Can Bhavish Aggarwal fix Ola Electric's problems - or is he one of them?

One evening last September, Pitambar Panda, a 24-year-old product designer in the Indian city of Pune, mounted his pearly white electric Ola scooter. He accelerated noiselessly through the city’s busy avenues on his way home from work.

When he was shopping for a scooter a few months earlier, Panda, short on funds, chose to go electric to save on gas. He was one of the founders of a small food-delivery app, for which he sometimes made deliveries. Affordable, stylish, and loaded with features, the Ola S1X Plus was a natural choice. It offered a range of 150 kilometers (93 miles), a top speed of 90 kilometers per hour, and a novel keyless start system that could wake the scooter up when he entered a password on his phone. At just 96,000 rupees ($1,125), it was cheaper than the alternatives.

And it was built by one of India’s most popular startups. Founded in 2010, Ola had grown from a successful ride-hailing service to become an electric-vehicle manufacturer in 2021. The media frenzy around the launch was full of breathless stories covering everything from colorways to delivery dates. Meanwhile, Ola’s CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal, was being touted as a visionary. “[Ola] just seemed like the best option to me,” Panda told Rest of World.

But as he drove through traffic that September evening, Panda recalled, the scooter’s screen suddenly glitched: PARKED and SYSTEM ISSUE flashed in blue on the 7-inch monitor between the handlebars. The motor shut down, slowing the scooter suddenly. A motorbike smashed into Panda, and flung him from the scooter. He fell hard on the asphalt, breaking his collarbone in half.

A close-up of an Ola electric scooter display showing a speed of 53 km/h, alongside options to play music and a distance of 57 km.

Panda spent a week in the hospital, where the doctors implanted metal plates into his shoulder. When he returned home, he wrote a LinkedIn post about the accident, including a photo of himself in a sling, his X-ray, and an image of the scooter’s display screen showing a jarring combination of his 24kph speed and the declaration PARKED. He also recounted how he’d been experiencing odd problems with his Ola from the start — like the scooter shutting down to automatically update its software when Panda was stationary at traffic lights — and had tried and failed several times to get help from the company’s customer service. “Great job, Bhavish Aggarwal,” Panda wrote. “I hope you’re enjoying this success.”

Aggarwal is one of the most recognizable faces in India’s startup industry. With his boyish smile and boisterous personality, he rose to fame in the mid-2010s while still under 30 after besting Uber to make Ola Cabs India’s top ride-hailing app. Seemingly leaping from one success to another, he then adopted a new mission of revitalizing and greening the domestic scooter industry in India, where people buy five times as many two-wheelers as cars.

“Just like the revolution that gave us our freedom in 1947, this one will give us our freedom from petrol,” Aggarwal declared at the launch of the scooter business in August 2021. Often referred to as India’s Elon Musk, Aggarwal has matched the Tesla CEO’s penchant for social media feuds, long workdays, demanding expectations of employees, and towering ambition. In recent years, he has also repeatedly praised India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister while positioning himself as a patriot working to take his country to new heights. “Tesla is for the West; Ola is for the rest,” Aggarwal has often said in his public appearances.

Two electric scooters parked at an Ola hypercharger station, with one rider standing beside the scooters. The charging station features a tall sign with 'OLA' and offers multiple charging points. A service booth with a yellow roof is visible in the background, surrounded by greenery.

As for Ola’s scooters, Aggarwal vowed: “Quite simply, it is the best scooter ever built.”

Over 100,000 people preordered scooters on the day Ola Electric opened reservations. By April 2024, the company had cornered over half of the domestic EV scooter market. Ola Electric’s subsequent IPO last August made Aggarwal one of India’s youngest billionaires. But since then, with increasing speed, the company has fallen back to Earth, stymied by a declining market share, a sinking share price, and a series of scooter failures that have left some riders scratched, bruised, or worse.

Drivers have reported that their Ola scooters spontaneously combusted — and in viral videos from across the country, some scooters can be seen smoking and aflame. Drivers have also recounted dangerous accidents caused by scooters shifting into reverse at full acceleration. In one such incident, a 65-year-old man reportedly received 10 stitches on his head after his Ola tossed him into a concrete wall. One man claimed his son’s scooter accelerated when the brakes were applied. Some Ola scooters have had their front suspensions snap in half. A woman was hospitalized with severe facial injuries when the front wheel of her scooter broke away mid-drive. Ola said this incident was caused by a road accident. It has pushed back publicly on other claims — once saying that a scooter fire was caused by faulty aftermarket parts, and in the case of the scooter that allegedly accelerated while braking, blaming the driver for speeding. At the launch of Ola’s new scooter line in January, Aggarwal jokingly suggested the safety issues had been exaggerated: “Many people fan the fire, pun intended.”

The company’s share price has sunk by a third since its high last August. So far this year, Ola has sold fewer electric scooters than the established domestic two-wheeler brands it once dominated, TVS and Bajaj. It has also fallen behind Ather, another Bengaluru-based scooter startup.

Aggarwal has been pilloried on social media by critics. In September, one frustrated customer set an Ola showroom on fire in Karnataka; a month later, someone at a service station in Delhi told a journalist he was so angry he also wanted to burn one down. In October, Ola stock dipped 10% when Aggarwal got into a Muskian fight with a popular comedian on X who had criticized the company’s after-sales service. Meanwhile, Ola’s signature cabs business has fallen well behind its rival Uber, while attempted expansions into food delivery and e-commerce have failed to take off. Through it all, buoyed by foreign venture capital, Aggarwal has remained as bullish as ever, seemingly unmoved by Ola Electric’s falling sales numbers, shortening market share, and rising chorus of complaints.

Rest of World interviewed nearly a dozen former senior Ola employees to explore what has gone wrong at the company and whether Aggarwal can turn things around. All spoke on condition of anonymity — even those who had nothing but positive things to say. “I am in the startup domain, and I would [like to] continue for the next two decades of my career, ” said one former executive, who spent much of an hourlong interview praising Aggarwal for his problem-solving and business acumen. Those who’ve worked with Aggarwal closely find him undeniably brilliant, with a penchant for obsessively attacking and solving big problems.

Some former executives also said that Aggarwal micromanages and routinely berates even his senior hires, leading to chronic instability. Nearly half of Ola Electric’s employees departed in the last fiscal year, including several senior executives. Amid Ola Electric’s rapid expansion, meanwhile, the company has fallen short on execution. Repeated safety mishaps and inadequate servicing have led to more than 10,000 customer complaints and an investigation by the Central Consumer Protection Authority. A Bloomberg investigation in March found that among the roughly 3,400 physical Ola stores for which it could access data, only about 100 had the required trade certificates — and that authorities had been raiding and shutting down showrooms around the country.

Aggarwal turned down multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. Abhishek Chauhan, a spokesperson for Ola, declined to respond to a list of questions, but stressed “the complexity, scale, and ambition of what is being built. Issues wherever they have arisen, have been addressed transparently, whether through improvements and expansion of sales and servicing network, or ongoing investments in customer experience and product safety.”

He added, “Bhavish has always showcased an entrepreneurial vision and courage that has challenged the status quo of Indian tech companies. He has led companies that embraced global trends by bringing and developing them for India.”

A former senior executive described Aggarwal as intensely driven by his grand visions: “‘I want to be the fastest person to the market. I want to have the biggest factory. I want to have the most market share. I want to define the electric revolution. I want to destroy the competition.’ These are the things that motivate [Bhavish].”

But, this executive and others said, Aggarwal can also lose interest in the follow-through of his big projects. “Today, I think the only focus is on [Ola] Electric,” another former executive told Rest of World in December. “Something next will come tomorrow.”

Located at a perpetually traffic-choked intersection in Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, Ola’s headquarters sit inside a dreary, glass-fronted office building. Last November, in a cafe a few miles away, I met Zishaan Hayath, one of Ola’s earliest investors.

A fellow graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, Hayath had just launched his own successful phone-commerce startup by the time Aggarwal graduated in 2008. Now 43 and also the founder of an edtech startup, he’s candid and affable, with a voice that carried across the cafe. He said he remained impressed with Aggarwal. “Put him in any room, he’ll be one of the smartest guys there,” he told me. “Raw IQ power. Ability to process things, learn new things, read up and just grasp it.”

In 2010, Aggarwal had just quit a post-graduation job at Microsoft to start Ola Cabs with another IIT-Bombay friend, Ankit Bhati. Aggarwal and Hayath would meet weekly at a Mumbai restaurant where Aggarwal always ordered the same dish — tangy lemon chicken — as the pair discussed what Ola could be. Aggarwal was a lean and earnest dominant-caste kid with an easy grin. Ola’s original proposition was to offer a long-distance cab service. Hayath was more impressed with Aggarwal than his idea, and told him to call when he started raising money.

A year later, Hayath got that call. Aggarwal had expanded his concept to include short-distance travel within the city and found two angel investors: Rehan Yar Khan, founder of Orios Venture Partners; and Khan’s friend, Anupam Mittal, the founder of matchmaking website Shaadi.com. The duo put together around 5 million rupees ($58,600), with smaller investments coming in from Hayath and others. Khan recalled Aggarwal going to a Mumbai restaurant frequented by celebrities and expats to hand out his card. The early goal, Khan told Rest of World, was to get to 100 rides a day.

