Peyush Bansal

The power of being discontent.

Often I meet people who congratulate me for building Lenskart.com into a great brand & every time I hear this, only thing that is going on in my mind is “Hope buddy you knew what crisis we are in and what all is broken. Glad you do not know about our this week’s Review where 7/8 things are pending. Thank god you are not one of the 4 customer escalations that came to me this week. You have no idea what I am going through..my Discontent :)”

This is one feeling that has not changed for me for last 10 years. Only thing that has changed is that earlier when my well wishers (family, HR, seniors) used to criticise me for having this feeling, I used to feel bad, and now I don’t :)

I have come to realise that BEING DISCONTENT is a Big Value in building an ever evolving, ever surprising, ever growing…customer centric organisation. And being discontent has nothing to do with being happy, but it has everything to do with what we will be 3 years from now… it is a way of being, of improving, of pushing to BE MORE and DO MORE every day, and yet being happy:)

I am not saying I am not appreciative of what we have done as a team so far and hard work put in, but I am also saying, it is not such a bad thing if…

Every time I meet a customer who is happy with lenskart, I thank god :) and my team and every time I meet a dissatisfied one, I am filled with frustration & shooting emails!…if every time I meet an entrepreneur who is telling me what all amazing stuff they are doing such as 10 min delivery to sustainability to AI, I feel “oh my god, we are so far behind”. And every time I speak to an AMEX representative, I feel “why are we not yet delivering the same service”. And every time I am browsing an amazing experience on a new app, I am “taking screenshots and whatsapping them to my product team:)”. It is not such a bad thing if every night I go to sleep thinking “how much more is left to do …”

In my view all entrepreneurs are discontent, else they would never have become entrepreneurs. And organisations need more entrepreneurs to grow i.e. more discontent :) It is this discontent that pushes us every day to do better & deliver more & more ….

Apple releases a software update every 15 days and each update has 100s of new small features which make customer experience better….and by doing this it has become a 3 Trillion Dollar company (larger than the GDP of India). If they were so content, they would not be doing this …

“Good is not good enough” i.e. what is good today will not be good tomorrow. And BEING DISCONTENT allows us to stay humble, stay curious, stay hungry to continuously push ourselves to innovate and build an organisation for tomorrow, not just today.

Thank you lenskart team for being discontent always, despite accomplishing so much…we have a long way to go and it is still Day1

And cheers to all the Discontent yet Happy people in the world…let’s keep doing more and being more !

#domorebemore

It all started with a dream...

A dream to make the world vision-deficit free. A dream to give people a better quality of life through vision and ever evolving eyewear.

Today I along with LensKart Team (including our partners) announce our biggest commitment towards this dream by launching the world's largest eyewear factory by Lenskart.com

Through this factory, we aim to serve 50 million pair of eyes (5 crore people) annually with highest quality eyewear at most affordable prices globally and with 99.9% reliability!

While this serves a fraction of our dream to give vision to a billion people, it is a big milestone for us in many ways...A large portion of capital we raised and preserved till date, we took a bet to deploy in creating this supply capacity (thanks to all our investors, advisors in backing us to do this). Through this we can finally see a real path to serve a billion people by replicating the learnings and supply. And lastly, we are very passionate about 'Make in India' dream and through this initiative, we hope to inspire ourselves and many others to build global standard manufacturing out of India.

So here's to all the bold ones, to the risk takers, to the unstoppables...

Lenskart is looking for 25 acres of land within 60 kms of Kempegowda Bengaluru International Airport to build its next Mega Factory.

If any company is looking to sell factory land near the Bengaluru airport, please send an email to:
megafactory@lenskart.in

Building for the Long Term

As high performance professionals and entrepreneurs, we are usually competitive and hence often times, we obsess about competition/market and in our desire to match, we start making popular choices that may not be best for our own business in the long term but are great to make us feel we are not losing (FOMO - Fear of Missing Out)

Over the last decade, seeing our own wins and failures at Lenskart.com, my learning is that it does not matter whether you are feeling left behind today... what matters is whether you will be standing, running and winning in the long term.

And to win in the long term, leaders have a huge responsibility - responsibility of constantly taking decisions for the LONG TERM...which are never easy because they do not give instant gratification & hence are not the popular ones...they don't make us look like a HERO.

Long term decisions can rarely be taken by obsessing over competition & market... and are best taken by keeping the company's purpose in mind and obsessing about customers.

At every stage of a business, we make such choices:
- What areas to invest- marketing, technology, GMV, training?
- What technology to build - add 100 more features to old platform or add 30 key and revamp platform for speed and scale?
- What talent to hire - ones who can join immediately, ones who can come and hit the ground immediately or ones that can learn & grow?
- Who to promote - ones who delivered best sales & no values or ones who delivered average sales & demonstrated all values?
- What partners to chose - ones who give the highest valuation or ones that believe in you and your vision ?
- What categories to add - ones that increase GMV & valuation quickly or ones where we can add most value?
- What values to inculcate - speed, perfection, risk taking, competition or customer obsession?

It is these choices that decide the what the business will be, not next month, but next 3-5-10 years down the line.

Some long term, non popular, decisions we took at Lenskart.com which paid off:
- Open Click-and-Mortal stores in 2015 when word 'offline' meant bye bye to investors...only because our online visitors wanted to try.
- Shut 3 other Karts which were 80% of our revenue (GMV) in those days i.e. 80% of our valuation... to focus on Lenskart where customers were telling us we were 10x better
- Over invest in Technology & Data across merchandising, AI, AR, supply chain, geo location...way beyond what makes sense for an eyewear business ...because we felt we were creating surprisingly delightful & reliable customer experiences through it.

Every decision has a pros and cons but my belief is that companies that are long term sustainable are the ones that take decisions for the LONG TERM

What we are today was already decided based on the decisions we took 3 years back (plus minus 30-40-50%), and what impact we will be creating 3 years from now, is what we will sit & decide today...

Start-ups are a big reflection of the founding team. Good and Bad both....

What lenskart Glassdoor says..:):(