In an exclusive conversation with Business Today, Kumar shares the full story of why he and his co-founder walked away from the acquisition deal. He also reveals how COVID became another moment when he feared ixigo might not survive.
The book is a manual for future builders, filled with lessons that entrepreneurs don’t necessarily have to learn through their own mistakes and can instead learn from others’ experiences. In the book, he writes that “the most expensive mistake every founder makes is hiring.”
While the book is full of anecdotes and real-life challenges that founders have to navigate, the IIT Kanpur alumnus also shares a “brutal truth” he says he realised later: “Nothing you are building is worth your health.”
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Edited Excerpts
Q – The title of your book is ‘Made in Fire’. So what was the fire that shaped ixigo?
We spent a lot of time thinking about the title. Initially, the book was going to be titled Innovate or Die; that’s how we started building it. But as we progressed, I realised that most of what I wanted to share wasn’t just about innovation; it was about the lessons we learned the hard way. The ideas in the book come from experiences that became muscle memory, lessons forged in fire. Most of the cultural values we built at ixigo weren’t created in boardrooms; they were shaped during some of our toughest and most defining moments. And there wasn’t just one such moment; our journey has been marked by many such moments. From the very early days to our IPO, nothing came easily. Even the IPO was hard-earned; we had to make three attempts before we were finally able to get there. Those experiences shaped not just the company, but also the principles we operate by today, and that’s really what Made in Fire is about. That’s really where the word ‘fire’ comes from, because every founder has to go through the fire.
I wrote this book for my younger self, perhaps the version of me graduating from IIT Kanpur in 2001. If I had this book back then, my journey would probably have been very different. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go through tough moments yourself. Resilience cannot be built without setbacks or those near-death experiences that every entrepreneur eventually faces. You can’t develop good judgement unless you’re forced to make difficult decisions. But while experience is essential, you shouldn’t have to learn every lesson through your own scars. Some lessons can, and should, be learned from the scars of others. You don’t have to destroy the trust of your customers to understand how valuable it is. You don’t have to lose your health to discover your own limits. You don’t have to poison your culture because you failed to recognise the cost of one wrong hire, or because you held on to the wrong person for too long. And you don’t have to betray a customer’s trust to realise that reputation and trust compound over time, but can be destroyed by a single misstep. And you don’t have to lose years making mistakes that others have already made before you. That’s exactly what a good manual should do. It won’t remove the fire from your journey, but it can stop you from walking into fires that are completely avoidable. That was the whole purpose of writing this book, and that’s exactly what the title, Made in Fire, is meant to convey.
Q – You mentioned that if you had this book earlier, your life would have been different. So if you were to start ixigo all over again in 2026, how would you do it differently?
I’ve actually written about this in the book. It’s very easy to look back and analyse everything in hindsight, but the reality is that entrepreneurs are a different breed. They’re wired differently. What drives them is a kind of irrational optimism, a deep belief that they can build something meaningful, even when the odds are stacked against them.
Q – In the end, you’ve written that there is no alternative to experience.
Yes. This is more or less the concept that I just talked about.
Q – Was there ever a moment when you genuinely thought that ixigo might not survive? You have mentioned one instance; this was during COVID.
There have been such moments. 2008 was definitely one of the biggest, when we genuinely felt that it would be very difficult for the company to survive. We were just about to close a funding round. In fact, we had already run through our previous seed investment because we were almost certain the next round would happen. We were literally at the stage where the money was about to be wired into our bank account. And then Lehman Brothers collapsed, the global financial crisis unfolded, and everything changed overnight. That was the moment we realised it could be game over for us. We had only about two or three months of salaries left in the bank, and we were a team of around 23 people. It wasn’t just about keeping the company alive; it was about the responsibility we felt towards everyone who had believed in us and joined us.
