Get Hired with GeeksforGeeks at SuperK | Job A Thon 8

Key Takeaways

hi hi are you sure this course is just for two for nine nights yes and you know this is the only course with this expertise across the world no way yes way [Music] don't delay enroll now geeks learning together hi everyone good evening how are you all i am dhhani from geeksforgeeks and i will be your host for today's session today we have two very special guests with us i would like to welcome the co-founder of super k mr anil and a co-team member mr kosciel hello hey hi guys uh how are you anil how are you caution great great so i mean before we go ahead with this session you know i have been super intrigued since i heard the company's name what yeah like what inspired you to come with the name super k like how did you come up with this thing cool um so you know we always wanted to uh go back and do something in the grocery space in the small towns and uh we thought about we thought of understanding you know what would relate more to the people there right so supermarkets in general is something which is aspirational for people going away and away and beyond the kirana stores so we thought that you know something more fancy something which they feel like they it's approachable but also about their you know regular is what we thought we would come up with and that is how we started thinking about the name local bike that was the company name but you know when we went ahead when we talked to a lot of people we realized that you know it did not really strike a chord with the mass regular audience so we wanted to ensure that you know when we go across india right or even global we needed basically a name or uh something which would stand out so that's why we said that super is something which everyone understands and because we are modernizing the kiranas we said that k would still remain from there so that's how super k that sounds amazing i was almost certain sure it was super cautious but okay so what inspired the idea of super k for you i mean i understand the need of karyana stores in india but what struck the chord for you i think the multiple things would be wrong if i say that there's only one thing that stood out uh for me honestly uh grocery has been a long-term crush i always wanted to explore something in the grocery space do something malaysia building tech and product for this company called cowadim which is urban company southeast asian counterpart so there i was able to relate to a lot of the organized players out there in the market in the way vietnam and malaysia in philippines or you know in indonesia or saying so all these kkk mods alpha mas my maternal family runs grocery stores and also owns rice mills and floor mills so that connect along with the organized trade uh we felt that this is the right time for us to build superkit right so i'm really curious here did you like always plan to start a startup or were you like you know like in the line of job and then idea inspired you uh me personally i've always been uh in that frame of mind itself that i wanted to do something of my own so super case is the second startup that i'm doing uh the first one was called flabberin which was uh similar to curefit it did not take off as we expected and all those learnings along with my experience with some other startups like phone pay hike by juice all came together to build superkey okay i mean obviously the experience fires up and you do great things so what is the mission and the vision for your company right so i think the mission definitely is to enhance the grocery buying experience of the small towns of india and the vision is to build an offline api for india right so grocery is a way of entry for us into the market and the idea is can you make these kirana stores as api endpoints where any digitally native company can come plug in on top of the superkin network and give access to all their digital services to the rural parts of india through super case stores that's quite interesting i mean that's something really huge i mean it took some time for me to understand but i think i get your point so example for that as well right so imagine you know the small towns they do not have an access to let's say buy uh a so they know that they can buy a make my trip package but they're always unsure of the certainty of that happening now imagine us an influencer who is sitting in the kirana store who is helping them make that purchase or make that transaction and you know make matter packages can be sold through super case stores that's how we would imagine it to be so basically interconnecting everything that can be bought on source on online right any commerce happens to super case stores that's that's quite interesting i mean that's really quite interesting so a very common question that is often asked to start up founders what was the problem that you faced and you know like what are the tips that you want to give to all the people who are watching this who are thinking of starting their own startups so i think um this also comes with a bit of an experience right so when we all did our first startups with me neeraj as well right so my other co-founder both of us when we did our first ever it felt like what are the problems that i am facing today is that something can that be something better but this time we imagine that what is the real problem that you know a large audience in this country is facing so when we went ahead with that pursuit that's how we found again it's not like the idea comes to instantaneously it's a iterative process for us it was at least a six months of iterative process before coming up with what super k actually is today i mean i can understand there is a lot of ideation that is required you know because once you start learning from your mistakes it's just that you want to build on things to avoid those mistakes so what would you describe the values like what do you describe as the values that your employees follow i think um then i'm in a grocery business not many people understand that this is a business in which you find your unit economics first and then scale rather than hitting scale and looking at unit economics so the fundamental thing to understand here is frugality which is imbibed into every individual in the company and the second most important thing is uh no ownership right so people need to own in a startup in the very early days you need a lot of employees to or say number of champs around you to own any particular task that they are taking and think very differently right and so you know the first in the first few set of uh people who join us for them everything is let's say new but what we again recommend for the second set of people who join us is you know take ownership of a task and ensure that you question people because what might have been right a year ago might not hold its stand today because the situations are very different right frugality ownership and the next most important point is bias for action right because people we cannot just sit and ideate and do nothing about it so you need to have the individually you know that intent to go and achieve something so and get a work done because in the grocery business unlike the e-commerce world where you add something and you know the cart dropouts right so when there is something that is not available no one comes back the second day and checks for that product this is very immediate need and if you don't find it in the shop in which you enter you immediately go to the next shop and buy it you don't wait for it to come back into this shop to make your purchase so ensuring the availability of products with a huge bias for action is very important for us so frugality is what we look at right so how did the covert pandemic you know affect your startup your work that you like do i think um you know on the business front it did wonders for us because we were the only store in the entire region that we were operating that gave at least discounts to customers or also maintained availability of stock right and then on the let's say on