
13 segments available
Aadit Palicha is the co-founder and CEO of Zepto, one of India's largest quick-commerce grocery platforms. What began as a WhatsApp group delivering groceries to neighbors in Mumbai during COVID has grown into a company employing over 200,000 people, processing millions of deliveries per day and operating one of India's largest fruits and vegetables supply chains — all built around a 10-minute delivery model powered by a network of dark stores. At Startup School India, Aadit sat down with YC's Jared Friedman to talk about the scrappy origins of Zepto, the pivot from a doorstep delivery model to owning their own dark store infrastructure and how the company is now using AI and robotics to drive supply chain efficiency and grow a fast-scaling advertising business. Chapters: 00:00 – Intro 00:17 – How Zepto Got Started 03:12 – Stanford or Startup? 04:46 – Competing in a Crowded Market 07:03 – The Pivot: Dark Stores & Zepto Is Born 10:30 – The 10-Minute Delivery Vision 12:04 – Obsessing Over 100 Customers 15:07 – The Hidden Supply Chain 18:11 – Scale & What Zepto Is Today 20:05 – The Long-Term Vision for Zepto 22:44 – How Zepto Uses AI 25:35 – The Engineering Team 26:12 – How Aadit Kept Leveling Up Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
"If you remove all constraints and you just remove all the laws of physics and you just think from first principles, what's the most extreme positive customer experience you can give and you start from..."
"So audit everyone in this room knows Zepto almost everyone uses the product many of them probably every day. I don't know how many people know the true story of how Zeppto got started. So I thought we..."
">> Yeah. That's true, Jared. I think and by the way, for everyone here, you know, Jared has been pretty instrumental in getting us off the ground. He was our group partner on YC and you know, he's bee..."
">> one thing that's interesting to me about the Zeppto story that I think might lead to a good lesson for everyone in this room is when you started Coranocart originally grocery delivery was not like ..."
">> Yeah, let's let's talk about this because a lot of people probably don't know that Zeppto is really a pivot from what you started with which even had a different name. You even like changed the nam..."
"delivery right >> which is a crazy idea at the time. I mean 10 minutes still blows my mind like somehow I order something in Zeppto and like 10 minutes later it shows up >> and you know by the way the..."
">> One of the things that I remember that stood out about you audit during YC was that you were constantly trying things and constantly experimenting. Like this is the first time, this is the first ti..."
">> Most people's experience with Zeppto as a consumer is probably like like the app experience is like like a a digital product. I bet a lot of people here don't realize that you don't really see Zepp..."
">> can you give people a sense of the scale that you're operating Zeppto I mean the numbers are just jaw-dropping I just learned today that audit at 23 years old is the largest seller of fruits and ve..."
">> Can you talk about the long-term vision of Zeppto? I think a lot of people maybe haven't really thought about what Zeppto could become in the future and I think it'd be really interesting to hear w..."
"Um so next I want to talk a bit about AI. So even though Zepto got started before the whole AI boom, you guys are now really deep into implementing AI at Zeppto and really on the cutting edge of like ..."
">> What is the software team like at Zeppto? And are you hiring? >> Yeah, we've got about 500 or so engineers and another 150 people on data science analytics uh product management, designers, etc. So..."
"Okay. And we're we're running out of time, but my my last question for you, Audit, is in order to run this company, you had to master an incredible number of skills. And you had to do it at a very you..."