Vikramaditya Shukla

Every stall I have ever approved started as a picture in my head that no render ever matched. Today we launched Boothlane - design your stall in minutes and walk it before you pay for it. Until today, it lived only in your head. Not anymore.

A while back, I had to choose between two candidates who we were interviewing for an important role. One had 10 years of experience and a CV that looked perfect and the other had barely three years, but she’d already used Boothlane (one of our products), made a list of everything she’d fix in it, and brought it to the interview. On paper, it wasn’t even close, but I still picked her. The experienced candidate kept asking about the next role, the next title, where this job could take him. She kept asking about the problems we were solving and how she could contribute to it. Not saying that a candidate shouldn’t ask about what the role and the company give him; it’s completely fair to ask those questions. In fact at EaseMyExpo, we try to give our people everything better than market standards, and we expect candidates to ask about it. But when the entire conversation is about what you’ll get, and none of it is about what you’ll build, that tells me everything. A year later, I’m still glad that I went with the less experienced one.

I’m 100% sure that we won’t be able to build companies like Apple or Samsung. Because when someone builds a product priced for the world, we troll him for not making it cheap enough for us. Just look at what happened with the Temple, it was launched at ₹85,000, and half of India asked, “Who’s going to buy this?” Deepinder Goyal himself had to reply that it’s not for India and he expects less than 1% of sales to come from here. Quite a few Indian startups are stuck in the same race: launch, discount, burn cash, repeat. Nobody makes margins, so nobody has money for real R&D. And then we keep questioning why the world’s best products aren’t made here. The iPhone costs more in India than in the US, and people still queue up on launch day. Nobody calls Tim Cook arrogant for that. But trolling an Indian founder for thinking bigger than India is exactly why so few of them try.

Dolly Jain charges anywhere between ₹35,000 to ₹2,00,000 just to drape a saree. She couldn't even speak English properly. Now she drapes sarees for the Ambani ladies. There is a lesson here: you don't always need a fancy degree, a corporate job or a million-dollar idea to build wealth. Sometimes, you just need to become exceptionally good at something that people value. She turned a skill that many would consider ordinary into a highly profitable business and a globally recognised brand. The market doesn't always reward what you do. It rewards how exceptionally well you do it.

One thing every founder needs to learn from Nvidia's CEO this week: past a certain point, your personal life isn’t personal anymore. Just after admitting to an affair with Alice Huang, his company got accused of helping restricted Chinese firms get Nvidia chips. And this is when Jensen has been one of the loudest voices asking the US to loosen chip exports to China. Nvidia’s board has opened an independent investigation, although no charges have been filed, and China calls the spy story baseless, but just the confession of Jensen Huang has made things so worse, both for him and his company. When you’re small, a mistake is personal, but as you grow bigger, your board, your investors and every employee carry the consequences of what you do after office hours.

Took my uncle to the Rameshwaram Cafe (who is, btw, from Delhi) here in Bangalore. This was his first trip to Bangalore, and when we reached the place, he kept looking around for a table and a chair. Then he asked me, “Baithenge Kahan?” I told him that there’s no sitting; you order at the counter, pick your plate, eat standing, and leave, and the reaction that he gave me was like I brought him to the wrong place :) By the time he finished his ghee podi idli, he’d figured it out himself: “Isliye itna sasta hai. Koi baith ke time waste hi nahi karta.” And that’s not just about the Rameshwaram Cafe; it’s very common here in Bangalore, and we call it the darshini model. At a lot of eateries we don’t have chairs or waiters, and because of that the food comes fast, the crowd keeps moving, and the prices stay low. I don't know about others, but I love this model.

Dubai has turned itself into the world’s expo capital in just a few decades. You can think about any major exhibitions or events, and it keeps happening in Dubai, be it GITEX or Gulfood; all happen there. And surely they have world-class infrastructure and venues, but that’s just one part of why these big events keep happening over there. Dubai has very seriously worked on easy visas, flights to almost every corner of the world, hotels right next to the exhibition halls, and most importantly, organisers who bring buyers from multiple countries into those rooms. In India we’ve built world-class venues in the last few years (Bharat Mandapam and Yashobhoomi), but we still need to work on management and multiple other things right.

This is our first Diwali celebrating together at the EaseMyExpo office. Until recently, we had just 3 of us in a tiny office, and everyone else was working from home. We used to celebrate Diwali pretty normally, like sending wishes on the team whatsapp team group and sending goodies and gifts through courier. But this year, everyone from the team is at the office; they have been decorating the office for the last few days, and I could see the excitement in their faces. And as a founder I’ve realised that you can keep thinking and talking about culture, writing values, planning offsites, deciding what kind of company culture you want to build. But it’s these occasions that tell you how much attached your team is to the company. Happy Diwali from all of us at EaseMyExpo.

