Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Today is Monday, the 19th of January, you're watching The Offline Network, we're streaming live. Hey, what's up?

Utsav Somani: How was the weekend? Good. How was yours? Nothing fun. Just relaxed and watched some Netflix and I saw the Joe Rogan podcast with Matt and Ben Affleck as well. They made some good points in there. Tell me more about it. We'll come to that, but first, let's give our audience the smart news. What's happening in the world of tech. So OpenAI announced that they're starting ads in the free and Go tier. Go tier is also expanded globally. And the CFO also posted an update on the revenue. So I think you mentioned on BG2Pod, Sam making a promise about them crossing 20 billion. So they've actually hit that number. So 3x year on year growth, 2 billion in 23, 6 billion in 24, and 20 billion in 2025. I mean, a lot of discussion points around here. The compute also go 3x year on year and Meta made 58, I mean, there was somebody who broke down the numbers behind how much does Meta make per user from their ads, which typically monetizes attention. There was $58 per user in 2025, purely from ads. And if OpenAI can match this via their ads, I think it's going to hit additional 58 billion in annual revenue just because of ad revenue.

Dhruv Sharma: Who will have to suffer ads in chat, Sribadil sir?

Utsav Somani: Man, I think free and Go tiers. And the funny thing is that have you seen the sample ad? We're showing it on screen, but it just looks hideous. Like, I mean, somebody posted that Google took a decade to get to this level of ad space on the screen. And they're literally taking up one third of the screen. So I don't know if it will be pleasing to many people. I think it might alienate some people, but you've known OpenAI to adjust on the fly as well. Have you read into any?

Dhruv Sharma: I haven't suffered an ad yet, thankfully.

Utsav Somani: Do you pay for chat?

Dhruv Sharma: I do. I do. I recently stepped down the tier I pay for because, you know, again, my AI tool usage was going through the roof. I looked it up and, you know, by the way, there's on a separate note, there is a link. I forget the link, but maybe we can share it with some of our listeners later where you can check all of the subscriptions on your, what's that called? The UPI thing that the record in UPI subscription?

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I know what you mean. Yes.

Dhruv Sharma: For that one. But coming back to this. So you remember OpenAI had shared that they have 800 million weekly active users. And we're learning that only 5% of them actually have paid subscriptions. So the balance 95% are going to have to suffer ads at some point or the other. And that could get them to the number you said was about 50. What was 58 again?

Utsav Somani: $58 per active user.

Dhruv Sharma: Is what Meta does and that could mean billions of incremental revenue.

Utsav Somani: Also, your point to note is that many people might flock away to other platforms. Like for Google, it's not that important to show ads. I mean, eventually they will. I mean, they were the first company to properly monetize ads, Google. And then of course, this was the wave in 2000s where search was monetized via ads. Then in 2010s, you had the social platforms like Facebook, Meta and everyone, Instagram showing ads. But now I think people are predicting 2020s might be the age where AI tools start showing ads. But I mean, the number of tools which are out there, it feels that people have so many options that they can really just go to any other platform and use. And all of them are evolving and competing with each other in a way that honestly, it's hard to tell which one's the best right now. For me, I think for my basic usage, any of them would suffice.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And print media, unfortunately, it's a Hobson's choice. So it's a take it or leave it. Like I'm in the magazine, the newspaper is going to have that ad. But with digital media, electronic media, you always have that choice to step up your subscription.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Sequoia is not making OpenAI happy. Sam has already warned investors that anyone who backs rivals non-passively will lose OpenAI access. And I say this because Sequoia is now investing with GIC and Kotu into the 25 billion round that Anthropic is supposedly raising. And Anthropic is making moves in India as well. So they've hired Irina Ghosh from Microsoft India to lead their India business. They're setting up an office here.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. That's interesting. But by the way, Sequoia is an investor in XAI as well.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. So they've really just indexed the market. I don't know how you deal with such powerful personalities like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Anthropic of course, the founder is much more reserved and media shy.

Dhruv Sharma: But there is a way in which venture firms can manage conflict, right? If they invest in two companies that compete with each other, maybe not at the start, but somewhere along the way, they have a method, right? To do that?

Utsav Somani: They do have, I mean, Chinese walls, just so that different partners are on boards of different companies. But eventually you have to think that a company which is winning, right, it's like buying an optionality ticket. There is only one growth fund that Sequoia has. And most of that money might get concentrated into winners also. So consensus capital, which our guest made a point about also, I think might stand true and you might lose out dollars from Sequoia just because they might be picking a different...

