Peyush Bansal is the co-founder and CEO of Lenskart, India’s largest eyewear retail chain and he is also known for being one of the judges on the reality TV show, Shark Tank India.
An entrepreneur to the core, Peyush is also an angel investor, having trusted multiple startups, including Shiprocket, Lil’ Goodness, Zippee, and many others.
Born and brought up in Delhi, he was an alumnus of Don Bosco School, New Delhi. Later, he got his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, Canada and landed a fancy job at Microsoft in the US.
Although he was quite content with the life he was leading, that ‘fiery passion’ was missing, which he regained by coming back to India and pursuing an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Then Peyush along with his co-founders Amit Chaudhary and Sumeet Kapahi founded VALYOO Technologies which is now the parent company of Lenskart. The aim was to truly add ‘valyoo‘ in customers’ lives by eliminating the retailers, and today Lenskart has truly revolutionised the eyewear industry.
Startup Story of Lenskart
“A lot of people thought I wasn’t cut out for entrepreneurship because I was quite a nerd and quite introverted,” Peyush says in an interview with Raj Shamani, a popular creator and podcaster.
“There was this desire to do something like Microsoft, but also about the fact that I wanted to change the world and there was this constant desire to do new things,” he adds.
This desire also urged him to sell a variety of random things like bags, watches, etc, until something clicked. Eyewear was his eureka moment and Lenskart was the breakthrough that he was longing for.
He found out that more than half a billion people in India were in need of glasses of which only around 170 million had access. With the hope of solving this problem, Peyush founded Lenskart along with his co-founders in 2010.
Initially, it wasn’t about building a business for him. Coming from an engineering background, he says that he purely looked at Lenskart from an engineering lens, without looking at the business side of things. “We believed in doing and failing instead of planning all of it on Excel before even doing it,” says Peyush.
After observing the online presence of other products, he felt the need to establish an online market for eyewear. After thousands of customer requests being taken into consideration and a lot of trial and error, Lenskart came into existence through an online website aimed at selling contact lenses and eyewear.
Other Ventures of Peyush Bansal
We’re all familiar with Lenskart, but there are so many more ‘karts’ to be aware of. Peyush Bansal is also the founder of WatchKart, JewelsKart, and BagsKart, which work on similar lines as LensKart.
He founded John Jacob’s Eyewear in 2015, a premium eyewear company which was born out of the need to establish a brand name for their glasses. He’s also behind AQUALENS, a stylish lens company founded in 2019.
Learnings from Shark Tank India
Watching Shark Tank India might’ve opened our eyes to millions of startup ideas from astonishingly brilliant to brilliantly flabbergasting ones. Trust me, our shark was as surprised as we were.
Peyush says, “I saw very unique brands and products with which I can’t associate with, but when I look at the numbers and what they are doing, I recognize that the consumers are really different. This made me realize that I haven’t learned the consumers, and if I want to grow as an entrepreneur, I need to dig deeper because the world is changing.”
For him, the most important quality of an entrepreneur is their openness to learning and tapping into what they don’t know. Today, this engineer-turned-entrepreneur has bagged multiple awards and he is an inspiration to aspiring entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to make their dream something concrete and big.
