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What is your instinctive reaction when you hear an outrageous idea that challenges conventional
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I think all of us recoil a little bit, because it is tempting to stick to our picture of
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how the world works, what is possible and what is not possible.
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It takes too much mental energy to keep shifting our frameworks, as it were.
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But over time, I have learned to fight this reflexive reaction.
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Energy progresses not because of those who follow the conventional path and build better
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mousetraps, but because of those who dream audacious dreams.
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That is why, for example, I don't join in the fashionable mockery of Elon Musk.
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Just look at the things he has done and is trying to do.
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Bloody hell, we need a hundred more Elon Musk's.
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We need to celebrate moonshots and crazy ideas.
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We need to let dreamers keep chasing their dreams.
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And yes, they'll often fail, but when they succeed, they can change the world.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Vinay Singhal, who was born in a small village in Haryana and who was
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a first graduate in his family.
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His earliest ambition was to be the richest man in the world.
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When he read that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world at that time, he decided
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to outgates Gates by building the best operating system in the world.
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That didn't go far, but he did go on to build a site called Witty Feed that for a while
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was second in the world only to BuzzFeed for viral content.
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That journey ended suddenly and devastated Vinay.
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He spent time mourning and introspecting and then dreaming again.
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And now he runs Stage, which he describes as a Netflix for Bharat.
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Stage is more than an OTT for regional languages.
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It is an OTT for regional dialects.
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As he tells me in this remarkable conversation, cities have languages, towns and villages
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have dialects, and we don't need to homogenize culture.
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Instead, we need to celebrate our diversity by enabling it.
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So far, Stage creates content not in Hindi or Tamil or Bengali or such major languages,
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but dialects like Haryanvi and Rajasthani, and has led to almost a reverse migration
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from Bollywood as industries have sprung up around those dialects.
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People who speak them no longer feel like outcasts in big cities, needing to lose themselves
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I was blown away by my conversation with Vinay for two reasons.
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One, the depth of his self-reflection, which made him learn from every setback and become
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And two, the audacity of his dreams and the clarity of his thinking.
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I left our conversation as a believer, not just in this venture, but in Vinay himself.
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This man will do amazing things.
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Before you see for yourself why I felt that way, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
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An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community
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The course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know about
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the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST, or about $150, and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Vinay, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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You know, ever since a couple of months back, you agreed to come on the show when I was
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I've been looking forward to, you know, before we talk about Witty Feed, and before we talk
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about Stage.in, let's sort of talk about you and talk about your early life.
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You know, where did you grow up?
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What was your childhood like?
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So I grew up in a very small village in Haryana, 50-60-odd houses, so much so that I was the
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first-ever engineer from my village that way, and first-ever graduate in my own family,
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Nobody had gone to a college before me, essentially.
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It's a Hindi medium school, a private school, essentially.
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I went to a private school that way.
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So grew up there, mostly, my family, my father, my mom, both of them are, so to say, unheard
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illiterates that way, right?
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I don't know if that's the right way to address them, but they were very aware about the fact
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that ki yaar, bachon ko padhana chahiye.
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And so they made a lot of focus on that, so sent me to a private school, essentially.
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Grew up around that, uske baad Hindi medium school se paske ek town mein shift weye hum
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log, English medium school mein pehli baad, 9th class mein mein pehli baad, English medium
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school mein basically pauncha.
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And wahan pe, and before that, gaon mein humesa kya raha tha tha ki, so I was good at studies,
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And basically, I used to be a class topper, school topper that way, very favourite of
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my teachers, so to say, gaon mein achcha karte ho aap to anyways, like that.
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Aur English medium school mein pauncha mein, and English medium school mein, I was basically
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at the bottom of the list, because meko kuch samajhi nahi aara tha ki chal gya raha, basically.
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And I remember an anecdote actually from my school that way, chemistry ki class thi, 9th
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class ki baate, and humari jo teacher thi, she was a South Indian, so Pandey ma'am, and
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I over time grew very fond of her, but anyways, initial days to wo South Indian thi, toh ek
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certain accent of English, Hindi bhi unka ek certain accent ka tha, etc., right, toh
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Aur main betha hu, aap kuch samajh toh aani raha hai, basically, I was clueless, toh main
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ulti kitab leke betha hua tha, basically, and sorry, not ulti kitab, I was actually,
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main physics ki kitab leke betha hua tha uss, uss klas mein, and she was like, Vinay, what
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I, like, tum, konchi klas mein baate hu, ma'am, chemistry klas mein, kitab toh physics ki
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hai, and which is when I like, what the hell, but anyways, yeah, so, made my way through
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it, it, kaafi aapko scene hota hai ki jab aap, ek top of the usse aate ho, first in the
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class, favourite of your teachers, etc., and then you are basically nobody, nobody, you
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are, you are at the bottom of the class, nobody cares about you, nobody, basically, kon pusta
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hai jo backbenchers aaya, jo basically jinka che marks nahi aar hota hai, right, so I kind
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of made a, sort of a determination that 10th klas mein jab mai yahaan se pass out karunga
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CBC mein, I will, I will become a topper in the school essentially, again, basically, and
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anybody I would have told would have basically laughed at it, right, I remember mai apne
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ghar mein jahan study table tha mera, main ek apne haath se sketch kiya, and I said 94
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percent, basically, 10th klas ka mera dream, sort of hai, and 9th klas mein, I hardly passed
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basic, 60 percent type mein kuch marks aayungi, essentially, and continued to work very hard,
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again, pre-votes, pre-votes mein se kuch jada kuch, kuch mahaan kaam nahi hua tha, at the
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end of it, when I passed the class, I actually topped it, mai first aaya, and I scored 93.5
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percent marks, so it was probably one of the, like, early achievements of life, and that
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way, like, felt kiya, cha yaar, if you put your mind to something, if you, if I really,
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you know, go after something, I probably can do anything, it kind of made me believe that
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yaar mai kuch bhi kar sakta hu, aisa kuch nahi hai ki, jo nahi ho payega, right, so did
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that, 2 saal wahan rahane ke baad, again, wahan se phir 10th ke baad, baari aaye ki kya
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karna hai life mein, basically, right, to mere gaun se, mere school se basically, ghar
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mein toh kyu padha lika tha nahi, toh kon bata tha ki kya karna hai aapko life mein, right,
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toh class meise kayi log Kota jaa rahe the, essentially, and maine unse pucha ki, aap
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mai kya karoge wahan pe kota ka kya scene hai, essentially, toh they told ki yaar wahan
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pe aisa aise coaching hoti hai, doctors banenge, mere kuch, jo aache friends dekh do, doctor
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Allen Institute, Allen Kitton Institute karke, Allen, aap toh very very famous Allen of course,
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uss samaj pe it was not a very known name, at least, at least in my village, toh wahan
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jayenge and all, and I somehow had this vague idea in my mind that my father wanted me to
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become a doctor and so I said, yaar chalo main bhi Kota chalunga, doctor banenge, so
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I landed in Kota, spent two years over there, kaafi interesting, kaafi amazing se journey
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re, wahan jaa ke maine life mein pehli baad discover kiya, medical, non-medical, lag lag
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streams hoti hai, maine discover kiya ki, matlab IITs, NITs and AIMs and all these institutes,
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mujhe pehli baad life mein MCQ ka meaning pata chala tha and in the process I also ended
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up discovering ki there is something called passion, people live and die for it, I actually
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discovered the word passion in Kota, Kota actually main doctor nahi vana, but meri life
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ka turning point tha in a way, I really believe that those were the two most important years
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of my life and I probably learned more about life in those two years than I learned in
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probably the rest of my life at that point in time, pehli baar aap maabaap ke protectionse
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bahar nikalte ho, apne gaan se bahar nikalte ho and you realize that such a huge world,
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right, uss se mein Kota was the definition of huge world to me but it was such a huge
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world still right, bodi bodi building aim you know and all of that stuff basically,
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toh Kota main do saal spend ki and there was a lot that happened around that time, maine
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just one more thing before I finish this part, I discovered when I saw a computer for the
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first time when I was in 10th class, 10th class mein jab mein tha toh pehli baar maine
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computer dekha life mein, humari lab mein, 9th mein maine lab mein dekha, 10th mein maine
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ek bhaiya the, humari senior the, unke paas computer tha basically aur some of our classmates
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we gathered and said kiya bhaiya se, model test paper, CBC exam paper ki tayari karne
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hai toh internet se nikalwak ke lata hai and we went and he did something and all of a
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sudden he had papers and he wrote and basically that was the time when I saw it with internet
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for the first time, computer plus internet maine pehli baar dekha, unhone google peh
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leka CBC model test papers ek website hai, humari sab kuch tha nekala and to me it was
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all magic mein le toh jadu hai, basically unhone kuch bhi chahiye tha and I asked him lot of
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questions and he was like haan internet pe aap jo chahiye likho, mil jata hai sab kuch
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yahan pe and all that stuff right, I think I fell in love with computers on like love
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at first sight sort of scene hua basically right and so I made my father buy me one,
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like within the next 60 days I think we bought one, it was a big deal, bahut bada event tha
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humare ghar mein ye right, gaam se kareeb 100 km door ek town hai Jhunjhunu karke, wahan
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se hum computer lehne gaya toh, kyunki mein mama ji side the toh, koi chahiye aapko jo
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bataye ki, kyunki 35-40 thousand rupees ki machine is a very big deal, kone computer
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kharita, it was something that was and again 10th class mein, most people would tell my
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father ki kyun kharid rahe ho, ish ab game khelega, ish pe baith ke, kuch nahi kharega
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basically right and kya jaro rata hai 10th mein and all, but I somehow felt ki yaar main
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isse kuch sikhunga tha I will basically do something other than what everybody else is
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doing and all right, toh 10th class mein wo Jhunjhunu chal aaye hai and again mere liye
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toh internet was the entire meaning of it right, toh internet ke sa dial up connection
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back in the day wo jo 256 kbps wale connections wate the right, abhi SNL ke usse scratch
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card se, I connected it and the first search that I made on it was who is the richest person
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in the world and of course irony, dekho jindagi ki Bill Gates aaye ho samayon pe and kaise
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bane ho, wo bane ki unhone computers which I am using today basically is dabbe ko useful
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bataaya essentially like he made it, he made the software which made it useful for everybody
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and so everybody has a PC today right and so his operating system was the best in the
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world so everybody bought it at that one time and so whatever basically, the simpler definition
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of it, so I grew up in a Marwadi family basically baniyas, mere papa ki gaon mein jo baniya
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ki dugaan hoti, grocery store hota hai, my father used to run that right and so if there
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is one topic that you want to discuss and have some commonality in a baniya family or
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in a Marwadi family it's money, that's something that you grow up with right, I keep joking
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that ke humare ghar mein khatarnak jagda chal raha ho sabka aapas mein and then all of a
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sudden you come and say kya re paise ke baare mein kuch baat karni, so everybody will like
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be quiet and listen to you essentially right, so I grew up around the idea of money a lot
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right and so the other part which is that I wanted to be best at it, I don't know how
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but somehow my life has always, mujhe lagta ki kuch karo tu jindagi mein best karo, fir
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usse kam karne ka matlab nahi hai, so money was the definition of success told by my family
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to me and my surroundings and best is what I wanted to become, so my first aspiration
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in life became that I want to become the richest person in the world, that was my sort of a
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goal that way right, but I ended up in Kota to become a doctor and which is where I discovered
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that I don't want to become a doctor right, so a lot of these points in my life story
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that you will probably discover now in next couple of hours is that it has been a lot
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about what do I not want to do instead of to be able to figure out what do I want to
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do right, mujhe lagta ki wo bhi kaafi efficient system hai, agar aapko yeh samajh mein aajata
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hai ki yaar yeh nahi karna hai, toh you have at least one less option to worry about right,
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hume AIP M.T.K.I.T. tayari mein sikhata tha yeh ki 4 option hai, yaar toh aapko answer
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bata hai, yaar aapko yeh bata ki 3 kaunse gallat hain, so you can also find an answer by elimination
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so probably that kind of stayed with me right, so I discovered ki aar mujhe doctor toh nahi
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banna hai, I used to score physics, chemistry aur bio 3 subjects ke test lehte the right
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so, so aise hota tha ki 50-50 and 100, 50-50 marks ki, physics semester 100 marks ki, basically
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double ka aata tha, what about marks, I don't know the exact number now, I don't remember
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it, toh mere tino mein beraber marks aata the, usmein se 50, physics semester mein 50 me
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se itne aata the, biology mein so much utne number aata the right, so it kind of got clear
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ki boss, doctor toh nahi banna hai right, but then I had made my father spend so much money
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being there and all right, so it was very hard to go back, toh maine wo 2 saal use kiye
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to figure out ki achha karna kya yeh, samaste hain thoda, chalo doctor nahi banna hai, toh
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I remembered ki achha you, when you got computer you wanted to become the richest person in
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the world, how do you become, duniya ko sapsameer aadmi bante kaise hain, and I remembered ki
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achha Bill Gates hai, Bill Gates ne toh Operating System banaya toh usse wo ho gaya, toh I decided
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ki toh bahot simple hai, merko kuch nahi karna merko ek Operating System banana hai, jo
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iss wale se better hai, Windows se bhehtar Operating System agar maine banaya diya, toh
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sari duniya mera Operating System use karegi and I'll become the richest person in the world,
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I literally used to carry a pocket diary and I would write features, kiye toh yeh bananga,
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yeh isme dekho Windows me kami hai, and all of that stuff basically, but Kota main toh
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doctor banne gaya tha maa maha pe, toh kya karein, so papa ka sapna, and plus believing
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that ki mere papa ka sapna hai, toh maine plan banaye ki aar ek kaam karte hai, pehle MBBS
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karta hu, phir mai MBA karunga, kyunki usse business kar sakte hain, aur phir mai yeh company
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banaunga, and that's how I'll become this thing and all, 2 saal nikle, phir I wrote AIPMT exams
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all that stuff, toh kahin pe mera BDS, BDS me ho raha tha basically, but I knew kiya boss
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yeh toh agar kar liya na, toh me basically it will be a miserable life, I don't want
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to become a doctor no matter what, and I gathered courage, I came back home, Kota se aaya main,
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kareeb 5-6 lakh rupee lag jaatein, 2 saal mein kam se kam bhi wahan pe, and it was a very
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big amount for a family, jo basically grocery store se ghar chala rahi hai, toh maine himat
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karke papa gola, papa mujhe, sorry I know aap jahate ho ki main doctor banu, par mujhe
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doctor nahi banna hai, and he was like, maine kab bolla toh doctor banne, so I was like,
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arey yaar yeh kya ho gaya, main phalat mein 2 saal wahan aise ho raha tha, no mujhe koi
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farak nahi parta toh doctor banne aana banne, and then he said something I think that became
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the, one of the most important cornerstones of my life, sensually, he said, ki dekh beta,
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maine apni jindagi yahan gaon mein gaj aariye hai, bahut mahenat kiye hai, itjad se jaya
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ho basically, kisi pehsa kabhi liya nahi udhaar, kisi ko diya hi hai, and again in his way
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of living a respectable life, all I want from you is, I don't care to kaamyab hona ho,
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toh theek hai life, mae jaroori nahi hai, sab kaamyab honge and all, but mae bas itna chaate
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ho ki yaar teri wajah se mera sar kabhi uncha ho na ho, bas kabhi nicha nahi hona chahiye,
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and then, I was of course, I teared up and I was like, this is, it stayed with me, and
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I think till date, when I make decisions, I go back, think about it, that ki mae kuj
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aisa toh nahi kar raha ho, which is going to probably, you know, make him feel bad about
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it, unka sar nicha nahi hona chahiye, that's what I keep remembering, toh bas wahan se
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unhone mujhe bola, I came to Delhi, I went to CBSC's office, bhai ma biology ka student
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ho, lekin banna engineer hai, so that I figured out ki agar operating system banana hai, toh
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basically engineer banna padega, computer se engineering karnei padegi, toh uske liye
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non-medical chahiye, wo sab discover kar liya tha kutta mein, toh mae yaar Delhi main Pahar
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Ganj main office, in CBSC ka I came there, toh mae jaa ki bola boss, engineering karne
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ki kya karu, which is when they told me ki aap supplementary exam likho maths ka, and
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aap maths me pass ho gaya ho gaya, toh ho jayega, and I took an admission in Akash Institute
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in Janakpuri, toh wahan pe, jo ma maths ki pehli klas mein gaya, toh dropper years mein
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baitha ho aap, again, right, toh teacher aaya usne pehla chapter hai, ek hi cheech maje
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yaad hai, poori 11-12 ke maths ki aap, which is pehla chapter subsets ka hota hai, toh
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symbols hota hai subsets ke hi, aur basically ultra shi desi hota hai essentially, right,
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toh usne aake banake ye sab padhana chalu kiya, and wo toh dropper years ko padhara tha
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teacher uske chalte hai, maine side wala se pucha hai, bhai, iska ka matlab kya ye, jo
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ultra shi desi banara hai, kabhi idhar, kabhi udhar, iska matlab kya hai, and which is when
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this guy says, kiya tu kya pagal banara hai, kya mera majak odha rahe hai, kya matlab tu
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dropper years ke batch, tu galat klas mein baitha hai, ya scene kya hai, nai bhai tu batah
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yaar, mujhe nahi batah ye sab, kyunki maine 11-12 ka maths toh mujhe idea hi nahi tha kya
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hota hai, kya nahi hota hai, but again wo saal nikala and thankfully I passed in the maths
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exam, jindagi mein do baari dudh lagaye, which I remember very distinctly, one is when I
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wrote that maths ka board exam, I cried a lot before that night, because agar mai fail
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ho gaya us exam mein, toh dhobi ka kutta nahi ghar ka nahi ghat ka essentially, because
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basically kahin ka bhi nahi nahi, I left biology a year ago, and ma maths agar pass nahi karunga
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toh mai engineering exams nahi write kar sakta hai, I will not get into an engineering college
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and I basically will be nowhere right, and another 3-4 lakhs has gone down the drain from
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my father, so I cried a lot and went to write that exam, but again thankfully passed in
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that, I got some 68-69 marks, again exam ka so distinctly yaad hai ki kitne marks aayi
#
the, passed it, went into SRM and like that's how the engineering journey started then,
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I probably took a longer time to answer this, no no it was beautiful, the story about your
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dad is also so moving, and what you said about you know the first time you saw a computer
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and I had that same feeling in the 90s when the first time I discovered and someone told
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me you can search for anything, and all the pages that there are in the world on that
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subject you can see them, and this was in the early days, so actually the limited pages,
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it's crazy na, you can imagine that, mujhe wo aathasi clark ki quote yaad aate hai ki
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any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so I try to think about that and
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not take all of this stuff for granted, ki computer internet ho ya GPS ho, ya abhi jo
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AI kar rahi hai wo, you know it's all so magical but we get very jaded, I want to ask you a
#
question following on from like this very interesting concept I learnt recently which
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has made me introspect a lot and think a lot, I came across it in this book called Wanting
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by Luke Burgess, and he was a disciple of the philosopher Rene Girard, so Rene Girard
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a few decades ago, he's a philosopher but he was asked to teach a literature class,
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so he needed the money, he said theek hai maa sikhata ho, so for that he went through
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a reading list, and when he read all those great novels which were in the reading list,
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he found that they all have one thing in common, that all the characters in the novel, the
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main characters in the novel, what they want, they don't want it because it's a genuine
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deep interior want, they want it because somebody else wants it, and he termed this thing mimetic
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desire that you know you want something because somebody else wants it, ki mujhe Mercedes chahiye,
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kuch intrinsic toh nahi hai, kisi aur ko chahiye, or if you're a young person growing up in
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India, I'll get married, I'll have kids, but why, because it's the way things are done,
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so you think you want it, but you don't really, aur usse mujhe I got to learn about the frame
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of thick desires and thin desires, aur iska definition kya hai ki thick desire is what
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is intrinsic to you, jo agar baaki koi bhi na hota aap ho chaate, still chaate, that's
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a thick desire, and a thin desire is a desire which is not intrinsic to you, kahin aur se
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matlab aaya hai ki Mercedes chahiye, or mujhe you know waha rahana hai, yeh karna hai, all
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of that, and the interesting thing is that thin desires can be very intense, whereas
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a thick desire can hide in the background, toh yeh nahi ki jo intrinsic hai, jo thick
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desire hai, that is going to be intense, not necessarily, very counter-intuitive na, it's
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very counter-intuitive, so the thick desire can be hiding in the background, and the thin
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desire, which can often be a desire for fame or money or whatever, can be in the forefront,
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can be intense, and so I am interested in, and this is both a question about you, and
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also a question about the sort of milieu in which you grow up, grow up in the people all
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around you, that an older question that I sometimes ask is ki hum jo sapne dekhte hai,
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kyu dekhte hai, why those specific dreams, why do we want those things, why do we want
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what we want, which ties into this question, and you've mentioned sort of turning on the
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computer and your first search is who is the richest person in the world, because obviously
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if you're a young kid, you're growing up in a village, that's the most important thing,
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right, you think that's what you want, and I feel that what happens is that as we go
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along on that journey, initially we might want to be rich or famous or whatever, but
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later it becomes modified in the sense that we see money as a means to an end, that something
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larger opens up, like I would imagine what the internet would have opened up for you
#
was a thick desire of learning about the world and figuring out what to do and all of that,
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so I want you to tell me a little bit about sort of your dreams and your desires because
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what happens is that if you have no exposure to the world, let's say you thought experiment,
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you have a 10-year-old who's grown up in a room for 10 years with no exposure to the
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world, what does that person want?
