Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Today's episode is special for two reasons. Number one, it's India's 77th Republic Day. So happy Republic Day to you. And it's also a 50th episode at the Offline Network. So how do you feel about that?

Utsav Somani: Love it. We're celebrating a bunch of things as well. So Google is doing their own doodle. But if you look on the bottom left of our screen as well, you'll see something that our team has cooked up as well.

Dhruv Sharma: The Offline Network observing Republic Day in its own way.

Utsav Somani: Thank you so much for joining on a day that's, of course, supposed to be a national holiday. But we thought we can chat some startups with you and discuss and shine light on some of the cool stuff that Indian startups are doing. So we'll have a couple of them. But let's quickly run down what's happening on our Twitter timelines. What have you noticed over the weekend, bro?

Dhruv Sharma: The weekend was crazy. I don't know what it is with the new X algorithm. But to me, it appears as though if you engage with posts, it just gives you more and more and more. Yeah, like from with the firehose, it just gives you some of that stuff. So on Thursday, I may have liked Macron's four-show post. And that's all I saw. On Friday, I may have liked the penguin. And that's all that was there in my feed. And then I think Saturday was Claude Borde. Yesterday was Alex on all today. It's, you know, the camels who walked at the parade. So it's been a very interesting on Twitter. It's been very interesting.

Utsav Somani: No, I think I mean, if you I think the For You tab, I think once it was introduced, apart from the following tab, I think that's when things changed. Like I think everyone now basically your social graph is what the algo shows you and not the people that you're following. So interesting. But I mean, Google Doodle highlighting is through space achievements. I think fascinating stuff that's been happening. And we'll talk about it with our first guest as well. Gold hits an all time high 1.6 lakh 61.62 lakhs per 10 grams. I think it's going crazy all of these metals. And I think Chamath has made a prediction that copper will be the next one where I think they're expecting a 30 to 40% shortage because of all the demand that's going into the world of EVs and stuff.

Dhruv Sharma: Have you been tracking? Yes, I've been tracking. You know, by the way, there's this there's apparently a joke they make on the Wall Street. Then when when the cabbies start talking about a stock or a trade, it's it's already too late. And I'll tell you, this really funny incident that happened with me last month, which, you know, I was down somewhere at a registry for some, you know, Angelus India paperwork. And we had like an advocate on the ground who was meant to be doing it for us. And I actually heard him say to someone, you know, in Hindi, in colloquial Hindi, I'm telling you to sell your house and put it all in silver. It's too early or this is going to just end very, very badly.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, the same thing happened in like crypto 2021. I think my gym trainer was asking me who, which coin should I invest like Doge and all of that stuff that was going on these literal scam coins. And I mean, I think crypto bros must be tracking this gold silver cycle very well, because I think all of them talk about currency debasement and USD and are hitting almost 92 now.

Dhruv Sharma: So if given assets, solar data centers, all of that, but I think we ought to bring an expert like we owe it to our listeners bring an expert to break down what's happening in the world of precious metals. One other tidbit for you and our listeners is I saw this Bloomberg video where apparently in Singapore, there's a private individual who's built this thing called the reserve, which is like a privately built Fort Knox in Singapore. So, you know, if you're like one of those billionaire types who has like a lot of gold, personally, you can just ship it there for safekeeping. It's called the reserve, guys. I mean, you can look it up in Bloomberg's YouTube channel.

Utsav Somani: We'll check it out. All right. So let's quickly discuss all the news, which is happening. Emergent, one of the prominent Indian AI startups, has raised 70 million in Series B led by SoftBank and Khosla and 300 million valuation. I mean, they've really gone crazy. I mean, Y Coding app, they've got tier one names like Process, Lightspeed, Togetherfund, Y Combinator. They've raised 100 million in seven months of launch, doubled their ARR to 50 million. And they're saying...

Dhruv Sharma: They're targeting 100 by April 26. And they're claiming they have 5 million users in some 196 countries.

Utsav Somani: Absurd. Like, I mean, crazy growth. And all of this is possible. And we'll discuss the A16Z market report as well, where it says that the AI companies are not overvalued like the tech bubble. And they've shown some charts as well. So we'll probably break it down for you in the next stream. One tweet that I think stood out, and Gary Tan also said that YC of India is YC. And Anmol Meni, who was a guest for the, I think, the previous two episodes as well. He said that India has 15 VCbacked companies which are valued over 5 billion. And YC was the first investor in four of them. Razobay, Misho, Groves and Zepto. Pretty crazy to have that track record. And yeah, I mean, fancy cars might be getting cheaper as well. India and EU have a trade agreement now.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And they've been working on it for quite some time. You know, like I found some interesting stats. I had no idea that our trade relationship is so robust. Apparently, we export some 75, 76 billion dollars in goods, some 25 billion dollars in services to the EU. And they've been trying to chalk this out, of course, for a very long time. But talks really became serious since June, you know, ever since the tariff war started globally and everyone's looking for alternate markets to go unlock access. I think people look and there's a lot of talk around automotive, you know, cars getting cheaper, automotive parts naturally getting cheaper as a result of that. But of course, market access works both ways.

