Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a86f5f4d239803d8

Microsoft, Adobe, Alphabet, IBM, Pell Alto Networks, even Starbucks. The CEOs of these companies were all born in India and emigrated to the US. A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the Dharma of the founders quite well. These are the principles were given to me, and I'm gonna sustain this and make it even bigger. I wanna keep talking about
India and how it's different and how to build products that are successful in India. No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life. The concept of time is not the same.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for Indian startups? India is changing because now for the first time we're seeing founders being respected and unicorns being celebrated. We have a national startup day and probably the first generation that'll have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building.

Today my guest is Kunal Shah.
Kunal is one of the most well known and respected entrepreneurs and product leaders in India and around the world.
He shared endless wisdom on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Where he's got over one million followers.
He's the CEO and founder of Cred.
A fintech startup based in India.
Which was last valued at over$6 billion, and as of a couple years ago processed over 20% of all credit card bill payments in India.
Prior to Cred, he founded three other startups, including FreeCharge, which he sold for over$400 million to Snapdeal.
Gunal is a deep thinker, both about product and about life.
His background is actually in philosophy, which comes across very clearly when you hear him share his advice.
In our conversation, we get deep.
Into what makes working and building in India different from US markets and other markets.
Including why trust is so essential and why so many people are so much more risk averse in India.
We talk about the biggest challenges and opportunities within the India market.
Why there are so many successful Indian immigrants in CEO roles across Tech?
And what we can learn from that.
Also, why companies in India can quickly grow DAOs, but not ARPUs, and what that means for building products in India.
We also talk about how to stay curious and open minded in the power of second order thinking, also stories of failure and lots of contrarian takes and so much more.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
A big thank you to Cyan My ET for making the connection to Kunal. With that, I bring you Kunal Shaw.
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Knall, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Lenny, thank you so much for having me and uh huge fan of
Everything that you do?
And and uh I like I said before
India is a huge beneficiary of what the stuff you do. We we are all
People who have learned the art of product by just
Figuring it out and
Watching some content here and there and
Reading some stuff.
So
Kudos to everything that you do. And like I said earlier that
You do the fabulous job of
taking the information asymmetry of the part of product and kind of make it accessible to
Many of us across the world.
So thank you.
Wow. I I really appreciate that. This is already feeling great to me.
I have a huge turns out this podcast has a huge audience in India.
As do you.
And so I feel like this conversation is gonna be really special and really meaningful to a lot of people.
I wanted to start with something very tactical.
There's a product framework that you came up with that
I absolutely love and I've shared it with at least thirty founders over the last couple of years.
And this is actually how I discovered you initially, is I heard about this thing and then I'm like who's this guy Kunal Shaw?
And look at us now chatting.
Could you explain this framework briefly and then just how you've used it or how you recommend people apply it?
Oh, and it's by the way, it's called Delta Four. I don't know if I even said the name.
Yeah. It's it's called the Delta Four framework, but I think it's actually quite
Simple if you think about it. A lot of people say that your product has to be ten X better and it's
Not very
Measurable.
Uh, you don't know if you're ten X better or not, uh unless you're delusional.
And the trigger for me was actually
Well, I'm the unusual tech founder in N a philosophy I'm the only
humanities philosophy major founder in India uh who's got into
Tech and and uh
I often wondered that most people who were my peers or people who were ahead of me were
significantly smarter academically
Or otherwise and and why did I become successful with my first start of features?
Which I exited in twenty fifteen for nearly like four hundred and fifty million dollars. And I was like
What?
would make this happen because I would not qualify into this super league of
Really
top IIT rankers that exist in India.
And and that got me onto the philosophical quest to find out.
What makes things successful.
So the simple framework is
Like examples I give often is that
Imagine
Uh the old way of taking a cab ride and an Uber.
Right, and if I asked you
Give me this
score of efficiency on Uber.
And let's say
Getting the old cap.
What would you say, Lenny? I'm curious, like out of ten.
Yeah, give a cab like three.
And an Uber like a yeah, like a nine.
Yeah. So every time you see that
The the product
Efficiency delta is greater than or equal to four.
Three things happened.
Uh
It is
Irreversible.
Second is that
you have very high tolerance.
For it to fail. I think
It Uber fails a little bit.
You will you say, Oh my God, that I'm going to like really
Stop using it. No.
And the third thing is that uh I I call it the uh UBP unique bragworthy proposition.
So every time humans unlock a Delta four product or service
They cannot
Stop
Talking
or sharing about it.
And therefore all delta four products will naturally have lower cacks or sometimes zero cacks.
Because people, humans and and think about Lenny, how you discovered Google. Definitely not so night.
Definitely not through some performance marketing here and there. Somebody showed you the demo.
And you were like
My God, this is crazy. And that's what I'm seeing right now.
What's happening with all everything on open AI.
And everything that is happening around LLM feels like magic and it's kind of delta four because the efficiency of doing things before and after is now
Showing that.
But there's
The failure is the real problem.
Right?
And and making everything tech does not make things more efficient.
Let's take a one to one example.
Uh
Buying a suit.
For you.
Uh online.
Versus offline.
All tech cool stuff.
All the features built in.
What would you say the efficiency of buying a suit online is versus let's say buying a suit offline?
I've actually done that and it was a terrible it did not fit at all.
Uh and so like it's efficient.
But the uh the end result was not is I it's probably often not
Not great. So it's probably.
uh of uh buying a suit online.
Yeah, I watch it offline.
Like, I'd probably give it
Five and five.
Like on offline is actually probably better experience. That's crazy, but because
You've broken the principle this is a tech product.
But the efficiency is better offline. Uh and and therefore
The when the delta is lesser than
For
Uh
What you will discover is that it is irreversible.
You will not see
People
Uh uh bragging about it.
Right.
Uh and you have zero tolerance for it. So you're never going to buy student online, I can tell you that right now.
Right.
So I think it's a simple framework.
I believe that if
Many companies applied. So I know now
Many VCs uh in the US uh use this
as part of the training programme for the analysts, I I know about it that
Uh, somebody in Sequoia mentioned this to me that they have this part of the
But uh
In in India we are like not
still applying many of these things. I I think it's a simple framework to at least know
And you can apply this to features.
You can apply this to products, you can apply that to business uh uh
And and uh oftentime this is a longer concept. We can talk about it in many ways because it's it's derived out of
Some study around entropy.
And something about evolutionary biology, which is the root

