Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy morning, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- BYJU’s latest khilwaad with their own employees,
- the Y Combinator startup that got kicked out,
- And what Instacart’s IPO means for tech companies.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 58 seconds - faster than Vimal can hire half of Bollywood for their ads. (bolo zuban kesari😵‍💫)

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

BYJU’s issues pile up harder and faster. 🤦

TLDR -
- BYJU’s hasn’t paid severance pay to the 2,500 people they fired.
- They also haven’t deposited any of their employee’s pension funds.
- This comes RIGHT after they offered to pay off their entire debt in full in 6 months.

BYJU’s might be the world’s biggest ed-tech company, but their own report card has a lot of red marks…

In June, they laid off over 2,500 people and cut roles across their sales, marketing, and finance teams.

Turns out that none of these people have seen their severance pay hit their accounts yet!

They were promised June, July, and August salaries by September, but BYJU’s missed that deadline.

Now, they’ve said that the final settlement amount should come in by the 17th of November. 💀

Plus, BYJU’s hasn’t been depositing their employee’s pension funds for the last few months and is just pocketing it all.

It’s crazy how they’re doing things like this on one side, and on the other they’re offering to pay back all their debt early WITH interest.

Golmaal hai bhai sab golmaal hai…

Y Combinator kicks out an Indian startup over “irregularities”… 🤔

TLDR -
- An Indian startup got expelled from Y Combinator.
- The founder apparently about his profitability, revenues, and education.
- Stuff like this is plain disrespectful and weakens foreign confidence in Indian startups.

Medobed is a startup that promises 10-minute medicine delivery, and they just got kicked out of Y Combinator’s S23 batch…

A YC partner issued a public statement saying to “disengage completely” with the company and walk away from them ASAP.

The founder of Medobed apparently -
- lied about numbers like $1mn GMV/month 
- faked the company’s EBITDA profitability
- frequently changed his place of education on LinkedIn 😂

Cheap money changed markets by making it very easy to build a multi-million dollar business by selling a convincing story.

But a lot of bad actors went punished.

Quite a few names in India’s startup ecosystem have been reeling from a protracted funding environment - and foreign investors having 2nd thoughts could really hurt.

A lot of local investors aren’t willing to make big bets on radical new business models, which is why we need that outside money flowing in.

As some wise guy said… only when the tide goes out do you see who’s been swimming naked. 🙈

Instacart IPO gives some hope to 10-min delivery giants. 😅

TLDR -
- Instacart is going public at a $10bn valuation.
- They made $2.8bn with $400mn of profit, so it’s a tech company being sold as a value stock.
- Will likely provide a much needed confidence boost to the market.

It looks like nature is healing… the world’s oldest 10 minute delivery startup is set to go public today.

Instacart is pricing it’s IPO at $10 billion USD, which is a pretty steep discount compared to their Series E round at a $39 billion valuation.

While everyone who invested during the tech bull run is probably gonna lose money on this IPO, it’s a decent win for the market.

Confidence in tech stocks has been very lackluster for the last few months (with good reason) and an offering like this is gonna help add a little bit more fuel to the fire.

Instacart is basically a tech company being pitched as a value stock - with over $2.8bn of revenue and $400mn of profit last year at a 3.5X revenue multiple.

That’s a cheaper multiple than their competitors Doordash, who are at 4.5X.

Should give a jolt of confidence to India’s host of 10-min delivery businesses too…

In other news… ☕

Zomato inches to a $11bn market cap after Instacart confidence boost (Inc42)

UAE sells USD-denominated bonds for the first time in 3 years (BBG)

Elon Musk thinks about making EVERYONE pay to use Twitter (TC)

Ford’s US+Canada workers go on strike (FT)

Canada points a finger at India over Khalistan drama (Mint)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it. Have a mauj-masti filled day.

Lots of ❤️,

Team Cutting Chai