“If you had to pick out of all these patterns and themes that we spoke about, which one are you the most sure about for the next season?

Two by Two is taking a short break before Season 3 starts in November, and for the season finale, the table gets flipped. Snigdha Sharma, who hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily news podcast, went back through both seasons of the show, pulled out the themes it keeps returning to, and put Praveen Gopal Krishnan in the guest's chair.

He discusses some of the themes India will see play out in the next couple of years, like how duopolies across quick-commerce, ride-sharing and food delivery will face pressures and continue to innovate to hold out. Or how legacy companies like HUL and Bajaj Finance tell us about our understanding of assets, and how that’ll play out. And of course, what exactly is the new urban Indian, and how will they continue to shape culture, cities and much more.

Two by Two will be on a short break, and will be back with Season 3 in November.

All of it leads back to a concept Praveen first wrote about six years ago in The Nutgraf: India’s California users, a group of roughly 10 million people whose habits shape the country's consumer tech, its startups and its culture.

In February of 44 BC, Mark Antony offered Julius Caesar a crown in front of a Roman crowd, and Caesar pushed it away. Antony offered it again; Caesar refused again. One more offer came from Anthony and Caesar refused it for the third time, yet again. Rome cheered.

Uber has been offered a way out of India three times in eight years. By SoftBank and Ola in 2018, by a phantom acquisition-merger with Ola in 2022, and by Rapido this May, and three times it has refused. Each time the objection was the same: Uber would not become a minority shareholder in a business someone else runs.

Praveen tells the eight-year story through two conversations recorded before the Rapido talks with Uber: Two by Two's own September 2025 interview with Prabhjeet Singh, then president of Uber India and South Asia, who explains the "number one or number two" doctrine, declines to disclose India's numbers, and describes a market where "a certain dollar amount has to be redistributed"; and Nikhil Kamath's August 2025 interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber explicitly acknowledged Rapido.

Uber calls India a must-win market.

The question we ask in this episode is what does Uber really want in India

References

Uber India has run the race and stayed the course. Can it change the game? : Episode 58, the full conversation with Prabhjeet Singh.

Uber, Ola, Rapido — the 3 wheels of India's post-Covid auto race

On 22 August, a hospital in Bengaluru hosted a “rave party” in its corridors, with kombucha and hospital props. Enough people were bemused and outraged. A week later, a "peptide party" was cancelled the day before it happened, after Karnataka's drug regulator asked what exactly was in the mocktails and later conducted raids. These are just a small flavour of the kind of strange, unusual events that are happening in the city. There are others : like invite-only house parties with AI-generated cocktails, people opening up their living rooms for strangers to come in and listen to music, running clubs, and people who make a habit of sitting in Cubbon Park reading different books, together, without speaking.

This summer, a new kind of Bangalorean has come to the forefront - they want to be around people, but never with people.

And brands have noticed.

This episode is about what happens when people who crave ambient belonging meet brands that are ready to push the envelope to find noise. The hyperindependent Bangalorean has moved here for a job, lives with flatmates they found on an app, is self-reliant to a fault, and is yet lonely in a very specific way. They will fill in a Google form to attend a party but won't accept an invitation to one. Then come the brands, who have discovered that fifty solitary attendees who are ready to experiment with something bizarre are worth more as a story than actually doing the work of crafting an event that’s worth their money and time.

Praveen puts this theory to two people who have spent years building events and curating spaces in Bengaluru.

Karthik Balakrishnan runs Underline Centre, a community space in Indiranagar that hosts a film club, improv, board games and origami meetups, and which he describes as "a daycare centre for adults".

Arpan Peter is the founder and CEO of Foreward Lifestyle and Experiences, a culture IP house behind the India Jazz Project and The Shift, a bar-culture platform whose ₹4,000 Secret Shift evenings sell out before anyone knows where they are.

Together, they try to answer the question of what happens when the hyperindependent Bangalorean walks into a hospital rave party.

