Raw and Real: Tarun Mehta on his IIT Madras days, NOT doing MBA & founding Ather Energy | BP2B S2E18
Tarun Mehta (guest)
In this episode of Best Place To Build, featuring Tarun Mehta, Raw and Real: Tarun Mehta on his IIT Madras days, NOT doing MBA & founding Ather Energy | BP2B S2E18 explores tarun Mehta’s IIT journey, Ather’s pivots, and builder mindset lessons Tarun describes a non-stereotypical IIT pathway—heavy on games, comics, and minimalism—yet driven by curiosity and building when boredom created mental space.
Tarun Mehta’s IIT journey, Ather’s pivots, and builder mindset lessons
Tarun describes a non-stereotypical IIT pathway—heavy on games, comics, and minimalism—yet driven by curiosity and building when boredom created mental space.
A one-week Stanford exposure rewired his understanding of entrepreneurship from resume-building to creating value without institutional permission or “structure.”
Ather began as a deep, long-term obsession (first Stirling engines, then energy), later crystallizing into EVs through hands-on battery work, customer interviews, and weekend prototyping at IITM labs.
The company’s most important early strategic pivot was dropping consumer battery swapping after real engineering/use-case validation, while keeping the core “build a great electric scooter” thesis intact.
Ather’s durability came from conviction-led decision-making, vertical building (hardware, software, tooling, standards), community-driven feedback loops, and a rescue investment led by Sachin Bansal during a near-failed fundraise.
Key Takeaways
Boredom and constraint can be powerful idea generators.
Tarun argues the most compelling ideas emerge either from desperation or from having enough unstructured time to get genuinely bored—then choosing one thing to pursue deeply.
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A short, high-signal exposure can permanently reset your ambition ceiling.
Stanford worked as a “vacuum-filler,” showing him students can start companies and create value without needing a big organization, title, or permission.
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Conviction comes from depth, not hype.
Ather’s decisions felt “obvious” internally because the founders spent disproportionate time reading, analyzing Tesla’s architectural choices, and stress-testing economics and feasibility before committing.
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Talk to users before you’re ‘ready’—even before you have a product.
They found EV customers via online reviews/comments, emailed them, met them for hours, and paired that with real usage (buying a cheap EV scooter) to ground product direction.
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Limit your downside to make bold moves easier.
Tarun quit because he felt he had no “golden handcuffs”; the real risk was only losing a small amount of savings, which reduced decision paralysis.
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Pivot only when engineering and use-case reality forces it.
Battery swapping was core early on, but once they built real vehicles and the architecture/use case didn’t add up for consumers, they dropped it—while keeping the broader EV thesis intact.
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Vertical building creates differentiation when standards and supply chains don’t exist.
Ather had to build its own dashboard/tablet software, charging approach, battery-pack assembly tooling, and even testing protocols—turning “nothing to buy” into a moat.
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Community can function as product feedback, marketing, and culture reinforcement.
Open houses and forums made Ather unusually close to users; the Chennai launch where ~50 Bangalore customers traveled and evangelized “rewired” the team around transparency and customer love.
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Competition is clarifying when it forces hard trade-offs.
Aggressive competitors pushed Ather to explicitly reject unsustainable low-price plays (given cell costs/capital limits) and later to accelerate software feature breadth to match market expectations.
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Founder–cofounder complementarity beats similarity.
Tarun says he and Swapnil don’t think alike but share vision; their different approaches create healthy tension while keeping direction aligned.
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Notable Quotes
“You don’t need a company behind you to create value.”
— Tarun Mehta
“Genuinely good ideas… come when you are either desperate… or you are completely bored.”
— Tarun Mehta
“I had no golden handcuffs… my downside is so limited.”
— Tarun Mehta
“If it does not exist, just build it. Done.”
— Tarun Mehta
“All the thoughts that you think you have… they’re actually Paul Graham’s essays.”
