Two by Two
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.
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Three times Uber said no to leaving India
<p>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. </p><p>Uber has been offered a way out of India three times in eight years. By SoftBank and Ola in 2018, by a phantom acquisition-merger with Ola in 2022, and by Rapido this May, and three times it has refused. Each time the objection was the same: Uber would not become a minority s...
Rewind : The numbers behind OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity’s deals with Phonepe, Jio, and Airtel
<p>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: </p><p>https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/perplexitys-free-ai-offer-left-it-with-millions-more-users-in-india/</p><p>Listen back to what we predicted and how things panned out.</p><p>------<br>This week, Two by Two debuts a new format: “Reverse engineering the playbook.”</p><p>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...
The 100th Episode Special
<p>This is a special one. </p><p>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 podcast. She's here to spin the tables: for once Praveen and Rohin are the ones being questioned.</p><p><br>The format is what the show has done for the last 100 episodes. Rachel takes some of India's best and biggest companies, themes and sectors like Swiggy, Pho...
Will Zepto become Swiggy before Swiggy becomes Zepto?
<p>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 launching and burying things, from cloud kitchens to a mall to an errands app. In one of our earlier stories, we even referred to it as a “graveyard”.</p><p>But now, weeks before Zepto's IPO, the roles have switched. Swiggy has done the one thing Swiggy hasn’t done in years — it’s got...
India's AI edge is that it has no AI of its own
<p>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 India on a quota that moves with the mood in the White House. And in July, Beijing convened Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai to weigh restrictions on overseas access to its own best models, open weights included.</p><p>Every serious enterprise on Earth now has to...
Why Jio made Dhurandhar and then gave it away
<p>But there’s one company in India with every piece of it refuses to spin it</p><p>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 every integrated media company since — if you own the content and you own the pipe, you don't rent your crown jewels to a rival. Content feeds the platform, the platform feeds subscriptions, subscriptions fund the next film. Apple runs it, Amazon runs it...
India’s biggest companies can afford to build frontier AI. So why won’t they?
<p>Three things happened in eleven days. </p><p>The US ordered Anthropic to cut off its most powerful models for foreign users. </p><p>HCL Tech put $150 million into Sarvam. </p><p>And Mukesh Ambani told Reliance shareholders that India cannot keep renting its intelligence. </p><p><br>Everyone agrees India needs sovereign AI. And yet, almost nobody agrees on who should pay for it. Most of the money that is moving into AI goes into data centres, the safest layer, not the models themselves.</p><p>Praveen Gopal Krishnan makes the argument that corporate India has to build and...
The Meta–Cred–Kunal Shah deal, stripped to its fewest assumptions
<p>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.</p><p>Because the people who actually know aren't talking, investors have liquidation preferences to protect. Operators have relationships on both sides. Insiders have NDAs. </p><p>So instead of adding a 13th theory, this episode refuses to start with one.</p><p>The only tool is Occam's Razor: when explanations compete, take the one t...
Agents changed everything about hiring except the outcome
<p>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 automated way. On the other side, recruiters who have increasingly gotten tired of the same AI-generated answers, resumes and artefacts that have been generated by AI have resorted to deploying AI systems to filter out candidates and get what they are lo...
‘Free the rupee. Let it go’—How to save the market from investors
<p>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. </p><p>The reason why that seems to be happening is pretty simple — every month, Indian households pour ₹31,000 crore into equity through SIP (Systematic Investment Plans), and that steady flow is exactly the liquidity foreign investors are using to sell down and leave without crashing anything. So the rupee slides, the RBI burns reserves to slow the fal...