Dhruv Sharma: There's a pro-anthropic point in Pat Grady's recent article as well on 2026, the path to AGI, where he says that what we're starting to see now, which is these autonomous agents that can pick up tasks, coordinate between themselves, some of them can plan, some of them can execute, is starting to look very much like functional AGI.

Utsav Somani: So the thing that Claude also released, the co-work tool, I think it will be because of some of this conversation as well. So yeah, let's hope AI still maintains...

Dhruv Sharma: Especially like these long running, long horizon tasks, right, where you just unleash them on a task that's going to take an hour or a day or a week or a year or even longer.

Utsav Somani: You know, one thing that India will pay for, if there's an AI agent that can answer my calls and give the OTP to the delivery person, right? There were so many times when the delivery guy has gone back just because I was in the stream and couldn't give the OTP when I was at home. So it's funny how this thing works, but that I think might be a thing that India pays for. Fun things that we saw on the internet, Ben and Matt on the Joe Rogan podcast, they've come up with the movie The Rape on Netflix, and they were here to talk content with Joe Rogan, three people top of the game. And the one thing that really stood out is that Ben Affleckman, I think he was the smartest Batman out there, where he says that AI pulls content towards the mean, so it's flattening originality. And the original work, I mean, so much of the AI world is optimizing for just producing at scale, but I think going forward, the future might look different. And you had a point to make about this as well, right Dhruv?

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, and my point was that maybe 10 years out, there's only going to be two fun places to be, you either work at a frontier lab or live in an off-grid cabin. But, you know, as you as you were saying this, by the way, so this must have been one hell of a podcast because I know you don't watch too many. So if you expanded your quota on watching this, this is the right thing to do, right?

Utsav Somani: I mean, Joe Rogan and this thing, I saw the movie before I saw the podcast.

Dhruv Sharma: What movie is this?

Utsav Somani: The R.I.P. It's The R.I.P. is basically a term for drug houses or safe houses in the U.S. Classic Miami cop thriller where the R.I.P. is called the collection that you make from these safe houses when you raid them. So yeah, funny enough, we saw this another tweet where it said weight loss drugs like Ozempic is on track to save U.S. airlines more than half a billion dollars in fuel costs. And given that, I mean, Trump is having a go at Denmark as well because of Greenland, Denmark controls like 60, 70 percent of those networks. So yeah, and tariffs are flying left, right and center. So it might be fun to track this.

Dhruv Sharma: I can't wait to see skinny polar bears.

Utsav Somani: All right, let's welcome our guests for the show. Today we've got two people and they're going to jam with us on an article that they've written last week and they've received some positive feedback, some negative feedback. So we'll break all of this down with them. Let's welcome Anmol and Anshul to the show.

Dhruv Sharma: One of them looks familiar. I've seen you before.

Utsav Somani: Anmol, you've made a monopoly, like you're hoarding our guest slots on the show.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): And the internet's attention. You should tell more people to write so then they can come on the pod as well or the show not pod.

Utsav Somani: But explain like Barbie, super catchy name. What motivated you both to write this together? Like who came up with this idea? Why this idea? And what's a Barbie founder?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): So we've been we've been talking about like this for at least like five, six months at this point. I think I was having initially a conversation with Sajid Bhai, who's a partner at Bloom. And I was telling him, oh, we invest in all these founders who study abroad and come back. And he was like, oh, I actually have been brewing up an acronym for them. And he was like, it's B-A-R-B-I. I need an E to make it interesting. And so then I kind of ran with adding the E and coining the term. And Anshul and I have known each other for several years. We've both gone to college in the U.S. We both lived in the U.S. and lived in India. So we kept Barbie's ourselves. And interestingly, Anshul's class at Penn has all these founders and investors in the ecosystem who've moved back and built companies. And he was like, oh, you should write about this. You should write about this. I think by December, he kind of finally goes like, OK, I'll write it with you. And I think that really drove us to spend some time writing this out. What I mean, expand the term for our listeners. So it stands for founders who do their bachelor's abroad and return to build in the Indian ecosystem.

Utsav Somani: So E was that ecosystem which pointed you towards. And how many have you invested in personally?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): We've invested in nine.