#
It's going to be very limited, right, but you know, so it depends on what is your environment,
#
what is your environment, what do people around you want, how society is evolving, that shapes
#
you into wanting whatever you want, so you tell me your journey from this lens, what
#
were the things you desired and how did that during these years sort of evolve, and also
#
I know it's a separate question, so also what people around you, you know, what do you feel
#
about that, that in a sense what you do through your site or what any content person really
#
does in whatever they do is they expand the universe of their viewers and in expanding
#
that universe, you can make them want differently because they're looking at the universe in
#
a different way, take me through these journeys.
#
Just to double-click on the second part that you just said, I think is one of the reasons
#
why I got into content and I continue to remain in content is because one of my strongest
#
belief is that there is nothing more powerful than content as a medium of mass influence
#
and yeah, we by telling these stories and by creating these different content pieces,
#
we expand the horizon of the universe of a person who consumes that content essentially,
#
right, so like I said, I think the very first aspiration in life I remember is becoming
#
the richest person in the world, right, that's what I remember.
#
It has to be a thin desire because I no longer want it, one and second, I now know for a
#
fact that it was influenced by the environment around me, right, like I said, the environment
#
in which I grew up, money is like probably one of the most important thing, you know,
#
where you grow up around and by the way, I don't mean that in a bad way, I don't think
#
there is anything wrong with it, the world will live in, it runs on money and so you
#
need it and the community that I come from has a certain way of taking care of it basically,
#
right and I think that has helped me a lot in becoming the person that I become, I am
#
very careful about money, I am very, I don't know, I think I know how to handle my finances,
#
I am a financially literate person that way, I like to believe that and most of it comes
#
from again the place where I grew up, right, but then I think growing up where we grew
#
up, it was like a lower middle class setting, right, there are 50-60 houses in the village,
#
dad is running a shop, so running a shop is probably little too extreme, I am saying,
#
but there are many villages, so we were well to do relatively in that particular place,
#
we would be very poor when you compare it with some place, let's say in Delhi, but in
#
our village we were okay to do, we were well to do, right.
#
So I basically understood about money, I understood about how to even build a business, how to
#
treat people, how to, so for example one of the best things about my father that I carried
#
from him in my business is that in the village he used to do the grain work in the shop,
#
basically to buy grain from the farmer, then sell it in the market, trader basically, right,
#
that way, so you need a lot of labour to carry on those tasks etc. and I know that all their
#
lunch used to be cooked by my mom throughout, at home they used to sit there and eat where
#
we used to eat basically and a lot of these people I would address as uncle, uncle, uncle,
#
And which ended up giving me very important life lessons like people are people, their
#
economic status doesn't define who they are and how you treat them, essentially basically,
#
right and I don't think my father was trying to teach me that, but he ended up basically
#
teaching me that in the process and all basically, I see a lot of our shop used to have a poster
#
and which I again carry with me till date and a philosophy that I use in my business,
#
it used to say that Dukaan Mera Mandir, Grahat Mera Devta and you can find it in most of
#
the Marwadi family shops basically, and today Jay Brazos writes a white paper on this saying
#
that you know why should you build customer first businesses and whatever basically right
#
and becomes a huge philosophy and like the entire startup world is like Jay Brazos is
#
a god and all, but it was it's as simple as that right, that your shop is that holy space
#
where you build it, it has to be as holy as a temple, which means you hold yourself to
#
the highest level of integrity, honesty, you do the most important things etc. and then
#
at the same time, the customer is my God, there is nothing above God, so if the customer
#
is equal to your God, then basically you treat them like that right, so I learned that and
#
again unknowingly I carried it, I like to believe that we have built very customer first
#
businesses over time and integrity has been one thing, one value that I don't like to
#
compromise on, you do whatever, everything is equal, but you can't compromise on integrity
#
essentially, actually these things are again my environment, things around me, how my family
#
treated us and they behaved probably around that, so I learned from that.
#
Then once I went to Kota and I discovered the world, I discovered that like you said
#
money is just a means to an end and I think I discovered it in Kota, but I didn't know
#
it and then I realized when I was in college, when I ended up in Chennai in college and
#
like a 100x larger world suddenly opened up right, Haryana to Kota is you don't get a
#
culture shock, from there you go to Chennai and like you have a college which has like
#
people from all over the country including Chennai itself etc. and like there's a culture
#
shock that you realize that this country is so large, there's so many people, of course
#
I also had aged by then so I and I had access to computer, internet etc. so my knowledge
#
had expanded to a very large extent compared to where it was again relatively, so now I
#
knew that money only is a means to an end, money allows you to do what you want to do,
#
but it cannot be the goal because then you have a very shallow goal, you can make money
#
through so many different ways right and it matters why you want to do what you want to
#
do and so it matters how you make that money essentially and then why do you want to make
#
it the way you want to make it essentially right, so I think those questions became important
#
and credit were due, one of my college senior, his name is Harsh Mani Tripathi, he is an
#
entrepreneur himself, sold one of his companies to Upgrad, he was the one who basically helped
#
me discover this, he asked me this in the first year, second year, we met in end of
#
first year, so he asked me in the second year that why do you, like what do you want to
#
do, what's your actual goal in life and he asked me why and I gave all the wrong regions
#
I don't want to work for anyone, I want to make a lot of money, I want to be famous and
#
I don't like to do a job, I don't think I made for a job, all of that stuff and then
#
I ended up at a place where I realized that it doesn't matter if I do a job, doesn't matter
#
if I make a lot of money or not make a lot of money, what I want to do is that I want
#
to do something that really matters, what gives me for example every time I watch a
#
movie where an underdog wins I cry, when I see a scene filled with compassion without
#
an exception I cry, so those are the things that make me click and so I realized that
#
all I want to do is just help people and if in the process if I can make a lot of money
#
great, awesome, if not then probably not right and which is why in the first year itself
#
and again articulation happened in second year when Harzbi asked me about all this but first
#
year itself I started an NGO, again I don't talk about it a lot anymore but I started
#
an NGO, I discovered that I am a very patriotic person, I love my country and like very intrinsic
#
desire to do something for the country and like all that feeling right, very revolutionary
#
type, so I started an NGO called Badlega Bharat and which was triggered by nothing
#
but simple that I realized that youth in this country, we keep saying that 67% of the population
#
of this country is a young population below 35, assertive but I saw most people around
#
me in college were preparing for GRE, they are going to write an exam, go do MS somewhere
#
and they are never coming back right, so these guys are not assets probably, these are at
#
least I thought at that one in time again has changed to a large extent now but I thought
#
these are liabilities, these guys are just going to go away from this country, they are
#
not going to probably come back here ever again, not care about this, they don't care
#
the problems that we have in this country, I thought like that and so I said nobody speaks
#
to the youth in their language, the language that they understand, nobody talks to us with
#
respect and asks us ki yaar ki des mein problem kya hai aur uska solution kya hai and what
#
you are going to tell me is it matters, so I started this NGO called Badlega Bharat then
#
the idea was that we will talk about the issues around youth, okay try in their own language
#
and we understand, so it was also probably my first content company because this NGO
#
was nothing but a website, I learnt to make websites just for that along with and I found
#
my co-founders also because of that, one of the best thing that happened to me ever Shashank
#
Vaishnava, I found him because of that, so we started this NGO called Badlega Bharat
#
and it was basically a blog where we would have 6-7 sections and we would write about
#
like incredible India, did you know and like something like 6-7 sections and as the luck
#
would have it, 2010 ki baat hai yeh sab, the Anna Hazare movement happened right and discovered
#
even the deeper like very deep desire to do something with the country etc again we became
#
very we joined the movement of course, most of the people did at that one in time, we
#
led the student movement in Chennai for that, for the first time ever in SRM University
#
we did a sort of a political event, we carried out a candle march with 3000 students taking
#
a part in it like crazy stuff you know, I would from our college is like at the suburb
#
and SRM is at like 40-45 kilometers away from the main city, we would take a local train
#
every day after college in the evening, go to the protest site in Chennai and like be
#
part of that 2-3 hours like all chanting all that stuff and I had some photos where like
#
Tiranga bandha hu aise mathe pe and like I am giving an interview and all that stuff,
#
very, very high energy stuff basically back in those days right, in the process I think
#
we also realized ki yaar Deshbhakti free mein nahi hoti hai, you need money even to run
#
an NGO and to do all things we wanted to do and which is what led us to starting this
#
company essentially, yeh Harsh Bhaiya se humari mulakat aise, end of first year, we started
#
this in the second semester, end of first year, so we became sort of famous because of this
#
candle march and all and so Harsh Bhaiya reached out to us, he discovered us, he reached out
#
to us, he met us very, very clearly remember it and like this was the last day of our first
#
year, we met in a canteen and he asked us like yaar bahot sahi hai toh bahot amazing
#
kaam kar rahe ho, tum super proud hai wo se and he had his own company already running
#
at that point in time, he said tum mere liye website banauge, like tum logne website banate
#
hai, why don't you do it for me and I'll pay you for it and which is when we were like
#
okay this could be a very good way for us to make money and we use that money to basically
#
fuel our NGO and basically do it what we want to do, that's how we started our first ever
#
company essentially, the end of first year of engineering, so we started that, another
#
reason I, since we were talking about dreams etc, another reason I wanted to, we started
#
that NGO and I wanted to build this was because and this was before the movement divided got
#
divided into a movement and a political party etc, I always believed that politics is a
#
very holy profession if done for the right reasons and the right ways and is the one
#
of the most effective ways of creating large scale impact, again coming back to the same
#
thing that I wanted to create large scale impact, so I've been very fascinated by politics
#
as a profession and mere life mein do be hags hai, so one of them is that I genuinely believe
#
that at some point in time, let me say this anyways out loud on your podcast, it is going
#
to go to some people but anyways that I believe that I will become the prime minister of this
#
country one day, it's not a dream anymore, I genuinely believe that it will happen at
#
some point in time and second is that I will die on mars, I will not live here for the
#
entire life, I genuinely again believe in the mission of making humans a multi-planetary
#
species and setting up cities on mars and within my lifetime I believe I'll end up
#
on mars and I'll take my final breath over there, so Badlega Bharat one of the reason
#
was also because I wanted to actually turn it into a myneta.info jaisa hai na, so I actually
#
wanted to create a platform like that ki kyaar ek mobile phone kridhne jaate hain to usko
#
compare kar sakte hain, aap 4 alag lag companies ke, 4 alag lag price point ke feature wise
#
compare kar sakte hain aur hum agle paath saal ka fate decide kar rahe hote hain and
#
we don't have any way to compare the people that we are voting for on their merits and
#
so I wanted to build a platform, Badlega Bharat ka larger vision was actually to do that
#
and so change the country through making impact in politics essentially ki rajniti ko agar
#
change karenge toh desh badlega apne aap essentially that was a thought, basic thought around it.
#
Once we got into entrepreneurship that kind of took a back seat over time and like this
#
the other side of it took off and so happened, so the reason I am in content now coming to
#
that is also for the same reasons that and maine aaj pehli baar yeh concept suna aapse
#
thick desire aur thin desire, mujhe lagta hai it's one of my thick desires that I just
#
want to do anything that allows me to do something with the masses, that's my calling if that
#
is the right word to quote here, to content again I believe that is the most powerful
#
medium of mass influence and distribution content may be if content is king distribution
#
is good I keep saying that, so asli game distribution ka yeh, we record this podcast if let's say
#
10 people hear it versus 10,000 people hear it, it makes a lot of difference in the value
#
that we can create like both of our time, so bus maine issi liye what I am doing, VT
#
feed got shut down, I again started a content company with the same reason that I believe
#
is one of the most powerful ways of being able to create a change at a mass level etc.
#
I don't know if this answers your question at all.
#
It's wonderful and for what it's worth I don't find your two aims outlandish at all I mean
#
it is not something that you know my sense is that the people who actually achieve things
#
are the people who dream big right, so you should have big dreams you know and you can
#
either dream big by you know sitting in a room or sitting quietly in office or not doing
#
something about it but clearly from your biography you've been out there and you're always doing
#
things and you're always trying new things. I want to ask you sort of a broader question
#
about a clash that I think all of us face in our lives and a clash that determines the
#
direction people go down on and certain kinds of people may go in different directions and
#
that's a clash between having passion slash principles slash dreams and also responding
#
to incentives and taking reality into account and going you know sort of according to that.