Supreme Court judges replied, “Don’t travel by air,” to a plea saying Diwali airfares had gone up 700%. And I agree that airlines aren’t charities, and festive demand will always push prices up, but how can we pretend that flying is optional, especially in this festive time? For lakhs of people working in Bangalore, Pune, or Delhi, a flight is the only way to get home for Diwali without losing two days of leave on a train, and even if they want to travel by train, there are no seats available due to the festive crowd. Just FYI, Bangalore to Kolkata flight ticket prices are currently going as high as ₹56k this season. Authorities seriously need to look into it, not saying that we should put some cap on the pricing part, but there should be some way out of it.

In the Netherlands, if your employees fall sick, you pay at least 70% of their salary for up to 2 years. If you don’t do enough to help them return to work, you have to pay a third year plus you can’t fire them until it’s over. Some Indian founders are calling it insane, and the funny thing is, some of the same founders don’t even have a written sick leave policy. I mean it’s understandable if you can’t implement it in your organisation, but at least don’t call it insane just because you don’t want to implement it at your place.

We’ve built a world-class venue, but still walk around it like it’s a village mela at events. India’s biggest trade fair (IITF) will run for 14 days at Bharat Mandapam from this month’s 14th. It is expected to attract lakhs of visitors around the globe, Having seen the biggest problem at these events, I’m sure a major chunk of the visitors won’t be aware of which companies and founders are exhibiting at that event. Not blaming them, but unfortunately there are no companies or founders who have tried to solve this problem. That’s the exact problem we are solving with Leadline, you can know in advance who all are exhibiting and what they do. So they walk in prepared about what to do in the event.

This year’s festive season hasn’t been equally kind to every industry. Was going through the numbers this week, and it’s like two different festive seasons are happening in the same country. If you sell phones or cars, it’s been rough: - Smartphone sales this festive season are expected to drop 12%. - Car sales during Navratri fell 22%. - Even the big online sales did about ₹30,000 crore in their first four days, against ₹33,200 crore last year. But if you deliver in 10 minutes, you’re having your best year yet: - Blinkit’s order value is up 79%. - Demand for festive clothes on Zepto increased by 400%. - Even electric scooters sold a third more this Navratri. What I make of this is consumers aren’t restricting themselves to spend, it’s just that they’re skipping on things that need them to think about it for too long.

My school friend opened a brand new cafe in Indiranagar, Bangalore, investing roughly 60-70 lakhs. However, his biggest problem right now is that a couple of customers order a single Rs. 150 cup of coffee, open a laptop, and sit there for hours (sometimes even for the whole day). Meanwhile, new customers walk in, see the cafe is full, and walk straight out. Obviously, he can’t ask the customers to leave as one negative Google review can hamper the reputation of the place. Now I get why cafes like Starbucks, CCD, and third wave coffee have such atrocious prices for coffee and snacks. As a customer you’re paying for renting the chair as well along with ordering the coffee. If you’re running a cafe, do share what you do for this problem.

Exhicon, a listed exhibition company, made Rs.205 crore in revenue in the last financial year. Rs.45 crore of that amount was profit. And some people (including investors+founder crowd) still tell me that exhibitions are a side business for event companies. These numbers should be enough to convince those people that this boring industry actually makes real good money and even if it doesn’t, a side business with a 22% margin is not a bad option. :))

Nikhil Kamath’s advice to study less and spend more sounds great, only if you’re Nikhil Kamath or your family has built a financial cushion for you to fall on. But if you’re someone whose family depends on you to earn well, then for you the actual cushion is: - Getting a degree from a reputed college and then getting a good job - Saving a good part of their income and investing in safer options for the future Simply because you don’t have any family business to walk into and no flat in Bandra waiting if things go wrong. Unfortunately, you don’t have that option to “spend and figure it out later.” Not at all saying that you need to stay like this for your whole life, once you have built the cushion, you can absolutely take the risks, but building that cushion is the first priority.

A packed event doesn't guarantee valuable connections. 2,000 highly relevant attendees can be worth more than 10,000 random ones. The real ROI question is: how many meaningful connections turn into business?

You can scroll past an ad. Try scrolling past a salesperson standing 3 feet away. That's why expo booths still work

5 questions that turn a mood into a brief: 1. who must stop at your stall: dealer, distributor or end buyer? 2. what's the one thing they should remember? 3. demo, meetings, or both? how many people sit at once? 4. what are you showing: sizes, weight, power? 5. what did you hate about your last stall?

"Make it modern. Blue. Premium." That's not a brief. That's a mood. Your fabricator can't price a mood. He can only guess, and you pay for every guess.

Everyone's worried about AI turning against humanity. I'm more worried about it working perfectly for the wrong people.