Utsav Somani: Nine. All right. But is that a thing that you look for? Like, I mean, most Indian VCs, at least in the previous era, were looking for just IIT founders and just going out to us. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Anshul Bhide: Well, I'm just going to say as part of this article, we spoke to several investors and especially people like Sandeep Singhal and Sandeep Murthy, who are they both did the undergrad abroad and came back to India. They both had nuanced views, which is that I think a lot of these Barbie founders do tend to start up in consumer tech. And that's something that Anmol observed as well. Because, I mean, if you're going to start something that caters to its enterprises, you just end up staying over here. You wouldn't move back to India. And therefore, I think Anmol and Untitled are investing a lot more. Anmol, maybe you can talk about why. Like, are you actively investing or does it just come up as part of your deal flow?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Yeah, I think it more so just kind of comes up as part of where we tend to invest and also where our networks lie.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): So like both Vedika and I did our undergrads outside of India. She also went to Wharton. So we tend to have an edge in those networks where we might not have an idea or a bit's edge that your Peaks or Excels or Nexuses or the other firms might have.

Dhruv Sharma: Do you guys have a view on that? I was going to say, do you guys have a view on how a bachelor's overseas molds you differently than, say, a master's does? Like, why is it Barbie and not some other acronym starting with an M?

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, so I think.

Dhruv Sharma: Our friend Sivya has done both his degrees abroad, I might add.

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, I think there are three Barbies over here. I think one thing to keep in note, and Didi expounded on this in his post, and we were planning to write this, is that it's the same feeder high schools that feed into a lot of the undergrad schools. So if you think of like Ambani or Cathedral or Doon, these are all the same schools. And therefore, the network is very tight amongst these. The BSRK Puram founder. Exactly, the BSRK Puram founder. So as a result of that, it is that leads to a very, very tight network, both when you go abroad and when you come back. So it's like very, very select few. If you're part of that network, it allows you to invest and work with them a lot more easily. Maybe Anmol, you can talk about what you see in these founders moving back, especially those that are building in consumer.

Utsav Somani: Do you think like, I mean, they make you better storytellers? I didn't go to US, but Singapore and Barcelona. But I mean, just being around international people, I don't think I got the same benefit of the network. But I think it just makes you a better storyteller because the whole rounded curriculum that they had, there was a final credit that I had to take called finishing school, where you had to give a mock interview, know how to like pour into a water goblet and like how to hold a knife and a cutlery. So just pitches. I mean, you better.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Yeah, I mean, I think definitely kind of agree with that. And we can touch about touch upon that in the article where you're kind of holistic learning experience at a university outside. India tends to be more. You could be having a lot of classes that don't tend to have anything to do with your core subject or your core degree. And it makes you a more well-rounded individual and naturally a better storyteller, so to speak. I think the other thing that Anshul and I have also kind of realized is because they come from a select few high schools that are all largely English medium schools and a lot of Indian VCs like or expect to be pitched to in English. Someone who doesn't come from that background maybe not be as comfortable expressing themselves in the language, even if they've primarily used that language now.

Dhruv Sharma: Isn't that changing a little now? Maybe because of shock tagging. I don't know why.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I think it definitely like at the earlier stages. Definitely so. But if you look at a lot of the growth firms and all the firms that are still based outside of the country, a lot of them don't even have Indian teams. So I don't know if those fundraisers are happening in English.

Utsav Somani: Or like Tiger Gold, perhaps. Like we don't have a team on ground. Like so when they were doing all of this investing, I think it might have helped to pitch them. But I mean, one of the critiques that was made was about privilege and wealth correlation where people who can afford to go overseas. And you mentioned that and you acknowledged that in the article as well. What's your take on that?

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, I think people didn't scroll down enough to see us call out privilege. And I mean, look, we knew. I mean, of course, we're privileged. Of course, you'd be privileged unless you've got a scholarship to go abroad. You have to be in the top 1% or even 0.1% to go abroad for studies. I mean, my comment referring to those people is that it's what you do with that privilege that and not to sound cheesy here, but that defines you. I mean, there are lots of privileged people in India and they don't start companies. They don't start offline or they don't start untitled. They don't run angel list. I do think that going abroad almost means that you took some initiative to go and apply abroad rather than staying in India, assuming you came from compared with somebody with the same socioeconomic background. And if you're coming back to India, you're taking more initiative and you're taking agency and so on. And I think it's, like I said, I mean, it's basically what you do with that privilege that is important, not whether you had it or not in the first place.

