The CEO Who ‘Figured It Out:’ Prakash Sangam and the redBus Decade

Prakash Sangam had heard it before.

“Don’t worry. You will figure it out.”

The first time, it sounded like reassurance. The kind you give someone stepping into something new.

But over time, it began to sound like a pattern.

It started with Hindustan Unilever in May 2000. Prakash Sangam had what most people would call a solid start. Campus placement, structured training, and a company that taught you how to think, sell, and build a career step by step.

It was predictable. And that’s why the engineer didn’t stay.

Telecom fascinated him early. In the early 2000s, mobile phones were still new. Not smartphones—just small devices that let you stay connected. But even then, the idea felt larger than the hardware. “This can be very revolutionary in mankind’s life,” he believed.

The problem was, telecom wasn’t exactly stable. It was capital-heavy, chaotic, and still figuring itself out.

Sangam went anyway. He exited Unilever after seven years.

In 2007, at Bharti Airtel, he found what he had signed up for: Uncertainty. His stint lasted about 14 months. Long enough to understand how the ecosystem worked. But short enough to know it wasn’t where he wanted to stay.

But it gave him something else: A vantage point. Airtel, at the time, sat like a gatekeeper to millions of users. Everyone building something on mobile—early internet companies, service providers, new platforms—had to pass through it.

From Airtel to Info Edge: Choosing the Internet Over the Gate

Sangam watched. Startups came in. Ideas flowed through. The internet was beginning to take shape on mobile. Many believed mobile would replace the internet. Sangam saw it differently. Mobile would expand it. That meant one thing. If you wanted to be part of that shift, you couldn’t sit at the gate. You had to move into the ecosystem.

The move came through an introduction. At Info Edge, he met Sanjeev Bikhchandani. The first conversation didn’t go the way you’d expect.

“Would you like to become the product head for Naukri?” Bikhchandani asked.

Sangam paused. He had spent years selling soaps and detergents. Then telecom. He didn’t know what product management meant. Didn’t know how web systems worked. Didn’t know the technology stack.

“I don’t think I can do justice,” he said. “Don’t worry,” Bikhchandani replied. “You will figure it out.”

He didn’t take the role. Not then.

But the discomfort didn’t go away. A few months later, another conversation followed. This time, it was about education. Info Edge wanted to build something in that space. There was no clear product yet. No roadmap. No fixed targets.

Sangam asked the obvious question. “What’s the vision? The plan? What do you want me to build?”

The answer was disarming. “You’ll tell us.”

It was the opposite of everything he had learned at Unilever. There, not knowing was a problem. Here, not knowing was the starting point.

Sangam joined and built Shiksha from scratch. There was no template. No precedent. Just a category that existed and a product that had to be imagined into it.

It worked.

By the time Sangam settled into Info Edge, things were stable again. Which, in his career, had a way of becoming temporary.

In 2013, a call came from a search firm. redBus had just been acquired by Naspers in a deal that stood out in the early days of India’s internet ecosystem. The founders were moving on. A new leadership structure was taking shape.

The role on offer: COO, with a path to CEO. On paper, it came with questions. Could a business selling ₹600–700 tickets really scale enough to make meaningful money Would a company survive after its founders exited so early Was it smarter to stay where things were working—or step into something uncertain again?

Sangam had been here before. Not at redBus. But at the edge of a decision where the answer wasn’t fully visible.

Taking Charge at redBus: A Company in Transition

So, in June 2014, he took it.

Sangam walked into a company in transition.

A leadership team had already seen churn; employees who had bet on ESOPs that hadn’t fully played out; and a system that, at its core, wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

The first signal didn’t come from inside the office. It came from the market.

He met agents, sat with bus operators, and listened. They didn’t soften it.

“We want to work with you,” they said.

Then, almost as a warning: “But we don’t trust your inventory.”

That was the problem. It wasn’t branding. It wasn’t pricing. It was trust.

At its core, redBus was a booking platform and ran on a simple promise: Search, select, and book. But between selection and booking, something kept breaking: Inventory. Seats that showed up weren’t always available. The system lagged, operators updated manually, and the platform didn’t catch up in time. Customers clicked. Paid. Failed. And every failed transaction did more than lose a booking. It chipped away at trust.

On the ground, that erosion was visible.

Agents stopped pushing the platform. Operators hesitated to route inventory through it. Conversations turned defensive. “Customer ko dikhaate ho, milta nahi (You show it. They don’t get it.)”

Inside redBus, there was no debate. The inventory engine had to be rebuilt. Everything else could wait.

