Best Place To BuildRaw and Real: Tarun Mehta on his IIT Madras days, NOT doing MBA & founding Ather Energy | BP2B S2E18
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 0:58
Harvard MBA interview failure and the mindset shift: value without permission
Tarun opens with a vulnerable story: getting an HBS in-person interview, bombing it, and confronting the loss of a “safe” career narrative. He reframes the moment into a builder’s philosophy—value creation doesn’t require a big company, permission, or a large organization behind you.
- •Selected for an HBS interview, but performs disastrously and doesn’t get in
- •Realization: you don’t need institutional backing to create value
- •Good ideas often emerge from desperation or deep boredom
- •Early hint of the builder/entrepreneur mindset that later shapes Ather
- 0:58 – 1:45
Setting the stage: IIT Madras pride, Ather’s scale, and unpacking the origin story
The host introduces Tarun at Ather’s office, celebrating Ather’s position in India’s EV landscape and the IPO milestone. They agree to trace the story from childhood through IIT Madras to Ather’s founding decisions.
- •Podcast context and introduction at Ather’s office
- •Ather framed as a top EV player and IITM success story
- •Conversation direction: childhood → IITM → entrepreneurship → Ather
- 1:45 – 6:03
Ahmedabad childhood: strategy gaming, comics, and doing the bare minimum academically
Tarun describes growing up around computers (due to his father’s business), getting absorbed in strategy games, and reading comics extensively. He emphasizes he wasn’t a “grind for JEE” student—he optimized for minimum required effort and maximum curiosity/leisure.
- •Early obsession with strategy/building games (Age of Empires, SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon)
- •Comics influence (Phantom, Mandrake, Indrajal collections)
- •No heavy coaching culture early on; tuition mostly in 11th–12th
- •Self-description: decent student, not an extreme striver
- 6:03 – 7:52
Choosing IIT Madras via Engineering Design: avoiding coding/electronics, leaning mechanical
Tarun explains his IIT rank constrained options and how he selected IIT Madras Engineering Design after reading course descriptions emphasizing automotive and robotics. He recalls meeting faculty during offline counseling and being sold on the department’s promise and proximity to mechanical engineering.
- •Rank-driven tradeoffs: IIT choice + branch choice
- •Engineering Design attracted him (automotive/robotics/biotech positioning)
- •Personal tilt: comfortable with mechanical, wary of coding/electrical
- •Offline counseling-era influence: meeting faculty helped decision-making
- 7:52 – 10:34
Arriving in Chennai: campus bubble, early projects, and “resume building” activities
He recalls settling comfortably into Chennai and loving IIT Madras’s campus environment. The discussion moves into early campus project instincts (like hostel beautification pitches) and his involvement in CTides/E-Cell-era activities, which initially looked entrepreneurial in hindsight.
- •Chennai transition: culture, food, campus forest, weather; little homesickness
- •Early “Spirit of Engineering” style projects and pitching build ideas
- •Hostel/campus tinkering energy (fountain/glass case concept)
- •Early involvement in CTides/E-Cell ecosystem begins
- 10:34 – 12:32
What CTides actually meant then: not startups, but management-career preparation
Tarun challenges the neat retrospective story that E-Cell leadership meant he was destined to found a company. He argues that at the time, entrepreneurship wasn’t culturally real on campus; CTides often functioned as a pathway toward consulting/IT/management careers and resume signaling.
- •Entrepreneurship wasn’t glamorous or well-understood in 2007–09 campus culture
- •CTides activities skewed toward case studies, events, and “management prep”
- •Personal honesty: early motivation included resume building
- •Bridge missing: understanding “building value” vs “career/wealth outcomes”
- 12:32 – 17:46
Stanford week: the moment entrepreneurship became “students can build companies”
A one-week Stanford experience becomes the pivotal belief shift: startups weren’t abstract institutions, but something students were already doing. Living around student founders and seeing Silicon Valley proximity makes “I can build this” feel real, changing how he views value creation and ambition.
- •Stanford trip initially framed as travel/adventure; becomes transformative
- •Cultural gap: India lacked visible entrepreneur role models then
- •Breakthrough belief: students can start companies without massive structure
- •Post-Stanford: CTides-style event focus feels insufficient vs real building
- 17:46 – 21:53
Stirling engines and the birth of “Ather Energy” as a serious long-term idea
Tarun and Swapnil converge around a single deep technical idea rather than many shallow experiments—Stirling engines. Swapnil coins the name “Ather Energy,” and they begin meeting weekly, studying deeply, and attempting to recruit collaborators, setting early founder rhythms of conviction and persistence.
- •Early founder pattern: pick one idea and go very deep for years
- •Stirling engine basics (external combustion, high theoretical efficiency, flexible heat sources)
- •Weekly library sessions to study and prototype; difficulty retaining collaborators
- •Swapnil names the company; early “energy is fundamental” shared worldview
- 21:53 – 28:00
Placements, the MBA trap, and a “dark” career moment after Harvard rejection
Despite entrepreneurial awakenings, Tarun still pursues traditional success signals: placements, consulting dreams, and MBA plans. The failed HBS interview triggers a crisis—no MBA, no top job, and unclear money path—leading him and Swapnil to consider core engineering as a holding pattern.