Utsav Somani: I actually got this book to read this weekend, but I couldn't start it. The Art of Deal by Donald Trump, because I think in the world of geopolitics, I think in the last one year, what's transpired is probably more than what I think the amount of change that has happened in just one year, I think is more than what would have happened in the last like five years. So I think it's fascinating in his Greenland and like, I mean, all the things that he does, like, I mean, his classic deal making tactics, I think just I just wanted to read the book. I don't know if I'll get to it. But have you read it?

Dhruv Sharma: I yes, I have like a really long time ago. So the first like this, you know, close personal friend of mine, we had a lot of fun during Trump's first presidency because, you know, I mean, like there's there's a certain comical element to him as well. And yeah, I'm so I've read the book and his his style of negotiating is very maximalist that he's going to place, you know, these outwardly demands in front of you. And from that point on, you just you know, you're just bargaining with him for a little concession here, a little concession there. He was like born to be a regulator. I don't know. I ended up as a president.

Utsav Somani: All right, let's welcome our first guest, Manu, welcome to the show.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: Hi, sir. Thank you. Hi, Dhruv.

Utsav Somani: I know it's Republic Day, so we'll have a good amount of chat with you. You're doing something extremely cool. So why don't you explain to our listeners what your company does? That's real.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: I mean, two years back, I mean, we we never the three of us, we never thought we'd be doing this. It was very organic. Essentially, we're building the world's first fully usable medium of launch vehicle of the Guild. What it is, what it means to do that or why we're doing that is basically today, if you look at it, over 85 percent of all assets that go into orbit come from one particular vehicle in one particular demography. That is, you know, it is not market dominance. It's kind of market dependence. Right. And this essentially means that today, all assets are almost the majority of the assets that are going into orbit and orbit being orbits being treated like real estates. It means that there is a tactical advantage that any anybody has with having too many assets in orbit, because today everything that you do has to do with space and network telecommunication, border surveillance, maritime operations, missile tracking, agri tech. I mean, banks are deciding whether or not to loan farmers based on satellite data of soil fertility. That's the age we live in. So for us, we the foundational vision was to in a way catalyze civilizational progress. But we wanted to start with space because. Today, what is a very unipolar access to orbit, we want to make it multipolar. So we what we're doing is building a rocket that is that can offer the launch cadence or frequency, as well as the cost per kg dynamic that the largest satellite operators really want. So that's basically what we're doing.

Dhruv Sharma: My hunch is in order for us to understand what you guys do a little better, we might need you to spend a couple of minutes just talking about stages in orbital launch and then we'll take it from there.

Utsav Somani: So, yeah, assume that our listeners are hearing about all of this for the first time. So, yeah.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: So in a way, stages in orbital launch, OK. I mean, you basically want to build a there are classifications of rockets, right? So the first ever rocket that we put into orbit was nothing but a missile, a larger missile, and we just shot them into orbit. This was during, you know, the Cold War era. And so eventually we came to a point where we thought, hey, you know, we can put assets in orbits and we can be able to derive stuff out of it. And then we kept on building bigger rockets to put bigger assets in orbit, eventually ended up putting a man on the moon, building a space station in orbit. And what an exciting time it has been since the last 60, 70 years. But the so there are classifications of rockets like there are small lift rockets that are medium lift rockets, small lift rockets or rockets that can carry between one kg up to four tons into orbit. And you have the medium lift rockets that can carry between four tons to 25 tons. And then there are heavy lift rockets that can carry about 25 tons. So it was getting in 2000, early 2010s, like 13, 14. Around that time, we saw the trend towards smaller satellites wanting to get into orbit faster. And the trend actually started in 90s and early 2000s when the telecom satellite operators and network constellation network satellite operators wanted satellites to be put into orbit in higher frequency to test certain things out. And then we miniaturized satellites so that we could accommodate them into smaller rockets and shoot them into orbit quickly. And this fared beautifully for a satellite industry, because that's how constellations were born. But we could never build a successful business out of small satellite rockets per se, because, you know, often you hear the Uber versus truck analogy between larger rockets and smaller rockets. But we forget to remind ourselves that unlike an Uber or a truck or rocket, you don't you don't have to manufacture an Uber or a truck every single time you utilize it. So then the moment reusability came into existence, then you had the perfect sync between what the most ambitious satellite operators wanted, which was to launch at higher frequency, to launch more number of satellites at one go into different orbits, at the same time being able to retain a lower cost per kg. So and that is that was super important when SpaceX introduced that, because they were the ones who proved that combining bigger rockets and reusability was the key to reducing cost per kg.

Dhruv Sharma: But eventually... You mean they would recover part of the launch vehicle? Parts of the launch vehicle, yeah.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: Correct, correct. So when rockets are going into orbit, you see parts of it falling off. So we we call it staging or stage separation. You can have, for example, India has four stage to orbit vehicles where you have four different stages combining solid stages and liquid rocket engines. And and then you have in the US where they do two stage to orbit or multistage to orbit sometimes as well. So but for reusability, from a first principle standpoint in itself, you know, two stage to orbit makes more sense because that is that basically means you have to recover only fewer number of times. And booster stage accounts for most part of the vehicle, at least about 70, 75 percent of the vehicle. So the the economic advantage and the cadence advantage it brought was amazing. But at the same time, the reason why we we are going at it from a different lens is because we are also aware that you can replicate SpaceX's business model, that if anybody wakes up and says, hey, you know, I'm going to do four or five launches a week. That's not going to that's not how it's going to work until you're vertically stagged like SpaceX, when you when you have hundreds of satellites to be put at that frequency. So you may want to retain that launch frequency or cadence, but you're not going to be flying full every single time you're launching. So the economics should make sense for you. Otherwise, the cost per kg advantage that you were able to offer, you wouldn't be able to offer that. So that's when we decided, OK, if there has to be another successful launch vehicle company that is actually, you know, VC bagged and completely vertically stacked, then essentially you should be able to fly your vehicle profitably, even if it is not full. And that meant also recovering the upper stage back. So that is how we circle towards. OK, this is how we have to go about it.

