Hyderabad's T-hub 2. 0: India's startup giants scaling up for 'Next Billion'

HYDERABAD: At a brainstorming session on — Building for the Next Billion — after the unveiling of T-HUB 2.0, heads of India’s biggest tech giants, including Zomato, Koo, Delhivery and Amazon shared their strategic approach to scaling already established multi-billion-dollar companies.
Chief technology officer of Zomato, Gunjan Patidar, co-founder of Koo Aprameya Radhakrishna, head of strategic initiatives of public sector, Amazon Internet Services, Deepti Dutt, and Delhivery co-founder Suraj Saharan spoke about their strategy to take their business forward for next-generation consumers.
Gunjan explained that Zomato was keen on expanding their delivery service beyond 1,000-plus cities, but cited that in each place, ‘products and consumers are different. “We understood the way people have come to (use) technology differently. We have enabled the voice search option in the Zomato app. It is more about convenience and food needs,” said Gunjan.
Explaining his reasons for entering the highly competitive social media space, Koo co-founder Aprameya said, there was a gap in the market in expressing thoughts in multiple languages and about increasing social media penetration. Taking an example of caller tune charges that were once charged 30 per month, Aprameya explained, ‘Emotional spenders would not mind spending money to showcase a certain personality of theirs. English users spend in thousands and non-English users spend in 10s and 100s, but they are larger in number, he added.
Suraj Saharan revealed Delhivery had delivered over 1.4 billion shipments across the country. “We built partners with local entrepreneurs to make these deliveries. That is how we managed to scale. Creating a network of partners is important,” he added. Deepti Dutt contended that while technology is an “important sibling’ to scale higher, it’s important to take care of field operations and directly cater to people”.