In the fast lane: Meet Vikram Chopra, Co-founder and CEO, Cars24

With his pre-owned cars business having almost doubled in valuation and expanding into newer areas, Chopra takes Pavan Lall through his life's journey, which has been 'bleisure' all the way

For a tech entrepreneur who’s steered a startup idea into a billion-dollar venture, Vikram Chopra lacks the trademark arrogance and attitude that accompany most CEOs who’ve seen such success in such a short span of time. On the contrary, he seems more like the quintessential kid-next-door who’s all set to go to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) — except, of course, he’s not.

We are meeting for lunch, although virtually. While I am in Mumbai digging into a bowl of rice, chicken curry and green vegetables, Chopra is in Dubai, partaking of a selection of mixed grapes. He’s there on a “bleisure trip” — part business, part leisure.

Chopra’s life has been in the fast lane for a while now. Launched in 2015, barely six years ago, his company, Cars24, raised over Rs 3,300 crore ($450 million) in fund­ing from DST Global, Falcon Edge, Soft­Bank Vision Fund 2 and others in Sept­ember — almost doubling its valuation to over Rs 13,757 crore ($1.84 billion). And now it plans to set up seven giant service centres, or Mega Refurbishment Labs (MRLs) as it calls them, in top metros — all before the end of this year. The e-commerce platform for pre-owned cars, which became one of the earliest unicorns in the auto space bang in the middle of the pandemic last year, needs these mega centres to spruce up for sale the 20,000-odd cars it buys a month.

At 38, Chopra is a young entrepreneur — but old enough, he says, to have seen the pre-internet time. Born in Raebareli, the politically significant Uttar Pradesh constituency, he says there was no internet in his town until he was in Class 9. This is part of the reason he headed out of his hometown and after college in Lucknow, turned his gaze IIT-ward. The decision to go to one of India’s foremost engineering schools, he says, came about as a result of friends sharing coursework coaching brochures.

“My friends in Delhi had some books from Vidyamandir (a prominent coaching institute for IIT-JEE, NEET and so on). And, of course, we’d all heard about the IITs and their reputation for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math),” he says, adding that he was led to believe it was all very hard and impossible to crack. But when he started going through the brochures, he found he could solve the problems fairly easily. So he decided to give it a shot.

It wasn’t as easy as it seemed, though, and Chopra barely scraped through the screening exam and then passed the mains, all the while aware that there was little difference between the 10,000-odd applicants in terms of intellect. He got into IIT Bombay where he studied metallurgy and materials science. The mindset in his family was always academics, academics and academics; everything else was secondary.

But the inspiration to think and act out of the box came in part from his father, who Chopra describes as a “real engi­neer”. His father, an electrical engi­neer, spent his life working for Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL). Later, he also started a movie rental business. “It was a matter of pride for me to be able to get my friends the latest flicks,” he says. But that business was short-lived and was hit hard by piracy. Eventually, his father moved to Hyderabad to work for a polyester company whilst also trying his hand at a printing press in between. All that showed Chopra that it’s okay to try different things, regardless of whether you succeed or not.

“My mom was a homemaker. We were a notch above middle-class but weren’t always stable economically, since there would be pressures at times when my father ran these ventures,” he says.

My chicken and rice is spicy but hits the mark. I see Chopra pop a black grape into the air and snap it up effortlessly. 

Chopra’s first gig, an internship at a large steel factory, involved recording the temperature and testing. He was so unprepared for it that he got heat stroke after a day’s exposure and had to be hospitalised. The factory world wasn’t for him, he concluded. Besides, his peers were joining consulting firms, private equity players and venture capital outfits — that is, if they weren’t pursuing MBAs abroad. He joined McKinsey and later venture capital firm Sequoia, enjoying the investing process that also involved an exploration of the Indian business landscape.

Later, he went off to Wharton for a business degree, but six months down realised it wasn’t for him and returned. 

“I had gone there half-heartedly,” he says, adding that he did, however, get something valuable out of that trip. It’s here that he met his future wife, who was working at Bessemer Venture Partners and was a year senior to him at Wharton. Later, she ran a jewellery startup called 21Diamonds and also worked at Housing.com.

Post-Wharton, Chopra launched Fab­Furnish, an online shopping desti­nation for furniture, furnishings and such — the idea being that a store can only offer these many designs, while the online world is limitless. The business ran well for a while, but was sold off by the time he turned 32. “What I learnt was that the challenge was not demand, but supply — a reality that can be applied to a lot of businesses in India,” he says. “It’s counterintuitive to build supply first but it works.”

His latest gig, Cars24, which he laun­ched with three other friends, is testimony to that. The company, he says, is event­ually going to be gunning for an IPO. “The key to this business is speed,” he adds, since customers change their minds fast and can move on if you don’t catch them.

As Chopra and his partners pursue the twists and turns that accompany the journey of every growing concern, I ask him which of these three prepared him the most for this entre­pre­neurial adventure: McKinsey, Wharton, Sequoia? “Honestly, you don’t learn that much about running a business unless you do it yourself,” he replies, pensively. “Poker has taught me much more about how humans behave and, of course, I am aware that if losing can be because of bad luck, then many a time winning, too, is simply a result of good luck.” Given the track record of the last six years, he and his mates are clearly in the lucky lane.