Utsav Somani: And what's the landscape like of launch vehicles? Sorry, I just want to understand the landscape a little bit more because we're talking about cost and models might work better in India in terms of your understanding of the landscape and anything that's going on in the Indian space tech industry. What does the landscape look like currently and how startups positioned now for the future?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: I like that you pointed towards the future because we are a fairly new, emerging private space economy, right? The I mean, to say the very least, you have very few space sparing nations that are actually. Doing a major space activities or commissioning major space missions in the first place. We I mean, we should be super glad that we've had the heritage of also having done a few of these missions. So currently, the landscape is we are not a self-sustaining private space ecosystem within the country, but by nature, space is a global business. You're not building rockets for your own country, your own satellite constellations, because, you know, it's for a much larger goal than, you know, just making the buck, because when you fundamentally look at it, you also need to have a geographical advantage to be able to launch rockets. What I mean by that is that let's say you have Europe. They're too far north and you have Australia. They're too far south. They're both wanting to build rockets. They have rockets. Right. And they're also trying to build and, you know, commercialize a couple of rockets. Europe already has those rockets. But because they are where they are geographically, they're limited to doing sun synchronous orbits, right? SSO, polar orbits, because the closer you are to equator, you're able to do better orbits.

Dhruv Sharma: Mayup, since you're in the launch vehicle business and not the satellite business, do you now have a launch facility of your own? Have you contracted one?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: Yeah. So we're we're we've signed about one hundred and thirty million dollars in launch agreements from government contractors and launch aggregators, as well as national space agencies across the globe, ranging from Europe, US.

Dhruv Sharma: Does that give you access to the launch sites?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: No. So we are the ones who are going to put their payloads in orbit. So we are like the logistics guys, right? So you can just consider this as we are like the FedEx in space. Good. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: I mean, how far out are you from materializing these contracts? Like what does the future look like?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: Twenty twenty seven is our first launch.

Utsav Somani: Twenty twenty seven. And the engine test fired all of that stuff. You'll be subcontracting to other vendors.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: No. So we've in fact, we've already built. We are the only company in the world to have built two high thrust class engines in under three and a half years. We've already built our own one point two mega newton booster stage engine. We've also built our 80 kilonewton semiogenic engine for a prestige. We've commissioned a seven hundred thousand square feet a rocket engine test facility in Tamil Nadu in Cuddalore. That is already done. I think our test campaigns is due from March. We are just doing the final test on the hardware before we commission that. And we've recently also commissioned a hundred and fifty acre facility near our launch port in Sriharikota. That's where we'll be doing our entire launch assembly integration test in that 150 acre facility. And then we transport the rocket to the launch pad and then we launch.

Dhruv Sharma: Fascinating. What makes it so challenging to build a rocket engine for especially for a reusable vehicle, for reusable rocket?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: It is the it's the very repeatable repeatability nature of, you know, being so. Rocket engines by need by designer, a little complex. But not too complex. But yeah, complex enough to, you know, complex enough to make the the make that hardware realization testing process very cumbersome. But when you're talking about reusing the same hardware, it poses different challenges, right? So, for example, RP-1, the fuel that we are using, it's nothing but very refined kerosene. But kerosene above 800 Kelvin does coking, coking, meaning it does carbon deposits. So now even a little bit of soot or coking that gets stuck in the region channels or or the combustion chamber can just. Because the next launch can be disastrous. Yes. Yes. So you you want you want to design and you want to design an engine that is going to last several launch cycles while because your margin for weight and stuff is also very low. You don't carry anything in excess when you're going into orbit and coming back. So the whole design function of being having an engine that is super lightweight, that is designed to operate at super high temperatures, super high pressure at varying atmospheric pressure as it goes up, varying external temperatures. Then it comes back and then it should work flawlessly again. The second time it does it again, the third time it does it. So that optimization is what makes a lot of makes it more challenging.

Utsav Somani: But we use heat from the reentry as well for some of this.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: That's correct. For the upper stage, yes. So historically, the upper stage has never been brought back because of the reentry heat. It's not like people didn't want to. But the reason why even the Falcon nine, they didn't try to bring it back because it was never economically viable to try to bring it back. I mean, if it costs you more, more cash to refurbish than build a new one, then you might as well just build a new one and do it. So but the historic approach has also been a little different. They've been fighting the reentry heat with thermal protection systems and heat tiles and whatnot. But, you know, it's like trying to catch a ball like this when you don't want to move your hand, like you. You just want to move your hand. So we were like, how do we take it? You know, how do we utilize it? And it's like you take a paper cup, you put water in it and you light a fire beneath it. The paper cup is not going to burn until and unless there is water inside it. So we were like, OK, I mean, at the end of the day, we just need to, in a way, increase the enthalpy of our fuel and then utilize it to run our engine. So that's how we went about it.

