and muscle-like ( antifragile, gets stronger under stress). I believe the near-death experience of COVID made Rebel an antifragile company. It really sealed my belief that we could be in for a very long haul.

Bold bet 6: We launched the world’s first food court on an app, Eatsure, in 2020 as we were coming out of COVID. We realized the power of offering multiple brands together, especially when people order in groups. This gave us a front-row seat to what customers are searching for, and our subsequent brand/product decisions were shaped by this incredible data.

Bold Bets 7 and 8: As the offline world came to a halt at the height of COVID, some brands came to us to seek space in our kitchens, from which they could deliver. This told us that we could actually use our entire operating system (tech, supply chain, kitchen network) to bring not only our own brands to every neighborhood, but we could also do this for 3P brands, either by hosting them or by investing in them. Thus came the decisions such as building Launcher and acquiring Smoor.

Bold Bet 9: Then, an opportunity showed up that none of us was expecting. It was the opportunity to license an iconic global brand. It came because the franchisee in India wanted out, and we thought, why not try to plug a global major into our operating system. Thus came Wendy’s. In 3.5 years, we opened 225 + Wendy’s locations — mix of cloud and malls — in India.

Bold Bet 10: While all this was happening in India, the UAE was suffering from a leadership void. We saw the potential in the market, but we could not capitalize on it. We thought of hiring some big shot to lead the team in that market, but in the end we took the bold bet of giving the market to a couple of people who did not have years of experience, but were true Rebels in terms of agency and hunger. This bet completely turned the market around, and today the UAE is a massively growing and profitable market for us. And more importantly, some of our brands became the most loved in one of the world’s most competitive arenas.

As we take stock of the bets, it’s amply clear that not everything worked. Some were abject failures, like wildfire and CBLD; some are still playing out, like Eatsure and Wendy’s; and some had a transformative impact on the company, such as multibrand kitchens and the UAE leadership change. But when we look back, collectively they propelled our company forward. And this is how it looks in aggregate.

But a company’s journey can never be measured only in terms of revenue and economics. It’s also the impact we have made on people’s lives. Transforming lives has been our second motive, alongside business outcomes, and today we employ 7,000 people, 5,600+ of whom work in our kitchens. Each has a decent livelihood, a pension, life and medical insurance for the family, grants for children’s education, and some Rebel Foods ESOP (with more than 1 year of tenure). Capitalism can lead to significant social impact. Below is a snapshot of our kitchen workforce today. CDOs are the Chief Delight Officers, who run our kitchens.

However, a single bet made all these bets possible at Rebel. And that was the bet of hiring for attitude, and not for experience. It all started with an email we wrote in 2012 to recruit our first batch of FERs (Faasos Entrepreneurs in Residence). Here is an excerpt from that email (full email here):

We recruited 8 people. Some of them went on to start their own companies, and the rest are running Rebel. Most of my predictions in life have been wrong, but in this instance, I did predict that one of them would one day become Rebel’s CEO. 13 years on, that prediction came true, as I hand over the reins of Rebel to Ankush, one of the original FERs.

But more importantly, this set off a cascade of Rebels hiring Rebels — people with high agency, hunger, and entrepreneurial spirit — and, naturally, they embraced and owned the big bets the company took. And as these bets began to have an impact, some of these people became leaders, and then they found and groomed more Rebels who embraced and owned bolder ideas — big and small. And thus the DNA of the company got set. And this gives me confidence that bets will continue to be taken at Rebel for a very long time.

The other thing to note about our bets was that they came in spurts. And that’s because sometimes the world changes dramatically and becomes a fertile ground for new ideas. Our bets came first during the ascendancy of food delivery and second during COVID, where, ironically, all bets were off, and it was a mad rush for survival.

Today, again, the world is changing. It is time again to make some big bets.

Great talent can hit targets that no one else can hit. But bold can hit targets that no one else can see.

Recently, I was invited to be a guest on a fireside chat at The Whole Truth, and Shashank and I spent an hour speaking to one of the sharpest groups I have ever encountered.

