There is a tax on being early, and it is almost as heavy as the one on being wrong. The difference is that early comes with a better story: the one where you were right all along and the market simply had not arrived yet. I have paid that tax in full. It nearly broke me. And it left me with the most expensive lesson I own, and the one regret I have not talked my way out of.
In 2015 we built Scootsy, out of Antfarm, in Mumbai. People remember it as a premium food app. It was never meant to be one. The plan was an everything platform: the best restaurants, the good bakeries, gourmet stores, gifting, fashion, books, the things you actually wanted, brought to your door properly, on one app. Multi-category delivery, ten years before quick commerce made anything-in-minutes feel normal. We were building the version of it that the market would not name for another decade.
Our average order value was around nine hundred rupees while the rest of the market fought over the cheapest possible meal. We raised three and a half million dollars. Two hundred thousand customers, the highest repeat rate in the segment. Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor were regulars, along with nearly every name in the city. The press wrote it up, Mumbai talked about it, and for a while it felt like we had found the thing.
We had. We had found exactly what people would want. We were just a few years early to when they could have it.
Right about what, wrong about when
Multi-category, premium, on-demand delivery needed a few things to be true that were not quite true in 2015. Enough smartphones in enough hands. Enough delivery density to make the unit economics work. A city that had simply gotten used to ordering everything. We were building the roof before the walls were up, paying every month to teach a market a habit it was not yet ready to pay for at scale.
The city lapped it up, and we did premium, the exact play the whole industry would chase a few years later. The hard part was upstream of all of it: the investors of the day could not yet see what the customers already had. Nearly every VC in India ordered from Scootsy, including the ones who were investors in Swiggy and Zomato. Their dinners arrived through us while their term sheets went elsewhere. We knew premium was right and that the unit economics held. They saw big baskets and small volumes and filed it under niche. The repeat rates said otherwise. Their own order history said otherwise. Capital was simply reading a different clock than the consumer, and capital was the one writing the cheques.
Paid in cash and in tired
Being early is a grind that quietly takes years off you. Every quarter I was back in a room convincing people of something my customers had already decided, raising round after round for the privilege of staying alive one more lap while the clock caught up. That is the real tax on early, and I paid it in cash and in the kind of tired that does not wash off. By the end I was running on fumes. It nearly broke me.
So when the offer came, part of me was relieved.
The one I let go
In 2018 we sold Scootsy to Swiggy. A real exit, all cash, the sensible home for a company a little ahead of its clock. On paper it was the right call, and with the same information and the same tank of energy, I would make it again.
It is also the one I wish I had held.
Swiggy bought what we had proven: that premium, high-basket customers were real, that curated and gourmet was a genuine segment, that hyperlocal logistics was a problem worth owning. The premium play we pioneered became part of their core. The logistics instinct fed the engine that now runs their quick commerce. Swiggy went public and became one of the country’s defining companies, worth many times what the whole of Scootsy changed hands for. I watched the category I was early to turn into a giant, from the outside, and I wished I had hung on for the eighteen months it would have taken for the clock to turn my way.
We were early. I just let go a beat before the market showed up.
The conditions are readable
It took me a while to stop calling that bad timing and start calling it a lesson. Being early is a misread of the conditions, and the conditions are readable. A market is ready when three things line up: the cost has dropped far enough, the behaviour has formed, and the infrastructure exists to carry it. Miss any one and you are early, which the market will price almost exactly like wrong.
The cruel part, until now, was the cost of holding on. To keep a position until the market caught up, you had to raise round after round and burn years just staying alive. Most early companies die because they ran out of runway, or founders, waiting for the clock. What took me out of the position a beat early was exhaustion.
Why now is different
The cost of building and running a company has collapsed. One operator with the right AI agents can now stand up the early bet and keep it alive on a fraction of what it used to take, and a fraction of what it used to cost the person. Early stops being a death sentence. You can move on a market before it is obvious and afford to wait for it, because waiting no longer eats your runway or your health. The skill was always reading the clock. The new part is that you can survive being a little ahead of it, and still be standing when now arrives.
And the constraint that took Scootsy out of my hands matters far less. Back then you needed a room of investors to believe the thesis in year one, before the market had proven it for you, and you needed the stamina to keep selling that belief for years. When you can hold the position yourself, cheaply, you do not have to win that argument early and you do not have to bleed to keep the lights on. You let the market settle it, and you are still there when it does.
Why I’m building again
I stepped back for a while after Scootsy, and then watched the market catch up to nearly everything we had bet on. The problem was the clock, and the toll of holding a position with a body and a balance sheet that both ran out. The last year I have been building again, on my own, with AI as the team, and it keeps landing: war.direct, the studio, the brands. That is what Antfarm is now: operators who have been early, learned to read the clock, and finally have the tools and the timing on the same side. The underdog with the pattern memorised, and this time the stamina to stay.
Being right is not enough. You have to be right now, and still standing when now arrives.
I would undo letting it go. Today, being a little early is something you can afford. So read the clock, place the bet, and this time, stay. The tax on early just got cheap.
If you have a read on a market that is not obvious yet, come and hold the position with us.