Utsav Somani: I have a philosophical question, just zooming out a little bit on this company building and like thinking from first principles. I think that is what sort of defined SpaceX and how Elon Musk thought about this whole journey. What is your background? Why did you get so personally excited about this idea?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: I grew up listening to the Vedas and from my grandfather, from my father, a good childhood friend of my grandfather who spent the last 30 years of his life transcribing the Rig Vedas. I always wanted to do something to do with space. But, you know, as I grew up, I got distracted, did a lot of different things and wanted to do a lot of different things. But eventually it comes it comes back and it came back to me when I was in college. So I mean, that's why I said four years back, I had no idea that I'd be building a rocket company because my goal was to become an astronaut. And in 2019, I had the opportunity as one of the 12 people selected for a formerly NASA Spaceflight Opportunities aided program called Project Postum. Graduated through the program and sorry, excuse me. During that program, I also got to witness the Apollo heritage, look at a couple of the things that I always grew up watching. But I could also see the heritage rockets and stuff there. And it just felt so connected. And I also had the opportunity to, through my amazing friends there, also work on a couple of the commercial spaceflight planning missions that were going on, the private ones. So that also gave me an understanding of how launch economics worked. Then it just felt like, you know, I was a guy who wanted to just get with it and then settle down and then pursue my journey there. But eventually I just wanted to come back and build here. So before that in 20, but my training program got done in 2022 because there was COVID in the middle and stuff like that. So I had to in 2019, I had the opportunity also late 2019 or 2020 I had the opportunity to work with ISRO at the Human Space Flight Center. That's where I met my co-founder Shubhayu. And then I worked with an IT Bombay based startup called Manastu Space. That's where I met my other co-founder Prashant. So, you know, when I came back, we discussed, I mean, the vision was very clear for all of us. I think the vision was common. Prashant had an offer from Rocket Lab. He was about to join there. Shubhayu was in ISRO. I was here on a different path. But I think things happen for a reason. And at the time, it just felt right to be able to do this. Our foundational vision was quite simple, that we will solve the hardest problems our civilization is going to face. We're going to start with space. Once we solve, once we actually make launch a multipolar activity, once we make access to space truly multipolar, then we'll move on to the next.

Utsav Somani: And where does this, and you've raised 20 million as well. So where does this 20 million take you in that journey?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: Yeah, so we, so first we did like a pre-seed of 360K, then we did like a seed of 5 million. Now we did this. This is going to take us to our, to the flight qualification of our booster stage. What I mean by flight qualification is it is qualified for flight, right? So that's what we say. So flight qualification of the booster stage for the TDV or technology demonstrator vehicle, as we call it. And for the flight qualification of the upper stage, that happens in two bits, particularly in our case. One is going to be cluster fighting of the upper stage engines. And the other part is going to be the cycle testing itself. So like I mentioned, for the first time in the last six decades of rocketry, a completely new rocket engine cycle is being built and it's being built right here in India. And that is the cycle that we're doing that's utilizing reentry heat. So to test that on ground, we have a particular a test campaign and a test infrastructure that we've planned. So I'm not sure completely if we can get through that with this guy, but yeah. So a cluster fighting of the upper stage, as well as a flight qualification of the booster stage will be done. So that's where we'll be.

Utsav Somani: Amazing. All the best. And Dhruv, any final closing question? I think you were asking something.

Dhruv Sharma: I do have a few. I don't know how much time we have with a couple of minutes here. So maybe just short answers to this, right? One, was the US Space Shuttle program the first attempt at just reusability? It was just very, very expensive. So that's one. Two is, you said something very interesting in one of your early comments, which is, you know, it's hard for a trip to be like, in terms of launch economics, it's hard for a trip to be profitable if the rocket is not full. So I want to understand, like, what's the way to maximize, you know, make like your space trip very, very profitable, like airlines of a sense of that, bus operators of a sense of that, like what do rocket men have to do to make like that space launch very, very profitable? 100% efficiency. Exactly. Like, I mean, you get a payload from so many different people, right? So, yeah. OK, let's just leave it at these two questions.

Utsav Somani: There will be a booking.com for booking your own space. There will be like reverse option of like space shuttle pay. You can book your own. Yes.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: That's what launch aggregators actually do. I mean, you have launch aggregators who actually do that.

Utsav Somani: I mean, or like there's a booking.com for like a kayak for crazy. Yeah. What's it called?

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: We don't have a .com for that yet, but you have the aggregators. It's like we're still in a yellow pages format for that. So you can just email them and say, hey, you know, I'm looking for just like 20 years back for flights. I mean, instead of a website, you just go to an agent, right? So you go to an agent today and say, you know, I want my satellite put in so-and-so month in this year. And there are aggregators who figure out what's the best launch vehicle for you based on your budget, what's the timeline and stuff.

Utsav Somani: Dude, I think it's a new business idea on the spot, like OTF for this. Like, I mean, I don't get the pitch deck ready kayak for packages.

