Interview/ Hari Menon, co-founder, BigBasket
Q/ How did BigBasket become one of India’s defining online grocery stores?
BigBasket was born from a simple but powerful observation: the Indian grocery market was fundamentally broken for the consumer. We set out to fix three things that mattered most—fill rate, on-time delivery and in-stock availability. Fill rate is something the industry consistently underestimates. When a customer orders 25 items and receives 22, those three missing items cause frustration entirely disproportionate to their number, because in grocery, these are daily necessities, not impulse buys. Getting fill rate right became a technology obsession. We built systems, invested enormously in routing and fleet management, and developed predictive tools to anticipate delays before they happened—unglamorous work, but foundational. The result was a platform customers could genuinely trust, and in grocery, trust is everything.
Q/ What were the hardest problems to solve in the early days?
Fresh fruits and vegetables were our single biggest opportunity and single biggest risk. Nobody globally was doing fresh produce online at scale when we launched, and we knew that getting it wrong could destroy the business. The quality perception challenge is unique: customers buying bhindi (lady’s finger) cannot squeeze it or hear that satisfying crackle. Earning their trust demanded fanatical consistency. We went directly to farmers. Convincing them to trust a young technology company over established networks was one of the most humbling challenges of our journey. On the technology side, there were no playbooks for demand forecasting, reordering and supply reliability in the Indian context. We wrote our own.
Q/ How did your education help you?
The most transformative aspect was not just the courses or professors at BITS Pilani, but the culture of freedom and responsibility. Attendance is not compulsory. When you arrive at 18, fresh out of school, you are handed a kind of autonomy that most young people in India rarely encounter. You could either drift or consciously choose how to invest your time and energy. That decision shapes a person fundamentally—making a woman out of a girl and a man out of a boy at a remarkably early stage of life.
Beyond academics, [there were] clubs and cultural activities like photography, music, drama and literary events. Music, in particular, became an enduring part of my life. It opened a dimension of experience that no classroom could have offered, teaching me something vital about passion, practice and perseverance—qualities I carried directly into my professional life.
Q/ What would you tell a student who wants to build something?
My advice is deceptively simple: work first. Genuinely, deeply work for a few years in an industry that challenges you. Understand how organisations function from the inside. Learn about market dynamics—not just from a case study, but from the daily reality of a business competing for survival and growth. Observe how teams are built, how cultures are formed, how decisions are made under pressure.