Raw and Real: Tarun Mehta on his IIT Madras days, NOT doing MBA & founding Ather Energy | BP2B S2E18

[00:01:45] From the Beginning: Tarun the gaming guy

[00:06:11] From Ahmedabad to Madras: A choice or compulsion?

[00:10:34] Engineering Projects to C-TIDES: What sparked his interest in Entrepreneurship?

[00:17:51] Ather Energy: Beginning the journey with the Stirling Engine project

[00:22:31] Life After Degree: Placements and applying for MBA

[00:28:32] First EV encounter: Balancing his first job and the Stirling Engine project

[00:34:39] From Battery Swap to an EV: How did that happen?

[00:45:00] The Ather DNA: Reading and Research and Customer Connection

[00:52:53] Building the Ather Supply Chain: Was it a conscious decision?

[00:55:29] A Pivot in Goals: Lessons from losing their market to a competitor 

[01:00:57] The Investment Story: The IPO, investors and a Flipkart Easter egg

[01:06:46] Co-Founder Equation: What is Tarun and Swapnil’s equation like?

[01:09:15] The Mark of a Good Builder: What sets them apart?

[01:12:02] Wrapping Up: Impact of being a startup founder on being a dad

[00:01:16] IIT Madras

[00:07:21] Tarun met a faculty at IIT Bombay for counselling and learnt more about Engineering Design as a course

[00:09:21] What started as Spirit of Engineering projects in 2007 - 08 later became CFI projects

[00:10:14] C-Tides was an earlier centre in IIT Madras that was eventually renamed as E-Cell

[00:12:36] Tarun travelled to Stanford University for a conference while he was a student at IIT Madras 

[00:24:18] Tarun was aiming for an MBA at Harvard Business School after graduating from IIT

[00:15:47] Swapnil Jain was Tarun’s classmate at IIT Madras and the Co-Founder of Ather Energy

[00:32:18] Prof. Sandipan Bandyopadhyay was Tarun’s project mentor at IIT Madras and allowed him to use his lab during weekends for research into battery packs

[00:36:17] Swapnil joined Prof. R Krishna Kumar as a project associate while Tarun was still working in Ashok Leyland 

[00:38:48] Sachin Bansal was one of Ather Energy’s first investors. 

[00:47:00] Tarun mentions that the Ather open houses were inspired by his reading about Travis Kalanick’s positioning of Uber against medallion taxis

[01:01:45] Nikhil Kamath and Lee Fixel are some of Ather’s investors

[01:05:26] Binny Bansal split the investment into Ather with Sachin Bansal

[01:08:30] Tarun uses Paul Graham’s essays as an example of how reading too much might stop founders from forming their own thoughts

[00:22:31] McKinsey & Company was Tarun’s dream job after IIT Madras 

[00:25:17] After his MBA interview was unsuccessful, Tarun thought he would get a job with ITC

[00:26:44] 3M and General Motors were some of the companies that offered jobs for Mechanical Engineering students during Amrut’s time at campus

[00:33:06] Tarun found a senior of his at Ashok Leyland and invited him to do market research 

[00:38:49] Tiger Global was one of Ather’s early investors

[00:44:04] Tarun read up about Tesla and their architectural decisions for their vehicles 

[00:46:04] Tarun mentions how only Porsche was the only automobile company that can hope to make good profit margins

[00:53:25] Ather Energy created a manual for how to use Google Maps for scooters 

[00:59:08] When Ola launched its EV, it announced many software features for the vehicle

[00:02:22] Age of Empires - The Rise of Rome was the first game that Tarun got interested in. 

[00:03:02] Claw and Need for Speed were other games that caught Tarun’s interest.

[00:03:18] Age of Empires II was also a game that Tarun enjoyed playing. 

[00:03:56] Other games that Tarun enjoyed playing on the computer were SimCity 2000, RollerCoaster Tycoon, The Sims and Civilization.

[00:04:42] Tarun’s father had a big collection of The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician comics, which he enjoyed reading.

[00:44:37] Tarun mentions a website called seekingalpha.com, where he read market analysis on Tesla

[00:15:48] A Stirling Engine is a combustion engine that uses an external heat source to expand a permanently sealed working gas to drive the piston, making them ideal for specialised applications like submarine propulsion and solar power generation.

[00:20:19] A Carnot Cycle is an ideal thermodynamic cycle proposed by the French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824 and expanded upon by others in the 1830’s and 1840’s. By Carnot’s theorem, it provides an upper limit on the efficiency of any classical thermodynamic engine during the conversion of heat into work, or conversely, the efficiency of a refrigeration system in creating a temperature difference through the application of work to the system.

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