Swiggy Co-Founder Phani Kishan Addepalli Talks About IPO and Journey So Far

The natural state of every startup is to die, says Phani pragmatically. “More startups die than live — surviving 10 years of our journey is big enough. Getting to a place where we are part of India’s growth story, taking people with us on that story… I don’t think that feeling has fully sunk in,” he adds with a smile, revealing that the company has been preparing for the IPO for the past two-three years. “The independent directors were there for two years. There was a lot of internal preparation to put in place governance, to find the right advisors, to prepare for the right level of transparency, to conduct ourselves in the way a public company should — all that was in the works. That part is not new to us. We feel good, business is going well.”

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The plural comes naturally to Phani when talking about the company he’s been with for nine years. While it’s hard to pinpoint his individual accomplishments, it’s clear that they’ve been significant: Phani, who started as an employee in 2015, was promoted to co-founder in July 2021 by OG co-founders Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy. “I’ve always been amazed by Phani’s ability to take on very new charters and start from scratch, go out and do great work. His approach to building new and lasting organizational capabilities (read: superpowers) has always been a multiplier for us, and I look forward to him moving forward and taking on new challenges to build even more superpowers in the years to come,” Majety, Swiggy’s CEO, wrote in a blog post announcing the move.

While Phani was heading up Swiggy Instamart’s fast-paced retail division when we met on July 31, he was soon given his newest role: chief growth officer. Catching up over a quick phone call last week, Phani explains what his job will involve and how it will continue to intersect with his role as head of Instamart. “In its simplest form, growth for us is about customer acquisition and retention. It’s understanding the next 100 million users and their barriers to testing, which could be simple things like cash on delivery, or quality concerns, or it could be app navigation—there’s that famous story about how the Amazon search icon was mistaken for a table tennis bat by many early adopters in India,” says Phani.

He also believes that quick commerce has huge potential to grow in India — a statement that is reinforced by the fact that the already fierce competition in the sector, mainly between Zomato’s BlinkIt, Zepto and Swiggy’s Instamart, is set to get even fiercer with Amazon and Flipkart joining the category; in fact, Flipkart’s quick commerce vertical Minutes was launched in several postal codes in Bengaluru last month, and Amazon is reportedly readying its technology for an early 2025 launch amid sporadic rumours that it is eyeing Instamart (Phani laughs).

“We fundamentally believe that the opportunity in grocery is orders of magnitude larger than the opportunity in food delivery. It’s just a much larger pool of potential users—take my mom, who doesn’t use Swiggy for food delivery but orders groceries on Instamart,” he says. In his view, food delivery in India is still a want, not a need, and for most people, it happens on special occasions—friends coming over, anniversaries. “Grocery is a $600 billion industry in India,” he says, and it’s clear that the fast-food segment is eyeing that pie covetously.

The evolution of Phani’s role at Swiggy is in line with the company’s own history. Both were young and inexperienced when he joined Swiggy in March 2015—just a few months after the company was born in Bengaluru in August 2014. “Our office back then was in a small villa behind the Prost Brewery in Koramangala, and we were a few streets away from Flipkart’s first office—in fact, they were some of our first customers,” Phani recalls.

Swiggy was a bold newcomer looking to disrupt the tough food ordering/delivery space, already crowded with established names like Food Panda. But there was a key difference: while others were digitizing restaurant menus and making ordering easier, Swiggy boldly announced that it would handle everything from start to finish, including delivery. “While we were late to restaurant aggregation, our unique expertise was essentially this: Can we control the last-mile delivery from restaurant to consumer to ensure an incredibly reliable experience every time? Can we remove the anxiety that comes with those famous words, ‘ladka nikal gaya hai’ (the boy has left)?” he says with a laugh, referring to a popular and often misleading phrase used by restaurant managers to reassure angry and hungry customers that their food is on its way.