Utsav Somani: And the first wave, I think, was driven more towards people who went abroad for a better life, like a better sense of, or better set of economic opportunities. They probably stayed back at the Infosys campus or the TCS campus. And now I think they're coming back because the internet market supports this in India. But do you think like Deep Tech founders, I mean, if they were to live, how many Indian founders do you know who made a mark in an overseas ecosystem? And how many Deep Tech founders have come back and made a mark here? Do you have stats on that?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Or like just general names and examples that you've- I think Anshul's actually invested in a Deep Tech founder who studied abroad, Khushi.

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, so Khushi, she started Aspera Industries. It's a drone company based in Bangalore. She was studying in Canada and then I think she dropped out, I could be mistaken, but she moved back to Bangalore. And she doesn't come from a privileged background, just to be very clear. She doesn't come from a privileged background. I think she went there on a scholarship. You're seeing more and more of that. Like Arnav, he runs a hacker house in Bangalore called Lagrange. He used to be a rep with me. It's primarily for Deep Tech founders. You're seeing this nexus, especially right now in the drone space and in the defense space of founders who are moving back and building companies in India. It's a small cohort. I don't have the data to back it up, but it's definitely happening right now. One interesting stat I'll give you. My dad went to IIT Bombay. He was in the first computer science class, I think in like 81 or 82. He moved back. So he went to the US like his entire class did. He moved back in 1997 and he was the only person in his class to move back. Fast forward to 2014, I was speaking to Aviral. He runs AJVC and he graduated in 2014. And what he told me is that only 20% of his class from IIT Bombay went abroad in the first place. Most of them stayed back. And you're seeing a lot more people stay back now. And I think that the opportunity that there is in India is also bringing people who went abroad for undergrad studies to come back.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Plus the geopolitical climate in the US.

Speaker 5: Yeah, of course.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Because I mean, like Anshul's parents, both my parents immigrated to the US in the 80s. And it was much easier for Indian citizens to get an H-1B, get a green card and make a life for themselves in the US. And now that path is very much a lot harder just because of how restrictive green cards are, because the H-1B lottery system and then the general view that Trump and the government has towards people of Indian origin.

Dhruv Sharma: We have so many more questions for you guys. But tell me when you wrote this piece, did you start from a place of like anecdotal observations and then said, okay, now we'll have to go fetch for some empirical proof. Is that how this came about?

Anshul Bhide: So to be fair, so Anmol had a list and he's been tracking Barbies ever since it came back. I found that for some reason in my class at Penn, there were a lot of people who moved back to India. And for some reason, Penn specifically my class is overrepresented. So all of my roommates became founders. I have no idea why. So Pratham Mittal, he started Masters Union and Abhijit Kaji, he started Kanya which is a medical scrubs company. The other two founders started bootstrap companies as well. So I can't explain it. There are people in the ecosystem as well, like Shiv Kapoor from Titan and Mansi from Axel and so on. And when Anmol and I were jamming on this, we sort of noticed that then, I bought up the point that Penn was sort of overrepresented and Anmol was like, oh, wow, we should do something about it. I think Anmol is the one who bought the empirical evidence to the table on like, okay, because he had the data that he's been tracking. And I think you're the only one with the data.

Dhruv Sharma: You can't find it on traction or you can't find it on- Anmol do you worry Mattel is gonna come after you guys for trademark violations?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I think that would be the greatest sign that the article has done well if we get sued by- But you did put a registered trademark there.

Dhruv Sharma: I did. And in all of this, did you end up speaking with people who work at companies run by Barbie founders to ask them what it's like to work for a Barbie leader versus a non, I don't know if you call them Ken leaders or what do you call them, but non Barbie leaders.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, you should have an article called Ken also by the way.

Dhruv Sharma: That sounds familiar too.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): We actually, that's one thing we did not do.

Dhruv Sharma: We primarily talked to a couple of Barbie founders and a couple of VCs who- Because I'm genuinely curious what they're like as leaders, right, like, I mean, we're talking about them as storytellers with investors, but I'm wondering if that, you know, liberal arts style education or critical thinking, etc.

