From Swiggy to MHRA: Why I Left Tech for Pharmaceuticals

I spent a year at Swiggy during one of the most intense periods in Indian startup history. Then I walked away from tech entirely to build a pharmaceutical distribution company in an industry I knew nothing about. This is why.

The Swiggy Years: Hypergrowth and Burnout

April 2019 to May 2020. Swiggy was processing 1.4 million orders every single day[1]. The company operated in 325+ cities with 45,000 delivery agents and partnerships with over 130,000 restaurants[1]. Valuation: $3.6 billion[2]. Monthly burn rate: $30 million[2]. The pace was relentless.

Everyone around me was optimizing for the same thing: the next promotion, the next funding round, the next product launch. We shipped features at breakneck speed. We celebrated "velocity" and "impact." We wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. This was the Indian startup dream everyone wanted—equity in a unicorn, exposure to hypergrowth, a resume line that opened doors.

I hated it.

Not because the company was bad. Swiggy was—and is—brilliantly executed. The operations, the logistics network, the growth engine: all world-class. But the experience crystallized something uncomfortable: I was building nothing that would last. I was optimizing for metrics that evaporated the moment I stopped refreshing the dashboard.

Peter Thiel has a question in Zero to One: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"[3] Mine was this: speed is overrated when you're building the wrong thing.

The Problem With Tech Startups Nobody Talks About

The tech startup playbook is seductive. Raise venture capital. Hire fast. Ship faster. Grow at all costs. Optimize for the next funding round. The game is to create enough momentum that you either achieve escape velocity (IPO, acquisition) or crash spectacularly. There is no middle ground.

Here's what they don't tell you: the game is zero-sum at the top and a bloodbath in the middle.

Thiel's thesis in Zero to One is simple but devastating: competition destroys profits[3]. In perfectly competitive markets—and tech startups are brutally competitive—companies fight over shrinking margins. The winners take most of the spoils. The rest fight for scraps or die quietly.

Swiggy versus Zomato was exactly this. Both companies were burning tens of millions monthly[2]. Both were competing for the same restaurants, the same customers, the same delivery agents. The only differentiation was speed of execution and depth of discounting. This is not a monopoly. This is a war of attrition funded by venture capital.

I realized: I was working at a company engaged in trench warfare, not building a castle with a moat.

The Peter Thiel Framework I Couldn't Ignore

Thiel's monopoly framework asks four questions[3]:

1. The Engineering Question: Can you create breakthrough technology, not incremental improvement?
2. The Timing Question: Is now the right time to start this business?
3. The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
4. The People Question: Do you have the right team?

Applied to career strategy, this becomes:

1. Can I build expertise that is 10x more valuable than incremental skill growth?
2. Is this the right moment to enter this domain before it becomes crowded?
3. Can I dominate a narrow niche rather than compete in a broad, saturated market?
4. Do I have the discipline and resources to execute this?

When I mapped this framework onto my situation at Swiggy, the answers were clear:

• Engineering: No. Product management and operations at a food delivery company were incrementally valuable, not breakthrough skills.
• Timing: No. The Indian startup ecosystem was already saturated with experienced operators from Flipkart, Ola, Amazon, and Swiggy itself.
• Monopoly: No. I was competing with thousands of similarly credentialed professionals for the same roles.
• People: Uncertain. I had ambition but lacked differentiation.

The uncomfortable truth: I was competing in a perfectly competitive market where my skills were commoditized.

Why Pharmaceuticals? The Contrarian Bet

Pharmaceutical distribution—specifically parallel import licensing in the UK—is everything venture-backed tech startups are not.

It requires:

• MHRA licensing (90-210 day approval timelines)[4]
• GMP-compliant facilities and quality assurance systems[4]
• Deep regulatory knowledge (MHRA, EMA, FMD compliance)
• Working capital for inventory and supply chain infrastructure
• Patience to absorb multi-year timelines before revenue

These are not features. These are barriers. And barriers create moats.

The UK pharmaceutical market is worth £48.45 billion and growing at 9.63% annually through 2032[5]. The pharmaceutical logistics market alone is valued at £11.28 billion[6]. This is not a small market. But the distribution and parallel import segments are highly fragmented due to regulatory complexity.