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“If I remember correctly, I said, ‘Can we build a Domino’s layer on top of every restaurant?’ Domino’s never claimed to have the best pizza, but it did guarantee delivery within a certain time (Check if we need a Domino’s template: Promoters HT Media Ltd, which publishes Mint, and Jubilant Foodworks are closely related. No promoter relationship though)/IMO no, it’s a one-time reference-SB//. Also, many restaurants, including some of the most popular ones like Corner House and Meghana Foods, didn’t join any of the aggregators. We said we would bring them all on board and said there would be no minimum order,” says Phani.

Indeed, it’s easy to forget that these practices, now standard across the food delivery industry and taken for granted by people like us, were pioneered by Swiggy, permanently changing urban India’s relationship with food. “I don’t know if we ever made it public, but ‘changing the way India eats’ was our internal slogan. Like ‘no customer goes hungry,’” Phani says.

The IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta graduate, who grew up in the BHEL town outside Hyderabad, was eager to join India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem after completing his management studies in 2013, though he did succumb to convention for a while, working as a senior associate at Boston Consulting Group in Mumbai for a little over a year. “I definitely learned a lot at BCG, but in 2014, which I consider the watershed year for Indian e-commerce — Flipkart raised $1 billion, Snapdeal was in the news in a big way, Uber and Ola were gaining — it was obvious that this was going to be really big. And I had this huge FOMO — I felt like something was happening and I wasn’t part of it. It wasn’t like I had a complete clarity about what I wanted to do, I just felt like sitting in an AC room at a bank advising them wasn’t going to get me anywhere near understanding what I wanted to do,” he recalls. He started reaching out to friends in the startup ecosystem, and a meeting with Majety, his senior from IIM Calcutta, sealed the deal — he moved to Bengaluru and joined Swiggy.

One of his first tasks was managing the company’s growing catalog—which included figuring out the nitty-gritty details of whether “idli” is spelled with an “i” or an “ay” and “paneer mein kitne n hote hain” (how many n’s are in paneer). “When I joined, I didn’t really have a defined role, and so did other people because we were growing and there were a lot of things to do. Then we were raising Series B funding—so I did a little bit of investor relations,” says Phani, modestly adding that “I knew a little bit of Excel and PPT.” Swiggy didn’t have a finance head at the time, so Majety asked him to manage finance for a few months until they found someone. Managing investor relations meant knowing the ins and outs of data, so he started a team of analysts. Over time, as the company grew, cross-functional projects emerged and he began to bridge teams from marketing to delivery. “If you ask me what role I played, it would be hard to say I did this for X amount of time…they started to blend together. “For the first three years, it was basically setting up a business unit, running it until we found someone more capable, and then stepping away from it,” he says.

He recalls three moments that clearly shaped his pre-IPO experience. One came very early on, a few months into the business, when the company started receiving complaints about poor customer experiences because business (basically orders) doubled in a few weeks. “We got a call saying we weren’t going to serve any customers, we were going to shut down for a day or two to fix some technical issues. I was very new to it—being willing to give up business for customer experience was a huge learning experience for me and gave me a better understanding of the culture,” Phani recalls. Then, in 2018, as they celebrated becoming a unicorn, he recalls talking to Sriharsha and Nandan about the fact that they were fulfilling 500,000 orders a day. “And it hit me—how far we’ve come,” Phani says. That number now reports to be more than 1.5 million orders a day across verticals.

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The third moment happened a few days ago. Speaking at a conference, it dawned on Phani that Indian startups are now global leaders, especially in the fast-paced retail category, which has proven difficult to break into globally (e-commerce giant Amazon shut down its two-hour Prime Now delivery service a few years ago). Indian startups have gone through three phases, Phani believes: the first was when they replicated Silicon Valley ideas in India, like Flipkart with Amazon or Ola with Uber; the second, when they started catching up with ideas that were developing simultaneously in the US and India, like food delivery; and the third phase is now, when ideas incubated in India are being adopted globally.

Google cofounder Larry Page came up with a method for deciding whether to buy or invest in a company: he called it the “toothbrush test,” asking himself whether he would use a product once or twice a day and whether it would improve his life. Phani says that inspired Swiggy: “For us, our ambition has always been to have 100 million people using us 15 times a month. And we’re starting to feel that—we’re starting to feel like that’s possible.”