ATLAS welcomes Lenskart Co-Founder, Chief Executive & People Officer Peyush Bansal

Lenskart Co-Founder, Chief Executive & People Officer Peyush Bansal’s visit to ATLAS SkillTEch University created a truely historic moment as huge audience of 800+ people including the students, faculty and staff gathered at the university auditorium to catch a glimpse of their favouite shark from Shark Tank India. Meeting and interacting with their favourite shark was a golden opportunity and overwhelming experience for them. 

Dr Indu Shahani, President & Chancellor of ATLAS SkillTech University and Mr Siddharth Shahani, Executive President, ATLAS SkillTech University engaged Mr. Bansal in heart-to-heart conversation that covered his entrepreneurial journey, his aim to build a business with a cause, focus on customer centricity, his inspirations, aspirations and challenges, common mistakes that people make at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey and advise for the upcoming entrepreneurs. 

Interview
Peyush Bansal
Co-Founder, Chief Executive & People Officer, Lenskart.com

How did your entrepreneurial journey start?

After completing my engineering, I joined Microsoft and I was so proud to tell people that I work for this company as everybody uses their products Office- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.  And I happened to be somebody who made PDF part of Office. It became like a big thing and I felt the impact that I was making. All of this was happening, I was loving it and then Bill Gates invited a few people to his house on the lake side. He was talking about his next plans, about building a foundation and how he wants to eradicate Malaria.

And I came back to India thinking that the impact that I am making is pretty incremental. I had no vision, no logic, but I decided to come back. I started a classified website for helping student housing. But now there was an urge to do something really much more impactful than the student housing. And then I came across an article about vision correction and how India’s the blind capital of the world.

 Important thing about brand building is keep the aspirations high

What was your true inspiration or the moment when you decided that this is the field that you want to start something in?

To be honest, all I wanted to do was do something which is very impactful and where I could use technology to make an impact. I was in hunt for something nobody used to do. And then I came across this problem of vision correction which I felt like nobody’s working on it. As I got deeper into understanding customers, started having deep conversations with people, I started realising that this has to be the work of my life.

Can you tell us about your decision to go online? Because you really disrupted the model by creating the first online store for something so personal like the glasses. It’s a product that people would normally like to try before buying. How did you envisaged that people would be comfortable buying glasses online?

I didn’t think people would buy glasses online, I just felt that the product wasn’t accessible as much as some of the other categories. So that’s how we started online. For two years, I was literally a customer service agent and I used to chat with customers. And later when I stopped chatting, I used to get a chat transcript. And through these chats I began to understand the big consumer problems that we were facing. That chat got me more and more interested in this field, and I decided to move forward.

Make Meaning, money will follow

And then your decision to go into retail after going online…

Yes, it was from the chat where people used to say that we want to try the glasses.  So no matter how un cool it was in those days to open a store, I opened my first store in Delhi. And I still remember there was neighbourhood optical store and in the first month we had more sales than that store which was there for almost ten years. This is because people knew us from the online ecosystem.  So if you ask me, Omni channel etc. are just buzzwords. The only single source of truth is customer. You have so much data online which you don’t have offline. We are just applying data analytics which people think is online.

Inspiring and motivating a large number of people at the same time is my biggest challenge

We spoke about the start of your entrepreneurial journey, finding the right problem, impact and focus on consumers. Now one question that remains is brand. Eyeware is something where your need the brand and trust together. How did you go about making Lenskart a ‘brand’?

A brand is not just marketing. It’s your culture. Marketing is just communicating what you already have. I never wanted to be a brand that consumers would hide in the pocket. They have to feel proud. One of the most important thing that we have realised over the years that one of the most important things in brand building is to keep the aspiration high. Hence, branding is the most complex part where 100 things need to come together to make the desired impact.

So many people make pitches in shark tank. Can you tell us what are the common mistakes that people make so that our young students can learn from that?

One of the most common mistakes that people make is that they want to do the ‘cool’ thing, something that they can flaunt on Instagram versus really identifying where there is a big problem and what is the right solution. Also, there is deficit of focus on what exactly they want to do and an over obsession about getting a funding. But we must remember that the best of the businesses in the world never raised funding.

A common mistake that most of the budding entrepreneurs make is that they over focus on optimisation and focus less on the content. It should exactly be the other way round.

Your expression never changes in the Shark Tank. You are always very respectful to whatever they are talking about…

I will credit this to 10 years of working in lenskart. When I was a young entrepreneur, I used to be more passionate and now I have become more patient. Also, you can’t say with 100% conviction that some ideas may not work as Murphy’s law applies to every situation. So It’s important for every entrepreneur to keep going.

Rapid Fire with Peyush

Your favourite college memory
Giving tuition to a French student who used to pay me really well. Because of that I never had to cook food and I could focus more on my study and work.

Your inspiration
Bill Gates

A start-up on Shark Tank that impressed you the most

A company called ‘Hakdarshak’ by an inspiring entrepreneur who left a successful career to solve the simple problem that there are so many government schemes available for people in India and most of them never get utilised. He is trying to solve this issue on a large scale. The billions of dollars of scheme utilisation that has already been happened (through the company) was phenomenal.

What you cherish the most? Your first funding or when you turned a unicorn?

None. I cherish different phases of my entrepreneurial journey the most and the challenges that come with it. Persistence is also very important.

Your most challenging problem

Motivating and inspiring a large number of people. As sale increases, execution takes over and innovation goes down. Balancing that out it also a big challenge.

Entrepreneur or investor?

Entrepreneur. Because I’m an action oriented person.

Most important attribute of an entrepreneur
Humility

Advise to ATLAS students as they start their entrepreneurial journey

Make meaning, money will follow

How do you select your glasses for Shark Tank
I choose the least selling Lenskart models for myself. The glasses that I’m wearing was the least selling model at Lenskart. It is today the largest selling pair of eye ware after the Rayban Aviator in the world.

About Peyush Bansal

Peyush Bansal is an Indian entrepreneur and the founder of Lenskart, an online eyewear retailer. He is also a judge of the famous Indian Shark Tank.

He was born on August 15, 1983, in Chandigarh, India. He completed his engineering degree in 2004 from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After graduation, he worked briefly for Microsoft in India before founding Lenskart in 2010.

Under Bansal’s leadership, Lenskart has become one of the largest eyewear retailers in India, with over 700 stores across the country. The company offers a range of eyewear products, including glasses, sunglasses, and contact lenses, and has been credited with revolutionizing the way people in India buy eyewear.

Bansal has received numerous awards for his entrepreneurship, including the Entrepreneur of the Year award at the Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence in 2016. He was also named as one of Forbes India’s 40 Under 40 in 2014 and 2015.