Over the last five episodes, you listened to ten bold and creative strategies for five real-world quick commerce platforms. You heard students from some of India’s best business schools define what winning in the rapid delivery space looks like to them.

In the grand finale, we find out who won the inaugural case competition and went home with the 10 lakh rupee prize.

Tune in.

One Billion in Ten Minutes is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The two teams that made it to the top 10 of The Ken’s case competition for their billion dollar strategies for Flipkart Minutes could not have been more different. They have both played to Flipkart’s strengths, but in radically different ways.

Team Illuminaire from IIM Lucknow decided to flip the script completely. The team’s logic is simple. Flipkart Minutes is just too late to the game. So there’s no point for it to even try beating everyone else at rapid delivery. Instead they want every other platform to be dependent on them for what is essentially the lifeblood of quick commerce – dark stores. This team wants Flipkart Minutes to be the AWS of dark stores.

They are up against Kenspiracy Theorists from XLRI. This team, too, believes that Flipkart Minutes is late to the game. But their solution is amping up the aggression by burning the full 1 billion dollars over 12 months.

Which team will win?

One Billion in Ten Minutes is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Team Kenvision from IIM Bangalore made a hard choice with their billion dollar strategy for Zepto during The Ken’s inaugural case competition, organised in partnership with Zerodha. Their strategy was centred around acquiring the Indian e-pharmacy company, Pharmeasy.

But while hard decisions make for bold and exciting strategies, they can also be seen as impractical. The possibility of getting it completely wrong is usually much higher. Which is why some teams choose to take a different approach.

Like team Kenith from Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi. It approached the problem statement almost like a math problem. This team decided to go down the optimisation route and spend a certain amount on dark stores, a certain amount on category expansion, a certain amount on operations and logistics and so on.

Hard decisions vs optimisation. Which will win? Let’s find out.

One Billion in Ten Minutes is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.