How we got Mr. Ratan Tata to fund our business? | Yash & Chirag, Boheco

Seven students, three event tickets, and a plan to corner Ratan Tata

BOHECO started as a solar electrification project. Chirag Tekchandaney, Yash Kotak and five college friends noticed something growing by the roadside on the way to the villages, and spent the next decade arguing with the government about it.

The founders met at H.R. College in Mumbai through a student initiative, and their first project had nothing to do with cannabis. They took solar kits to villages that had never had electricity, half the cost covered by the village so it would be valued and half from corporate CSR budgets.

On those long drives north they kept passing cannabis growing wild along the roads. When co-founder Jahan Peston Jamas came back from Australia carrying hemp shirts and surfboards, the roadside weed started to look like a resource. Bombay Hemp Company was founded in 2013, named in the spirit of Bombay Dyeing, with an absurdly large brief: roti, kapda, makaan aur dawai from one crop.

Hemp, bhang and ganja are not the same thing

There are two kinds of plant. One is short and bushy, and that is what our country calls ganja, which is where charas comes from. The other grows 12 feet tall, is industrial in nature and carries almost no THC, the molecule that gets you high. That tall one is used for fibre and seed. The shirt I am wearing is made from it.

So hemp is the fibre. Bhang is the leaf, used therapeutically and everywhere in north India during Shivratri and Holi. Ganja is the classified narcotic drug. Same family, different parts, different law.

Three tickets and a washroom

One father said do something of your own, just promise me you won’t become the next Pablo Escobar. Another said give it a thousand days, and if there is a spark of success in that time, keep going. We were bootstrapped throughout and took no salaries for three years.

At our annual founders’ retreat, which we called Cannabliss, one of the questions we asked each other was: if we could pick our first investor, who would it be? All seven of us independently wrote Ratan Tata. We were young and naive in a misunderstood industry, and his association would make people take the room seriously.

We heard he was speaking at a ticketed event. We had no contacts, so we bought three tickets and spent three months planning. Sanvar was placed in the audience with the smartest question we could write. Delzaad near the elevator. Jahan near the washroom, because over three hours Mr. Tata was going to use one or the other.

It was the washroom. Jahan caught him there, gave a one-minute pitch, and Mr. Tata handed over his card and said write to my office. It still took nine months of chasing to get the meeting. What he said when it happened was that we were doing something pioneering and creating a category, and that was why he wanted to be associated with it. One of us then held on to his handshake for about two minutes, which the rest of us enjoyed considerably.

We turned up with a salad, a brick and a shirt

In 2014, less than a year in, two of us were given a platform at North Block in Delhi to present the case for industrial hemp to Ministry of Finance officials. The Ministry later gave us a letter, which we still have, saying we were the first company ever to come to them with a request like this.

We took a salad made from hemp seeds, a brick made from hemp fibre, and a shirt. We were 21 and 22, and the perception of cannabis entered the room before we did. There were only two levers to pull: policy and science. To disprove bad science you need science, and policy is something they wrote themselves, so you cannot be second-guessed on it.

We started with states where cannabis was already part of local life rather than somewhere like Maharashtra. In December 2016, nearly four years in, the first government order came through in Uttarakhand allowing industrial hemp cultivation.

The villages were never the problem

Go to a mandi in Uttarakhand and hemp seeds are sold by the kilo. Every household has bhang ki chutney, bhang ka namak, bhang ke pakore, all from the non-intoxicating seed. People keep hemp seeds in a pouch to eat through the day for protein, because it runs at about 35 grams per 100 grams.

It is a 90-day crop that grows 12 feet tall and needs nothing from you, which is why it is called a weed. It is not a replacement crop either, it is an addition. A farmer can grow it between food crop cycles, two to two and a half cycles a year. It needs no pesticides, and the long roots hold the soil, which is why you always see it along the banks of the Ganga.

People used to walk up and smell the fabric

For the first seven years we were a textile business, and at flea markets in Bombay customers would walk up to the clothing and sniff it. We leaned into it and said we were high on fashion. The motto became educate, cultivate, elevate, in that order. At a farmers’ market in 2015 I finished a five-minute pitch on hemp seeds and an elderly Gujarati aunty came close to my ear and asked, but isn’t this non-veg? That was ten years ago and it is still taking time.

Starting wellness with the least frightening product

The law is clearer than people assume. The NDPS Act of 1985 classifies the flower and its resin as narcotic drugs, and specifically exempts the fibre, seed and leaf. The leaf sits under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act instead.

There was still no precedent for licensing, so we worked with the lawmakers and got India’s first licence at the end of 2018. When you are sitting across from a regulator, you go with the low-hanging fruit. We launched in February 2019 with three products only: hemp seeds, hemp seed oil and hemp protein powder. That was the entire range for about ten months.

Patient and persistent at the same time

Anything novel and noble takes time. While you are patient about the end goal you have to be persistent about the short-term one, and keep knocking. The first one out of the door usually gets shot, and we have always been in that position, so wear a kevlar. We thought we would do it in a thousand days. It has been about three thousand.

Listen to the full conversation with Chirag Tekchandaney and Yash Kotak on FyndOutWithRagini.