Part 2: Ultraviolette Automotive's Narayan Subramaniam on tinkering, designing and learning by discarding

First Principles

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My first introduction, and indeed my ongoing and recurring one, to Ultraviolette has been personal. For years, driving by the Inner Koramangala Inner Ring Road from where I stay to Indiranagar, the Ultraviolette showroom would always catch my eye on the left. I used to constantly wonder about those really cool bikes hanging from cables in the double-ceiling office, intrigued by what kind of bikes they were.

Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".

We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.

Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".

He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.

Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"

The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.

Welcome to First Principles.

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This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

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