https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaTQWE6b0Bg&t=480s

must to have digital sovereignty

Artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT use AI to do thinking or writing or creating for you. Pretty amazing, but also a little terrifying. What happens to the people who used to do those jobs?

Olivia Fair graduated four years ago. "I've applied to probably over a hundred jobs in the past, I don't know, six months," she said. "And yeah, none of them are landing."

She's had a series of short-term jobs - one was in TV production, transcribing interviews. "But now they don't have a bunch of people transcribing," she said. "They have maybe one person overseeing all of that, and AI doing the rest. Which I think is true for a lot of entry-level positions. And it can be a very useful tool for those people doing that work. But then there's less people needed."

According to Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed, the job-listings website, job postings have declined year over year by 6.7 percent. "This is a tough year," she said. "Younger job seekers, specifically those who are recent grads, are having a harder time finding work."

Asked if there is a correlation between the rise in AI and the decline in jobs for recent graduates, Ullrich said, "I think there is a cause-and-effect, but it's maybe not as significant as a lot of people would think. If you look specifically at tech jobs, job postings are down 36% compared to pre-pandemic numbers. But that decline started happening prior to AI becoming commonly used."

Ullrich said in 2021-22, as the effects of the COVID pandemic began to ebb, there was a hiring boom in some sectors, including tech: "Quite frankly, I think some companies overhired," she said.

The uncertain national situation (tariffs, taxes, foreign policy) doesn't help, either. Ullrich said, "Some other people have used the analogy of, like, driving through fog. If it's foggy, you slow down a bit. But if it's really foggy, you pull over. And unfortunately, some companies have pulled over to sit and wait to see what is gonna happen."

That sounds a little more nuanced than some recent headlines, which make it pretty clear that AI is taking jobs:

• AI will take your job. Get over it (Fortune)
• AI could replace equivalent of 300 million jobs: Report (BBC News)
• AI will replace most humans, but then what? (Reuters)

"I read today an interview with a guy who said, you know, 'By 2027, we will be jobless, lonely, crime on the streets,'" said David Autor, a labor economist at MIT. "And I said, 'How do I take the other side of that bet?' 'Cause that's just not true. I'm sure of that. My view is, look, there is great potential and great risk. I think that it's not nearly as imminent on either direction as most people think."

I said, "But what it does seem to do is relieve the newcomers, the beginning, incoming novices we don't need anymore."

"This is really a concern," Autor said. "Judgment, expertise, it's acquired slowly. It's a product of immersion, right? You know, how do I care for this patient, or land this plane, or remodel this building? And it's possible that we could strip out so much of the supporting work, that people never get the expertise. I don't think it's an insurmountable concern. But we shouldn't take for granted that it will solve itself."

Let's cut to the chase. What are the jobs we're going to lose? Laura Ullrich said, "We analyzed 2,800 specific skills, and 30% of them could be, at least partially, done by AI." (Which means, 70% of job skills are not currently at risk of AI.)

So, which jobs will AI be likely to take first? Most of it is jobs in front of a screen:

• Coding
• Accounting
• Copy writing
• Translation
• Customer service
• Paralegal work
• Illustration
• Graphic design
• Songwriting
• Information management

As David Autor puts it: "What will market demand be for this thing? How much should we order? How much should we keep in stock?"

AI will have a much harder time taking jobs requiring empathy, creative thinking, or physicality:

• Healthcare
• Teaching
• Social assistance
• Mental health
• Police and fire
• Engineering
• Construction
• Wind and solar
• Tourism
• Trades (like plumbing and electrical)

And don't forget about the new job categories that AI will create. According to Autor, "A lot of the work that we do is in things that we just didn't do, you know, 50 or 100 years ago - all this work in solar and wind generation, all types of medical specialties that were unthinkable."

I asked, "You can't sit here and tell me what the new fields and jobs will be?"

"No. We're bad at predicting where new work will appear, what skills it will need, how much there will be," Autor said, adding, "There will be new things, absolutely."

"So, it sounds like you don't think we are headed to becoming a nation of people who cannot find any work, who spend the day on the couch watching Netflix?"

Autor said, "No, I don't see that. Of course, people will be displaced, certain types of occupations will disappear. People will lose careers. That's going to happen. But we might actually get much better at medicine. We might figure out a way to generate energy more cheaply and with less pollution. We might figure out a better way to do agriculture that isn't land-intensive and so ecologically intensive."

Whatever is going to happen, will likely take a while to happen. The latest headlines look like these:

• Not today, AI: Despite corporate hype, few signs that the tech Is taking jobs - yet (NBC News)
• Why AI hasn't taken your job (and any jobs-pocalypse seems along way off) (The Economist)
• AI may not steal many jobs after all. It may just make workers more efficient (AP)

Until then, Laura Ullrich has some advice for young job seekers: "The number one piece of advice I would give is, move forward. So, whether that is getting another job, getting a part-time job, finding a post-graduate internship - reach out to the professors that you had. They have a whole network of former students, right? Reach out to other alumni who graduated from the school you went to, or majored in the same thing you majored in. It might be what gets you a job this year."

So far, Olivia Fair is doing all of the above. I asked her, "You're interested in creativity and writing and production. So let me hear, as a human, your pitch, why you'd be better than AI doing those jobs?"

"Okay," Fair replied. "Hmm. I'm a person, and not a robot?"

Source

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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