WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

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I put Rajesh Magow, the chartered accountant who co-founded MakeMyTrip on a team where almost nobody knew travel, and Puneet Chhatwal, the Delhi boy who spent twenty-eight years running hotels in Europe before coming home to pull IHCL out of a decade of losses, into one room to explain the business of Indian travel from scratch, and what came out was far bigger than a lesson, from why boutique hotels are better built by outsiders and how a fifty crore partnership between their companies became twelve hundred, to what a hotel actually pays to sit on MakeMyTrip and why booking direct still isn't cheaper, why ChatGPT can't scrape its way into the travel funnel and where voice bookings are taking tier-three India, why Puneet thinks the answer for a 25-year-old isn't another app but a small, clean hotel, why only ten million foreigners visit a country with more than forty UNESCO sites, what went wrong in Goa and where the next thirty Goas should be, why tourism being a state subject is the real bottleneck, and the full playbook both of them would run to take India from ten million tourists to a hundred million.

Timestamp:
00:00 Introduction
07:03 Getting to Know the Guests
14:30 How MakeMyTrip’s Hotel Partnerships Work
21:45 Booking Direct vs Travel Apps
28:26 Puneet Chhatwal’s Journey from Delhi to Europe
35:01 Building Villa Stays & Solo Travel Businesses
41:43 Will AI Change How We Book Travel?
48:40 Customer Data vs Personal Hospitality
55:43 Can Robots Replace Hotel Staff?
1:03:05 Bringing Small-Town India into Online Travel
1:09:52 Should Hotels Cut Out the Middleman?
1:16:37 India’s Mid-Range Hotel Opportunity
1:23:51 Marketing India & Fixing Tourism Taxes
1:30:46 Mass Tourism vs Luxury Tourism in Goa
1:38:26 Can Luxury Trains Attract Premium Tourists?
1:44:44 Civic Sense & the Tourist Experience
1:51:24 Making India’s Attractions Discoverable & Bookable
1:58:44 Alibaug’s Potential & the Homestay Business
2:05:56 Why Celebrations Are Driving Villa Bookings
2:13:42 What Travel Business Should a 25-Year-Old Start?
2:19:43 Handling Bad Experiences & Building Trust
2:27:16 Nandan Nilekani & the Shift to Hotel Branding
2:34:40 What It Takes to Run an Asset-Light Hotel Brand
2:41:13 The Wellness Hotel Opportunity
2:48:44 Building Travel Businesses for Gen Z
2:56:16 Travel Education & New Business Ideas
3:02:19 Unlocking Unexplored India
3:08:42 Building New Destinations & Event Tourism
3:15:38 Private Jet Economics & Closing Thoughts

Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip Limited
LinkedIn: Rajesh Magow

Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL)
LinkedIn: Puneet Chhatwal

Nikhil Kamath — Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: Twitter
Instagram: Instagram
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Facebook: Facebook

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
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#WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

I put the two companies most Indian holidays run through into one room, Rajesh Magow who co-founded MakeMyTrip and Puneet Chhatwal who runs IHCL, the company behind Taj, and what began as friendly needling over whose business is bigger and more profitable turned into the one question I couldn't let go of, why a country with this much coastline, culture and history gets barely ten million foreign visitors a year and what it would actually take to make that a hundred million, which pulled us through OYO's pivot, whether India's problem is marketing or the product itself, why tourism gets half a percent of GDP when every rupee spent on it comes back three times over, where the next Goa is, and the line that stayed with me, that India has become a great country to travel from and not the best country to travel to. Full episode drops soon.

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I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center.

00:00 Introduction
06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium
12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces
17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP
22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts
27:07 Why China won the electric car
33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths
38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling
43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal
48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit
54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery
1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand
1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract

Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26_summer_davos_highlights/

Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/

Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/

Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

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https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn

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https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59

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https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

#WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

I went into this wanting one answer, if I were starting something today, should it be an electric car company or a battery company and what I got back was narrower and more useful than I expected: don't build the thing that needs rare earth. We got into why sodium carbonate sits at roughly a tenth of what the equivalent lithium inputs cost, what $50 million actually buys you if you're starting this from scratch, why the world saw over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone and what that says about the chemistry everyone standardised on, and the part I keep coming back to that your car is parked 98% of the time in front of your house, and there's a version of this where that's not a dead asset but a micro data center. Every car a token factory. I didn't see that coming.

Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/
Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/

Footage Source: BYD footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0oMa2jWXaM
Tesla footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50PU-cQx7j0

Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

#WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

The street believes struggle makes the founder, so we removed the struggle — twenty-five strangers, a brand and four crores each, ninety days in one house in Alibaug and then sat down to ask the only question that scared us: does a head start make a founder, or unmake one? Nikhil Kamath, Kishore Biyani and Ronnie Screwvala audit the model, the equity split everyone questions, the two philosophies built into this house, and what the three of us will do if twenty brands don't sell.

00:00 Introduction
06:18 Is The Foundery a selfish bet?
12:29 Why building new beats the capitalist high
18:28 How the company-builder model formed
24:47 The new consumer categories driving the bets
30:41 What happens after Day 90
35:13 The equity split everyone questions: 25% vs 75%
43:11 Where the ideas come from, and how the gates work
50:56 Founder–idea fit and the flaws each founder owns
58:05 Why equity beats an endorsement fee
1:05:14 What happens if the brands fail
1:11:08 What actually drives Nikhil
1:17:46 Abundance vs scarcity in one house
1:23:54 Social mobility and India's bubbles
1:28:54 What the founders are unlearning
1:33:09 Twelve months out: what they'd change

#NikhilKamath
Co-Founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF'
Twitter: @nikhilkamathcio on X
Instagram: @nikhilkamathcio on Instagram
LinkedIn: Nikhil Kamath LinkedIn
Facebook: Nikhil Kamath Facebook

The Foundery is a venture builder that forges entrepreneurs into co-founders and builds companies with them from the ground up.
Website: The Foundery
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCtJssM5FzLXSWIf5VWUmT2w
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jointhefoundery/?hl=en

Kishore Biyani – Founder & CEO of Future Group

Ronnie Screwvala – Co-Founder & Chairperson of upGrad, Founder of UTV Group
LinkedIn: Ronnie Screwvala LinkedIn

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
WTF is Podcast on Spotify

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
People by WTF Podcast on Spotify

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
WTF Online on Spotify

#WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline