PODCAST · business
Two by Two (Private)
by The Ken
The Two by Two podcast is a premium business podcast from The Ken that investigates, discusses and breaks down the most important business stories around you.Hosted from The Ken's newsroom by business journalists Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, Two by Two will feature guests and experts from across the industry and academia to talk about issues no one else is talking about.
Episodes
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Connecting 110 Dots (Season Finale)
“If you had to pick out of all these patterns and themes that we spoke about, which one are you the most sure about for the next season? Two by Two is taking a short break before Season 3 starts in November, and for the season finale, the table gets flipped. Snigdha Sharma, who hosts Daybreak…
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How do we fix how India sells insurance?
“A cap is simply a number on a sheet” In today’s episode, Shrehith Karkera, co-founder of Ditto Insurance, is joined by Ishaan Wadhwa, Founder of KubrickCube, to figure out how we can fix and change how insurance is sold in India. But why today? Well, because of what the Irdai, the insurance...
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Swiggy is eating itself to stay in the game
Early in today’s episode, Praveen draws an analogy between what Swiggy is doing with Toing and what Britain did during the First World War. At the time, despite having the most advanced naval fleet in the world, the British Navy went ahead and built the HMS Dreadnought, which was a technological...
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India is built for AI agents. So why isn’t it using them?
Sometime last month, the world got its first real encounter with AI agents with Instinct, an app you can text on WhatsApp that can go and do things like cancel subscriptions, book a trip, buy the groceries. Investors valued it at around $2.5 billion within weeks. Last week, Meta followed with…
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The hyperindependent Bangalorean walks into a hospital rave
On 22 August, a hospital in Bengaluru hosted a “rave party” in its corridors, with kombucha and hospital props. Enough people were bemused and outraged. A week later, a "peptide party" was cancelled the day before it happened, after Karnataka's drug regulator asked what exactly was in the…
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Three times Uber said no to leaving India
In February of 44 BC, Mark Antony offered Julius Caesar a crown in front of a Roman crowd, and Caesar pushed it away. Antony offered it again; Caesar refused again. One more offer came from Anthony and Caesar refused it for the third time, yet again. Rome cheered. Uber has been offered a way out…
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Nykaa would rather be premium than be fourth
Inside Myntra, there’s a spreadsheet that lists the competitors it’s tracking closely. Nykaa Fashion is not on it. To find it, you open a dropdown called "others" and scroll past Shoppers Stop, LimeRoad and Club Factory. That is where India's biggest fashion platform files Nykaa's fashion…
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Ather's Rs 1 lakh scooter walks into TVS and Bajaj's market
Ather took eleven years to sell its first half-million scooters, watched Ola raise more money and build bigger factories, and cut its own valuation by 44% to get its IPO away. Since then, it’s been on a tear, building factories, scaling, and now it’s at the point where it’s ready for the biggest...
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Rewind : The numbers behind OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity’s deals with Phonepe, Jio, and Airtel
No new episode this week, we're on a break. So, here's one from November 2025 that just became relevant again: Perplexity's free year with Airtel has begun expiring, and the numbers are just being reported:...
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The new UPI equation
For six years every UPI payment in India was free. This was because a rule from January 2020 said nobody could charge a merchant for accepting one. Then on the afternoon of 6 August, the Lok Sabha removed that guarantee by voice vote. The details of the rules haven't been framed yet, so nobody...
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Zepto's ‘generational wealth’ narrative has started to crumble
Today's episode of Two by Two is about Zepto’s decision to pause its IPO and how things will play out next. For years, Zepto has told one story — about its potential: for growth, for profitability, for making money for everyone from investors to employees. And to be fair, Zepto executed at a...
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The 100th Episode Special
This is a special one. For the 100th episode of Two by Two, we've brought Rohin back to the podcast, after all, he co-hosted the first seventy-three episodes with Praveen. Also we decided to switch the host completely and handed the microphone to Rachel who co-hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily...
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Will Zepto become Swiggy before Swiggy becomes Zepto?
