Delhivery co-founder Sahil Barua (left) with Sandeep Barasia. Photo:
Pradeep Gaur/Mint
It is not the guitar lying in a
corner, or the poster celebrating iconic British rock band
Radiohead, that sets this office apart. It is not the curated
collection of artworks—including a whimsical painting by a former
employee, an ephemeral, black and white figurative print and a
playful, Indianized take on the classic Birth Of Venus painting by
Italian artist Sandro Botticelli—that grabs my attention. It is not
even the life-sized replica of the Darth Vader mask, the fictional
antagonist of the Star Wars franchise, that I find compelling.
It
is the selection of books that is most intriguing. Stacked on the
desk, they look like they belong to a university student in a
library rather than a chief executive officer (CEO). The Industries
Of The Future by Alec Ross, a business book, sits next to The Course
Of Irish History, edited by T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin. On a shelf
above the desk is Night School, a thriller by Lee Child, and The
Poetry Of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel-winning Chilean poet, amongst
several other titles. The books suggest an occupant with a
Renaissance approach, blending business, art, literature, history
and technology. The objects reinforce this perception, pointing to
someone with an evolved sense of aesthetics as well as a taste for
popular culture.
I am in the Gurugram office of
32-year-old Sahil Barua, the soft-spoken, publicity shy, rock-loving
co-founder and CEO of digital commerce logistics company Delhivery.
He is somewhat reticent but walks me through his space, sharing only
a brief description for each item. He likes reading and recommends
the Ross book.
His time in Ireland, as a tourist, and in
London, as a working professional, account for some of his aesthetic
choices.
A Star Wars fan, he bought the Darth Vader mask.
“That’s my general reputation too in the office,” he laughs. Sandeep
Barasia, joint managing director, clarifies, “It’s because of his
decisive and action-oriented nature, and being a CEO, he’s
perpetually having to take the tough calls.”
Although the
office is open-plan, it defies the prevailing stereotypes of modern
workplaces, with a rugged, industrial selection of materials and
finishes, and an unconventional treatment of space. The cabin door
has been removed to promote greater transparency.

Sahil Barua’s table.
Blended assets
At a time when bland is the accepted norm for workplace décor,
Barua’s office offers its own point of view. Its rawness can make it
unpalatable to some, but it is undeniably distinctive. The aesthetic
is mirrored in Barua’s business life, so much so that the office
serves as a visual metaphor for Delhivery’s business strategy. In the
same way that Barua combines aesthetic and intellectual disciplines in
his office space to establish a particular look and feel, Delhivery
has “blended” its assets to come up with a strategic blueprint for a
modern internet logistics company.
“Blended assets” is a
term I am coining for the way in which Delhivery is integrating its
“hard” logistics infrastructure (warehouses, etc.) with “soft” design
thinking and “technical” data-directed insights on how to manage that
hard infrastructure. Barua presents a personal point of view on each
of these three assets—the hard infrastructure, the design thinking,
and the data and technology. Together, the “blend” of assets is more
than the sum of the individual parts—it represents the engine of
Delhivery’s business success.

Sahil Barua’s personal artefacts such as a Radiohead poster, a Darth
Vader mask and a guitar.
‘Structure is destiny’
Most Indian logistics companies
specialize either in transportation or warehousing, but not both,
says Barua, adding, “My favourite quote is, ‘structure is destiny.’
However you set up your business in the early stage, when you are
starting out, it is pretty much what you look like at the end of
time. Our view was that if the customer wants the product, it’s our
job to figure out the most efficient way of getting that product to
him. That means if we have to run warehouses, we will do it; if we
have to run a transport network, we will do it.”
Barua
likens Delhivery’s capabilities to setting up the “operating system”
in which e-commerce companies are “applications”. “It doesn’t matter
who you are, whether you are Flipkart, a small business going online
or a housewife making jams that she wants to sell to 150 customers
across the country. We will find a way of providing you the
fulfilment service for that product,” he says, specifying that
Delhivery is only interested in digital commerce, not the offline
delivery market.

