"You can't do anything outside while you are still there," Lalit Keshre has said of Flipkart, where he was a Group Product Manager. So in 2016 he quit.
Before that, there was a village. Reports place his birth in Lepa, a small village in Madhya Pradesh, in a farming family. The village had no English-medium school, so he was sent to Khargone to live with his grandparents. After Class 12 he learned about the Joint Entrance Exam and won a seat at IIT Bombay, where he finished a dual degree in electrical engineering in 2004. In college he began building a medical device, and later made video tutorials to help students prepare for IIT-JEE.
He and Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, all from Flipkart, set out to fix it.
At Flipkart he led Flipkart Quick. The idea for Groww grew from his own frustrations. He had invested in stocks since college and found Indian financial products "commission-centric." In 2016-17, he said, only about 20 million of 300 million middle-class Indians invested in equities and mutual funds.
He and Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal and Neeraj Singh, all from Flipkart, set out to fix it. Reports say the founders' own difficulty buying financial products, which they found opaque and complex, inspired the company. They started as a direct mutual-fund platform with three funds, and about six months in dropped extra features to keep it simple. When they took the idea to people early on, Keshre recalled in 2022, "they used to laugh at us." He says it made them more motivated.
The product launched in May 2017. In November 2025, Groww went public at ₹100 a share with a ₹6,632 crore issue subscribed 17.60 times, listing at ₹112 on NSE. Reported FY25 profit was about ₹1,824 crore, against a loss near ₹805 crore the year before. Promoters held 27.98% before the issue.
What they do show is a pattern: a boy sent to another town for a school, a product manager who knew he could not build a company on the side, and a team that took laughter as fuel.
For founders, the take-away is small and concrete. Leaving the day job was not the heroic bit. It was accepting, in his own words about the old job, that nothing else could be done on the side.