#
For example you know at one point you know in one of your other interviews you've spoken
#
about how you know there were nine of you which became seven of you who you know first
#
started the thing and it was only the three of you who were passionate enough to stick
#
with it and the others kind of drifted away and because you know other priorities came
#
and all of that and equally in another context you mentioned politics and what I often say
#
about politics is that politics will always corrode character because you can get into
#
politics for all the right reasons that these are my principles I want to do all these good
#
things but then the reality of politics is that to rise within a political system you
#
make so many compromises and all of that that by the time you actually get somewhere those
#
initial principles have all gone or at best they are posturing your actions have changed
#
who you are it doesn't matter anymore for example I wrote a column once about why you
#
know people ask the question why were our freedom fighters such great leaders and why
#
don't we have that quality of leader today and my candidate answer for that was key you
#
know those guys had no power to lust for they were animated by higher principles they had
#
no power to lust for so you attracted that kind of principled person who didn't give
#
a shit about consequences and they were in it and and today it's all a game of you have
#
an all-powerful predatory state it's all a game of power power interacts with money in
#
specific ways that you know we know about and it attracts therefore that kind of person
#
so you know and therefore it also seems to me that the kind of person who says key music
#
and I hear that you know you've spoken about how through all your ventures every time you
#
think you're doing well something or the other will bring you crashing down and then you
#
go again and then you go again and then you go again and I can totally imagine that at
#
different points of the journey you could easily have said key TKR engineering job let
#
me whatever but you get up and you keep trying again and that takes a particular kind of
#
person and most people would not do that they would at some point be practical they would
#
say key you know my chances of success are 1% 99% I'm going to fail let me just get the
#
guaranteed income and build a stable life and all of that and you didn't do that and
#
looking around you you know so what is your sense of that because you've been on this
#
journey with people who have moved away and given up and with people who stuck to it and
#
in this on this general larger question of you know being principled and sticking to
#
something because you're passionate about it or just taking a conventional route you
#
know but I mean how do you look at it and what are the observations you made during
#
this journey on this so let me first state that it's not like there has never been an
#
instance where I have not thought about it right I mean life may as you must have found
#
during your research key what's our ups and downs right so there are times where I have
#
thought about it there are times where my family said what the hell I mean basically
#
why are you struggling so much right and I just turned 31 three days ago and I think
#
it's not that old but I feel very old because of probably the kind of experience we have
#
had in last I've been doing this for 12 years now and I had my fair share of it right so
#
it has happened that my father says many times that given the start-up environment out there
#
I can probably get a crore or so as a salary out there right I have also thought many times
#
my father also says that if we spend affluently we can spend 10 lakhs that's it 10-12 lakhs
#
lakhs a month more than that our family doesn't have the courage to spend means they don't
#
know how to spend on our normal day-to-day life basically so even if I get half of what
#
I just said this is more money than our family can ever consume basically right which is
#
when I realized that it's probably not about money for me anymore like one of the validations
#
that I got and I'm not doing it for money anyways right and I think I will never make
#
the mistake of saying that this is very easy or once you believe in something it all comes
#
out no no it doesn't happen like that it's very hard to stick to what you believe in
#
principal life is a very troubled life to be honest there has been instances where there
#
has been offers where I could have made easy money even in the business right and I decided
#
not to and again I've gotten slack from my family from even from my co-founders at times
#
and I'm like yaar matlab teri values ke chakkar mein sab but then I think maa unko ek hi
#
baat bolta hu yaar and see kahi baar hoti jaise yaar 10-12 saal ho gaya toh bahut humare
#
peers hain jino ne companya banayi hain jo acha kar rahe hain kisi ko exit mil gaya kisi
#
ne bada round raise kar liya secondaries ho gayi unke toh bahut they live an affluent
#
life and all right one of my co-founder was telling me once ki yaar he met one of those
#
people and in and some event and he's doing like a he met one of our peers basically peers
#
bhi nahi humara affiliate hoda tha wanda kabhi kisi samayi jindagi mein and he's now doing
#
like phenomenally well he's made a lot of money in life and he met him one of my co-founder
#
met him and he said I met him and I went back to my hotel and I cried and I kept kind of
#
like fadh like what am I doing with my life I think it has happened to me also there are
#
times when our peers do really amazingly well and I want to I feel happy for them but I
#
feel very sad for myself I feel jealous to be honest you know it feels ki yaar mainne
#
kya galat kiya hai life mein I've been doing when things don't work out you ask yourself
#
yaar main toh sab kisi ka bura bhi nahi kiya basically in a very desi term kiyaar main
#
toh kisi ka bura bhi nahi kiyaar so why the hell is it so you there are my point the point
#
that the larger point I'm trying to make is that ki sense of doubt prevails at all times
#
to be honest it's there a constant question mark hovering right over your head at all
#
times right but then I think a sense of purpose in life outweighs all of it when once you
#
once you realize that yaar mainne kya suna tha yaar I'm not able to remember who to
#
credit it for mainne kya suna tha kiyaar if you really want I think navel ka hi coat hai
#
ki when you feel jealous of someone when you feel kiyaar yeh dekho then you should be willing
#
to you know replace every aspect of your life with every aspect of their life toh mainne
#
yeh bahut use karta hu aaj kal jab aisa hota hai toh I go back and I ask myself that malhab
#
do I want to be Amit and do I want to be everything that Amit is today versus what I am which
#
includes my family my wife you know and it reminds me that I am so much more beyond just
#
my work and I have a life and a family and so much more right and I think usse kaafi
#
madad milti hai continue karne mein basically yaar himmat milti hai bahut andar se ki I can
#
keep doing what I'm doing for a long time basically and dosara paise ka moh jab khatam
#
ho ana ek baar I think it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me the fact that
#
and again I am an entrepreneur I am building a company so I am a capitalist person at the
#
end of the day so I am not saying I am a socialist I am not saying that I will distribute all
#
my money whatever the hell right I am saying I want to make money but I am not driven by
#
it anymore right I don't care about how much I make anymore right and like you said it's
#
a means to an end and it's a very important distinction between and most people don't
#
I think most people don't realize that right toh jis din I think wo mere dimaag mein wo
#
aaya us din se it has been a liberation from there onwards ki yaar paise ka moh nahi hain
#
toh aap decisions asaan ho jaate hain aapke principal life like you said asaan ho jati
#
hai toh follow your passion asaan ho jata hai but Viti Feed ke khatam hone ke baad stage
#
banana was the most foolish decision from a rational point of view from everyone that
#
we are because it's probably one of the most difficult businesses that you can build right
#
every other player is an incumbent every other player I know we will talk about it later
#
but point being that it was a very hard thing to do but did it because it felt like the
#
right thing to do so I think if any listener out there wants to live a principal life I
#
would say if the first thing you should do is sit down and resolve your feelings about
#
money and how you feel about it because the world we live in today money you may not know
#
it but it does impact every decision we make every second out there so yeah that's what
#
That's inspiring and that's a fantastic frame also that if you feel jealous of someone replace
#
every aspect of their lives I'm going to use it on myself every time I look at someone
#
and say ki aare I wish yeh meri jaga hota and also another aside I think you know being
#
a capitalist is not something anybody should say apologetically I think capitalist is a
#
good word because you know as you would know being a baniya how do you make money you make
#
money by making someone else better off by giving them what they want and what they value
#
you know that whole thing about the grahag being bhagwan you know ussi toh hota hai it's
#
You create something that somebody feels valuable enough that they are ready to pay for it yeah
#
which means you created enough value for them so yeah building businesses is not a bad thing
#
at all right but humare des mein yeh bahut ek samasya aur bhi hai ki we make our entrepreneurs
#
villains basically nah humare yaar paisa kamana is not looked at a very nice thing actually
#
amir amir aadmi by default kharab ho jata hai pariwaar mein jo thoda amir ho jata hai
#
usko arey ho toh aaj kal bahut bade aadmi ho gaye hain hai wo bichara ne kuch bhi galag
#
nahi kiya ho gaya phir bhi usko yeh bolenge ab wo aadmi bada hota hai toh uske pa samay
#
ki by default kami hoti hai by chance usne aapka ek baar phone nahi uthaya hai toh arey
#
aapka aap phone uthaya hai wo bade aadmi ho gaye hain ho gaya and all that stuff right so
#
we actually all grow up feeling that making money is a bad thing somehow
#
bada yeh contradiction hai humare life mein ek taraf humare humare families hume batata
#
nahi paisa kamana paisa kamana usri taraf wo jo paisa kamana hota uske liye sab kuch
#
kharabi baat ho riti hai aapas mein right and so i think we need to celebrate our entrepreneurs more
#
versus probably the other people that we celebrate so much and yeah like you said it's not a bad
#
thing no i think like the like the frame that i look at it as a writer john stossel had once
#
spoken of the double thank you moment ki aap cafe gaye aap coffee kharid le kharid re hai
#
and when the you know the person hands you the coffee you say thank you she says thank you
#
right and what's happening here is that you value the coffee more than the money you paid for it
#
and the cafe values the money more than the coffee they gave you so both are benefiting and i think
#
india mein image kharab isliye hai ki india mein like hum jo baat kar rahe hai double thank you
#
moment positive sum wo matlab free market mein hoti hai lekin india mein bahut cronyism rahi hai
#
where the state with this power is ruling everything and a lot of the people who are making money are
#
not necessarily providing a service but they're using the power of the state to take a monopoly
#
in some area and so on and so forth people have made money through undue advantages yeah
#
toh i think matlab ki ye humari legacy hai kyunki definitely 70s 80s you know when i was a kid in
#
the 80s image ye thi and to some extent matlab ki asani ki businessmen had a choice they had to
#
work within the system or asahi tha but i think that image is changing slightly my next question
#
is you know what i'm sort of really impressed and moved by your answers is a self-reflective nature
#
that you have not just sat back and thought a lot about the business and the things that you do
#
you've also sat back and thought a lot about yourself in the questions that you asked yourself
#
and so on and so forth and i remember reading this chapter on wikifeed in snigdha punam's book
#
dreamers where she speaks about how you have a plaster on your hand and the reason you had that
#
plaster on your hand is because you had gotten angry and punched the wall right and apka ek
#
maine youtube pe talk bhi dekha ja 2016 se jo bo plaster aapke haath pe hai and i am like one of
#
course that anger is coming from a place of intense desire and two i am sure you've also during this
#
time therefore reflected on all of these aspects figured out how to moderate that desire figured
#
out how to channel the anger so take me through a little bit of your personal journey and the sort
#
of growth that you've had in this period oh very interesting thank you that you actually went through
#
so much and asked this question yeah i was actually a very short-tempered person so to say
#
right and i have actually thought about it a lot so much so that last especially last three years
#
when the wikifeed situation happened it changed me as a person a lot right because it meant that
#
i had a lot of time to reflect etc i had almost a decade of being an entrepreneur in a certain way
#
and then all of a sudden there was emptiness and i was able to think about what am i doing
#
and i realized that it's actually very bad for me in very in a lot of different ways and so
#
i made it as one of the reasons why i went to therapy i've been doing therapy for last two and
#
half years two and a half years now and i i also have an executive coach which has helped actually
#
she was the one who helped me work through my anger first and then therapy of course dug a
#
little deeper figured out where it comes from etc during my reflection what i realized was that
#
apart from the fact that so my mom is a very angry person and i grew up and and her own
#
i had a very strained relationship because of that with her and then therapy again helped me
#
reflect a lot on that and figure out why was it and like how how it happened and why my mom was
#
or is the way she is etc right but i think i probably inherited some of it from her
#
and then i made it my coping mechanism for multiple things one for a lot of inferiority complex
#
right that i started this company when i was 19 right along so was shank and praveen was
#
like 16 right or younger basically so i look we are daddy
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even now i'm not like a very macho man type right i'm i'm very sleek guy that way
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right and they would not give you the same kind of respect if a man in his 40s walks in
#
and doesn't know shit but still will get the respect because
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basically or whatever again another contradiction in our indian society right
#
then you want people to work for you i i was hiring people when we were 20 21 something like that
#
right and again growing up
#
all of these things were there with me right some of the bad ones that i carried from my family
#
and business that way right so my way of establishing my authority as a ceo on my team
#
was through being very strict and tough right and and i had a problem of anger but i would
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basically now justify it by saying that it is important it is needed uh for me to and i i did
#
this for four five six years probably more than that
#
i hope some of them listen it now i was thinking to write
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a letter to all my ex-employees at witty feed and i wanted to write an apology letter to all of them
#
saying that it feels like i was a very toxic boss because i used to get angry a lot i don't
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believe i was a bad boss to them actually but that part of me was very toxic right i i believe that
#
we have built witty feed with a with an amazing culture cared about people but there were two
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extremes of me and there is one side where i was i was get so angry and the people would be scared
#
of talking to me and the other side which would be like extremely empathetic you know go 10 steps
#
out of the way to do anything for those people that they need right and which is why so many
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people stuck with us even when we had nothing right than during the witty feed thing to justify
#
and i started a company it was such a busy thing to do but i never had a chance to sit down and
#
think about who am i what am i doing here right because i had gone through a very amazing journey
#
of building a company and i got married which is another story and so much more right so
#
your belief system changes but not many of us realize that and realize the fact that we need
#
to sit down and reflect on it and think about it
#
you may believe the same or it might have changed
#
you know on the opposite 180 degree
#
but you will only realize that when you will sit down and reflect on it
#
and that awareness of reflection is something that was missing and i was so busy
#
end of 2018 when this witty feed thing happened and again i'm very lucky for this one person
#
hersbya hersbya he had just joined us october 2018 he joined us november 2018
#
the witty feed thing happened but he he's the man that he is so he decided to stick with us and
#
he is someone who is one of the most articulate person
#
most articulate person that you will meet and like he has these deep thoughts he'll ask you questions
#
he'll make you think about things that you've never done that and which is where i realized
#
this anger is actually bad for everything like it's very toxic for the people who have to face it
#
because of me more importantly it is even more toxic to me my mental health even my physical
#
health and i'm no shame in saying it now because i thankfully worked out
#
through it that i used to shout so much so that my stomach used to hurt
#
and i think about it today and i'm like why why did i do so much harm to myself
#
there's no reason but just that i wanted to ensure that you know i am the alpha in the room
#
and there is an authority i'm the ceo i have 150 people to manage and i'm 23 24 right like how do you
#
comprehend that and and there was so much inferiority complex inbuilt in me
#
that i come from a village, speak more english in front of people who dress in a certain way
#
people who speak in a certain way people who eat certain kind of there was a lot of inferiority
#
that that i've been able to thankfully i think work out and process in last few years last
#
three four years especially and i'm so happy that i'm actually a better person at the end of it now
#
but yeah maybe this podcast is the way to do it i am really sorry for all those people who had to
#
go through this because of something that that was truly just my internal stuff.
#
No when you say you're 31 you know most people who are 31 or most people at any age don't really go
#
through this period of self-reflection where they can you know talk about themselves in the way that
#
they have my other question is this you know sort of following on from what you said about controlling
#
your anger that do you not feel angry anymore or do you still feel angry but you immediately
#
control it because you have the self-awareness i am i absolutely feel angry there's there's no
#
doubt about it right but now i'm aware of it i can look at myself in third so the way i process
#
through my anger is that my therapy and my coach they were able to help me look at myself like time
#
travel basically you know when i'm about to get angry 90 percent of the times i am able to
#
see through five minutes down the line and what am i going to do like literally i can stand as
#
a third person i'm and i'm looking at the entire scene how am i behaving right now and how am i
#
going to make the other person feel and how how am i i am going to feel in in five ten minutes
#
from now and i would feel terrible every time after getting angry by the best any palabby
#
because like i said that the true self in me was in a very empathetic person i would feel
#
almost every single time i would go and say sorry to those people and all then you've done the
#
damage you've done right so i i'm able to visualize that now right and so 90 percent of the time i'm
#
like do you want to feel like this do you want to make him feel or her feel like this
#
and and i realize there's a better and my literally sentence repeat
#
if i'm going to say something in a certain way to someone i reiterate that sentence and i'm like
#
i'm like there's a better way of saying it like
#
and i'm i'm like i'm able to somehow do that you know thanks to my coach and my therapist
#
i'm able to do that and that is what basically avoids so i i don't think my anger went away
#
because that's who i am but i know how to work through it now and i'm able to process it basically
#
so one of the concepts in philosophy which had a big influence on me and i think about it often
#
is immanuel cantt's categorical imperative and basically what it says is that you should never
#
treat other people as a means to an end but as an end in themselves right and sometimes when i look
#
at all of us look at myself look around at people and i have to ask myself the question that am i
#
treating other people even those who are close to me closest to me as a means to an end that you
#
know we all have a play in our heads and we are the central character and everyone else is a prop
#
right so i consciously try to then make the effort that you step back and you think of other people
#
as people and and partly this plays through in conversation also like one of the things that
#
doing this long-form show has taught me is that just listen like stephen covey once said that we
#
don't listen to understand we listen to respond or usmekhya hai usme pura ego hai so i could be
#
talking to you but everything is about my ego i am the central character you are a prop who is
#
there for my amusement but then if you really listen then you treat the other person as an end
#
in themselves then you are trying to learn from them then it's not about your ego then you're
#
just taking it in and i find that our default mode can sometimes be that our main character oh
#
baki sab you know it it could be like baki sab could like this virtual reality you know it could
#
be a similar thing that you are playing a game and everybody else is a character in this virtual
#
reality around you and then you have to remind myself and and i thought of this because you know
#
when you were speaking this sort of these moments of pause when you get angry and you ask yourself
#
should i say it like this or should i say it like that what you are i think doing immediately in
#
that moment is converting that person from just a means to an end to an end in themselves right
#
this person is a human being i got to think about how they will feel and which you would do anyway
#
like you said because that empathy is also inbuilt so you know and and you've spoken earlier in other
#
sort of talks and interviews you gave i think a tedx talk on this which i'll link from the show
#
notes where you speak about the importance of people you know the importance of you know how
#
you deal with people how you manage people all of that so take me through your learnings in this
#
not just from the point of view of a manager with so many people working for you but also from a
#
personal point of view yeah before that i remember one thing that you asked me do you still get angry
#
etc right so just yesterday i lost myself with my father we were having a discussion and i
#
and maybe when you were asking the question i was thinking about it that okay it happened to me yesterday
#
and so it happens even now right and again i felt terrible i wrote my apology message
#
before sleeping etc basically see people i didn't know about the philosophy that you said but i think
#
i i look at people in a similar manner like that's my articulation of it also that people are people
#
can never be a means to an end no matter who they are basically if you try to
#
to think about how is it going to feel if it were you
#
i think it changes your entire perspective right so just say while building the company
#
we always so customer god right but your people are equally important
#
they are basically they say that god is in every corner so if you can treat people better
#
that's probably the best worship of a god anyways right so your people if you treat them properly
#
so they will take care of your they are the priest
#
so you have to anyways really be you know very you have to be taking care of your people
#
anybody basically so you i think we are nothing but a sum of people that we earn in life and at
#
least in my understanding every relationship has to be earned
#
but again if we if we want to have them and build on them we have to earn those relationships
#
everybody says you have to invest into relationships you really have to invest in your people right so
#
you you have to do that right so i tried that is one of my modus operandi and i learned it
#
while i i think i think empathy natural my father is a very empathetic person
#
but he has other traits also i'm not sure if it came it came from him but
#
there are a lot of things that i keep wondering why am i the way i am a lot of these times because i
#
don't see my surroundings which would have led to this i don't see my parents or anybody in
#
my family who would have impacted me to be that way but anyways so so just say
#
one of the philosophies that i built it on was that if you share the company what you're building
#
i didn't know about e-shops back then so i built it with absolute transparency so one of the things
#
that i value most and is most critical thing in my understanding or to build relationships and value
#
people is you have to be very transparent so i built my companies with at most transparency
#
everybody knows everything about the company if you are working with us you can call our accountant
#
and ask him the most secret questions and there is no secret there basically you will know everything
#
right if you trust me with your career which is like one of the most important parts of your life
#
then i need to trust you with the information and that this company has right and why should
#
anything be hidden from you at least i still believe in you i don't know what will happen if you grow up
#
like you said politics changes your character i think it happens in business too when businesses grow up
#
but hopefully they haven't gone there right so they can maintain till now i built it with absolute transparency
#
i'm in open town halls i tell them about the the worst of the things in the company what's going wrong
#
what's going right i basically speak very transparently to my people second
#
i have i think all the money that lives in our account at any point i think that
#
the value of that money is the same as much as it can be useful to us right again means to an end
#
right so if any of our employees ever needed any money then i don't think we would have ever
#
refused i don't remember i mean that old company is closed but there are still some people's
#
unsecured loans lying around that they haven't returned basically there are a lot of people
#
three four people that i can think of now who still haven't returned that money basically so
#
i always felt that this person needs two or three or four lakhs whatever he needs
#
in my account he has more money than that and this three lakh four lakh is not going to impact
#
make a dent in this entire thing and but if he gets it his life changes if i don't give these three or four lakhs
#
he will go away from somewhere he will take a loan if he doesn't get a bank loan he will pick up a hundi
#
whatever means he will unnecessarily become part of that monstrous interest rates
#
and he will get stuck in a debt cycle and i used to think that the stress he will have in his life
#
is better than the interest rate of this money that if he doesn't have that much stress in his life
#
this guy will be more productive my way of justifying it as a business was that but then
#
what i felt was okay here i kept the money here it was needed it was used basically right so we
#
used to do one of those things we still if anyone in the company needs money they get it basically
#
whatever is needed another philosophy outside company or in company i have always followed