And thought about Delta Four?
That when does a species get disrupted?
Or and what is entropy and
Uh and why does low entropy require
growth of high entropy and like it's
It's a it's a day long podcast on its own, so some other time.
Okay, we'll save that for a future follow up, just diving in on the psychology of Delta Four. Just to kind of summarize this,'cause I think it's a such a powerful framework and I find it useful.
to convince founders why their product isn't
taking off. They may feel like this is better than
Like the classic example is a better Excel.
look, this is so much better than Excel. It can do all these things.
You don't have to learn all these formulas.
But the trick here and that I love is just
What would people rate the existing solution one to ten? What would they rate your solu one to ten and
It has to be four points higher, otherwise no one
No one's gonna pay attention. I think
I think it's pretty simple. People are busy. They have enough things to do. They have enough products and apps. They're not gonna
take the time to really dig into something if it's not that much better.
Absolutely.
Okay, I'm gonna go in a totally different direction.
I want to talk about Indian
CEOs in the US.
Okay. So
Today the COs
Uh Microsoft.
Alphabet.
Adobe, which is a two hundred fifty billion dollar company, it turns out.
Uh IBM, which is a hundred seventy billion dollar company.
Pell to Networks, which is a hundred billion dollar company, even Starbucks.
Also a hundred billion dollar company, I was looking that up.
And then also Twitter before Elon took over Twitter.
The COs of these companies were all born in India and emigrated to the US.
And I might be wrong.
But I think this is the largest
ethnic group of COs of tech companies other than just white dudes.
In the US.
Okay. So
I'm curious why you think Indian immigrants are so successful.
In business and in tech in the US.
Especially in these very high positions, and then
I'm most curious, just what can we learn from that? What can we learn from their success?
So it's a great question. I often
Often wonder about it.
And uh
Good fortune to meet
a fair bunch of these individuals and had a chance to really explore with them
What really went on?
So there are a few
Things that pop out.
And and and again these are all conjectures which I can't prove in any ways, but
It's a it's a thought experiment and you get to talk about these things.
In a in general
Immigrants
that get out of the country are usually
have chip on the shoulder in a very different way and the struggle that they have to go through to just get out.
And be successful.
And that hunger.
uh that got them there. There was no privilege. Like they they were
we came from very, very humble backgrounds and and
Literally no money to start.
So I think the the
That this force is real.
Right. But I can say that for many immigrants
In general as well. But
Appreciation for Matt.
In general or logic
Which came to the society.
In a big way, right? Kind of give
Let's say for example lots of engineering graduates come from only a few countries.
Because the society was
bent towards let's say earliness of mathematics or earliness of this and
I think that
Kind of helps.
create status that what will get appreciated. For example
Being an engineer, being a doctor like
Philosophy measure hours are a write off for the society.
Right. So
Uh the reason I am the rare commodity over here because
Yeah.
Consider
to be very bright unless you break into these very hard exams and very, very hard things. So the filtering criteria on its own
Is big.
But there's another interesting framework altogether which I have actually
learn from this gentleman called Devdat Patnaak. He he he he applies Indian mythology.
and management principles together. And it's an interesting thing that there are three
Major
Uh Indian God, one is the uh
Oh.
Brahma, uh the god of creation.
Shiva the god of destruction. I'm I'm super generalizing, but that's the classification.
And and the third is like Vishnu which is the god of sustainance and
There are avtar the word avtar comes from Vishnu keeps changing Aftar, right? So we have had
Rama, Krishna, all these guys are altars.
Uh uh uh
Yes.
What you notice is that
Uh
If you took a two by take a two by two of
People who are
High on values and low on values.
Are high on obedience and low on obedience.
Yeah.
You make an interesting to buy too
Right.
No
Lord Krishna, uh, which is a one of the
Very popular.
of cars uh which was non no I mean
Food still.
So it's the entrepreneurial
category which is high on values but very low on obedience.
Yeah. Uh God and he could actually create lots of things and then his Rama
Which is known to be the one which follows principles and obedient.
Right. So they they will follow Dharma.
Uh and scale on that.
And and then there are these notorious characters as Ravana, which is
Low on values, low on
Uh uh obedience and the Duryodhana which we he says that
is low uh high on obedience but low on value, right? So these are the
People that you don't want to be.
All you notice is that
Uh
Uh a lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the erm of the founders.
Quite well.
They they have not diluted the karma.
of the founders uh who have
started these companies
And manage to sustain that.
Uh uh.
And a lot of CEOs have this need to say, Oh, I'm gonna change the company forever
and I it will be my identity and I will change the logo and I will change the name and I will
Do all sorts of things.
Right?
But maintaining Dharma
Right. But I will say that this is the principles were given to me and I'm gonna sustain this and make it even bigger.
Comes from humility of saying that
There is something
And I think therefore
the that character stays on. Right? And and therefore
The the characters of
Brahma and Shiva are the founder of create and
Destroy like that's the thing, but sustainance
Is is the harder one.
And and therefore our tars keep happening uh uh over and over of time and and different hurdles come and different levels come.
But when it when you think about
uh the the archetype of at least the inn seeers I've seen that they have
Fabulous.
I
moving between Krishna and Rama all the time.
Right? They can play this
Consistently.
Uh and therefore the key
evolving and and keep making these companies bigger and bigger. And I think
We we'll see a lot more of this in years to come because
Now they have the role models of these individuals who've kind of done well.
But the the key principle is that if you ask the founders
They will love these CEOs if they're around.
Because they maintain the Dharma
of the thing. And and for example, I say what Tim is doing
is maintaining the Dharma of Steve Jobs.
Because if you had tried to change the therma of
save jobs and what the values the companies are.
It's very hard to imagine it to be sustaining itself.
Forever and ever.
Wow. What an answer this
What I love about this is this combination of using a two by two.
And Indian
Mythology is like the micro
Cause them of you?
Which is philosophy and tech.
Uh and so
I love that and makes a lot of sense. That's where your mind goes.
Something else this makes me think about is I read this book a long time ago, Jim Collins, either good to great, or one of his early books.
About leadership and he talks about level five leadership, I think is
Him and where level five leaders are ones where it's not about them.
It's about the business and they can disappear in the future and things will
Work great.
Yes.
And and
I I feel it is very hard.
If you believe that your identity
needs to have its own position and legacy.
uh and and therefore a lot of time chasing status
causes disruption because you will say that oh this doesn't have my signature in it.
Uh uh and therefore becoming
Um
Uh accepting the religion and trying to be the
The Pope of it or the father of it.
Is is better than trying to say oh
I need to have my variant of religion.
Uh and that's where
the creative destruction starts happening.
Interesting. Okay, so you said that there's this good balance between Krishna and Rama that happens. Can you just uh
Again, summariz the where they are in that two by two. Rama is uh high on
uh values and high in obedience.
And Krishna is
high on values
and low on obedience, but they both are high on values, which means they will follow Dharma.
Yeah, uh
And and they will change the side. For example, let's say Satya
uh during the open air crisis played Krishna.
Uh and and God
Things out but
He he'll switch back to being Rama and continue to
Keep scaling it up.
Amazing. And just to close the loop on here, is your sense that they're like they're actually thinking
about this and their religious
Or is this just like in the ether of growing up in India and this is just part of the culture?
It's a great question. I don't think they consciously think about it.
Uh but I think if they ever heard this
They would agree with this.
That's what they grew up with.
And and the value systems are
Much more long term. For example,
I believe all bad behavior in humans humans come from being short term.
Right?
Uh and and being long term.
uh uh comes
It's a big choice to make.
Uh a lot of people argue that oh, we have arranged marriages and like
It's ninety five percent arranged marriages and
Less than one percent divorce rate.
comes from this whole long term thinking.
Right.
People are married through
Values.
Worse
Attraction or
Lust and all of that stuff. But
more long term oriented and about building a family, building values.
Or or no divorce, right?
We'll fix
uh along the way versus trying to say, Oh, I I need to evolve and I need to move forward. So I think
Being long term.
Uh uh about that mindset and and that's why
Some cultures last for
thousands of years because of this need for everybody to be
More long term.
versus shot.
US could use a lot of that these days.
You mentioned this interesting uh fact about how
in India there so the fact that most startups fail, you said you know, I think the classic status ninety percent.
And that the risk is a lot higher to start a company.
And then fail.
Can you just talk about what that and what impact that has? How do people try to avoid that? Because that's that'd be amazing if you can reduce the risk of
starting company, or is it just it happens and people get
Super
In debt.
I I think uh long term societies are naturally more risk averse.
Mm.
Right. Uh
And not all
Great CEOs can become great founders.
For the same reason.
In fact
I would say that it actually makes it very hard to be a founder if you've been a great CEO.
Because y you've turned into this
Sustain her.
uh uh uh versus destroyer or creator.
Right. Uh
So the nuance I'm talking about is
When you are thinking about
Like
Risk capitalised. India's changing but now
For the first time we seeing founders being respected and
talked about and these unicorns being celebrated and our our Prime Minister talks about
uh startups quite openly we have a
National Startup Day and so on and so forth. So I think there is a
Thing that has changed this thing, but
The core principle let's understand the core human behavior basics.
India still has large arrangement marriage.
And if you are a founder and a failed founder, your chances of getting
A person to marry.
It's still
A hard thing to achieve.
So if this is all true then the
Appetite to take risk.
Will be can
control. Right. And somebody gave an interesting example to me that there's a
Very large, let's say
Uh uh F M uh C P G company in India.
Uh and let's say you do a zero to one over there.
And and the CEO changes in four five years and your your zero to one fail.
But you were the best person. That's why you're given the zero to one.
Next you were like so what have you done in the last five years?
Nothing I just tried to launch it f
And and you neither give a promotion in the company, neither a new company will say, Oh my God, I'm gonna hire this talent. So

