Cost to Company

This week your host Sneha will take you inside businesses at war, through the voices of those fighting in the trenches. We’ll hear how the same war — the war against inflation, a funding winter and shrinking markets — is being fought differently in different businesses. We’ll see how war sharpens, and sometimes disfigures, a business. We’ll see what is martyred and what is protected.

This is what a business fighting for survival looks like.

Tell us, is your business fighting for survival?

For months and months now, there’s a word that’s been whispered among recruiters, founders, CXOs, and executives who are hiring for key positions in their companies.

It’s a word used to describe a cohort of professionals whose salaries are out of sync with the reality of the market. It’s a word that is used for people who work in product management, engineering, marketing, and even cross-functional roles.

Meet the “unhireables”. They live among us. They work in our offices. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see that their careers are paralysed. Some of them are actively seeking jobs, but their interviews end abruptly once they inform the recruiter of their current compensation. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re unhireable.

Between 2020 and 2022, investors pumped billions of dollars into startups whose founders and leaders offered up the mythical “hypergrowth” narrative. Those startups, in turn, pumped money to hire and grow a layer of mid-level and senior-level executives whose job was to deliver on that hypergrowth narrative.

And salaries went through the roof. Hikes of 50% and above were par for the course.

Cut to the present.

If overvalued startups are widely recognised as a problem, can overvalued employees escape the same fate?

This episode was written, hosted, and produced by Akshaya Chandrasekaran with audio engineering by Rajiv CN and creative inputs from Anushka Mukherjee and Snigdha Sharma.

Listen to how Apple is building an army of ‘faithfuls’ in one of the most price-sensitive markets in the world, on Daybreak, a business podcast by The Ken.

Cost to Company is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

It was the day of Wasim’s engagement. He was wearing his favourite kurta for the big occasion. It was the first time, in many days, that he was genuinely happy.

Just then, he gets a call from Byju’s HR team:

“We regret to inform you that your employment with Byju’s has been terminated.”

If 2021 saw the high of the VC influx, Bored Ape NFT projects, and salary hikes; 2022 is going through a slowdown, a crypto winter, and thousands of job losses.

Who bears the brunt of a global meltdown? Who will survive this winter that’s been around for far too long now? Why do layoffs even happen in the first place? Which companies have to let their valuations slip and let their employees go?

And within these companies, who gets laid off first?

In episode 2 of Cost to Company, we explore these questions as we speak to founders, HR mavericks, career counsellors, and most importantly: people who’ve been laid off.

The answers aren’t easy, but the perspectives are worth listening to.

If you like our podcast, or have thoughts, feelings or story ideas, write to us at [email protected].

Or share, retweet, and follow @thekenweb.

On Feb 11th of this year Subhash Chaudhury, CTO and founder of Dukaan, posted the salaries of nine new hires. That tweet went viral. The very next day, the CTO of Chingari, also posted salaries of six new hires. This tweet also went viral.

Salaries are the one part of our jobs shrouded in secrecy. We know, without anyone specifically ever telling us, that they are not to be ordinarily shared with our colleagues. We don’t want to be impolite. And businesses like paying as little as they need to.

And here you have two businessmen, breaking that cardinal rule.

In this, our pilot episode of Cost to Company, we will explore why these tweets were posted, and what happens when you break this cardinal rule of business.

We will see what this experiment - the publishing of a salary - does to a business. Does it make salaries more fair and equitable? And is the relationship between employee and employer — bound by goodwill and a confidential fiduciary contract — changed for good?

If you like our podcast, or have thoughts, feelings or story ideas, write to us at [email protected]. Or share, retweet, and follow @thekenweb.

There is a gap between what young people want from their careers and what they get. We’ve spent months trying to understand this white space, and we've distilled our learnings into a brand new careers podcast from the newsroom of The Ken!

The first two years of our careers are hard. They are exciting and full of possibilities, but also frustrating and anxiety-inducing.

Every interaction, every assignment, and every initiative seems to hold promise and uncertainty in equal measure.

Do you have to love your job? Must your colleagues also be your friends? Is it okay to feel restless after just six months? Did your boss offer you feedback or criticism, and does the difference matter? Is it okay to be seen as ambitious? Can finding a great mentor help you grow faster? And just what is the right level of cool to wear to work?

Perhaps you were lucky enough to land your “dream job” during placements, but the reality of any job can be daunting even in the best of times.

No wonder a large majority of graduates end up quitting their first jobs in the very first year or two.

You’d think companies would pay the same level of attention to welcoming, nurturing, and mentoring their young first-time employees as they did to hiring them on campus. (They’re busy with other things).

The First Two Years is a new early careers podcast from The Ken, hosted by Akshaya Chandrasekaran. Think of it as a friend that will ask—and answer—the most important and interesting questions about learning to succeed at work.

Sure, you will hear accounts of crisis, failure, turnaround, and triumph from young professionals in their early 20s. But we also promise you that right mix of humour, awkwardness, wit, and cool that is equally important.

You can call us TFTY. Follow us on Spotify and Apple to get notified when our first episode drops – trust us, you don’t want to miss us.