Two by Two

Epizódok

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  Rewind : The numbers behind OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity’s deals with Phonepe, Jio, and Airtel 20.08.2026 1ó 28p

  No new episode this week, we're on a break. So, here's one from November 2025 that just became relevant again: Perplexity's free year with Airtel has begun expiring, and the numbers are just being reported: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/perplexitys-free-ai-offer-left-it-with-millions-more-users-in-india/Listen back to what we predicted and how things panned out.------This week, Two by Two debuts a new format: “Reverse engineering the playbook.”Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan attempt to crack the math behind this recent wave of AI-telco partnerships in India. Why are companies like Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI racing to bundle their expensive premium subscriptions with Airtel, Jio, and Phonepe? To decode the economics, they are joined by two industry experts with firsthand experience managing these exact types of deals: Chandrashekhar Vattikuti (ex-CPO of Inmobi and SVP of their Telco Cloud business) and Prakash Deep Maheshwari (head of product at Grab and former director of growth for Netflix in India and Southeast Asia).The group explores whether Indian telcos are desperate for differentiation or simply cashing in on a gold rush where the smartest move is to sell shovels–or in this case, subscribers. Prakash argues this is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: once one telco bundles an AI service, the others have no choice but to follow.They also break down the actual structure of these deals, from minimum guarantees to the marketing halo the partnerships create. The conversation gets into why OpenAI likely entered these deals “kicking and screaming” to protect its platform ambitions, while Chandra offers a reality check on whether these massive user numbers will actually stick around once the free periods end.Episodes referenced in the conversation: 1. ‘Do we even need product managers?’– Two by Two episode 13 with Chandrashekhar Vattikuti 2. ‘Threat models, using taste to defend margins, ChatGPT’s ‘collab’ with Phonepe’- Zero Shot episode 9
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  Zepto's ‘generational wealth’ narrative has started to crumble 06.08.2026 31p

  Today's episode of Two by Two is about Zepto’s decision to pause its IPO and how things will play out next. For years, Zepto has told one story — about its potential: for growth, for profitability, for making money for everyone from investors to employees. And to be fair, Zepto executed at a blistering pace. But the story always ran on momentum, on a sense of inevitability. And the reason why Zepto told that story again and again, with bluster, is because the company always knew the truth: there was exactly one destination.For Zepto, going public wasn't a milestone. It was the endgame. And it came within inches of pulling it off.Now, Zepto and everyone in and around its massive orbit — shareholders, vendors, delivery partners, employees — will acutely feel the gravitational pull of the same momentum that propelled it up. And the way down, like the way up, will be driven by narrative. Except it'll be a counter-narrative this time, and perhaps just as irrational. The confidence narrative has two sides: thus far, Zepto has been climbing ladders, and now it's going to encounter snakes one after another.This episode is a bit different from Praveen reading out the special newsletter edition he published last week, with some help from Snigdha, who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken's daily news podcast. In this episode, Praveen plays out what the way down looks like — why India's largest mutual fund houses took one look at Zepto's valuation and financials and passed, why brands and creditors will become a lot more unreasonable, and the three outcomes from here, all of which look tricky. And after he published the newsletter, he got a wave of theories from subscribers — founders, leaders and executives among them. He reads some of them out.The market has learned. Now we find out whether Zepto can.
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  The 100th Episode Special 30.07.2026 1ó 4p

  This is a special one. For the 100th episode of Two by Two, we've brought Rohin back to the podcast, after all, he co-hosted the first seventy-three episodes with Praveen. Also we decided to switch the host completely and handed the microphone to Rachel who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily podcast. She's here to spin the tables: for once Praveen and Rohin are the ones being questioned.The format is what the show has done for the last 100 episodes. Rachel takes some of India's best and biggest companies, themes and sectors like Swiggy, PhonePe, Reliance Retail, Netflix India, the India AI mission, the Indian software engineer, and a dozen more and asks the two of them to place each one on a single 2x2. One axis: master of its own fate, or hostage to someone else. The other: best years ahead, or best years behind. Across a hundred episodes of shared history, Praveen and Rohin don't agree on all of them.The full map runs in this week's newsletter, and Praveen has made some promises he must keep before for episode 200, so just like him, we hope you listen to this one, and come back to listen to the next hundred as well.Thank you for subscribing to Two by Two. If you enjoyed the episode, drop us a line about your favourite episode at [email protected] and we’ll cover it in the newsletter. 
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  Will Zepto become Swiggy before Swiggy becomes Zepto? 23.07.2026 54p