stable brand within the C P G company kept growing, but
that has natural tailwinds. All he has to do is nothing.
In that brand.
And then suddenly what you see is that he or she's like managed to do well and this guy has done a zero to one, has not done well. So
Mm
We do not celebrate uh risk takers of the country yet. And I think we'll we'll we'll change that.
I think it's changing already.
But we have a f long way to go. Uh one of the
beautiful things I I often talk about is that
I I was in uh Portugal
Uh once and I saw uh
I don't know if you've ever been and seen this, but
In the church, uh
normally let's say only the royalty is allowed to be buried or or cremated or whatever, like they they are there.
Only one more category than loud is the
The explorers.
Vasku the Gama, all of these guys who explored the world and took risk and

the country forward.
They were given the same position as the royalty.
Right?
So when we give the highest status to risk takers
the country appreciates it. Because ultimately we're all looking for markers
of social validation.
Super interesting.
I wanna keep talking about India and how it's different and
Especially what may surprise people about the market, both building there and then how to build products that are successful in India.
I saw in a different interview you talk about how there's this big difference between
Dows and Arpoos.
that in India it's really easy to get Dows, basically get lots of users.
Really hard to make revenue per user.
And that changes the way you build product.
Probably can you just
Talk about why this is the case. Why is why is it so much easier to get Dows versus Arpoos?
So I think uh R pool's a function of per capita income.
Of a country.
Right. You cannot
Mm.
Hundred dollars.
per user from a country for a product when their income is
Let's say two thousand five hundred dollars per year as an average for the whole country.
Right.
So what happens is
Uh many global companies love to come to India because we have the cheapest data.
Very high smartphone penetration.
So
If you look at lot of global giants, they'll have five hundred million users from India or sometimes a billion.
And numbers coming from Asia.
Uh and and they don't have huge arms.
But they they help you show the user growth.
Which helps you in your public market and there therefore improve your valuations.
Right.
For example, my my guess is that
I don't know if this data is public or not, or
talk about like my guess is that Meta would not have more than
three or four dollars per user per year monetization in India?
But if you look at the user growth.
In India it'll be huge.
Right.
So a lot of times uh
For global companies, India becomes a great MAU firm.
Uh but very low on our pool.
I and therefore a lot of Indian founders who
try to copy the Western market saying, Oh, I'm gonna have two hundred million users.
make a terrible mistake because
They will need to then go abroad to find their arpose to balance the act.
You talk about how Netflix is a good example that where
they launched an India that got lots of users but just couldn't make a lot of money.
Yeah, because uh uh
Four
Bad users.
to find relevant content and pay for s content when we have
Tons of free data, tons of free content, like all over the place, like
short videos which are competing with time, like so much going on over here.
Uh uh people actually paying for that.
by design is gonna be less. And and I'm not saying that it'll not change in ten, fifty, but
uh the expectation that many global companies come over here saying that oh I'm gonna have like these
Tens of millions of users who start paying me as soon as I come.
Uh for Spotify, for Netflix, for
Almost anybody with
uh uh or or Amazon Prime for that matter, uh has not pan out.
So one of my takeaways here is just when you look at a startup as an investor, especially and you see like
We've got a hundred million users.
Don't
Treat that the same as
Say a hundred million users in the US.
Or other markets.
Absolutely. One of the things is uh
Value of time as a concept.
Right. So one of the things you'll notice then is that
No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life.
Mm.
Right?
But let me ask you a question. What was your first ever job and how were you paid?
My first ever job I was
Tutor
Tutoring women on about computers and passing Microsoft certification tests.
And it was paid, I'm pretty sure it's outly.
No
most likely you'll remember what the hourry income was and and even though you've started making a lot more
You somehow have the concept of what the value of your one hour is.
Yeah. But if you ask most Indians, uh and if you ever come to India and do this exercise when you meet them
Ask them what's your income per day.
or income per hour.
nobody will be able to answer. No matter what their job is.
They could be
Stuff.
At the restaurant.
to somebody who's doing really basic work, to anybody in a f any fancy job, because we've never ever be paid an hourly salary.
So when you are not paid an hourly salary, the concept of time
is not the same.
And then the concept of time is not same paying for time.
Yeah.
Hard to do.
Right. And and therefore you'll see a lot of Indians who make
Let's say uh I don't know, maybe a hundred dollars an hour.
Uh uh still
Spend an hour to send ten dollars on a flight ticket.
Because
That's what it is. And and if you by the way
Discuss that with many of the
Indians in the West also you'll realise that this is a common joke that
they will still fight for the ten dollars because the value of time is something
That is harder to get used to unless
From your childhood
That
the unit of time was moved smaller and smaller.
That is really interesting.
And you're saying that comes from just the fact that people never get paid hourly. It's always a salary and and so people don't know. Valuing time
Uh
Uh uh uh like many Indian languages do not
Have a word for efficiency.
Wow.
And that's true for many Asian languages, the word for efficiency does not exist.
So then how do you value it if it's not in your vocabulary?
Fascinating.
There's something else along these lines of
Dows and R Poos and efficiency.
that you talked about that I love, which is this idea that focus is
Is a curse in Asian markets.
that in the US there's often this it
advice. Focus. Build one thing that's amazing that everyone loves.
Try to make that work, scale that, and then only then build a new product or build something.
Uh build a new big feature.
And you're
advices in India and Asian markets in general, it's the opposite. And I think it's because you make so little per user. Could you talk about that?
Yeah. I think one as you make
Very little per user.
So you have to do many things, but
Also
All low trust markets, when I let me define low trust markets as
There
uh consumers are a lot more wary of trying new things.
Uh because there are no institutions that protect you
against a bad behavior done by a company, right? So
For example, if I ever had a fall
uh in a coffee shop in the US, I can think about suing them and making money off it.
In India you're only worried about I'm gonna pay my thing, you don't even think about suing the coffee shop or you're hoping that you will get any money for that.
So what happens is in a low trust country
Uh uh and it's uh all developing nations are low trust by design.
Uh, because the institutions are not strong enough to kind of really, really take care of many things. What happens is
There is concentration of trust.
So you will see that
super apps, superstars, super companies all exist in low trust markets because
The lack of trust creates concentration of trust.
The night.
Uh and and therefore you will say
one app can do four hundred things. For example, we have
a company like Tata that can do salt to car to jewelry to anything and people will buy because it's a Tata brand.
'Cause it comes from a low trust society trusting the brand.
And and not being
Oh I'm I'm going to go's preferred
And and
The joy for trying new new things.
is not so high in low trust nations.
Wow, I'm learning a lot here. I didn't know all this. So essentially brand is
even more exponentially more important in Indian
markets. It's funny, but the oldest brand in the world is a brand call as Chavan Prash.
Uh it's it's a by a game guy named Chavan who built a Praj, which is a uh a sort of a pace that you can have for good health.
And and uh uh it's
It was built in India.
uh uh many, many, many, many centuries ago.
Uh uh and and and
But there are lots of Indian businesses still have the name of the person behind it. Even the US used to like that.
J P Morgan, all these guys are not some fancy name.
Name of people.
Uh and therefore in India
Uh trust still comes from a lot of
Names of people who
had a lot of trust behind them and reputation behind.
I wanna zoom out a little bit before we go in a different direction.
What do you see as
either the most pressing challenges
In India.
Right now for tech.
Or the biggest
And or the biggest opportunity for Indian startups. And then just generally where do you think things will evolve in the next few years?
