Summary

The Offline Network Episode 19: India's Festive Boom & AI's Funding Frenzy (aired 2025-10-13). Guests: Akshay Chaturvedi, Ravi Handa from Leverage, Handa Uncle. Akshay: "Started out with the premise of helping folks who are young, folks who want to essentially make that movement to become more upwardly mobile, give them different options in India and abroad." Akshay: "So we land at about 45 crore ratio, if I bet down a 400 crore type revenue by the end of this financial year." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, crypto and Web3, consumer brands and D2C. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: Alright folks, welcome back to TUN. I hope you've taken a good break over the last 10 days. We've been not streaming. A lot has happened. Some funny, some serious. So let's break down what the funny stuff will be. But before that, let me tell you who the two guests today will be. We've got Akshay of Leverage coming to talk about education and study abroad with us. And then we've got Ravi Handa, who is a famous personality on Twitter and talks about personal finance and also FIRE. So it will truly be a Fireside Chat with him. First, I think some of the funny stuff that's happened cannot mention, cannot go on without mentioning Bill Gates was on Kyunki Saas Bhi Gavi Bahut Hi. We talk about a social cause, but I think just to see him appear on an Indian TV series on a Mac where Tulsi Ji was dialing in to Bill Gates, I think was fun. Lourve got robbed. I think we live in the 1920s because, I mean, this heist was very, very simple. I think it took like a total of 30 minutes, I think, or maybe even lesser to complete the full thing. And they just broke in using a ladder and out. They stole some of the stuff that Napoleon's family had used in their lifetime. So very interesting. There's a betting scandal in the NBA, a betting and a poker scandal, which the mafia was controlling. So all of this is really funny stuff. And the world is increasingly becoming strange here by the day. But before that, we before we welcome our guest, let's talk about the more serious stuff. So consumer spending was up. Diwali, GST, all of those factors played into all of this. India's saving rate is very, very low, 8.5 percent, lowest on record it's ever been. But the funny thing is Mercedes-Benz was selling a car worth one crore every six minutes. And I mean, the credit cards, of course, plus 27 percent boost in transactions. All of this tells you that India is moving towards a heavy consumption economy. And I don't know if this is good or bad. But coming to the world of startups, AI is the talk of town. Dhruv, why is that?

Dhruv Sharma: Well, there's a report out itself by KOTU, which has made it abundantly clear that almost half of all the VC money that went into companies in the first half of this year went into AI companies. And there's got to be a reason for this. Obviously, we've covered this and we've covered this on the show enough number of times because it's such an important story of the day. But we're in the middle of a platform shift. We're in the middle of a, we're at the start pretty much of a super cycle. AI is where all of the capital is starting to concentrate. In fact, not just from venture firms, but all sorts of investment firms and even the large tech companies, almost more than half of their free cash flow is now being spent in CapEx.

Utsav Somani: And KOTU makes the case that this is not a bubble, right?

Dhruv Sharma: Well, you hear a different version of this every single day. But then if it is, let's assume it is a bubble, why is money still making its way here? So you'll often hear venture investors say, you know, in venture, you don't want to make errors of omission and once in a while to make errors of commission. Nobody wants to sit this party out. Plus, also, it's like, there's a line in the Lion King, right? Like, wherever the light touches is my kingdom. So AI is going to affect pretty much every industry. So I think people are going with, you know, that assumption also.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And there's a new browser in town.

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, OpenAI is doing a launch after launch. By the way, on Wikipedia, there's actually a section on, yeah, people still use Wikipedia, but there's a section on Browser Wars. And so, you know, the world's always had some version of this or the other. It went from Netscape, you know, back in the day to Internet Explorer, we've all used Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome. And now everyone's trying to unseat Chrome from its position. But think about this for a moment, right? And there's two large themes playing out here. One is, of course, monetization. You've got to make money at the end of the day, right? All of this money is coming into these companies. They've also got to, like, if you want to buy and if you want to interact with ChachiBitty here in India today, you've got the 399 plan, you've got the 2000 rupee plan, you've got the 20,000 rupee plan. That's not going to cut it. And so advertising is how they were monetized, at least in the early days. By the way, very interesting. OpenAI thinks of themselves as not just one company, but maybe three or four companies. So it's obviously a consumer app company. It's also a research lab and a frontier model company and an infrastructure company. We've covered that on the show, like the Stargate, this massive 3 trillion dollar AI build out. And so something's to pay for it. And again, these sort of browser wars keep going on. So anyway, their browser is called Atlas. You will remember that Perplexity had launched theirs, it was called Comet, just a few days ago. It's only available on macOS right now. I don't know if you've tried it. I encourage everyone who's a Mac user to try it out. The first thing you'll see, by the way, is they allow you to import all of your browsing history from your current browser. And then they're always reminding you to try and make it your default browser.