- •Sweet-spot academic performance and still sitting for placements
- •Why MBA felt “logical” (peer role models, consulting/US masters pathways)
- •HBS 2+2 interview failure becomes a psychological low point
- •Conclusion then: take core engineering jobs, revisit entrepreneurship later
- 28:00 – 34:39
First jobs, first EV ride, and obsessive customer research before building anything
While working (with comparatively more free time), Tarun dives into battery pack research, buys the cheapest electric scooter, and uses weekends at IITM labs. He conducts scrappy market research by tracking down EV owners online and meeting them in person—learning the EV reality from real users.
- •Final-year patents and early interest in swappable battery packs
- •Weekend lab access at IITM to read, think, and prototype battery packs
- •Buying and riding an early low-speed EV scooter as a lived experiment
- •Finding customers via online reviews/comments and emailing them for interviews
- 34:39 – 38:37
The leap: Swapnil resigns first, IITM faculty support, and Ather begins in a lab
Momentum builds until Swapnil abruptly resigns and moves to Chennai, forcing Tarun to confront his own decision point. With supportive professors and limited “golden handcuffs,” Tarun resigns too—reframing risk as manageable—and the two start building full-time from an IITM lab setting.
- •Timeline: 2012 jobs → early 2013 battery focus → resignation decisions
- •Swapnil’s decisive move triggers Tarun’s commitment
- •Faculty backing enables early runway and a physical base to build
- •Risk framing: limited downside due to modest salaries/savings
- 38:37 – 46:20
Battery swapping to full scooter: conviction-driven roadmap, not constant pivoting
Ather initially raises money on swapping and builds prototype vehicles that resemble later Ather products, but real-world engineering and use-case issues erode confidence in swapping. Tarun emphasizes their style: long thinking, high conviction, minimal pivoting—supported by deep study of Tesla, costs, and EV unit economics.
- •Started as a swappable battery pack company; swapping dropped around 2015
- •Early belief: consumer swapping less relevant; B2B swapping may work
- •Company formation: registered Oct 2013; pivot toward full scooter in early 2014
- •Tech-and-business homework: Tesla architecture reading, battery cost curves, margin logic
- 46:20 – 52:19
Open houses, forums, and the Chennai store story: customers shape Ather’s DNA
Ather builds a community-led go-to-market approach through open houses and transparency, inspired partly by Uber’s “movement-building” playbook. The Chennai expansion becomes legendary when Bangalore customers volunteer to travel, bring vehicles, and help run multiple launch events—cementing a customer-centric company culture.
- •Open houses as both marketing and high-signal feedback loops
- •Confidence in sharing openly: low fear of being copied
- •Chennai launch: ~50 customers travel from Bangalore; Ather hosts logistics/hotels
- •Impact: customer love rewires internal DNA around transparency and doing the right thing
- 52:19 – 55:16
“If it doesn’t exist, build it”: in-house tech, factory tooling, and standards creation
Tarun explains why Ather built so much in-house: there wasn’t much to buy in early Indian EV ecosystems, and the team’s default was to build rather than compromise the end goal. They created everything from dashboards and software to battery assembly equipment and testing protocols, which also stabilized teams and reduced early attrition.
- •Built tablet/dashboard, software stack, and early connected features when standards were immature
- •Designed battery pack assembly processes and equipment due to lack of local precedents
- •Had to invent charging approaches and testing protocols
- •Clarity of mission (“build that”) reduced confusion, politics, and early attrition
- 55:16 – 1:00:53
Competition shock and execution sharpening: pricing realism and the software feature race
Competition doesn’t change Ather’s identity as a builder company, but it forces sharper decisions and removes ambiguity. Tarun describes tough debates on whether to chase low-price segments prematurely, and a later realization that Ather was under-executing on software—triggering a sprint to expand software feature breadth and catch up.
- •Competitive pressure clarifies tradeoffs (premium vs mass-market feasibility)
- •Economics reality: low-cost scooters would burn cash without scale capital
- •Strategic correction: from a few “working” software features to a broad feature set push
- •Paranoia as a healthy forcing function: align execution with stated strategy
- 1:00:53 – 1:13:44
IPO reality, the Sachin Bansal lifeline, co-founder dynamics, and the builder’s definition
Tarun downplays the IPO hype, focusing on the harder investor journey and the critical early save: Sachin Bansal’s decisive round-leading investment when Ather was close to running out of money. The conversation closes with lessons on founder complementarity, forming independent conviction, defining types of builders, and how startups shaped him personally.
- •IPO framed as modest at subscription time; stronger performance after listing
- •Fundraising was consistently hard; early runway crisis in 2014
- •Sachin Bansal story: cold outreach → meeting on Big Billion Day eve → he leads the round
- •Co-founder complementarity with Swapnil; advice to build a “cocoon” for original thinking
- •Two builder archetypes: building for love vs building for purpose; parenting traits from startup (patience, humility, optimism)
