Sustainability Over Capital ? This Entrepreneur Duo says Yes Entrepreneur India caught up with Karan Jain, founder of Revv to know more what it takes to build a sustainable business model.
By Nidhi Singh •
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The term "sustainability' is being used more and more frequently in the business. Many companies are integrating sustainability principle to their business to capture growth rather than focusing on capital alone. Although each company has their own reasons for becoming a more sustainable but the process of sustainability involves considering the long-term consequences of the industry.
Entrepreneur India caught up with Karan Jain, Co-founder & COO of Revv which is a Delhi-based self-drive car rental company platform, to know more what it takes to build a sustainable business model. He along with his co-founder Anupam Agrawal founded the company in 2015 with the aim of creating more efficient ways of allowing people to use cars.
Talking about building a sustainable business, Jain said "Take your startup to a sustainable position and then try to get funds for investment.What had happened in last two years is that people have got into this rush of trying to raise the capital left, right and center. In the process of doing this a lot of business fundamentals were let go off so I do think every entrepreneur needs to find a sustainable business model. Once he attains sustainable business model capital will come."
Jain feels, the sequence has to be identifying a sustainable business model first then raising the capital and not the other way round.
"People are just running to raise the capital nowadays and therefore there are enough examples of companies having raised huge amounts of capital and yet not having a sustainable business and no line of sight when we will they ever become sustainable. And therefore all the capital they have raised will last only for a while and start dying," he added.
Journey Of Revv Since Inception
The company which started with two consultants with no industry backgrounds has evolved now. It not only looks at the car sharing feature but also talks about a very different mission which is giving easy car access to 50 percent of Indians.
"We are very different company now. I think the biggest delta was both on the demand and supply side. When we entered the view of how we were looking at demands was restrictive. It was restrictive in a way that we were looking at the world view of the space more from the car sharing economy," claims Jain.
Sharing Revv's journey since inception, Karan said " When we started we were a young company, two consultants with no industry backgrounds, nobody knew us. We had to go and get cars on our books which were debt finance and that requires a huge amount of capital. Since then we have now moved to going completely asset like so not a single car we are adding now sits on our books.In other words we have become capital efficient."