Here's the monopoly insight: instead of competing with 10,000 product managers for the same SaaS job, I could build expertise in a domain where fewer than 100 people in the UK have deep operational knowledge of MHRA parallel import licensing combined with business execution capability.

This is Thiel's monopoly question answered: start with a big share of a small, defensible market.

The Steven Bartlett Lesson: Being Naive Is an Advantage

Steven Bartlett, founder of The Diary of a CEO and former Social Chain CEO, has a counterintuitive hiring philosophy: "Sometimes being naive, inexperienced and not knowing the accepted answer makes someone more important to solving an old problem in a new way."[7]

When I decided to enter pharmaceuticals, I knew nothing about GMP compliance, pharmacovigilance, or the Falsified Medicines Directive. I had a mechanical engineering degree and one year of operations experience at a food delivery company. By conventional standards, I was unqualified.

But Bartlett's insight is this: industry insiders often can't see solutions because they're trapped by "the way things are done." They know too much about why something won't work. Naivety lets you ask the dumb questions that reveal structural inefficiencies.

Pharmaceutical distribution in the UK is dominated by large multinational logistics players (DHL, UPS, Cencora)[6]. They have scale, infrastructure, and decades of relationships. But they also have legacy systems, bureaucratic decision-making, and high cost structures.

A small, specialist parallel import operator can move faster on product selection, negotiate better sourcing terms (because large players don't bother with small-volume arbitrage), and serve niche markets that multinationals ignore. This is not a technology advantage. This is a structural advantage created by regulatory fragmentation and market segmentation.

Being naive meant I didn't self-select out of the opportunity because "someone smarter would have already done this." I simply started learning: MHRA application processes, GDP standards, FMD serialization requirements, supply chain mechanics for temperature-controlled pharmaceuticals.

Bartlett's other principle: "Hire the attitude, then train the skill."[7] I applied this to myself. I couldn't hire expertise I didn't understand, so I became the expertise. I read MHRA guidance documents. I studied parallel import case law. I mapped the European pharmaceutical pricing arbitrage opportunities. I built financial models for working capital requirements.

Six months of obsessive self-education gave me more domain-specific knowledge than 90% of people considering pharmaceutical entrepreneurship. Not because I was smarter—because I was naive enough to think it was possible.

Reality Check: What Actually Happened

Leaving Swiggy in May 2020 was not a triumphant leap into entrepreneurial glory. It was terrifying. I had no pharma network, no investors lined up, no validated business model. What I had was a thesis:

Regulated industries reward patient capital and operational discipline more than speed. If I can navigate the barriers that scare away venture-backed founders, I can build something defensible.

The first year was brutal. I spent months just understanding the regulatory landscape. MHRA applications require proof of systems that don't exist yet—quality assurance SOPs, pharmacovigilance protocols, supplier qualification processes. You can't fake this. You have to build it.

I bootstrapped initial capital through savings and small angel checks from people who believed in the thesis more than the traction (because there was no traction). I hired a regulatory affairs consultant who had spent 20 years at GSK. I found a GMP-compliant warehouse operator willing to work with a startup. I negotiated terms with European pharmaceutical suppliers who were skeptical of a 25-year-old with zero pharma experience.

Every step took 3x longer than I projected. MHRA timelines that "should" take 90 days stretched to 210 days due to RFIs (Requests for Information)[4]. Suppliers who verbally agreed to terms later ghosted when compliance paperwork piled up. The learning curve wasn't steep—it was vertical.

But here's what I gained:

• Irreplaceable expertise. I now understand UK pharmaceutical regulation at a level that took most people 5-10 years of industry experience to acquire. This is not transferable to other startups, but that's the point—it's defensible.
• Operational resilience. Building in a regulated industry teaches you to plan in years, not quarters. This is the opposite of startup culture, but it's essential for capital-intensive businesses.
• A monopoly position in a niche. NovaPharm Healthcare is not competing with Swiggy or Zomato. We're competing with established pharma distributors who move slowly and specialist importers who lack scale. The competitive set is small and the barriers to entry are high.

Would I Do It Again?

Yes. Immediately. Without hesitation.

Here's what I know now that I didn't know in 2020:

1. Credentials are overrated; conviction is underrated. No one cared that I had a mechanical engineering degree when I was applying MHRA regulations. They cared whether I could demonstrate competence in quality systems, supply chain logistics, and regulatory compliance. You earn credibility by doing the work, not by having the right pedigree.