Dhruv Sharma: I'm already. Yes, absolutely.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: So, yeah. So you're right. You're right. I mean, Space Shuttle was the first ever usable craft that we essentially did for cargo and stuff. But yeah, it was not a not very economically viable because it costed one. I think if you quote me, but I think it was about one point one billion dollars to refurbish while a new one cost about 800 million dollars. Right. So that was the scale of the shuttle. But eventually they were like, yeah, I mean, it doesn't make sense. We're to shut it down.

Dhruv Sharma: But maybe technically it was not as challenging because, you know, the horizontal glide was much like an aircraft. And and so unlike a rocket, which is descending vertically and so you have to stabilize it, you know, all the hardware that you need. Yeah.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: And you're talking about a launch vehicle. I mean, you have different kinds of reentry methods. You have the lifted reentry. So a space shuttle comes in something called a lifted reentry. So that there was a lifted reentry method like a space plane, you know, like a shuttle. So and then you have the ballistic reentry and then you have the skip reentry methods like how crew modules that carry astronauts come down. So for a launch vehicle, it's more difficult to come in that fashion because the the reentry velocity is very high. You enter all three regimes. You enter hypersonic regime, supersonic regime, subsonic regime. So you just have to have a super amazing thermal management system for that. So that's that's one thing. Coming back to the second question, there is how do you make launch logistics profitable? So earlier, if you look at it, like I said, an Uber is always more expensive than a truck or a bus, right? So there is one of economy of scale approach to reduce the cost per kg. That is one side. And then you have the reusability bit. So but both of it have their own challenges. So so the economy of scale approach is limited by one bit, which is frequency. So on its own standalone basis, large rockets. It takes time for you to fill a rocket. I mean, of course, the because the denominator is high, the cost per kg is going to be much lower. But the cost to build a large rocket is also higher. So you need for the rocket to be beyond a certain payload limit for you to be able to operate at that profitability. So to fill it up was a challenge back in the days. So in the 80s, 90s, the frequency was not very great for bigger rockets. And then you had this reusability approach where nobody knew if the physics made sense and SpaceX did it. But even after the demonstrated reusability only makes sense beyond a certain point, you can't do rock reusability in small rockets by design. So let's take for example, you take a rocket, you try to put it in orbit. Fundamentally, a rocket has fuel and payload. Right. You want to know you want to bring the same rocket back. But the mass of the rocket is not changing. Only the mass fraction changes. But because you want to bring the rocket back, you're retaining fuel. So then you end up carrying less of a payload, right? Because you're not carrying it for a few weeks. So the same rocket. So but it's not a linear progression. So if you design a rocket that can carry about, let's say, two and a half tons into orbit, then you try to bring it back. You end up being able to carry only about 200, 300 kgs. So bigger the rocket, better the reusability. So when you combine bigger rockets and reusability, they cancel out each other's cons and the cost per kg is actually awesome. But to make sure that you're able to retain that cadence, because that's an excellent question. What do you ask when people overlook that? Like SpaceX is able to do those many launches. They have Starlink. They have those missions going on. But if you think about it, if you're if you want to if you want to do four or five launches a week in that Falcon 9 kind of partially reusable configuration, you should have a factory that can produce four upper stages. A week, right. Each upper stage costs you about 12 billion dollars. It's a huge setup to be able to do that. So the amortized cost per kg is not going to make sense until you're vertically stacked. You have other, you know, revenue systems like SpaceX does unless you're cross subsidized with the government for certain activities. So it doesn't make absolute sense to be able to have that launch cadence until you that that economics work. So for us, it was very clear. I mean. We should be able to standardize the cost per kg and change the model from revenue per launch to revenue per launch vehicle over the lifecycle of the vehicle, how much you're going to make. So that is why full usability made more sense. And that's the way for us to go. So.

Utsav Somani: All right. I think. Thank you so much for that detailed answer and coming on our show. I have a wonderful, wonderful week ahead and all the best on the milestones.

Manu Nair - Co-founder & CEO, EtherealX: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: All right. Let's welcome our next guest. Suryansh of Essentially Sports. Suryansh, welcome to the show.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Hello, sir. Hey, thanks for inviting.

Utsav Somani: So, yeah, for our listeners, we're hearing about your company for the first time. How would you describe it?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: It's an interesting company to describe, especially that I have logged in to the company called AfterEthereal, which is a space company. So kind of you can draw a parallel to Twitter.

Utsav Somani: I think your internet's glitching a little bit, so we're not able to hear you properly.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Okay. Is it better now?

Utsav Somani: Yeah, slightly. Yeah.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Okay. Let me know if there's more disturbance. I'll switch to the hotspot.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: So we are basically building a new gen sports media company for North American market. The way to describe it is think of it like Bleacher Report put together with Twitter. So we are creating a media platform where we cover storylines with a very unique angle. And we are able to do that across different media formats. And we built it from an engineering background, etc. So we kind of put together the journalism, thinking with data, thinking together.

