Two by Two: Daily Summaries Delivered

Rewind : The numbers behind OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity’s deals with Phonepe, Jio, and Airtel

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.------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

The new UPI equation

For six years every UPI payment in India was free. This was because a rule from January 2020 said nobody could charge a merchant for accepting one. Then on the afternoon of 6 August, the Lok Sabha removed that guarantee by voice vote. The details of the rules haven't been framed yet, so nobody knows what a UPI transaction will actually cost, but what's clear is that the arrangement India's payments ran on for six years has ended and a new one is being written. The pool of the money involved is large enough to redraw who wins in Indian fintech.In this episode, Praveen is joined by Pranav Gundlapalle, Director and Senior Research Analyst at Bernstein who has been closely tracking India’s payments landscape for years, and with Bhavik Kaul, former Chief Product Officer of Supermoney, Flipkart's fintech arm and the fifth-largest UPI app, who before that spent several years across Indian fintech including running LazyPay and PaySense at PayU Finance. Pranav brings the perspective of the ecosystem from outside it; and Bhavik presents the product view of someone who has built inside it, in a world where MDR always existed.All of them work through a series of assumptions to derive the new UPI equation — who was paying for it earlier, and who will be paying for it in the future? How much? And what are the second and third order effects of this UPI rearrangement?

Zepto's ‘generational wealth’ narrative has started to crumble

Today's episode of Two by Two is about Zepto’s decision to pause its IPO and how things will play out next. For years, Zepto has told one story — about its potential: for growth, for profitability, for making money for everyone from investors to employees. And to be fair, Zepto executed at a blistering pace. But the story always ran on momentum, on a sense of inevitability. And the reason why Zepto told that story again and again, with bluster, is because the company always knew the truth: there was exactly one destination.For Zepto, going public wasn't a milestone. It was the endgame. And it came within inches of pulling it off.Now, Zepto and everyone in and around its massive orbit — shareholders, vendors, delivery partners, employees — will acutely feel the gravitational pull of the same momentum that propelled it up. And the way down, like the way up, will be driven by narrative. Except it'll be a counter-narrative this time, and perhaps just as irrational. The confidence narrative has two sides: thus far, Zepto has been climbing ladders, and now it's going to encounter snakes one after another.This episode is a bit different from Praveen reading out the special newsletter edition he published last week, with some help from Snigdha, who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken's daily news podcast. In this episode, Praveen plays out what the way down looks like — why India's largest mutual fund houses took one look at Zepto's valuation and financials and passed, why brands and creditors will become a lot more unreasonable, and the three outcomes from here, all of which look tricky. And after he published the newsletter, he got a wave of theories from subscribers — founders, leaders and executives among them. He reads some of them out.The market has learned. Now we find out whether Zepto can.

The 100th Episode Special

This is a special one. For the 100th episode of Two by Two, we've brought Rohin back to the podcast, after all, he co-hosted the first seventy-three episodes with Praveen. Also we decided to switch the host completely and handed the microphone to Rachel who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily podcast. She's here to spin the tables: for once Praveen and Rohin are the ones being questioned.The format is what the show has done for the last 100 episodes. Rachel takes some of India's best and biggest companies, themes and sectors like Swiggy, PhonePe, Reliance Retail, Netflix India, the India AI mission, the Indian software engineer, and a dozen more and asks the two of them to place each one on a single 2x2. One axis: master of its own fate, or hostage to someone else. The other: best years ahead, or best years behind. Across a hundred episodes of shared history, Praveen and Rohin don't agree on all of them.The full map runs in this week's newsletter, and Praveen has made some promises he must keep before for episode 200, so just like him, we hope you listen to this one, and come back to listen to the next hundred as well.Thank you for subscribing to Two by Two. If you enjoyed the episode, drop us a line about your favourite episode at twobytwo@the-ken.com and we’ll cover it in the newsletter.

Will Zepto become Swiggy before Swiggy becomes Zepto?