2. Regulated industries select for different traits than tech startups. Tech rewards speed, adaptability, and risk tolerance. Pharma rewards patience, meticulousness, and risk management. These are orthogonal skill sets. Most people self-select into one or the other. The opportunity exists precisely because the selection is binary.

3. Monopolies are built slowly. Swiggy's 2024 IPO turned 500 employees into crorepatis overnight through ESOPs worth ₹9,000 crore[8]. That's the tech dream: equity appreciation at scale. But it's also survivor bias. For every Swiggy, there are dozens of startups that raised capital, burned through it, and died quietly. Pharma monopolies don't create overnight wealth. They create compounding returns over decades through defensible market positions.

4. The best career moves feel wrong at the time. Everyone thought I was insane to leave Swiggy in 2020. "You're walking away from equity in a unicorn." "Pharma is boring and slow." "You have zero domain experience." All true. But the contrarian bet is precisely what creates asymmetric upside. If everyone agreed it was a good idea, the opportunity wouldn't exist.

What I'd Tell My 2020 Self

If I could go back and talk to the version of me sitting in a Bengaluru apartment, staring at Swiggy's org chart and feeling trapped, here's what I'd say:

Trust the thesis, not the timeline. You will underestimate how long everything takes by at least 2x. MHRA applications, supplier negotiations, facility certifications—all of it will take longer than you plan. This is fine. The barriers that frustrate you are the same barriers that prevent competitors from entering. Lean into the friction.

Read Thiel and Bartlett, then ignore the hype. The frameworks are useful, but the execution is personal. Thiel's monopoly thinking and Bartlett's contrarian hiring philosophy are mental models, not blueprints. You still have to do the unglamorous work: reading MHRA guidance documents at 2 AM, negotiating with suppliers who don't return emails, building financial models that show 18-month runways before breakeven.

Optimize for learning rate, not status. Your peers at Swiggy will get promoted, raise Series B rounds at their own startups, post about their wins on LinkedIn. You will spend two years in regulatory rabbit holes that no one understands or cares about. This is the price of building something defensible. The learning compounds. The status doesn't.

The best time to build a moat is when everyone else is building for speed. Venture capital flooded into Indian tech from 2015-2021. Everyone was optimizing for growth. Almost no one was building regulated, capital-intensive, slow-growth businesses. That asymmetry created the opportunity. When the crowd goes one direction, look the other way.

Closing Thought

I don't know if NovaPharm Healthcare will succeed. Success in pharma is measured in decades, not quarters. What I do know is this: I am building something that cannot be replicated by hiring ten engineers and deploying an AWS instance. I am building expertise that is rare, defensible, and valuable precisely because it requires years of patient capital and operational discipline.

Peter Thiel asks: "What valuable company is nobody building?"[3]

Steven Bartlett says: "The tempting thing when faced with a challenge is to accept conventional ways of doing things. But the world has changed. You need to find new and progressive solutions."[7]

The valuable company nobody is building is the one that doesn't fit the venture capital playbook. The progressive solution is to reject speed as the primary metric and embrace depth, discipline, and defensibility.

I left Swiggy not because I thought tech was broken, but because I realized I was optimizing for the wrong game. Tech rewards velocity. Pharma rewards monopoly. I chose monopoly.

That choice is looking smarter every day.

References & Sources

Swiggy Company Data

• [1] Swiggy. "Swiggy growth metrics 2019." 1.4M daily orders, 325+ cities, 130K+ restaurants.
• [2] Times of India. "Swiggy valuation and burn rate 2019." $3.6B valuation, $30M monthly burn.
• [8] Upstox. "Swiggy IPO 2024." $15.1B valuation, 500 crorepati employees, ₹9,000 crore ESOPs.

Career & Business Philosophy

• [3] Thiel, Peter. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business, 2014.
• [7] Bartlett, Steven. "Hiring philosophy and contrarian thinking." LinkedIn, 2024.

Pharmaceutical Market & Regulation

• [4] MHRA. "Apply for parallel import licence." UK regulatory requirements 2025.
• [5] Grand View Research. "UK Pharmaceutical Market Outlook 2025-2030."
• [6] UK Pharma Logistics. "Market size and competitive landscape." £11.28B market valuation 2025.