Among other things, we talked about this concept of founder mentality, a way of being by employees when they are not founders, at least not the original ones. This was in reference to my essay on the subject of “Founder Mentality vs CV Mentality.”

Over time, I’ve come to realize there’s nothing more important than having a founder mentality across the length and breadth of an organization — especially if you care about building something that lasts.

Founder Mentality in brief (as defined by the book Founder Mentality by James Allen and Chris Zook):

• Insurgency: a clear sense of purpose, usually to challenge the status quo
• Frontline Obsession: obsession with customers, and empowering the people closest to the customers
• Owner’s Mindset: bias for action, cost discipline, long-term accountability

Founder Mentality has nothing to do with actually being a founder. CV Mentality is the opposite: always wondering what’ll look good on LinkedIn, never owning a mistake, and being very particular about designations.

Now, during the TWT chat, I realized that all this while I was talking from the company’s vantage point — how the company benefits when employees display a founder mentality.

Someone from the audience asked, “What’s in it for the employees?”

I hadn’t thought it through, and my on-the-spot answer was totally half-baked. You know, this is why I avoid giving talks, especially to smart people.

But I reflected on it for a long time after. Here is what I think is the right answer.

Assuming you are in the right company — a company that’s mission-driven, not political, a meritocracy — here’s what happens.

1. Bigger responsibility comes to you ahead of time. Every leader is a sucker for people who show up with a founder’s hustle and ownership and get the job done, and, as a result, they root for them all the way.
2. Over time, you have an institutional knowledge that is unparalleled. You know every pulse of the company. You know what’s right, what’s wrong. Sometimes even more than the founder, because chances are you are closer to the ground. With that tribal knowledge, when you get that greater responsibility ahead of time, you excel because you know what works in the company.
3. You gain tremendous reputational currency over time, which helps you take bold steps and, if needed, change the company’s course. Leadership, board, investors — they trust that you will always think “enterprise first.”

When these three things come together — ever-expanding responsibility, tribal knowledge, and the trust from everyone around the table — nobody can stop you from leading the company in the long run.

The world is full of such examples. Take the world’s 5 biggest companies by market cap: NVIDIA, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. NVIDIA is still run by its founder, Jensen Huang. The other four are run by long-term employees who embody a founder mentality — Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, and Andy Jassy. The majority of these companies’ market cap growth has occurred under their leadership. Check out the table below.

At Rebel, we have benefited tremendously from this Founder Mentality, and at the same time, the people who demonstrated it have become the company’s leaders, including our current CEO, COO, CFO, and Chief People Officer, as well as most other senior roles.

So, ironically, employees with Founder Mentality end up with the most extraordinary CVs, in addition to the opportunity of a lifetime to lead and shape category-creating companies.

I recently read “Rule Breaker Investing — David Gardner”, just to see if there is a world beyond the ideas of Buffett and Munger. The book made me think, and that’s usually not a good thing.

One of the core ideas of the book is to forget everything and back the “top dog in an important and emerging industry”, for the long run.

While going through the list of such companies, I realized that these are companies that did not compete better in an existing industry — they simply created new industries and, as a result, became the top dogs in that industry.

Amazon — Shopping, Cloud Computing

Netflix — Streaming

TSMC — Chip Manufacturing

Google — Search and associated ecosystem

Tesla — Exciting and Luxury EV

Uber — Mobility

NVIDIA — Compute

Apple — Smartphone and associated ecosystem

The fundamental insight is that the protagonists found an angle in this world that no one else has either thought of or scaled. They did not think of strategies to compete better. Amazon did not want to be a better Walmart, and Netflix did not want to be a better Blockbuster (eventually, at least).

So this gets me to the realization that there are two types of successful companies

A. Companies that compete in an existing world order

They compete fiercely and more often than not emerge as winners at the expense of others. They build moats — economies of scale, brand, switching costs, process power, etc. Defend their turf ferociously. Examples: Unilever, Walmart, Jio, McDonald’s, Exxon-Mobil, Oxychem, Geico, Marico, Asian Paints, Tatas, etc.