By the end of 2011, Ola was clocking more than 50 rides a day, just enough to keep the lights on at the office that doubled as Aggarwal and Bhati’s apartment, Khan recalled. Then Khan got a surprising email from a friend, who told him that an American investor wanted to speak with him about Ola. It was Lee Fixel, then a partner at the New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management. Fixel was becoming known, Khan said, for a simple strategy: Look for the next Amazon, the next Grubhub, or the next Uber in the crowded parts of the world and inject them with funding. (Fixel couldn’t be reached for comment.) Fixel said he had nothing to do over the holidays, Khan said, “so he started poking around to see if there is an Uber in India.” Khan put Fixel in touch with Aggarwal for a phone call, and the offer came together quickly. Khan recalled being in Abu Dhabi for a Coldplay concert, and running around the city to find a shop where he could print the papers he needed to sign.

Tiger Global pledged an initial investment of around $4 million, then co-invested with another firm the following year for another $20 million. Aggarwal has been defensive over the years about being compared to Uber, pointing out that Ola was his original idea. But in Khan’s telling, Fixel was inspired to put so much cash into such a small and relatively unknown startup thanks to Uber’s headline-grabbing rise. Following the investment, the company grew, and Ola was operational in about a dozen Indian cities by mid-2014 and clocking thousands of rides every day.

Ola’s quick rise caught the attention of Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, who visited India in 2014 with the intention of expanding his venture capital empire to the country’s rapidly growing e-commerce market. Former SoftBank executive Alok Sama has recounted negotiating its investment with Aggarwal, settling at $210 million, while SoftBank made a similar deal with the two young founders of an Amazon-like website. As Uber and Amazon knocked on the Indian market, Sama writes in his 2024 book, “I was rooting for my ‘chill, normal dudes’ in their battle against America’s brashest exponents of capitalism.”

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal in a black suit and blue shirt leans against a yellow and green auto rickshaw, with palm trees reflected in the glass building behind him.

The yearslong battle with Uber would transform Ola — and Aggarwal along with it, according to people who worked with him at the time. Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber, was fast-moving, given to flouting regulatory norms, and cutthroat. Before 2014, “he was quite a chilled-out guy,” Khan recalled of the pre-Uber Aggarwal, “this kid roaming around in shorts with his SLR camera.” He continued, “The phase two of Bhavish was the entry of Uber into India. That changed him as a person because it was a bloodbath, it was intense competition. … You had to be impatient back then, because you were fighting a do-or-die battle with the other guy [Kalanick], who was super impatient.”

While using the SoftBank investment to absorb Ola’s main domestic competitor, TaxiForSure, Ola allowed users to pay for the ride in cash, then the primary mode of transaction in India. Ola was also the first to offer auto-rickshaw rides on its app, further increasing its reach, as Aggarwal pushed the company forward with extreme urgency. “There was this blitzkrieg,” recalled a former executive, describing the company going into “steroids mode” with launches in city after city.

For the time, it seemed Aggarwal had checkmated Uber. The battle with Uber also taught him to evolve his thinking, the same former executive said, from “great depth to phenomenal width.” To run a successful cab-aggregating business was no longer enough — Ola had to become a full-on tech company. “And anything to do with any dimension of mobility, we want to throw our hat in there, right? And before we knew it, we had new experiments,” the executive said.

Most of these experiments — food-delivery services, an e-commerce venture, a platform for selling used cars — either fizzled out or were seemingly put on the back burner. But in 2017, Aggarwal registered Ola Electric, a subsidiary of Ola Cabs. It received scant public attention until 2019, when it secured major investments from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, and SoftBank.

Then came the pandemic, which brought Ola’s ride-sharing business to a screeching halt. The Indian government enforced one of the most severe lockdowns on the planet with only essential workers allowed to venture outside. The pandemic would ultimately shrink Ola’s revenue by 65% by late 2021.

A large advertisement for Ola cabs in Delhi, featuring a smartphone displaying the Ola app interface, stating 'ALL CABS FROM DELHI AT ₹8/km!', with a white car graphic and a green background. A man is walking in front of the billboard.

With the company’s ride-hailing business staring at an uncertain future, former executives told me, Aggarwal became hyperfocused on the idea of building electric scooters. India, the fifth-largest economy in the world, is a country where 10% of the population owns 77% of the wealth and very few people can afford cars. As a result, around 250 million people in a country of 1.4 billion rely on mopeds, scooters, and motorcycles. For much of the past 20 years, the two-wheeler market was dominated by Honda, with its Activa model becoming practically synonymous with scooters in the country. Meanwhile, India’s domestic scooter giants, Bajaj and TVS, had fallen behind.

By 2019, only 1% of vehicles sold in India were EVs, and among India’s established scooter brands, only Hero offered electric drivetrains. But with petrol prices rising, global battery technologies improving, and EV hype taking hold globally, Aggarwal reasoned, electric scooters were a perfect product for India.

In May 2020, Ola Electric acquired a Dutch e-scooter manufacturer called Ertego in a distress sale. Ertego’s Appscooter became Ola’s prototype model, and helped Aggarwal catch up with his domestic competitors, who were years ahead in research and implementation. The next step was to ramp up the production speed. By the end of 2020, according to people who worked with him at the time, Aggarwal had decided to build a massive scooter-manufacturing factory three hours south of Bengaluru, scaled to produce 2 million scooters annually. He fell into a mad rush to start deliveries, hoping to make the scooter as cheap as possible and claim the biggest share in the untapped market. He set himself, and everyone around him, a seemingly impossible timeline.

“Everyone told Bhavish that it will take two years to build the factory,” a former senior executive at Ola told me. “He built it in eight or nine months.”

Stepping into the Ola conference room in early 2021 must have felt like walking into the inner workings of Aggarwal’s brain. He’d pasted rainbow-colored Gantt charts floor to ceiling around the room. This was the operations center for Ola’s ambitious new plan to launch an EV scooter factory. And not just any factory — one advertised to be the biggest two-wheeler factory in the world, spread across 2 million square meters (500 acres). Ola had just one problem: The company had never built a factory.

By all accounts, Aggarwal was a quick learner. Three Ola executives, who were part of frenetic daily meetings at the time, told me Aggarwal involved himself in everything from land surveying and excavation to acquiring building materials and the equipment for the assembly lines, hiring security for the site, bringing on construction crews and a workforce, and even calculating things like the amount of industrial oxygen the facility would need for metal cutting.

Each detail was a line item on the Gantt charts: endless rows of color-coded cells outlining individual tasks and their schedules in the process of construction. “To build a factory and get it production-ready — you can imagine the number of line items in these Gantt charts,” recalled the former senior executive. “They were these long Excel sheets. And he got them pasted in his meeting room. Two walls were covered ceiling to floor in those [pages].”

Aggarwal spent endless hours in that room, multiple sources said. He would call staffers in, ask for updates, and send them out with new instructions. He’d stand on a chair to point at specific lines on the printed charts, and ask specific questions about everything from concrete to lithium. “What about this? Where is that? Is this finished? He would have an input on every single line, and there were thousands of lines,” the former senior executive said. “You couldn’t bullshit him, because he was always prepared. He knew what he was talking about.”

When construction of the factory was completed in August 2021, Ola advertised the plant as “ground zero” for India’s coming EV revolution. On August 15, India’s Independence Day, Aggarwal declared the factory’s launch in a video address from its roof. He stood smiling and wide-stanced before a rolling camera, dressed in dark jeans and an open-collar blue shirt, its sleeves rolled up. He layered it with a fluorescent visibility vest bearing the Ola logo. “The past paradigms of manufacturing were built in China, but the future of manufacturing will be written in India,” he declared, bringing the tips of his outstretched fingers together for emphasis. “A revolution that we will start here in India and then take around the world.”

A construction site with heavy machinery, including trucks and excavators, in operation. In the foreground, a worker in a yellow vest and white hard hat observes the activity, holding a document in one hand while standing on uneven terrain.

But even amid the celebrations that August, some executives thought they saw cracks forming. A former group vice president remembered watching the big sales screen that had been installed in the Ola offices as it filled with bookings: “I thought, wow, people are really going to give him their money.”

The 100,000 reservations in the first 24 hours were a major step toward Aggarwal’s dream of turning electric scooters into a mass product in India. It was an idea with government backing: Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said the previous year that he wanted India’s share of EVs to rise from 1% to 30% in a decade, and supported government subsidies to make that a reality. Those subsidies brought down the price of an Ola scooter by a third.

Over the next three years, Ola jump-started a largely dormant electric scooter market, making a popular, viable product. Vloggers met in cities with their Olas and made videos encouraging others to go electric. Some recorded themselves taking their scooters on long-distance rides from Mumbai to the holiday destinations of Goa and Lonavala. Others took their Olas off-roading in the Himalayan foothills. Seemingly every announcement Ola made about its scooters generated press headlines, feeding the excitement.

Between 2022 and 2024, Ola sold almost 800,000 scooters, about a third of all electric scooter sales in India. During that same period, India’s market for electric two-wheelers quadrupled to 6% of overall sales in the segment. Ola’s success seemed to impel the established giants who’d so far thought of their electric offerings as niche products: In the summer of 2022, TVS updated its iQube electric scooter with a better range and lower price. Bajaj followed suit the next year with its Chetak and Urbane models. Yet despite their decades of manufacturing experience, Ola held a strong lead.