Sahil Barua’s personal artefacts.
Empathy and design thinking
This point of view on building a logistics network is enhanced by
specific, design thinking-led insights into human behaviour. Design
thinking, also known as human-centred design, is a discipline
predicated on developing empathy for end-users by immersing oneself in
their lives, coming up with better insights about their actual needs
and preferences.
Once again, Barua offers his own take.
“Empathy for its own sake is useless. Empathy, if it is actually
channelled into changing the way you do something, then it is worth
it. In our case it really forced us to ask questions about how we do
things.” All the senior managers at Delhivery regularly deliver
parcels themselves to get a sense of the challenges faced by
front-line staff. Some, like Barua, have delivered several thousand
parcels themselves. Over time, this “design thinking” approach has
made Barua and his colleagues reconfigure the fundamentals of the
business, such as developing new software tools to better locate
addresses, in a geographically complex country like India.

Sahil Barua’s personal artefacts includes a life-size Darth Vader
mask.
Being data-directed
Data
is oxygen for any internet company, and Barua is clear about its
application. “We are data-directed versus being purely
data-assisted. The data tells us this is the way it should be done,
not just that there are five ways to do it and you can choose one,”
he says.
For example, data has led to distribution
centres being closer to consumers, so delivery staff spend less time
on the road and more time knocking on doors. “We went from doing 18
parcels per head a day in September 2014 to doing 37 parcels per
person per day by June 2016, which was huge in terms of the unit
economics.”
Failures from incorrect data projections have led to learnings.
“Three years ago, we got our Diwali projections horribly wrong. We
thought the market would grow significantly more than it finally
did. Last year in October, when our team sat down, the data team
came up with their projections of how many orders we would do, and
they ended up being only half a per cent off from their
predictions,” he says.
This year, Delhivery is preparing
for the festive season by using data “to identify better ways of
balancing heavy loads across our network, to retool the network to
become more productive during surge situations versus needing to
blindly add more capacity. As a consequence, without major increase
in staffing, we are able to nearly double volumes,” says Barua.
For
him, the elements of hard infrastructure, design thinking, and
technology and data just reflect intellectual curiosity. “The
difference between us and everybody else is simply, in some ways,
the quality of questions that we ask about the industry, at a
fundamental level, going back to first principles. What we do is no
different, we do warehousing and we do transportation,” he
concludes.
As any university student knows, it is both
the rigour of analysis, and the ability to blend multiple
viewpoints, that can deliver a higher grade.

The ‘exposed’ conference room at Delhivery. Photo: Pradeep
Gaur/Mint
Furnishing logistics
Workplaces come in all shapes and sizes, but they usually share two
common business practices: Board meetings are held in a private,
enclosed conference room, and the cafeteria is where top management
holds company-wide town halls with employees. Delhivery, however,
slices through these workplace stereotypes with unconventional design
logic, expressed in its “exposed” conference room.
Not only
does the double-height conference room have a glass wall on one side,
it has a “‘viewing gallery” above, along the length of both sides,
from which visitors can see what’s going on.
For Barasia,
who was in charge of the office fit-out, opening up the boardroom was
a strategic decision, to promote transparency. “The entire floor was a
double-height space, with steel beams, when we moved in. So we just
made the conference room a double-height space. People can stand and
look down at the conference room from the floor above. It’s also a
space for a mini town hall. And there is a meeting room next door,
with glass between the walls. So if something is projected in the
conference room, they can actually see it in the meeting room. We
don’t mind that,” he says.
The palette of colours,
materials and finishes in the boardroom reflects the company’s
tongue-in-cheek humour—an elegant and expensive Italian marble
tabletop contrasts with timber plywood walls, engineered with woven
fibre to generate an acoustic wall. “We didn’t want to feel fancy, but
we also want to make sure that people who work here feel like they are
coming to a special place,” Barasia explains.
Akshat Bhatt,
head of multidisciplinary design studio Architecture Discipline, and
lead designer for this project, responded to the design intent with
creativity and frugality.
“A building is a hoarding for
what you are. How can you bring in part of what Delhivery is to a
workspace? That’s how we started. It was obvious to us to use a
material palette that is frugal, hardy and appears to be an
inexpensive, ‘found’ aesthetic,” he says, highlighting that many of
the materials were either recycled or were rejects from existing
vendors. “Some of the walls are made of recycled containers. We’ve
gone beyond exposed ducting, we’ve got exposed air-conditioning
units,” he says.
By seeking to create a space that is
somewhere between an early-stage start-up and a fully-fledged firm,
Delhivery’s management team has arrived at a spatial and creativity
identity of its own.
Aparna Piramal Raje meets heads of
organizations every month to investigate the connections between their
workspace design and working styles. She is the author of Working Out
Of The Box: 40 Stories Of Leading CEOs.