Watch the episode
Pep Talk with Vijay · PodcastIn short
- Akash Gupta spent about ten years in corporate jobs before starting up, and calls it the base for everything after.
- Zypp went from shared cycles to electric scooters, rentals and then delivery, pivoting each time the market said no.
- Having little capital is what pushed it towards an asset-light model.
The journey
- JaipurGrew up in a middle-class family and dreamt of running a business.
- Engineering, then IMT GhaziabadFound he preferred organising people to coding.
- A decade in corporate rolesPerot Systems (later Dell), Airtel, Snapdeal and MobiKwik.
- LetsflauntA custom T-shirt side business with his wife, Rashi. Profitable, but hard to scale.
- MobycyShared cycles, launched in 2017. Within months the team saw it wouldn't work in India.
- ZyppElectric scooters, then monthly rentals for riders, then delivery for businesses, which took off when COVID hit.
Chapters
- Growing up in Jaipur (opens on YouTube)
- College life and MBA lessons (opens on YouTube)
- Job switches and finding his way (opens on YouTube)
- First startup with his wife: Letsflaunt (opens on YouTube)
- Shared cycles: Mobycy (opens on YouTube)
- Pivot to electric scooters: Zypp is born (opens on YouTube)
- Pivot to delivery (opens on YouTube)
- Shark Tank (opens on YouTube)
- The asset-light model (opens on YouTube)
- Rider safety (opens on YouTube)
- What's next for Zypp (opens on YouTube)
Lessons for founders
- Be excellent at one thing. Trying to do two things at once rarely works.
- Find where you're slightly different. Even in a room of a thousand people, that's your niche.
- Corporate years aren't wasted. They built the skills and network he used as a founder.
- Accept failure fast and pivot. Zypp moved from cycles to scooters to rentals to delivery.
- Constraints shape the model. Not having capital is what led Zypp to grow asset-light.
In his words
“I can't die saying I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I want to take one shot.”
35:16
“One thing we got right: we accepted failure very quickly and pivoted.”
39:45
“Today they call it asset-light, but it was really not having money that pushed us into this model.”
52:54
Zypp Electric is a Soonicorn Ventures portfolio company. Quotes are translated from Hindi.
Views in this episode are the speaker's own and are not investment advice. Startup investing is high-risk and long-term; you can lose your capital.
Hosted by Vijay Singh RathoreCo-Founder & CEO of Soonicorn Ventures. Pep Talk with Vijay is a conversation series with founders and investors.
