Vidit Aatrey

About

Sometimes an organisation doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity,” writes Ben Horowitz in The Hard Thing About Hard Things—a book Vidit Aatrey often revisits. That clarity, it seems, came early to him. In 2015, Aatrey and his IIT Delhi batchmate Sanjeev Barnwal launched Meri Shop—or Meesho—with a mission to empower India’s small entrepreneurs. Ten years on, Meesho has grown from a social commerce idea to one of India’s largest e-commerce marketplaces, with a $6.2 billion GMV run rate and an 8.9% market share. GMV, or gross merchandise value, represents the total monetary value of goods and services sold on a platform, before deductions. What makes Aatrey’s journey remarkable is not just Meesho’s scale, but its ability to constantly reshape itself in a hyper-competitive market. From experimenting with grocery delivery during Covid-19, to launching logistics arm Valmo—which now handles over 50% of Meesho’s daily orders—and from serving nearly 15,000 PIN codes via 6,000 partners, to creating nearly 85,000 jobs, and building a content-led affiliate programme to ride the creator-economy wave, each shift has been bold and calculative. Meesho also became India’s first horizontal e-commerce platform to turn positive on free cash flow (generating more cash from operations than spending). Aatrey, however, says the best is yet to come. “Our highly scaled AI-driven platform now connects four key stakeholders—consumers, sellers, logistics partners, and content creators.” Aatrey is also a founding angel for philanthropic initiatives at The/Nudge Institute, working to reduce poverty at scale.