  For the four years, everyone was seeing the same thing. Swiggy was losing market share in a business it had no business losing. Zepto was the aggressor, with a tight, disciplined approach, a tight catalogue, ten-minute groceries, not much else. Swiggy became the sprawling super-app that kept launching and burying things, from cloud kitchens to a mall to an errands app. In one of our earlier stories, we even referred to it as a “graveyard”.But now, weeks before Zepto's IPO, the roles have switched. Swiggy has done the one thing Swiggy hasn’t done in years — it’s gotten focused: backed out of a price war and leaned on the business that makes money, food delivery. Zepto has walked the other way, shutting hundreds of Café stores while launching a premium tier, reviving a paid subscription for the third time, and selling investors an advertising-and-AI story.So while Swiggy is learning discipline the hard way, Zepto is spinning up, and shutting down things. We’ve seen this story before. All the way back to the very first episode of Two by Two, which was titled, Can Flipkart become PhonePe before PhonePe becomes Flipkart?To make sense of it, Praveen is joined by Jignanshu Gor, Director and Senior Research Analyst at Bernstein, which publishes one of the sharpest reports in Indian quick commerce.We get into:Why the "gold rush" for dark stores is over — and whether what comes next is a long harvest or a doomsdayDepth vs breadth, made physical: Blinkit splitting the long tail across small stores while Instamart builds mega-storesThe three painful quarters Swiggy chose, and the case that capital is a necessary condition for survivalWhy "neither growth nor profitability" is the worst quadrant to be in — and who's stuck in itThe ceiling nobody prices in: dark-store saturation, an urbanisation-capped TAM, and the Instacart plateauThe one thing Zepto doesn't have — a profitable business next door paying the billsThe endgame math that could give Swiggy infinite runwayAlong the way, we pull stories from the 2x2 archive: our earlier calls on Zepto, Swiggy's graveyard of products, the Zepto Café bet, and the super-app roadshow where every assumption turned out wrong.Featuring past-episode clips from:EP03 — Is Zepto a gold medallist or a bronze medallist?EP05 — Swiggy needs to reclaim its past gloryEP60 — Firstclub wants to be the Costco of quick commerceEP70 — QIP, IPO, Bubble: why Swiggy, Zepto and Blinkit see quick commerce differentlyHosted by Praveen Gopal Krishnan. Two by Two is a weekly business podcast from The Ken.
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  India's AI edge is that it has no AI of its own 16.07.2026 1ó 7p

  It's the middle of 2026 and the best AI models on the planet are ones you can't use. Anthropic built Mythos, decided it was too dangerous to ship, watered it down into Fable, and cut off paying customers. OpenAI's newest model went to a handful of approved American companies. The chips arrive in India on a quota that moves with the mood in the White House. And in July, Beijing convened Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai to weigh restrictions on overseas access to its own best models, open weights included.Every serious enterprise on Earth now has to build for a world where the model it depends on can be switched off overnight by an export order it had no say in.Praveen's argument, first made in The Ken's AI column Zero Shot: that's the opening Indian IT services has waited half a decade for. When models can be turned off, when a Chinese model is brilliant but you can't be sure what's inside it, most enterprises need someone who can run all of them inside its own walls and keep the lights on when one goes dark. That's an integration and governance problem, and integration is the one muscle India has been building for thirty years. India has no frontier model of its own, which everyone treats as the reason it lost the race. Praveen argues that this is specifically India's qualification for the job, because you can't be the neutral broker if you're also a competitor.Pranay Kotasthane of the Takshashila Institution tackles the geopolitics side. He argues whether India’s non-alignment position is credible, and whether it can even hold this in the face of significant complicated interests globally around technology, chips and models.Brady Ng, Deputy Editor of The Ken, and Zero Shot co-host, provides the US-China perspective. Chinese open weights grew out of a two-decade open-source culture formed behind the Great Firewall, and TikTok and Douyin already show what a dual-track export model looks like coming from one company. Brady shares the background and the factors that make this future viable for everyone. Links* Pranay Kotasthane, "Should the US Sell Advanced GPUs to China? An Indian Perspective" — Takshashila Issue Brief 2026-15, 29 April 2026 · https://takshashila.org.in* Zero Shot episode with Kendra Schaefer on Chinese tech policy — https://the-ken.com/podcasts/zero-shot/china-let-its-ai-industry-run-wild-to-build-the-best-models-now-it-wants-control/* Praveen's Zero Shot column on the non-aligned layer — https://the-ken.com/columns/zero-shot/the-non-aligned-layer/* Reuters via Quartz — Beijing weighs curbs on overseas access to its top AI models, 7 July 2026 · https://qz.com/beijing-china-ai-model-export-restrictions-070726* 2x2 EP50, "In an AI age, India does not have an open source strategy" — Pranay's first appearance, with Kailash Nadh, 10 July 2025* 2x2 EP63, "India risks losing cultural relevance in the AI era" — 16 October 2025
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  2025 Year-end special 25.12.2025 54p