Utsav Somani: So they give you more limits, right, on the usage of chat CBD. Absolutely. Interesting thing that I think, why they're doing this. And by the way, remember on the earlier show, you mentioned that what percentage of the world's knowledge is digitized? I actually went up and looked at that stat. I think it's 8 to 10 percent. So what chat CBD or OpenAIR might be trying to do with this is they're trying to convert weekly active users into daily active users. And along with becoming a daily habit or even like an hourly habit for some people who work on their browsers, they get to collect so much more data. So all of this is access to private data, which is coming or getting passed by chat CBD for usage. And some of this might flow back to their LLMs as well to improve their models. So I think this gives them like embeds them into somebody's life much more closely.

Dhruv Sharma: Absolutely. And now you can so the chat CBD agent can do stuff for you natively from within the browser, from within Atlas. So the use case that everyone's everyone likes talking about booking trips for you, making reservations, etc. It's actually happening. We mentioned Comet. And before we move on to the next story, we want to talk about the subtle differences between the two. So chat CBD is designed in such a way that, you know, Atlas can just work for you autonomously. It doesn't need that much supervision, unlike Comet. Also, chat CBD gears towards an outcome, right? So in the end, you get stuff done and perplexity will still leave you with intelligence. It'll give you a great answer and a point to sources. But that's the key difference between two at this point in time. But this company keeps shipping. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: And even perplexity. I think what they did with Airtel in India, where they distributed like their pro membership for free to every Airtel user, I think they got a lot of usage from India. I hope some of that converts into actual usage for them. Otherwise, they'll end up burning a big hole in their balance sheet. This one is personal. I mean, we've gone through Diwali right now, so Delhi is polluted. Luckily, it's not as bad as it could have been. That's what Dhruv told me once last week. But there's a company which won the E.T. Startup Awards for social innovation and Chakra Innovation is doing something very interesting. Most of the construction sites or even residential properties in India have a DD or a diesel generator set, which emits a lot of pollution. So 80 percent of that can be reduced if you use one of their products, which is what the core product offering is right now. But interestingly, they're developing this new technology where they're using aluminium plates to increase the lifespan of storage of energy. And this is fascinating because lithium ion batteries are not that recycling, recyclable, often recyclable in nature. And aluminium plates, I think, will be a very, very good advantage, sort of a big uplift into this sort of the green energy revolution as well. So super excited about this. They want to raise 23 million to go global as well. Iron Pillar led that round. And interestingly, Nvidia has made their first investment in India. They've backed Unifor, which has raised 260 million at a 2.5 billion valuation. Dhruv, what's happening in the world of voice AI?

Dhruv Sharma: I mean, we've had Anand's talk about this as well. So on the on the consumer side, think about this for a moment. You know, the world at this point in time actually is a common best friend, which is chat GPT. Everyone's talking to chat GPT or of course, whatever you use or like just make about one model and one interface. But everyone's just talking to chat GPT and the text responses are going to feel the same, right? When you talk to your human best friend, they all sound different. And so voice is it's meant to be contextual. Like if I were to ask you, hey Utsav, how was your Diwali, you know, the response I get is going to be very different. Hey Utsav, how was Diwali for you? So the response is going to be think about this for a moment. If you know you're having you've had a bad customer experience and you're talking to a customer agent that's actually an AI agent and you're furious and that's trying to talk in that typical 911 voice, you're not going to like that so much. So between consumer applications and business applications, I think the models have I'm going to mention two companies, by the way, for everyone to check out or even start using for if your day-to-day speech, text, translation, try out Whisperflow, it's an Indian founder based in the Valley.

Utsav Somani: We've been trying to get him on the show, by the way, but the timing doesn't match.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And we will succeed one day. We have to bring him on.