Utsav Somani: What's there inside the package. I think that's what Dhruv was trying to get at, but you mentioned Pratham Mithil and we know him because of Master's Union. So there are these new wave of undergraduate universities, right, Ashoka, Master's Union, and many others, right, Lakshya. It's a new form of education, the new universities which are coming up and eventually in time, like they'll have a stronger alum network as well. So do you think this trend will sustain? And everything that's happening geopolitically as well, like most parents are not comfortable sending their kids to US or that's at least the narrative that's catching steam.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I don't know if that is necessarily true because at least from the data we've seen, it's not seeming like people moving or applying to the US for undergrad is slowing down. It's certainly, I think there's more data around grad school where it is getting a lot harder. And I mean, one thing is for sure that Trump is denying more F-1 visas, which is the visa you need to go study in the US. And I'm sure like Ashoka and Lakshya and all will do great, but they seem like they don't really add that many seats yet. Like Ashoka is- It's a class size. Yeah, it's like only 600, 700 kids a year. I don't know what it is for Lakshya. I assume it's about the same or slightly smaller. And when you have like 33 million undergrad students in India, I don't know if that's going to really have a huge impact on people.

Utsav Somani: Let's talk about ISB. Like ISB, I think was the first one, which I mean, was accepting GMATs and everything. They were the masters, I think mostly. I don't know if they have an undergrad. They have an undergrad program.

Dhruv Sharma: They have the two plus, I think it's called two plus two. So you apply after you, it's not an undergrad program, but you apply after.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I'm sure like Ashoka will have great founders as well. Like there's already a lot of, I know folks in the venture ecosystem who are earlier in their venture careers who've gone to Ashoka or gone through their YIF, the YIF program there. So I'm sure they'll also have an impact on the ecosystem, but I don't think that counter impacts the effect that Barbies are going to be a larger part of the ecosystem over the next couple of decades.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, the numbers are not there. I went to the YIF myself, but the numbers are small, but growing. All right, you guys used, I mean, in the article, you talk about taste and then over here, you spoke about agency. I hear about those two words everywhere over and over again. I don't even know what they mean anymore. What do those two things mean, guys?

Anshul Bhide: So I'm just going to put it out there. Anmol and I had a difference of opinion when it came to the taste subject. Maybe Anmol, you can double click on that.

Utsav Somani: Who did the graphics and chose, I mean, Barbie and- That was Barbie. I mean, did you check with the founders before featuring them?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Were a lot of founders- I checked with, so the poster includes three of my portfolio founders, and I checked with them.

Utsav Somani: I did not check with- You need to get a follow-up on allocation after calling them a Barbie founder.

Dhruv Sharma: I think you'd want to lawyer up Anmol after this piece. A lot of people are going to come after you with a lot of things, but I'm kidding.

Utsav Somani: How's the reception from founders?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I mean, I think we had a lot of people who are Barbies reaching out to us and telling us, oh, we loved your piece. We love that you wrote about us. There's several VCs texting us as well. I, privately, I don't think we got a lot of negative feedback. I think publicly, we definitely got some amount of critical feedback, which we were kind of expecting and aware of, because anytime anything blows up- Do you think some of that is, do you think some of that is valid?

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, I think- Say more? I think for sure. Somebody had a good piece on the Pygmalion effect. I think it was on Twitter.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I can't remember.

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, and it was actually very well put out, unlike most stuff on Twitter. His point was thatSorry?

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I think it was a big- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anshul Bhide: So his point was that basically, it's the high potential students that are marked out and they get more attention given to them. Therefore, they tend to do better. And in the case of Barbie founders, it's almost self-selection, where it is because you're privileged, you go abroad, you come back, and you notice them doing well, but it's all part of the same sort of trend. And I do agree with that to some degree. I do think there is a little bit of Pygmalion effect going on. I don't know what you think, Anmol, about this. That was a piece of criticism that I thought was actually really, really good.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Yeah, and I concurred it fairly strongly. I mean, it shows that the venture ecosystem isn't completely fair in India. And I don't think we are denying that.

Utsav Somani: I don't think it's fair anywhere in the world. I think the world is unfair.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): And I think you could maybe say, okay, Barbies have even more unfair advantages than your IIT founders or your BITS founders or any other archetype of founder, which sure, we kind of agree with. But I mean, that's kind of the reality of the situation. I don't think we're out here to try to deny that or try to negate that.

Utsav Somani: Did you post this article after the one million Twitter? Dude, I feel bad for that guy, Dan Coe, man. Yeah, I saw that. He posted an article with, I don't know, how many?