For the four years, everyone was seeing the same thing. Swiggy was losing market share in a business it had no business losing. Zepto was the aggressor, with a tight, disciplined approach, a tight catalogue, ten-minute groceries, not much else. Swiggy became the sprawling super-app that kept...
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India's AI edge is that it has no AI of its own
It's the middle of 2026 and the best AI models on the planet are ones you can't use. Anthropic built Mythos, decided it was too dangerous to ship, watered it down into Fable, and cut off paying customers. OpenAI's newest model went to a handful of approved American companies. The chips arrive in...
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Why Jio made Dhurandhar and then gave it away
But there’s one company in India with every piece of it refuses to spin it In 2017, Disney walked away from a fortune. It pulled Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar off Netflix, ate the lost licensing cheques, and poured the money into a platform it was building from scratch. The logic was the logic of...
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India’s biggest companies can afford to build frontier AI. So why won’t they?
Three things happened in eleven days. The US ordered Anthropic to cut off its most powerful models for foreign users. HCL Tech put $150 million into Sarvam. And Mukesh Ambani told Reliance shareholders that India cannot keep renting its intelligence. Everyone agrees India needs sovereign AI. And...
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The Meta–Cred–Kunal Shah deal, stripped to its fewest assumptions
In the 48 hours since Meta announced it was putting $900 million into Cred and taking Kunal Shah to run WhatsApp globally, you've probably read a dozen confident explanations of what it all means. Praveen and Rohin don't have one. That's the point of this episode. Because the people who actually...
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Agents changed everything about hiring except the outcome
The newest way to build a new AI product is to say, “X is broken, and we fixed it using AI”. Well, hiring was probably broken, but AI didn’t change the outcome. Instead, it made it into an arms race where candidates are sold AI tools which help them apply to companies and roles en masse in an...
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‘Free the rupee. Let it go’—How to save the market from investors
Everything around the Indian economy looks shaky, i.e., a months-long conflict, a sliding rupee, and a government telling people to stop buying gold. Except for one important caveat: India’s market continues to hold on. The Sensex and Nifty have barely moved. The reason why that seems to be...
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Where are Emergent’s users?
Emergent, the vibe-coding startup, has a $100 million annual run rate and 6 million users across 190 countries. Plus, it’s backed by the biggest names in the industry—Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. By most conventional measures, Emergent is the most successful...
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Amazon’s quick-commerce wildcard is Prime
There are two ways to tell the quick commerce story in India. The first, and the more conventional way this narrative exists is that quick-commerce is a three-way race between Blinkit, which has pulled ahead with 2,200 dark stores and a roughly half-market share lead, Zepto, which has packed 21...
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Everyone bet on PhonePe and CRED. Bajaj Finance got there first.
These days it’s fashionable to have an AI story, no matter what you do. But in December 2024, Bajaj Finance took it a few steps further. Instead of calling itself "a lender investing in AI," it started to describe itself as a "FinAI company" - a category of one, which it committed to in a…
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Groww beat every odd to get here. What beats it next?
In 2017, four ex-Flipkart engineers made a bet that looked seemingly ridiculous at the time. They decided to build a company that let anyone buy mutual funds directly, with no commissions or hidden fees. And then on top of it, they built it as a clean app that made it easy and simple for anyone…
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Should young designers pay senior designers to teach them?
The old way to grow as a product designer meant doing the grunt work (button variants, banner sizes, edges cases) until your instincts calibrated. In the new world, AI does the grunt work, faster and cheaper than any junior designer ever could. And the numbers reveal this crisis : UX job postings...
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Hyrox gave India a finish line. What happens after you cross it?
Eighteen months ago, Hyrox did not exist in India. Last month, 8,200 people paid Rs 9,000 each to do a sled push at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. Attendees described the event as a “carnival”, and for several weeks, everyone was talking and proudly sharing their Hyrox timings. If...
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Why do India’s gig workers love a job they’re desperate to leave?
“There is no pride in this. Kya karoon (what can I do), I’m just a delivery boy.” Every time someone raises the topic of gig economy in India, the conversation follows the same script. Side A: this is exploitation. Side B: but employment. And then everyone moves on, nothing changes, and 12…
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Are HUL's best days behind it?
