Operational discipline biggest challenge every day: Battery Smart founders

Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka, the founders of Battery Smart, have been featured in this year’s 40 under 40 young entrepreneurs list. The 33-year-old IIT Kanpur graduates believe entrepreneurship has been a turning point in their careers. Battery Smart is a Gurugram-based battery-swapping company founded in 2019 and currently has a presence in 28 cities with 1,000 swapping stations.

Reflecting on their journey Khurana and Sikka say that after quitting their first job, venturing into entrepreneurship has been a defining moment in their career. "I think the turning point was when we decided to start this company, and that was the moment which defined where we would reach. We are still very early in that journey but at least that journey began when we made that choice," says Khurana.

Echoing similar thoughts, Sikka muses that he wants to do entrepreneurship throughout his life. “For me, the turning point was when I decided to quit my first job to start a first venture, which was in the bus pooling space. That was back in 2015. And I think back then, I was very sure that entrepreneurship is something that I want to do all my life,” Sikka says.

They say that advice to their younger self would be to take more risk and play the long game. “The advice to my younger self is to take more risks and do it now rather than waiting for that thing,” says Khurana.

"I think the advice I would give to my younger self is to always play the long game. When you are young you optimize for short-term decisions. I think understanding that value creation takes time and believing in the power of compounding is something that I boosted my younger self as an entrepreneur," says Sikka.

Notably, Khurana and Sikka say despite challenges, they are continuously solving the problem and improving on it every day. “We have been able to demonstrate that we can do a job which is much better than what has been ever done in the past,” says Khurana. Sikka observes that ensuring the operational discipline is probably a challenge, that they solve every day,” says Sikka.