The other defining moment was during COVID, when bookings went to zero almost overnight. In many ways, COVID was even more uncertain than the global financial crisis. During the financial crisis, we believed that if we could somehow survive long enough, the economy would eventually recover. But COVID was different. Nobody knew how long it would last, when travel would return, or what the world would look like on the other side. It was an unprecedented event, and there was absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel. There was no playbook, no roadmap, and no obvious way to navigate through it. But these weren’t the only moments. Over the years, we have gone through many such periods where the odds seemed stacked against us. In each of those situations, we somehow managed to scrape through, survive, and live to fight another day. Looking back, those moments became some of our greatest lessons, and they played a big role in shaping both the company and us as founders.
Q – You also reveal that ixigo came close to being acquired about 15 years ago. So what made you walk away from that deal?
I think we had a reasonably good exit opportunity at the time. Over the years, I have seen something similar happen with a lot of friends who have gone through the entrepreneurial journey. Many of them believed they were chasing success and money, but what they eventually discovered was that those weren’t the things that truly fulfilled them. The moment they achieved financial success and exited their companies, they also lost the one thing that had kept them awake at night and excited to wake up every morning: their sense of purpose. They had money, success, and recognition, but they no longer had a mission to work towards. I know at least three friends in my own network who, despite making significant wealth, ended up seeing psychiatrists because they felt they had lost their purpose in life. That was a very powerful lesson for me. We found ourselves at a similar crossroads. We had a path to an exit; we had some secondary liquidity, so financially we were in a comfortable position, and we felt that being acquired by a very large company meant we had made it. But the more we thought about it, the more we realised we weren’t actually happy with that outcome. Deep down, it felt like we had only just begun. We believed there was so much more we could build and achieve on our own. So we made what, at the time, seemed like a very unconventional decision. We went back, unbound the deal, bought back part of our stake, brought in new investors to buy out the strategic investors, and chose to continue building ixigo independently.
Q – You have devoted a whole chapter to AI. You write that companies using AI merely as a cost-cutting hammer will eventually hollow themselves out. What did you mean by that? And where do you think businesses are getting AI wrong today?
I think whenever a major technological inflection point comes along, the first reaction is often fear. Large organisations, in particular, tend to respond from a place of fear rather than opportunity. The mandate becomes, “We need to use AI”, and companies end up adding AI to everything for the sake of saying they’re using AI. That’s not how transformative technology works. Startups approach it differently. They see AI as a chance to leapfrog incumbents and build something fundamentally better from the ground up. You can’t build an AI-native product if you’re simply layering AI onto legacy software. More importantly, you can’t build an AI-native company without AI-native people. It starts with mindset, not technology. The biggest challenge today isn’t AI; it’s human resistance to change. Many people struggle to accept that the skills that got them here may not get them where they’re going. Take software engineering as an example. AI has fundamentally changed how software is built. The value is no longer in writing code; it’s in judgement, architecture, and deciding what to build. As (Nvidia CEO) Jensen Huang said, “AI won’t take your job; someone who knows how to use AI will”. That’s why companies need to invest not just in reskilling people, but in helping them unlearn old assumptions. What used to take six months may now take six weeks, but many organisations are still making decisions based on the old world. Ironically, AI makes human qualities even more valuable. If I gave two people access to the same AI tools and unlimited compute, who would build the better product? It wouldn’t be the person with better memory or technical knowledge. It would be the person with better judgement, taste, curiosity, ambition, resilience, ownership, and empathy. Those are the qualities that determine the decisions you make, and ultimately the products you build. I’ve always believed we shouldn’t hire people for what they know; we should hire them for how they think. Knowledge is becoming commoditised because AI puts it at everyone’s fingertips. I have personally learned more in the last year than I did in the previous twenty. The real differentiators now are timeless human qualities: judgement, creativity, resilience, empathy, and the ability to learn continuously. Those mattered before, but they’re becoming far more important in the AI era because the noise around skills, tools, and accumulated knowledge is rapidly disappearing.