Utsav Somani: Unless we do a stream at a different time.

Dhruv Sharma: Or we should try that. That'll be super. And then there's this other company called Sesame, which is it's a free preview. Just go check it out. There's two agents or there's two, you know, there's two agents that you can talk to Maya or Miles and one's a guy and then there's a gal. And so they understand your tone of voice. They understand the context around it and calibrate their answer accordingly. So it's definitely an exciting place. We have, in fact, one other company in India called Greylabs AI, which is.

Utsav Somani: Oh, yes. Sarvam actually partnered with Meta recently on their glasses. So now some of the stuff that you talk with in Hindi or any of the other Indic languages, Sarvam's the LLM being used on those Meta Ray-Ban glasses. So a lot of interesting developments there. All right. So one quick one to wrap this up was EREX. One of the largest crypto exchanges of India is resuming operations today. They were hacked for 235 million USD, allegedly by a North Korean group, which is prominent in the hacking circles for attacking some of these exchanges. But interesting to see that they've resumed operations from today. And what I think a lot of consumers will be happy about is they plan on repaying the lost funds back while the business profits that they generate. These things are all the best to them. Let's head into the guest segments. We're welcoming Akshay Chaturvedi of Leverage to come and educate us about a few things. Akshay. Akshay, welcome to the show.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): What's up? Thank you. Glad to be finally doing this. Hi Dhruv. You guys have a question?

Utsav Somani: I know you mentioned that you're a fan of the TVBN format. We're trying to be the TON of India. So many differences, but I hope you enjoy the conversation that we've had. And I hope listeners also enjoy this. So before we begin, you've come up with your profitable story as well in the public domain recently, where the TechCrunch piece came out. But for our listeners, tell us what the business is like. What does Leverage do?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Sure. No, very simple. Started out with the premise of helping folks who are young, folks who want to essentially make that movement to become more upwardly mobile, give them different options in India and abroad. And somehow the admission overseas opportunity kind of stuck through. And that's what we kind of started to do. And a couple of years down, we figured out that, hey, the admissions piece isn't enough. We need to build a full horizontal stack platform for them. So we started doing education loans, started doing remittances, started doing student housing, started helping with internships. And very soon we realized that, OK, this is not an India to global story. This is a global to global story. Today, we help 16 different countries as source markets launch into 12 different destinations and essentially helping them with everything, figuring out what they should be doing, whether it be a short term course that is focused on a specific profession, whether it be nursing or hospitality or teaching or healthcare workers or whatever that be, to doing more generic programs, either a degree in business or finance or law or something more specific in STEM or essentially then kind of figuring out how to kind of go out if they want to stay back in that country, how to be a good immigrant, helping them with the financial services stack, housing stack or if they want to come back here in India or Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever that be, wherever the home country be in Africa, ensuring that we give a good comeback path for them as well, connecting them with employers and things like that. So been a good journey. We've been evolving. We've been feeling our own selves over the course of all of these years. And it's been good to kind of I think we must have done some good stuff to be finally here on the offline network.

Utsav Somani: Recap the numbers. Recap the numbers for our listeners.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Sure. So very, very briefly, we've been doubling every year for the last four years and just in the last couple of years we moved from 90 to 185 to now about 400 plus this financial year. And between last year to this year, we've had a bit of movement of about 100 crores plus. So we land at about 45 crore ratio, if I bet down a 400 crore type revenue by the end of this financial year. And of which about a quarter of the business is what we call a platform business, which is the value added products around lending, remittances, housing, et cetera. And the core admissions piece, helping these guys figure out what's next from an education slash employment perspective is three fourths of the business within which India is still about half of the source market and the remaining is staggered across Africa, South Asia, now starting to kind of do reasonable numbers in Middle East as well.