#
with people is that whether you are involved in someone's happiness or not doesn't matter to anyone
#
if someone calls you to a wedding and you don't go then the wedding won't stop
#
but they're not going to really remember it or care about it too much except it's like really
#
close friend or whatever right but if someone is in pain like let's say somebody has a family member
#
passed away and if you're not there at that point in time they are going to remember you for the
#
rest of their life and so then you should always be there for people you care about
#
when they are down when the chips are down because that's when everyone says that
#
if i say that then i need to be with you when you are your chips are down right
#
right so i used to make this a point and i try to do this even today
#
one of my employees during witty feed days lost their grandmother and
#
but i felt very contentful going there and i think i made a lifelong relationship with that guy by doing that
#
i took the pain to go there and
#
you have no right to complain that people
#
were not with you when chips are down when your chips were down if you before that have not been
#
with those all those people when their chips were down because that's another thing that
#
i really follow a lot in life not your typical management stuff right but i follow this also
#
what else one interesting thing that you'd mentioned in one of your interviews was
#
and this also struck me as very self-aware at the time that you know you might have a hundred
#
employees so for you talking to one employee for a minute it's just oh you have a hundred of them
#
but for that person that person is one boss yeah and talking to you kind of makes a little bit of
#
absolutely it makes or breaks that day because
#
you can't look at people as employees you can't look at them as one number on a balance sheet
#
or on an excel sheet basically you have to look at them as people when you do that
#
i think the entire perspective changes and you were mentioning that there are certain
#
characteristics that you look back on and you wonder how did i become like this
#
and like two of those elements of course are those two sides of the same coin perhaps anger
#
and empathy which you mentioned which are interesting to you what else yeah just say i don't
#
care about money my entire family does i like to just within my family also i have a very large
#
family actually very big father people are four brothers five sisters mother people are also four
#
brothers five sisters very big especially on my father's side i come from haryana so it's a
#
little bit of a misogynistic family so i have more influence on father's side so i have two
#
older brothers my two uncles and i have three cousins who are elder to me but i still have like
#
i am positioned in the family as sort of a pseudo leader of the house larger family and i think i
#
have kind of given that place to myself i conducted myself in a way that it basically became mine right
#
why i was very close to my grandfather so he was a very smart guy he wanted
#
i'm a big fan of joint family and all that stuff so and i kind of carried
#
that legacy from him to kechalabad but like now so those leadership type qualities are like i don't see
#
in such a big family even one person who has something like this basically something will happen
#
i mean there will be such characteristics right it will be a little self-boosting but i like to
#
believe that i'm a very selfless person well i have achieved 70 percent of that at least
#
well there are times when i become selfish but i like to believe well the 30 times when i'm not
#
it was a very selfish thing to do you know i don't think i have very selfless family
#
not many people are like that my mother had some of it she used to make so many things for everybody
#
in the village sometimes she used to make sweets for them sometimes she used to make a sweater for them
#
sometimes she used to do something but other than that i mean there is no such selfless type family
#
there are very self-centered people like that then there are many things i mean sometimes i think
#
that sometimes i feel very out of the place in my own family that i don't know i mean like
#
i like to believe i'm a very liberal person by thoughts i don't have a family which is very liberal
#
by thoughts at all right i don't know i can't remember now there are so many things like i said
#
sometimes it feels like i'm out of the place how was i born in this family
#
and i love all of them either nice people of course i i ended up like this for some reason
#
because they were around me right but sometimes i feel like how did i end up the way i ended up
#
with these guys right so there's an aspiration sorry sorry if you remember there is no aspiration
#
in the family anywhere right it's very important human trait you have to do something big in life
#
no one has to do it i mean keep pushing keep pushing keep pushing i i i i'll tell you about the 11th
#
class i remember an anecdote sorry you say i'm okay it's okay if i share that right so so
#
my family at that time we all grew up i was in 11th i mean my cousins were one of us one of the
#
cousins was married and other one was about to get married or something so i mean it became a very big
#
family we were still a joint family and at that time it was basically about being separated
#
my grandfather was still there he was very unhappy and like very sad about it but he had nothing
#
i was in the quota i came back and i made a presentation i literally made a powerpoint
#
presentation okay i had a computer i made a powerpoint presentation and basically all the
#
men in the house because they are the ones who decide type men there i basically pulled all of
#
them in one room we are eight cousins all seven of us we put all of them in one
#
room and i presented a grand vision of building the single group one day i was like you have heard
#
ambani you have heard birlaz you have heard all these names but have you ever heard of a single
#
group someone very big we will make it why don't like four of you eight of us 12 people if we all
#
do some business like a very grand vision all of that talk about money everyone listens in our
#
house we can make thousands of crores of money we will make big businesses we will do this and that
#
they of course listen to it it has been a few days after six months finally they had to
#
but nobody cared about it later on i mean in my family i mean it's basically a useless thing that
#
i did at that point in time basically right one of my cousins started a mobile shop in the village
#
he left studies at that time and my belief was that you will have to study if you want to make a single group
#
i slept in the same room with him that night and i cried the entire night
#
because he left his education and started a shop i was like how will we make a single
#
group if you leave it like this how will it happen and all that stuff right and i mean so which is
#
like how like sometimes i feel out of the place in the family that i am i love all of them but
#
so you you mentioned that you are a selfless person and i am not such a selfless person but
#
for the moment i can see that i think both of us need a break so let's be selfish take a
#
short break and come back after that long before i was a podcaster i was a writer in fact chances
#
are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog india uncut which was active between 2003
#
and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time i love the freedom the form gave me and i feel i
#
was shaped by it in many ways i exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think
#
about many different things because i wrote about many different things well that phase in my life
#
ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now i'm doing it through a newsletter
#
i have started the india uncut newsletter at india uncut dot subtract dot com where i will
#
write regularly about whatever catches my fancy i'll write about some of the themes i cover in
#
this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to india uncut dot subtract dot com
#
and subscribe it is free once you sign up each new installment that i write will land up in your
#
email inbox you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the india uncut newsletter
#
at india uncut dot subtract dot com thank you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with vines single and we've had our
#
little selfish break and now it's time to just open up and sort of have a conversation again
#
and tell me now about you know that part of the journey which eventually ends up in in witty feed
#
like you've you know we've gone with you to college and that sort of that change has been
#
happening you've started your little NGO you've started this little site business making websites
#
then eventually how did you sort of gravitate towards witty feed happening yeah so like i
#
told you the journey started with that NGO and the idea of funding that NGO we were seven people
#
when we started it which is how the first the name of our legal entity also came up the company was
#
called vatsana technologies and vatsana also it's a thai word which means trust actually and
#
that's how we ended up like adopting the name it's initial of everybody's name all seven people's
#
name essentially so we started to make websites software for people the literally 500-500 website
#
all your pecker movers all your property guys and all and this is what 2010-11 those years right so
#
a website was a cool thing basically and this was a time when here in karol bagh or somewhere
#
i used to go to ask people for work essentially when we used to come from chennai we would get
#
some clients and time when people will not take us seriously they are 19-20 year old boys basically
#
what will they do they will run away with money or whatever basically all that stuff right
#
right after since badlega bharat mein we we didn't know like when i look back at it now
#
now we know that it was a content thing at the end of the day we were writing lot of content etc
#
we had got a taste of it facebook happened basically around that time to us and praveen
#
actually started a facebook page which was called amazing things in the world and the idea was very
#
simple the idea was kiyaar hum log aise bata bata baat karte hai we were like duniya mein
#
itna negative negative hi kyun aata hai sab kuch media mein dekho aap to social media you know all
#
your electronic media aap facebook pe dekhlo aap new channels pe dekhlo har koi aise unko dekha
#
lagta ki duniya bas kharam hone wali abhi sab kuch kharab chal raha hai duniya mein whereas the world
#
definitely has more good than bad right and that thought led us to sort of a brainstorming overnight
#
thinking that ki what we realized was kiyaar negative is naturally viral because we are
#
genetically wired to spread bad news right because see malab humari animal instincts to
#
ye hi kaiti hai na the moment i see danger the moment i see something bad i am supposed to warn
#
everybody else of my kind right that is what virality is so today's all these viral mechanisms
#
those clickbait sites like one we had what people essentially do is they take sensational stuff
#
package it with fear and so you share it very fast which is why whatsapp pe ye sari
#
whatsapp university and all these clips and all of those things work so fast right
#
so we realized ki acha which means there is definitely more good in the world and we there
#
is more good in the world than bad and so can we create something that appreciates the good in the
#
world so we started a community which was basically just for that and it was called amazing things in
#
the world the facebook page was called amazing things exactly what it it did exactly what it
#
said that we would and hum hum again we're not content people by education right kisi ne koi
#
journalism ne kiya hua hai or mass communication me kuchh ne kiya hai and all that stuff right so
#
hum to engineers the and we were all just figuring it out from a very common sense point of view
#
ki it makes sense there should be more good and hume usse me to frankly speaking hume abhi
#
tak bhi nahi pata hai I mean this was this happened in 2012 abhi tak hume nahi pata hai ki hum content
#
ka kuchh bana rahe hain ya content company bana rahe hain in our minds hum log kuchh bas
#
achha karna hai life ke saath tu karte hain kuchh type me to we started this community the idea was
#
simple we would curate you know content from everywhere on the internet and put it on this
#
facebook page koi content create ne karte the hum log naya curation karte the basically
#
the the idea went viral the people people responded seems like ki
#
what worked in our fear was one was consistency and going back to what my father taught ki tukhaan mera
#
mandir grahaak mera devita ki ghar aap isko kar rahe ho to genuine imaandari ke saath karo
#
consistently hum like one post every hour meaning one post every hour no matter what hum laate the
#
kainse bhi dhun ki itna content and grahaak mera devita meaning that we would get at peak I think
#
some thousand messages every day kuchh to sirf ye bolne ke liye ki yaar bahut achha kar rahe hain
#
thank you so much type me some people would come with requests some people would come with
#
you know suggestions advice criticism whatever basically hum poori 1000 ka 24 hours ke tag pe
#
reply karte the you would just sit down and reply to those messages and this is when we had no idea
#
ki iska kya hoga ye kyu bana rahe hain matlab ye facebook page se hoga kya basically at the end of the day
#
right and but we were we were doing it with very religiously you know and I think that paid off
#
the community became very huge within the first six months we had about a million followers and
#
this is all organic back in the day 2012 me to matlab facebook boost post ye sab kuch tha nahi
#
organic was a thing and I think we also got lucky right place at the right time facebook was promoting
#
pages and as a thing and organic reach was at a peak and we just happened to create a facebook page
#
with a unique thing basically back in the day agar aapko yaad ho toh samay pe there was a very
#
viral page called i love science uski goodies goodies bhi bhikti thi and all that stuff right
#
so we were one of those like us category ke pages the hum log at same level and primarily in us
#
primarily us mein amara chalta tha basically and so that facebook page was our introduction
#
to the world of content uss samay pehli ba realize ki hua ki aar hum ek content company media company
#
ye sabki baate kar rahe hain around the same time so pehle dos saal toh mei ye bhi nahi prata tha ki
#
startup hai isko startup bolte hain aur investors kya hota hain vcs kya hota hain frankly speaking
#
for the longest time I did not understand why would somebody give you money when you are a
#
loss making company and all that stuff right flipkart ki news uss samay 2010-2011 mei toh
#
flipkart hi bada tha basically news sunta thei 5000 crore ka loss 4000 crore ka loss aur usko
#
bhi funding mil raha hai 1 billion 2 billion so my marwadi mind used to ask me ki papa tha
#
mei sahi batata thei ki business is a function of wealth creation in his own words he used to say
#
that yahan toh aajab chal rahi hai ye khaani ye malhap losses ho rahe hain pehle bhi log paise
#
de rahe hain ye khaani kya basically no idea how VC works etc right toh agle 2-3 saal mein
#
wo sab samajh mein aaya ki what we are building a startup why investors invest how does this entire
#
thing works then we also realized we are building a media company content company what does that
#
mean right and what are the ways to make money in media ye wo sab one of the earliest things
#
that you realize is ki ads se paisa banate hain basically you set up a blog drive traffic make
#
money right so we did that the first website that we made was called thestupidstation.com
#
nice name man I thought so at least when we started it ki tss bohot me hum usko
#
thestupidstation.com ki kiyaar it's a place of amazing stuff amazing people are stupid
#
basically is what I believe toh theek hai you all come here it's a place where you discover things
#
which are unbelievable sort of stuff and all and it was a unique name the idea was
#
my understanding is a name should be so unique that it sticks with you that's the function of
#
it basically brand ka kaam itna hi hota it was definitely unique enough to stick right
#
we set up a website and we would basically jo bhi stories waha post karte the unka detailed version
#
basically website pe likhti the essentially toh yaha pe aaki aap humne kuch actual me content create karna
#
start kiya we started to write stuff of our own ye wo sab and the idea would be ki out of 24 posts
#
a day probably some 15 would still be on facebook and 8-10 of them will be on the website and we'll
#
post a link and drive the traffic crazy traffic organic reach ki toh koi uss samay pe limit hi nahi
#
thi ya it was khadarnak kaam tha matlab 20-30 million ka traffic matlab 10 million
#
jab humara pehli baar hit hua toh and and we would we we would go to all these Chennai meetups founder
#
meetups entrepreneurs se milte the unlo ko maa batata the 10 million traffic humara website kam
#
college ke bache people are crazy 10 million how can that even happen how is that even true
#
wo log humse humare analytics ka screenshot mangti kya google analytics ka screenshot dikha ho ye hai bhi hai kya
#
kya another thing malham most of our life people have not believed what we have done because it was
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so unbelievable at least i look back and i also like a kaafi tod kaam karte the matlab uss time
#
pe right 10 million and this is 2013 ki baat hai ye 10 million traffic india me matlab se pagalpan
#
10 million flip card ka traffic tha probably 10-20 million kuch uss time pe and 30 million
#
page views 30-40 million page views 10 million ka traffic and it was all free humne toh wo
#
community banayi thi wahi se aara tha we would monetize through google ads and so may 2013 me
#
aur Shashank college se pass out huye 2014 me Praveen pass out hua and 2013 me jab hum pass out huye toh hum
#
hum 20-25 lakh raha mahina banate the and this was basically free money right so we and and you're
#
like 22-23 you have so much money that you 25 lakh meri family ne ek baar mein sir saheb hi dekha
#
hoga basically so my father would tell us ki kuch gharat kaam toh nahi ghar rahe ho nahi kuch
#
kyunki 25 lakh raha mahina is a lot of money right so wo sab kya kaafi amazing raha wahan
#
tha toh toh yahan se humari content ki journey start hui we learned two very important lessons
#
out of this number one which i have spoken about actually in during our earlier questions which is
#
that number one that there is nothing more powerful than content as a medium of mass influence yahan
#
se samajh mein aaya plkul clearly kyunki dekho we were bunch of college kids sitting out of a
#
dormitory in chennai and we were here a facebook page jahan pe we were making friends in u.s in
#
uk canada australia and new zealand all over europe and these were people there was a mother
#
who would message us saying ki yaar your page is like a bedtime story to my kids
#
la mai roj shaam ko mere bachon ko bas aapka page scroll karte hu hai ja story because it was all
#
positive stuff right and and basically she was like you know this your page makes my kids believe
#
that it's a really nice world out there you know believe in the good of the world basically
#
we didn't sign up to do this basically to be honest humne asa kuchh sochke nahi start kiya tha
#
ek teacher tha new zealand mein jo jis ka message aaya ki yaar main paanch bhi klas ke bachon ko
#
badhata hu fifth grade students and i start my class with your page right there was this girl
#
it became too much to handle when there was this girl who messaged us ki you saved my life
#
so we were like kya hua amne message kiya usme jorab itna bhi ekdham content creator thi lagta hai
#
kusin ekdham asa suspense wara you saved my life likke thank you you saved my life likke
#
message chodd ki chodd diya like yaar kya hua what happened and then she told us the entire story
#
she had lost her father recently and then she basically she went into a depression
#
she was admitted to a hospital so much so and like she was suicidal ye wo sab and
#
one of these days she was just scrolling through facebook so a post from our page
#
landed in into our feed through some friend or something she went to our page and kept on like
#
down the rabbit hole but she kept on scrolling for hours and hours and hours and then she was like
#
your page made me believe that there is so much good out there in the world that i'm missing out
#
on and now i'm going on a world tour and i'm all out of depression all that stuff you know like
#
what the hell man it's too much right again 23 year olds how do you handle all of that stuff
#
which is when we realized that yaar content se fard koi medium nahi hai mass influence create
#
karne ke liye duniya mein we had six wo that community grew to about six million at its peak
#
6 million log uske through reach thi kam se kam bhi 40-50 million ki even more than that at
#
peak probably itte logon toh ka hum har maine paunchte hai which is humongous right i will
#
i will do anything more up to 50 million people is not a joke right so that was the first belief
#
second belief that we understood from there was that if content is king distribution is god
#
the real power is distribution because we also realized that none of these stories
#
none of these content pieces were something that did not exist before we existed all these nice
#
places nice people nice inventions that we talked about we didn't discover anything new from this
#
sab exist karta tha pehle se right all we did was we brought them and we created a distribution
#
mechanism through this community that it can reach to so many people right and so the real power
#
was in distribution itself right so you can write an amazing book you can create a great movie but
#
if nobody reads it nobody watches it what's the point basically it is then made for libraries
#
and so humara dosra belief maha se bahot strongly bana ki real power distribution mein and that is what
#
then finally in 2014 mein jab hum figure out kare the kya karna hai no toh which is what led us to
#
starting witty feed witty feed in the front of it it was like a viral content site basically
#
pretty much like that but in the back end humne distribution ko actual mein solve kiya so the
#
unique thing that we did the real secret source of it if it was the distribution again hum content
#
kal log toh thei nahi mein phir baar baar ye bol raha ho ki content was not our forte to humne kya kiya
#
he said yaar ek facebook page se itna kuch ho sakta hai agar aur duniya ke saare facebook page agar mila
#
liya jaaye unka distribution mila diya jaaye toh you can build a very very large influence basically
#
and dosi taraf there was no way to make money through facebook pages so again the social good and a
#
way to make money right so we figured it out humne website set up ki humne google ad set up kya uspe
#
traffic drive karna uska pura server infrastructure manage karna so we were like if you can provide
#
this as a service to people you know there is no way to make money through facebook pages today
#
people have millions and millions of followers but they don't know how to make money out of it
#
and not everybody knows how to set up a website then regularly content create karna uspe google
#
ads ads ye sab figure out karna and uska server people just don't know all of that shit right so
#
so we said let's do this so we created world's first ever content affiliate network back in the
#
day okay if you have a social community join us you have access to all content of viti feed you
#
share it with your people and whatever traffic you will drive back to our website we will basically
#
do a rev it share with you so ye again bahut a unique idea tha hu samay pe and the idea went
#
viral over next four years we had 65 000 such influencers working with us across the world
#
and we scaled to about 120 million uniques month on month on the website it was a bootstrapped
#
company again back in the day we were doing so hum 2014 hum Indore we shifted and Indore se humne
#
september 2014 mein ye company start ki thi so we were doing everything that most that was basically
#
things that the startup world believed that couldn't be done at that point in time
#
building from tier 2 bootstrapped revenue profitable and global from india these are like
#
every notion of startups that people thought ki ho nahi sakta hai india se basically at peak of about 40
#
crores annual revenue we became the third largest media balance sheet in india back in the day
#
digital media balance sheet times internet ht and then us kyunki 40 crore revenue koi karta nahi tha
#
usme pe digital se itna paise banta nahi tha 100 million traffic hum logon ko yahan bataate the
#
toh logon se se re kya baat kar rahe ho Indore se koi ghoti ho gaha kuch toh scam ho gaha
#
bot traffic ho gaha 100 million hota hai kya india mein 100 million users nahi hai bhi ye wo sab
#
but they wouldn't realize that out of 100 50 60 million was out of 120 60 million was from
#
US alone and jab unko wo bata ho toh toh ori unbelievable ho jata tha re Indore se batke kaisa
#
US ka traffic aayega ye wo sab how do you create content for US from Indore and all that stuff
#
but haan so that's how we landed at witty feed and then it became a story of its own so tell me a bit
#
about how you arrived at your content philosophy in terms of figuring out what works like a lot of
#
you're from Sringda's book I looked at some of your headlines from that day and like one of them
#
is why your best friend is your true love just like Mila Kunis and Ashton Kusha and then this
#
is what you want to know about Amanda Justin Bieber's new girlfriend and so on and so forth
#
so how did you sort of arrive at the triggers and the hooks which really work in terms of content
#
and looking back on it now or even thinking about it back then because you obviously as soon as you
#
figured out the triggers you figured out the deeper question which is what does it reveal
#
about us what does it reveal about human beings that a certain set of things draw our attention
#
and make us click and other things don't yeah so I actually used to give a presentation on this
#
virality I believe is more science less art you can you can actually plan it pretty much
#
there are three elements to it and there's a title and this is again back in the days when
#
text content articles were the way to consume most of the content right so there's a title
#
there's a thumbnail and then there is distribution basically that how do you distribute it right so
#
title and thumbnail are pretty much like a trailer of a movie right so they give you
#
that your title and thumbnail of a story has to be good enough it tells you enough to generate
#
a curiosity that it should want to make you click so title or thumbnail ka kaam hota clickability
#
drive karna so clickability is the number one masala in the the recipe basically of virality
#
so title and thumbnail leads to clickability of it so it generates enough curiosity that you want
#
to click on it but doesn't tell you everything so that you're not interested anymore basically
#
right the second one is shareability that is the job of the the content inside right so
#
so people share stuff when it makes you feel something and it can be good bad anger happiness
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whatever basically but it has to generate an emotion that is when you will share it you will
#
comment on it it has to trigger you basically it has to you know speak to you in some way so
#
relatability of the content is very very important which basically leads to shareability over time
#
so more people share it more people see it so more people click on it and so it's a virtuous
#
cycle basically that way right but for this entire thing to work there is a threshold distribution
#
that has to happen and which is what we correct through the the platform that we built it was
#
called viral 9 by the way viral and 9 as a number so viral 9 was our way to jump start
#
start and give the threshold distribution to a particular story and then it basically then
#
it took off from there essentially right so clickability shareability and then distribution
#
threshold distribution those are the three elements to making it viral what worked as a content is
#
people want to know about other people basically we are creepily very interested
#
into what other people are doing in their lives etc right so celebrity stuff would work amazingly
#
well humor is a evergreen content basically so again there's so much bad out there at all times