The Ola factory, meanwhile, was also widely celebrated. In August 2023, the facility reportedly employed an all-women manufacturing workforce of 3,000 people, an exceptional departure from the norm in a country where men make up more than 80% of the workforce in this sector. The operating system for its scooters was developed in-house. As Ola worked to build a network of exclusive servicing centers across the country, it also bypassed the traditional brick-and-mortar dealership advantage of traditional scooter makers, starting with digital-only sales via a new app.

Even as reports of defective scooters and faulty customer service emerged, Ola maintained its momentum. Ahead of Ola Electric’s August 2024 IPO — the first for a major Indian automaker in two decades — a Bloomberg columnist captured the excitement by calling the company “a proxy for revival of India’s stunted manufacturing ambitions.”

In March, I took a cab to an Ola service station in Delhi, one of hundreds across the country and among the busiest in the capital. Located in a garage behind a shopping complex, it had no external branding. I found it by following a trail of broken scooters that stretched out to the road. Inside, amid a heap of cardboard boxes and scattered spare parts, a few mechanics were fiddling with Ola scooter carcasses.

This was the same service station that a disgruntled customer had suggested setting aflame six months prior. On the day of my visit, though, things were calm. A customer sat patiently on a broken chair while waiting to get his brakes fixed, and told me he was happy enough with his scooter. I asked the manager, a middle-aged man in a T-shirt and jeans, how things had been in recent months with Ola constantly in the news for complaints about its service network. He told me it was because of the rains, and that when the scooters get wet in the rain, they “start acting up.” With a salesman’s zeal, he assured me the next version of Ola scooters would overcome such problems: “Gen 3 won’t be suffering under rain.” (Ola [has](https://www.olaelectric.com/safety#:~:text=The Ola battery comes with,have nothing to worry about!) said its scooters function well in the rain.)

Angry customers, a falling stock price and market share, and a scooter whose riders report many types of malfunctions — how had it come to this for Ola Electric?

Troubles with the scooters started early on. Nearly eight months after launch, in March 2022, a report of an Ola scooter catching fire emerged online, prompting a government investigation. The company responded proactively, recalling more than 1,400 scooters in what they called a “pre-emptive measure.” Sales slowed for several months, then resumed their steady rise, even amid continued reports of scooter accidents and malfunctions. In 2023, Ola sold more than 260,000 scooters, emerging as an industry leader. By March 2024, it sold more than twice the number of electric scooters of its closest competitor, TVS, marking the height of its popularity. Since then, apart from a period of excitement generated by Ola Electric’s stock-market debut, its sales have been in free fall.

The company squandered its early momentum on the market, Vivek Kumar, a Bengaluru-based automotive project manager at the analytics and consulting firm Global Data, told Rest of World. “Issues such as operational inefficiencies, limited innovation, and shortcomings in after-sales service have dampened consumer demand,” he said, adding that Ola’s “hurried” and “premature” scooter launch had led to “early-stage problems, including battery fires and mechanical failures” that eroded customer trust. The celebratory vlogs that once boosted the Ola brand were eventually overshadowed by videos of customers stuck with their unmoving scooters on the side of the road.

Ola’s app-only sales model also ultimately proved limiting, leading the company to open 4,000 showrooms, some of which now face government shutdowns and raids in response to customer complaints. TVS and Bajaj, which have thousands of storefronts and dealerships around the country and whose advertising jingles are recognizable to generations of Indians, have eaten away at Ola’s market share. In January 2025, both companies matched Ola in electric scooter sales. In February and March, they raced ahead.

Ola has also fallen behind Ather Energy, the buzzy Bengaluru-based e-scooter startup. In February, according to government data, Ola sold just over 8,600 scooters, down from some 34,000 the previous year, while Ather sold 11,994 units. Ola has attributed the drop in sales to “disruptions” in its vehicle registration process. Citing the same purported issue, the company has not disclosed its sales data for March. Indian financial journalists have pushed back against Ola’s explanation. (The government’s next report on vehicle registration data is expected on May 1.)

Several executives who spoke to Rest of World raised concerns about Aggarwal’s management style. He can be a brilliant, hands-on, demanding boss, executives told me, but also severely impatient, berating his senior staff using language so vulgar that when I asked for examples — whether we were in an office, a cafe, or a bar — three interviewees lowered their voices to a whisper out of politeness before answering. But in conference rooms, Aggarwal would bark these lines at the top of his lungs. “How many times do I have to explain this to you, madarchod [motherfucker]?” a senior executive recounted Aggarwal saying, while the former group vice president recalled, “You are so fucking stupid, behenchod [sisterfucker], you don’t even get it that you don’t get it.”

The former group vice president described Aggarwal as brash but fair, and saw some of his frustrations with his subordinates as valid. “I had never seen him ask a nonprofessional question in the meetings,” this person recalled, blaming Ola’s executives for too often failing to provide adequate answers. “They crumble after questions, and then [Aggarwal] would get even more angry.”

Three former executives told me they saw Aggarwal throw pens at people to get their attention. Two of them said they saw him tear pages and smash laptops on tables to express disappointment or impatience. Sometimes, to show everyone he had had enough, Aggarwal would, without saying a word, get up and walk out of the conference room and out of the building, and sit on a patch of grass outside. Back in the conference room, some of the highest paid executives in India’s startup industry sat anxiously, wondering when it might be safe to approach him. “Anything could tick him off,” the former group vice president said.

“[Ola] is a solar system,” a former senior executive told me, with Aggarwal as the sun — “the hottest part.” Pressing on with his metaphor, he continued: “At my [level of] involvement, I was probably Earth or a little beyond. But there were people right next to it … Mercury and Venus. I would see them occasionally burning. I could see the instant terminations happening, public humiliations.” Then the Venus and the Mercury were gone, and the executive took their place: “The closer you are to the sun, the more uninhabitable it becomes.”

In just the past year, Ola Electric — which had an employee attrition rate of 47% in fiscal year 2023 and 44% in fiscal year 2024 — saw the departures of a group vice president, chief marketing officer, chief product officer, and head of sales, among others. Ola’s cabs vertical lost its chief financial officer, chief business officer, and chief executive officer. At Ola Krutrim, Aggarwal’s artificial-intelligence venture, the business head departed.

Such a high turnover rate hurts a company’s ability to attract and retain top talent and “affects a lot of things like project continuity,” N Shivakumar, a Bengaluru-based human resources expert, told me. It should also, he added, lead to questions from investors, since “how well you’re doing internally … makes it very evident how well you can do externally.”

Chauhan, the Ola spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Aggarwal’s management style or alleged problems with the company’s scooters and business. “At Ola, we take immense pride in having built three futuristic businesses — Ola Consumer, Ola Electric, and Ola Krutrim — each of which has been a category creator and a force multiplier for India’s positioning in the global innovation ecosystem. From fundamentally transforming personal transportation in India to launching one of the world’s largest two-wheeler EV manufacturing facilities run by an all-women workforce, to building India’s own AI models and supercomputers through Krutrim, these are not incremental achievements — they are bold, nation-building milestones,” he said.

“We categorically reject any insinuation that prioritizes speed over safety, or vision over responsibility,” Chauhan added. “Ola Electric has a community of a million strong customers, holds a market-leading position in EV two-wheelers, and has catalyzed an entire ecosystem of EV mobility. That journey, like all cutting-edge innovation, came with its unique set of challenges, but the company’s resolve remains unwaveringly forward.”

While Aggarwal’s subordinates see much in his mindset and behavior to remind them of the popular image of Elon Musk — whom Aggarwal has said he admires — there is also a crucial difference. Though Tesla also has high turnover, Musk has kept some of his top deputies, like Steve Davis (originally of SpaceX) and Lars Moravy (Tesla), in his close circle for years, even decades. “Elon has … these people, this team, and he makes sure that this team — while they might be having a tough time — remain constantly motivated by the larger vision,” one former executive who worked closely with Aggarwal for two years told me. But Aggarwal, this person continued, “doesn’t trust anybody” to run his businesses for him, and “won’t let them do their jobs without constant interference.”

One essential similarity between the two is that both are the privileged sons of segregated societies. The Aggarwals are among the most influential clans in the Bania community, historically one of the most affluent classes in the matrix of India’s caste system. The two richest Indians are both Banias, as are the founders of a number of prominent Indian conglomerates, and the tradition carries through to Indian startups. At least one of the founders of Ola, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Myntra, Zomato, Urban Ladder, IndiaMart, Oyo Rooms, Lenskart, and Shaadi.com — 10 prominent Indian tech companies — is a Bania. Firms founded or run by an Aggarwal received 40% of all investment into India’s e-commerce sector in 2012, according to India’s top-selling financial newspaper, which was the year Ola got its first round of funding. Most Indians can’t come close to this access to social networks and capital, or premier schools like the IITs that are almost a prerequisite to enter Indian startups. “I am a Bania,” Aggarwal told an interviewer in 2023, describing his path to becoming a businessman. “I had those genes in me.”

A man wearing a traditional blue kurta stands in a modern lobby pointing outward, with his left hand on his hip. Behind him is a large sign with the word 'OLA', a yellow scooter, and decorative plants.

