The Cars24 Birthday Letters, 2016 to 2026

Every year on Cars24's birthday, something gets written. Sometimes by me. Once by Mehul. And in a few years, by the company itself, one teammate at a time.

This page holds what those notes said, year by year, read back with affection and, in a few places, a wince. The original letters and the birthday-day notes that survived are preserved in a separate appendix, so this story can still breathe.

2016, year one

I wrote the first letter when Cars24 turned one. It praised the team's ingenuity, said we were solving a real problem for the person selling a car, and refused shortcuts. The credit went to the team, where it belonged. The ambition was specific: build India's largest used-car company. Hold on to that word. You will meet it again.

On 24 July 2016 a note went to the whole company. It called out feedback that bordered on abusive and asked for something specific: "Let's make Cars24 a loving, cordial environment to work in." We made that promise in our first year. The rest of this story is how long it took to keep it.

A week earlier I had announced Singapore as our first city outside India. We had just crossed ten thousand cars and I wrote that it was time to dream "bigger and braver." So even in year one, the horizon was already moving faster than the letter could hold it.

2017, year two

Year two came from Mehul Agrawal, not from me. His note caught us coming out of our amateur phase at speed, in a year when the outside world refused to sit still: odd-even, the diesel ban, demonetisation, GST, one after the other. Inside, we were putting a real company together: new businesses, values, career paths, our first television campaign, dealer processes, more and more automation through Tech and BI.

The ambition had widened too. Mehul wrote about earning trust and love from customers, dealers and the team, while building the biggest and most profitable company in the industry. Two years old, still learning how to run itself, and already trying to be an institution rather than a string of transactions.

At a birthday celebration in Jubilee Hills that year, someone said they hoped Cars24 would become the largest auto company in the world. That was exactly where our heads were in 2017. Largest, said out loud at a party, and it sounded completely reasonable to us.

Around the letter, the birthday had become a small culture festival: a values quiz, a product-naming contest, a video series, photographs, gifts and decorated offices. The founders were still writing the main note. The company was beginning to answer back.

2018, year three

Year three did not come as one founder letter. Shivi wrote to the company about the journey so far, thanked everyone who had helped build it, and asked the team to celebrate by giving to people around us. I went to Slack and asked everyone to share their pump-the-fist moments.

In 2018 the record changed hands. The 3 Years of Cars24 series ran in twelve parts, one employee story at a time, each with a photograph of that employee.

In September 2018 I asked on Slack: "Do you have this mentality? Called founder mentality?" I wrote that such people cannot rest once a problem or opportunity is identified, that they take personal responsibility without complaint and deliver despite politics. So 2026 did not invent founder mindset. It is at least eight years old here. What changed is what we built around it, and what we now promise the person who carries it.

2019, year four

There was no founder letter in year four either. There were ten more employee stories, one for each person looking back at what Cars24 had become through their own work. On the day itself, we announced MS Dhoni's partnership with Cars24 under the subject A New Beginning. My surviving Slack line was simply, "happy anniversary to all of us." The brand was getting bigger. The birthday record was getting less singular.

The 2019 campaign films survive on the official Cars24 YouTube channel. One is embedded in the source appendix, with links to the other three.

2020, year five

2020 said India's largest auto company on the birthday, but Slack had carried that destination since 2017. What 2020 actually added was the world outside India. And in the middle of the global push, Mehul asked Sonam to "Keep teaching us how to be more human in everything that we do." The ambition and the wish sat side by side.

The employee journey series returned that year too. By then, the birthday had two records running beside each other: what the founder thought the company needed next, and what the people inside it believed they had built.

2021, year six

The same year we put an investor's customer survey in front of everyone: NPS falling, pricing and quality mistakes, paperwork delays, a competitor ahead of us on experience, right beside the $2 billion valuation. We could be honest about customers a year before we could be honest about ourselves.

Year six said thank you for the hard work, the sweat and the tears, and for people making Cars24 their own. It spoke about changing the auto industry and about the team creating legacies. It was a warm letter, and reading it now I can see what it stepped around. Some of that sweat and some of those tears had come from the way we were running the place. The letter did not say so. The next one did.

The email also became a thread. Over the next few days, other people added their own reflections. The anniversary note was no longer only something sent to the company. It was something the company could speak back into.

2022, year seven

2022 is the hinge, but not because we discovered that people matter. That promise was already six years old. The hinge is that I finally said the gap out loud: the pressure inside Cars24 had been brutal, and "loving, cordial" had not been kept. Naming it did not lower the bar on economics or accountability. It put the old promise under the same scrutiny as our targets.

2023, year eight

Year eight went back to the small room at a petrol pump where Cars24 began, and to the people who sat in it through the late nights, the hard problems, and the lessons that came with both.

2024, year nine

There is no birthday letter for year nine. I did not write one. What I did write, at eight that morning, was an email titled New Career Opportunities at Cars24. In it I admitted I had been wrong about career paths for our frontline teams, and I made their growth my personal responsibility. I did not think of it as a birthday letter at the time. I do now. Owning a mistake in front of the whole company turned out to be a fair way to mark the day.

2025, year ten

2025 did not turn to culture and purpose for the first time. Those words are all over our 2019 and 2020 messages. What 2025 did was make them the main work instead of the side conversation, and then point them outward: the tenth birthday went to filling potholes instead of advertising, and Mehul wrote that we need "100 founders not 4."

2026, year eleven

2026 is not new language. It is a 2018 question turned into architecture. Mehul put it plainly: "We always said founder is not a designation but a mindset." We removed bands, grades and titles. Everyone is a Builder. We removed variable pay because we would rather run on ownership and honest feedback than on fear of losing earned pay. And for the first time the ask carries a promise back: when a Builder makes a sincere call and it fails, I stand beside them. I also said we are "nowhere near" the ideal. Keep both of those sentences together. Read the full year-eleven letter.

A note on this archive

These were internal letters, written for whoever was inside Cars24 on the day each one went out. The figures and language belong to those years. They show what we believed at the time, not how we would write the story today. If you want the record itself, read the original letters and surviving birthday-day notes. And if you were in any of those rooms along the way, this archive is as much yours as mine.

The birthday letters are one collection inside the Cars24 Archive. The wider archive keeps the origins, beliefs, contradictions and corrections that the birthdays alone cannot hold.