Why An Already-Successful Indian Entrepreneur Chose Babson For His MBA

Rakshit Reddy has begun his second year in the Babson Olin MBA program. He was already a highly successful entrepreneur before starting the program in 2021. Courtesy photo

Rakshit Nadiga Hanumantha Reddy is, by any measure, a wildly successful entrepreneur.

Reddy is a founding team member of Waycool Foods, one of India’s largest agri-tech startups, which has received more than $80 million in funding since 2015. The social impact company works with thousands of Indian farmers to help them sell produce at a fair price. Waycool has more than 4,000 employees and boasts about $50 million in annual revenue, and has recently expanded operations to Dubai.

So why would Reddy — who serves as chief growth officer for a company that has done nothing but grow — want to go back to school to get an MBA? And why choose a school, Babson College’s F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, that is best known for its entrepreneurship programs?

‘THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY IS VERY SUPPORTIVE’

Rakshit Reddy: “In each and every stage of our life, we have challenges, and we come up with new things to overcome them.”

“I was always fascinated by Babson,” Reddy says. “One of my co-founders did his undergrad at Babson. He was always talking about how the faculty are very helpful, how the entire community is supportive when somebody’s starting something. I don’t know about other colleges, I can’t comment on that, but when it comes to Babson, they’re very helpful. If you reach out to any alum, they try to do what they can do.

“Also, it gives me access to a lot of family business entrepreneurship in the budding stages, because Babson is known for it.”

Reddy had a diverse academic and professional background before Waycool. He earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in 2011, then a master’s in engineering management two years later. His CV ranges from automotive consulting to manufacturing to agri-tech.

But once Waycool took off and he and co-founders Karthik Jayaraman and Sanjay Dasari began working there full-time, Reddy realized that he needed more: He needed to “brush up on my leadership skills.”

FROM B2B TO B2C, AND BUSINESS BOOMS

Waycool had begun as a typical B2C company, a retail firm that bought produce from Indian farmers — staples like fresh produce and dairy — and sold it from brick-and-mortar storefronts. By 2017, when he joined the company full-time, Reddy and his co-founders knew they needed to change their business model.

“The biggest challenge, we realized, is if you buy only good produce from farmers, obviously, this is not a manufactured product. It comes with different shape, sizes, and all that stuff,” Reddy tells Poets&Quants. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we help them liquidate their entire produce?’ Because if you only buy good produce, obviously, you’ll struggle to liquidate the balance produce because it’ll go for a lesser cost. In a country like India, we have huge supply of produce, and at the same time we have a huge population, too.

“We thought, ‘Instead of doing a B2C as a bigger market, we’ll try doing B2B initially, and then see how the market goes.'” It went very well. Waycool started supplying hotels and restaurants, then moved on to catering institutes. “We saw it grow, and then we realized, ‘Why don’t we supply to the modern trade now?’ Modern trade is like the Whole Foods or the Amazons of the world. They need packed produce and we have very good margins.”

Business exploded. WayCool was on its way to becoming India’s largest and fastest-growing agri-commerce company, operating a full stack, broadline product range across multiple channels and categories, serving over 100,000 clients in the general trade, modern trade, and food services space; among its clients are Madhuram, KitchenJi, L’exotique, and Freshey’s.

The office of Waycool Foods in Bangalore, India. Courtesy photo

‘MY MISTAKES WERE COSTING THE COMPANY MONEY’

But with success came challenges — not least for Reddy as Waycool’s chief growth officer, charged with driving multiple channels and products across markets while also driving the company’s digital transformation. Though he had “a leading hand,” as he puts it, in “shaping the value chain and all aspects of the business,” Reddy knew he was missing key skills that the firm needed him to have.

“My idea for getting into business school came when I was working with multiple banks and I was going through multiple business models, because we were building a lending channel and I was leading the entire thing since I was a core team member and I was in the leadership team,” he says. “I had to wear multiple different hats because I was driving the growth opportunity for the company.