What happened to the company that once understood India better than anyone else? For decades Hindustan Unilever has dominated kitchen pantries and bathroom cabinets across the country: Surf Excel in the laundry, Brooke Bond in the kitchen, Clinic Plus in the bathroom. It was the undisputed gold...
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Can NPCI’s BHIM take on the giants it created?
"Of course BHIM is giving crazy cashbacks. That's where I pay my bills." That's not a BHIM fan but a product head at a competing UPI app. After demonetisation hit in 2016, India desperately needed a way to go cashless overnight. UPI existed but barely anyone was using it. Banks were dragging…
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19 years on, is IPL still too big to fail? Sharda Ugra answers
"This is our Frankenstein. We made it. And now it's left the room." A cricketer said this about the IPL and our guest, Sharda Ugra, India's most respected cricket journalist with thirty years of covering the game, brought it to our studio. And honestly, we couldn't think of a better way to open...
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Rapido broke the Uber-Ola duopoly. Can it now break the Swiggy-Zomato one?
Last week, Rapido launched Ownly, its zero commission food delivery app and went straight for Swiggy and Zomato's throat. This is the same company that dismantled the Uber-Ola duopoly with just a simpler model, cheaper rides, and a very different idea of what India actually needs. Their weapon…
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The Middle East war will cost India. How much and for how long? Ft. Mohit Satyanand
Last year, when Trump's tariffs blindsided the world, we called Mohit Satyanand. He made sense of the chaos before most people had even figured out what to panic about. This time, we didn't wait. A war broke out in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and within days India was rationing...
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Healthify swallowed its disruptors. But can it digest them?
Most businesses die quietly. They miss a wave, lose relevance and fade out. Healthify nearly got hit by two in quick succession. First, AI that could do what took the company years to build. Then, a drug which meant you didn't need the discipline anymore. So Rahel Philipose and Praveen Gopal...
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Did Gen Z hand consumer brands a blueprint to beat the giants?
"They are not disloyal. They are unforgiving." Sector by sector, a new generation of brands is doing the same thing by ignoring millennials entirely and going straight for Gen Z. Zepto did it to Blinkit. Snabbit is doing it to Urban Company. The thesis is simple: Gen Z has no loyalty to the old...
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What Peak XV's partner exodus says about VC economics
Quick question: Would you give someone your money for ten years if they promised you'd get back roughly what an FD would give you? And they'd also take 2% of your money every single year, no matter what happens, plus 20% of any profits at the end. You'd laugh them out of the room, right? Well,...
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What a global investor really thinks about India's next decade
If you are in your 20s or 30s in India right now, things probably feel a little weird. The headlines say the country is a rocket ship, but your reality might be hiring freezes and stagnant salaries. To understand why, we sat down with someone who actually moves the money. Since the 1990s, Rohit...
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Ranking TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL: Who thrives and who survives in the AI era?
Last week, nearly ₹2 lakh crore vanished from Indian IT stocks in just four days. A big reason was Anthropic's new product, Claude Cowork. Suddenly investors were confronted with an unsettling reality: what if the work Indian IT has long depended on is now the easiest to automate? For almost 20...
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Who is the entry-level software engineer now?
Software engineering as we knew it is over and the entry-level job has vanished. So what do you tell someone graduating today? This question splits even the experts. Arnav Gupta, Engineering Manager at Meta and co-founder of Coding Blocks, argues the knowledge must compress. He says that the…
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PhonePe dominates payments but loses money. Now what?
PhonePe leads nearly half of India's UPI transactions, but as it gears up for a $1.3 billion IPO, a tough question looms: can a company built to defend its lead ever learn to make real profit? In this episode, Rohin Dharmakumar argues that PhonePe's dominance might actually be a strategic trap....
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With Noice, Swiggy picks the 3rd path in quick commerce
Swiggy has launched Noice, a private label brand that's popping up across categories on Instamart. But is this a genuine brand-building play or just another experiment destined for Swiggy's product graveyard? In this episode, co-hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar are joined by...