In recent months, as China’s DeepSeek grabbed headlines and Silicon Valley leaders, including Musk, continued to pivot toward artificial intelligence, Aggarwal’s focus seemingly shifted to Krutrim AI, which he has said will be a ChatGPT-like large language model with “Indian cultural sensibilities.” Ola Krutrim already has a billion-dollar valuation, with $50 million from the India arm of Matrix Partners, which stood to make nearly 10 times its investment in Ola Electric’s IPO. Aggarwal has also partnered with Nvidia to develop an Indian supercomputer. In February, two weeks after the release of DeepSeek’s AI chatbot, he announced he’d be investing $230 million in Krutrim. Over the next year, Aggarwal posted on X, he aims to quintuple that investment: “Our focus is on developing AI for India.”

In March, even as Ola Electric started delivering its third-generation scooters, it announced plans to slash over 1,000 jobs due to projected losses and declining market share. The cuts will take hold across departments including procurement, fulfilment, charging infrastructure, and customer relations.

Many Ola Electric customers, meanwhile, are still stuck with their scooters. When Panda, the product designer in Pune, recovered from his accident, he told me, his LinkedIn post about the ordeal had drawn significant attention. As like-minded Ola users, along with many of Aggarwal’s critics, shared the post widely, Ola’s customer care got in touch and took back the vehicle to make repairs. “They told me we have made the changes. They restored multiple things, they have changed the body,” Panda recalled. “And they told me to delete the post.” (Rest of World could not independently verify this exchange.)

He refused, and his scooter was repaired and returned free of charge. “Right now I’m not facing any issues,” he said. “But I’m just waiting for it. The issue will come back.” When I asked if he was afraid to ride the scooter, he responded, “What choice do I have?”

As it turned out, Panda had started freelancing at a startup in the business of two-wheeler EVs: It manufactures electric bikes. The company’s mindset is to build methodically — and, as its modest funding shows, it is unlikely to attract major attention in India’s competitive startup industry. “We are running very slow,” Panda said. “For the past one year, we are working on just the one product. Our whole mindset is make the product [safe], then release it to the customer.”

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Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, totaling 33 million nationwide and making up 99.9 percent of all businesses, according to the [U.S. Small Business Administration](https://advocacy.sba.gov/2023/03/07/frequently-asked-questions-about-small-business-2023/#:~:text=Most businesses are small- 99.9,46.4% of private sector employees.). They play a critical role in job creation and economic growth.

Even as small business owners today grapple with rising costs, labor shortages, shifting tariff policies, inflation, and supply chain disruptions, business applications are surging. The U.S. averaged 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024, a 50 percent increase compared to 2019. This trend highlights the resilience of small businesses, the strength of the entrepreneurial spirit, and the enduring dream of starting a business.

To shed light on what it really takes to launch a business, I sat down with my Hello Alice co-founder and small business expert Carolyn Rodz as part of Yahoo Finance show, “The Big Idea.” Together, we broke down three essential steps every entrepreneur should take to turn their dream into a thriving business in this uncertain time.

1. Ensure the market is ready for your business.

The key is to carve out the time to deeply understand the value you’ll provide to your target market. Then you have to figure out how to capitalize. Entrepreneurs have to take calculated risks. Starting a business is challenging, but with the right mindset, preparation, and financial strategy, success is within reach. While small businesses employ nearly half of the American workforce and represent 43.5 percent of gross domestic product, they can have high fail rates and difficulty accessing capital. Keep in mind:

• Is your product or service unique to the market? Answer the problem you are fixing or opportunities you are providing.
• Is there competition that you need to understand in order to dominate? Make a plan to overtake them or partner to launch alongside in the market.
• The time of year matters in marketing. Launch when your customer is active. For example, is there a push for back-to-school shopping, holiday engagement, or tax services?

2. Manage your capital ahead of launching a business.

One of the biggest challenges new entrepreneurs face is financial management. Carolyn and I took a frugal approach when launching Hello Alice. We used credit cards, shared a babysitter, and commuted two hours on public transit to build our company. Here are some of our financial tips for those just starting out:

• You can bootstrap, but remember to avoid excessive debt. While financing is necessary, relying solely on credit cards or personal loans can be risky.
• Explore small business grants. Government and private grants can provide much-needed capital without repayment obligations. In the early days of Hello Alice, we applied for every grant we could find, and that experience shaped our mission. It’s why we’ve made it a priority to raise $8 million in grants and given away more than $57 million in grants through Hello Alice. We know firsthand how much they can mean to a growing business.
• Diversify your capital: The best funding comes from customer receipts. Managing your capital will be your most important role as a CEO, from the day you start until you are a billion dollar company.

3. Find the right time to start your small business.

There’s no perfect moment to start a business. Most small business owners have an existing job, childcare responsibilities, or elder care commitments. Interestingly, the average age of entrepreneurs in America is 45, proving that experience and preparation often lead to success. Whether you’re launching a tech startup or a local bakery, remember:

• Make sure you have the income you need to support your personal life and household. Double-check that your expected earnings in the early days of your business align with your personal budget. Consider starting the company as a side hustle while you have a job and build up from there.
• Insurance is a real consideration. Be certain that you have medical coverage sorted out for you and your loved ones as you get started.
• Time will be tougher than capital. With your current obligations, evaluate whether you can realistically dedicate the time needed to build your business.

In this time of uncertainty, remember that the capital that is least expensive and most reliable is the kind you don’t owe back. In other words, money from grants—or from your customers.

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Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. Its meteoric rise [to a $300 billion valuation](https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/31/openai-raises-40b-at-300b-post-money-valuation/#:~:text=OpenAI raises $40B at $300B post-money valuation | TechCrunch) has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant to create startups of their own.

The hype around OpenAI is so high that some of these startups, like Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, have been able to raise billions of dollars without even launching a product.

But there are lots of other startups in the OpenAI mafia ecosystem. These range from AI search giant Perplexity to xAI, the new owner of X (formerly Twitter.) There’s also smaller outfits with some futuristic plans, like Living Carbon, which is creating plants that suck more carbon out of the atmosphere, or Prosper Robotics, which is building a robot butler.

Below is a roundup of the most notable startups founded by OpenAI alumni.

Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and John Schulman — Anthropic

Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in 2021 to form their own startup, San Francisco-based Anthropic, that has long touted a focus on AI safety. Later, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined Anthropic in 2024, pledging to build a “safe AGI.” OpenAI reportedly remains multiple times larger than Anthropic by revenue ($3.7 billion compared to $1 billion for 2024, The Information reported). But Anthropic has quickly grown to become OpenAI’s biggest rival and was valued at $61.5 billion in March 2025.

Ilya Sutskever — Safe Superintelligence

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 after he was reportedly part of a failed effort to replace CEO Sam Altman. Shortly afterward, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, with “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence,” he says. Details about what exactly the startup is up to are scant: It has no product and no revenue yet. But investors are clamoring for a piece anyway, and it’s been able to raise $2 billion, with its latest valuation reportedly rising to $32 billion this month. SSI is based in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Mira Murati — Thinking Machines Lab

Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, left OpenAI last year to found her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged from stealth in February 2025, announcing (rather vaguely) that it will build AI that’s more “customizable” and “capable.” The San Francisco AI startup has no product or revenue but plenty of former top OpenAI researchers and is reportedly in the process of raising a massive $2 billion seed round valuing it at $10 billion, minimum.

Aravind Srinivas — Perplexity

Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist at OpenAI for a year until 2022, when he left the company to co-found AI search engine Perplexity. His startup has attracted a string of high-profile investors like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, although it’s also caused controversy over alleged unethical web scraping. Perplexity, which is based in San Francisco, is currently raising about $1 billion at an $18 billion valuation as of March 2025.

Kyle Kosic — xAI

Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in 2023 to become a co-founder and infrastructure lead of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup that offers a rival chatbot, Grok. In 2024, however, he hopped back to OpenAI. Palo Alto-based xAI recently acquired X, formerly Twitter, and gave the combined entity a valuation of $113 billion. The all-stock transaction raised some eyebrows but is a good deal if you’re betting on Musk’s empire.

Emmett Shear — Stem AI

Emmett Shear is the former CEO of Twitch who was OpenAI’s interim CEO in November 2023 for a few days before Sam Altman rejoined the company. Shear is working on his own stealth startup, called Stem AI, TechCrunch revealed in 2024. Although there are few details about its activity and fundraising so far, it has already attracted funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

Andrej Karpathy — Eureka Labs

Computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy was a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI, leaving the startup to join Tesla in 2017 to lead its autopilot program. Karpathy is also well-known for his YouTube videos explaining core AI concepts. He left Tesla in 2024 to found his own education technology startup, Eureka Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that is building AI teaching assistants.

Jeff Arnold — Pilot

Jeff Arnold worked as OpenAI’s head of operations for five months in 2016 before co-founding San Francisco-based accounting startup Pilot in 2017. Pilot, which focused initially on doing accounting for startups, last raised a $100 million Series C in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation and has attracted investors like Jeff Bezos. Arnold worked as Pilot’s COO until leaving in 2024 to launch a VC fund.