— Tarun Mehta
Questions Answered in This Episode
What specifically did you see at Stanford (people, demos, conversations) that finally made entrepreneurship feel “possible” to you?
Tarun describes a non-stereotypical IIT pathway—heavy on games, comics, and minimalism—yet driven by curiosity and building when boredom created mental space.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In 2014–2015, what engineering findings made consumer battery swapping “not add up”—weight, packaging, reliability, cost, safety, or user behavior?
A one-week Stanford exposure rewired his understanding of entrepreneurship from resume-building to creating value without institutional permission or “structure.”
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You said early Ather decisions were ‘obvious’ due to deep reading—what were the 3–5 most decisive datasets/insights (battery cost curves, margins, adoption signals) you relied on?
Ather began as a deep, long-term obsession (first Stirling engines, then energy), later crystallizing into EVs through hands-on battery work, customer interviews, and weekend prototyping at IITM labs.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How did you structure the early customer research process (who to talk to, what questions, how to synthesize) when you had no formal market research team?
The company’s most important early strategic pivot was dropping consumer battery swapping after real engineering/use-case validation, while keeping the core “build a great electric scooter” thesis intact.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You mention a later ‘kitchen sink’ software feature sprint triggered by competition—what features mattered most, and what did you learn about feature-breadth vs feature-quality trade-offs?
Ather’s durability came from conviction-led decision-making, vertical building (hardware, software, tooling, standards), community-driven feedback loops, and a rescue investment led by Sachin Bansal during a near-failed fundraise.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
I applied for Harvard Business School. I got selected for an in-person interview. My parents, uh, paid for my flying. Did an absolutely pathetic, disastrous interview.
Oh, no!
I was really not ready for, uh, an interview. I didn't know what to do now. I thought I was a damn good student. McKinsey to le hi lega.
[laughing]
ITC to matlab, theek hai, I'll say yes to ITC, worst case.
McKinsey and ITC are day one jobs.
Interview nahi laga? Theek hai. You don't need a company behind you to, to create value. You don't need, like, an army of people and a full organization to necessarily create value.
And you don't need a license. You don't need permission from anyone.
And I think genuinely good ideas that you are really passionate about only come when you are either desperate, and that's the only way out-
Mm
... or you are completely bored, and you can do anything, but you decide to do that. [upbeat music]
Hello, and welcome to the Best Place To Build Podcast. Today, we are sitting at the Ather Energy office. I'm sitting with Tarun, uh, the CEO and co-founder. Hi, welcome.
Hey, hi.
You are now, uh, one of the top three EV companies in India. Congratulations. You had a very good IPO last year.
Thanks.
Uh, and from the entire community at IIT Madras, very proud of you, and you are an inspiration to all of us.
Thank you. Nice to hear that.
Yeah, and, and, uh, your story, um, is very rich. There are lots of plot points in your story, and I want to sort of start from the beginning.
Sure.
Um, you grew up in Ahmedabad, and you've said in your interviews that you heard of IIT really late-
Yeah
... and you were a gaming guy, uh, in your schooling, schooling years, right?
Yeah.
So can we start from there?
Harsh, I-- gaming guy is a... I, I think the modern definition of a gaming person is very different. I was just somebody who was not, uh, good with, uh, physical sports. I didn't bother much with it. I was too lazy. And I think, um, so Dad had a computer business, so there were always computers at home, and many of them were pretty damn good ones in the early years. I just got hooked on to playing games. Uh, and luckily, they were mostly not first-person shooter games, so they were not just like, you know, a way to sort of pass time. Uh, the earliest game that I got hooked onto was, uh, AoE 1. Uh-
Age of Empires.
Age of Empires ka bhi woh pehla Rome wala version. Uh, what-- I forget what is it called now, Battle of Rome, Conquest of Rome, something like that. Not the AoE II that became really famous.
Mm.
I actually got hooked onto the demo version of AoE 1 very many, many, many years early.
Is this the period where we used to get these free games on CDs and-
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