Vikas

The internet is full of productivity hacks. But, 99% miss the most effective ones. So, I sat down for 11 hours and found the 9 best pieces of advice.

we've always employed our drivers directly at @volercars. full-time. trained. long tenure. proper benefits. the industry thought we were overcapitalizing on workforce. the new Labour Codes just made our model the standard. gig and platform workers now have legal recognition, social security rights, and formal protections for the first time. aggregators who built their cost advantage by offloading risk onto drivers are now facing the real cost of that model. turns out treating the person closest to your customer well wasn't soft thinking. it was just good business.

India just changed its startup rules for deep tech companies. longer runway. more time to stay in "startup" status before the policy clock runs out on them. the previous framework was built for consumer apps. fast iteration. quick revenue. short cycles. deep tech doesn't work that way. you can't build a drone defense system or a sodium-ion battery on a Series A timeline. this change is small on paper. it signals something bigger: India is serious about backing companies that take 10 years to matter, not just ones that matter in 10 months. that's the kind of patience that builds industries.

everyone asks me why i stayed in employee transport for 15 years when there were flashier opportunities. here's the honest answer. boring industries are boring because the problem is so persistent that people have stopped trying to solve it well. everyone assumes it's been figured out. it hasn't. the ETS market in India was ₹50,350 crore in 2023. it's projected to reach ₹1,09,760 crore by 2030. that's one of the largest underserved markets in corporate India. but you'd never know it from the startup conversations i was having in 2010. no viral launch. no TechCrunch headline. no disruption narrative that fits on a slide. just: make sure employees get to work safely, every day, on time. the founders i respect most in this country have one thing in common. they found a real problem that companies were willing to pay to solve. and they stayed in the room long enough to become genuinely good at it. passion didn't start it for me. competence created the passion. if your idea doesn't make people say "that's cool", you might be onto something.

India has over 1,800 GCCs now. employing nearly 2 million professionals. the number is on track to cross 2,400 by 2030. every GCC announcement gets headlines. nobody writes about what happens when those 2 million people try to get to work. here's the pattern i've seen play out across our own client base. a company invests crores in a world-class office. ergonomic chairs, collaboration zones, chef-run cafeterias. then their employees spend 3 hours a day in traffic getting there and back and arrive too exhausted to use any of it. the GCC story in India will not fulfill its potential without solving the last mile. ₹64.6 billion in GCC revenue last year. and companies are still treating the commute as the employee's problem. the infrastructure conversation has to include the journey to the building, not just what's inside it.

the best storytellers raised the most money between 2021 and 2024. the market is asking a different question now. from "what's your vision?" to "what are your unit economics?" the founders i backed who are doing well share one thing in common. they were too boring to raise big rounds in 2021. so they had no choice but to build. execution was never less glamorous than it was then. it's never been more valuable than it is now.

the law just caught up to what should've been common sense. GPS tracking. verified drivers. no woman dropped last. safe drop for contract workers too. we've had all of this since 2010. not because of a mandate. because a woman getting into a cab at midnight deserves to know she'll get home safely. a law can require the system. it can't require what happens at 2 AM when something goes wrong. that part was always on us.

here's the number that should change how every fleet operator thinks about safety. 67% of road accidents in India happen on straight roads. by overspeeding or distraction. the moments when drivers feel safe and drop their guard. this tells you familiarity is a safety risk. that's the insight that changed how we approach driver training at @volercars. it's not enough to train for emergencies. you have to train for complacency. for the moment when the route is too familiar and the shift is going well and nothing has gone wrong in months. because that's exactly when something will. most fleet operators train for accidents. we train for the conditions that create them. that's a different curriculum entirely.

hybrid work didn't just change our numbers. it made the numbers unpredictable. monday: 60 cabs needed. wednesday: 110. friday: 40. no warning. no pattern. you can't run a 2000 vehicle operation like that. so we rebuilt everything. flexible route clusters. usage-based billing. attendance patterns by shift and zone. a year of rebuilding quietly, while still running operations. the companies that haven't done this are paying for empty seats and scrambling for cabs that aren't there. sometimes on the same day.

