Two by Two

The fastest growing segment of insurance in India is individual health insurance. It’s growing steadily at a, well, healthy pace of 20% annually.

But scratch just a little beneath the surface and things don’t appear so rosy. Of the 20% annual growth in revenue, nearly 15% comes from medical inflation. Meaning, existing customers paying higher premiums each year because the costs of treatments are going up.

The growth in the number of customers each year is just around 5-6%.

Health insurance in India is broken from top to bottom. 70-75% of Indians have no health insurance. Of those who do, the largest chunk have free or low cost insurance provided by the government, followed by usually employer provided group insurance. Less than 10% Indians have their own health insurance.

Scratch that. It’s more accurate to call it hospitalization insurance, not health insurance. Because the industry has developed in a way that incentivizes catastrophic illnesses and hospitalization and treatment, not health.

Why, you wonder?

Because much of the industry wrongly incentivizes, for legacy reasons, all the wrong things. Like, large groups that make lots of claims. High commissions to distributors. Expensive procedures. Expensive premiums.

Instead of incentivising the right things. Like, getting the young and healthy covered early on. Insuring blue collar workers. Building products customers actually want. And most importantly, staying healthy.

So when hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar sat down to discuss this complex topic, they decided to invite two guests who had the experience and candour to tell them what needs to change.

Our first guest is Viren Shetty, the Executive Vice Chairman of one of India’s largest hospital groups, the listed Narayana Health. was our first guest. Viren has also been spearheading Narayana Health’s foray into providing its own health insurance, built to address many of the gaps I spoke about earlier.

Our second guest is Shivaprasad Krishnan. Shivaprasad currently runs an investment banking firm, Kricon Capital, but was a part of the founding team at ICICI Lombard, one of India’s first private health insurers. He also has over 3 decades of experience in finance and management.

This episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Sound engineering and mixing is by Rajiv C N.

What you just listened to were just some of the highlights from an almost 90 minute discussion that Praveen and Rohin had with Viren and Shivaprasad. You can listen to full episodes either with a Premium subscription to The Ken or by subscribing to Two by Two Premium on Apple Podcasts.

Of course, you could also wait 4 weeks, because we do make full episodes available for a while after that.

[This is a highlights episode which you listen for free on Spotify, Amazon Music or YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts if you're not a paid subscriber yet]

If you enjoyed listening to this episode of Two by Two or have some thoughts that you’d like to share with us you can always write to us [email protected]. We’ll be back next week with a new episode for you.

If you are a Product Manager, especially in India, you’re probably going through a crisis of faith and existence.

As a career, Product Management in India has gone through multiple eras — in the early days, PMs struggled to explain to people what they actually did. Think about all the people you’d imagine who work at a software company. Marketing. Engineering. Sales. Analytics. Design.

You can explain what they do to your grandmother. But the one exception to the rule is Product Management. It’s the only function where the people who do it struggle to explain to their parents what they do.

Then suddenly there was a gold rush when everyone wanted to become a Product Manager. And now, there’s an existential crisis — partly driven by the reduced funding and attrition, the rise of AI, and the changing nature of products themselves, more and more leaders are asking the question : Do we even need Product Managers?

In today’s episode of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan interview two accomplished product leaders in India. First, there’s Chandrashekhar Vattikuti (CPO and SVP at InMobi, ex-Yahoo, Microsoft) and Shreyas Srinivasan, Chief Product Officer at Paytm*, and also founder of Paytm Insider. During the discussion, they trace the origin, the evolution and the crisis that Product Management as a career faces in India. They try to figure out why and how Product Management became a science and stopped being an art.

And they try to answer what makes for a great Product Manager, and how to find them.

And they also ask the question that CEOs and Founders are asking themselves — do we even need Product Managers at all?

Welcome to Episode 13 of Two by Two.

Two by Two is also a newsletter, where every Friday short storified version of the latest episode is sent out to subscribers for free. You can sign up for the Two by Two Newsletter here.

(Listen to the free highlights only episode on Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts)

Further reading:

Product Managers used to be creators. Now they are mostly bureaucrats

Who killed the art of Product Management in India?

Who made the Frauduct Manager?

Episode referenced:

Google Pay: Big. Successful. Vulnerable

This episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode. This is a shorter version which contains some of the most interesting part of the close to 90 minute full episode available only to the Premium subscribers of The Ken and on Apple podcasts with a separate monthly subscription.

New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and tell us what you think of the show. You can write to us at [email protected].

*Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor in The Ken.

Welcome to the first episode of The Ken’s brand new premium business podcast: Two by Two!

In this episode, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar, CEO of The Ken and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, COO of The Ken, sit down with Professor R. Srinivasan and Srikanth Rajagopalan to discuss Flipkart and Phonepe – both owned by the American giant Walmart – are stepping over each other’s toes in an effort to create more avenues. Why? Of course, to bring in revenue and strengthen their bottom lines. Flipkart is trying to make its mark with its payments app Supermoney and PhonePe is trying to have a crack at hyperlocal delivery with Pincode.

But why wade into unfamiliar waters?

Both Flipkart and PhonePe and Flipkart have their reasons. For Flipkart, their market isn’t growing as fast as it used to and PhonePe – even with its billions of transactions – isn’t able to make money off of it. Because UPI is a public good and should not be monetised. So, naturally, they are looking at places where opportunities lie. And both want what the other has.

And therein lies the conflict.

And what better way to plot this conflict but on a 2x2 – which represents the purest form of a conflict.

In fact, each episode of the Two by Two podcast will feature an important story investigated and discussed and visualized as a 2x2 matrix.

You can think of Two by Two as your personal investigative business brain!