  2025 is done. Forty-eight episodes. Hundreds of guests. Endless banter between Rohin and Praveen.This year, Two by Two covered stories from Bengaluru to the world including business, tech, and everything in between. We didn't just stick to the usual. We asked about people, trends, and the things others weren't paying attention to. We brought on guests who didn't rehearse their answers and tried to make sense of things as they happened.Some episodes turned out to be prescient. Some were messy. Some sparked arguments in our inbox. All of them tried to do what we set out to do: spot hidden connections, ask unasked questions, and figure out what's really going on.This final episode is Rohin looking back at six moments from the year with clips from conversations that stood out. Between each one, he adds context and some behind-the-scenes perspective on why it mattered.Here are the episodes featured:Episode 26: Zomato, Swiggy, and the rise of the 10-minute "dark" caféEpisode 31: Airtel fights spammers. And Truecaller's business modelEpisode 47: Who broke Bengaluru, and how do we fix our cities?Episode 50: In an AI age, India does not have an open source strategyEpisode 51: The invisible whale that capsized India's leaky options boatsEpisode 66: What will bring ambition back from the dead?To everyone who listened, argued with us, sent guest suggestions, or just stuck around, thank you. Next year, we're coming back with everything that makes Two by Two what it is, but bigger and better. Maybe even a few surprises. Stay tuned.There won't be an episode next Thursday. We will return on January 8th, 2026.See you in the new year.________This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, family and colleagues who would be interested in listening. If you have suggestions for guests, episodes or even changes we could make. Please write to us at [email protected] or comment below.
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  60 seconds for every 2025 episode 18.12.2025 54p

  As we try to wind down this year, Rohin and Praveen do something they’ve never done before: go through every single episode they recorded this year. All 48 of them. In 60 minutes.The rules were simple. Each host had 10 points to build their personal top 10 list for the year. No take-backs, and no pre-discussion. It was a completely live, vibe-based recording where they figured it out as they went.What follows is a rapid-fire sprint through the year. From Amazon India’s struggles to the electric car slowdown, from B-school placements to the rise of quick commerce dark stores, and from Razorpay versus Juspay to the chaos of concert infrastructure in India. They cover it all—the hits, the misses, the prescient calls, and the episodes they wish had gone differently.Along the way, they debate whether episodes were too speculative, too early, or just not memorable enough. By the end, they’re locked in a tight race with only five episodes left and one point each remaining.Because it wouldn't be Two by Two without a matrix, we plotted the results of their debate. Take a look at the graphic to see which episodes they both loved (the green zone) versus their personal favourites.It is chaotic, nostalgic, and a perfect preview of what 2025 looked like through the lens of Two by Two.______This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.With 48 episodes in the books, this is the perfect starting point for anyone looking to catch up on the defining business stories of 2025. If you liked this sprint through the year, please share it with someone who loves a good deep dive.Have your own "vibe-based" arguments about our list? We’re all ears. Reach out at [email protected] or leave a comment.
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  Deepavali Break 23.10.2025 1p
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  No Explainers, No Takeaways: One Year of Two by Two 31.07.2025 1ó 12p

  Join Rohin and Praveen as they celebrate the one-year anniversary of the 2x2 podcast, reflecting on 52 episodes of business and strategy discussions. This special ‘vibes’ episode looks back at their journey creating Two by Two, the evolution of the show, and future plans, deviating from their usual topic-focused format.Praveen shares key meta-narratives he picked from the past year, including a "desperation-driven convergence" where companies like Flipkart and Phonepe try to become each other. He also highlights themes such as the government shaping markets as a "competitor" or through "artificial constraints", and a "great career existential crisis" impacting roles from engineers to marketers. Other themes include the "destruction and retreat of big tech in India", the podcast's contrarian framing of topics, and a focus on India's "livability crisis", addressing issues like urban infrastructure and air pollution.We’d love to hear what you think about Two by Two as well. You can write to us at [email protected].
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  2024 Year-end special 26.12.2024 56p