By definition, they operate in highly competitive industries. Typically, there is a Pepsi (and a Red Bull) to the Coke in this type of game. They are also led by tremendously talented leaders. This is Buffett’s hunting ground. Over the last sixty years, he has found such companies again and again and let compounding do its job.

B. Companies that birth new industries and take them to scale

Companies that come up with a completely new game and create mammoth industries out of nothing — Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Apple, NVIDIA, all did it in the last 20 years.

Typically, there is no Pepsi to these Cokes. They enjoy a massive market share for a long time, and given their character, they can continuously create new headroom for growth out of thin air, as their DNA is that of invention.

They almost always come out of one person’s vision, but then they typically find a worthy successor, another person who may not be the founder, but almost is.

These companies trade at unbelievably high valuations in the beginning, and Buffett would typically never touch them. But eventually they would catch up to those valuations and exceed them many, many times over.

These are the top dogs in an emerging and important industry, and if you can identify and manage to invest in them in the first 5 years of their public journey, you will be sorted — monetarily at least (you will, of course, have other types of worries; there is really no free lunch in this world).

Obviously, over time, their dominance attracts competition, and eventually they start playing in a highly competitive market. And they need to start building some deep moats themselves. Many of the companies that started in the second bucket eventually move to the first — e.g., McDonald’s, Coke, Disney, Walmart, etc.

So — what are today’s emerging and important industries? AI is obvious, but what about Renewables, EV, Electrification, Space, Nuclear, and Defense? And who are the emerging top dogs?

I have my hunches, but I will keep them to myself (I am hardly in the business of dishing out stock tips). Besides, the framework is only worth anything if it helps you make your own list. If it helps you see a target before it is obvious.

Which is, of course, the hard part. But hard is good, it makes your brain productive again in the age of LLMs.

All in all, I find it a fascinating way of looking at the world — as an investor (which I am not) and as a student (which I am), trying to make sense of the world — present and future.

Also, it shows us how a handful of people in this world could make such a monumental impact by changing the game.

The two lines that got stuck in my head from the book are:

Talent can hit a target that no one else can hit.

Genius can hit a target that no one else can see.

-Schopenhauer

Yesterday, according to the official payroll records, was my 15th work anniversary at Rebel. Can’t believe it all started on April Fool’s Day, at least officially. I received some heartwarming messages, and some of the rebels celebrated it with a delicious cake.

When I think about it, it actually felt much longer than 15 years. It felt like a lifetime. From the days when we used to use the 40 sq ft storeroom behind our second Mumbai store (or was it the third) in Chakala, Andheri, as the corporate headquarters to today, feels like two different worlds, in every respect.

There are still many people at Rebel who witnessed (and would remember) my short fuse and violent outbursts during those days. As the saying goes in Zen, I used to be a tiger; now, after all these years of humbling experiences, I am just a cat.

Anyways, I realized the reason it feels much longer is the 8th wonder of the world — compounding. Everything happened slowly, but it all compounded over time.

I am a disciple of Buffett, and one of his core teachings is about the power of compounding. If you had invested USD 1 mn in his company 65 years ago, when he started, you would have USD 95 Bn today. Yes, it’s not a typo. For people with less patience, it would have been 30 MN USD in 20 years, not bad either.

And if you think this means there would have been massive growth every year, you would be mistaken. The stock compounded at the rate of <20% every year. Do the math. That is the power of compounding.

If you apply this to Rebel, we started with 0 revenue, obviously. I remember the first year, the revenue was 40 lac Rs. The compounding has been 76% a year so far. But over the last five years, our revenue has compounded at 34% annually. Now, it does not sound absolutely impossible that we will grow at 25% pa for the next 20 years — there are 7 Bn people in the world eating 3/4 times a day, and, according to our model, that is our TAM. We will be doing 20 BN USD (at the current exchange rate) a year. I won’t be there, but many of the current team will be, leading Rebel, and we will still be just getting started. That is the power of compounding.

