Lenskart changed how India buys glasses. It made eyewear affordable, stylish, and available on every street corner. But behind that success is a story of shortcuts. Cheap acetate frames, thinner coatings, and rushed prescriptions have left many customers questioning the quality they once trusted.
As the company prepares to close a massive IPO, its promise of clarity is facing some uncomfortable scrutiny.
In this episode we look at how Lenskart built its empire on affordability and what that means for the people who actually wear its glasses.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Last week, ChatGPT launched its own AI browser — a tool that promises to surf the web for you. It can summarise articles, add chocolates to your cart, or even tell you which email to reply to first (though… not always correctly).
OpenAI’s vision is clear: make ChatGPT the centre of your digital life. But are users buying in? From buggy app integrations with Canva and Spotify to real concerns around privacy and data access, this episode explores why AI-powered tools aren’t quite the game-changers they claim to be — yet. And why OpenAI keeps rolling them out anyway.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
🎧 The Ken's premium podcasts are now available on Spotify! Subscribers can now listen to all episodes of Two by Two, First Principles, Zero Shot, 90,000 Hours and Make India Competitive Again on the streaming platform
Ola’s ride-hailing business is losing speed. Its market share has dropped from 45% in 2018 to around a quarter today and investors are running out of patience. Some even explored a merger with Rapido in late 2024 but the talks collapsed.
Bhavish Aggarwal’s focus on Ola Electric and his reluctance to sell have kept the cab business in limbo. Leadership churn, shrinking cash reserves, and a collapsing valuation have added to the strain.
So why can’t investors leave and why is Aggarwal refusing to let go?
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
🎧 The Ken's premium podcasts are now available on Spotify! Subscribers can now listen to all episodes of Two by Two, First Principles, Zero Shot, 90,000 Hours and Make India Competitive Again on the streaming platform
If you’ve ever used a Classmate notebook or a Doms pencil, you’ve already been an unwitting part of one of India’s quietest rivalries in action.
For years, ITC ruled the stationery aisle — backed by its giant paper mills and powerful brands. But Gujarat-based Doms is catching up fast.
Since its 2023 IPO, Doms’ sales have surged, its stock has tripled, and it’s closing in on ITC’s notebook empire.
With everything made in-house and a perfectionist at the helm, Doms is turning pencils into profit, and giving one of India’s biggest conglomerates a run for its money.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
🎧 The Ken's premium podcasts are now available on Spotify! Subscribers can now listen to all episodes of Two by Two, First Principles, Zero Shot, 90,000 Hours and Make India Competitive Again on the streaming platform
LG Electronics India just pulled off a record-breaking IPO, drawing bids worth over 4 lakh crore rupees. Investors love its dominance in consumer electronics and its unrivaled retail network. For decades, LG has built trust through deep relationships with local retailers, flexible margins, and a people-first culture.
But as the company shifts toward profit maximization and premium products, those same relationships could be tested.
Can a business built on generosity stay efficient enough to compete with rivals like Samsung and Whirlpool?
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Accenture is reinventing itself. Literally. Its new “Reinvention Services” division, led by former Americas CEO Manish Sharma, is supposed to make Accenture the best version of itself for clients.
But inside the company? "Reinvention" signals a deep internal culling after nearly 11,000 job cuts. The layoffs, however are also fuelling a new kind of hiring boom elsewhere.
The Big Four—Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG—are seizing the moment. As they race to turn themselves into AI and tech transformation powerhouses, corporate restructuring at tech-services giants like Accenture and IBM just made hiring tech talent a whole lot easier for the Big Four.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.</strong></em>
Trump hiked H-1B visa fees overnight. For Indian students and engineers, it was a shock. For GCC employees, it was a chance to step up.
While global capability centres handle tech, ops, and innovation, final decisions usually stay in the US. Senior employees started to wonder: could the visa disruption finally shift some power to India?
In this episode, we explore why GCCs’ leap from execution to strategy is still far from guaranteed.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Meesho is preparing for one of India’s most watched IPOs. The company built its success in small-town India, where trust matters more than speed.
Over 75% of its orders are still paid in cash on delivery. That approach helped Meesho win millions of new shoppers and grow faster than bigger rivals. But it also ties up cash and squeezes margins, making investors uneasy.
Now Meesho is working with Razorpay to encourage more prepaid payments and faster settlements.
But can a company that grew by trusting cash-first customers convince them to go digital without losing their loyalty?
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
At 2 a.m. in Bangalore, a call-centre agent is resolving flight refunds with a new kind of colleague — one that never sleeps.
AI copilots are now embedded across India’s BPM sector, watching every click and keystroke to improve their own efficiency. For firms like Capgemini and Genpact, the real prize isn’t labour anymore — it’s workflow data.
Because in the race toward “agentic AI,” whoever owns the data, wins. And India, for all its scaled up manpower, might be training the machines that will one day replace it.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Is the AI revolution already running out of steam?
Despite years of hype about a world transformed by smart tools and endless innovation, the data tells a quieter story. The growth is flat, the excitement is fading, and there have been fewer breakthroughs than expected. Has AI already peaked or are we just looking in the wrong places?