#
when something that lightens your mood and something that cheers you up pops up in your
#
feed you will mostly click on it and like you will go and like see it what is there and all right
#
right and then the specialty that we built was like I said we we tried to remain on the positive
#
side of the content all the time like at least
#
I used to say that every interaction of a content that we generate with people out there
#
imagine it as a smile so I used to this exercise will sound almost like a cult building but
#
the morning stand-ups I would basically ask my entire team to close their eyes and tell them that
#
like imagine every click that a user is doing on your content every time your content pops
#
up in their feed and they click on it they like it they share it they comment on it they land on
#
our website and then they scroll through the page every single instance is a smile that you're
#
living out there a positive energy that you're living out there in the world and that is why
#
you work like that's the work that you're doing here that's my that was my way of basically
#
helping my team find a purpose in whatever we were doing basically so purpose was to generate
#
more smiles out there and so we tried to remain on the positive side of the content I would not
#
make the mistake of saying that our 100 content was like that I'm sure we had a team of 70 people
#
traffic but we tried to remain on the positive side of it
#
so just say photography and travel
#
10 places to travel and like amazing pictures people love that people used to love that with us
#
amazing people stories you know stories of stories of underdogs people winning
#
you know and good winning over bad like
#
you remember there was a website back in the day parallel to us called Upworthy
#
yeah and so we actually would have a lot of similar we were all of the same category you
#
know Buzzfeed, Upworthy, WittyFeed, Dipli, LittleThings all of us were in the same
#
category of the which is why all of us are dead now so same same basically
#
similar type of content is what we would create so negative works but we had to figure out
#
beyond negative and which is where we figured out that compassion works you know celebrity content
#
works humor works history works history was another very big thing for us by the way
#
you know 10 pictures from india from 1857 for example it's a viral article
#
it's a viral article if you make it today it will go on even today
#
i know this very much curiosity is there in these articles and how did india look like
#
how were the people at that time so we will want to see that basically
#
pictorial content was mostly ours so it used to work
#
amazing like one negative headline of yours which i found was how your face would look if
#
you survived the car crash and i can imagine this would have been pictorial also i'm going to
#
actually go and look for this because i'm very curious now that how would your face look if you
#
survived a car crash the other you know very interesting thing i find about this is that
#
you are creating content which is going madly viral in the united states most of all where the
#
culture is completely different there means american pop culture completely different
#
everything is completely different you know little things like you know how people romance
#
how people date how people everything is different right and you have a bunch of young kids in
#
indoor and they have to get inside the minds of the american public as it were and figure out
#
what works what doesn't work all of that so how was this process like was it a process of kind of
#
discovering universal hooks that these are things that everyone is interested in or was it a case
#
of also doing trial and error where you figure out some things don't work and therefore the other
#
things work and you know when you're writing pieces like which which might have dating advice
#
or why your best friend is your true love then you know how do these young people who are from
#
indoor how are they able to sort of do something that actually works with that american audience
#
so two three things one it was a mix of all of this basically so of course we tried to keep a
#
lot of our content global because it was not just americans which were our which were our audience so
#
canada uk australia new jillian and all these are very different cultures so they're not like
#
not very similar in nature apart from the fact that they speak english right so we would try
#
to keep a lot of our content global in nature etc right and advice etc global in nature but having
#
said that all our team was it too we would ask them to watch all american sitcoms all american
#
series say what to understand the cultural nuances the way people talk what they say etc etc
#
so that's how we would do it second we would use a lot of data to basically being engineers came
#
into play there right that all three all between the three founders two of us were engineers
#
the all three all between the three founders two of us were engineers so we knew here and and the
#
guy who runs content was not the engineer in our case right so shashank is his engineer is the cto
#
i was the engineer and praveen who is not the con who is not the engineer was the content guy among
#
us so but a complementary skill set and we would have a lot of data in terms of what stories work
#
what don't which story the user reads up to where it drops why is it dropping a lot of such
#
insights we would essentially use and all of this data would go back to our team and
#
again like i said virality is less gut more science and so we would use that data to plan
#
so let's make more of these these type of stories etc we did
#
how do we mimic more of these and also actually
#
you want to repeat that as a business at the end of the day right so we would do that
#
and my patriotic side came into play there and also i always felt that west has
#
has some unnecessary and undue influence on how the rest of the world's media works basically
#
right and all of that basically and and and these guys are genuinely great storytellers
#
for some reason us is the power center of the world that's at least that the entire world
#
believes that even if it's not right so so i wanted a flavor of indian or asian thing going
#
to the world why can't we create media in india and the world should consume it right
#
so actually our audience is americans we want to be relevant to them
#
but i don't want you to lose the fact that you are indians who are writing it for them
#
basically so i want you to preserve that and so have a taste of that always you know
#
when you're giving some advice or writing any piece of article etc right
#
passed away right and it should be a home page story definitely on our website etc
#
so my team my editorial of course disagreed with it
#
if an american leader passes away let's say obama for example or whatever whoever
#
would every indian publication do a story on them and would it feature on home page or not
#
well of course here's the america's leader the same way this is an important country in the world
#
we are one of the more powerful country and like it represents seventh of the population of the
#
world or more than that actually so why do you think that the leader of these people passed away
#
and it is not relevant for the world if you don't feel so the world is never going to feel it
#
right so again i might be thinking wrong here there's no right and wrong i think
#
well it was just my perspective my opinion my way of bringing an indian flavor to the world like why
#
should world not have an indian flavor of content etc so all of it there was a lot of trial and
#
error we were like a content factory 70 people writing more than 100 new articles every day
#
right so because thankfully text was less because it was pictorial content but still it's a lot
#
so now in that when you are producing in such a mass so if any given day if even 10 stories
#
would run then that was enough then every influencer all the 65 000 would share the same story
#
they go big we get our traffic it's all good right so it was more of them didn't work less of
#
them worked but the ones who worked gave us all the traffic that we needed that's how basically
#
we built it i think that point you made about wanting to push indian content out there
#
is really interesting because i think like the argument your guys would have made against it
#
it's about supply demand there is no demand here we will do obama's because there is demand
#
and this perception is that there is demand there is no demand but the counterpoint to that is
#
that you can change the demand from supply absolutely my point was that if that story
#
was not visible to the audience then how will it consume it you put it maybe it will not work
#
maybe your typical story does 100k users this one will do 10 000 but then that's okay right
#
10 000 has read that narrative right and so that will make an impact so you
#
you don't have to go big every time right those those small small changes would lead to some
#
large impact over time so that's exactly the point i made and maybe i was the ceo that is
#
why i want or maybe the point wanted but i got the story i got the story on the home page for a day
#
no and there's another interesting angle here with which i'll lead to my next observation and
#
question which is that like you said if a regular story gets 100 000 and this gets 10 000 the point
#
is that these 10 000 are more engaged than those other 100 000 because these people clicked on it
#
in the first place because they are interested or they are that curious and they're finding out
#
whereas in the 100 000 there'll be a lot of people who just kind of skim the content and i
#
have recently sort of been trying to think about media and the creator economy and the frame that
#
i use is something like earlier we were talking about thin desires and thick desires and the
#
frame that i use for this is thick engagement and thin engagement like i keep telling people
#
that i would rather have a 100 000 people listen to one of my episodes than do a 10 minute video
#
and get 20 million views for it and the reason for that is at 20 million views the engagement
#
will be thin that you know people will watch drop off at 15 seconds drop off at 20 seconds
#
but here my average session time is 40 minutes plus and here the engagement is much deeper
#
i hear from my listeners i am you know and in very tangible ways i understand how thick the
#
engagement is and the thing is that this is not something like when advertisers think or sponsors
#
think about your business they think in those absolute numbers that 20 million is way more
#
impressive than a 100 000 or whatever but actually the value of that thick engagement to me is like
#
way greater right so in your business is that also something that you sort of thought about like
#
you've already said ki aap dekh sakte the ki kaunsi article log kahan tak par rahe hai you know
#
which is also an element of kitna engagement hai yeah i guess kitni baar share kar rahe hai is
#
an example because that obviously indicates so tell me your sort of learnings with regard to
#
different levels of engagement and not like you know people speak of clickbait disparagingly ki
#
bandhe ko click kar waya but the main process really starts after that ki kitni engaged hai
#
are they going to come back are they going to share yeah so what are your learnings on this
#
yeah so yeah like i think what what you said at the end of is probably the answer of it also ki
#
you can make somebody click on it by doing a click betty article a click click betty title
#
and thumbnail but you can't make them stay on your website if you don't really have a meet
#
uh you know in in the content that you are writing so which is why the stuff that you
#
write has to be really really solid right and hum isliy thodi aise lengthy type ki stories karte the
#
ki there's a business sense also in it by the way ki kya hota hai ki the amount of effort it
#
takes to bring the users to consume a piece of content is the same chahi wo 10 minute ka ho chahi
#
wo 10 gante ka ho amount effort same hai usko user ko wahan tak laane ka right uske baad wo
#
10 minute dekhega ya 10 gante sunega wo depend karta hai aapke quality of content pe right so
#
you're actually better of creating a very high quality content and make the same effort to bring
#
the user there and then engaging them for a long time right so it actually makes a lot more business
#
sense to create very high quality content and keep them engaged for a long long time right so to hum
#
log bhi koshi share karte the bahot saara humare aise stories the jisme madlab 100 things type hoti
#
thi so so niche tak chale jaate the right and it makes business sense also because the deeper you
#
go the more ads i can show and the more money i can make probably out of this back in the day
#
right so so yeah we we we used to i mean it was the the trade of the business ki engaging content
#
banayenge to utna jada paisa banega i'm probably not getting the question deeper in terms of ki
#
what do you want to know like how do you create engaging content is it not just how you create
#
engaging content but for example you spoke about how you how this girl wrote to you and she said
#
you you know you saved a life and obviously she engaged with your content at a very deep level
#
it meant something to her right at the same time you could create a content which is like just
#
yesterday i clicked on some stupid headline on some stupid viral site which was to the effect of
#
yx did this to y right but the point is it's paginated you have one picture and one piece
#
of information and you're like clicking 40 times before you get to the point and you actually
#
figure out why x did something to y and to me that's not engagement you know you're clicking
#
40 times you're showing 40 ads you're making it interesting enough perhaps that the reader stays
#
with you and goes on to the next one but it doesn't mean anything to them emotionally or
#
intellectually or in any way at all so they've spent time but the engagement isn't high you
#
know okay and and you're monetizing it but then the point is if you create that deeper engagement
#
like that girl whose life who wrote that thing to you would have come to your site every day
#
after that right it would have been a part of her life in a deep way and you can't measure that
#
right so did you sort of have any thoughts yeah so i think you're right just the fact that at
#
least at that point in time i believe that the fact that that user is actually clicking 40 times
#
to find out what it is they're probably interested enough and so they are engaged enough we did have
#
the paginated system at one point in time we removed it later on figuring out this is a very
#
bad way of keeping the users on the site and all but we did have it for probably few months or so
#
so see my answer to that is
#
you can't make anybody click so many times without the intent right of
#
finding really finding out what happened etc and
#
it's the same thing packaged in a different way right
#
it's just that if you click again and again you probably make more money because you can show
#
more ads and whatever right so i don't agree with the part where you say that is not engagement at
#
least in my mind to my business it was engagement i mean it is engagement but it's what i would call
#
thin engagement but then that depends on the kind of content we did right so we we didn't
#
necessarily do all content which was thick engagement content i don't think we did i think
#
and i think that was one of the things that was wrong with witty feed so that reminds me of
#
something very interesting when witty feed got shut down and it was doing 120 million uniques
#
at that point in time and and when we were thinking on what thinking about what to do next
#
and what was wrong with witty feed one of the things that we thought about was that when a product
#
is actually good and it really matters to its people and it goes away people cry for it
#
there will be somebody somewhere out there that it mattered so much that they would want it back
#
anyhow right and they'll miss it they'll reach out to you they'll write to you all of that right
#
out of 120 million nobody did right and which is why i feel that because of the format or because
#
of the way because of the way you can monetize online content through ads etc unfortunately
#
most of us ended up building very thin engagement websites how do you optimize for maximum time
#
spent so that you can show maximum ads and so you can make maximum money out of it and and
#
which is where again from believing that you want to create a positive content site
#
that you keep telling yourself no i am making positive content now baby
#
but like not for that deep engagement now this is how do i optimize for maximum revenue
#
and so on and so forth so nobody cried for witty feed right and and we wanted to change that this
#
time when we were thinking about a new idea we thought we won't make it like this even if we make it
#
for a few people this time but this time when i want to do it i want to do it i want to build
#
a product that really matters to people that if it doesn't exist then maybe someone will cry
#
and say what happened to my life it was so important to me basically so that's why we
#
important to me basically so i think witty feed over time became a thin engagement site only
#
if it was thick engagement then facebook wouldn't have died is what i would say yeah i'm not even
#
making a judgment call in the sense that some things i do i try to be thick engagement some
#
things i'm okay with thin engagement there's a value to that as well if you're entertaining
#
people or if you're you know satisfying some other need i i don't see anything to look down
#
on at all that's also important in people who do it well are doing a great job tell me also about
#
your approach to building the team that you did like one really one insight you shared in one
#
of your talks which impressed me a lot was where you were sharing the story of a team member who
#
when he came to you for the interview he said that this is my last interview i won't give it to you
#
and you asked him why is that and he said no i go everywhere people ask how is your english
#
and in this i get a mark and you said that okay we don't have it like that and you hired the person
#
and then at the time you gave the talk you said he was leading one of your teams and all of that
#
and this is something that i totally agree with in the sense that over time i would not have
#
thought this when i was say a manager 20 years ago or whatever but over time i have come to
#
realize that the most important thing is attitude that are you open to learning you know if you
#
have the humility and you have the openness to learn then the skills don't matter so much
#
you can teach anything so one tell me a little bit about how you evolved your philosophy towards
#
employees because like another unusual thing you did and stinkda mentions in a book that everybody
#
used to live in these two large bungalows so it was like a family but the orientation was that it's
#
not just a normal company you're an employee you come into work attendance is done you check out
#
your card and you get out of there but you're all actually kind of living together you and your wife
#
were called bhaiya and bhabhi apparently so how did you come up with this you know what were
#
the roadblocks you faced what were the learnings that you got from it so i'm just very keen to
#
understand your approach towards people and employees yeah let me start by completing
#
that story that you mentioned right so see again we were very young and we were hiring right so
#
by default you don't get the best of the talent options for you
#
number one second it's very hard to work with people who are older in age because again it's
#
very hard to establish authority and like all that doesn't work very well actually it has not
#
over time it changed but at least when you're a little too young 20-22 year old who will listen
#
basically right so we mostly used to hire freshers at that time so how do you judge them how do you
#
figure out if this guy is a good guy or not right so then attitude is the only skill anyway you
#
can't do anything too much and we ended up building a policy of hiring only freshers
#
that they work out on their own at the end of the day so let's work with only freshers first
#
we get them at a low price and second we can hire them on their attitude skill we will teach
#
basically always believe that skill can be taught and attitude can't be so how to judge so we
#
we and and again when you're young young and like I believed in hustling so much I still do but
#
little too much at that point in time so I we used to actually judge at two things and this was
#
Sushant's discovery he's always been better among the three the best among three of us in terms of
#
finding out the right ways to interview people etc etc not that I'm very proud of what we used
#
to do we basically we wanted to see how he reacts when he is put out of comfort zone
#
and secondly is he never giving up attitude if he is a person who gives up then he won't be able to
#
because he has to teach new things, he is a start-up, he will have to work very hard extra
#
people used to work till 2-3 days at night at that time it was again that is how companies are built
#
in the initial days so what we used to do we used to tell people to push ups nobody would expect
#
to do push-ups in the interview mostly boys and girls also used to say something like this
#
something weird and this was Sunil's name that boy Sunil started this okay so Sunil came he said
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sir I have my last interview before starting that sir you see I am done I have come from the village
#
I have tried a lot here but everyone says that what do you know from the beginning and English
#
they ask and what else do you know no one is ready to teach I am ready to learn but no one is ready to teach
#
so now okay sir I will go to my village I will do farming I am done here so Shashank was the
#
interviewer by the way so Shashank says okay what can you do tell me tell me sir whatever you say
#
I will do for this job so I think he did one of the two things either he told him to put up a push-up
#
at that time or the other thing that Shashank used to do was our office was on the sixth floor
#
okay so he would ask people to do six floors up and down through stairs some four five times
#
something like that basically something that is basically undoable essentially right and if you're
#
ready to do that the idea was that I know that army type style was basically hiring that
#
that roadies type interview is going on that if you do something that is unthinkable then
#
at least you don't have any attitude problem skill is on us now that we can teach or not
#
so we told Sunil and he did it and it was crazy he he he turned out to be an amazing hire actually
#
and he was with us for the longest time and I'm so proud to tell you that he runs his own company
#
today in Indore he runs his own IT company has some employee strength of some 40-50 people I think
#
and he's doing phenomenal actually that guy who maybe if his interview didn't go well that day
#
so much talent which goes you know unutilized because nobody gave them a chance right and plus
#
I think language cannot be a judge language cannot be a parameter to judge somebody's talent
#
basically that's the most poor way of very lazy way of finding out how talented you are right so
#
so then that interview turned into a thing so that roadies style interview used to happen
#
all the time I mean of course we would ask simple questions all that stuff also but then
#
by default in every interview we used to ask something weird and then we found out that
#
our golf strip was in the office so basically we used to say that we have to put it in 10 times
#
or 5 times continuously basically it should go the ball should go into the hole
#
if you missed once in between then start again now it would take hours but people used to do that
#
and I think which is why we ended up building an army of you know it was genuinely an army an army
#
of people who were just not ready to give up on anything and that is why we were able to build a
#
company against all odds so that that that is how we we built it up one this sounds like a great way
#
of selecting for attitude but it's also a little you know like you said that looking back I would
#
not have done this now or something so why is that what are the misgivings you have about this
#
this is very masculine in nature I think right and again now it is possible that no one will push us
#
but then doesn't mean that I don't know it's not like 100 correct way of
#
basically finding it out we still look for never giving up attitude we still look for
#
I think even today in the new company that we're building we still look for similar stuff
#
that we test for the thing that has changed is that we do look for skill fit also but I think
#
we still look for culture fit and never giving up attitude and that are you do you have a learning
#
attitude there are different type of questions that we ask now to understand that but we do
#
still look for the same skill I think that we used to look back in the day and these days in
#
corporate circles like where I have been a long time back I think 15-16 years ago I quit my last
#
job and I said I'll never work in an office again but there's a lot of talk these days of corporate
#
culture and so on and so forth and your corporate culture as it were like you know
#
so tell me a little bit about how you arrived at that this is the right way to do something and
#
you know and what do you feel about that sort of I won't say experiment but that experience
#
now looking back I think it came from again the way I grew up right so and my belief of
#
join family and family as a thing right so everyone used to say that keep your business or personal
#
life separate and all that stuff right and you should never work with your friends you should
#
never work with your family and all that stuff right I used to feel the opposite that I am the
#
first guy who was made out of like who's who have an exit possibility from the middle class life of
#
my family and if I don't hand hold and work with the rest of my you know cousins and brothers and
#
sisters and my family then who will and why I should definitely do that one second I always
#
believed that when you lead with emotion you actually build better companies and better
#
businesses you can build better businesses I believed that I believed here with the right
#
with the right intent in place and all the empathy all the like treating people as people
#
right so and if I can be unbiased having my brother as my co-founder having my wife work
#
in the same company and so on and what's wrong with it etc you have some people that you can
#
trust blindly in your business and you need them you need such people when you're building at
#
least so I had my brother as my co-founder I actually my relationship with my other co-founder
#
is also pretty much like a brother there was a point in time in our story where I and Shashank
#
also departed and then we came back together and then we decided saying the exact thing that you
#
said that Praveen is my brother he didn't have an option to go anywhere so if we do it this time we
#
do it with an option to never go away from each other like there's no option to call it quits on
#
each other and so let's be brothers and not like the co-founders co-founders later as brothers
#
first that's the relationship touchwood that we share and have you seen such amazing ups and
#
downs and we've we've stuck together I think it's a miracle and it's because of the way we look at
#
our relationship the narrative of relationship is not that we are co-founders but it is that we're
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family we're brothers and then we're co-founders we value our relationship with the three of us
#
more than the fact that we work together basically right so there was a book called
#
Super Siblings and Priti was so kind that she wrote a special chapter about us in that
#
book the last chapter which was a brother from another mother and she wrote a story about the
#
three of us right so that's the kind of relationship we've had right so working with family,
#
working with emotions, working like a family is not a bad thing is what I believed a little
#
has changed I'll talk about that too how it has changed the logic of what we kept at home was that
#
all the freshers were there right you ask you invite a fresher to work with you mostly all