Dhruv Sharma: 100, 150 million, I think.

Utsav Somani: And I think he's posting it two days before the one million channel starts.

Dhruv Sharma: He has a new one called How to Change Your Life in One Hour. And then people are like, one second, one, go.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I mean, I think I was more surprised that our post went that viral for us linking Substack because I mean, you hear about, Twitter is a down-ranking post with Substack in it. And we were still able to get a lot of traction despite us linking it.

Utsav Somani: But why did you post it as an article on Twitter or X?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I think we've built up an existing distribution on the newsletter where that's kind of our, usually our place where we write stuff. I tried out X articles for the first time for the last piece I had wrote just to see, does writing on Twitter actually boost your post in any meaningful way? And it seems like it does, but I think we still tend to navigate to writing anything on the newsletter in the first place.

Utsav Somani: Let's talk about writing for a bit. Dhruv, sorry, you had something.

Anshul Bhide: No, I didn't. No, I was just gonna add in terms of virality, I think posting it on a Friday afternoon that was a slow news day helped for sure. And thankfully Twitter went down later that night and not before. So it was good in that sense.

Utsav Somani: Catchy name, like all of those things, I think are going in your favor. A little bit of controversy around privilege and all that. But talk about writing to us for a bit. I mean, had a brief go at the Joe Rogan podcast with Matt and Ben Affleck, where he says that AI and this world of content generation in AI, AI is not gonna make movies because they're all gonna revert to meme. Like this one line, I think that stood out. And he's spoken, I mean, Ben Affleck actually talks about AI much better than most people can do. The world of valuations, compute, and how like, I mean, 25% increment is like 4x your compute cost and so many other points that they've made. And you can see the love between them. Like I think Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are just made for being poker buddies, movie buddies, like everything. But writing, like, I mean, in the world of AI, how do you stand out? Like Dan's article did really well, but how do you really stand out? And how do original ideas proliferate? Because people are just like, oh shit, this is gonna be another AI sloppies. What can a writer do? Or a casual writer can do on the internet.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I mean, I think it's like you, as long as you don't rely too much on using AI in the output of what you're creating. I think this is what Ben Affleck talked about like sometimes when you want to use AI to generate ideas or generate options to kind of build off of, you can do that. But as long as you are like putting out original work that is authentic to you and your style of writing, I think it comes across really well.

Anshul Bhide: And I think- And we didn't use AI at all. Now that I think about it, like I use it to check typos and grammar, but it was like, I wrote the first draft then Anmol went in and completely redid it. And so it was like, actually we didn't use chat GPT when we could have easily done that. So yeah, I think self-consciousness today, people know what's AI written and what's not AI written. I think we all know that.

Utsav Somani: And- If there's an impasse, then it's probably chat GPT.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): Yeah, I think our writing style naturally is not very- or like our process is not to use a lot of AI when actually doing the writing. And I think that's why it does not, then it feels more authentic or more compelling than something or someone who's just used AI to write something out.

Anshul Bhide: What's a question for you? I know we are the ones who are supposed to be getting the questions, but when you came up with offline, was the idea before GPT or after GPT? Because I think, I mean, now it's sort of common knowledge that obviously real life experiences will have a value when you look at like- Yeah.

Utsav Somani: This was pre-GPT. To be honest, like I think it was inspired by, like, I mean, being completely honest, inspired by two things. Like a lot of people during that time were asking me about MyPO and Neo, which are private membership communities in India. And other said on Twitter was talking about Hampton. Like I think, I mean, what I've realized, I think most of life, you can find good alpha on Twitter. And I think LinkedIn is where the beta happens. Like if you're early on X, like you'll discover tools earlier, you will discover ideas earlier, you'll discover good companies earlier and good people earlier. LinkedIn, though, it's like an AI slot. So Hampton is something that I came across and I was like, man, wow. Like I love hanging out with founders, slightly social as well. And all the time at AngelList India, I think I've connected with a lot more. So it might all come together in this package, but Hampton was trying to be, or MyPO and Neo were trying to be non-profit organizations that have existed for a long time. So kickstarting that community, I think was sort of the hardest challenge, the cold start problem for like a sort of this marketplace of sorts. But Hampton, I think is the one where I think it really just crystallized that you can have vertical communities where people pay for the same product that they've experienced at MyPO and Neo, but doesn't exist for tech founders. But I didn't have chat GPT then. So anything that's written, site copy and all of that stuff, it wasn't.