Sometimes I wonder the challenges and the opportunities are exactly the same.
Mm uh, for example, one of the biggest challenges we have is
Uh we have very low female participation of labor compared to many markets.
But I also believe it's an opportunity because you can
Let's say use AI and create many new types of business and opportunities because
No.
Like work from home is not a alien concept anymore. You can actually create very interesting businesses for that.
Number two.
Is uh uh
Uh
We are
low on per capita income. So what AI can do
Instead of taking our jobs away, just make us
Brighter because now
Uh like Satya talks about that now expertise is available in air.
So you can actually just kind of ride on that and really make the world very equal.
In many, many ways.
Right?
So that's
massive opportunity. And also the challenge because I often make this joke that
The largest employer of the world is inefficiency.
And if you take that away too quickly, we'll have a very, very jobless world.
Right. So the thing is that
Uh it can be an opportunity for a country like India and also
Potentially a
Because we don't start
becoming great at AI.
I I was actually just telling somebody today that
Maybe all of our interviews
should become
About
Giving a task.
That they can only perform if they were very good at AI.
And no matter what the job is.
You make that the minimum criteria that
Uh if they cannot use that, leverage that.
They'll become a liability in five years anyways.
And the last one is uh
We have a very young demographic
Very
Well
Position that
access to technology, access to smartphones and so on and so forth, a lot of hunger.
Uh, but our challenge is also that
It's also the first generation that is truly running learning what is entrepreneurship, what is risk.
And and we'll make all sorts of mistakes.
Get there and
I hope we don't
go into shell after having
these large scale failures which you have not seen before.
India is not used to
Layoffs.
Like startup world is used to lay offs, but
In India if you start us to lay offs it becomes the national news and
All sorts of discussions happen over here. So
You're not.
There yet.
But we like
Being that
somewhat of a collectivist or some of our endowistic societies. We are somewhere
We India is a great remix of everything.
Mm.
I love this line you just shared of
Inefficiency is the largest employer in the world.
I totally get that.
Okay, so let me talk let's talk about cred for a bit.
So you had I think three startups before Cred.
Okay, and then you've been building Crit for about six years now.
I'm curious just
Well on this journey of cred, what
You've learned
Well or changed your mind about
during this phase of your career?
Versus
Previous phases.
I think
Creds inside was actually quite simple, we realized that
Uh un unfortunately the value of time and per capita income is concentrated in twenty five million families and
Therefore focusing on them is important and they are
lot more global in their approach versus rest of India.
So
So you have to build them very differently. Uh
And and I realized that
Ability to
Focus on a customer set.
Which is not historically.
possible to do because everybody every investor expected us to be the next China.
Uh and the only similarity of India and China was the population and nothing else was similar.
So I think uh
having that conviction that I'm gonna build only for just folks and
This large enough market?
Uh
Yeah.
Thankfully I had one success for somebody to bet.
So our s like our series A was twenty five million dollars. I would have not had that luxury if I had no success in the past because
I had no product with any monetization to prove that I'm doing the right thing.
It turned out okay, but I think
I I could get a lot of people to take risk.
behind
my insight or my thesis is because I focused on
the right customer category and and built on it.
But I think the few things I've learned differently is that
uh uh companies that are very, very good at zero to one.
will not naturally become greater ten to hundred.
Uh there are lots of different lessons to learn. The founder has to evolve.
The biggest thing that has to happen.
Most people are
Cred are people who have not
See a bigger business than red.
Which comes at its benefits and costs. So
You have to gentrify the org.
Every now and then.
to to make people understand the value of many of these reliable things. And
And I often tell people that entrepreneurs are uncertainty absorbers.
Uh for everybody.
For
For employees, for investors, for customers.
They they are
And and therefore
They they they they get rewarded for being
Those people.
to remove uncertainty from people's lives.
Uh but
The kind of expectations keeps changing at the company of scale. For example, if you have a
Oh uh let's say uh
A seed shed investor
They they are very used to very high uncertainty and
They're happy with some absorption.
But as you got a growth investor and if you've got sovereign on your cap table.
the the amount of stability you need to provide is significantly more
And and therefore you need to evolve very, very differently.
So I think those are the few lessons I have learned. Talent
you start realizing that not everybody can scale into everything.
Uh and and you cannot expect
that you can give up the zero to one DNA just because you're building ten to hundreds of how do you kind of
Coexist with those things.
How do you react to big changes in the market and not become the slow company
Uh uh and every company goes through that. I I mean
If you look at what Zach went through in the last

I offered the he had to play the shiva.
Come and do a lot of destruction.
To become
Big again, right? So I think that's what founders can do.
Uh and and and
It's not easy to do.
One of the things I've learned is that
Profit pools.

Tell you a lot about what the country values.
And trying to
uh copy somebody else's profit pool to your country will not be a wise idea because
The country's values are demonstrated in what profit pools exist.
Let's take an example.

profitable companies in India are the number of retailers
would be probably two.
Or three.
But if you look at the Western market, you will see a bunch of them.
Because uh
It's a consumption market.
Plus
very high divorce rate means you're always peacocking again in the market again.
You're trying to be fit and be
uh cool and all of that. India has very low divorce rate, less than one percent.
Uh uh arrange marriages.
Uh
And fashion and because we have a a lower
female participation of labor.
India is probably the only market where female fashion spends is less than men's fashion spend.
Everywhere else it's probably five, six, X more for them.
So what happens is you start appreciating what the country values. For example, I have noticed that
Many patriarchal societies have very significant market cap in financial services.
Versus consumption.
And these
Broad patterns you start thinking about
Very, very differently.
So many lessons there. I love this idea of a
Founder being a uncertainty absorber.
This other point you made about uh Zuck becoming the Shiva and destruction touches on something
Brian Chusky and I chatted a bit about is
How founders often start in control.
Giving
And very micromanagey, just driving the ship.
And then as the company grows, they delegate and power
And then things start to
Slow down.
And then they come back, play the Shiva and
And uh take control again. Is there anything there that you've seen? Yeah, but that's the universe. The universe goes through the exact same phases, so
If you study Indian mythology you'll see that there's a Brahma
Wish no mahe
cycles and every yog is called goes through these three phases all the time.
Beautiful. I see. So this is just inevitable. This is the circle of life.
Absolutely amazing.
I love this all just ties back to your philosophy background. I love it, it's beautiful.
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Okay, so on cred, so with a funny thing that happened. I asked people on Twitter what
questions to ask you on this podcast and
One of the most common questions was
When do you think you'll become profitable? Which is interesting because when I have other COs that are
founding a company that is and most companies aren't yet profitable. Nobody's asking that question.
So I'm just curious why why is that such a common question that comes up. It's it's fascinating. It's fascinating.
Uh
As a country
Может бизнес варов.
Trading.
You buy something at low cost.
Sell at a higher price and you make profit.
Right. Most of our businesses, most of our family businesses were trading.
Right.
But building a
Capex heavy distribution, monetizing it later on.
Focusing on high revenue growth rate versus trying to get profitability first.
Is not
Known to us.
Right.
So
When they see these lar numbers of losses
Like
There's a shop that
Why would somebody give you this kind of money?
Like and then by the way, my my own dad wouldn't respect
me till I was a profitable company. So it's not surprising that
uh people in India have these comments, but
It also comes from not understanding how businesses are built.

