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I love it how Zepto’s Aadit Palicha is the only quick commerce founder to call it an INDIAN INNOVATION 🙏🙏 Is it really an innovation, if it works only in India, or nations where cheap imported labour is abundant - The Middle East? Also, does that not mean, it’s less about the innovation that makes q-com work in India, and something else? Like the low wages and denser cramped cities with shoddy infra and insane traffic? Are those things a part of the innovation? No. But, are those the most significant factors that have made a case for feasible q-com in India? Yes (or so I believe). .. Not belittling anything that Zepto, or other q-com players have achieved. Insane work, something I’m sure, I could not have pulled off. I mean, Dmart & Reliance with all their cash are still trying. Who am I? A nobody. What they, and also Instamart, Blinkit & BigBasket have pulled off and demonstrated is a fab and disruptive new supply-chain engineering. Kudos for that. But, to call that INNOVATION doesn’t add up. .. Secondly, why do we have to be so fixated with innovation ONLY, anyway? What about ambition? Look at China. Alibaba, PDD’s Temu, ByteDance’s TikTok have one thing in common. Same for all their AI startups - all going for global markets from day 1. How many such stories do we know of in India? The companies in China literally build with the mindset of how they can tap into and milk the global citizens to bring money back to China. And here in India, almost every company - startup or traditional biz - is majorly about milking more out of the same Indian buyers. This is a sad and undeniable reality. Thus, I care less about our lack of innovation and more about our lack of ambition. .. Look at TikTok. They launched an e-com (TikTok Shop) in Sep 2023. By end of 2024, it was alreay live in US, UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore, Mexico, Brazil and the UAE. And in just 4 months of 2025, it has already gone live in France, Germany, Spain and Italy. That’s ambition and aggression that you hardly see in most Indian businesses/startups somehow. .. My bigger question is, why are so few of our companies going global, if they are really as good and INNOVATIVE as their PR makes it look like? And, even those going global, 99.99% only go to places where the Indian diaspora is huge - the Middle East or Singapore. Why is that so? These are the tough questions that the so-called innovation brigade should answer. Else, we should be focussed on building value, as we know best.