  Welcome to the year-end special edition of Two by Two.We’ve released 22 episodes of Two by Two since our inaugural edition in July. We’ve covered an incredible breadth of counterintuitive topics framed as, well, two by twos. Would Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe became Flipkart? Did Delhi prick Bengaluru’s bubble? Is the golden era of the software engineer over? Why is health insurance broken? How will Ola and Uber avoid ‘death by a thousand cuts’? Why is Zepto behaving like a gold medallist? Can venture capitalists do no wrong? Dmart versus the challengers at the gates. AI and the impending disruption of Indian SaaS. We’ve had incredible fun exploring these ideas with a bunch of really sharp, experienced and opinionated guests. Finding guests who don’t hesitate to speak their minds and state unpopular truths has been one of the hardest things. Far, far tougher than finding interesting topics. We owe all our guests a huge thanks for trusting us. Far too many professionals and leaders prefer to stick to rehearsed and predictable talking points in public these days.We’d started Two by Two with the ambition to operate at the intersection of curiosity and synthesis. Each week, we said we’d spot the hidden connections and unasked questions. We’d identify the cast of players and their motivations. We’d bring in incredible people to discuss these with. We’d try to answer simple yet fundamental questions like, what is going on, why is it happening, who gains and who loses, and where is all of this leading to?By always asking questions. Always connecting the dots. Always being unfiltered and uninhibited.We wanted Two by Two to be ‘your personal investigative brain’. In 2025 we hope to make Two by Two even more interesting and unpredictable. Yes, at its core it will still be a weekly podcast. But I’m excited at the possibility of doing so much more by involving our subscribers, listeners and readers in these endeavours. We want to make Two by Two ‘our collective investigative brain’. And hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan will continue to do so with a new episode every Thursday.To listen to all episodes of Two by Two, consider subscribing to The Ken’s Premium plan, which in addition to the podcast, will also get you access to our long-form stories, Premium newsletters and visual stories.If you just want access to Two by Two, you can do that as well on Apple Podcasts with a paid subscription.Two by Two is also a free weekly newsletter published every Friday. You can sign up for it here. Listen to all Two by Two episodes here:1. Will Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe becomes Flipkart? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/will-flipkart-become-phonepe-before-phonepe-becomes-flipkart/2. Why has all the excitement and disruption gone out of startups? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/why-has-all-the-excitement-and-disruption-gone-out-of-startups/3. Is Zepto a gold medallist or a bronze medallist? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/is-zepto-a-gold-medalist-or-a-bronze-medalist/4. Delhi pricked the Bengaluru bubble - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/delhi-pricked-the-bangalore-bubble/5. Swiggy needs to reclaim its past glory - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/swiggy-needs-to-reclaim-its-past-glory/6. Is the golden era of the (software) engineer over? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/is-the-golden-era-of-the-software-engineer-over/7. Google Pay: Big. Successful. Vulnerable - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/google-pay-big-successful-vulnerable/8. Private coaching is eating away at schooling - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/private-coaching-is-eating-away-at-schooling/9. Why Stripe could not become the Stripe of India? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/why-couldnt-stripe-become-the-stripe-of-india/10. Health insurance in India is ripe for disruption - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/health-insurance-is-ripe-for-disruption/11. Netflix and its last growth market - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/netflixs-last-growth-market/12. Ather Energy was a pioneer. Can it also be a leader? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/ather-energy-was-a-pioneer-can-it-also-be-a-leader/13. Do we even need Product Managers? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/do-we-even-need-product-managers/14. How will Ola and Uber avoid ‘death by a thousand cuts’? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/how-will-ola-and-uber-avoid-death-by-a-thousand-cuts/15. The relentless rise of the government as a competitor - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/the-relentless-rise-of-the-government-as-a-competitor/16. What does the future hold for Ola Electric? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/what-does-ola-electrics-future-hold/17. Can venture capitalists do no wrong? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/can-venture-capitalists-do-no-wrong/18. Dmart versus the challengers at the gate - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/dmart-versus-the-challengers-at-the-gate/19. Marketing is eating itself from the inside - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/marketing-is-eating-i...
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  Happy Deepavali! 31.10.2024 3p

  Happy Deepavali, dear listeners!On account of Deepavali, the Two by Two team is also taking a small break. But don't worry; we'll be back with our regular programming next week.Until then, you can always listen to past episodes of Two by Two that you haven't gotten around to yet. If you're a Premium subscriber listening to this on The Ken’s mobile app or on Apple podcasts, you can just scroll down and listen to any of our episodes in their full, unedited form. On the other hand, if you aren’t a premium subscriber yet, you can listen to one of our older episodes which we’ve unlocked for you. In fact, in the latest unlocked episode, we argue, debate, and discuss what Netflix needs to do to win in its last growth market — India.Netflix's last growth market. (Full republished episode for free users available on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | Youtube)By the way, if you’re in the mood for something other than two-by-twos and business models, why don’t you head over to Daybreak, The Ken’s daily podcast?Just last week, our colleagues Snigdha and Rahel did an amazing episode where they spoke to multiple people to understand why women freeze their eggs.Successful women are freezing their eggs. And that's on men. (Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | YouTube Music)If you have suggestions for potential future episodes, we’re all ears. We’re also all ears if you have recommendations for interesting guests we can invite to the show—guests who know their stuff and aren’t afraid to speak their minds, even if it goes against conventional wisdom. Write to us at [email protected].