In today's episode, we dive into one of The Ken’s most thought-provoking essays by Praveen Gopala Krishnan, 'What does an AI bubble burst look like?'
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
When Dreamfolks Services entered India’s aviation scene, it quietly built the plumbing that made airport lounge access possible. It linked banks, card networks, and travellers to hundreds of lounges nationwide. For years, it stayed out of sight, powering a privilege most flyers never thought twice about.
Now, it’s being shown the door.
Adani, India’s biggest airport operator, is moving fast to take full control — not just of the runways, but everything that happens beyond security. Lounges, food courts, duty-free zones, and retail stores are all coming under its fold. Some are being rebranded, others replaced — and nearly all are being pulled into Adani’s growing airport ecosystem.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
What if the smartest money move you ever make… is doing less?
In this episode of Daybreak, host Snigdha Sharma sits down with Megha Jose, CEO of Fortune Wealth Management and founder of Thryve, an investment advisory firm, to explore the idea of “Lazy Girl Investing.” Can women really build wealth without the burnout? And does the real rebellion lie beyond hustle culture?
From confronting financial shame to finding your “North Star” and rethinking how you see the stock market, Megha breaks down simple, low-effort systems that make your money work for you—quietly, confidently, and consistently.
Because financial freedom isn’t loud. It’s quietly compounding in the background.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Silver is having a moment, and not in the way you might think.
Once hoarded by billionaires, now sought after by AI and clean energy — the world is experiencing a historic silver crunch. Jewellers are refusing orders, mutual funds are freezing ETFs and Diwali shopping just got a lot more expensive.
The thing is, silver supply has been trailing demand for years now. And now, the gap is finally showing. What's behind this sudden shift?
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Across India, many heirs are stepping away from running their inherited businesses to run family offices instead. They see investing as more flexible, more global, and less tied to daily operations.Their parents built factories but they are more interested in managing portfolios.
It’s a practical shift but one that’s changing how old wealth works and what it values.
What’s driving this change and does India’s next generation of uber-rich business owners still want to build anything at all?
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Launched last year with the promise of 10 million internships, the Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme was meant to bridge the gap between young graduates and India’s job market.
A year on, the numbers tell a different story. Fewer than 9,000 interns have joined so far, even as top companies like TCS and Reliance came on board. Behind the slow start lie deeper problems — poor funding exacerbating a mismatch between corporate expectations and student realities.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
OpenAI’s latest classroom experiment is starting in India. A deal with the Arise school network gives 10,000 free ChatGPT licenses to teachers but the fine print has schools on edge.
But between NDAs, data collection, and new privacy laws, India’s educators are asking what OpenAI really wants from their classrooms.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Six months after launch, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro is already India’s second-biggest pharma brand, ahead of antacid Pan and just behind antibiotic Augmentin. Days later, Eli Lilly announced a $1 billion investment and a new Hyderabad hub.
The timing is no accident: India has one of the world’s largest obese and diabetic populations, Ozempic’s patent expires in 2026, and local pharma giants are gearing up with cheap GLP-1 generics.
In this episode of Daybreak, we unpack how this landscape presents both an opportunity and a challenge for Eli Lilly.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
When Deloitte refunded part of the A$439,000 it was paid by the Australian government for a report riddled with AI-generated errors, it seemed like the perfect moment to slow down.
Instead, the firm doubled down and announced a global rollout of Anthropic’s Claude to nearly half a million employees. That decision captures the strange new logic shaping the Big 4 consulting companies. PwC, EY, KPMG, and Deloitte are no longer just using AI, they are performing it.
Audit and tax work has slowed, regulation is tightening, and growth now depends on signalling technological boldness. In this new credibility economy, hesitation looks worse than failure. A mistake is no longer a crisis; it has become proof that you are early.
But as every firm rushes to prove its AI edge, sameness is setting in, and the next real differentiator may not be accuracy at all.
What could it be then?
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Founded by the Patel brothers, Vini Cosmetics built Fogg into the country’s top deodorant brand with its no-gas formula, and high-margin pitch. In 2021, global giant KKR swooped in with a $600 million deal, valuing Vini at $1.2 billion—the biggest private equity play in Indian FMCG.
But the partnership never clicked. The founders refused to fully step back, while KKR struggled with the quirks of a brand-led business in a market it didn’t quite understand. Advertising budgets were slashed, rivals like Denver surged ahead, and new launches flopped.
Today, Vini is still profitable, but its margins are shrinking, and Fogg’s dominance is fading. And even as the founders return fully into the picture, it's future looks foggy at best.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Even as markets wobble and trading volumes shrink, one online broker has raced ahead. Dhan, a four-year-old broking startup, managed to grow rapidly, post profits, and raise $120 million at a $1.2 billion valuation—all in the middle of a market correction.
In this episode, we look at Dhan’s journey from a niche platform for power traders to one of India’s newest unicorns.
What's making investors so bullish on Dhan when the rest of the industry is slowing down?
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Correction note: In this episode, the host mistakenly referred to Dhan’s raise as $120 billion; the correct figure is $120 million, led by Hornbill Capital, valuing the company at around $1.2 billion.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