There was a date: August 15, 2014. Independence Day. The team wanted a reset they could point to. A moment to go back to the market and say—this works now.

They didn’t make it. The delay wasn’t unusual. Systems of this scale rarely switch cleanly. But outside the office, time didn’t pause. The calls kept coming. The complaints didn’t slow. The teams in the field had to keep answering for something they couldn’t yet fix. Every extra day stretched credibility thinner.

By early September, the system was ready. Or ready enough. This was the uncomfortable part. You don’t get certainty before a launch like this. You get preparation. You get testing. You get belief. Proof comes after.

That morning, Sangam stepped out. He walked about 800 metres from the office to a small temple nearby. He isn’t particularly religious. But that day, he paused.

Back at the office, the plan was to go live at one. He moved it up. “Let’s do it at eleven.”

The switch flipped. For a few minutes, nothing obvious happened. Then the numbers began to move. Failed bookings started to drop Completion rates ticked up. The friction that had defined the system began to ease.

How redBus Fought Back: Pricing, Markets, and Alliances

On the ground, operators noticed first. Then agents. Then the team. For the first time in months, the platform was doing what it was supposed to do: Showing the truth.

The effect was immediate and internal. A working engine changes behaviour. Marketing stops compensating Sales stops defending. And product stops firefighting.

Inside the company, confidence returned. For a team that had seen exits, uncertainty, and leadership churn, this mattered. It was proof that the system could be fixed, that the business could be stabilised, and that the platform could be trusted again. For a moment, it felt like the hardest part was behind them.

It wasn’t.

By 2015, the shift was subtle. There was no visible slowdown yet. But just a loss of ease. Growth was still there. But it wasn’t accelerating the way it had before. For redBus, that mattered more than it would for most businesses. Margins were thin, commissions sat in single digits, and fixed costs didn’t step down just because growth softened. Profitability depended on scale.

If growth held, the math worked. If it slowed, the pressure built.

By early 2016, that pressure was visible. And then, the market changed. Paytm didn’t enter the category quietly. It arrived with intent.

At first, it looked like competition. Another player. Another channel. Another platform trying to capture share. Then the pricing began to move. Discounts deepened. Cashbacks stacked. A ₹700 ticket could suddenly cost half. “It’s a very thin margin category,” Sangam says. “If you burn, your unit economics goes for a toss.”

But the point was it wasn’t just aggressive pricing. It was distortion. The model redBus had been building toward—steady growth, eventual operating leverage, profitability through scale—began to bend. Because now, growth wasn’t just about demand. It was about who was willing to subsidise more.

The trade-off was immediate. Match the burn, and the business weakens Hold discipline, and the customer leaves. There wasn’t a clean option.

So, they adapted. Not with one move. With many.

In markets where redBus was strong—Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh—they held pricing longer. They could afford to. Brand mattered there, supply was dense, and customers returned.

In weaker markets, they couldn’t. Discounts followed. Even that wasn’t enough. They began stitching alliances. Wallet players who were competing with Paytm were brought in. Asked to co-fund offers. Share the cost of staying relevant.

It worked for a while. But even that came with questions. “What’s the ROI (Return on Investment)?” partners would ask.

After the Merger: Control, Structure, and Continuity

There wasn’t always a clean answer. Every week became a calculation: Where to spend, where to pull back, how much to burn, and how much to protect.

Slowly, the numbers began to move again. Growth returned. The numbers improved, traffic increased, and transactions picked up.

But the nature of that growth had changed. “When you throw money, customers will come,” he says.

It looked like momentum. But it wasn’t entirely theirs. Underneath the charts, the same question lingered. How long do you play a game you can’t afford to win?

And just as the market began to steady, another shift appeared. This time, it wasn’t pricing. It was ownership.

By late 2016, the conversations had started. MakeMyTrip and ibibo were in talks. At first, it was noise. Inside the company, the shift wasn’t immediate. Nothing breaks overnight in a merger. It moves slower. Through conversations. Through signals. Through the way people start asking different questions. By October 2016, it was no longer speculation. If the deal went through, redBus would change hands again. Barely three years after its last acquisition.

For Sangam, this wasn’t new. He had walked into redBus knowing the founders were leaving. He had rebuilt the system, stabilised the team, regained trust in the market.

Now the structure above him was about to change again. The concern was precise. Would redBus remain independent Would decisions stay close to the market Or would they move upward—into a structure where buses were just one category among many?

Because redBus wasn’t just another vertical. It ran differently. Its core markets—Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh–Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra—accounted for the bulk of its business. These were not fringe geographies. They were the engine. And the user it served here was different. More price-sensitive More transit-driven Often moving between smaller towns Less aligned with the kind of traveller booking flights and premium hotels.