David Luan — Adept AI Labs

David Luan was OpenAI’s engineering VP until he left in 2020. After a stint at Google, in 2021 he co-founded Adept AI Labs, a startup that builds AI tools for employees. The startup last raised $350 million at a valuation north of $1 billion in 2023, but Luan left in late 2024 to oversee Amazon’s AI agents lab after Amazon hired Adept’s founders.

Tim Shi — Cresta

Tim Shi was an early member of OpenAI’s team, where he focused on building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked at OpenAI for a year in 2017 but left to found Cresta, a San Francisco-based AI contact center startup that has raised over $270 million from VCs like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others, according to a press release.

Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — Covariant

The trio all worked at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017 as research scientists before founding Covariant, a Berkeley, California-based startup that builds foundation AI models for robots. In 2024, Amazon hired all three of the Covariant founders and about a quarter of its staff. The quasi acquisition was viewed by some as part of a broader trend of Big Tech attempting to avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Maddie Hall — Living Carbon

Maddie Hall worked on “special projects” at OpenAI but left in 2019 to co-found Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to create engineered plants that can suck more carbon out of the sky to fight climate change. Living Carbon raised a $21 million Series A round in 2023, bringing its total funding until then to $36 million, according to a press release.

Shariq Hashme — Prosper Robotics

Shariq Hashme worked for OpenAI for 9 months in 2017 on a bot that could play the popular video game Dota, per his LinkedIn profile. After a few years at data-labeling startup Scale AI, he co-founded London-based Prosper Robotics in 2021. The startup says it’s working on a robot butler for people’s homes, a hot trend in robotics that other players like Norway’s 1X and Texas-based Apptronik are also working on.

Jonas Schneider — Daedalus

Jonas Schneider led OpenAI’s software engineering for robotics team but left in 2019 to co-found Daedalus, which builds advanced factories for precision components. The San Francisco-based startup raised a $21 million Series A last year with backing from Khosla Ventures, among others.

Margaret Jennings — Kindo

Margaret Jennings worked at OpenAI in 2022 and 2023 until she left to co-found Kindo, which markets itself as an AI chatbot for enterprises. Kindo has raised over $27 million in funding, last raising a $20.6 million Series A in 2024. Jennings left Kindo in 2024 to head product and research at French AI startup Mistral, according to her LinkedIn profile.

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Warren Buffett rightly known as the world’s top investor, has wealth greater than $130 billion. But he didn’t make his riches by knowing it all—his wealth comes from real life experiences and deep knowledge in a few areas. He calls it his “circle of competence,” a core principle behind every investment he makes.

Before we begin, please know that all the stocks named further, are only for driving a point and not a recommendation.

Now, for young investors in India swept up in the frenzy of the startup surge with giants like [Zomato](https://www.financialexpress.com/market/zomato-share-price-today-live-updates-28-mar-2025-3790975/#:~:text=Zomato stock is trading at Rs 203.1, reflecting a -1.29,decrease in the stock price.) and emerging quick-commerce companies, this concept is super helpful. When navigating a space stuffed with chance and risks, getting your circle of competence straight could be the secret sauce to amassing long-term money.

What Is Buffett’s “Circle of Competence”?

Buffett’s approach is simple: stick to investments you understand. He was a strong believer of his quote, “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” In simple words, this means staying close to sectors and firms you can understand—where you can guess their long-term success. Buffett steered clear of tech shares for years since they weren’t his strong suit. He concentrated on areas within his expertise such as insurance and consumer products crafting his success story with names like Coca-Cola and American Express.

In India, most investors can’t resist running after the latest craze. And no blame there! After all the startup space is lively, hosting more than 100 unicorns with values hitting the billion-dollar mark or higher by 2025. People cannot wait to grab their share of whatever’s hot right now—like speedy shopping apps or fresh electric car businesses. But Buffett might throw a warning your way about all that. If the whole thing about a company flies over your head, you are not investing—you’re just rolling the dice.

India’s Mad Dash for Startups: Goldmine or a Pitfall?

The startup ecosystem in India is super exciting, no doubt. Big names like Swiggy, Paytm and Nykaa are grabbing investors’ attention and raking in the cash from investors. To give you an idea, in the year 2024 Indian startups got their hands on over $20 billion, and that’s straight from Tracxn’s numbers.

The young investors are all pumped to get in on the action and grab a piece of the pie. But hold up, it’s not all smooth sailing: a bunch of these new companies aren’t making money yet, and figuring out how they run their show can be a real head-scratcher. Like take these quick-commerce businesses—they swear they’ll get stuff to your door in 10 minutes flat, but the price they’re paying to pull that off? It is burning a hole in their wallet. The million-dollar question is, are they going make it in the long run? If that’s got you scratching your head, then it’s something you don’t get.

Buffett’s expertise lies in his art of asking the right questions: Do I get how this business earns cash? Is their future in a decade something I can guess? A no means he steps back even if the share looks thrilling. In India, that calls for fighting off the excitement urge and sticking to familiar territory.

Discovering Your Circle of Competence in India

Your expertise zone stems from personal history, learning, and things you like. It’s where you’re ahead knowing more than many. For the young in India, it might link to where you’re coming from or your job.

Think about a person from a farm somewhere in rural India. They’re familiar with the tough parts of farming stuff, like weird weather or wanting better seeds. This makes them get what companies, like DeHaat or Ninjacart, are doing to fix those issues with tech. Spotting the worth and chances for these businesses to grow is right up their alley. But for ones who don’t get how things move around in big cities or what city people like to buy, a startup doing fast shopping like Zepto might be a bit confusing.

As a software engineer, your circle of competence could be IT companies such as Infosys or TCS. You’re up to speed with industry patterns knowing that things are moving to the cloud, and you have the skill to judge if a firm stands in a good spot. But peeking into a biotech startup slashing at gene editing? Now that could be a bit out of your wheelhouse, unless the science is something you’ve dived into.

Why It Matters: Steering Clear of Expensive Blunders

Keeping to your known territory is not about earning cash – it also helps reduce losses. Many Indian investors in 2021 chased after crypto cash tempted by tales of massive earnings. But when things went south in 2022, they saw billions vanish. Buffett, a long-time skeptic who has called crypto a “mirage,” kept his distance. Crypto was beyond his expertise so he steered clear of it.

In India, the same mistakes cropped up with startups. During the pandemic, heaps of investors threw money at edtech companies such as Byju’s, but then the values tanked when expansion hit the brakes. If you weren’t clued in about how edtech companies rely more on strong marketing than lasting earnings, you ended up in a soup probably. The wisdom from Buffett is very simple to understand stay away from putting your cash into companies that seem like a mystery to you, even if it seems super exciting.

Slapping the Circle on Modern Market Trends: A Real-World Example

Check out this actual case to spot the rule at work. Picture two stocks out there now: the first one is over 45% down from its all-time high, and the second is over 40%down from its all-time high. These lower prices might look like sweet deals, but Buffett would ask the question: Do you get how these companies operate?

Imagine the first company dabbles in high-tech stuff for farms, like automating things that take a lot of manual work. Now, if you’ve got roots in farming, you see the huge chance here—consider that India’s got this massive $400 billion agriculture industry, but it’s also got some serious problems, like not enough productivity. So, look and see if this business is fixing a legit issue. If it is, you might just have spotted a probable goldmine that’s right up your alley, kind of like what investing whiz Warren Buffett would find.

On the flip side, imagine the second company to be a fresh fintech venture that’s a bit tricky to get, you know, like it lets people buy things now and pay for it later. Figuring out where it’s headed might be tough. And if you don’t get your head around the potential messes it could run into—like government red tape or users not paying their debts—you’re probably better off not touching it with a ten-foot pole.

Buffett’s intelligence stands out here. He will not run after every bargain even when the prices fall. He stays in his zone making sure he knows what he’s doing with each dollar he puts down.

Building Your Own Circle of Competence

The thing you’re good at is not set in stone – you can get better at it if you put in the work. Take Buffett, for example. He reads like there is not tomorrow. He reads for hours daily to make his smarts even sharper.

You’ve got that option too. Kick off by choosing a couple of sectors that grab your attention. Dive into some articles about them. Keep tabs on the latest updates. Peek at business summaries over on the BSE site.

Say you’re all about consumer products, look at how companies like Colgate Palmolive or [ITC](https://www.financialexpress.com/market/itc-ltd-share-price/#:~:text=ITC Share Price Update,traded price is ₹427.25.) run their show. How do they bring in the cash? What sort of obstacles are in their way? Stick with this, and before you know it, you’ll have a solid understanding.

Got an interest in green power? Strike up a conversation with an industry insider. Talk about the price of solar panels or the rules the government sets. The deeper your knowledge the bigger your circle gets. But keep it real about what you don’t know—just like Buffett does.

The Buffett Trick: Simple is Better

Buffett’s circle of competence suggests that mastering everything is not necessary for success. Like he himself has said, it’s not important how big the circle is. What’s more important is that it is well defined i.e you know where your competence ends.

During these times in India where startups are zooming ahead, that’s a big lesson to learn, isn’t it? No need to run after every shiny new startup or the latest hot industry. Stick to the things you get—like farm tech, computer stuff, or even the old-school world of money lending and saving. Become better at knowing a little bit and you’ll make choices that are way sharper and less risky when you put your money down.