The point is, when you see something compounding, stick to it — as an investor, as a founder, and as an employee.

However, the real teaching of Buffett transcends money or business. Compounding applies to everything — culture, character, career — and I have seen it firsthand at Rebel for 15 years.

The culture compounded at Rebel because of a series of decisions, big and small — first hiring of Faasos Entrepreneurs in Residence (Rebel’s current CEO, CPO, COO belong to that cohort), starting of YER (Your experience at Rebel) survey back in 2018, introducing star/superstar criteria along with performance and values, hiring for culture fit deliberately, written notes over CVs, and reversing wrong hiring decisions quickly. Everything compounded, and that’s why today I can see a sea of incredible people with massive ownership, creativity, and true founder mentality at every corner of Rebel. The Rebel spirit has never been higher, and I am sure that in 20 more years, the company will be the stuff of legend.

I have also seen the compounding in many personal and professional journeys. I have seen many rebels start as fresh-faced 20-year-olds and then, over 5, 10, or 12 years of learning, courage, and ownership, become absolute gems of leaders. I have seen them go through challenges, the ups and downs of performance. I have seen them break down completely and then stand up and face another day. All the while, compounding kept working in the background, making them what they are today.

But remember, compounding has two variables: rate of growth and time.

Most people think about the rate of growth, how fast I am growing, how fast the company is growing this year, and how much higher a salary I can get this year by changing my current job.

People dont think about time. But the equation is “one + growth rate to the power time” — so time is truly powerful, really and metaphorically. Magic happens when you let compounding happen over a long period of time.

It happens everywhere — in your career, in your relationships, in your start-up, in your athletic pursuits, everything. Just getting up every morning and showing up with intent for a very long period of time will lead to fulfillment, I have realized after all these years.

Being at Rebel for 15 years has not been easy, but I would not trade it for anything else. It’s been a ride of a lifetime.

There are all sorts of pains in building a company over the long run. If anyone ever tells you that founding, building, managing, and growing a company is fun, that person surely has not done it themselves.

There are occasional highs — usually once or twice every couple of years, but it’s mostly pain. At the end of it, I have realized that company building is about how you manage these pains.

When I look back at my 15+ years of running ( and sometimes pretending to run) Rebel Foods, I can see 3 types of pain.

Here they are — from the easiest to the toughest, in that order.

1. The pain of being written-off:

There are times when you are simply written off by everyone, by the investors, by the media, and even by the casual bystander.

This is the easiest of all pains. It means no one is expecting anything from you or your company at that moment. Usually, this is when you can take your boldest bets. You can make a stroke of a pen, big decisions, and no one cares.

In a convoluted way, this pain feels like freedom.

Happened to us a couple of times: when we were written off as a QSR back in 2014, and again during COVID, when the business came to a grinding halt.

Both times, we took calls we could not have taken under business-as-usual conditions. In the first instance, it led to the formation of a completely new concept in F&B, and the second time it led to a complete overhaul of our tech.

The pain of being written off can lead to the boldest bets that you can take in your life, personally and while building a company.

1. The pain of constraints:

This pain, I believe, is tougher than the first one. There are times when the walls close in, the market is brutal, you are left with one month’s payroll, and the like.

But magic happens when you embrace the constraint and innovate around it. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. When you are boxed in, the only thing that can save you is thinking outside that box.

In our business, real estate was the biggest constraint. Our revenues were tied to the box, and the box was tied to a brand.

As we thought hard about how to break down the walls (metaphorically, of course), the epiphany of multibrand kitchens occurred to us.

We realized that decoupling the real estate from the brand opens up an infinite canvas for us. The constraint led to a game-changing (and surviving) innovation.

The interesting part is that when there is no constraint, business may seem easy and flowing, but, like muscles, it atrophies in a restful state. When there is stress, innovation happens, and the business, like a muscle, gets stronger. So, sometimes, you have to induce the pain, the pain of a constraint.