#
of them were like that some of them were also indoors but we would hire from everywhere right so
#
people would come from small small towns the biggest problem in their life is to find a house
#
no one gives a house to bachelors even if they give it to them there are 50 types of problems
#
the lowest type of property in the city is given to bachelors they don't give good properties to bachelors
#
then after that if they get it then find a house to clean it up who will cook food
#
if they will put tiffin outside then they will sleep hungry for half an hour if they will put maid or cook
#
at home then that too has thousands of problems then grocery shopping and all that right so
#
our thought was that we have invited them to do a job why can't we solve everything else for them
#
and just let them do the job right so basically we gave them a pre-made solution that this is a house
#
you go and live here cook here will cook in the morning and evening
#
someone else is responsible for grocery shopping your job is just to work
#
you don't have to worry about anything else and you can live a like a nice life better life basically
#
than you would otherwise live as a bachelor etc and it it worked people used to love the fact that
#
they don't have to take a headache and productivity used to be high they are getting good food everyday
#
food poisoning and acidity and all these problems are not happening we used to actually serve pretty
#
much like a google type lunch in in the in the office also you used to serve lunch, dinner,
#
breakfast in our office you used to serve breakfast, lunch, dinner in our office and
#
on indoor standards it was famous people would call us our office as the google of indoor type
#
so it had a lot of benefits right family part and I will give you an address
#
like you said people used to call us brother and sister-in-law most of the people still
#
we build those relationships with each other right so we back then had a policy of not firing
#
anyone but at Tata's I am actually inspired by Tata's quite a lot especially Tatan Tata right
#
and the philosophies that they have of the business the way they build the businesses
#
we had a policy of not firing anyone so taking my belief in humans to a very
#
to a very peak level so I used to think that we shouldn't give up on people so easily right
#
beliefs don't believe that I am talking about the past because that changed a little bit that
#
belief has changed a little bit it has evolved a little bit so I used to think that we shouldn't give
#
up on people I mean if it's not happening then it's okay we will figure out something else you help him
#
help him help them you know you train them you find them some other job within the organization
#
you basically and freshers in their careers if we don't invest then who will invest it's my
#
I used to believe that it's our responsibility to invest in their careers to build something
#
so a very family-type environment so that a person can come to the office and feel completely
#
chilled out they shouldn't miss home or they shouldn't feel out of the place so
#
now that brother sister-in-law actually happened because of this when I started I was not married
#
of course so it started with brother and then naturally became sister-in-law also because I was
#
very young I hated that somebody would call me sir but the way the system is unfortunately
#
they found it very weird to call me by name they would not call me by name so the midway became
#
bhaiya basically and I was okay with it again because of my family values and all that stuff
#
right so we worked very hard to get rid of that bhaiya now we have stopped it very difficultly
#
because what happens is that cultural systems get built and they change very difficultly over time
#
now by going to the stage with difficulty I think 90 percent of people don't call us bhaiya anymore
#
a couple of people who are old now they have so much ingrained in them that they feel bad from the inside
#
that how can I call them by name or call them by head type right so this happened it has changed
#
to you I probably can talk about that also a little bit when we built stage
#
I realized that calling a company a family is a very hypocrite sort of a statement because
#
and it works both ways one is that you can't fire somebody from your family
#
we didn't fire anybody but on cause we did fire on integrity and people also left they resigned
#
so if they actually believed we were family why would somebody leave right this should be your
#
last job this is your first job and this should be your last job why should you ever leave if you
#
leave you should become an entrepreneur so I used to promote entrepreneurship quite a lot within the
#
we used to promote that quite a lot so it used to be like a I would take it personally
#
all three of us would take it very personally
#
so again it's very hypocrite people will not work for you forever number one you need to realize that
#
second you need to realize that you will also need to fire people if you want to build a world-class
#
team right but at the same time we concluded that you can be very emotional you can be very
#
empathetic you can be very nice to people without calling it a family so that's what we are we are
#
a team now we are very influenced by Netflix culture document by the way we use that quite
#
a lot in our system a lot of policies we are replicated and all and radical candor one-on-ones
#
one-on-ones all of that stuff we promote quite a lot now internally so we are a team and in a team
#
everybody knows that if you don't perform you can be replaced we contextualized it in such a way that
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you can be replaced but we will not replace you immediately we'll give you a chance we built a
#
very comprehensive skill gap assessment system and the company your manager we will invest and
#
we will we'll invest money we'll invest time and we'll invest effort with you to fill the gap in
#
terms of what we want your skill level to be and something that you also agree on if you make
#
progress we will keep doing it and we'll keep you with us if you don't then we replace you which is
#
fair and square both ways right even you will leave if you don't feel satisfied here i'll fire
#
you if you're if you're not making progress but i can fire you without guilt now and you can leave
#
without hurting me now because i and i will not be hurt because i know that people will not work
#
for me forever right and and i'm openly i openly say that it's a team and not a family without
#
meaning that i'm not there for you anymore i am i am still i think we are we are even more available
#
to our team now emotionally we are more available in terms of financial like in every way that we
#
used to support them at witty feed we support them probably 10 more now but we're not a family
#
and i i and i think it was more about we accepting that fact than our people accepting it so
#
we accepted it and it has turned out to be a more fulfilling experience building this one of the
#
themes that i'm i've become very interested in is people's relationship with their past like when
#
someone makes a journey like yours where you're born in a village you go to a city then you're
#
kind of moving up ladders in a certain way at a faster speed than the rest of your family might
#
have been able to and how that relationship with the past plays out is very interesting to me like
#
some people can be embarrassed by their past and keep it at a distance while others can embrace it
#
because of the sense of belonging and home and community and rootedness that it gives them like
#
there's a beautiful short story by ken lou called paper menagerie one of my favorite stories which
#
i'll link from the show notes which is about this person coming to terms with the embarrassment he
#
felt because his mother was out of place in america he was an immigrant and she couldn't speak the
#
language and all that just a lovely story so and in your case it seems that you went completely with
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the second option which is that that past meant a lot to you family meant a lot to you you married
#
your sweetheart from your village and you sort of you kept your friends together like you mentioned
#
tata i've heard you quote another superb quote by tata where i think he said something to the effect
#
of if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together which is so beautiful so tell
#
me a little bit about like was your relationship with your past complicated at times did you
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sometimes look back and like just now you've said sometimes i wonder how i was born in that family
#
so how has that i think you're right i i i love where i come from i think i feel very lucky for
#
where i was born i think i feel very privileged to be born the way and where and how i was born
#
basically so if i was not born where i was born i would not be building stage today basically it's
#
as simple as that right so i literally owe what i am right now to the place that i was born right
#
you know he's a very the way he talks he's very straight from the heart sort of a guy right so
#
sir he was very important to me. If I had found everything in my life and he said in I can relate
#
with him because I come from a very similar place that if my parents had gone to school and
#
picked me up and if I had found everything before asking for it and all this would have happened
#
he said that I had immense amount of struggles but I love the fact that I had them and which is what made me who I am today right so I think I will not change a single word in that statement. Everything that happened to me including the witty feed thing including
#
most people can look back at it and say Gary it was the wrong thing. I think it was the most important juncture of my life to become a doctor and then you know ending up with engineering. I very soon figured out I don't want to be an engineer as soon as I entered my college.
#
It was and so people can say that I was in the wrong education. I think I was in the perfect place. People can have regrets about IIT. I think it was the right thing.
#
You know so everything that has happened to me. What if you had an option to go back and change something or what would you do differently if you were 20 again or whatever. I would not do anything differently. I am happy with the person that I am today. I am very proud of the person that I am today actually and so I will not change a thing because then if I do I will not end up where I am right and I am very happy and very satisfied to be honest with the kind of person that I am.
#
Ended up being and it's all because of my past. It's all because of my village etc. I mean I and I am a city person. I think I am a I embrace where I am but I miss my village. I am a village person actually.
#
You know I like. I don't like the air of the city very much. I live in Noida whereas I come from Haryana. We work in Haryana. Everybody thought and the startup ecosystem is in Goodgaon and it's like one and half hour closer to my village basically from Noida versus Goodgaon right.
#
Everybody thought we would live in Goodgaon. I just don't. I don't understand Goodgaon basically. Like where I live in Noida it's still high rise and all but it's a very open place. There are gardens.
#
You know I can go down and roam on the roads and like villages are still left. Our vegetables come from villages. My parents go there. They have left villages in the sectors somehow.
#
I feel much closer to home in Noida versus I would ever do in Goodgaon actually that way. My fantasy of retirement is going back to my village and thankfully I got a wife which thinks very similarly to I want to go back to my village.
#
Have a small school opened up there and just retire like that essentially. So I love everything about my past basically that way. I would love to. I plan a lot of things about my will.
#
I want to do something for my village, for the people there. All of that. And whenever I get a chance I speak very proudly about where I come from.
#
What do you do in your free time? You mentioned that you're in Noida. You like the open space. All of that. Like I know you're very obviously very intense about your work and you spend a lot of time on that.
#
But when you have downtime, when you have me time as it were. So what are the kind of things that you do? How do you?
#
That was another thing that changed after VT Feed. So I used to work 16-18 hours a day. I would I would travel 17-18 days a month, sometimes 20 days a month. And it was crazy.
#
And then I realized that it doesn't make sense. I don't want to live a life like that. I'm a little bit laid back. That doesn't mean that I'm not building it with passion and all.
#
I'm just. So I'll define it better. So when I reflected on the last 10 years and how I want to live the next 10 years, when VT Feed was making the stage.
#
So I said I lived my entire 10 years wanting big and fast. Those were the two keywords. I wanted everything very big and everything very fast.
#
And I want to live the next 10 years for like slow and small. Like I want to build slowly and I want to build small, small, small steps like which has.
#
And I want to put a disclaimer here that it doesn't mean that I don't have large aspirations. Still do. But it's just that I don't want it fast and I don't want any big, big chunks.
#
I think I'll take the tortoise approach versus the rabbit. So, so that's there's another big thing that that changed from VT Feed to stage.
#
What do I do? So the city guy was saying that I'm not I'm not a party person. You would have figured out by now.
#
I like to do meditation. I like to do yoga. I like to watch a lot of content. I mostly watch English content and I would when I'm down and I'm not feeling good, I binge watch and it helps me a lot.
#
So it's one of my coping things. Basically, I do that. I like to, you know, learn new stuff all the time. I'm generally a very curious person.
#
So and one of my main source of learning is actually not books or not podcasts or any of that stuff is actually meeting people and talking to them.
#
So I actually spend a lot of time talking to my friends, mentors. I have a humongous number of advisors and mentors in life.
#
Something that I'm very proud of that I've been able to build and I talk to them very often. I spend a lot of time talking to them, learning from them.
#
And otherwise, I like to spend time with my wife and my family a lot, actually.
#
I think as an entrepreneur, anyways, we can't give materialistic things to them because they're always underpaid. You're always short on, you know, there's something or the other going wrong in your company and so you're always under stress.
#
All of that stuff, right? At least you can give them time. And that's the most important gift that you can give them, right? So you sit down, listen to them. And also, I try my best to give as much time as I can give to my wife, my family, my parents live with me.
#
That's also a condition I put on them that I just will not live without you guys. And I hope they continue to live with me for the rest of their days or my days, whatever.
#
So, yeah, I do that spending time with family a lot more.
#
There's also a lovely, there's such a lovely thought of, you know, giving time to your family because just thinking aloud, you know, when people are gone and you miss them, you never remember the things they gave you. You remember the time you spent with them.
#
Again, and my wife has had a lot of influence in this and I probably found her and fell in love with her and we married because of those similarities and thoughts also that both of us are far, far away from materialistic stuff basically.
#
So we don't understand expensive clothes, expensive things, big car, big house, all that. Thankfully. And we both are alike that way, right? So, I mean, my way of showing you my love will never be about giving you costly, like very expensive gifts.
#
I feel actually very bad when even somebody gives it to me and like, I can't do it. I will sit down with you. I will be there when you need me. If you are feeling down, I'm going to sit down with you and have like a three hour long conversation in a row and I don't mind doing it.
#
If I have an important meeting, I will miss it if I need to sit with you and like spend time with you. But I won't be like, I'm giving you a 50,000 rupees gift on your birthday. I'm giving you only 5,000 rupees.
#
It's not materialistic things basically. It's very, very hard for me to do that.
#
You've also, you know, mentioned at different times how there have been so many ups and downs, ebbs and flows in your time, you know, and especially the way Witty Feed ended. Like if it happened to something I built, I think it would have been so incredibly traumatic.
#
I don't know how I would have gotten the motivation to continue. You know, it would have felt like the end of the world. So tell me a little bit about that phase. If you want to talk about any earlier downs, if you think they are relevant. But you know, when it was ending, you know, how did it happen? How did you get through it? You know, like how was the whole process that you continued from there and came here?
#
So, so yeah, I mean, there have been multiple instances, even before Witty Feed was made, and a lot of times it happened. But without a doubt, this experience of losing Witty Feed entirely after building it at such a large scale was the biggest one in the entire thing, right?
#
And it was very traumatic. It was very depressing. All three of us, we were diagnosed clinically depressed after that.
#
We have been doing therapy for the last three years. I mean, as soon as we figured it out and then we started, then all of us are on therapy. We did some medication also in between. We had to take some medication also to come out of it and all. See, it's the right analogy. And I'm not exaggerating when I say it is that you raise a baby and you lose it when they are eight year old.
#
That's what it was. Now, couple it with the fact that this is the only identity that you have of yourself out there to the world. You started it in college and that's the only way people know you. And there's so much, there was so much fucking fame around it.
#
I mean, we were at one point in time, the poster boys of the tier two ecosystem, startup ecosystem in the country. There was ET writing about us like everywhere.
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We were being called to every conference. We were sort of a mini celebrity in our own right at that one time. And then all of a sudden, it all goes away.
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To entrepreneurs do one thing, which is that, and it's a big mistake we all make, which is that we not entrepreneurs. I think all people are passionate about building anything they do.
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And this is that they associate their idea of self with the work that they do. Right. And we did that, of course.
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So our identity was Witty Feed, Witty Feed Founders, Witty Feed Founders, and all of a sudden that didn't exist. So the very first thing we had was identity crisis. Who are we?
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We are not Witty Feed. We are the founders of Witty Feed. So who are we? And we had no idea. See, you need to understand that the intensity with which you have to build when you're building a company, the entrepreneurial experience, people don't realize that it's so dense.
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The density of experiences when you're building a company is so very high that you don't really have time to process any of this. And you're having the highest level of density of experiences in your life.
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And so the intensity is very, very high. And all of a sudden, all of it goes away. So you don't know who you are, essentially. And we were certain something of a certain level. We were in Indore.
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The feeling of a king used to come because we were the biggest company there. Which is why we were in Indore, actually, in the first place. We went there because we said that we'll lose so many start-ups in big cities. Can we go to a city where we can build the entire ecosystem and be the kings of our own world?
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And we were. And all of a sudden, you're a nobody. So I think it started with denial. The typical first phase of any grief cycle, I think. So we said, how can this be? We are Witty Feed. We'll fight it out. We'll fight on Facebook. We'll do legal battles.
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We did it. We hired the best of the lawyers and we wrote back and all that stuff. In 2-3 months, we lost all the money that we had accrued in terms of profits. We even took loans. You make a lot of foolish decisions in times like this, right?
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So because our books were very strong, every bank gave us unsecured, pre-approved loans of Rs. 25 lakhs. We took loans from some 13-14 banks. We took loans from all the banks. We took loans of Rs. 3-4 crores.
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So people who used to have a couple of million dollars in their account as their profits were now at minus 3-3.5 crores, essentially, and with no idea of what to do. It came to a point where we would probably have to shut down the company, right?
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And then all that story of how employees bailed us out, which was the biggest validation of that we probably built it the right way and also we made a pitch. We did a town hall basically and we made a pitch to 90 employees that we don't know what to do from here.
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But if you believe in us, you stay with us, we will figure it out what to do from here. You take 25% of your salary, the rest 75%, we will double it and we'll give you as an equity in the company.
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So you become our angel investor. And this is a pitch to employees in Indore back in 2018 when these things were not so common, right?
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And this was all from that idea of this can't be the climax of my story. Again, that attitude of how can this happen? My story, my picture is not ending here basically.
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Out of 90, 54 people decided to stay back. And even those who were going, those poor people were going in helplessness. They were mostly the sole earning members in their families and all that stuff, right?
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And it was probably the most emotional or second most emotional day of my life. So much crying and you don't know what to do with this.
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People who are leaving, you know why they are leaving. And people who are staying, you don't know. Like there is so much weight on your shoulders.
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There are a lot of 54 people and their salary is also high. Initially, we thought that if 4-5 people stay back, they won't be depressed. We will have a reason to come back to office. We will do something and all.
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What will you do with 55 people and 54 people basically? There are a lot of people and I don't have a product. I don't even have an idea what to do from here basically.
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So, but yeah, I think that is what saved the company. Even those who stayed, they were like, sir, leave 25%, I have a savings of 1 lakh rupees, I have a savings of 2 lakh rupees, I will give it to you. We won't let the company die.
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One of our guys, I remember this very distinctly that he had a kid very recently, I mean at that time. And he said, sir, okay, we will do one thing. This is my salary. And what will be the salary of Indore?
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It starts from 20,000 and goes up to 60-70,000. Basically, all the salaries are in between. So, he said, sir, we will do one thing. We will order milk only for my kid at home. We will cut down the rest.
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And he said a couple of things like that. But I will stay with you no matter what. I will stay with you at 25%.
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I mean, it was such a huge weight that I can never let wrong happen to these people.
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And I think that became one of the reasons why we survived. Because it changes the entire vibe, the energy. It tells you that there are 55 people who trust you more than you. They believe that you will not fail. You will do something with your life.
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So, now we will have to do it. So, that happened. And then we became a stage company. And one more thing, I am very proud to tell you that last year in June, we gave exit to all the employees.
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They made some 2x of their investment etc. When Unicorn will be made and our investors will make 50x, I don't think it will ever give me more satisfaction than giving exit to those people.
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Because the burden has been lifted. The grief continued with us I think throughout. A lot of things are unprocessed to be honest.
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December 2020, we were trying to raise a series around stage. Everything was going well but we didn't monetize till then. Every VC that we spoke to said that Bharat doesn't pay, subscription won't work. We were just not able to raise.
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We had about 5-6 months of savings. And when 2-5-10 people say the same thing, it gets into your head. It starts to impact you.
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And you start to believe that so many smart people are saying so many things. They must be saying something right. They do this for their daily job.
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And you start to doubt yourself. And that is when all the shit that you are buried, it all comes out.
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So what happened is, it got into my head that I am not a good entrepreneur. Witty Feed got shut down. There were a lot of people who said that they knew about it.
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When Facebook does something, everybody says that why would Facebook do this. Nobody would say that my story is the right story. Until and unless I prove it at some point.
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Everybody would say that why would Facebook shut down someone else's story. I was the culprit in everybody's mind.
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But by the way, why did they shut you down? Yeah, I will probably come to that as a follow up. And some people said it was a fluke.
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Anyways, we used to say that nothing will happen to them. Now when the money was saved for 6 months and the money was not being raised, what were the thoughts in my mind? That the stage will also be shut down. And then everybody who said so will basically be right. And they will say that we had said it. They don't know anything basically.
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I used to roam around the garden at 2 or 3 in the afternoon. I was a crazy guy who doesn't know anything. I didn't understand what I was thinking. I used to think that the stage will be shut down.
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What job will I get? Who will give me a job? The sense of worthlessness for self was so high that I used to feel that who will give me a job? What job will I get? I don't know anything. I am not an expert in anything.
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You are basically a jack of all trades as an entrepreneur and you are a master of none. You will get an entry level job as a product manager. You are not a developer. You are not a CEO. What will you do basically?
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I just couldn't think of a single job that I could get. All the unprocessed grief of witty feed not making it came out basically. And it took a lot to come out of this.