To end, here is a quote from Buffett to keep in mind before your next Breakfast with Buffett

“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”

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Career success today is less about sticking to a rigid plan and more about embracing growth, ... More experimentation and opportunity.

From college career centers to executive coaching sessions, professionals have been encouraged to map a step-by-step blueprint for their ascent. But in today’s rapidly evolving world of work, clinging to a rigid five-year plan may do more harm than good.

Instead of guiding your career, a five-year plan limits it. Here’s why it’s time to trade in that long-term script for a more dynamic, flexible strategy.

The World Of Work Has Changed—Permanently

We live in an era where entire industries are being disrupted and reinvented at lightning speed. Technological advances, automation, AI, remote work and shifting societal values have redefined what a career looks like. According to the World Economic [Forum](https://www.weforum.org/impact/reskilling-revolution-preparing-1-billion-people-for-tomorrow-s-economy-2c69a13e66/#:~:text=Businesses predict 44% of workers,to stay one step ahead.), 44% of workers’ core skills will change by 2027. New roles are emerging while others become obsolete.

5 Emerging Roles

• AI ethicist and AI governance specialist—As AI becomes embedded in daily business operations, companies need professionals to ensure ethical use, prevent bias and comply with evolving regulations.
• Sustainability manager and climate risk analyst—With increased focus on ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), organizations hire specialists to lead sustainability initiatives and assess climate-related financial risks.
• Remote work experience manager—This role optimizes the digital employee experience by building culture, collaboration and productivity for distributed teams.
• Data storyteller and data journalist—These professionals bridge the gap between complex data and clear communication, helping businesses make data-driven decisions through compelling narratives.
• Digital product manager (with AI fluency)—Product managers must thoroughly understand AI capabilities to integrate intelligent features into apps, services and platforms.

5 Obsolete (Or Rapidly Declining) Roles

• Data entry clerk—Automation and AI tools are rapidly replacing manual data entry tasks, especially in finance, HR and logistics.
• Telemarketer—Robocalling, AI chatbots and digital marketing strategies have made traditional telemarketing less relevant and more intrusive.
• Library technician—With most information now digital and searchable, the demand for traditional library technical services has declined.
• Bank teller—The rise of mobile banking and self-service kiosks continues to reduce the need for in-branch banking staff.
• Assembly line worker (in certain industries)—Advanced robotics and manufacturing automation are phasing out many repetitive manual roles in automotive and electronics production.

Creating a fixed five-year plan in such an environment feels like trying to chart a course with an outdated map. What’s the point of planning to climb a corporate ladder that may no longer exist in its current form?

The future of work belongs to those who stay curious, adaptable, and open to change.

The future of work belongs to those who stay curious, adaptable and open to change.

You’re Not The Same Person You Were Five Years Ago

A five-year plan assumes consistency, not just in the external world, but in your internal one. But people grow and evolve. Interests change. Values deepen. Life throws curveballs. A career path that seemed ideal at one point may no longer feel aligned two years later.

When your identity and ambitions evolve, but your plan stays static, you risk pursuing goals that no longer serve you. Career fulfillment doesn’t come from checking boxes; it comes from alignment between who you are and what you do.

Plans Create Pressure—And Tunnel Vision

Five-year plans become pressure cookers disguised as roadmaps. They focus so intently on a future destination that they downplay the value of the present. This tunnel vision causes professionals to miss out on unexpected opportunities—such as taking on a stretch project, exploring a side hustle or saying yes to a role in an entirely different industry.

When you’re fixated on a predefined path, anything that doesn’t fit feels like a detour. But those so-called detours are the most pivotal moments in a career.

Embrace The Pivot: A Smarter Strategy

Consider adopting a more agile approach rather than committing to a five-year plan. Think in terms of 6- to 12-month career experiments. Ask yourself, “What skill do I want to build this year? What kind of impact do I want to make next? What opportunities excite me right now?”

This method allows for intentionality without rigidity. It also fosters resilience, encouraging you to adapt rather than panic when circumstances shift.

Another powerful framework is to use a career compass instead of a career map. Know the values, themes or impact areas that matter most to you, whether innovation, mentorship, creativity or social change. Let those principles guide your choices, even as the specific roles and industries change.

Ditching the five-year plan isn’t about abandoning ambition but evolving how we pursue it. Career success is about building transferable skills and recognizing that growth comes from the unexpected.

So next time someone asks, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”—consider answering with something more honest and future-proof: “I see myself doing work that challenges me and allows me to keep evolving in my career.”

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India’s booming quick-commerce sector saw a major casualty earlier this year.

Dunzo, the first Indian startup to receive a direct investment from Google in 2017, shut down in January, leaving hundreds of consultants, vendors, employees, and delivery workers unpaid. Rest of World spoke to Dunzo’s former employees, investors, and industry experts, who revealed how mismanagement, operational challenges, and fierce competition led to its demise.

Indeed, there are flaws embedded in the very concept of fast commerce that have taken down many players. “Most of these models such as quick commerce are thriving due to investor funding and cheap labor,” Yugal Joshi, partner at global tech research and advisory firm Everest Group, told Rest of World. “Though they have a revenue model of charging delivery fees, most of their value is through loss leadership.”

Dunzo’s CEO, Kabeer Biswas, declined to comment. Rest of World also reached out to other Dunzo founders and its key investors Reliance and Google, but received no response.

Dunzo was launched in 2014 as a WhatsApp-based, concierge-style pick-up and drop-off service. Its agents would, for instance, collect laundry, buy and deliver ingredients for a meal, or bring the wallet a user forgot at home to their office.

The company’s steady growth in a country where 90% of startups fail earned it a distinct reputation: Customers would simply “Dunzo it” when they needed something.

By 2020, the quick-commerce sector in India began gaining significant traction and Dunzo decided to jump on the bandwagon. It launched Dunzo Daily, a service that delivered goods from the company’s “dark stores” instead of other retail outlets.

Dark stores is something of a misnomer for neighborhood-based warehouses owned by quick-commerce companies, where supplies are stocked and accessed only by gig workers who pick up online orders and deliver them to customers.

This shift pitted Dunzo against deep-pocketed rivals such as Swiggy Instamart, the Zomato-backed Blinkit, and the Y Combinator-backed Zepto, which had started ramping up their warehouse expansion.

Dunzo’s strategic misstep was shifting from its core strength — connecting buyers and sellers online — to aggressively scaling quick-commerce operations through a network of dark stores, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Dunzo’s early-stage investor, told Rest of World.

“Some of the elements of what we [Dunzo] started off with … was to empower the local stores. A dark store is the antithesis of that,” Chattopadhyay said.

Dunzo expanded to 15 cities and operated 120 dark stores, but remained at half the capacity of its rival Blinkit.

The company also struggled to run these stores, Manmeet Kaur, a former brand safety and escalation desk officer at Dunzo’s New Delhi office, told Rest of World.

“Customers were screaming at me and riders were screaming at me,” she said. “There were no offices for riders where they can go and file a complaint.”

Other former employees told Rest of World the company encountered new problems: battling rivals in price wars, maintaining higher app user retention, and balancing operational costs with the company’s pan-India expansion.

Dunzo “started off with some certain selected products and they didn’t extend their assortments,” Karan Taurani, vice president at investment firm Elara Capital, told Rest of World. “The app experience was kind of mixed. They didn’t create that impact of branding. … On the other hand, other players came in pretty aggressively.”

The expansion and financial setbacks went hand in hand — the company’s losses were pegged at $88 million in 2021.

In January 2022, Reliance Group, headed by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, invested $200 million in Dunzo for a 25.8% stake, becoming its largest shareholder.

Reliance may have “wanted to compete aggressively in [the] quick-commerce segment,” making Dunzo a strategic ally, Joshi from Everest Group told Rest of World.

Flush with funds, that October, Dunzo reportedly spent 400 million rupees ($4.6 million) to run a viral 20-second ad campaign during the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket competition — the second most-valued sporting league globally after the NFL. In the immediate term, traffic to the app skyrocketed. But the fervor was short-lived.

Meanwhile, Reliance’s investment added a new dimension to the company’s daily operations. Dunzo staff were tasked with providing back-end support and delivery services for Reliance’s e-commerce platform JioMart, straining resources and blurring mandates, at least three former employees told Rest of World.

“The company’s package drop services, which were still valuable to customers, also suffered as it expanded to quick commerce,” said Joshi.

By 2023, signs of trouble began to emerge.

At least four former employees told Rest of World Dunzo started missing salary payments, delayed appraisal cycles, and did not pay the government taxes that the company had deducted from workers’ salaries starting mid-2023. The company, which used to answer employee questions and post revenue numbers in Slack channels, did an about-face on transparency. It started muting people on Zoom calls, and picking and choosing questions posted in the chat.

The same year, Dunzo owed over 114 million rupees ($1.3 million) in unpaid ad dues and vendor payments to Facebook, Google, marketing agency CupShup, tech cooperative Nilenso, and others.

Dunzo entered a state of flux — the employees said it could neither commit fully to quick commerce nor maintain a competitive edge over its original model, which was to act as a marketplace aggregator.

Dunzo warehouses grappled with pricing discrepancies, expired products, and slow order fulfillment, while delivery workers struggled to get uniforms and bags from the company, Kaur said.

