Lesson 1: Bet on the gap nobody respectable is filling
Chanakya wrote in the Arthashastra that the wise person profits where others see only risk. Falguni Nayar spotted exactly that kind of gap in 2012. Organised beauty retail in India barely existed. Department store cosmetics counters were chaotic, mall kiosks stocked only a few international brands, and online shopping for beauty products was treated as a fringe behaviour. Nayar, a former investment banker at Kotak Mahindra, had spent decades reading markets. She recognised that Indian women were already spending on beauty, they just had nowhere reliable to do it. Nykaa launched not as a technology bet but as a curation bet: the right products, authenticated, delivered. The age at which she started, 49, was irrelevant to the logic of the gap. The gap was real regardless of who spotted it.