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Thankfully we shifted from Indore to Noida around that time. 1st of April last year I shifted here. Changed the energy, changed the vibe and we launched subscriptions 10th of April. Thank God it worked out.
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And that gave me the energy to be able to raise the... within next 2 months I raised some million dollars or so and then we survived and it all is going great now and all. But the point is like you said where do you even bring the motivation from etc.
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The truth is that I am not always motivated. Truth is that there are times when I feel like worthless piece of shit. There are times when I feel like giving up and I am like what the hell why don't I even do a job itself and all right.
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But then what motivates you and what brings you back to doing it all over again is the reminder of why did you start in the first place.
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You remember that did you start it for the money? Why did you start it? You started because you want to do something good for people. You are able to do that basically. There is an entire state which is coming out of inferiority complex based on their language because you created a platform in Haryanvi.
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The youth, entire Haryanvi youth today are you just call and tell us that because there is a state today I don't feel bad in speaking in Haryanvi.
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And I think about that and I am like what the hell we have to do this. If not who? If not us who? Who will do it? No one is doing it. We have to do it basically.
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And I think just by thinking like that the whole motivation point, success point comes into your mind and you do something and then you start doing it.
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And I think success is the biggest motivator. In entrepreneurship you have to look for the ropes.
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I always say that sadness comes in a truck and happiness comes in small pieces. Success also has something like that. Failure happens at the same time. It's over. You wake up one morning and it doesn't exist.
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But you never get success like that. Success doesn't happen overnight. Success doesn't happen at once. Success comes in small pieces.
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So you need to be able to learn to identify those ropes, hold on to them and like catch the other one after the other, one after the other and like keep climbing up.
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So when there's a spiral down, now at least the way I have learned to handle it is that I acknowledge it. I don't fight it.
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I have realized that motivation is not a linear thing. There are days when you feel amazingly motivated and you should use that to do everything.
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And then there are weeks when you will feel really low and it's okay. So I don't fight too much with myself on the days when I'm feeling low.
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And I tell myself that it's okay. It will also pass. Basically, it's been so many times that it doesn't feel like it's okay. I know you're feeling very bad right now.
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But you have to do some self-soothing that it's okay. It's been so many times. We will feel better tomorrow.
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So you look forward to tomorrow and one of those days turns out to be a good day. Something good happens and one good thing leads to another.
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I told my team that one good thing leads to another. Look for one thing that is going good and build on that.
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And from where I'm sitting, it seems to me that what you described with your 54 employees is such a big success.
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I mean, you were earlier talking about your anger issues and whatever, but you know, 54 people making that kind of a choice.
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It shows that it didn't matter that overall there was something else that you did right. So that's quite amazing.
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Just to go back to the smaller question of why did Facebook do what they did and also the larger question that brings about is the power that platforms have.
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Like as someone who cares deeply about the creator economy, this also worries me that the way the tech ecosystem has evolved is that you practically have monopolies in their domains of Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and so on and so forth.
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And if a platform tomorrow makes a small change in an algorithm, a creator's entire, you know, revenue model could fall apart or a business's model could fall apart as happened to you.
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So is this something you think about given that earlier you said if you know content is king, distribution is god, distribution to platforms key through.
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So what are your thoughts? So let me answer the what happened to VT feed first and then I'll tell you my views on it.
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Right. So not that these companies tell you what they do, why they do, how they do it, etc.
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How do these companies operate? They have a dictatorship type because they have monopolies and they can do what they're doing.
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So they pass orders and you live in their world and you just have to accept it. You can't do much about it. You can't really fight them.
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That's the reality of the world. Right. So just like that one fine day we got this notice in our inbox.
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And before even we read that, we discovered the notice later.
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Before that, all our properties were basically deleted from the platform, including my own like founders profile, our vibes profile that deleted all employees.
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Basically everything about VT feed was removed and so on and so forth.
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We never got an official reason. Official reason notice was that you violated some of our platform policies, which is a black hole.
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You don't know what policies. How do I even know? Right. And I'm a large company. I'm giving you so much business.
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There are 150 people is a business, real business lives on the other side of that email. Right. So you need to talk to me.
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If I'm violating, I'm not a criminal. I'm not. You need to talk to me. You need to tell me these are the problems.
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But then again, over time, what we discovered, the actual issue was that 2018 was also the year of Cambridge Analytica in US.
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And from a very American point of view, the entire issue was non-American companies influencing American voters using Facebook as a platform.
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Right. We were a non-American company. We were reaching out to every third American voter every month.
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That was the scale that we had 60 million American users. Right. And we were using Facebook as the primary source of distribution.
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Right. Now, Facebook was under a lot of pressure. Mark was going through Senate hearings, all of that stuff. Right.
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So they needed to show some action. We had to show them that we were basically doing something. Right.
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Now, you can't do anything with BuzzFeed. You can't do anything with other companies in New York.
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If you kill a company which is based out of Indore and nobody has even heard of, who cares?
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And the action, however, is 120 million users, 65,000 influencers. You show like a huge action. Right.
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And nobody cares. Basically, same company if owned by some American based out of New York, the outcome would have been very, very different.
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Basically. Right. So that is what happened. Actually, I think it also has a lot of unspoken racism, unspoken.
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I mean, how these large companies, especially US companies, look at Asian companies and Indian companies, especially Indian entrepreneurs.
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And there's a lot of discrimination, inbuilt discrimination that exists over there.
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This superiority complex. I mean, there are a lot of underlying issues, basically, that play out. When you peel the onion, you will find that there are so many layers to the entire issue.
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It was just convenient for them to kill us. And that is why we got killed. Not because we deserved or we did something wrong or anything like that.
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It's just that it because it was convenient for Facebook to kill us, they killed it. And it didn't like they there were zero consequences that they had to face.
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Right. So it's as simple as that. Now, my views on distribution and platforms and all. Right.
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So one of the reasons we decided to build stage as an authority platform, an app based platform, is that at least to some extent, we remove that dependency that once you have a user on your app, at least now they're your user up.
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There is still dependency of place or distributions and all their you all policies like you have to pay 30 percent on cart and all that stuff. Right.
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So but and which are very I don't know what's the right word, but wrong policies. Right.
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I think so we reduce that to a large extent by being an app based player this time, like having our own and companies like Dream 11, etc.
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Because of policies have shown that you can build a user base without having to distribute on Play Store and so on and so forth. Right.
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So which is why we choose to build this.
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At least I am never going to trust these platforms for distribution because even today,
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I feel that Facebook, Google will ever get up and say, no, your app is banned from the Play Store.
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We can't do anything. And it has happened to so many companies, even companies like PTM, such a large company, it happened to them.
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Right. It is probably the influence of VSS in some way, etc. And like a lot of media buzz around it, etc.
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And like a certain narrative that got pulled in, which is why Google came on the back foot and they restored it.
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If it can happen to them, as long as I am young, it can happen to me anytime and anywhere. Right.
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So I think these platforms need to relook into these things.
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And if they will not, we are already seeing the winds of change and these guys will lose.
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There has to be a point where creators will realize that and creators will start to figure out their own this thing and they will lose on that over time.
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Right. So anyone, all creators, I still tell everyone that you are a YouTuber, you are all this.
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But the problem is that you are on the mercy of these platforms. They can kill you whenever they want.
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SEO people are killed by Google every third month. Right. We know that.
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And it's like a known industry accepted fact that every third month the traffic will be bad and then you have to figure out what is new.
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Basically. Right. Similarly, there were so many entrepreneurs on Facebook, so many companies were killed.
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There was a very viral thread recently by the founder of Little Things, which was also killed in a similar manner.
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BuzzFeed, which was more than a billion dollar company at one point in time.
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Their total valuation of the company is less than the money that they raised for a simple reason because Facebook killed them.
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The reach is over. The reach is over. Basically, the traffic is over. Everything is over.
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So I still don't know the answer to what to do from here.
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I am trying my best to ensure that my dependency on them is bare minimum.
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So tell me about stage now. Like, how did you think of stage?
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And what I find so interesting and also impressive that you could then have the courage to follow through on it is that it's going against so many of so much of what the industry is doing in terms of being as hyper local as you are.
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You know, where people could even argue. You know, and even against the conventional knowledge of India versus Bharat Bharat, where, you know, the assumption is that it's only the very top, which I also believed until I, you know, heard otherwise while researching you that, you know, it's a very top layer of elites like us who can actually spend money via the market.
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And, you know, Sajid Bhai of Bloom Ventures, Bloom Ventures is one of your funders. Sajid had come on the show and he had once written an influential article on this, I think, and had broken it down that most of India is basically like Sub-Saharan Africa.
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But what your venture seems to say and what you're saying, not by words, but by actions. Just in the same way that your parents, even though they were in a village, sent you to a private school.
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So, you know, so tell me a little bit about, you know, how did you conceive of stage and how did all these beliefs that Bharat will pay that we should be hyper local, how did all this come about?
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Yeah, see, the idea of stage came from, it is rooted into those two same common beliefs that the power of content as a medium of mass influence and distribution is the real game.
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So we knew that we want to build a content company again, and we knew that we are going to do things differently in terms of distribution this time, right?
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And whatever we did wrong with Witty Feed, basically, one thing that we this time wanted to change was the fact that we wanted to build it for Bharat.
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We made it for Americans, the extreme one end of the spectrum. And now we want to do the other end of the spectrum on internet, which is the Bharat audience, right?
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Reason being because when we were making Witty Feed and this entire Jio story was unfolding in India, we always felt very frustrated and jealousy with the kind of companies that were coming up and building for Bharat.
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And we felt that what are they doing? What are they making? We can do a much better job and they're not doing it the right way. And so we should do it basically.
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But the revenue of this company of 40 crores does not pivot, basically. Okay, bro, let them make it. What can I do? It's running, so I'll keep running my company.
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Now we had a chance, basically, right? And so we decided to go back and build it for Bharat. We were thinking about, okay, what are the problems in content in Bharat, right?
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And the top five content companies back in the day which were solving for Bharat were all Chinese, all UGC content companies and all of them used a huge amount of sexually explicit content as their actual growth hack, right?
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So TikTok, Likey, Hello, Bego, these type of companies basically were running at that time, right? All of them were Chinese and UGC and sexual content.
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I said, if I am saying that I am Bharat, my family is Bharat, then how is that? Do they want to consume only this kind of content?
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The question was that I want to see my family like this. And the answer to that was obviously no, they want to consume better content, premium content, sensible content, but unfortunately it doesn't exist.
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Nobody is creating that for Bharat. And that's where we figured out this problem statement that if we could build a premium and sensible content company for Bharat, it's a complete white space.
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It's a very large opportunity and you can build a very large company here. Now, the moment you say premium, you can't say UGC.
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So if you make UGC, then basically you will get useless content. So we said, okay, remove UGC. There are very few options in PGC. You can build a news company.
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Either make something like VTV or something like a news channel or basically make OTT. VTV got eliminated because of whatever reasons.
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News, because again, where will you distribute it? Facebook, Google, all this will happen. Stage made more sense. Sorry, OTT made more sense because one, it was as much a tech play as content.
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So it connected to us. If we make an app base, then our distribution will be our own this time. We will own the user. Whatever we acquire, they will be ours.
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The problem with VTV was that we used to acquire 120 million every month and none of them was ours. Our returning user was 60-70%.
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But we had to acquire it every month basically. So here, if we acquire it once, basically if we can retain it, then we said, let's build an OTT for Bharat.
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Netflix for Bharat solution came out. But the problem, the moment we said it, we kind of got scared a little because that means there are about 20-25 active OTT platforms in India.
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Small and big, you can mix them all. If you ask anyone at night, if you ask in your sleep, they will say that we are building Netflix for Bharat.
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Everybody claims that only. If you ask Sonilab, Hotstar, G5, Allbalaziz, ask anyone. Everybody will claim the same thing.
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So we said, what are we making here in such a crowded market? And every single player literally is owned by an incumbent.
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It's a large production house, a large company backed by some media backing. So here, what are we going to do here? We went back to our village literally.
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And so here an important point, what I want to tell you is that one of the things that has helped me throughout our story, all three founders, that we always remained an outsider.
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Even in Viti Feed, whatever we were able to do, we were able to do it because we didn't know that it can't happen. We didn't know that Indore doesn't make a company.
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We have to go to Bangalore for that. We have to start up. So we didn't know that we shouldn't do revenue. We didn't know that profitability is not looked at as a good thing in the VC circle.
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We didn't know that we can't make global media from India. We didn't know all this. So we did it. Then it happened.
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Same way, we were still an outsider. Basically, we don't know what can't happen.
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What is told by the book that all this doesn't happen. Our entire life, our entrepreneurial journey has been all about common sense.
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Think about it with common sense. What does make sense here? So we said, on one hand, I am saying that premium sensible content is needed by my family and it is not.
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On the other hand, I am saying that there are 27 OTTs. So where is the problem? What is the unsold part? We went back to our village literally.
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And there we did some research. What we discovered became the unique insight on which we built this company, which is that you look at all the OTTs in India in the name of vernacular content.
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All of them do language based content. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam. You will get all these.
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I grew up speaking Haryanvi. Haryanvi is not a language and there was no content in Haryanvi. There was no app in Haryanvi. Nothing.
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So I thought, this is it. This is not happening. Both are right. There are 27 OTTs, but no one is doing Haryanvi. Why not?
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Which is the pursuit of trying to figure this out. We found that Haryanvi is a dialect and not a language. Before that, I did not know all this.
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I spoke in Vyakran and read the language, but never thought of it in a practical sense.
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And this discrimination by our constitution between a dialect and a language leads to a lot of things.
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The dialects don't have their own script, so they don't have their own literature, so they don't have their own cinema, and so there is no industry.
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The words are literally spoken, but not written. Basically. They are not written.
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So we said, boss, it is in Haryana. Is it a Haryana only problem?
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So you go to Rajasthan, people speak Marwadi, Sikawati, Haruti, Mewati, depending on the region that you come from.
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UP speaks Braj, Bundeli, Avdi, Bhojpuri, Kannoji. Bihar speaks Mathli, Maghai, Bhojpuri, Angika and Bajika.
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Then North is completely covered. Then we said, is it a North only problem?
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You go to the entire coastal region of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa speaks Konkani.
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Konkani is a language, recognised as a language because of Goa, but still there is hardly any content in Konkani, and there is a very large population that speaks it.
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In Gujarat, there is Gujarati, but under Gujarati there is Kathiawadi and Kachi.
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Maharashtra has Kolhapuri, Malwani, Telangana and Andhra were divided.
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One of the big reason was that they speak two different versions of Telugu.
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There is Tullu and there are different Sindhi.
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There are many such small languages like Assamese, Udia, the entire North East, Nepali and all this.
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Point being that we discovered that in India, language is an urban concept.
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In the city, you are from somewhere, I am from somewhere.
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If we understand Hindi and English, then we are using it.
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I can't speak in Haryanvi because you won't understand.
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Whatever dialect you may speak, you can't speak in that because I will not understand.
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So we need common ground.
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So urban places, cities are about languages.
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But the moment you go beyond urban settlements, everyone speaks in dialects.
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If you go 20 km from Gurgaon, you won't find a person who can speak Hindi.
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For me, to learn Hindi, to speak clean Hindi was as big a task as it was to learn English.
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Just like we were talking about Neeraj Chopra.
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He speaks his Hindi with a very Haryanvi accent and I am so glad that he embraces his own identity so well because I didn't.
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Growing up, we thought that Haryanvi was supposed to be a bad thing.
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I used to literally scold and beat my siblings for speaking in Haryanvi.
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So our minds are filled with inferiority.
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The point being that the insight was that in India, language is an urban concept.
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The moment you go beyond urban settlements, everybody speaks in dialects.
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And so if there is a true hyper-local content company to be built for India, for the next billion people,
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something that will disrupt Bollywood, something that will be built bottom-up for them
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and not with a top-down approach that one film will be made in Mumbai and the whole country has to watch it.
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Something that will not bastardize the Haryanvi spoken by the characters in Dangal
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because it has to be relevant to somebody in Maharashtra also.
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So it has to be a dialect-based content company and not a language-based sort of a platform.
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So we decided to build the most hyper-local content company ever built.
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A dialect-based entity for India, basically.
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Again, we didn't know that this was not possible.
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So we just went ahead and built it and the time has passed.
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The challenges remained their own.
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Maybe I can talk about that also a little bit.
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There were challenges in three parts.
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Everyone said that who will download the app for Haryanvi?
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And even if they do, how many people will be there?
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So demand and depth is one problem.
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Second, people said there is no existing supply.
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Which means there are no existing creators.
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So how will you build the supply, basically?
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And third, monetization.
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India doesn't give money, basically.
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We solved all three problems one by one.
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First of all, we solved the demand.
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So we launched with a free app in the first 18 months.
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There was no money to make content.
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To make PGC content, the prerequisite is that you have to invest money.
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So you have to figure out which content will be made cheaply.
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So artist-based content.
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Comedy, poetry, storytelling, folk, nookar naatak.
#
This naturally exists in the dialects.
#
Second, it is very cheap.
#
Third, our original idea was to make only artist-based content.
#
Which is why the name is Stage of the platform.
#
Because we thought that mainstream media is bought and sold.
#
It has its own problems.
#
So historically, from the time of Raja Maharaj, till now,
#
what type of content is it that creates revolution?
#
Where does revolution come from?
#
Where do sparks come from?
#
And it has always been the artists.
#
Whether they do comedy, poetry, in the form of folk.
#
History tells the story of the winner.
#
But who tells the story of the loser?
#
History always tells the story of the winner.
#
So who told the story of the loser?
#
It comes out in the form of folk.
#
A poem is written on it.
#
Something else is written on it.
#
Art has always preserved our history in the most, this thing.
#
So we said that if the Netflix of dialects will be made,
#
then it will be artist-based.
#
These artists are the ones who keep it alive.
#
So if we genuinely want to make a platform that creates revolution,
#
which can be a surrogate way to wake up the people,
#
then it has to be an artist's Netflix.
#
Which is how the stage, which was the original idea of the stage.
#
So we started with that content.
#
Within the first 18 months, the app was free.
#
We had 1.5 million downloads just from Haryana.
#
We started from Haryana because of course, my home dialect.
#
There were 1.5 million downloads.
#
So demand, depth, all this has been solved.
#
But we also realized that people will not pay for this content.
#
And see, this is where, going back to what you said,
#
there are contradictions in life.
#
You start with something and then you realize that
#
if you want to sustain it, you have to do something else.
#
I started with an NGO and then I started a business.
#
I started with the idea of building a surrogate media,
#
like a platform for artists, etc.
#
But then I realized that people will not pay for it.
#
Because everyone thinks that this content will be available on YouTube.
#
Even when it was exclusive,
#
the problem with artist-based content is that people think that it is available on YouTube.
#
The second problem is that you can try anything.
#
If a comedian is performing,
#
then he will perform at one place.
#
So his perceived production value is very low.
#
It is very difficult to take money for that.
#
Which is when we realized that people will pay
#
only for the established content formats,
#
which are longer content formats like movies and web series and so on and so forth.
#
And so came the part of solving for the supply.
#
That the supply that we have made, you will not get money for that.
#
For the supply, you will have to make the typical entertainment supply.
#
So we literally jump-started a local Bollywood in Haryana.
#
We literally created a whole industry from scratch.
#
One of the cliché insights that you,
#
when you work there, you realize that talent is universal,
#
but opportunity is not.
#
There are so many people who want to create great content,
#
who wanted to make movies and so on.
#
Like they want to work in Haryana,
#
there is a script written or something.
#
But it is not a platform.
#
If you want to make a movie in Haryana, who will release it?
#
If you invest money, how will it recover?
#
So we basically went on the ground,
#
worked with these people, incubated them,
#
helped them become creators and producers.
#
And we sanctioned the first web series in Haryana.
#
As soon as we put the first web series on the app,
#
the engagements skyrocketed.