1. The pain of moving forward, when all you want to do is stop

This is the toughest of all pains in building a business. This pain is akin to that of a long-distance runner, a polar explorer, or a mountaineer.

Everything hurts, from fatigue — mental and physical, from burnout, from no impending rest or respite. Every bone in your body wants to stop (physically and metaphorically). Yet, you move forward.

The ability to endure this pain is the most important skill for building a successful long-term company (or for climbing a mountain). It’s called endurance.

The terrific book “Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance” by Hutchinson talks about pain’s role in success. In one place, he talks about what Paula Radcliffe’s (world record holder for the Marathon for 16 years straight) coach said about her: “Her capacity to hurt was unprecedented.”

At Rebel, we faced this all the time. From daily catastrophes to prolonged downturns. From 20-hour days to solve a system outage to a year-long supply chain shock. This pain is chronic, ever present over long arcs of time, unlike the other two.

I am not saying I have mastered pain; there are still days when I just want to stop, and one day I just might. But I don’t know of an enduring company that got built without this.

The one thing that helps manage all three pains is the team you build around you. Not in a motivational-poster way. More practically than that.

When you are written off, if your team also believes it’s over, there is nothing left to bet with. The boldness requires at least a few people who haven’t given up yet.

When the walls close in, a culture that hasn’t learned to embrace constraint will panic. Innovation needs people who treat a dead end as a call to action and a design brief.

But it’s the third pain where the team matters the most. Endurance is lonely by nature. What I’ve found is that when the people around you are feeling the burn and choosing to keep going anyway, it makes your own choice slightly easier.

You’re not carrying it alone. And somehow, that’s enough to get through another day.

My all-time favourite business book (I wanted to say all-time favourite book, period — but then I did not want to be judged) is Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Here is the core thesis:

Big, successful companies often fail — not because they’re badly run, but because they’re good and they are focused on what’s working today.

They listen to their best customers and keep improving existing products through sustained innovation.

Meanwhile, a scrappy newcomer launches a cheaper, simpler, “worse” product with one or two outrageous benefits that nobody takes seriously at first (apart from a few early customers), and copying it will make the big company a poorer business.

That cheaper/worse product slowly improves and starts stealing customers from the bottom up.

By the time the big company notices, it’s too late — the newcomer has taken over.

The only way out is to spin off / invest in small, independent teams to pursue the new opportunity without being held back by the main business. Or, if you’re Zuck, have billions of dollars to spare and gobble up other innovators before they become a problem.

The Innovator’s Dilemma destroyed some truly world-class businesses in the last century — Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, BlackBerry — and made many others poorer. Companies that were, by most measures, excellently managed. That’s the terrifying part.

The Rebel Story (So Far)

At Rebel, we have been the scrappy newcomer for a long time.

People misunderstood us — what we were building, why we were building it, how it could possibly work. Big F&B companies did not, and could not, copy us. Or sometimes killed their experiments early.

Mostly because they would have dented their current profitability had they tried. The media helped our cause by publishing long articles claiming our model would never be profitable.

But the flywheel turned. Quietly, we are now a 2000 crore revenue, profitable company. By no means are we a big company. We are just getting started. I am super excited about the next decade of core Rebel business. The flywheel is spinning, the canvas is infinite, and the compounding is real.

But I am also super paranoid. Because we are no longer that scrappy newcomer.

I am paranoid that someone, somewhere — maybe in a garage, maybe in an AI lab, maybe in a kitchen — is building something that could kill us, or make us irrelevant. The biggest threat to Rebel will not come from another big food company doing what we do. It will come from something we don’t yet understand, built by someone we don’t yet know, serving a need we don’t yet see.

Rebel Ventures: What We’re Doing About It

So rather than wait for disruption to happen to us, we’re going to look for it.

We are launching Rebel Ventures — a small fund with a specific objective: partner with founders in the early phase of their journey, founders who are creating and building the next disruptive idea around food.

Now, a clarification. While we continue to look for brands and businesses to acquire and plug into the Rebel Flywheel — we did this with Smoor and Wendy’s, and are doing some others now (a separate post on that is coming) — this is different.