Until she was laid off in August 2024, Kaur had merchants reaching out to her on LinkedIn, asking about their back pay. She is still waiting on her own unpaid salary, amounting to 250,000 rupees ($2,860).

When the first round of layoffs happened in January 2023, Sarthak Gandhi, then a lead developer at Dunzo, saw it as a routine restructuring. But in April, “a lot of senior folks went, like whole verticals were shut down and in the All-Hands [meeting], we got to know they even reduced the number of dark stores,” Gandhi, who had joined Dunzo as a consultant in 2020, told Rest of World.

After the next round of cuts in July and September, Gandhi and most of his peers and managers were let go. He was only a month away from his wedding. Naveen Meka, a Hyderabad-based supply lead who joined Dunzo in 2019, was laid off around the same time. He wrote WhatsApp messages and emails to the company’s leadership, begging for his unpaid wages so he could pay his children’s school fees, but nothing came of it.

“It’s a big, big pain during that time for multiple employees, not only me,” Meka told Rest of World.

By August 2024, a skeleton crew of 50-odd employees was retained just to keep things running, reports suggested.

In early January this year, Reliance wrote off its $200 million investment. Soon after, Biswas reportedly joined the Walmart-owned Flipkart to head its new quick-commerce segment, Minutes.

Meanwhile, Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart — the three market leaders that control 80% of India’s burgeoning quick-commerce industry — have each set up more than 1,000 dark stores.

“This business is all about the execution. [It] has to be top-notch,” Elara Capital’s Taurani said. “You need to have the best people, best technology offering, best assortment. It’s not only about the investment.”

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“No late fees.”

When Netflix launched as a DVD rental service in 1998, that was its most effective pitch to potential customers — an unmistakable reference to the thing that people hated the most about Blockbuster. With more than 9,000 locations, Blockbuster was the biggest video rental chain in the world, but it was alienating members because its profits came from charging hefty fines for movies that weren’t returned on time.

“It was an obvious sore spot,” Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder, says. “People loved renting movies and watching them at home, but the late fee became the symbol of everything painful about that model. So we decided to create something different.”

Netflix didn’t just do away with late fees by allowing customers to keep movies for as long as they wanted. It offered subscribers unlimited rentals for a monthly flat fee. As a bonus, it delivered DVDs directly to customers’ homes, eliminating the hassle of having to drive to the local Blockbuster to scour aisle after aisle of movies in search of something to watch. However, some of Hastings’ top lieutenants worried there were problems with Netflix’s business model.

“It was scary,” remembers Patty McCord, who was hired by Hastings in 1998, eventually becoming Netflix’s chief talent officer. “Late fees were the gas in Blockbuster’s tank; everybody hated them, but the company didn’t have great profit margins without them. So we all went, ‘How is this going to work?’ Lots of people thought getting rid of the late fees was crazy, but Reed was willing to bet the farm on it.”

That gamble paid off. Twenty-eight years after it debuted with little fanfare, Netflix, now under the leadership of Hastings’ successors, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, dominates Hollywood. Its market cap of $392.68 billion surpasses those of Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and Comcast combined. Getting to this point, however, involved fierce corporate battles, dramatic shifts in strategy and a passion for risk-taking. Netflix’s transformation is one of the most remarkable in corporate history, rivaling those of Apple and Facebook. But how the company pulled it off, and pushed Hollywood into the streaming era, is now only dimly remembered.

In its first year or two, Netflix was a ragtag operation. McCord and other executives were routinely asked to hit up their local Walmart or Costco to buy DVDs at full price, which the company would then rent to its small customer base. To grow, Netflix needed to establish relationships with studios that could sell them their discs in bulk and on better terms. In 2000, Hastings hired Sarandos, who had strong ties with the studios from his time working as an executive for chains like West Coast Video, to help him break into Hollywood. With most of the company composed of engineers who were stationed at its Los Gatos, California, headquarters, Sarandos spent his first three years as chief content officer working out of his bedroom in Los Angeles. It wasn’t glamorous. Yet because of his personal relationships and disarming personality, Sarandos was able to get DVDs from the likes of Warner Bros. and Sony.

“It helped that I wasn’t some Silicon Valley guy flying in with my lawyer or my agent to talk to the studios,” Sarandos says. “I knew these folks; we’d gone up the ranks together.”

It took time for Netflix to work out the kinks. There were issues with getting discs to customers quickly and efficiently. A large part of those early years was spent building out the company’s network of processing centers, so Netflix could cut down on the time people had to wait to receive their rentals. Slowly, the company made a name for itself.

“At first no one knew who we were,” Sarandos remembers. “But that began to change. I still remember the first time I saw a post office with a sign that said this box was dedicated for Netflix envelopes. And then there was a time where I’m going to my own doctor, and I saw the red envelopes in the outgoing mail bin. Eventually we became ubiquitous.”

Blockbuster initially shrugged off the competition. According to lore, the company turned down a chance to buy Netflix in 2000. With any good yarn, there’s dispute over the facts of what went down, though everyone agrees there was a meeting at Blockbuster’s Dallas headquarters. But some Netflix executives remember being “laughed out of the room” after they proposed a sale, whereas Hastings doesn’t think the talks ever got that far.

“They had us down there, but I don’t think it was serious,” he says. “They didn’t see us as a significant player. I think it was curiosity rather than anything else.” Over the next few years, Blockbuster mostly ignored Netflix. When it did acknowledge the company, it was usually with derision. As a ritual, Netflix executives would gather in the conference room to listen to Blockbuster’s earnings call, trying to get a sense of what they were up against.

“One time, an analyst asked Blockbuster CEO John Antioco what he thought of Netflix, and he basically said, ‘They are nothing. They are no one. They are a gnat,’” McCord says. “I looked across the room we were in, and there was a chart of our subscriber numbers on the wall. The arrow was going straight up. That’s when I realized, ‘They don’t get it.’”

Blockbuster eventually got it. In 2007, the company launched a service, Total Access, that allowed customers to rent a DVD online and get a new movie free when they returned it to any of its stores. Since Blockbuster had thousands of physical locations, customers could easily exchange a disc when they wanted to instead of having to wait for another one to arrive by mail. Initially, Total Access caught on, with Blockbuster attracting 2 million online subscribers in its first year, more than a quarter of Netflix’s user base, but the offer was unsustainable. Instead of making money, Total Access put Blockbuster, a legacy company with massive overhead, in a financial hole; after shipping and other costs were factored in, it was losing $2 on every disc it rented.

Blockbuster had other hurdles that it couldn’t overcome. It was saddled with $1 billion in debt after it was spun off from its parent company, Viacom, in 2004. As its popularity waned, it ultimately had to declare bankruptcy in 2010. Blockbuster also operated under a franchise model, licensing its brand to store owners who didn’t want the company to devote financial resources to its online operations at their expense.

“Blockbuster’s corporate interests and those of its franchisees weren’t aligned,” says Michael D. Smith, a professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “That’s why the company took too long to pivot.”

People at Netflix say that the company’s decisive victory over Blockbuster wasn’t inevitable. There were times when Netflix faced setbacks. An initial public offering was canceled in the wake of 9/11 and the dot.com bubble bursting, and the company’s idea of concentrating more on growing its subscriber base than achieving profitability carried risks.

“Now, it looks obvious to everyone that we would win, but at the time it didn’t feel that way,” says Jay Hoag, an early investor in Netflix and a member of its board of directors. “We were locked in a price war with Blockbuster. Our stock was bouncing around a lot. It was a challenging time for the company. But Reed and Ted had a vision to offer a better service, and they stuck to it.”

In his pitch to Sarandos to join Netflix, Hastings was already looking beyond DVDs. The internet was still in its infancy — it was slow and clunky, and barely anyone could imagine watching a feature-length movie online — but Hastings dreamed of turning Netflix into a streaming giant. Of course, that term didn’t exist at the time. But Netflix’s name — a combination of “flix,” slang for movies, and “net,” a reference to the internet — signaled his ambitions.

“When I first met Reed, he described Netflix almost exactly like it is right now,” Sarandos says. “He didn’t use the word ‘streaming.’ He called it ‘downloading videos’ then, but he was very clear that he thought all entertainment would come into the home on the internet. And this was at a time when no entertainment came into the home that way.”

From its inception, the idea was to build Netflix on two tracks. The company would continue attracting customers with the DVD-by-mail business while ramping up its infrastructure so that as soon as internet speeds improved, subscribers could watch longer movies and shows online. By 2007, digital technology had caught up with Hastings’ vision, and Netflix launched its streaming service.

It was a hit with subscribers, allowing the company to more than double its customer base from 7.3 million to 18.3 million in three years. But getting movies and shows for the service presented a fresh set of challenges. Studios still preferred to send their first-run movies to traditional cable channels after they finished their theatrical runs, leaving Netflix to sign deals with more fringe players. For two years, it also bought and distributed its own movies — ultra-low-budget indies like the Maggie Gyllenhaal drama “Sherrybaby” — and released them under a short-lived label called Red Envelope.

“There wasn’t much available for us,” says David Hyman, Netflix’s chief legal officer. “It was really niche stuff, just edgy and avant-garde. It was pretty hit-and-miss.”

