Falguni Nayar, the founder of the fashion and beauty product e-commerce platform, came into the spotlight after her company did a news round. Nykaa performed so exceptionally on the stock market that it was traded on both the Bombay stock exchange and the national stock exchange at a premium of 79 percent to its initial price set at Rs. 1125.
Falguni Nayar has proved that number of your age does not matter in your entrepreneurial journey. What is all required is the right choice of industry you want to plunge into, accompanied by a determination to succeed.
Falguni Nayar, originally hailing from Gujarat, had completed her education at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. For more than twenty years of her life, she worked as an investment banker with Kotak Mahindra Bank under the leadership and guidance of Uday Kotak.
Working closely with the prominent Indian entrepreneur and banker Uday Kotak has, for sure, has provided Falguni Nayar with an opportunity to learn and inhibit entrepreneurial skills.
Falguni Nayar started her venture when she was on the edge of turning fifty years old. She wanted to do something related to technology and beauty. So, she founded Nykaa in 2012 as a bootstrapped startup. Nykaa completely ran on her savings for the first two years as she wanted to create an identity for her startup before approaching the investors. Nykaa received an honor to be reckoned as a unicorn company in March 2020 – just eight years after its inception with a seed funding of around Rs 3 million from the Nayar Family.
During an interview with a leading news portal, Falguni Nayar disclosed what she learned from Uday Kotak. She said in an interview that she knew two fundamental lessons from Uday Kotak. One, Corporate governance stays crucial. Two, don’t do anything that does not sustain you financially. Undoubtedly, what she learned from Uday Kotak has facilitated Falguni Nayar steer Nykaa to a unicorn company.
It would be best not to make consumers purchase from your website because it is not sustainable. I think I have learned so much from it. Initially, I used to crack jokes that I did something wrong, like free shipping to any level. That is something Uday would disapprove of. So, there are a lot of lessons that revolve in my mind as to whether I would or would not do something, she jokingly said.
Falguni Nayar And Kotak Mahindra Bank’s Unbreakable Relation
In their book called How Uday Kotak built a valuable Indian Bank, R Gopalkrishnan and Tulsi Jayakumar have mentioned Uday Kotak’s attempt to stop Falguni Nayar from quitting the bank after her husband got a job abroad.
We had launched an advisory division in Kotak Mahindra Finance Limited. A year later, Falguni’s husband, a city bank employee, was deployed to London. Falguni Nayar was set to quit her job at the Kotak Mahindra Bank and shift to London with her husband. We said, ‘Falguni if you are shifting to London, we would set up an office in London. We want to sell and trade stock in GDRs. Why don’t you open it?’
Setting up Kotak Mahindra’s office in the United Kingdom was possible because of Falguni Nayar. Two years later, Sanjay Nayar, Falguni’s husband, was relocated to New York. We said it was great! Set up the New York office.
Uday Kotak further recalled an incident from 2012. He said Falguni told him that she was happy with what she had been doing at the bank, but she wanted to do something different and not compete with me. I asked her what was on her mind? She replied, ‘I am excited about starting something related to the internet and beauty. She turned her Idea into reality and christened it Nykaa.
