Indian Tech CEO Fails A Business Test Against A Comedian

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In this story, we have two characters - Bhavish Aggarwal and Kunal Kamra.

Bhavish Aggarwal is the founder of Ola Consumer (India’s alternative to Uber), Ola Electric (India’s leading electric two-wheeler manufacturer) and Ola Krutrim (India’s first AI unicorn).

Kunal Kamra is a standup comedian who has recently been more popular due to political controversies than his comedy.

And, we have a third character, an average Ola scooter owner.

Ola Electric has been selling scooters since late 2021 and many customers have been complaining about different aspects of the scooters since then.

And here is where the latest controversy starts. On the 6th of October, Kunal posted this on X, while tagging India’s Transport Minister:

Whether this was Kunal posting as a caring citizen or was it a post sponsored by one of Ola’s competitors is not what I’m concerned with.

What was important here was how Ola’s Customer Service division would respond to an account with a considerable following on X.

What followed was a business “disaster class” by none other than Ola Electric’s CEO himself.

Bhavish’s reaction was emotional. Running a business is perhaps one of the most difficult things in the world.

Making a high-quality, robust and scalable consumer product is difficult. It takes years of R&D and failures to reach a product that people love. Ola Electric is still in its early years, and with the right team and investment, the scooters will surely improve.

The anger is understandable when someone fans the flames that you have been trying to douse.

The problem is that emotions in business are a costly affair.

Bhavish (not for the first time) got brutally trolled with memes and facts and more complaints.

But, the impact was not only on the internet.

On Monday, Ola Electric’s stock price fell by 9.4%! It has recovered slightly at the time of writing this story.

Of course, this public spat is not the only reason. Ola Electric’s shares have been falling since its IPO in August due to a variety of fundamental flaws.

All that aside, the Bhavish-Kunal spat gives us important business lessons.

• Do not react immediately. Give it 5 minutes.

• Mind your own business. This incident could have easily been avoided if Bhavish had let his customer service handle Kunal’s post like any other complaint.

• It is easy to criticize and difficult to create. But, don’t expect the opposite party to easily understand your perspective.

• Patience and perseverance win in the long run.

Do you remember any recent incident like the one I wrote about today?

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