Utsav Somani: And how big is the team? And why did you choose sports as a category?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: So I'll take a step back to tell the story a little bit. So in 2014, I was an engineering student and a couple of my friends who I ended up starting it with, were also engineering students back in India. And one of us just bought a domain, essentially sports.com. At that moment, it was supposed to be a passion project to express ourselves. And I'm somebody who's always liked to make money online on internet, build, tinker around, etc. I've been doing since I was 14. So when my friend asked, okay, let's do this. I was like, okay, yeah, let's do it. And then turns out a lot of people felt the same way. We would in our college ask people, do you want to write? Do you want to write? And there were at some point, 50 volunteers across different colleges in India and different parts of the world who were just doing it for fun. It was almost like a college society at that point. That continued for almost four years. We were a WhatsApp run remote company distributed across colleges, getting viral online before creating content online was cool in a way. We were doing a bunch of sports. We're doing Formula One, tennis. At that point, we even used to do cricket and soccer. So that continued. And I think doing it for a reason that we're just passionate about it is why we started it. Then over time, this kind of became our home in a way that we felt like it's something we could express ourselves on. And after college around 2017, we all kind of moved out into different jobs, moved to different parts of the world. And the volunteer team also died down a little bit. What that experience did for us is it kind of taught us how to do publishing at scale in a way. How do you manage operations of a 250 member team? How do you think of topic ideation? How do you handle virality, etc.? But we weren't really a business. We weren't making revenue per se. I think for the first five years, we hardly made any revenue. Around 2018-19, one, two years into our jobs, the standard cycle of corporate jobs, not giving you the excitement that you want of building a company. And then you have this project, which you weren't really thinking about as a business, but always felt home. We all, like me and my cofounders, Harit and Jaskirat, felt that energy. Let's really use this to channel that entrepreneur mindset that we have. And around 2018, I think we kind of, I remember we did this call that, OK, let's really double down on this. I think there's something here. And at that moment, we kind of removed all the distraction and made it Formula One and tennis focus. And that's when we discovered how you could, like how fandom is so universal in a way that a bunch of journalists or like a bunch of founders from India could build it for any country. And we found good traction in the US and UK at that time.

Utsav Somani: From 2018... Tell us a little bit, just for our sake, so our listeners know what the scale looks like. What's the scale right now in terms of viewership, subscribers? How do you monetize?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yeah, so at this moment, we have 20 million monthly users. 95% of them is United States focus. We have a few million loyal subscribers on our newsletter, etc. We do around eight figures in revenue annually. We are fully bootstrapped. And because we are bootstrapped, of course, we are profitable to keep this running. It's been the case for the last five to six years. And the vision that we are building it with is, I really want to make it like a generational business in a way, a media company that stands the test of the time. And we could like adapt with whatever we need to.

Dhruv Sharma: What are the top sports in your primary market in the US? Like what's big? What's one? What's two? What's three?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yeah, so our claim to fame in the market, especially in COVID was niche sports that we found underserved pockets, which somehow were not the top three sports in a way in US and nobody was serving them in the way they should be, like NASCAR, tennis, golf. So that was a claim to fame. But at this point, because we kind of serve a big portion of United States sports fan, our top sports are NFL, college football, and NASCAR will still remain in our top three.

Dhruv Sharma: It's not just big league. It's also NCAA tournaments, everything.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have like regional products that we cover. We have journalists who are like draft experts and like college football, March Madness. We are really excited about that's going to happen in a couple of months.

Dhruv Sharma: What's the sporting culture there like? And how is it different from the one back home here in India?

Utsav Somani: Oh man, in terms of fandom or just viewership? Like I think we have instead of everyone watches cricket.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yeah, actually, there are so many things to talk about on this topic, because I feel like, first of all, I do think India has so much potential in sports, which is still untapped because the infrastructure has not happened, which is not leading to crazy talent and that's leading to advertiser budgets are not coming. And because that budgets are not coming, that whole flywheel is not starting, which I think US has cracked really, really well. It's probably like the, at this moment, the whole AI, et cetera, really changed the way advertisement budgets are moving. But sports is the only category which is untouched because it is the most predictable, successful life programming event, right? Like, you know, any event that is happening in sports is going to work very well, which is why all the OTTs are trying to get licensed. I was just listening to Netflix quarterly report and they were like, sports is why they are killing it again, in a way. And that's, you're going to see as a pattern with everybody. Apple TV bought like big MLB rights, YouTube is trying to get NFL weekend game rights, et cetera. So sports is the most trustable advertisement product, which I think kind of fuels the whole culture per se. In terms of talent, because there is so much budget coming in, I feel like the schools in US has such a good infrastructure. The question that you asked about NCA, the whole high school situation, the whole quality, even the pipeline is amazing. The high school, even the high school tournaments have a solid sponsorship structure, et cetera, which India does not have. My co-founder was like university cricket captain in India. A lot of our early hires were like national level tennis players, amateur boxers and doing different sports. And they couldn't actually make a career.

Dhruv Sharma: Almost all of these big league players have had high school careers and then college careers and everything's been tracked. Like if you ever look up their records, like there's a record of, you know, how many throws in at the high school level and so on. So long track careers is a steady pipeline.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yeah. You're based in the US? So I'm actually based in Amsterdam. I partially spend my time between Amsterdam, India and New York. But we have majorly built a company without living in US, mostly.

Utsav Somani: So you have a team on ground which covers all of these sports?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yes. So we have a bunch of expert journalists in US, but a lot of our original team is in India as well. So like it's Indian journalists. So that's where I think like fandom is so universal. Like our best NFL content guy is a 25 year old guy in India who like really understands NFL fandom to the top. Like with him, we have... I would never get that.