“It was when I was building a business model of the digital lending business while dealing with banks that it became very tough for me, because all my life I worked in marketing and operations, and I’ve never been part of finance. I used to learn from mistakes, but my mistakes were costing the company money.

“I thought, ‘Why don’t I brush up my leadership skills and financial skills? You should have a hold on it.’ So that’s why I decided to join Babson.”

Rakshit Reddy: “I was always fascinated by Babson. One of my co-founders did his undergrad at Babson. He was always talking about how the faculty are very helpful, how the entire community is supportive when somebody’s starting something.”

WHAT BABSON OFFERS

Babson College has long been considered one of the top business schools in the world for entrepreneurship. Earlier this year, the Olin School maintained its title as U.S. News‘ No. 1 school for startups, landing the coveted spot for the 29th straight year. Not bad for a school tied for 57th in U.S. News‘ overall ranking.(Babson is second in Poets&Quants‘ 2021 entrepreneurship ranking; our new ranking will be published in a few weeks.)

What makes Babson such a startup hotbed? Stephen Spinelli, who took over as president of Babson in July 2019, credits the integration of the school’s “thought and action” approach that emphasizes smart action, failing fast, and pivoting based on what you learned — as well as the school’s focus on interdisciplinary collaboration among its faculty, no matter what discipline they come from.

“It is a purposeful strategy for the business model at Babson,” Spinelli explained in a 2021 interview with Poets&Quants, pointing out that Babson is home to multiple institutes and centers focused on the marriage of thought and action — or the theory and practice to teach students an entrepreneurial mindset.

“That has created this more direct connection between what happens in the classroom and a student’s ability to self-curate their interaction with the marketplace at the same time,” Spinelli said. “Those centers and institutes allow a student to do that with a greater degree of self-curation and freedom. You have to have finance, you have to have accounting, you have to have marketing. You have to have these integrated studies.” Then you can apply those in the different institutes and centers, he said. “That coordination and integration that is really led by the students is probably the single-most innovation that I’ve seen.”

RAKSHIT’S FIRST YEAR AT BABSON: ALL ABOUT SKILL ACQUISITION

Rakshit Reddy: “If you get exposed to this world, where you have an entrepreneurship community, you can do wonders.”

Rakshit Reddy, on sabbatical from Waycool Foods, struggled initially in the Babson MBA while taking core finance courses last year. The curriculum — and the faculty and members of his cohort — helped him grasp concepts that had eluded him as “an operations guy.”

“Courses like Corporate Finance, which is actually evaluating opportunities or raising funds — those courses helped me actually understand finance as a whole,” he says. “Obviously, a person like me who comes with a zero finance background — all my life, I worked in operations — to learn and to study something about accounting or finance in the first semester, it was a nightmare for me because I’m not a numbers guy. If you talk to me in missions or automation, I can talk to you.

“It was very overwhelming, but again, the cohort and the faculty are very supportive, and they helped me understand the concepts. I used to reach out to them and go meet them, our professors, and we actually had one-on-one conversations.”

One key challenge: technology, terminology, and accounting techniques differ slightly in India and the U.S.

“I always come with the Indian perspective because I never worked in a global context,” Reddy says. “They used to correct me because some of the technologies or terminologies, what we use in the USA and what we use in India are slightly different. And also the way we account books is slightly different. I was able to gain those skillsets, and actually that helped me a lot and improved me.”

ADVICE FOR BUDDING ENTREPRENEURS

What is Rakshit Reddy’s advice for budding entrepreneurs considering business school?

“In each and every stage of our life, we have challenges, and we come up with new things to overcome them,” he says. “Humans should not stop learning. That’s why I decided that to leave automotive consulting, leave behind what I knew, and join the startup. ‘This is my comfort zone, and they have a startup and they will actually let me work here.’ You come out of your comfort zone, learn something, meet new people, meet different entrepreneurs who bring different experience to the table — and when you interact with them, then you get a global experience.

“This is what I can say: If you get exposed to this world, where you have an entrepreneurship community, you can do wonders. You never know, you may come up with a different business idea, too.”

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