India now ranks third globally in AI talent. but here's what nobody's saying alongside that. most of India's enterprise problems - transport, supply chain, compliance, field operations aren't AI problems yet. they're still basic systems problems. bad data. manual processes. no visibility. the founders who'll win the next decade aren't the ones building on top of AI. they're the ones fixing the foundation that AI will eventually run on. infrastructure before intelligence.

Apple just turned 50. in 1976, Steve Wozniak built the Apple I in a garage. Steve Jobs sold his van to fund it. 50 years later it's the most valuable company in the world. the thing people forget about that story: it was deeply boring for years in the middle. not every year was the iPhone launch. most years were: keep the team together, ship the product, survive the competition, don't run out of money. the highlight reel doesn't show the decade where they nearly went bankrupt. that part is the actual story.

there are two ways companies buy employee transport. the first: annual tender, lowest bid wins, vendor gets replaced next year if someone cheaper shows up. the second: multi-year partnership, service quality is the metric, vendor knows the client's shift patterns, their new office locations, their compliance requirements. the first approach costs less on paper. the second costs less in reality because the hidden bill for missed pickups, compliance gaps, driver incidents, and HR hours never shows up on the tender sheet. we've always positioned ourselves as the second. it's why we have clients who've been with us for 10+ years. price wins tenders. trust wins renewals.

i started volercars in 2010 with 2 rented cars and no clients. the business has changed completely since then. but the thing i keep coming back to after 15 years: the problems never stopped. they just got better. year 1 — will anyone pay us? year 5 — can we keep up with demand? year 10 — how do we scale culture across 10 cities? growth isn't the absence of problems. it's earning the right to face harder ones.

for the first several years at @volercars, i thought culture was something you declared. a set of values on a wall. a founders' note in the employee handbook. a speech at the annual offsite. i put genuine thought into those things. and then watched people behave in ways that had nothing to do with them. the gap between stated culture and actual culture is one of the most consistent things i've seen across every company i've built or invested in. and here's what actually creates culture, not what gets written down, but what gets tolerated. the manager who delivers results but treats their team dismissively. if they stay, you've just told everyone what you actually value. the shortcut taken on a client deliverable because the deadline was tight. if it's accepted, the standard just moved. culture is made in the decisions that don't feel like culture decisions in the moment. it's made at 7 PM when the choice is between saying something or letting it slide. here's what i've learned to watch for now, not what people say about the company. what they say in the car ride home after a hard day. that's your actual culture. the work of building real culture isn't a values exercise. it's hundreds of small, boring, often uncomfortable decisions about what you're willing to let go and what you're not. nobody sees most of those decisions. they just feel the result.

there's a version of building a company that looks like success from the outside. revenue growing. team expanding. clients renewing. but the founder is secretly involved in every decision above ₹50,000. cc'd on every client escalation. the last call before anything important ships. i lived in that version for about four years.and i told myself it was necessary. "i know this business better than anyone." "it's faster if i just do it." "i'll delegate once we stabilize." the stabilization never came. because i was the reason it couldn't stabilize. here's what nobody says clearly enough: when you're the bottleneck, your business can only grow as fast as your personal bandwidth allows. and your personal bandwidth has a ceiling. the shift happened for me not because i missed something. a client had a problem on a friday evening. my ops head had already identified the solution, briefed the driver, and closed it before i even saw the message. i hadn't been in the loop. and it had been handled better than i would have handled it. that was the moment. because i realized i'd been treating my involvement as a quality guarantee when it had quietly become a speed limit. if you're reading this and everything still routes through you: the business isn't dependent on you because it needs to be. it's dependent on you because you haven't trusted it not to be. that's a different problem. and only you can solve it.

