WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center.

00:00 Introduction
06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium
12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces
17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP
22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts
27:07 Why China won the electric car
33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths
38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling
43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal
48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit
54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery
1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand
1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract

Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26_summer_davos_highlights/

Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/

Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/

Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

#WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

I went into this wanting one answer, if I were starting something today, should it be an electric car company or a battery company and what I got back was narrower and more useful than I expected: don't build the thing that needs rare earth. We got into why sodium carbonate sits at roughly a tenth of what the equivalent lithium inputs cost, what $50 million actually buys you if you're starting this from scratch, why the world saw over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone and what that says about the chemistry everyone standardised on, and the part I keep coming back to that your car is parked 98% of the time in front of your house, and there's a version of this where that's not a dead asset but a micro data center. Every car a token factory. I didn't see that coming.

Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/
Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/

Footage Source: BYD footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0oMa2jWXaM
Tesla footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50PU-cQx7j0

Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

#WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

The street believes struggle makes the founder, so we removed the struggle — twenty-five strangers, a brand and four crores each, ninety days in one house in Alibaug and then sat down to ask the only question that scared us: does a head start make a founder, or unmake one? Nikhil Kamath, Kishore Biyani and Ronnie Screwvala audit the model, the equity split everyone questions, the two philosophies built into this house, and what the three of us will do if twenty brands don't sell.

00:00 Introduction
06:18 Is The Foundery a selfish bet?
12:29 Why building new beats the capitalist high
18:28 How the company-builder model formed
24:47 The new consumer categories driving the bets
30:41 What happens after Day 90
35:13 The equity split everyone questions: 25% vs 75%
43:11 Where the ideas come from, and how the gates work
50:56 Founder–idea fit and the flaws each founder owns
58:05 Why equity beats an endorsement fee
1:05:14 What happens if the brands fail
1:11:08 What actually drives Nikhil
1:17:46 Abundance vs scarcity in one house
1:23:54 Social mobility and India's bubbles
1:28:54 What the founders are unlearning
1:33:09 Twelve months out: what they'd change

#NikhilKamath
Co-Founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF'
Twitter: @nikhilkamathcio on X
Instagram: @nikhilkamathcio on Instagram
LinkedIn: Nikhil Kamath LinkedIn
Facebook: Nikhil Kamath Facebook

The Foundery is a venture builder that forges entrepreneurs into co-founders and builds companies with them from the ground up.
Website: The Foundery
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCtJssM5FzLXSWIf5VWUmT2w
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jointhefoundery/?hl=en

Kishore Biyani – Founder & CEO of Future Group

Ronnie Screwvala – Co-Founder & Chairperson of upGrad, Founder of UTV Group
LinkedIn: Ronnie Screwvala LinkedIn

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
WTF is Podcast on Spotify

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
People by WTF Podcast on Spotify

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
WTF Online on Spotify

#WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

So we ran an experiment. We call it The Foundery. Sixty days ago, twenty-five people we'd never met moved into a house in Alibaug — each one handed a new-age consumer brand, four crores, and ninety days to build a real business with us. Not a college, not an accelerator: a place where we become your co-founders and build the company alongside you. In this first conversation, Nikhil Kamath, Kishore Biyani and Ronnie Screwvala get into why we built it, what we're risking, and what happens if none of it works.

#nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

The Foundery is a venture builder that forges entrepreneurs into co-founders and builds companies with them from the ground up.
Website: https://www.thefoundery.in/

Kishore Biyani – Founder & CEO of Future Group

Ronnie Screwvala – Co-Founder & Chairperson of upGrad, Founder of UTV Group
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronniescrewvala/

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

#WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

I got two of the biggest names in Indian pharma into one room, Rajeev Juneja of Mankind and GV Prasad of Dr. Reddy's, who'd somehow never actually met before this, and what came out was part masterclass and part origin story, from why being relentlessly contrarian beat following the herd, to how a college dropout from Meerut turned everything he hated about a medical store into a pharma giant, to why a chemical engineer who says he owes his career to his marriage spent decades chasing one original molecule, and somewhere in between we got into why India makes the world's generics instead of discovering its own drugs, what it really takes in time and money to bring a single drug to market, why GV thinks the AI-will-cure-everything story is overstated, where GLP-1s go next, and the one thing they'd tell a 25-year-old trying to build in pharma.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
04:27 Rajeev Juneja's path from medical-store apprentice to building Mankind
10:11 Mankind's contrarian OTC and bottom-up market strategy
16:23 G.V. Prasad on science and the Dr. Reddy's lineage
23:06 Segmenting the industry and how generic drugs are made
29:15 Why drug purity standards are shared but enforcement differs
36:40 Why India is the pharmacy of the world by volume, not revenue
41:00 How margins are split across the pharma value chain
45:17 Whether online pharmacy and consumer brands are real openings
53:15 Whether hospital roll-up valuations are justified
59:10 Tariffs, Jan Aushadhi and drug price controls
1:03:21 How China built a pharma-innovation ecosystem in a decade
1:10:02 Long-horizon governance and removing entrepreneurial fear
1:15:40 China's incentives, talent and leverage over the US
1:22:01 Why the Ayush and wellness market outgrows pharma
1:25:05 The evidence, quality and standardisation debate around Ayurveda
1:35:13 The sexual-wellness opportunity and the stigma problem
1:40:26 The fertility, IVF and egg-freezing opportunity
1:43:45 The API narrative debate and how a drug is synthesised
1:50:54 Biologics, monoclonal antibodies and vaccines explained
1:55:57 Stem cells and peptides, separating therapy from hype
2:00:06 The semaglutide story and how GLP-1 works
2:05:01 Mankind's ethical-selling philosophy on GLP-1
2:08:06 Why India leads in small molecules but lags in biologics
2:15:07 Where a young founder can enter the GLP-1 wave
2:23:38 The yin and yang of innovators and generics
2:29:05 Diagnostics, CDMO and the China-plus-one opportunity
2:37:18 Applying AI to pharma and the expired-medicine problem
2:43:01 Why founders should never copy a set formula
2:45:30 Succession, home diagnostics and the microfluidics frontier

#nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

Rajeev Juneja-Vice Chairman & Managing Director at Mankind Pharma Ltd
LinkedIN- https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeev-juneja-27882a24b/

G.V Prasad Reddy-MD & Co-Chairman at Dr. Reddy's
Linkedin-https://www.linkedin.com/in/gvprasadster/

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn

Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59

Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify
https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th

#WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline