The Conviction Carriers

HOW THREE ENGINEERS CARRIED A MATHEMATICAL CONVICTION FOR ELEVEN YEARS UNTIL IT DELIVERED A BILLION-DOLLAR PAYOFF

- ANEES HUSSAIN

GREAT COMPANIES ARE often built on simple arithmetic. Pranav Goel discovered his in 2013, while moonlighting from his job at JPMorgan in Mumbai, where he covered internet stocks like Uber for American investors. After office hours, he rode across the city to hubs where truck drivers would wash their vehicles after long hauls, trying to understand their pain points.

What Goel uncovered was simple arithmetic about carrying capacity. The drivers he met were operating at 1.5 trips per day when they could easily manage three. They were returning empty on most routes, carrying nothing but fuel costs back to base. Between jobs, they sat idle. "We realised if we could get them from one and a half trips to three, that's a 2x efficiency gain—30% higher net income for drivers, 20% cost savings for customers, and a viable margin for us," Goel recalled.

Goel's conviction about this mathematical truth carried personal weight. His father's timber import business, moving logs from Kandla port across India, had given him front-row access to SME logistics pain points. "That lived experience made the problem very real for us," he said.

Armed with this insight, alongside Uttam Digga, his IIT Kharagpur roommate and fellow JP Morgan analyst, and Vikas Choudhary, a friend, they launched Porter in August 2014 with ₹6 lakh from personal savings.

Rather than waiting for perfect technology, they started immediately with call centers and Google Sheets, carrying forward orders manually.