VCs are giving you the capital to kind of build distribution, unique product, edge, brand, all of that stuff.
And then monetize.
Later on. And and Marta is big.
And then have very large profit pools to go after.
But a lot of times uh
Uh this comes from
not understanding this business uh
And and I feel
It'll change.
Because many internet companies are now
getting very profitable, public listed. So we'll have
A decade.
Uh uh
Let's understand one thing. Like in the US uh
Maybe twenty seven, thirty percent of US market cap is now tech companies.
And uh
tech companies wouldn't probably make
Less than two, three percent of the market cap?
So uh we are mostly and and and I'm not saying India has this fabulous history of building very, very profitable tech companies. We are
probably the first generation that'll have to prove ourselves.
to be very large profitable companies. But
We are still figuring out.
What this means and and
The fact that this question by by the day I can tell you one thing that I have
been asked this question by
people on Twitter way more than my any of my investors ever asked me this question.
which also creates an arbitrage for entrepreneurs who can actually build businesses.
And I'm going to raise capital.
Uh and and prove their business model with very revenue high grants.
high revenue growth rate and and build large brands and so on and so forth.
But
It I find it fascinating as well.
Uh also what one thing you'll see fascinating in India is that
That is like
immense amount of trolling and doubt that will come in your comments. No matter what you do.
Uh uh so if you see any founder in India, they'll post something about the thing.
The comments.
Will rarely have
Appreciation.
So uh uh it it's it feels
Sad because uh
when you see global companies do stuff like India will lose their shit on Apple Vision Pro and all the stuff and like
the Twitter will go gaga over it. But I think when it comes to
And I believe
Uh
Envy is hyperlocal.
We do not envy
Elon Musk for
All the stuff he does because he's so far away.
But we we envy our own, uh uh, because they were just like us.
Not many years ago.
Uh I and therefore uh
N V is like Wi Fi. It's like a
Like an hyperlocal side. How do you stay?
positive and focused and not let that stuff bring you down.
And you have advice for founders in India that are dealing with the same sort of
It's funny the number of calls I've got from founders who start getting hit.
And the
go to person to get this call because
Uh uh they've they've seen me get it for many more years.
And I tell people that
We couldn't have
Made it this far.
If we cared about criticism of
Everybody?
Uh versus
People who've done better than us.
If
Somebody who's done anything better than me
Give me
And
Amount of criticism.
I will absolutely flip and make all the changes and evolve.
And I I seek feedback all the time from people.
But if I start taking feedback from everybody who who do not understand and nuance and empathize with what I'm doing,
I'm not saying that we should not take customers' feedback. That's very different but
Let's say somebody commenting about your business.
who does not understand the nuance of it.
Uh
You can't be reacting to everything. And I I often tell people that
No, there's a reason uh
Elements with
Lower valencies are called noble gases.
Because they're hardest to get reaction from.
That's over my head, but I I I love it anyway.
It's so interesting. Like I love all these different these elements you're pointing out of how different building in India is that I think people in the US have no idea about.
And so I appreciate you getting into all these little elements.
Is there anything else around the Indian market that may surprise people before we go in a different direction about building a startup there?
For all the
challenges, uh India remains the most promising market that one can be building for right now'cause
Everything is going our way. We have all sorts of digital public infrastructure.
Government sub

Uh uh all these great
People doing extraordinary things, uh
Apart from the Twitter noise and Twitter is designed for
uh uh outrage getting likes. So I I wouldn't read too much into it, but
I think all of us are doing well because
We have
An audience set
uh an evolved ecosystem that is fully supporting us.
And and really
Taking it forward. So I think
I I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building.
Because of this
extremely vibrant uh crazy opportunity that
one can learn from
However I wish I often wish that
I wish I could get a one month internship.
With Brian.
And learn
How to do things.
And I've never had the luxury I can only watch
his podcast with you to learn a few things, but what if I got a chance to
Be there and and I and I missed that part.
But I've never been
really trained by these extraordinary product brands.
Uh or or even observe them make decisions.
So I I recently posted one thing that
You know, the the word operation theatre comes
Because operating used to be a public process and people used to pay money to watch surgeries and see all the bloody gory stuff.
Uh and even before Anesthesias was born and and
And and
There's so much joy in seeing somebody do their action and
I wish there was theatre for
Brian take a product decision, Zach take a hard call on killing a product.
Or or or or seeing Tim
uh uh rejecting uh uh all the ideas that they have
to before the GTM of a product. I think
we could benefit so much from that. And and unfortunately it's remains in very small circles. And like I said, I I the reason I said
You do a fabulous job of removing some of the information asymmetry and kind of making it more democratic.
But there is so much more.
that we all could learn. Uh and I I I feel
Extremely uh
Envious to many people who have the opportunity to kinda work with the best of the best.
Because many
Of us from India never had the luxury we had to figure out everything on our own.
Wow, how cool would that be?
Just to have
a camera in some of those meetings just as a learning experience.
Because like very few people are in those rooms.
And
There's so much to learn. I think though people will find
Holy shit, this one, this is how decisions are made. What is going on? And two, is like, uh, I don't want to work for this person. This sounds
Uh very difficult and stressful.
Those are probably some takeaways.
They will emerge.
Kind of along these lines.
Something that comes up a lot in your
Talks and work is is
Curiosity.
Yeah.
Show called Cred Curiosity.
You often talk about the power of curiosity. I'm just curious
Why is curiosity so important to you and why is it important
for other people to always stay curious and
What value is there?
I think a curious person
Is
Somebody who's constantly demonstrated.
Demonstrating that they are not
Proud of their expertise.
And they will demonstrate extraordinary amount of excitement when they face a problem which they have no clue how to solve.
Uh and and therefore a lot of people stop growing.
Because they want to constantly demonstrate their expertise.
versus demonstrate their curiosity.
Right, because curiosity
should come from security because you
Imagine I was in a
I'm the founder CEO of this company and this group of sixty people on WhatsApp. Somebody posts something I'm a
And ask a dumb question, what does this word mean?
you you need to have the security
Do feel okay with it.
But a lot of people
Of insecurities.
try to demonstrate expertise and and do it or Google not ask these people
I think that slows down the compounding growth.
And I think uh
Yeah.
Keeps you very
Good at
Adapting.
Right. Uh
So
It's funny, I was recently GPT is my favorite thing to keep asking random questions because now I don't need to
really worry about Google having those questions answered around because I can
asked the GPT. So I recently asked the question that
But
Animals have managed to survive which species or animals have survived for more than a hundred million years without changing too much.
And what is common in all of them?
So GPD came out with interesting answers which says that it shocks
Uh uh
Uh oh.
Like Horseshoe Crab, uh uh uh like
Oh well.
Crocodiles and all of these people have survived to do this thing. So
Three distinct plates were
One.
Ability to to reduce
Metabolism at will.
Yeah.
Okay. It's fascinating.
I can
Bring down my metabolism by
Twenty percent.
Like one one is to twenty or like crazy, crazy scale they can bring the metabolism down.
The second one is by the way a lot of uh in in an ancient uh
Yogis have demonstrated this as well. Uh it comes from the same yogic practice.
The second thing is about
And if you think on companies context is the same.
If covert came, did you
Could you do so on your motorblues?
And so I've
Right? Or you burnt your way out of the
And disappear.
The second thing that was interesting was
Very high conversion rate on every attempt to secure food.
Right?
uh uh they don't go around chasing randomly and doing things. They have a very high conversion rate, which means
High judgment.
And the deadliest bite.
So they will not chase many options, but if they chase something, they will have the biggest bite on it and they'll convert it.
And the third thing that was more interesting one was they have survived
All sorts of crazy
Environmental changes.
Just adapting and adapting.
comes from curiosity.
Right. Uh uh and and and you could see those people in covet.
There were two sets of people who were completely gone into shell.
And they were like who are like this curious like, Okay, so what do I do with this? Like
What happens now? Like
Do I need to train something? Do I need to tweak something?
So
But it was change.
Very quickly.
So I often feel that curiosity is that demonstration to adapt.
And learn and and
You only create more information asymmetry
To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry.
All the best companies
In the world have
Unfair information asymmetry.
And and
That
comes from curiosity because you're constantly collecting
Ting dots.
Connecting dots.
Collecting dots.
Connecting dots.
And end up creating this
unique edge for yourself.
And information asymmetry for yourself.
And if you
Assume that I have collected enough?
mean then no human life is gonna be enough to connect and connect all the dots, right?
We never
be able to get and sometimes I envy the stuff that you do because you're
Like
You are
Efficiently connecting
and collecting dots.
Uh by having luxury of
All these people to talk to.
And and you are making more dots getting connected. So your information and symmetry is growing.
Wait till you uh
IPO and then someday maybe leave cred and then you could start this podcast podcast of your own like this and
Connect all the dots. And I think that's a reference to Danny Meyer, who's uh
The founder of all these fancy restaurants and big on hospitality and has this phrase always be.
Collecting dots, I think, A B, C D.
I'm a link to that.
Yeah.
Um
Okay, wait, this is really interesting, this list of what are the common traits of the most
uh long lasting
animals. They can lower their metabolism at will.
They have a high conversion rate to get food.
And they've survived
types of environments. And I think there's a lot you can
Transformative as you've done.
to startups and leaders.
This could be its own.
If you haven't written about this, this would be a cool blog post.

