Sidhantt Suri, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DeliverIt and Urban Harvest, believes leadership is tested most when things are going well. Not during crises but during comfort.
In a conversation with ET Now, Sidhantt Suri spoke about a belief that has shaped his journey. For any business, the real danger is not failure but becoming irrelevant.
That belief became personal when Urban Harvest, his private label food brand, was growing steadily. Revenues were improving, profitability was coming in, and there was no immediate reason to disrupt the momentum. Yet, Sidhantt Suri chose to build DeliverIt, a four-hour B2B delivery platform, knowing fully well that it would demand capital, effort, and patience and that it would not be profitable in the early days.
For him, the decision was not driven by ambition alone. It came from a sense of responsibility.
“Markets change faster than businesses think,” Sidhantt Suri said. “Customer behaviour does not wait for you to feel comfortable.”
He saw restaurant owners and small businesses struggling with delayed deliveries and broken procurement systems. These problems had been accepted as normal for too long. DeliverIt was created to challenge that acceptance. The four-hour delivery promise was not meant as a marketing headline but as a commitment to do better in a system that was not built for speed.
Making that promise work was far from easy. B2B orders are larger, volumes are higher, and expectations are unforgiving. Technology helped, but Suri is clear about what really made the difference.
“Execution does not happen on slides,” he said. “It happens every day through people and processes.”
Customer responsibility sits at the centre of that execution. Sidhantt Suri does not believe in drawing lines around blame. If a customer faces an issue, the company owns it regardless of where the problem started. That approach, he says, has helped build trust and long-term relationships, not just transactions.
Working in a low margin business has only strengthened this thinking. Instead of chasing quick wins, Sidhantt Suri focused on efficiency and repeat usage. While margins on individual orders may be small, customers order frequently. Over time, those margins add up.
“People look at one transaction,” he said. “They forget how value compounds when customers keep coming back.”
Leadership, however, is not just about strategy. It is also about people. Sidhantt Suri describes hiring as the hardest part of building a company. Processes can be written down. Skills can be learned. Intent cannot.
“You cannot teach ownership,” he said. “People either have it or they do not.”
Reflecting on the startup ecosystem, Sidhantt Suri is cautious about the obsession with valuations. Numbers, he believes, can rise and fall quickly. What lasts longer is how well a business is run, how customers are treated, and whether the culture holds up under pressure.
Looking ahead, Sidhantt Suri does not see himself stepping away from the fundamentals. His role, he says, is to put the right people in the right roles and give them the systems they need to succeed.
In a business environment that changes by the month, Sidhantt Suri’s message is simple. Comfort does not protect a company. Relevance does. And relevance comes from acting early even when it feels inconvenient.