Anshul Bhide: Oh, I meant before GPT. I think post-GPT offline experiences are suddenly at a premium because everyone wants to get away from all of this. So I think, I mean, offline, I don't know what metrics or what you guys look at, but I'm sure there are a lot more people interested now, sort of post-GPT.

Utsav Somani: 100%. Like I think 100% and people do realize the value of in-person stuff. Like Anmol, you also run a dinner series. Yes, yes, yes. I mean- Talk to us about that. So, yeah.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): So we actually hosted the first one in honor of Anshul when he was visiting Bangalore. But I have a friend at Bloom Ventures, Samira. And her and I are both Barbies as well. We both studied in the US. She was at UCLA. I was at UCSD. And over the last year, I've been spending a lot more time in Bangalore. So we wanted to kind of meet more people in the ecosystem who had studied in the US, like us. So we started hosting dinners for people who we knew, who studied in the US. And they started inviting their friends and their friends' friends. And so now we've done, I think, four or five of them and have a couple more lined up over the next couple of months. And it's just been a way to meet a lot of new folks.

Utsav Somani: What's the aim for you? Like, I mean, just meet cool people or do you want to build something around this?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I think right now it's kind of just more, meet new people. And then sometimes I get to hear about new Barbie founders moving back to India because of that network, where they're like, oh, my roommate from Stanford is thinking about moving back.

Dhruv Sharma: You're doing this for deal flow, basically. I think there's room for only one offline.

Utsav Somani: I think, I mean, people are going to like, verticalize this thing even more. I think there's plenty of room. I think people want to meet cool people. And this thing, I think everyone's sick of like these VC bar mixers where you just go and want to go. Like Visiting Card and the partners are calling the top founders to come show a face. And so that Twitters or the social media. So I think that world is going to evolve and go slightly more private.

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): And also I think we, like what I've realized is from like these large events, you don't actually get to meet a lot of people because then if it's like 200 people, you're kind of just going to the event to see the people you know. Versus if you try to host, like we try to max our capacity to I think like 15 people. And then you get a chance to talk to everyone. And maybe there's three people you know, but 12 people you don't know. And that's the way you actually get to know a lot more people. I'm sure like you've designed your kind of founder groups in offline in a similar way where- If you were put in charge of GFF, how would you do it differently? I have never been to GFF. The crowd scares me there. So I would, I don't think.

Dhruv Sharma: You went, right, Dhruv? This one time I did, yeah.

Utsav Somani: I think the side events are where like, I think maybe it's just a quick way to like say hello to everyone, like this thing. But I don't think any depth happens there. But Anshul, talk to us. I mean, we should have done this earlier, but talk to us a little bit about CalSoft. And you spent time at Dreplet also. What does CalSoft do?

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, sure. So we are an AI digital product engineering services company. What that means is that we work with product companies like Fortune 500 companies in the Bay Area to help them build their products. So my father started it actually 27 years ago. And I think it's very interesting in the world of AI. So while I was at Dreplet, obviously it's a front row seat to what AI is doing in terms of coding. And I saw that it was going to have an ally side of the equation. So that means as the marginal cost per line of code goes to zero, what happens to Indian IT services, which is a $250 billion industry. I mean, we export more of that than Saudi Arabia does oil. So it was an interesting time to move into that. Obviously, working in a family business has its pros, cons, all of that. But it's an interesting time to sort of take it to the next level, given the technology shift that we're in.

Utsav Somani: Nice. And time at Dreplet, man. I keep seeing that the company on my Twitter timeline valuation is 2X, 3X, like it's what, 9 billion now?

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, I mean, I don't know the exact figure. But yeah, it's interesting. Amjad and Haya built that company for like six, seven years. We had a bunch of users. So I joined Dreplet because I've always wanted to know how to code, but I never could get around the setting up of environment and all of that piece. And Dreplet just made it super easy to do that. And when I use it as a user, I was like, hey, this actually makes sense. And then I went ahead and joined it. They built all of this, but we were not capturing the majority of value that users were getting out of the platform. But after launching Agent, as you saw the numbers, I think Dreplet crossed at least $100 million, $150 million. It's like fastest growing ARR. I think now we're capturing a lot more of the value that is being created on the platform. Bill Gates has a famous quote that a platform is defined as when the economic activity, the economic surplus of everybody is greater than the platform itself. And I think that is growing with Dreplet.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, you see these influencers charging like crazy money for posting on Instagram, while Instagram's still generating $58 per user. Yeah, exactly. And how was it with the developer community, the large developer community in India? Were you spending time with them? Yeah, 100%.