Q – Ixigo is in the railway ticketing business. You write about a moment when ixigo’s growth had stalled, and you brought your best engineers to identify the most painful problem that you wanted to solve. In today’s time, we hear that many passengers struggle to book Tatkal tickets. This is the biggest pain point. So if you were to apply the same principle today, how would you solve this problem?
We have solved similar problems in the past, although the problem then was different; it was about helping people get confirmed train tickets. The challenge with railways is that many aspects are beyond our control. Tatkal bookings, inventory allocation, and ticket availability are governed by Indian Railways, and because it’s a government-run system with demand consistently exceeding supply, you can’t simply create more tickets overnight. The underlying constraint is infrastructure. Trains need to run faster to increase capacity, but that requires upgrading tracks and the broader rail network, which naturally takes time. So we realised we couldn’t change the underlying infrastructure or create more supply, but we could solve the problems around it. We could give people insight into whether they should book a ticket or not, whether this ticket would get confirmed or not, helping travellers make more informed booking decisions based on the likelihood of their ticket getting confirmed. Similarly, when people wanted to know where their train was, we knew we couldn’t install GPS devices on every train or wait for that to happen. Instead, we found another way: we used anonymised location data, with users’ permission, from travellers using the ixigo app onboard trains to estimate train locations.
Q – There’s been a lot of conversation in recent years about international travellers choosing destinations in Southeast Asia over India. If you had to pick just one or two things, what should India prioritise and what should the government fix to become a much stronger destination for foreign tourists?
If you think about India’s cultural heritage and history, we should arguably be one of the world’s top tourist destinations. The sheer diversity, history, and richness of what India offers is extraordinary. I’ve visited UNESCO World Heritage Sites in other countries that honestly don’t compare with what we have here. So, I don’t think the challenge is a lack of attractions; it’s more about the overall ease of travelling in India.
That said, we’ve made significant progress. Connectivity has improved tremendously over the last few years. There are now many more direct flights from Southeast Asia to India, including to Tier-2 cities, which wasn’t the case earlier. Road infrastructure has also improved dramatically. If you go back ten years, a road trip from Lucknow to Delhi or Kanpur to Delhi would have been daunting. Today, people comfortably drive those routes in four or five hours because the highways are much better. These are all positive developments. Going forward, we need to continue investing in infrastructure and connectivity, while also doing a much better job of marketing India globally. Many Southeast Asian countries have been exceptionally successful at promoting themselves as tourism destinations, and there’s a lot we can learn from that. Equally important is addressing the perception of safety. Having lived in Europe, I know that many international travellers still perceive India to be far less safe than countries like Thailand or Malaysia. In my own experience, that’s often not the reality; I have felt more unsafe in certain parts of cities like London or Paris than I ever have in India. So changing that perception is equally important. Ultimately, I don’t think India needs to compete on amusement parks or manufactured attractions. We already have something far more powerful: an unparalleled cultural and historical heritage. Our biggest opportunity lies in making that heritage easier to access, easier to experience, and much better known to the rest of the world.
Q – Once readers turn the last page of your book, what is the one message you hope stays with them?
I hope readers come away with a sense of energy and purpose, a feeling that inspires them to go out and build something that creates real impact. If there’s even a small spark within them, I hope this book turns that spark into a fire. That’s really my biggest hope, especially for young people who are just starting their journeys. A couple of weeks ago, I was back at IIT Kanpur as the guest alumnus for my Computer Science batch’s convocation. After my speech, many students came up to me asking how they could start building something of their own and what kind of support they could get. That was one of the reasons I announced the Made in Fire Fund at IIT Kanpur, to back young founders at the very beginning of their journey.
Launching with the Class of 2026, the Rs 1 crore founder fund will support 10 technology-led startups from each graduating batch with Rs 10 lakh in non-dilutive prototype funding for every selected startup. Beyond funding, the selected founders will receive mentorship from ixigo’s leadership team and me, along with product reviews, go-to-market guidance, and hiring support. Sometimes, all it takes is one person who believes in you. The difference between success and failure often comes down to having that first believer. I hope I can be that believer for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