the working uh all the employees and everything on that front right what happened is that all of us shifted base to the small town called kadapa in andhra pradesh which is you know a six hour drive from bangalore and all of us staying together as a close-knit family in that small town eating the eating out of the only biryani place that was available and working out of us very small office uh made a lot of wonders for us and now we have slowly shifted uh to bangalore right so i would like to direct my next question to caution your voice is cracking i mean is there an internet issue at your head i think it should be fine no yeah now i guess it's okay so caution as you are a co-team member at super k how has the working experience been for you and you know like working under the guidance of anil how has that how has that been like it's been a phenomenal experience basically uh got to learn a lot joining in the initial days uh you know got got to learn everything from scratch that you got to know about you know how business functions uh multiple functionalities of the business uh how how how to run a business basically right so that was very much fascinating right so anil what are the key technologies that super k is currently focusing on so you know i'll uh explain that in two parts uh basically all of us who are there in the core team are all tech and product guys so for us building tech was very very intuitive and very easy for us right and what we chose was to build business first and not the technology but to build any business you need technology as an enabler and we all started building things on no code or you know google spreadsheets itself right so the kind of things that we wrote we built an erp out of google spreadsheets use no code applications like app sheet utilize and all these uh other tools that were available in the market and we were able to at least identify the choking points of the technology and any design or any business or that we think about and today we are at a stage where we very clearly know without investing much into technology right uh what we need and that is the most interesting phase for any developer coming on board because they can be very confident that what they build now will be used for long not something which might be scrapped tomorrow so that's the philosophy behind the technology piece of super k and today the multiple things that the team is working on let's say we are using this open source software called erp next on which we are building all our technology and we use a paytm pos solution for our in-house stores to sell the products so there are a lot of scripts that are written in python to pull that data from a different third party put it into the erp system that we have we use aws gcp wherever that it is required and the analytics side we use gcp and metabase together to you know help the people make decisions based on data and now we are building our own mobile app on react native so that will also be very very interesting for us because that will help our store partners in this journey to make more informed choices so it's across the spectrum from mobile development to web development whatever people are interested in is something that they can pick up right so what vacancies are there in super k and what hiring procedure do you follow to hire new talent so are we currently looking for uh hiring full stack developers within the organization so they'll be working on again as anna said right so they'll be working on web applications as well as mobile applications so uh huge scope of uh like knowledge or you know you can learn a lot and the team comprises of people from multiple people who worked in uh you know amazon people from iits and right ids a huge scope of improvement in the hiring process basically that we're following is we would be having a couple of technical rounds and then our casual filter right so uh recently you partnered with geeks for geeks to source the candidates for your tech hirings so what was the experience and what are your expectations out of this partnership uh yeah so we're looking at uh again so uh uh it's been a very recent uh association with the with geeks and geeks right so uh we've got a few good candidates who we could talk to right and uh what we're looking at from this association is uh you know having someone who can join our china team really great products uh which are everlasting right so yeah right so what are your views on jobathon like the hiring contest and how will it help you in your hiring and tier 3 and tier 4 candidates to start their careers so uh yeah so i think it is a great platform uh when uh you know it helps us understand uh you know the candidate better where they stand how uh how they are like technically uh and also not technical uh skill what type of medical skills that they have right and uh i think they are for candidates as well uh it is a very good platform for them it's like a stepping stone to know what uh uh outside corporate world expects out of them right that's that's about right i mean once we start participating in contests like this a student can understand what the level of you know like what the expectations are in the industry so for a startup what do you look for in a candidate who is suitable to work with your company okay sure so i think um as we uh did mention right um people who have high ownership have a good bias for action and i personally appreciate people who have a large uh you know hungered for growth right so if you don't have the hunger to grow beyond your shoes then it's just a mediocre uh you know job that people get into and as a startup we expect people who would want to grow beyond their shoes take up more responsibilities and become let's say on the technical side become a tech leader or a cto themselves right so as a co-founder what advice would you like to give to an entry-level developer in any organization like the developers who are looking for their first jobs so you know when you develop products there are you would come across in any company there are two kinds of developers one kind who are product engineers who you know work along with the product managers help them build a lot of products build good amount of features and then there's a second set of developers who are very technical uh who would list love to work on some amazing technology and all these things right so for a bus for a company which is more business oriented right which is not building let's say too heavy tech uh products in the first job i would recommend people to look at opportunities in which they can become product engineers understand the business and build products which customers start using that is when you know it feels more valuable both to the organization and to someone who is building those things right so do you have any internship opportunities as well um [Music] at the moment at the moment we don't actually uh so we're looking at someone uh someone with good experience and also someone who is technically sound good you know learn uh the basics quick and uh start uh because we're at a phase where we want to you know as we want to roll out the features as soon as possible so uh uh we want to deploy our energies there uh towards shipping right so i guess that's it for the questions i have one last question so to conclude this conversation what would be your message to the candidates who are watching this video and are looking for an opportunity in superkit look no further come join us that's really wise i mean a lot of the people watching this video i'm sure you know they are looking for opportunities to expand their horizons to work with amazing startups like yourself and i mean i really hope you can find some good talent through this uh you know like this job-a-thon so i guess that's it for all the questions that i have thank you so much anil and thank you so much caution for you know like answering all of our questions and for such an informative session and thank you all for watching us and have a great day ahead take care thank you very well thank you guys see