Anshul Bhide: So yeah, I think the dev, the developer ecosystem in India has taken off in a big way. What I mean by that is you're seeing a lot more developer tool companies coming out of India. And especially when you look at the startup ecosystem. So obviously Postman is a canonical example of a successful dev tool company. But now in the age of AI, you're seeing companies like Portkey that is an LLM ops middleware layer that's based out of Bangalore. You're seeing more and more developer tool middleware companies coming out of Bangalore. And I think that's very interesting. Developers have taste. I mean, Anmol, I think, is the only developer amongst us, although now he's become a VC, Gen Z, consumer, whatever it is. But developers have taste. And in the past, it was very difficult to sell to Bay Area developers where a lot of the most opinionated people lie. But I think Indian founders have now cracked the code. They obviously stood their time between Bangalore and the Bay Area. They come here, they come for the event, sell, but they build out of Bangalore. And I think that's, you're going to see a lot more interesting developer tool companies come out.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Dhruv, any final closing questions?

Dhruv Sharma: I do have one. So let's try and contend with the privilege question.

Utsav Somani: And in closing, Dhruv's mind is going on. Like, I think we've had reflate and everything, discussions, Dhruv was like.

Dhruv Sharma: No, but you said, ask the final closing question. I'm happy to let them go with reflate. No, so when, you know, maybe let's put it this way. When Barbies succeed, do they succeed because they have a burning desire to succeed? Or because they don't really have a fear of failure?

Anmol Maini (Untitled Ventures): I mean, I think this is a, it's an interesting question because you need to kind of decipher that for every founder when you're looking to invest in them. And is this, you kind of ask yourself, is this a person who really wants to build a massive business? Or is this someone who just wants to kind of hang around and do something else with their life? And when you're evaluating opportunities and evaluating people, I'm sure there's a lot of folks we've met from outside who've done their undergrad outside of the country, who come back, who aren't very motivated or don't have that hunger in them. But there are a lot of Barbies who do. And I remember we had invested in a founder who had studied from the US. He came from a very, very wealthy family. And I was part of their first angel round. And they had then gone on to raise money from a couple of larger firms. And one of the partners at those firms asked me like, Anmol, is this guy someone who really wants to build a massive business? Like, why is he raising money? He comes from all this wealth and kind of all this background. And I told him like, it's very evident after you spend time with him that he really wants to do something much larger. And he has that hunger and drive in him. Now, I don't have the data to say that Barbie founders are more hungry than non-Barbies. And I think it's going to be very hard to figure that out. But I think a lot of the Barbies who do end up raising and doing well do have that itch to do something really massive.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I think everyone under the same brush. I think there's different bullet points, maybe like five bullet points. Somebody might be more hungry. Somebody might have unfair access. I mean, the business can open doors to either customers or investors. Or they do tend to have an unfair access to something or the other.

Anshul Bhide: Yeah, no, Dhruv. I think that's a great question to end on addressing privilege. I think it's both. I think it's the fact that they have a safety net. But in some cases, because of safety net, because you have a family business, you want to show that you can do even better. You want to get out of your parents' shadows. You want to take it to the next level. And I think it's a combination of both. I think there's a bit of chip on your shoulder. You want to prove that you are more than just whatever family business you're part of. But of course, you're privileged. Of course, you have a safety net. Of course, your family will bail you out. I mean, that definitely lets you take more audacious bets. And that's something that we've written about in this article as well.

Utsav Somani: All right. I think that's a solid note to end on. And thanks, Dhruv, for that question. And Maul and Anshul, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your thoughts.

Dhruv Sharma: Thanks for having us.

Utsav Somani: Thanks for having us. What's up, Dhruv?

Dhruv Sharma: Keep writing these wonderful essays and coming back.

Utsav Somani: Coming back in order to win the 1 million X article. Like somebody has to win it.

Dhruv Sharma: If Anshul had come in a green shirt today, he would have been a school kid. Red, yellow, blue, green, house.

Utsav Somani: Oh, man. Those are the days. All right. Yeah, try to close again. All right. Let's take a break on Wednesday. And we'll see you on Friday. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.