Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar says trust is key to any business partnership

Kumar shares how he and his two other co-founders manage a symbiosis while running the B2B e-commerce platform.

By Maleeva Rebello, ET Bureau | Updated: Mar 06, 2020, 09.56 AM IST

Kumar says that he and his co-founders play to their strengths.

What does it take to join the coveted startup club of unicorns? This is a question that most founders may have on their mind. For Sujeet Kumar, co-founder of online marketplace Udaan, the answer is simple: “The core of it is trust,” he said.

Kumar, who was in Mumbai recently for an entrepreneurs’ meet, shared how he and the other co-founders — Vaibhav Gupta and Amod Malviya — worked together to make the company India’s fastest growing unicorn. “We cannot divide the roles artificially because as a person you want to know everything. Trust is when you can blindly trust each other. Somebody taking the decision must be fair. Everybody has their own strength,” he said.

According to Kumar, he and his co-founders play to their strengths.

“I enjoy operations, building scale and people. VG [Vaibhav Gupta] is more analytical, building business; he is a business finance guy. He was the head of the business finance [in his previous organisation]. For Amod, it is technology. He is one of the best tech talents in the country. The faith is that he will build capability technology-wise. We lead with faith,” he said.

United we stand
Udaan was started in 2016 by the three former Flipkart employees. And the journey to becoming a unicorn in three years wasn’t easy. Like most fledglings, the trio struggled to find an investor and had to put in their own money to take their venture off the ground. But the one thing they didn’t struggle with was finding the right balance between three people helming a company. “Conflicts [among the co-founders] do happen but with transparency, we discuss that,” Kumar said. “We fight with each other. But at the end of the day, we understand. Our relationship and trust help us reach a joint decision rather than taking a position and not budging from there. These are very crucial aspects.”

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