Summary

Episode 88 opens with Dharmesh Ba, an ethnographer at D91 Labs, sharing insights on the behavioral patterns of Bharat (India's next billion users). He discusses throwaway money thresholds (100-200 rupees), micro-drama and sachet subscription trends, the role of relatable role models in driving adoption, and how India needs more primary consumer research for product building. The second guest, Bharat Pinnam from Emergent, discusses WipeCon — a vibe-coding hackathon with 20,000 applicants and 300 selected participants with direct YC access — and how non-technical founders are now building full functional apps using AI tools. Bharat also talks about the AI literacy gap and how Emergent is helping developers and non-developers understand the foundational AI concepts like agents, RAG, and prompting to build better products.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners, it's the middle of the week and our first guest today is Dharmesh Ba. I don't know if you've read something written by him before, but many people call him Indus Valley's unofficial ethnographer. So we're very, very excited to have him on the show.

Utsav Somani: I think Sajid Bhai calls you the anthropologist, which you connected to ethnographer, right? Yeah. So let's start off with that. What does an ethnographer mean?

Dharmesh Ba: Ethnography in academic sense is the study of people's, their lives. What I do, I take a lot of those principles and apply in the business context. What I'm mostly interested in is why people make decisions, how do they make decisions, what's the motivation behind them and what's the general attitude towards life, money, healthcare, all of it. I'm really excited about it.

Dhruv Sharma: Dharmesh, my guess is before you started doing this work and when did you start doing this work, by the way?

Dharmesh Ba: For the first five years of my life, of my career, I was one year UX designer. So from 2015 to 2018, 2019 is when the ship happened. It's pretty accidental. I always wanted to do a lot of this work. Nikhil, who's the co-founder of Setu, called me in and said that I don't have a design role, but I have a role which is at an intersection of design, FinTech and community. Are you interested to take it up? It sounded challenging. I picked it up. Then I started this lab called D91 Labs within Setu, where we started writing financial journals of people. And one thing led to the other and I went deep into behavioral finance.

Utsav Somani: So I'm going to dive a little bit into some trends with you. I think you've written about this also, but we've had recently the founder of LOLO on our show. And they've got, I mean, different live streaming game show, they've got something to do with educations and micro dramas as well, which I think is a big trend from last year. So I read somewhere that watching a 30 second clip about starting a business gives you the same dopamine hit as actually starting a business. So what do you make of this trend that's going forward?

Dharmesh Ba: So the last two years, when I started doing a lot of ethnography, I keep asking this one question, what's your throwaway money, right? So throwaway money is nothing but a quantum of money that I'm willing to sort of experiment on things, even if I lose it, right? Now, that has been around 200 rupees, so where did that 200 rupees equate come from? So if you ask most people, they'll say, even if I go and drink a chai and a puff and I hang out with a couple of my friends, that money is anywhere between 100 to 200. So if I want to try out anything new online, throwing 100, 200 rupees and getting to see whether this works out or not, people are okay with it. That coupled with you pay auto pay is one magic.

Dharmesh Ba: We need to listen. Listening is the most important skill. What I've observed while working with a lot of founders and product managers, because they have fallen in love with the product that they have built, they're always in this tendency to superimpose their beliefs there. And for you to go into the field, talking to a customer and telling and listening to say a customer saying your hypothesis could be wrong, needs a lot of humility.

Utsav Somani: All right. Looking forward to it. Thank you for coming on our show, Dharmesh. And here with us, let's welcome Bharat from Emergent. Bharat, welcome to the show.

Bharat Pinnam (Emergent): Hey Bharat. Hi, what's up? Hi, hi Dhruv. Great to be here.

Utsav Somani: So let's dive right in. WipeCon just finished. 20,000 applications, 300 selected winners get access to YC directly. What are the builders in 2026 building now with Emergent?

Bharat Pinnam (Emergent): Yeah, I think it might be like if you're following the space, right? For the last one, one and a half year, you know, wipe coding has taken like a very different shape altogether, right? And today, I think the capabilities that every platform is like building upon, primarily in terms of like just not building product prototypes, right? We moved beyond that. And like now today, you know, people are able to build fully functional apps that are out there with users and as well getting monetized, right? So I think the idea with WipeCon was fairly simple, right? I think, you know, we launched it back in 2025 in San Francisco and then, you know, brought the version 1.0 to India, you know, in March, where we did like around the time of like the conference, the AI conference that was happening. And then I think we went big when YC was coming to India, right?

Bharat Pinnam (Emergent): Right, right. And I think, you know, the craziest part is like the agentic world that we're seeing today, right? It's fairly fast. The kind of speed in which, you know, we as a product company have to operate right in this world is crazy.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next segment and our next guest is ready. See you on Wednesday. Bye-bye.