Founder Thesis · 2026-07-22 · 1h 4m
Most founders spend to acquire customers, but Kazam built an EV charging business where customers pay upfront and the cost of acquisition turns positive. Akshay Shekhar breaks down the India EV charging infrastructure playbook, from a broken first prototype to 250,000 charge points and a shot at the country's next open digital network for energy. What makes this story unusual is where it started, a Hindi and English YouTube channel reviewing early EVs, which the founder of Kazam used as cheap market research before building any hardware. Akshay Shekhar, a second-time founder who passed through PepsiCo and Godrej after a failed IKEA-style furniture venture, now runs a device-agnostic platform that helps fleets, OEMs and utilities install, manage and monetize EV charging. In this conversation with host Akshay Datt, he explains why he calls hardware a distribution wedge rather than the business, how load-balancing software cut fleet vehicles left uncharged overnight from 40 percent to under 10 percent, and why India wastes double-digit percentages of power at night that smart charging can absorb.
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