#
today, something that I am most proud to tell is that
#
Haryana today has a very flourishing industry,
#
We very fondly call it Harrywood.
#
And there will be at least 25 production houses here.
#
More than 1500 people have jobs directly and indirectly
#
because of what we have been able to create.
#
And reverse migration is happening.
#
Earlier, if a Haryanvi wanted to do something in entertainment,
#
he would basically go to Mumbai.
#
He used to struggle in Bollywood.
#
They are like, films are being made in our village
#
and we are struggling here.
#
Plus, if a person comes back from Mumbai,
#
He has come from Mumbai, he has learned, right?
#
So this is quite amazing.
#
As soon as we put the web series,
#
engagements skyrocketed.
#
And which is when we knew that people will pay.
#
Answering your last part of the question,
#
which is that how did I know that people will pay
#
and why did I believe in that and all?
#
See, when you grow up in the village,
#
you understand those people.
#
So like you said, my father sent me to a private school.
#
Dad used to run a grocery store,
#
We used to sell Pepsi, Coke, Dabur,
#
We used to sell all these.
#
There will be a lot more other brands.
#
It has never been about that they don't want to pay.
#
It has always been about that have you created enough value for them.
#
And with entrepreneurs,
#
the problem is, unfortunately,
#
everyone thinks that India will not pay.
#
and who becomes an entrepreneur normally?
#
Some urban people become.
#
Or at least after coming to the city,
#
Nobody is making a company in the village normally.
#
So an urban bias becomes.
#
And the easy way out is to make it for the city.
#
So everybody ends up creating for the cities,
#
for the urban audience.
#
And then they feel entitled.
#
And then India gets a second-class experience.
#
And which is why they have not been successful in monetizing the user.
#
And we said on day zero,
#
we will build for everyone minus the top 10%.
#
The top 10% should not be made for Delhi,
#
Which is why we had the courage to build it in dialects.
#
So we thought people will pay.
#
We have truly created value for them.
#
we became a fully paid app.
#
And the response has been phenomenal.
#
Now we have 1,10,000-1,15,000 paying subscribers just from Haryana.
#
We give Rs.400 per year.
#
Which is also typically the rate at any other OTT.
#
Even our minimum is Rs.200.
#
Typically it is Rs.30-50 per month for OTTs.
#
Our minimum is Rs.200 for 3 months.
#
And we got phenomenal response.
#
8-10,000 new subscribers come every month from Haryana.
#
And people love the fact that
#
we have been able to do what we have been able to do.
#
And we found a meaning, a larger meaning,
#
when the youth came and told us.
#
And that became the mission of the company today.
#
we feel ashamed to speak in Haryana.
#
So much inferiority complex.
#
If I podcast in Haryana now,
#
people feel that it is illiterate, illiterate,
#
it doesn't know the language.
#
You can't speak in the city.
#
And so imagine what it does to people
#
who speak only Haryana in their life.
#
Like, if you come to my house, Amit,
#
and you are sitting in the living room,
#
in my own house, on my sofa,
#
my father will not sit there.
#
no, no, you are educated people.
#
He will just feel so inferior
#
by the fact that you and me will end up talking in Hindi or English.
#
And he will just not feel comfortable there.
#
Imagine what it does to this entire set of people
#
who only grow up speaking in their dialects.
#
And they are made to feel inferior
#
because they speak in a certain way.
#
Which is borderline criminal in my understanding, right?
#
And these people came and told us that...
#
What used to happen is that people would come on the app,
#
look at the 5-star reviews and write,
#
Jai Haryana, Jai Haryanmi.
#
You saved our language.
#
And which is when by talking to them,
#
we understood that our true mission is actually
#
to restore the pride and the dignity of the dialects,
#
the respect, the pride and the dignity of the dialects and cultures
#
back into them, basically.
#
That's the real product that is happening
#
because of what we are able to do.
#
I can't tell you how inspiring this is.
#
I hope many, many people are listening to this
#
and feeling like they should do the same for their dialects.
#
When we fixed our episode,
#
I sent the link to download the app to a bunch of my friends
#
and I said, please download, tell me what your experience is.
#
And one of them, shout out to Kumar,
#
just sort of wrote back today to say he was so blown away.
#
And one of the things he was blown away by
#
is that all these artists, he said,
#
I have never heard of them.
#
I have never seen their work.
#
In Bollywood, nobody is familiar to me.
#
So all of these people, the fact that they have a platform,
#
the fact that they have a stage to...
#
So you've created a new ecosystem.
#
And when you create a new ecosystem, you expand the culture.
#
Like one of my worries that I've discussed on the show
#
and I feel I've spoken with various people
#
about whether it is happening to languages is homogenization.
#
Because Hindi has so many dialects,
#
but gradually the smaller ones start disappearing
#
and Hindi becomes everything,
#
especially because India is a rapidly urbanizing country.
#
because there is such a rich heritage there that is kind of gone.
#
So I'm just sort of blown away by what you're doing.
#
My next question is this that at one level,
#
like I completely agree with your disdain
#
of the top-down way of thinking
#
and the top-down content creation,
#
like it happens in Bollywood,
#
that we will make a whole country from Bombay,
#
you will see and all of that.
#
And that was actually one of the reasons
#
I loved TikTok when it came out,
#
like Chinese company, Beshako.
#
It was a huge leveler because any people across the country,
#
in villages, people of alternate sexualities,
#
people who were otherwise oppressed and marginal,
#
who could never have access to a platform,
#
could suddenly just turn their phone around
#
and shoot a video of themselves and put it up.
#
And I thought that was incredibly empowering.
#
So at one level, I understand where you come from
#
when you say that user-generated content can only go so far.
#
But at another level, I feel that that is also a kind of bottom-up.
#
You know, your artists that you have access to
#
also is still a limited pool.
#
And, you know, user-generated, maybe,
#
I see sort of a lot of hope there.
#
Like, most of the content I consume on YouTube
#
is actually user-generated.
#
So I agree with you on that.
#
And I have nothing against UGC, by the way.
#
We've been debating an idea internally
#
of having a UGC section on our own app also, by the way.
#
And so what I meant when I was explaining why not UGC,
#
because the way these, especially the Chinese apps,
#
were using UGC was, in the name of UGC,
#
they were essentially seeding a huge amount of
#
sexually explicit content and calling it UGC
#
and using that as the actual growth hack, right?
#
So there were a lot of amazing things about TikTok,
#
and it brought out an amazing set of influencers and creators
#
and so many talented people out, right?
#
And we heard such amazing stories
#
because of TikTok and short video apps, right?
#
So I agree with you on that, absolutely.
#
And just that this needs to be done with the right intent.
#
UGC platforms are amazing,
#
but need to be done with the right intent.
#
YouTube has done a fairly good job.
#
There are so many creators, UGC creators,
#
who have become big creators because of YouTube.
#
Even there are some newer kind of platforms
#
which are doing a good job,
#
like the Indian versions, for example,
#
are not so bad to be honest.
#
See, the problem with Chinese apps was that
#
they basically had zero accountability, right?
#
There was no fear of anything,
#
that they could cross any limit and get away with it, right?
#
And which is what was bringing up a huge,
#
an entire generation online,
#
believing that this is what internet is.
#
And which is why I said,
#
we chose a certain white space,
#
that every Tom, Nick and Harry says that
#
Especially after going to TikTok,
#
it started raining, right?
#
All my investors messaged me,
#
it's my time, you make UGC.
#
Because so many people are making it,
#
so what will I do in that?
#
The empty space, the fact that
#
most people thought that India doesn't deserve premium
#
is what was a problem for me.
#
I feel that India also deserves premium content.
#
Why does everyone think that
#
premium content like Netflix
#
is only for Delhi-Bombay people?
#
Why can't the people of my village get premium content?
#
we all know about Daily Shop,
#
it's bullshit content, essentially.
#
I know it works, it does amazing TRPs and all,
#
can I not deliver great quality content?
#
Do you think that they don't want to consume quality content?
#
And my entire fight has been that they won't do.
#
We have made a very hard stance,
#
that we will not do any
#
sex, violence and abusive content on our app.
#
Everything that we do has to be
#
But the stories will be very high quality,
#
very high quality acting
#
and something that will leave them thinking,
#
that will not be mindless,
#
if someone understands the actual stage properly,
#
then that is the proof that we have been able to create.
#
of the fact that India wants to,
#
if you provide, India can consume premium content,
#
wants to consume premium content,
#
and stories which are not mindless.
#
sexual comedy does not work in India.
#
A lot of other things also work.
#
revolution that we are trying to basically build up here.
#
And another thing I was struck by is that you said that
#
that you can't possibly keep up.
#
And therefore, even when you make mistakes,
#
even when some content isn't perfect,
#
it is still extremely popular.
#
So basically your learning curve is coming at a profit.
#
They are very forgiving now.
#
This user also realizes that
#
before this, no one was giving anything.
#
There is someone who is making a film in Haryanvi,
#
is making a web series now.
#
They are demanding also.
#
That doesn't mean they are not demanding.
#
They will come, critique, they will tell us.
#
They are like, as long as you are improving.
#
for example, we had a phone app before.
#
And we didn't have an Android TV app.
#
And we received huge amount of complaints about it.
#
They want the best of the experience.
#
It was a revelation to me that
#
the penetration of Android TV in India is so huge
#
that we don't even realize.
#
We should build for those platforms.
#
If there is an entrepreneur listening this somewhere out there.
#
They want the best of the experiences.
#
But they are forgiving of the fact
#
that they realize that this person is doing something.
#
So they want to, you know, stand by you.
#
They want to stick with you.
#
They want to support you.
#
For example, I tell people that
#
people in the world download it to watch films,
#
to watch web series, to watch content.
#
Our app is the baseline.
#
People download it because it is in Haryanvi.
#
For that, it's a matter of pride.
#
Any product manager looks for epic meaning in any product.
#
What should I make to get epic meaning in this product?
#
Because that's when you become irrational.
#
And your retention becomes very high.
#
It is by default in our product.
#
The epic meaning of the fact that
#
you are doing it for Haryana,
#
you are doing it for Haryanvi.
#
Thank you for doing this.
#
It's a matter of pride for me.
#
It's a very, very big deal for them.
#
And there is a very big reason why they buy the subscription basically.
#
And not just pride, I would imagine comfort zone also.
#
So I remember my father in his last years,
#
he was brought up in Calcutta,
#
and so very Bengali by culture,
#
and retired in Chandigarh and lived there till he passed away.
#
the only thing he would watch on television really was old Bengali serials.
#
Because it's that comfort zone factor,
#
this is my language and that sense of,
#
you know, so I sort of totally get that.
#
So what are your sort of plans moving ahead now?
#
Haryanvi hai, Rajasthani hai,
#
you know, do you see this as sort of an all India play
#
ki harjaga hyperlocal karte hai?
#
Because hunger is clearly there,
#
you have demonstrated against all conventional wisdom
#
that they are willing to pay.
#
We have identified 18 such markets across the country,
#
which have a minimum potential of 5 million paying households.
#
So hum parivaar ko ek TG maante hain,
#
bajay ki individual ko,
#
ki subscription ghar mein eki aad mein lega basically, right?
#
So 50 lakh people at least speak a dialect,
#
there are 18 such dialects and small languages,
#
which basically have a potential to replicate the same success all across.
#
When we capture all these 18,
#
we will be addressing 50 to 60% of India's population
#
through their own local dialects basically,
#
125 million households almost.
#
We will most probably not do South a lot,
#
because maha pe languages itself are playing that role
#
and it's a very crowded market and like very expensive market.
#
So we probably will never do South,
#
but everywhere else in this country, there is a huge potential.
#
We are already live in Rajasthani,
#
we are going to launch Bhojpuri, Mathali and Maghai within the next one year.
#
And once we do that, then the rest of the Hindi belt,
#
which is Avdhi, Bundeli and then Pahadi, Chhattisgadi,
#
we are already talking to a partner in Nepal to launch stage Nepali,
#
something like that, then Gujarati and basically Konkani
#
and basically the entire set of these things.
#
So this is absolutely an all India play.
#
This reminds me of something,
#
I will make a point there about homogeneity.
#
India's last linguistic survey based on dialects happened in 1901.
#
The British did it, we never did it after that.
#
Nineteen thousand dialects were identified in India at that time.
#
Today only 700 of them are alive.
#
Only 700 of them, right?
#
And it happened because of a simple reason that after independence,
#
under a political agenda, basically,
#
one country, one language and whatever bullshit,
#
basically we sold to people.
#
And there was some colonial baggage,
#
we told our people that if you don't speak English,
#
Now, thankfully, because of the internet,
#
a little bit of Hindi came back,
#
that you can speak Hindi in a business meeting,
#
in a language, in a podcast,
#
otherwise even that was not allowed.
#
In dialects, there is a type of no-no situation.
#
And we feel, we make those people feel very bad.
#
There are still schools in this country,
#
in the rural parts, where when you speak in your local language or dialect,
#
It used to happen in our school,
#
and there are many friends that I have heard saying the same thing.
#
So this is just a small dream that across the country,
#
so that people can feel their pride back on it.
#
And let me tell you one thing,
#
language is the best way to preserve culture.
#
For culture preservation,
#
local dialects are the most important.
#
Because, like in Haryana, there are some songs,
#
which are sung at weddings,
#
or on different occasions.
#
They have preserved the entire cultural elements around them.
#
So there are many such things,
#
which hopefully we can carry over time,
#
and restore a sense of pride in this.
#
We do have global aspirations also.
#
First of all, all the NRIs who are living outside India,
#
they have a very different problem.
#
Their second generation, the children who are born there,
#
they have no idea what their culture is,
#
what are their roots, and unfortunately,
#
it's not their fault because there is no way to know.
#
The only source of understanding India is Bollywood basically,
#
which is not a very great source, unfortunately.
#
And beyond that, like what we did in Haryana,
#
what stops us from doing the same thing in Nigeria,
#
or all the African countries,
#
because same, very distinct language,
#
small population, very distinct culture,
#
And we are 5-7 years behind in terms of internet, etc.
#
So a very large business opportunity also that way.
#
A lot of Southeast Asia, Middle East,
#
all of these places basically have this opportunity.
#
Parts of Europe have this, something like Ukraine for example,
#
a very own distinct language,
#
and some local industry, but not like a lot of it.
#
So you can go and build a platform there.
#
There are a lot of global opportunities, if this works out,
#
then this can become a very huge company.
#
Amazing, you couldn't make an operating system,
#
but maybe this will take you where that was intended to.
#
So you know, you had earlier said in this episode
#
that the biggest gift you can give someone is a gift of time,
#
and I agree, so thank you so much for your graciousness today.
#
Before we sign off, one last question,
#
which I end most of my episodes with,
#
which is for my listeners and me,
#
can you recommend either films or music or web series or books or whatever,
#
whatever form of art has meant a lot to you in your life,
#
you know, which would be Desert Island is for you in a manner of speaking.
#
So, you know, what would you like to recommend?
#
So before I name any of this stuff,
#
I'll tell you, like I said, I watch a lot of content and mostly English content.
#
One of the ways to, so I look at English films as a way of learning for me.
#
The beauty of English content is,
#
what I realized is that,
#
in every film or web series,
#
there are at least one or two dialogues
#
which define the entire film.
#
And they are more like words of wisdom.
#
So when I watch any content,
#
I keep looking for that line, basically.
#
That learning, that life lesson.
#
they incorporate it in a very interesting way.
#
And the learning is very realistic.
#
Somewhere, there will be a scene, a dialogue,
#
in which the summary of the entire film,
#
the morale of the entire film is there.
#
And I have seen it almost,
#
except completely senseless content or something else,
#
but otherwise, this is almost without exception.
#
I think it's a Hollywood formula,
#
that they have this line.
#
Before I recommend anything,
#
I'll recommend a way to watch content that,
#
if you are watching and it is not just about entertainment,
#
then try and look for that dialogue.
#
Can you give an example of something like this?
#
I can't remember a good example,
#
but like there is a film,
#
it's a film called Steel or something like that.
#
Basically, it's between,
#
so I am very bad with names,
#
sorry, I can't remember the names.
#
It's about a kid who has a very large robot,
#
and it's a film about the fights of robots.
#
I thought it was a childish film.
#
But in that film, basically,
#
there is a point where there is a fight going on,
#
and a very filmy moment,
#
there is a fight going on with it,
#
and of course, this guy is taking a beating,
#
this, that and all, right?
#
So how does that robot's owner train him?
#
And in that scene, it is reflected that,
#
keeps on taking the beating,
#
and his trainer keeps on telling him,
#
not now, not now, not now.
#
when the other robot gets tired of beating,
#
when it exhausts its energy,
#
that is when this guy says,
#
And the learning for me was basically that,
#
that you have to wait for the right time
#
to make the best impact, basically.
#
You know, you may not be the best guy in the ring,
#
you know, preserve your energy
#
while the rest of them fight it out,
#
and, you know, make the best use of it, right?
#
So, now I am not able to replicate the exact dialogues for you,
#
but in the point, there was something like that, basically, right?
#
And so many other films,
#
like, sorry, I don't remember anything,
#
No, you can send me the name of the film later,
#
I will put it in show notes,
#
and send recommendations.
#
I watch anything, everything about space,
#
you would have guessed that.
#
So, Martian is one of my favourite films, right?
#
I also watch a lot of web series contents.
#
I am right now watching a web series called The Good Doctor.
#
It is one of the most amazing contents that I have seen.
#
I don't understand anything about the Doctor stuff that they do in the episode,
#
but I think it's a very compassionate content.
#
It is very amazingly made content.
#
And there are such amazing life lessons
#
throughout every single episode
#
that you can't even imagine.
#
I think all my liberal nature was built out of
#
watching a lot of Hollywood stuff, I think.
#
I got a lot of influence from there.
#
So, The Good Doctor is one of them.
#
there is a book called Hard Thing about Hard Things.
#
It has influenced me quite a lot.
#
There is a book that I read from Simon Sinek,
#
which is The Infinite Game.
#
I think that book spoke to me because it is...
#
I basically follow the same philosophy in life.
#
I think that book helped me articulate a lot of it,
#
that businesses and life itself are infinite games.
#
There are no winners here, and there are no rules here.
#
You play it to enjoy it, basically.
#
I used to think that it's not about the destination,
#
but about enjoying the journey.
#
This is a different version of it.
#
That book is amazing. You should read it.
#
A lot of very nice anecdotes in that book,
#
and you end up with basically understanding the idea of this thing.
#
As entrepreneurs, if you are starting up,
#
please read Zero to One,
#
and please read Lean Startup,
#
which are very cliche recommendations,
#
but two of the most amazing books
#
that you can read as an initial entrepreneur.
#
Actually, if you are starting up as an entrepreneur,
#
then one of the things that helped me the most,
#
and I did not discover it when I was starting up,
#
but I discovered it three years ago
#
when I was starting again at stage,
#
and I learned so much from it,
#
and I was able to appreciate better
#
because I had already gone into grind for eight years.
#
It is a playlist from Y Combinator.
#
They have a platform called Startupschool.org.
#
We will fill in the details about the company
#
that you are building or want to build,
#
and they curate an entire list of lectures for you and essays.
#
They curate a course of 20-25 videos and essays
#
and it is probably one of the best things
#
that I have ever taken.
#
Every morning, we would join on a Zoom call.
#
We did it during the pandemic.
#
We would join for an hour,
#
and we would watch the video,
#
read the essay together basically on a Zoom call.
#
It was probably the most important stuff
#
that we learned as entrepreneurs basically through that,
#
so please do watch that.
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Sign up for Startupschool.org platform
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if you are starting out as an entrepreneur.
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Yeah, that's mostly it basically.
#
this is one of the most inspiring conversations
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so thank you so much for your time and all your insights.
#
It means a lot coming from you
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because you have done too many of them,
#
and you meet some really amazing people.