In 2008, Netflix figured out a workaround. It negotiated a pact with Starz, then a middling cable service, that allowed Netflix to stream roughly 1,000 movies a year. Many of those films were newer releases, such as “Ratatouille” and “Superbad,” that Starz had licensed from Disney and Columbia.

But Sarandos knew that it was only a stopgap measure. He realized that other studios wouldn’t always be interested in sharing their content with a business that was going after the same customers. Netflix needed to take its destiny into its own hands.

Just as Hastings initially identified Blockbuster as his chief competitor, Sarandos came to see HBO, considered the flashiest brand in cable thanks to “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” as its next rival. He saw no reason why Netflix couldn’t produce its own watercooler shows and buzzy movies.

“Ted really kept us focused on HBO as the target,” Hastings says. “He wanted us to see ourselves as a content network rather than an Amazon-like retailer. Later, he came to regret that slightly, because he said it should have been HBO and CBS. Because we didn’t want it to be just elite programming, we wanted it to be mainstream as well.”

Like Blockbuster before it, HBO publicly scoffed at any notion that Netflix was on its level. In 2010, Jeff Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, the cable channel’s parent company, likened Netflix to the Albanian Army, which, of course, no one is afraid of.

“We all went out and got Albanian Army military insignias that we wore,” Hastings says. “It was accidental on Jeff’s part, but he definitely helped us. That’s when the press positioned us as the challenger versus the incumbent, which legitimized us.”

Sarandos knew that he needed to sign a statement-making deal to signal the scope of Netflix’s ambitions. He found it in “House of Cards,” a remake of a BBC miniseries, which swapped the British Parliament for the U.S. Congress. Every network and cable channel was desperate to land the project because of the talent involved — David Fincher was producing and directing the first two episodes, with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright set to star as a villainous power couple.

Sarandos learned one weekend that Fincher planned to pitch his show to the networks. After combing through data to see more about viewership of Fincher’s and Spacey’s movies on Netflix, he found that both were popular with the service’s subscribers. He worried initially that the show would be too focused on politics, but after reading the script for the first episode, Sarandos appreciated that “House of Cards” was more interested in Shakespearean backstabbing than the intricacies of turning a bill into law.

“It had sex and revenge — everything you want from television,” Sarandos says. “We had to have it.”

He called the producers and said he wasn’t interested in hearing a pitch for “House of Cards.” Instead, he wanted to sell Fincher and his collaborators on why they should go with Netflix, despite the fact that it had no track record for making shows. In the meeting, Sarandos said he would commit to spending $100 million on the series and he’d pick the show up for an unheard-of two seasons — this was before a pilot had even been shot. He also agreed not to give Fincher any notes, guaranteeing him full creative control. It was a deal so rich that no one, not even HBO, could match it.

At Netflix, colleagues worried Sarandos was making a mistake. “I wasn’t comfortable with it,” admits Hastings. “It seemed perilously aggressive to me — just on the edge of reckless. We’d been working together for a decade, so I’d come to trust Ted’s instincts. But they were definitely not my instincts.”

Sarandos wasn’t done shaking things up. After “House of Cards” was bought and made, he pushed for it to release its entire season at once, instead of debuting a new episode every week, the way every other broadcaster and cable network did. He had seen how Netflix users liked to binge older shows, streaming one episode after another in single sittings, and it gave him a disruptive idea.

“I got a phone call from then CBS head Les Moonves, who said, ‘Do you know how television works?’” Sarandos remembers. “He goes, ‘You give them one at a time, and you can drag it out over 13 weeks before you need to find something new.’”

When it debuted in 2013, “House of Cards,” with its twisty look at Beltway maneuvering, earned rave reviews and attracted waves of new subscribers. It also showed that Netflix could produce the kind of glossy, highbrow TV that had made HBO famous. In the process, it put Hollywood on notice.

Over the ensuing decade and change, filmmakers and showrunners would flock to Netflix, lured by promises of greater creative freedom as well as the vast sums of money it was willing to throw at them. The shows and movies coming out of Netflix — from “Stranger Things” to “Roma” to “Squid Game” — garnered awards, acclaim and an ever-expanding global audience. Its success would lead nearly every other entertainment company to launch in-house streaming services, some of which, such as Disney , have been embraced even if they fail to match Netflix’s user base of 300 million subscribers. Because of the revolution in programming and distribution that Netflix sparked, streaming has become the dominant way that viewers watch movies and TV.

“Netflix changed the entertainment industry,” Smith says. “They did a lot of things right, but they also did the right things at the right time.”

As for Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail business, with the company devoting more resources to making programming and delivering it via streaming, fewer and fewer customers used the service. In 2023, Netflix shipped its last red envelope, ending the service that had grown less important to its bottom line, to become a streaming-only company. Netflix’s metamorphosis was finally complete.

“They had the courage to kill the first business to feed the second one,” McCord says. “That’s the Netflix story. How many other companies could have pulled that off?”

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Old school business leaders believe growing an empire requires a permanent office. They warn remote founders they won't be able to create a culture, close deals, or manage effectively. They insist you need to physically watch employees work and shake hands with clients. But this tired advice ignores reality: entrepreneurs are building multi-million dollar companies while living anywhere they want. And you can too.

I ran a social media agency for ten years before selling it in 2021. For 9 of those years we had a physical office. But revenue grew the most when we didn't. That's when I realised the rules had changed. The old way wasn't the only way. Now, I'd never sign an office lease. Let’s debunk some common myths that keep entrepreneurs anchored to one location.

False limits holding back location-independent entrepreneurs

The biggest barrier to building a thriving business while traveling is mindset. Not practicality. Outdated assumptions block progress and keep talented founders chained to fixed locations when they could be thriving globally.

Business leaders cling to physical-first thinking because change threatens their world view. When someone says "you can't grow a business while traveling," what they really mean is "I can't imagine doing it myself." Don't mistake their limitations for yours.

Seven nomad business myths you can ignore immediately

Culture suffers

Traditional business leaders will have you thinking you need an office or a physical location. People need to turn up to work each day and you need to look them in the eye and watch over them while they work. They will tell you that culture can only be built from a physical location, not while everyone is in a different city. But this simply isn't true. Many thriving businesses have entirely remote teams with strong cultures. Zapier, Buffer and Basecamp are a few.

Creating strong company culture remotely requires intention, not proximity. Build rituals that connect your team across time zones. Host virtual events that bring people together. Make your values visible in every interaction.

Your growth is capped

Many people claim clients will want to meet you in person before they sign huge deals. But this assumption rarely holds true. Plenty of deals get signed without wet ink on the contract. You can structure offers that scale while traveling.

Package your expertise into high-ticket group programs. Put core teachings into digital systems that deliver 24/7 regardless of your location. Clients pay for transformation, not your zip code.

Managing the team is difficult

People assume when you're not physically present, you don't know what your team is doing. But if you have to watch over your team to know they are working, the issue goes beyond office space. Task tracking software can make sure work gets done. Measuring outcomes means the right stuff is the focus.

Remote management means you have to hire for accountability and independence, not just technical ability. Your onboarding gets more detailed. Your expectations become crystal clear. Start measuring what matters instead of hours in a chair.

Investors are skeptical

Many founders worry investors won't back location-independent businesses. This concern is largely unfounded. Plenty of angel investors are exited founders themselves. Many of them grew and sold their business while traveling. They know that for those committed, it will work out.

Modern investors care about results. Your lifestyle should not be their concern. Your pitch deck should showcase customer growth and revenue, not office photos. Think globally and hire to match. Build with a distributed team and prove them wrong..

People don't take you seriously

Old habits die hard. Physical locations, in our heads, means success. But that's not the case anymore. Ask a gen-z if they want an office. They will probably say no. What makes an aspirational business has fundamentally changed.

Others take you seriously when you take your work seriously. And you know how to do that. Create case studies that showcase client transformations. Build content that demonstrates your knowledge. Speak at virtual events in your industry. Signal authority with your work.

Too much disruption to focus

Naysayers will tell you traveling is too much of a mental overhead and you can't grow a business while doing it too often. Yet successful nomad entrepreneurs prove otherwise. Your VA can sort most things for you according to rules you put in place. SOPs are for your business, not just your life.

Systemized operations remove yourself as the bottleneck. Document processes for your team so they don't need you for daily decisions. Automate client onboarding and other routine tasks. Use templates for recurring tasks. Build a library of process manuals that makes your business location-proof.

All work gets done on the beach

The digital nomad stereotype suggests unprofessional setups and casual work environments. This couldn't be further from reality. Nomads are setting up in wealthy cities joining coworking spaces and living from Airbnbs with plenty of room to set up their office.

Serious digital nomads create professional environments wherever they go. They research internet speeds before booking accommodation. They join premium coworking spaces with meeting rooms and business addresses. They invest in portable technology that maintains quality on the move. If you want to work from the beach, go ahead. But you can do whatever you want, and that’s the point.

Building your business around freedom works

The Instagram hashtags show beachside laptops and infinity pools, not strategic planning sessions and financial projections. But that doesn’t mean they’re not in place. Digital nomads prioritize lifestyle, but not necessarily at the cost of serious business growth.

Building a location-independent business requires intentional structure. Set clear communication protocols for your team. Create systems that run without your constant input. Package your expertise for remote delivery. Focus on results, not hours worked. Don't wait for permission. Design the business that supports your dream life.

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