Episodes to an Electric Future

[Music]

hello everyone

i’m sam through our childhood we keep

hearing

that study well or you will fail

fail in the exam fail the academic year

or fail in life i mean depending how

much tv our parents watch

the significance or the impact would be

directly proportional

sometimes even to the extent of not

getting a good wife

or a good husband or the neighbor’s kid

having a bigger car

and you a cycle i would say

as long as that’s an electric cycle i’m

okay with it

today let me share my journey with you

the ups and downs

the struggles the stickers the trials

the tribulations

actually none of that is strictly true

it wasn’t that dramatic

i just said it more for the impact

because somehow

it’s more powerful when these talks

begin with a story like

i came to bombay with 200 rupees in my

pocket

but yes my story it had its own share of

drama

comedy and some tragedy of course

a good screenplay for a bollywood pot

boiler

or a web series hence why not seat

this entire journey as episodes of a web

series

so here we begin episode one

the origin like many recent movies and

web series favorite setting

it’s small towns like mine also began in

one

in my case luckily this happened to be

goa

thanks to all the stereotypical sun surf

sand imagery attached to it

s for studies did not come across as a

big priority

but it was and it is good education

was given much higher credence than even

entrepreneurship

being brought up in goa i realized that

the small town learning

is very different you are a little more

rooted

you evaluate situations very differently

you learn to work with minimum available

resources

you also have this homing device

attached

that keeps the connect intact

being born in a pre-mobile phone world

also meant

that there was a very close interaction

with the larger community

which meant being part of everybody’s

traditional festivals the cultures

and the cuisines which helped me build

my own understanding of the world when i

look back each day

i can say it added immensely to the

knowledge jar of mine

i learned that how and where you grow up

becomes a core part of yourself

episode two learning on the road

as kids we all wanted to be pilots

as we grew up we learned about something

called

careers of course we learned that most

of the kids who wanted to be pilots

also ended up being doctors or engineers

because it was the right

sensible choice similarly i did my civil

engineering from pune

but thankfully i have not really

constructed

anything that’s one area where i’m happy

that just my dream crashed and nothing

else

then the right choice of an mba beckoned

what my mba did for me was open up my

thinking

just a little more give a little more

clarity

and the ability to question the normal

while i was getting educated it was the

people i was with and the places i was

in

from whom i learned something every

single day

straight from my mba campus i moved to

the swanky

tech world in bangalore as a part of a

large tech company

i met a lot of people interacted with

people from diverse cultures

during this time i lived in bangalore

mumbai

delhi and i traveled across from working

in the world’s

biggest tech company for a decade to

being the ceo

of a hospitality chain and finally

co-founding be life thankfully

in all those years no one asked me

samarth

where do you see yourself in five years

i

honestly wonder what my answer would be

and i believe it’s okay if you don’t

have the five year plan made

a straight road without a few twists and

turns

can be quite boring for me i don’t come

from a business background

but the whole idea of creating something

grounds up from all the experience and

the learning i have gained

and putting it out in the open in the

world was always exciting

i learned that the best part about

knowledge

is that you can share it and you can

create something

literally out of nothing that takes me

to the third episode

episode number three the conscious

entrepreneur

if any of you have traveled across india

there are few things

common with most of the tourist

destination

here are a few facts for you we have

about 1.6 billion

indian tourist visits every year out of

that

about 10 million are international

travelers

it’s a 250 billion dollar industry much

bigger

than the it industry and almost

contributes to about 13 percent of the

employment of the country

but vehicular pollutions are a deep

concern

across all tourist destinations

every popular location is choked with

infrastructure

crumbling goa for example has a

population of 1.5 million people

and gets about 10 million tourists every

year

local art and craft are declining

the green covers are diminishing and we

all know about that

sandeep my co-founder and i have been

friends for 20 years

over these years we kept talking about

doing something

which creates a positive impact

but it took us time being a gohan

i had personally witnessed how tourism