Here, I am NOT looking for another food brand. Or a cloud kitchen. Or a health label. Those are not disruptors — those things are already here.

I am looking for founders with ideas that, if realized, would usher in a new order on the canvas of food — a new customer behaviour, a new business model, a new paradigm. I am mindful that these ideas may be living in someone’s head rather than necessarily in real life, earning revenue and profits.

What We Bring to the Table

Apart from money (which, let’s be honest, is the easy part):

Fifteen years of living and breathing food — not to mention eating it. A 120+ city network of food operations. A culinary innovation platform. A lifetime making mistakes. Limitless curiosity. A 0 “know-all” attitude. And an ability to jam with anyone through first principles.

We are definitely not here to mentor from a pedestal. We have been the scrappy newcomer, remember. We know what it feels like to be written off, to be called out for wasting investors’ money, to be told the model doesn’t work, to be advised to follow the beaten path. We just want to be of help when the founder needs us.

The Dream Founding Team

I will be looking for folks who are building something, raising a seed round, or even just prototyping — maybe sitting in an AI lab, maybe in a commercial kitchen, maybe in a co-working space.

They are customer-obsessed. First-principle thinkers. Lifelong learning machines (different from machine learning, I guess). Ready to put in an unthinkable number of hours for the next 10 years. (I know saying this carries the risk of being trolled for violating the sacred work-life balance — but if we celebrate incredible hard work by sportspeople, why can’t we celebrate the same from business builders?)

The Disruptive Idea

An idea around food that sounds borderline crazy at this time — the way food delivery, internet restaurants, Uber, or quick commerce sounded 10–15 years back.

It needs to have three properties:

1. Painkiller, not vitamin. It has the potential to solve an existing or emerging customer problem. The customer may not even know it’s a problem until she experiences the new thing — but once she does, there’s no going back. Think 10 Min Q-commerce vs two day e-commerce. Or Google maps vs printouts (example from another century — ya, I am that old).

2. An inbuilt loop. There is something in the mechanics of the idea that makes it grow and iterate organically, without needing to spend billions on marketing. Something that compounds naturally.

3. A big tailwind. It benefits from a major shift in the world — tech, AI, health, fitness, or something else entirely. The wind is at its back.

We have a significant appetite for craziness. We strongly believe that abnormal returns result from an idea that is right, but no one agrees with today, such as a 100-bagger stock. The consensus trade never produces extraordinary outcomes.

How to Reach Us

If you think you and your idea fit the above, write to diamonds@rebelfoods.com.

Please — no attachments, no slide deck with stupendous market size assumptions (in fact, the smaller the starting niche, the better), no kick-ass graphics made by Nano Banana Pro (who came up with that name, I wonder). Just a simple write-up, 3 pages max, outlining:

1. Who are you, and why are you the dream founder/team?
2. What’s your idea?
3. Why does your idea tick all three boxes — painkiller, inbuilt loop, tailwind?
4. What’s the summary update of progress so far?

We’re looking for the next disruption. Maybe you’re building it.

While going through the trials, tribulations, wins, exhilarations, and heartburns of building a business in India for 15 years, the biggest lesson I have learned is that a business becomes super powerful when it discovers a self-fulfilling flywheel and an infinite canvas to draw on.

Thanks for reading Musings of a Rebel! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It’s not product-market fit that defines a company’s coming-of-age. PM-fit can be fragile in the face of competition or the struggle to scale up. It’s the discovery of the flywheel and the canvas that separates the long-term compounders from the rest.

I first learnt about the concept of a flywheel in the context of business while reading “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. Btw, it’s a book that can ignite a fire in you to build a career in business, similar to what “Open” by Agassi does for tennis players or “Born to Run” by Chris McDougall does for zillions of runners around the world.

Jim describes a flywheel as a self-reinforcing system of activities that builds cumulative momentum. Each push is small and unimpressive on its own, but over time the momentum compounds until the flywheel turns almost by itself. Jeff Bezos drew the Amazon flywheel on a piece of paper after reading the book, and the rest is history.