Inside Myntra, there’s a spreadsheet that lists the competitors it’s tracking closely. Nykaa Fashion is not on it. To find it, you open a dropdown called "others" and scroll past Shoppers Stop, LimeRoad and Club Factory. That is where India's biggest fashion platform files Nykaa's fashion business, eight years after Nykaa promised its IPO investors that fashion would be the second engine.

Except this past quarter, Nykaa Fashion made money for the first time in its existence. Its GMV grew 30% last year and crossed ₹4,900 crore, H&M chose it for a marquee launch and became the platform's number one brand within months, and Nike handed it something almost no global brand hands anyone — its entire India digital storefront, run end to end. And finally, Nykaa was profitable, but just about.

How did this happen?

Nykaa decided to stop competing with Myntra altogether: walk away from the discount war, wind down the private labels, and go premium.

Praveen tells the story of Nykaa's two acts in fashion through two conversations — with Aalok Dubey, who has spent thirty years building brands in India, on what premium actually means and why platforms keep falling for private labels; and with Nuha Bubere, who reported The Ken's story on the turnaround, on what Nykaa changed and why Myntra still isn't looking.

And together, the story is about Nykaa - which has chosen a different path for itself, and what comes next.

References

Nykaa finally fixed fashion, and investors came rushing back. Myntra still sees no reason for panic — by Nuha Bubere, The Ken.

Ather took eleven years to sell its first half-million scooters, watched Ola raise more money and build bigger factories, and cut its own valuation by 44% to get its IPO away. Since then, it’s been on a tear, building factories, scaling, and now it’s at the point where it’s ready for the biggest challenge yet: this week it’s launching a new platform aimed at the ₹1 lakh scooter mass market.

There’s a reason why nobody has gotten this far. TVS leads the market. Bajaj is second and already makes money on electric. Both entered EVs once Ather had proved the demand, and between them they now hold about half the market, funded by profitable petrol businesses.

So Praveen asks his two returning guests the question: what happens when Ather takes the fight to TVS and Bajaj’s home ground?

Kunal Khattar, founder of Advantage, an early-seed fund that has spent a decade betting India's EV transition will be won by startups and Narayan Sundaraman, independent strategy and brand advisor, most recently head of marketing at Bajaj Auto, are surprisingly optimistic about Ather’s chances — but with caveats.

Together, they discuss how Ather got here, how it found the resilience to stay where it is right now, and what lies ahead for India’s most promising EV company.

References:

https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/ather-energy-was-a-pioneer-can-it-also-be-a-leader/

No new episode this week, we're on a break. So, here's one from November 2025 that just became relevant again: Perplexity's free year with Airtel has begun expiring, and the numbers are just being reported:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/perplexitys-free-ai-offer-left-it-with-millions-more-users-in-india/

Listen back to what we predicted and how things panned out.

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This week, Two by Two debuts a new format: “Reverse engineering the playbook.”

Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan attempt to crack the math behind this recent wave of AI-telco partnerships in India. Why are companies like Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI racing to bundle their expensive premium subscriptions with Airtel, Jio, and Phonepe?

To decode the economics, they are joined by two industry experts with firsthand experience managing these exact types of deals:
Chandrashekhar Vattikuti (ex-CPO of Inmobi and SVP of their Telco Cloud business) and Prakash Deep Maheshwari (head of product at Grab and former director of growth for Netflix in India and Southeast Asia).

The group explores whether Indian telcos are desperate for differentiation or simply cashing in on a gold rush where the smartest move is to sell shovels–or in this case, subscribers. Prakash argues this is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: once one telco bundles an AI service, the others have no choice but to follow.

They also break down the actual structure of these deals, from minimum guarantees to the marketing halo the partnerships create. The conversation gets into why OpenAI likely entered these deals “kicking and screaming” to protect its platform ambitions, while Chandra offers a reality check on whether these massive user numbers will actually stick around once the free periods end.

Episodes referenced in the conversation:

1. ‘Do we even need product managers?’– Two by Two episode 13 with Chandrashekhar Vattikuti

2. ‘Threat models, using taste to defend margins, ChatGPT’s ‘collab’ with Phonepe’- Zero Shot episode 9