had impacted

the environment over the years vehicle

density

in goa is one vehicle per person

which is about 1.5 million vehicles for

the same number of people

while doing our research we found that

this problem

existed in every tourist location

whether it was oti

pondicherry agra or jaipur

sandeep at around the same time was in

finland and he saw this

amazing ecosystem of electric vehicles

over there

when he moved back to india we wondered

if

that’s the unique area that we should

work on

bringing clean mobility to tourism

i have lived between bangalore and gua

for a while

i have an eight-year-old son during one

of our many drives while in goa he

casually said

hey papa there are no traffic jams in

goa

and that’s where it all made sense that

we need to preserve

we need to conserve and need to pay it

forward

and it’s not about preserving the

environment but also about preserving

the art

history and culture of the place we come

from

and be life does just that

be life essentially stands for be

alive we conduct these amazing

and immersive tours on environment

friendly electric cycles

each tour takes you on a beautiful

journey of nature

history music culture and of course

food our experiences are led by local

guides

and on effortless non-polluting electric

cycles

our aim from the very beginning was to

collaborate

whether it was partnering with local

guides or lending support

to small artists or small businesses our

aim has never changed

for example every one of our guests gets

a string bag

made out of cloth we source that from a

women’s ngo near pondicherry

we have also been very conscious about

any material that we use

our first hub was a beautiful example of

upcycling

we used old discarded shipping

containers

and made them into swanky storage and

maintenance hubs

for our e-bikes that is how

we will bring about this positive impact

so every guest who takes an experience

with us

ends up learning something about the

place

about the people and in most cases about

themselves

we all need to learn from what is

happening around us and

quickly act in this case to safeguard

for the next generation

episode 4 the twist

much like a filmy twist in the tail

despite getting used to the ups and

downs that businesses and startups face

covet 19 exploded on the scene and was

a lot like the villain whom you could

not beat a terminator of sorts

we ticked all the boxes for being the

worst affected

tourism sector yes services industry

yes startup hell yes

from doing about 600 tours a month we

went to zero

the next month but then they say

when you have hit the rock bottom the

only way

is up so we learn to enjoy the ride

code 19 has been an eye-opener for all

of us the damage that we’ve caused as a

raise to the environment and the impact

that small actions

that can create detrimental effects was

rubbed into our conscience

like never before you would have noticed

that everyone became

more aware and accessed more caution in

their actions

people also became master chefs and

something called dalguna coffee trended

far too long then it deserved but that’s

another story

people also got a chance probably for

the first time in their whole lives

to witness what a world without

vehicular pollution looks like

hence we thought it’s the perfect time

to take our message

of clean mobility to a much wider

audience

by launching our online multi-brand

ev store that was the choice we made

instead of giving in

you assimilate all the learning you have

done and relearn

rebuild and restart you learn to make

adversity into opportunity

episode 5 the beginning

today we have delivered electric cycles

to places like

jamshedpur baroda indore trishur

our e-bike tours are in nine states

across india

and our customers are loving it we hope

that we continue leading this charge

and help switch as many users to

electric as we can

each of our tours saves about 900 grams

of co2

so far we would have saved approximately

200 fully grown trees and imagine

when we are at 100 locations and we are

adding new ev users

in thousands every month the kind of

impact

that we can make india sells about 22

million two wheelers every year and is

growing

if we transition even 10 percent of that

that’s more than 2 million units imagine

the amount of pollution

that we can reduce we have even launched

recently a campus ambassador program so

that we can drive awareness

and learning about the positive impact

at an early age

and thus drive early adoption the sooner

they learn

the faster the positive change to sum it

up

life teaches us new things every day but

pandemic

can alter everyone’s syllabus and as i

said in the beginning

mine is no pot boiler from bollywood

kind of a story

but it has a lesson with each new

chapter unfurling

i actually learned that more than

learning it is the

unlearning that should never stop and as

the popular movie line goes

i would say learning abhi bhakti

meredost thank you