However, the strongest of flywheels stutter after some time if the opportunity size is small. But when the opportunity size is gigantic, the flywheel keeps accelerating forever, thus creating a long-term compounder. This is what happened, and is still happening with Costco, Amazon, Netflix, and possibly now with Zomato.

Rebel looked like a linear model for a long time, until we discovered the unbelievable interplay between the operating system (a combination of physical, digital, and culinary stack) and customer food missions. Today, we have a legitimate flyhweel in our hands, the stronger our operating system becomes → we can introduce more brands in existing and new categories → this addresses more and more of customers’ food life → this gives us more data and insights on what to do next → this strengthens our operating system → this helps us add new brands/categories and the flywheel keeps moving.

Also, we are lucky to be in a category where the canvas is infinite. Food is the most unique and yet most diverse of consumer goods. Food represents culture, geography, emotion, seasons, festivals, and life in general for 7 bn+ people worldwide. It is also tremendously dynamic — food habits and trends change in the short term as well as in the long run. So, even if we keep at it for a lifetime, we will still be scratching the surface.

Of course, we can’t declare victory; we are far from an Amazonian long-term compounding, but now we have the makings of becoming one. It will depend on how we preserve our culture and keep raising the bar on our execution and thinking.

Now, what’s the relationship between flywheel, infinite canvas, and long-term compounding? To create shareholder returns over decades, you need two things: a great return on capital and a great rate of reinvestment for the earnings. Together, they create the heady mix of decades of compounding.

A strong flywheel makes a business generate high ROCE because organic growth (and earnings) comes without massive capital deployment, and an infinite canvas enables a high rate of reinvestment, as there are always new avenues to deploy capital. And together they create absolute magic in the long run.

Beyond Rebel, I had the good fortune to do some very small investments (really tiny, guys) over the last 10 years — mostly in ex-Rebels. Two that created the most value have the same characteristics: A self-reinforcing flywheel and an infinite canvas/vision. They are:

Revant’s Mosaic Wellness ( Their mission is: building India’s most loved wellness brands )

Shashank’s The Whole Truth ( Their mission is: rebuilding the world’s trust in food )

In both cases, you can see the flywheel and the infinite canvas. Of course, when I invested in them, I had no epiphany about this flywheel, etc.; it was just pure luck of knowing two of the most brilliant people closely. But it turned out this way. And hence there is a lesson to be learnt.

Recently, I wrote a small check (really tiny again) in a company called Reccy. Their mission is to “Inspire every Indian to get out and experience the outdoors”. This time, I invested knowing that there is a humongous potential to build a flywheel on an infinite canvas. Also, I knew the founders for many decades through my climbing pursuits.

I am not a VC and probably never would be, but if I were one, I would look for these two characteristics ( or at least the potential thereof) in a business. Of course, the right founder comes even before that. The right founder, given enough time, can make a strong internal engine meet a boundless external vision

I posted this last week on LinkedIn.

And someone asked for some light to be thrown on the biggest mistakes we made. I had promised to do a post about that.

Here are the really big ones:

One: Doubling down before clear evidence emerged

As pathological dreamers, we would constantly get excited about some shiny new thing, and even before witnessing the results, we would scale the damn thing, wasting a bunch of money, time, and bandwidth, only to retreat — licking our wounds — months later.

Example: Once we launched something called Wildfire (naming is our superpower), in which we would get existing restaurants run our brands from their premises. Seemed perfect on paper: capex-light, tremendously scalable.

We got super excited, went full steam ahead, and then we met the market — the product ratings nosedived as the “Wildfiree” did not have skin in the game. We effected a hasty retreat.

Over time, the bar has become much higher for anything seeking capital. It’s not about the number of experiments, which should be many; it’s about which ones to double down on.

