We Should Pray for Crisis
Employee #1—> Co-founder/CEO: Avnish's first job after his Indian Ivey League MBA was selling washing machines in a region with almost no water. He joined CaratLane as employee number one almost by accident. Avnish never had the credentials for the job. He wasn't a marketer, product manager, or founder. Avnish later became CaratLane’s co-founder & CEO. In 2023, Titan paid about ₹4,600 crore for CaratLane. That valued the whole company at roughly ₹17,000 crore (about $2 billion), making it a “billion-dollar brand,”.
His story matters because he learned to turn those missing credentials into a method. He trusted common sense over best practice and borrowed ideas from sports, statistics, and other industries. Where most managers settle for paying people on results, he paid them to do the right things, and when he needed to, he changed the rules of his industry instead of only working within them. Under it all is one way of thinking: identify which variables you can actually control, measure them, and design for repeatability rather than luck. He is also frank about how much luck shaped his path, and how often CaratLane's good decisions only made sense afterward.
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Key Lessons: https://www.onepercent.live/episodes/episode-94-avnishanand
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00:00 Intro
03:05 Introvert to Ambivert
04:42 Math Discovered or Invented
09:13 Soldiers and Scientists
15:56 CaratLane Category Creation
18:10 Solitaire Bet and Pivot
21:48 Times Group Detour
24:07 Culture and Hiring Calls
30:45 Becoming a Generalist
34:27 Lessons From Mithun
37:59 Stepping Into CEO
48:57 Gopal’s Mentorship
50:13 Ikigai And Career Filters
52:33 Backing Winning Founders
56:39 Are MVPs Dead
58:37 AI And Personalization Future
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