Dhruv Sharma: Akshash, you mentioned a lot of regions. Try and paint like a global map for us, right? Where are the education hubs? Where are the student hubs? What are the migration routes? Which ones are heavily treaded? Which ones are likely treaded? What's new that we don't even know about?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Sure, Dhruv, it's an ever evolving answer to an ever evolving question. Unfortunately, it gets picked up a lot in mainstream media. Sadly, so, which makes investors look in all different kinds of directions. But I'll try to paint a decent picture as of how things stand as of this morning. Just to kind of give you a big, I would say, a fundamental block of sorts. There used to be big four destinations, which used to be, as you know, America, UK, Canada and Australia. Over the course of last half decade or so, just before COVID, they started to mature into big seven and then big ten, which meant that there were newer hubs like Ireland, Germany, parts of Europe that kind of started to come around. In the last three to four years, there's been another new phenomena called TNE, which is called transnational education, which is these British and American and also university setting up campuses in these geopolitically sensitive, non-sensitive towns of sorts. So there is a Dubai, there is a Singapore, there's a Hong Kong, it is increasingly gift city as well as Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore now that that's been in the news recently.

Utsav Somani: Even IIT is going and setting up campuses overseas now, right?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Correct, correct. That's just in fact launched yesterday and Sheikh Hamdan was there at the IIM Ahmedabad launch. So so that's happening too. Interestingly enough, there were very different eligibility criteria as compared to what they have in the home campuses, which is similar for when British and Australian universities set up campuses in the Middle East or somewhere else. So I think that is giving a just kind of give you a very broad summary of it. It gives students the option to look at, hey, I can either go to the main campus, which is very far away, or I can go to a satellite campus or I can go to this TNE campus or I can pursue online. And for the university also, from a profit model perspective, it says that, hey, I can either educate these kids at my main campus setting in Boston or London or Berlin or wherever that be, or I will open a satellite campus, which is about like, say, in the main city of my country or one of the top four or five big financial hubs. Or I will open up a TNE in transnational education hub in Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai or whatsoever. Or I will then kind of teach them online. So everybody is trying to ensure that they are present across all of the different realms of figuring out how they can meet each other and using that as a platform to figure out what's next for themselves.

Utsav Somani: And I mean, a lot of people go study abroad with the belief that it's a better opportunity for a job or a higher income possibility for them. Does that belief still hold true?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): So that's an interesting one. So I think these numbers keep going up and down in different geographies. So, for example, as we essentially seen that in the UK, the number came down from 71% to about 58% for us, whereas the number in Germany is about like, say, 91% right now. Similarly, people of Latin American or Spanish descent, if they are trying to look for jobs in anywhere in Europe, like they have 100% success rate in terms of visa as well as in terms of any employment opportunities that they're kind of looking at. For Indians, more specifically, they're getting a large set of venues in the Middle East or more specifically in places like Ireland, places like Malta, places like Italy right now, places like Poland, which traditionally haven't seen as much Indian influx as a lot of other destinations have. So it's like a moving mountain. So these things keep changing. And in fact, I would say that while we have a very outside in approach to it, I would say like you as a company, we also would have an outside in approach. The students are very, very self-aware. They keep abreast of these movements. So a lot of times we are just catching up to what the student interests is on our app and saying, OK, you know, a lot of students are going to Malta. Malta is 6% of my revenue this year. I would have never reckoned that there's a place called Malta till about two years back.

Utsav Somani: What course do they go for? Like, what do they study there? What are the top selling courses?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): In Malta, it's hospitality. Different countries will also have different programs. Germany, it's a lot of AI right now. It's a lot of AI in healthcare. In Malta, it's more hospitality. In US, you have Washington district where we're essentially recruiting teachers with a bunch of universities together. And then you have a lot of sports happening still on the outskirts of UK in Australia, even though the doors are otherwise shut in Australia. So there is a good combination of the right program and the right city within the right country in the right framework with the right visa policies. And if somebody is able to kind of get that right, hey, I want to build a career in automotive. It makes sense for me to go to Germany. Other than UK, it makes sense for me to go to Birmingham because that does set up a massive factory there. I'm going to get a job more easily or in the US, I'm going to be in Texas or I'm going to essentially be somewhere in Michigan. So I think people are able to now have more self-awareness in terms of what they want to do, how they should go about it, and what city would be like a good fit for them in the course of their career in the three to seven year horizon.