I'm curious who you look up to.
in business, either in India and outside India. Who comes to mind we're like I really
Inspired. I'm inspired by these folks.
I I often tell people that
I hate the word favourite because it tells me to become limited.
In my mind.
So I I stay away from being favorite, but I I learn
All the time from everybody and there are so many people to learn
Across.
The world and
in history, in recent past, and and and every time you will discover
Fascinating, extraordinary
things about them. So I I don't think I have
A person I I I am this person about
How did they solve this hard problem?
So many one of the things that we started doing recently in
not very ritualistic about it so far is
I ask uh
myself and my
He report is every month.
we go around the table and ask ourselves what was the hardest problem we solved last month?
And it's very hard.
To come up with an answer.
And if you do this with a product
Leaders.
Like just go around.
and ask what are the hard problems you solved last month.
you will realize that we all stay very busy.
And displacement is hard.
But if you notice extraordinarily successful people.
They'll have a lot more content to talk about.
Every month, every quarter.
Because they're obsessed.
About making that big displacement.
Uh and does not come
By being busy.
And that's another thing but
You cannot chase the big thing. You don't see a crocodile being busy.
You see a crocodile just waiting patiently at the watering hole.
For that
best meal and have the deadliest bite.
Fall back.
So the beautiful definition of predators predators I read was
The one who burns the least amount of calories to earn the most amount of calories.
So how do you become that?
And I think when I meet people who are extraordinary at that and it comes in all shapes and forms.
I learned something from it.
So in these meetings you have, are you judging people's
Yeah.
success based on how many
hard problems they solve. Now that they've heard this, they're gonna be like, Yeah, I need more
Because if you're senior, what what is
What is the role of a senior person?
You have to be the chief problem solver.
I love that. I have and I often think of leaders as uh professional firefighters who are just
Endless fire to put out.
kind of along the lines of people and where you learn from, is there any sources of content? This is actually an audience question on Twitter.
Uh Anrag Verma asked this.
What are your favorite sources of content to learn from in terms of what's happening in the world?
And what to pay attention to.
A vish I

Take off an answer.
My method of collecting information is mostly about
I come up with conjectures in my head.
And then I go all over the place to find out if there are
Pro
of what I'm saying is true or not.
For example, I recently came up with the conjecture that
Everybody who's been successful in the history of
Is this a vicus?
Help.
historically done a lot of philanthropy.
to create a good image for themselves and therefore being treated as a respected
Citizen versus
Being treated as a person who did vices to make wealth.
And then I asked this to GPT and I GPT came up with like
Fifty people who did what?
Uh, and what were their vices? How did they change the reputation by doing lots of
uh philanthropy and all of that stuff.
I'm
Then
A thing happens and then I research in all sorts of directions and
And I have no boundaries to if I go to chemistry or physics or
uh uh human behavior to some universal principles.
So my method of learning is
Constantly come up with conjectures from the dots that you've connected.
And then
Like
Absolutely work hard.
To find proof of it.
And then use that to connect to the next dot.
Right. So I often tell people that
Everything that you
Every book you read
Makes your brain porous to read the next book.
Mm.
That's the purpose of books.
But that's true for every single thing we learn.
It makes our brain more porous for the next thing that we are supposed to learn.
Is there a recent example that where you got super sucked into some topic?
Uh well it's my daily life I get sucked into topics every now and then.
Uh uh for example, I've been like
Uh thinking about
second order effects of
Yeah, and what happens to countries and and jobs and and and how to expect some of these things to change, not change.
rate of change, rate of skill change.
I got recently obsessed with
What happens to lap grown diamonds? If they become big
Does it kill diamonds? Does it make diamonds bigger?
And then I looked at parallels, so Pearl industry was very big before
Uh culture
Uh uh

the the the high status of pearls disappeared.
Because everybody could have pulse.
Uh uh but not too long ago.
Both was

uh used to have pearls around them, but
as soon as it was easy to
Uh uh
uh manufactured in a lab, it lost its value. So I think
So then should I be shorting?
Uh or or going long on diamonds, thinking about what happens. So but there'll be a temporary period of making a lot of money on lab grown.
Diamonds uh which will
Kill it's it will become parasitic on the status of diamonds and
Uh
And destroy all its profit pools.
You heard of your first time to buy some diamonds.
Futures.
Uh, I feel like I feel like there's no one in the world chat GPT impacted more than you, considering how much you want to spend just digging into random topics.
I I often wonder, uh Lani, like if if you took the most serious people and made their
GPD searches public.
Mm lot of people will learn because the problem of GPT is now
It will give
It will
It'll make the people with great questions do well versus
People who are
uh are looking for uh basic answers. So I think the world is gonna be
Unfair.
People are gonna ask their questions.
Interesting. Okay, well I gotta ask you, is there any advice you have for asking great questions?
That has helped you in your work and career and life.
Whenever somebody has
Many choices and they make the right choice.
In whatever s domain they have. For example, let's say
You could hire anybody, but you hired great people.
Or let's say you could
Marry anybody but you married a great person and and so on and so forth.
How do they make choices?
For that domain.
of expertise. And I think that is the most and and many times
They cannot be they'll not be able to explain how they make great choices. So really go in
Into that.
'Cause they don't really have their mental model figured out.
Uh they cannot articulate, they cannot coach, they cannot explain but
If you can figure out a way how they make great decisions in general, in in whatever domain of
Uh work that they're
uh doing. You'll find many interesting insights coming over there.
The the
Good questions.