Utsav Somani: But I mean, in this world of AI, like I mean, content generation and everything that's happening, like I mean, do you think journalism and fandom specifically as a second order effect is changing from that? In my opinion... Content creation, content consumption, then eventually fandom as well.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Content creation processes are definitely changing because of AI coming into the place. But I feel like the reason media companies exist is because we tell stories better than anybody else, not because we tell news. News put in together with stories is where fans love to get engaged and entertained. And that is not where AI is heading, at least as of now. I feel like it's of course hard to predict, but I feel like storytelling is our mode. And that's what we are seeing people who thrive in our team are the ones who are doing that very well.

Utsav Somani: Is the biggest consumption mode on your platform or video is the largest one?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: So editorial is our strongest play. We have been a couple of years into the video space as well, but editorial is still largely our audience as of now. And on the platforms, you're definitely seeing like, let's say the algorithms change quite a bit because they are also trying to figure out what does trustable written content look like in a way. And that, in my opinion, is the biggest impact of AI that it takes a trained mind to kind of differentiate good and bad content sometimes, which a lot of platforms are also not accustomed to. So they get confused what is AI and what is not. And which is where, because we have been doing this for a while, there is an understanding that, okay, what does it take? Plus we have done this unique combination that we also bring in like certain experts which are breaking exclusive news in ways that have like not been done before. So if you add that together, you kind of create a content alpha, which like AI cannot do.

Dhruv Sharma: So can you give us a sense of what are the subscription products? What are the various subscription products that you guys sell?

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: Yeah, so we are actually a full, so our tagline is the fan's perspective. And I fundamentally feel that fans are getting, like asking to get paid in so many ways. People are like, there is a $300 jacket that you need to buy. And so it's all like a $500 ticket. So I want to keep the product free. And the way we have been able to do that is we have like stacked the multimedia products. So our core website is the editorial focus website where you kind of go for the viral news and certain engaged products. Then we have our newsletters, which have 1.5 million subscribers. That is our daily habit product. So across 15 different categories, 8 a.m. between 7 to 10 a.m. EST every day, you get a newsletter from us. And that like brings you back to the website or you consume that on the newsletter platform. And then we run certain IPs, which is we have three IPs right now. One is the draft IP, which is run by Tony Pauling, which is about draft picks that we do every week. The second one is a college sports focused IP, which came into happen because there is a whole phenomenon going on in U.S. right now that U.S. college athletes couldn't get a sponsor till like three, four years ago or something, because it might- For sports or is that for a particular sport? All college athletes, if you are like enrolled in the college program, you couldn't get a sponsor because at that young age, it was considered that, okay, you will get distracted, et cetera. And it's of course surprising for a capitalism first country that law existed. But then over time, this new thing came out, which is called NIL, which is name image likeliness, which is fundamentally that- And this actually happened because a lot of athletes started to have Instagram and like had their own following, but they couldn't really monetize it. And they started to kind of like also reconsider playing sports. So they had to come up with this law. And what this allowed to do was it allowed you to monetize your name, image and likeliness. And that's where we are running another podcast with a couple of Florida Gator athletes. One of them is Maria O'Neill, which is Shaquille O'Neill's daughter. So she's like quite tuned into the NBA culture, et cetera. And the third one is sports marketing focus podcast, where we get CMOs and brand marketers to talk about their brand campaigns that they're doing with athletes. Because some of these conversations never really come out. We call it the think tank. It's like, okay, I got this athlete to do this Pepsi or Coca-Cola campaign.

Utsav Somani: Priyansh, before we let you go, tell us the two teams that you follow most religiously.

Suryansh Tibarewal - Essentially Sports: So I follow tennis quite a bit. So watching US Open recently was definitely a lot of fun. And I was definitely supporting Michigan in the college. Yeah, Australian Open is going on right now. I'm really tuning into that. And I'm looking forward to Michigan's game in the draft pick.

Utsav Somani: All right, awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dhruv Sharma: Awesome, great to have you.

Utsav Somani: All right, before we end the show, we have one final guest, Aryan. He's gonna give us a demo on stuff that's going viral on Twitter and teaches a few new things.

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, on CloudBot, the new viral personal AI assistant that X can't get enough of and Aryan has it configured and is going to hopefully be able to give us a demo, live demo.

Utsav Somani: Have you checked it out? What is the whole thing in your words or whatever you've been able to understand from the whole thing?

Dhruv Sharma: You're asking me?

Dhruv Sharma: This is the one thing I haven't checked out yet. Like I try and stay loyal to my AI tools for at least a few days between switching from one to the other, which is why we had it arranged for Aryan to come talk about it.

Utsav Somani: Aryan, welcome to the show. Hi, nice to meet you. Awesome, so what do you do currently? Just for our listeners to have some background. Sure, so can you hear me all right, by the way? A little bit. I think the internet's not the best. There's a little lag, I feel.

Speaker 5: Yeah, let me just try one second.

Dhruv Sharma: It's quite interesting, by the way, their site itself, they have a live page where they're posting user stories of what people are using CloudBot for. I'm just going to pull it up very quickly.

Utsav Somani: All right, I think Aryan's back. So Aryan, give us some context.