In our very first episode, you’ll hear the speakers discuss how Flipkart and PhonePe are gradually moving in each other’s directions too. When the overall market is only so big, niceties like staying out of your siblings turf is, well, impossible.

So, the question we wanted to ask is, where do these two giants, advancing into each others turf, meet? Where do the sparks fly?

And might they collide?

About the guests:

Prof. R Srinivasan teaches Strategy at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B). He has been teaching strategy for over a quarter of a century, and for the last decade focused on studying platform business models. He also leads IIM-B’s Centre for Digital Public Goods (CDPG).

Srikanth Rajagopalan is the CEO of Perfios Account Aggregation and runs Anumati - one of the earliest startups in the Account Aggregator space. In a career spanning nearly 30 years Srikanth has worked at FMCG companies, tech startups, global credit card giants, telecom and cloud computing.

And don’t miss out on the puzzle, here it is: The X-axis goes from full WFH on one side to full WFO on the other. What should the Y-axis be? You tell us.

Write to us at [email protected] to let us know what you thought of the episode and of course, your answer to the puzzle.

We have unlocked the full and unedited subscriber version of episode six, which we released on September 19th for Premium subscribers of The Ken on The Ken’s app and on Apple Podcasts. Now, you can stream the full episode on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts for free for a few weeks.

The fastest growing segment of insurance in India is individual health insurance. It’s growing steadily at a, well, healthy pace of 20% annually.

But scratch just a little beneath the surface and things don’t appear so rosy. Of the 20% annual growth in revenue, nearly 15% comes from medical inflation. Meaning, existing customers paying higher premiums each year because the costs of treatments are going up.

The growth in the number of customers each year is just around 5-6%.

Health insurance in India is broken from top to bottom. 70-75% of Indians have no health insurance. Of those who do, the largest chunk have free or low cost insurance provided by the government, followed by usually employer provided group insurance. Less than 10% Indians have their own health insurance.

Scratch that. It’s more accurate to call it hospitalization insurance, not health insurance. Because the industry has developed in a way that incentivizes catastrophic illnesses and hospitalization and treatment, not health.

Why, you wonder?

Because much of the industry wrongly incentivizes, for legacy reasons, all the wrong things. Like, large groups that make lots of claims. High commissions to distributors. Expensive procedures. Expensive premiums.

Instead of incentivising the right things. Like, getting the young and healthy covered early on. Insuring blue collar workers. Building products customers actually want. And most importantly, staying healthy.

So when hosts Praveen Gopal Krishna and Rohin Dharmakumar sat down to discuss this complex topic, they decided to invite two guests who had the experience and candour to tell them what needs to change.

Our first guest is Viren Shetty, the Executive Vice Chairman of one of India’s largest hospital groups, the listed Narayana Health. was our first guest. Viren has also been spearheading Narayana Health’s foray into providing its own health insurance, built to address many of the gaps I spoke about earlier.

Our second guest is Shivaprasad Krishnan. Shivaprasad currently runs an investment banking firm, Kricon Capital, but was a part of the founding team at ICICI Lombard, one of India’s first private health insurers. He also has over 3 decades of experience in finance and management.

This episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Sound engineering and mixing is by Rajiv C N.

You can listen to full episodes either with a Premium subscription to The Ken or by subscribing to Two by Two Premium on Apple Podcasts.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode of Two by Two or have some thoughts that you’d like to share with us you can always write to us [email protected]. We’ll be back next week with a new episode for you.

The Swiggy of 2024 is a shadow of its former self.

Boxed in by younger, nimbler and hungrier competitors from all sides, it has been defending itself for so long that it seems to have forgotten how to play offense.

It wasn’t always like this. Swiggy used to define innovation, product chops and “Bengaluru cool”.

In many ways it pioneered food delivery in 2014 after pivoting from a courier service.

Zomato, originally a restaurant discovery company, got into food delivery a year after Swiggy. It may have started as a late follower, but today Zomato’s market share in the food delivery space is estimated at 56-57% by Goldman Sachs, with Swiggy in second place.

Then there’s quick commerce. In 2020 Swiggy was the first to launch a quick commerce grocery business, which we now know as Instamart. Zomato meanwhile bought Blinkit and rapidly integrated and scaled it across India. Once again, it would go on to beat Swiggy in market share. Blinkit is estimated to have a 46% market share, followed by Swiggy at number 2.

Underpinning all of Swiggy’s business were its apps and products, long considered the gold standard of user experience and design. They were slick, intuitive, fast, and fun.

But Swiggy’s apps today are a haphazard and constantly changing collection of sub-products, menu items, offers and distinct sections.

How did it come to this?

This week on Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan discuss Swiggy with Arnav Gupta, the Director of Engineering at Jio Cinema, and Deepak Shenoy – the co-founder and CEO of Capitalmind*.

Arnav, who used to lead product and engineering for Zomato's consumer apps, explains how product and teams work within a food delivery company. Deepak runs a company handling 2000 crores worth of investments and is a great expert on how the public markets work. He breaks down exactly what the market wants and needs from Swiggy, and what it needs to do to succeed once it goes public.

[You can listen to the full episode on The Ken’s app or on Apple Podcasts, with a paid subscription]

Additional Reading:

Swiggy is at the mercy of Zomato for its IPO

Swiggy and Timidity

1,500 stories about India’s complex relationships with Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto, and Bigbasket

Both Rohin and Praveen are investors with Capitalmind.

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P.S. We're hiring! Our podcast team is looking for an audio journalist and a podcast producer. Apply here.

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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is our lead writer and researcher and our resident sound engineer Rajiv C N is our audio producer.

What did you think of the episode? Write to us at [email protected] with your opinions and suggestions.