The conversation today over Google Meet was with Amit Kumar, who has recently taken on the role of CEO at Takealot.com and moved to Cape Town. This note is mainly to record how such calls tend to recalibrate my thinking around business and personal momentum. The setting was informal, but the substance was grounded in execution, leadership, and context. He spoke briefly about settling into a new country, managing a large organization, and adjusting to a different economic rhythm. These calls usually leave me more alert than before, not because of motivation, but because they sharpen the frame through which I look at work.
Amit has a way of compressing experience into clear observations without turning them into advice. Perhaps that comes from having operated at scale before, including his time as CEO of OLX India. He does not dwell on narratives of success or failure, but instead on systems, incentives, and timing. During the call, he touched on how leadership changes when markets are uneven, and how decision-making becomes less about certainty and more about speed with accountability. I noticed again that he rarely talks about ambition directly; instead, he focuses on operational clarity and the discipline required to maintain it across teams and geographies.
There is also a personal familiarity that makes these conversations easier. Amit is a senior from IIT Bombay, and through another overlap, he is the brother-in-law of a close friend from IIM. These social links are incidental, but they remove the need for posturing. The discussion stays practical, almost clinical, even when it drifts into broader themes like career arcs or relocation. It reminds me that the most useful professional exchanges often happen when there is no agenda beyond sharing how things actually work.
One point that stayed with me was his view on South Africa as a place to operate a business. He described it as having a rare mix of developed-world infrastructure and developing-world constraints, coexisting in close proximity. That mix, according to him, forces better prioritization and more grounded product thinking. He suggested that spending time there can recalibrate assumptions formed in more homogeneous markets. He also encouraged me, without pressure, to visit and see the context firsthand. The suggestion felt less like an invitation and more like a hypothesis worth testing.
After the call ended, I noticed the familiar pattern: a quiet sense of energy that does not demand immediate action but subtly reshapes the questions I ask myself about work. These conversations do not provide answers or plans. They instead act as checkpoints, reminding me of the importance of context, execution, and long-term orientation in building anything meaningful. Writing this down is mainly to remember that such exchanges matter, and that staying connected to people who think clearly is a form of maintenance I should not neglect.