Speaker 5: For college, I went to Princeton. I studied computer science and finance. I was actually doing DeFi out of college. I was actually in the crypto space, but I started a company with a friend when AI was taking off. And we were actually doing AI agents for WhatsApp. So CloudBot was really interesting because one of the surfaces that you interact with it is WhatsApp along with Telegram and other stuff, right? So I moved on from that company and the last maybe five or six months, I've just been tinkering on a lot of side projects, just indie hacking mostly and traveling around. And yeah, I've just been building a lot on CloudCore and the CloudAgent SDK. So this was kind of like a perfect fit. Dhruv has been playing around with that.

Utsav Somani: But I mean, is the unique thing that you can chat with it on WhatsApp? Like that's the only unique thing about this or there's something else to this whole thing?

Speaker 5: I think there's three things. So there's the surface element, obviously. Like if anyone in the audience has used CloudCore, they're pretty familiar with the whole interface is like, but you kind of have to interact with CloudCore while your MacBook is open. CloudBot is essentially CloudCore that's running on like a simple server, like a VPS. So it's always on 24 seven. It's pretty accessible. So they've set up the surfaces to be like anything that you can set up as a bot on WhatsApp or Discord or Slack or anything else, even Telegram. And so you can just have your phone and access CloudCore without being on your MacBook. So the third thing is because it's running 24 seven, it can sort of trigger tasks in the future, kind of like a cron job basically. So you can schedule tasks like remind me in 20 minutes to take my medicine or like check my Twitter feed every 9 a.m. and give me a summary, that kind of stuff. So it has this concept called heartbeats. Every 30 minutes, it can check for like your emails, your calendars and stuff and proactively reach out to you, which currently isn't really possible with a lot of the stuff that's out there.

Speaker 5: Why don't you give us a demo?

Dhruv Sharma: Finally somebody who can read all of the X bookmarks for you.

Speaker 5: 100%. I tend to revisit my...

Utsav Somani: I remember Meta had this thing, right? Where they banned Perplexity, ChatGB and OpenAI from using WhatsApp, right? I think it's now not allowed. That's why OpenAI is now stopped on WhatsApp.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, Meta, I guess Meta didn't like that ChatGB was more popular than MetaAI on WhatsApp.

Utsav Somani: So what are we doing here?

Speaker 5: So I just have like a Telegram chat. I set up a bot and I called it Puppy. And really it's just running. I gave it like a personality. It's like a playful bot. I gave it some context from my ChatGB memory. So it knows like bits and pieces about me. So I can ask it, for example, what do you know about me?

Utsav Somani: And it knows like, think of it, let's talk about this on screen. Like, I mean, it just throws up some random thing that, hey, you watch like... That would be, yeah.

Speaker 5: It knows a lot of stuff. All right. It's basically just like my wife, my finances. Not that much stuff though. So for example, I could ask it like, summarize some... Tweets about... Dude, it's telling your ARR or MRR on screen.

Utsav Somani: Last bit, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 5: Like, MRR is a public thing. I feel like you should not be hiding your MRR, right? It's a motivation thing.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, the site is now verifying all of these stats publicly. Yeah, it is true. Twitter now where they have to like, you know...

Speaker 5: So I connected my Twitter, for example, and I can ask it, show me some tweets about CloudBot. So it's checked up a bunch of tweets. It can like surface things, hype, what it does, etc. I can also connect... I connected like Braves...

Utsav Somani: There was two things that will blow our mind. Like, I mean, you've described it. Like, what will... I mean, Dhruv is fairly savvy himself. Like, he is a nighttime hacker on CloudCowork. He's used Cowork to like, I think organize his 2021 bank, Dhruv?

Speaker 5: So, I mean, yeah. Yeah, the thing is like, my honest take was there's a lot of stuff that you can do with CloudBot. There's stuff you can do with CloudCode. So there's like a few security issues that made me prevent it from connecting everything to CloudBot. I've connected my Twitter, which is like a small account. And I connected like a search API. So I can ask it to search the internet and do like a lot of complex steps. But right now, for example, asking it for tweets through like a chat interface or like asking it to remind me in one minute to say hi. I mean, those things like you can like stack up a lot of things on top of it, right? You can create like a very long workflow. It'll just go off. I can ask it, for example, search on the internet about the offline network. And just search about it and summarize all of it for me. So I think for me, it feels like a simple UI of like cloud that can also proactively do things for me.

Utsav Somani: How does one set it up for themselves? For our listeners, like we want to set this up for themselves.

Speaker 5: And I think, so the setup is fairly technical. They've come up with like a simple script on docs.cloud.bot. I think that's the domain name. I have a feeling that a bunch of agencies and consulting companies will pop up to do the setup for you or someone will put up like a nice UI layer on top of all of this to do setup. But the way I did it was I just set up like a 10 bucks per month server on Amazon on AWS. And you can SSH into the server. And then they've given you like one line that you have to paste on the server. This will do the setup for you. You just have to plug in your API keys. So obviously all of this is running behind Entropiq. So you're actually paying for all the tokens, right? The only thing you'd really want to set up is like whatever LLM provider you're using, like the API for that one. And then for connecting each of these things, you can just do it through whatever interface you use. So it will take probably five to 10 minutes. I think there's a lot of like tutorials and stuff, but I feel like someone would probably abstract it, all of it away and maybe charge some money.

Utsav Somani: All right, perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you for agreeing to do this, Aaryan.

Utsav Somani: All right, folks, let's end the Republic Day special and our 50th episode. We'll see you on Wednesday at four o'clock. Have a good one. Thank you.