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Can Urban Company avoid BigBasket’s fate?
Urban Company has spent years building trust as the go-to platform for home services. But a new generation of founders is now using the Zepto playbook to target its most profitable segments. On Two by Two this week, Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar are joined by Arpit Agarwal, a…
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How can restaurants scale sustainably?
Running a successful restaurant is hard. Scaling one without losing what made it special is even harder. This week on Two by Two, hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar talk to two people who are deep in that fight: Sameer Seth, founder and CEO of Hunger Inc. Hospitality (The Bombay...
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2025 Year-end special
2025 is done. Forty-eight episodes. Hundreds of guests. Endless banter between Rohin and Praveen. This year, Two by Two covered stories from Bengaluru to the world including business, tech, and everything in between. We didn't just stick to the usual. We asked about people, trends, and the things...
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60 seconds for every 2025 episode
As we try to wind down this year, Rohin and Praveen do something they’ve never done before: go through every single episode they recorded this year. All 48 of them. In 60 minutes. The rules were simple. Each host had 10 points to build their personal top 10 list for the year. No take-backs, and…
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QIP, IPO, Bubble. Why Swiggy, Zepto, and Blinkit see quick commerce differently
Swiggy just raised a billion dollars in its IPO last year. Now it needs another ₹10,000 crores. That's not a great sign. On Two by Two this week, hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar try to make sense of the chaos in India's quick commerce space. Joining them are Ashwin Mehta, head…
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The bro-ification of business and tech podcasts
"When you called me yesterday, I came up with eight different reasons to say no to you." That's Kosturi Ghosh, partner at Tri-Legal, explaining why she almost didn't show up for this podcast. It's a revealing admission and one that gets to the heart of why business and tech podcasts have such a...
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Meesho has come a long way. How much farther can it go?
This week on Two by Two, hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar dissect Meesho's strategy with Adarsh Menon (partner at Fireside Ventures and former head of Shopsy at Flipkart) and Ganesh Nagasekar (founder of GSN Invest). Fresh off filing its DRHP, Meesho has gotten here by doing...
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The numbers behind OpenAI and Perplexity’s deals with Jio and Airtel
This week, Two by Two debuts a new format: "Reverse engineering the playbook." Hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan attempt to crack the math behind this recent wave of AI-telco partnerships in India. Why are companies like Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI racing to bundle their...
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What will bring ambition back from the dead?
The popular narrative often blames Gen Z for a lack of ambition, but is it the millennials who are truly suffering from “ambition fatigue”? This week on Two by Two, the conversation takes its lead from The Ken’s deputy editor, Arundhati Ramanathan’s recent and concerning article, “Indian Tech...
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The great big Indian IPO
What is the “listing pop” that everyone is chasing, and does it still matter six months later? This simple question is the starting point for a deep look into the current boom in the Indian Initial Public Offering (IPO) market. Despite a massive influx of investor wealth, the standards for...
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How do we reimagine hospitals from scratch?
What’s the dumbest thing about hospitals that we still tolerate in 2025? This simple question kicks off a deep dive into the broken core of the Indian healthcare system. From confusing X-ray pricing and misaligned incentives that prioritise “sick-care” over healthcare, to the irritating…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Two by Two podcast is a premium business podcast from The Ken that investigates, discusses and breaks down the most important business stories around you.Hosted from The Ken's newsroom by business journalists Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, Two by Two will feature guests and experts from across the industry and academia to talk about issues no one else is talking about.
HOSTED BY
The Ken
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Two by Two (Private) have?
Two by Two (Private) currently has 113 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Two by Two (Private) about?
The Two by Two podcast is a premium business podcast from The Ken that investigates, discusses and breaks down the most important business stories around you.Hosted from The Ken's newsroom by business journalists Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, Two by Two will feature guests and...
How often does Two by Two (Private) release new episodes?
Two by Two (Private) publishes regularly with 113 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Two by Two (Private)?
You can listen to Two by Two (Private) on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Two by Two (Private)?
Two by Two (Private) is created and hosted by The Ken.
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