Inside a larger travel company, priorities shift. Flights. Hotels. Packages. Each competes for attention, capital, and focus.

For Sangam, the question was simple: Would the business still be run by people closest to it? Or would that distance grow?

The merger was announced in January 2017. Publicly, it was framed as consolidation. Internally, it meant recalibration. Reporting lines changed. But some things held.

The operating freedom he valued didn’t disappear. Decisions stayed close to the business. The team he had built remained intact. Many of his core leaders—hired in 2014–15—continued.

Leadership Lessons: Hiring, Accountability, and ‘You will figure it out'

That continuity mattered.

For a while, the system adjusted. Growth returned. The Paytm distortion eased. Jio and demonetisation had brought more users online. Digital payments surged. The category expanded.

By 2017–18, redBus turned profitable. It felt like stability. And then, in March 2020, it disappeared.

The buses stopped. Routes shut overnight. Interstate movement froze. Terminals emptied. “Our business overnight went down to zero,” Sangam says. “Zero. And we didn’t know when it would recover.”

There was no gradual decline. No warning curve. Just absence. For a business built entirely on motion, this was stillness. And stillness leaves very little to manage. There were no pricing levers to pull No discounts to calibrate No markets to defend. The system he had spent years stabilising had nothing to process.

The early days weren’t about strategy. They were about uncertainty. How long would this last When would movement return What would the category even look like after?

There were no answers. Recovery didn’t arrive with clarity. It came slowly. Routes opened. Then shut again. Then reopened. Demand returned in patches. Then steadied.

When the movement came back, so did the business. redBus moved back into profitability. Volumes recovered. Scale returned.

By FY25, over 100 million tickets were being sold again.

From the outside, the graph looked familiar. Down. Then up.

But some decisions don’t show up on graphs. Vietnam is one of them. redBus had entered the market early. The logic was sound. Fragmented supply. Rising digital adoption. A structure that felt familiar to India a few years earlier.

It wasn’t a large market yet. But it was building. Then the MakeMyTrip and ibibo merger happened. And with it, scrutiny. International expansion came under question, capital allocation tightened, and priorities shifted.

Vietnam was still small. So, the call was made: Exit. “We decided to roll it back,” Sangam says.

He pauses. “In hindsight, I should have fought harder.”

The market didn’t stay small. A local competitor scaled. The category expanded. What once looked early began to look inevitable.

redBus returned later. By then, the window had moved.

Not every mistake announces itself loudly. Some reveal themselves slowly in hindsight. And not all of them come from the market The harder lessons weren’t always external: Hiring. Wrong hires don’t fail immediately. They slow things down, distort decisions, and delay execution. “You feel the pain when you make a wrong hire,” he says.

At that level, accountability is direct. “The buck stops with you. You can push down the work. You can’t push up the blame.”

That responsibility doesn’t get lighter. It gets quieter. “It definitely is,” says Sangam, when asked if it gets lonely.

But the decisions don’t stop. Years later, the pattern hasn’t changed. redBus had tried hotels once before. The logic had been obvious. Millions of bus travellers needed a place to stay. The traffic existed. The supply could be plugged in.

It didn’t scale.

After the merger, with multiple brands inside the same group, overlaps were cut. The category was shut down. And then, the question returned. This time, the approach was different. Narrower and more deliberate. There was no attempt to replicate full-stack hotel platforms. No premium inventory. Only ultra-budget. Transit stays. Not only pilgrimage routes but across. And rooms that matched the journey. The bet wasn’t on scale. It was on fit.

But the challenge remained. “What is difficult,” Sangam says, “is to build categories where you become a port of call.” redBus already is one—for buses. The second is never guaranteed.

Across his career, the pattern has repeated.

Sangam stepped into telecom when it was uncertain; moved into internet when he didn’t fully understand the domain; built Shiksha without a playbook; joined redBus when the system didn’t work; navigated a market he couldn’t outspend; operated through a merger he didn’t control; and ran a business that dropped to zero.

Each time, the same line returned. “You will figure it out.”

The problem is, in business, you don’t always know if you did. Not immediately. Sometimes not even years later.

Back in 2016, when growth slowed and discounts surged, there wasn’t a right answer. There were only trade-offs. Protect margins or protect share. Spend or hold. Compete or endure. He chose. Then adjusted. Then chose again.

A decade ago, the system needed fixing. Today, it holds.

But the decisions haven’t gotten easier. Because the road doesn’t flatten. It splits. Again and again. And each time, Sangam still has to choose.