the most reliable business metric i've found in 15 years isn't NPS. it's the conversation that happens at renewal time. there are three versions of that conversation. version one: the client asks for a pricing review. what this means - they're happy enough to stay, unhappy enough to look around. you're a vendor to them. replaceable at the right price. version two: the client's procurement team sends a standard renewal form. what this means - you're in the system. comfortable. probably safe for another year. but nobody inside that company is championing you. version three: someone from the client side reaches out before the contract is even up. asks if you can expand to their new office. mentions you by name when someone else in their network asks for a referral. version three is the only one that compounds. we've built @volercars largely on version three. because we've been obsessive about the thing that turns version one into version three over time. not promises. not pitch decks. not account management. what you do on the bad days. the driver who called in sick at 4 AM and the backup was there by 4:22. the compliance document requested on a friday that was back fully filled by sunday. the mid-event request for 15 additional vehicles that was covered in 30 minutes. clients don't remember your best month. they remember how you behaved when something went wrong. that's what turns a vendor into a partner. and a partner into someone who opens doors you didn't even knock on.

people see 15 years and think: consistency, discipline, vision. here's what it actually looked like: year 1-2: pure improvisation dressed up as strategy. we were figuring out what we were selling while trying to look like we'd always known. year 3-4: first real clients. first real pressure. first understanding of what we were actually bad at. year 5-7: the dangerous years. enough success to feel confident. not enough wisdom to know how fragile it all was. we made our biggest bets here. year 8-10: humility. the self-drive venture failed. COVID arrived. we rebuilt with less arrogance and more process. year 11-13: something settled. we finally knew what we were and what we weren't. and we stopped apologising for the second part. year 14-15: the problems are genuinely better. harder in some ways, but better. how do you maintain culture at scale? how do you build leaders who'll outlast you? how do you grow without losing the thing that made you worth growing? i wouldn't trade any phase. not even the years that hurt. because each one was teaching me something the next phase would need. the only straight line in 15 years was the commitment to stay in the game. everything else curved, broke, and rebuilt. that's what building actually looks like from the inside.

here's something the corporate transport industry doesn't say out loud: safety is a commitment that costs money when nothing goes wrong. and that's exactly why most companies underinvest in it. when you do background checks on every driver and reject 70%, you're paying for rejections that produce no visible output. when you run pre-trip vehicle checks daily, you're paying for checks that usually find nothing. the cost is visible. the value is invisible, until the one time it isn't. when you monitor driver alertness protocols at 4 AM, you're paying for a system that, on most days, catches nothing. you're buying the absence of catastrophe. this is the fundamental problem with safety investment in any industry. the ROI is measured in zeroes. in the accidents that didn't happen. in the headlines that were never written. we've had to explain this to clients who push back on our pricing. some clients get it immediately. some need to have a different kind of conversation first. we'd rather be the more expensive option that never makes the news.

running operations across 10+ cities has taught me more about human nature than any leadership book. here's what i've observed: people don't fail because they're bad at their job. they fail because the system they're in was designed for someone else's context. our SOPs worked perfectly in cities where we had strong networks. the moment we entered a new city without those relationships, the same SOP collapsed. people will absorb ambiguity up to a point. then they guess. and when 200 drivers guess simultaneously on a foggy December morning in Delhi, you don't have a communication problem, you have a safety problem. most conflicts inside a company aren't conflicts between people. they're conflicts between unclear expectations wearing people's faces. operations strips away the theory of leadership and replaces it with the reality: people do their best work when they know what's expected, believe it's achievable, and trust that someone is paying attention. everything else is commentary.

the client who haggles hardest on price in the negotiation is the same client who escalates hardest when something goes wrong. i've seen this pattern too many times to call it coincidence. people who don't value what you do before you start won't value it after you've delivered either. your pricing isn't just a number. it's the first signal of what kind of working relationship you're choosing. some clients are not worth having at any price.