Oh
Second order thinking, what do they think will happen?
uh to the world and why did they come to that conclusion and you see their full chain of thoughts
For example
Uh second order thinking it's known to be
the most powerful trait to predict success of somebody.
I often wonder.
What happened in
childhood of people who became great at second order thinking.

Fully discovered or discussed yet?
Uh uh and I've found some
Lose examples of
Did you play strategy games or only physical games?
And a strong coalition to
Building so rigor came from physical games.
But
Uh second order thinking came from playing charge games as a kid.
And if you had both, you could do
really well in general because you have the discipline and second round of thinking together.
Uh then
Uh did you ever have an exercise
Uh
on looking at history, for example
One of the things I recommend to
uh parents to do with their kids.
I call it the Wi Fi school is
Uh ask them a one wide question if you
Every meal.
And let them come back with the answers next day. For example
Why do humans wear jewelry?
And
Why
is uh uh something
In a certain way, and let them go into the
full depth of history and
Find out.
uh oh
why uh why is it so expensive to advertise on Super Bowl? And and so on and so forth. You just I take one question and
If you train them on why
They evolve at a very different rate because how what are the questions which do not evolve at you at a much higher rate because why is the deep question?
And and it breaks a lot of things in your head.
Or another question about origin stories.
How did elevators come into being and and what made
Your phones happen.
Microphones.
Why is it called microphone?
And why is it called a phone?
And if you just one moment to go into that is depth.
you see people kind of build second order thinking automatically because
Either you go in history
And see second order thinking coming of all of that, or you play
Games that
Train your brain for second order things with a spectrum.
Uh but that's
broad range of things that I think people should be asking.
I'm looking forward to a canal uh
Children's raising book, like a book to help you raise this.
This could be your future. I don't have kids, so I can run experiments on everybody else's kids, so it's a it's a great thing to do.
I feel like with these questions, uh, I think the rule has to be you can't just ask chat GPT.
For the answer.
Actually it's not bad.
Uh uh I think we should encourage it.
Because we have to assume that we are gonna be all co pilots.
Oh yeah I know.
Uh what you have to do is
Derive the second order insight that okay, if this is true
Where is the similarity of this in somewhere else? Like give me an example of
This found somewhere else.
Yeah.
And so on and so forth.
Amazing.
Okay, I have just a couple more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round.
First
Let's visit Contrarian Corner.
I'm curious what's something that you believe.
That
Very few other people would agree with you on.
And why
Do you hold that belief?
Our understanding of wealth is flawed.
Uh and what wealth is.
Uh, to me wealth is
Nothing but storage of energy.
Uh and therefore
The reason wealth is not zero sum because energy is
And we are just finding all ways to convert
Energy not.
advantage.
We are the only species that have managed to convert all forms of energy to our advantage.
Kind of take energy, yeah.
You
Sound and solar.
No no other species have done this.
And therefore since industrial revolution are
Wealth has gone like this and continue to be like that. AI and
nuclear fission and all the stuff will kind of take us
Hate that.
So
I I I have a strong view that we will never, never have uh
Equality of wealth.
Uh in fact
Chasing that is
Actually a bad idea.
But if you let people
Uh do
well and chase wealth. They'd have enough wealth for everybody else, uh and we could take a lot of people out. And then I I think
It's com complicated because we can have all these democratic arguments that oh the wealth is concentrated and all that stuff. But
That's the physics of it.
It'll always be concentrated.
it it changes mediums, companies
Countries
They're all uh to me, wealth is nothing but an entropic complexity.
uh that'll keep changing in form and shape. Uh
uh uh you can keep fighting it or accept physics and and
Take the benefit of that physics.
I think of uh Elon had this interesting point that
Wealth is just a database.
Where everyone's
that wealth, I guess, is just an a row in the database and here's how much everyone has.
And you're just transferring numbers around and that's that's the whole no economy.
Infinitely. Uh and and and and therefore his vision of
uh sun's energy. Like if we really convert all the energy to our advantage, the amount of wealth we'll create for humans is
Disproportionate.
Uh and and all the species that have managed to
Collaborate and cooperate.
to create
wealth. For example, let's define wealth as biomass.
So
bacteria and humans are the only few things that have the
Largest biomass.
on this planet because we figured out how to make energy work to our advantage.
Wow.
Uh I love all the directions we've gone.

Probably the last question.
Is there a story of failure in your career that would be
Interesting to share, something that taught you an important lesson.
It's just series of failures. Uh uh I think there is no escape for anybody who's
But anything in life
not fail a lot, like every day, every
Uh thing.
I I would say that
Uh
many initiatives, many products
Companies that I've built.

Have
Absolutely failed. Uh
hiring that I fail, uh
Trust broken betrayals.
Uh so
I think that is
No end to it.
Entrepreneurs have this weird
Ability to
Forget.
About failures.
And
Almost
Turn that into a lesson that you hold.
And you forget the story?
Uh
And and like for example, Covid is literally no memory for me. I I just don't remember.
One would call it.
But it's it's just a blank uh in my head right now. And I think we are humans are great at forgetting
the the memory of failure, but remember the lesson from failure. But I think
I'm constantly learning. Uh and and uh
I often believe that life is too short to make all our mistakes ourselves, so we should be learning from other people's failures as well.
Uh and a lot of times we don't do that because we believe that we are special. Nothing like that will happen to us.
Uh-huh.
Bueno.
As as humans.
We should be learning.
I I would say that
m my life started from a failure. My my
family went through severe financial crisis.
I just started working from the age fifteen and uh
I feel
Till dead, I am just trying to escape.
That failure.
It happened in the family. So I think
Many of us are just
Uh uh
Fighting that
initial large failure that we've had and
Don't want to be anywhere near.
That when although we are significantly far away from that.
But the feeling
Is exactly that.
Circles back to whenever
First few questions about the chips
on shoulders uh driving a lot of motivation. There's this phrase chips on shoulders.
uh drive chips in pockets.

