Rashmi said that redBus cannot wash their hands off by saying “it is the responsibility of the bus operator” and leave it at that. They have to be responsible for any occurrence.
redBus will aggregate buses across 5,700 routes in the two countries. It will make available 1 lakh seats to travellers daily. The move marks the launch of the redBus global platform that supports multiple languages, regions and currencies. redBus has gone international after claiming to capture 75% of the Indian online bus ticket market.
redBus, the company which got acquired for Rs 800 cr by South African media conglomerate Naspers is seeing senior level exits as many employees feel left out of the ESOP story, according to sources
“Unlike IITs, BITS is not always about education, but also about all round development and better exposure. The people also come with strong analytical background, to add to this development, there is strong peer pressure and competition.”
For us entrepreneurs, it is a clarion call to assess/reassess if it makes sense to attempt an India-only play and if one continues to do, attempt to understand what the market’s natural limits are and ensure that our per-unit economics make sense within that canvas.
“Marketplace it is a bit abused term. Marketplace is when your brand to the consumer and make the merchants responsible,” Rahul Chowdhri, Director of Helion Venture Partners told NextBigWhat in an interview. Edited Excerpts.
We didn’t negotiate because the valuation was fair. We had decided that whenever we exit, we’d also make the buyer successful. We said that if the money was good for us, we would not worry about what we aren’t going to make. Deals don’t fall apart because of 20-30% here and there but we said we don’t want to put pressure on the buyer.
The recent tendency amongst both startups and accelerators to dismiss India as a market has been quite pronounced. redBus is a great example of finding problems to solve that are unique here, and putting your head down and getting down to solving them.
ibiboGroup has said that redBus.in will continue to run independently and operate as separate businesses and the founders and management team will continue to run the business.
But the ‘open’ question is whether Naspers will keep the redBus APIs open? We aren’t sure. In fact, if getting market share is the prime reason for redBus acquisition, Naspers probably will keep others off the API/Inventory.
The acquisition of Redbus, valued at over Rs 650 cr will be the largest ever among India’s internet companies. ibiboGroup is owned by MIH group, the internet arm of Naspers and Chinese Internet company Tencent.