For the four years, everyone was seeing the same thing. Swiggy was losing market share in a business it had no business losing. Zepto was the aggressor, with a tight, disciplined approach, a tight catalogue, ten-minute groceries, not much else. Swiggy became the sprawling super-app that kept launching and burying things, from cloud kitchens to a mall to an errands app. In one of our earlier stories, we even referred to it as a “graveyard”.But now, weeks before Zepto's IPO, the roles have switched. Swiggy has done the one thing Swiggy hasn’t done in years — it’s gotten focused: backed out of a price war and leaned on the business that makes money, food delivery. Zepto has walked the other way, shutting hundreds of Café stores while launching a premium tier, reviving a paid subscription for the third time, and selling investors an advertising-and-AI story.So while Swiggy is learning discipline the hard way, Zepto is spinning up, and shutting down things. We’ve seen this story before. All the way back to the very first episode of Two by Two, which was titled, Can Flipkart become PhonePe before PhonePe becomes Flipkart?To make sense of it, Praveen is joined by Jignanshu Gor, Director and Senior Research Analyst at Bernstein, which publishes one of the sharpest reports in Indian quick commerce.We get into:Why the "gold rush" for dark stores is over — and whether what comes next is a long harvest or a doomsdayDepth vs breadth, made physical: Blinkit splitting the long tail across small stores while Instamart builds mega-storesThe three painful quarters Swiggy chose, and the case that capital is a necessary condition for survivalWhy "neither growth nor profitability" is the worst quadrant to be in — and who's stuck in itThe ceiling nobody prices in: dark-store saturation, an urbanisation-capped TAM, and the Instacart plateauThe one thing Zepto doesn't have — a profitable business next door paying the billsThe endgame math that could give Swiggy infinite runwayAlong the way, we pull stories from the 2x2 archive: our earlier calls on Zepto, Swiggy's graveyard of products, the Zepto Café bet, and the super-app roadshow where every assumption turned out wrong.Featuring past-episode clips from:EP03 — Is Zepto a gold medallist or a bronze medallist?EP05 — Swiggy needs to reclaim its past gloryEP60 — Firstclub wants to be the Costco of quick commerceEP70 — QIP, IPO, Bubble: why Swiggy, Zepto and Blinkit see quick commerce differentlyHosted by Praveen Gopal Krishnan. Two by Two is a weekly business podcast from The Ken.

2025 Year-end special

2025 is done. Forty-eight episodes. Hundreds of guests. Endless banter between Rohin and Praveen.This year, Two by Two covered stories from Bengaluru to the world including business, tech, and everything in between. We didn't just stick to the usual. We asked about people, trends, and the things others weren't paying attention to. We brought on guests who didn't rehearse their answers and tried to make sense of things as they happened.Some episodes turned out to be prescient. Some were messy. Some sparked arguments in our inbox. All of them tried to do what we set out to do: spot hidden connections, ask unasked questions, and figure out what's really going on.This final episode is Rohin looking back at six moments from the year with clips from conversations that stood out. Between each one, he adds context and some behind-the-scenes perspective on why it mattered.Here are the episodes featured:Episode 26: Zomato, Swiggy, and the rise of the 10-minute "dark" caféEpisode 31: Airtel fights spammers. And Truecaller's business modelEpisode 47: Who broke Bengaluru, and how do we fix our cities?Episode 50: In an AI age, India does not have an open source strategyEpisode 51: The invisible whale that capsized India's leaky options boatsEpisode 66: What will bring ambition back from the dead?To everyone who listened, argued with us, sent guest suggestions, or just stuck around, thank you. Next year, we're coming back with everything that makes Two by Two what it is, but bigger and better. Maybe even a few surprises. Stay tuned.There won't be an episode next Thursday. We will return on January 8th, 2026.See you in the new year.________This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with your friends, family and colleagues who would be interested in listening. If you have suggestions for guests, episodes or even changes we could make. Please write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com or comment below.

60 seconds for every 2025 episode

As we try to wind down this year, Rohin and Praveen do something they’ve never done before: go through every single episode they recorded this year. All 48 of them. In 60 minutes.The rules were simple. Each host had 10 points to build their personal top 10 list for the year. No take-backs, and no pre-discussion. It was a completely live, vibe-based recording where they figured it out as they went.What follows is a rapid-fire sprint through the year. From Amazon India’s struggles to the electric car slowdown, from B-school placements to the rise of quick commerce dark stores, and from Razorpay versus Juspay to the chaos of concert infrastructure in India. They cover it all—the hits, the misses, the prescient calls, and the episodes they wish had gone differently.Along the way, they debate whether episodes were too speculative, too early, or just not memorable enough. By the end, they’re locked in a tight race with only five episodes left and one point each remaining.Because it wouldn't be Two by Two without a matrix, we plotted the results of their debate. Take a look at the graphic to see which episodes they both loved (the green zone) versus their personal favourites.It is chaotic, nostalgic, and a perfect preview of what 2025 looked like through the lens of Two by Two.______This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.With 48 episodes in the books, this is the perfect starting point for anyone looking to catch up on the defining business stories of 2025. If you liked this sprint through the year, please share it with someone who loves a good deep dive.Have your own "vibe-based" arguments about our list? We’re all ears. Reach out at twobytwo@the-ken.com or leave a comment.

Deepavali Break