Cars24 Is 11 Today

Autonauts,

Cars24 turns 11 today. And after all these years, I know this much: what looks important from the outside is not always what carries you through the hard days.

Money matters. I want it too, and people who say money doesn't matter usually already have theirs. But when things get hard, money is not what keeps me going.

What keeps me going is purpose, love for the work itself, and trying to do something beautifully for our customers and for each other.

I am one of the founders of Cars24, and I own more of this company than you do. But nobody is born a founder, and no title makes you one forever. It is a mindset I try to earn every day. And I want every Builder to earn it too.

You earn it when something is broken for a customer or a teammate and you care too much to walk past it. You find out what is really going on, make the call and stay with it. It will not make every minute easy. But it makes the work feel alive. That is what Flatland is for. Anyone can work this way, not just a few of us.

If you own a problem, you will sometimes get it wrong. I still do. When it happens, don't sit on it. Say it early, look at it honestly and make the next call better. You own the call, the truth about it and what you learn from it. What happens to Cars24 is on me. That includes the people I chose, the environment I shaped and the things I let continue.

So when you make a sincere call and it fails, and the room goes quiet, and people look around to see who takes the hit, look to your left. I will be standing there. You will not face it alone, and you will not be offered up to make a bad month look explained. I got you 200%, always. That is my promise.

I make that promise because the Cars24 I dream about cannot be built by people playing it safe. We are in a strong place financially, but that is not what I am chasing. I want us to redefine mobility and what a customer can expect from a company. I want us to build one of the most meaningful companies India has given the world in the last hundred years. We have not earned that yet. I want it more today than I did on day one. Tomorrow morning, we get back to earning it.

Thank you for building this with me.

Happy birthday, Autonauts.

Keep moving Forward,

Vikram

Editor's note: the earlier birthday letters, from 2016 onwards, including the year that went without a formal one, are collected in the Cars24 birthday letter archive. It is the first collection inside the Cars24 Archive, a living record of what we believed, what happened and what changed.