That's interesting.
Yeah. Uh is there anything more you want to share about that?
Early
uh challenge you ran into or is that something you've shared often enough enough? I mean I've shared that enough but
I I just
See, I I should not talk about it before because I think that I would get some sympathy for that and
And I
Only till r like recent past I speak about it.
because I I want people to realise that I was not some gifted kid who had some
Rich parents who
made me extraordinarily bright and put me in grade school and colleges and I
Made my way through that.
Oh
Uh I I I I I should start talking earlier because I I there's a lot of tendons to give sympathy to those people that oh
Scratch.
I don't want to be given
Any current
Uh for
Playing that.
Poverty card or this card or
Uh uh struggling for food card. Like that's not
An excuse, uh uh there are so many people in the world who've done extraordinarily well because they had the gift of struggle.
And I often tell people that this is the biggest curse of successful parents that
That's the only gift they'll not be able to give to their kids, the gift of struggle that they had.
Well
I think about that a lot. We have a kid, he's eight months now, and so I'm trying to figure out the balance of struggle versus making life easy and great.
uh a new challenge for me to figure out.
Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else, Kenal, you wanted to share or leave listeners with? Anything
Any last nuggets of thoughts?
Well I I I would love for the listeners and
from different fields of product is that uh
Please uh share
What you are learning without being
Fearing judgment of your peers.
'Cause there are many, many people who are
Learning only because you share your evolution.
And your thoughts?
And I I believe that
a lot more could be contributing and and a lot of your listeners are
Really bright people.
If they all shared
Uh uh many people from many
Places in the world.
Would learn?
Uh uh and and
Achieve some amount of success.
Thanks to your sharing.
Amazing.
With that.
We've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
All set.
Let's do it.
First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most?
to other people.
It keeps changing a lot, but uh my books are usually around understanding human behavior, uh and and I keep changing based on the person, but
Uh I think it's the biggest subject. All our customers, all our investors, all our employees
All our relationships are all humans.
And the subject that we are weakest on is human behavior.
And how do we live this life? We are playing life on extremely hard mode.
if you don't l learn human behavior so I would say that's one thing.
The second thing at evolutionary biology.
It teaches a lot about how species evolve and how do they make decisions and what are the core motivations that drive
Everybody?
Uh so that's another one I would
recommend and I I don't want to make recommendations because
I I
I can barely finish a book.
to to be honest. So I I believe in drifting.
and going deeper into topics so understand the topics versus trying to say
Uh, give me these three books and I'm gonna be good.
Uh and the last one I would say is that uh
Uh.
A me
thing that can make you learn something about their journey.
versus their success.
Right. So
Uh um
Sometimes autobiographies are too
celebratory in some ways, but if you can just kind of understand how
The
How did they
If if any book can teach you how people
Recovered from a setback.
In great detail.
Is a great book to learn from.
An audience member on Twitter actually asked a similar question along these lines, if there's one book that you could
Read
Over and over and over.
What would that be?
Is there one? I I absolutely don't believe in

Uh uh because uh
I I
I believe that
We are evolving. You might discover the same stuff coming from different books.
And you will say, Oh, I can categorize this in my brain again and again, but
Uh I I I I think we should
Uh we we we tend to become
Believers.
And
It becomes too religious.
If you repeat.
Yeah.
Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?
I I love Oppenheimer because of the struggles, but uh
And Nolan's craft for making the movies, but uh
Nothing in the recent past that
I feel side of there.
Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask?
candidates that you're interviewing.
Uh I like to ask a hypothetical second order.
Thinking question.
For example
If everybody who's taken a Covid vaccine dies tonight, what happens in twelve months from now?
Can you explain the world from
What happens to money, what happens to law, what happens to countries, what happens to military, what happens to
stock market, what happens to order of things.
And and
I would say less than ten percent of really smart people can really have good answers.
Excellent.
tells how good they are in second order thinking.
Um
But uh the questions can keep changing. For example, if you said that
What if arranged marriages were banned in India? Made made made
got capital punishment for doing.
What happens to the country?
How do we change from there?
Uh like some absurd scenarios.
But then what happens after?
Not to give away your secret sauce, but what do you look for in an answer that gives you a sense of their own.
And think about
If this happens, B happens and then C happens.
Like the the leaves they could make.
And just so people understand when when you're talking about second order thinking, what's the simplest way to describe
That concept.
I think the simplest way to think about this is that
Uh being able to
Correctly
Judge.
the butterfly effect of an event.
in as close as possible. For example
Okay.
Like lotta people in stock market use that to say how which stocks will go up and down down. Like that's
There's something that has happened in the market.
Oh, there is a war now?
In uh but
Russia, then what happens to the market? Like can you be good at predicting that?
But in every thing in life, like uh if if this happens and
Uh a lot of people hate this uh because it's very taxing to the brain.
Bring
Bin
absolutely hate second order thinking unless you've trained your brain
with second order thinking all the time that it looks forward to it. So it you know, can convert this into a
A hate versus a reward cycle.
And that


Probably doing it.
Probably early on in your life.
Yeah.
Doing second round of thinking.

Yes. That sounds like a lot of work for the brain.
Okay, just a few more questions.
Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love?
I'm looking forward to my
Vision Pro that is coming soon.
It's a future, future favorite product.
Uh, we have actually Boz from Meta coming on as the next guest in my recording.
I'm not sure when they come out in sequence, but we're gonna talk about
His thoughts.
Yeah.
The the most fascinating thing that I saw was uh
Zack
Talking about the utility of
Uh
Meta
being better than Vision Pro and their product.
And and
That's exactly going to work well for Apple because
When you try to ex make
the product more utilitarian, it loses status.
And and uh
If you study animals, you realize that the one which gets the highest mating success is the one which can demonstrate ability to waste resources.
and not be very efficient with resources.
Uh and therefore
people who are known to buy a product that is wasteful
will actually earn higher status and I think Zach made it actually quite easy.
for Apple to demonstrate their superior positioning by saying that, Oh, we are not as efficient, we are not as cheap, we are not.
For everybody.
Wow. Just continue to blow mines even on our lightning round.
Ha ha
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often
Come back to share with friends and family find useful.
In work or in life.
Uh I it's not a remote, but I think we we truly are transient.
uh and we are very lucky to have this life that we have and we have to make the most out of it.
Uh uh and and all these struggles will mean nothing.
Uh
I often tell people that I'm not going to be able to
This
For your life to be so great that you have collected the highest amount of content when you are old.
you have no end to the stories that you can talk about.
That reminds me of a book I once read that really had an impact on me where
somebody was trying to make a movie of their life.
And the producer was like, There's nothing. There's no good movie here. You have not done enough interesting things. I love it. And so he actually became he turned his lens into what to do in life.
By thinking what would make a great
Story.
And so you just started do and a great story is something where you overcome challenges and achieve something you wanted.
And so that became his life motto is I'm gonna try hard things and overcome them and that's gonna be my life. I love it.
I love it.
I'll link to that uh book in the show notes.
Final question.
You have this series on Twitter that you call Monday Motivations.
I'm curious what's motivating you these days.
I find it is filled with all these people trying to give this fake motivation and make money off that stuff and and like
It's almost like a
drug for people to feel, Oh my God, there's motivation I'm gonna do well.
Uh uh I I just wanted to remind people that all success comes from
Extraordinary amount of pain.
and struggle and hard work and there is no shortcut to anything material
coming in life and so the Mandavish motivation post comes as the anti motivation
uh uh uh potion because uh the world is filled with
Uh
I I believe that the biggest profit making scheme that I've seen in recent times is to
Tell people to love themselves and
They'll pay you money for saying that and and
Uh uh and
I I think the best way to love yourself is to keep evolving.
So my motivation comes from
Evolution.
Connecting dots.
solving harder problems than I have solved in the past and
I think life is ultimately a game that you want to feel that your levels have changed and your skills have changed.
Constantly.
Canal.
You are wonderful.
Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and follow up on some of the stuff?
And how can listeners be useful to you?
You can find me on social media, look for Kanal Shah. I'll you'll find me everywhere.
Uh, I usually have different personality on each social media.
And and uh uh
in terms of being helpful, uh
Keep tagging me on interesting things that you discover that gave you that moment of Oh my God, I did not know this. Uh I would love that.
Amazing.
Can all again, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Bye, everyone.
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