Two by Two (Private)

The newest way to build a new AI product is to say, “X is broken, and we fixed it using AI”. Well, hiring was probably broken, but AI didn’t change the outcome. Instead, it made it into an arms race where candidates are sold AI tools which help them apply to companies and roles en masse in an automated way. On the other side, recruiters who have increasingly gotten tired of the same AI-generated answers, resumes and artefacts that have been generated by AI have resorted to deploying AI systems to filter out candidates and get what they are looking for. And AI companies sit on both sides of the transaction, billing tokens while hiring outcomes come back to exactly where they were.The answer to fix hiring isn’t in deploying AI better, but in creating processes that abandon it altogether, or at the very least use it sparingly. Hiring needs to be more like a “love-marriage” with the candidate working with you as a live-in relationship. Instead, agents have made it more like an “arranged marriage”, where candidates have agents who create their profile, and agents who evaluate other profiles, before humans even meet each other. Instead of relatives and parents, the machines are doing the role and getting paid for it.Praveen takes this position and argues it against two founders who have gone all-in on incorporating machines and agents to "solve" for hiring. On the company side, Aakash Dharmadhikari, Co-founder of Realfast.ai, has adopted the approach where every candidate must spin up an agent and apply using it on their MCP for all technical and non-technical roles. On the candidate side, Saumil Tripathi, CEO of Grapevine, has created an agentic product called TAL, which helps candidates match and apply for jobs en masse.In this episode, both of these founders defend their approaches and argue that they have, in fact, solved hiring in their own ways, with better outcomes for companies and candidates.Guests: Aakash Dharmadhikari, Co-founder, Realfast.ai · Saumil Tripathi, CEO, Grapevine

Quick question: Would you give someone your money for ten years if they promised you'd get back roughly what an FD would give you? And they'd also take 2% of your money every single year, no matter what happens, plus 20% of any profits at the end.You'd laugh them out of the room, right? Well, that's venture capital.Peak XV lost three of its partners. Ashish Agarwal who backed Groww, Ishan Mittal who invested in Razorpay and Tejasvi Sharma who bet on Cred. These guys crushed it and they still walked out over "disagreements on economics and payouts."That's when we realized: this isn't a Peak XV problem but a VC industry problem that nobody wants to admit. So we brought in Mayank Bansal, a hedge fund manager who pulled the actual numbers: Crisil data, Peak XV's fund performance, small cap index returns, FDs. All of it. Joining us is also Arundhati Ramanathan, deputy editor at The Ken, who's been tracking these partner exits closely.Mayank's take? "What is happening in the VC industry currently is they are charging the profit shares of that Medallion fund while returning less than index funds, which is blasphemous."Most Indian VC funds are charging 36% profit share to deliver 12% returns while a small cap index fund gave 13.35% over the same period which you can withdraw anytime. So why do the smartest investors in the world keep putting money into this? Why does two and twenty still exist?Fair warning, this episode is number-heavy. We've linked the reports in the show notes so you can follow along. But the punchline is simple: venture capital in India might just be an overpriced underperforming asset class nobody's willing to admit is broken.Listen to find out why the exits are just beginning.____Additional resources:1. Accel India's fund returns (Newcomer, paywalled)2. Crisil's AIF Benchmarks Report3. Indian VCs’ boss wants them to take a pay cut by Arundhati Ramanathan4. India's VCs are getting disrupted… by India's tax-payers by Praveen Gopal Krishnan5. The invisible whale that capsized India’s leaky options boats- Two by Two episode 51____This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap.If you liked this episode, share it with your friends, family and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com.

Last week, nearly ₹2 lakh crore vanished from Indian IT stocks in just four days. A big reason was Anthropic's new product, Claude Cowork. Suddenly investors were confronted with an unsettling reality: what if the work Indian IT has long depended on is now the easiest to automate?For almost 20 years, India's IT giants have been unstoppable compounding machines. They built empires worth hundreds of billions of dollars by doing one thing very well: renting out smart people by the hour to write code and run technology for Western clients. But when code starts to write itself, what happens to these companies?Conversations about IT services usually lump all these firms together, as if they are the same business with different logos. In this episode, we break them apart. We ask a simple but uncomfortable question: in an AI-first world, who thrives and who gets left behind? We take five of the biggest IT services firms in India's orbit—TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Tech and Cognizant—and rank them on who is best placed right now for what's coming next. Spoiler: the answer is not what the last 20 years of market-cap tables would suggest.To do this, we brought in two people who have lived this industry from the inside.Krishnakumar Natarajan co-founded Mindtree in 1999 and built it into a multi-billion dollar global IT services firm. He later chaired NASSCOM and now runs Mela Ventures, where he backs early-stage deep tech and enterprise startups.Vivek Kant spent over two decades in IT services across Tech Mahindra and Cognizant, then moved to the other side of the table as CTO at Bajaj Markets and as an advisor at Boston Consulting Group. He still codes 3-4 hours a day using AI. You can check out his blogs here.The board is set. The King, the Rook, the Knight, and the Bishop. The question is: who makes the first move?_________This episode of Two by Two was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com.

PhonePe leads nearly half of India's UPI transactions, but as it gears up for a $1.3 billion IPO, a tough question looms: can a company built to defend its lead ever learn to make real profit?In this episode, Rohin Dharmakumar argues that PhonePe's dominance might actually be a strategic trap. With zero-margin transactions and shifting regulations, the next ten years cannot look like the last. To win, PhonePe must decide whether it's willing to risk its crown to become a bold market creator. Will it evolve into an aggressive disruptor like Zomato, or remain a safe, boring utility like PayPal?Joining co-hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan is Arundhati Ramanathan, Deputy Editor at The Ken and resident fintech expert. Arundhati recently published a story on January 26 titled 'Should PhonePe be worth more than Paytm's $7.9B?' which dives deep into the company's valuation puzzle. We also introduce a new voice to the 2x2 team: Rahel Philipose joins as our third co-host to help unravel the cultural and strategic shifts required for PhonePe's survival.This episode of Two by Two was produced by Uddantika Kashyap mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.If you liked this episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com.----------Additional resources:- Platform ambitions: The story of how Ispirit lost its true north by Rohin Dharmakumar- The unlikely story of BHIM, the upsetter of plans by Arundhati Ramanathan- Naryana Health's Viren Shetty on learning 'how much insurance is about selling and how little about health' by Seema Singh- Two by Two episode 1: Will Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe becomes flipkart?

Urban Company has spent years building trust as the go-to platform for home services. But a new generation of founders is now using the Zepto playbook to target its most profitable segments. On Two by Two this week, Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar are joined by Arpit Agarwal, a partner at Blume Ventures.The conversation explores the wedge strategy: how specialized startups like Snabbit and Dazzl are driving deep into specific categories like household help and beauty services. Arpit explains why horizontal giants are often wired like sloths, making it difficult for them to stay nimble when a fast moving dragonfly startup attacks a single category.The hosts also discuss the operational shift from scheduled slots to instant supply. They look at how these new players are treating human labor as an engineering problem, using heat maps and demand prediction to promise services in minutes. But can you actually standardize a home cleaning or a cooking service without losing quality?It is a deep dive into the battle for your living room and whether efficiency will eventually take over brand loyalty._______This episode of 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, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. And if you have thoughts on the discussion, write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com. We’d love to hear from you.