

rishiseth
4.7K posts

@rishiseth
PR practioner, social media follower, Indian nationalist















Here’s for the crazy ones! Back in 2013 starting Ather was one of the most audacious decisions to take for us. It was based on a single belief that we can do fundamental engineering and product development in India. It was a common understanding back then that while India is good for low cost manufacturing or for Value Engineering, one doesn’t do ground up product development in India; we should do JVs or buy technology from somewhere and just manufacture in India. The engineer in us couldn’t just accept that. During our journey, at every step we needed many of such crazy folks with similar beliefs. Our professors who gave us space in their labs and enabled us with their personal money;those early employees who joined us with the same passion to build the dream, when we had very little to offer than a dream; those early investors who thought beyond short term gains; the early supplier partners and retail partners who joined the bandwagon because of their belief in Indian engineers. And the most important our early customers. All those crazy ones were enabling us at every step to build Ather. With the first generation of Ather 450 all those beliefs came to life, a vehicle which was “designed” grounds up in India. And It wasn’t just any vehicle, it was also attempting to do many things for the first time in the segment. A true demonstration of what Indian engineers can achieve. It wasn’t perfect in any way but for many it was symbolic. From then we had to learn scaling production, improving cost, scaling up sales and servicing and many things to move from a startup to being an automotive OEM. The journey has been full of rollercoasters, but looking back every minute was fun. Because we were building for the long term, something which will live for 100 years, so these intermediary disruptions didn’t matter. Today is a big day for all those crazy ones- it is a significant milestone for all of them. It is also a validation of the belief that hardware startups can scale, young engineers can build tech in India. I believe these efforts of all those crazy ones will start a vicious cycle, more engineers will start believing in designing and building in India. All of our supporters wanted to see great products being designed in India more than anything, today is a day for those crazy ones. #AtherEnergy #WheeeRangTheBell #ListingDay








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