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
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