Two: Letting cash dictate strategy rather than the other way round

When we raised cash, we went all guns blazing, hiring overnight, expanding fast, launching new business lines. And then, as cash became tight, we would become more prudent, better capital allocators, and sharper in our strategy.

Instead of a coherent scale-up strategy dictating cash sources and use, we did it the other way around.

Today, I am convinced that there is no prize for scaling fast unless you are in a business with a network effect and a “winner take all” dynamic.

I am also convinced that you need a CFO early on who will manage your cash, like a Sherpa manages your oxygen cylinder on a big mountain.

Three: Looking at the scoreboard, instead of the field,

Buffett, like Tagore, has a line for all situations. Once he said, “Games are won focusing on the playing field — not by looking at the scoreboard”.

There were a number of years when my mood would swing up/down along with sales and ratings. Once, I got home, beaming (a rare sight those days), my daughter looked at me and said, “Looks like sales are up.” It was a maddeningly stupid way to build a business.

Over time, we moved to written docs/disciplined reviews that exposed the right issues (more on this, maybe in another post) and helped us focus on the right inputs — right food innovation, technology, incentive structure that rewarded the right actions, behaviour, and attitude.

Results started taking care of themselves.

I must say, in spite of everything, the culture at Rebel remained full of founder mentality — purpose-led, ownership-driven, and customer-obsessed.

That is the only reason we could reverse these gigantic, multi-year mistakes, learn from them, and eventually create the most exciting flywheel of innovation, platform thinking, and growth — on the infinite canvas of food.

And that defines the Rebels more than any mistake — big or small.

I am Not Trying to Be Kotler (Especially Not by Advancing the Alphabet)

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that customers make decisions very differently depending on the type of product or service — and no unified set of As, Bs, or even Ps can fully capture that.

Now, I’m not here to complicate things. If anything, I’m trying to simplify some mind-numbing complexity into something a bit more manageable.

So here’s a mental model I’ve found useful. Like all good frameworks, it’s a 2x2 (is there any aspect of life that can’t be described with one?). And like all 2x2s, it’s a generalization, not a law — so please be kind when you find an exception.

The Axes:

• X-Axis → Ticket Size
• (How much money a customer spends to buy something)
• Y-Axis → Product Differentiation
• (How obviously and objectively different the product is to the customer in a blind test)

Top Right: The Quadrant of RESEARCH

High Price, High Differentiation

If the product is visibly and objectively differentiated and also costs a bomb — think house, car, or company offsite — customers will dive into deep research before buying.

Marketers here need to help customers search, compare, read reviews, go deep into specs. Think configurators, videos, brochures, transparent pricing, and FAQs

Bottom Right: The Quadrant of REPUTATION

High Price, Low Differentiation

If it’s expensive but hard to differentiate objectively — like colleges, hospitals, or surgeons — people default to reputation.

No shortcuts here. This takes time. Years, sometimes decades. You can’t build the next Harvard in ten years. But once built, it’s surprisingly hard to destroy unless there is a gigantic screw up.

Bottom Left: The Quadrant of RECALL

Low Price, Low Differentiation

You can’t tell one from another in blind testing, and it doesn’t cost much. You just buy the bran you remember first. Shampoos. Colas. Soaps.

This is the Kotler quadrant — brand building through the 4 Ps. Big budget. Consistency, communication, mass media, and sheer repetition. Flood the shelf. Flood the mind.

Top Left: The Quadrant of RESONANCE & RECOMMENDATION

Low Price, High Differentiation

Restaurants, Cafes. Apparel. Indie music. Here, you feel something. You connect. And you recommend — sometimes obsessively.

This is the quadrant where founders and marketers blur into each other. The best ones here start with purpose — then build product, community, and storytelling around it. World’s most interesting brands are built here — The Whole Truth, Patagonia, Nike, Royal Enfield (arguably mid-ticket, but it’s 1/15th of a car)

Of course, the lines aren’t perfect. Brands migrate — from Research to Reputation, or Recall to Resonance. But thinking clearly about where your product sits today — and where you want it to go — can be a quiet game-changer in a sea of sameness..