Utsav Somani: And geopolitics also plays a part in all of this, right? I mean, US, Trump changing visa rules every other day. So students must be, I mean, worried about this whole thing before choosing US as a destination or even for other countries, for that matter.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): One thousand percent, for example, while the US still had numbers moving in the right direction until about two months back, those numbers have come crashing down in the last six weeks, most specifically when the H1B news came out. Even the clarification hasn't helped so far because people feel that, OK, there's going to be a flip-flop on the policy front. At the same time, when we think about it as a business, we know that American universities now have to fill these seats some way or the other from some other geographies. So now China for them is closed, India subcontinent is closed, Africa is somewhat a little bit edgy. So they're trying to look at Brazil. So we're now in LATAM, we're just opening up Brazil next month. We're trying to get the students from Vietnam. We're trying to get the students from the Middle East. So now Vietnam, in fact, has seen 170% increase in visa acceptance. Brazil is growing very, very quickly. So there has to be a mix and match from a demand and supply perspective, as long as you're able to kind of get that right. I'll give you just one very quick example from three years back when the whole Indo-Canada issue happened. We raised our hands and said that, hey, Canadian universities, you do still need students. Why don't we send you students from Nigeria? So Nigeria is now about almost 22% of our revenue. We have a large, almost 40 people plus physical team in Lagos and Abuja. Similarly, these Indian students who were looking at going to Canada, they still had to have options which were in that 10, 12, 15 lakh rupee tuition fee range of sorts. So these folks started going out to Germany and that's how the destination got built. So there's a little bit of mix match that happens because of geopolitics, but you've generally seen that audiences are self-aware and they move very, very quickly alongside that.

Dhruv Sharma: Akshay, was it clear, when did it become clear that there's a full-stack opportunity here? I understand you started with admissions. When did that happen?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Sure. So there was no, I'm not a visionary founder and we are not a very like, we are not seeing jobs very much. We accept the reality. We are essentially operations slash funnel optimization guys. In 2021, we saw that 7% of our funnel can't go through because they're not getting a loan on time. 7% of our funnel can't go through because they are not able to make remittance on time. The typical behavior in India, as well as other emerging markets around that time, we were doing mostly Nigeria and a bit of Nepal, was that people would stay there, take their money kind of very close to their chest till the last date, and then they would kind of make the remittance. And we would say that, hey, don't do that. Don't do that. But they were essentially, that's their behavior. They were trying to kind of save every last rupee or whatever that be. So that's how we said that, okay, you know, we don't want to be a financial services company, but we're going to integrate this within the app, within the consumer journey, so that we can essentially control the whole thing and ensure that the student experience is much better. And I think that's how some of these things evolved. We started something called Leverage Careers as, like, in April last week, in partnership with King's College London. And the reason for that again was that, hey, a lot of people think that, hey, I did not get a job at the end of the entire thing. My experience was either fair or either poor or whatever that be. And we said, hey, you know, you won't find a job in the typical Indian placement style. Somebody's not going to come and knock your door and say, you have to prepare very early on. You have to meet employers. You have to kind of design your career in a very, very different way. So why don't we kind of come together and help you through the entire thing? And of course, if we're doing this, we are essentially going to ensure that there's a business model for ourselves too. So some of these things, I would say most of these things have evolved from just completing that whole journey for the consumer and ensuring that we are building something that can stand the test of time. And also, it also helps the core business because thanks to this, the NPS always keeps on increasing. My referral from when I was doing 90,000 revenue to about 400,000 revenue now has moved from 4% to 26%. So that means as my ARPU is going up because it's all margin-negative revenue, my CAC is going down because a large set of people who use my platform, even like say a couple of years back, they're now referring their cousins and friends back in the system. So it all comes together very nicely.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of like, I mean, admission counseling and all of these processes, has AI played a role in your business?

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): 100%. So we have two GTMs. 50% of our business is B2C. We would directly reach out to students in all of these geographies and 50% is B2B, where we integrate about 7,000 plus small mom-and-pop stores to do the same thing and then we give them a software through which they help the student do shortlisting of universities, shortlisting of programs, so on and so forth. So in both the cases, in the case of B2B, we have a bot called VasuBot that sits on WhatsApp. So the common WhatsApp group that we will have with the small mom-and-pop owner and if they have any queries, bot is going to answer those queries in terms of what program is right, what country is right, which is what profile. In terms of, we work very closely with universities. So we build tools for them to take AI-led interviews. So they don't have to essentially sit through 10,000 interviews. AI can take off 9,000 and only the 1,000 good ones that essentially have to have a manual admission officer run through a bunch of questions or help them manage their funnel and things like those. So there's a lot of AI integration that still essentially is in the works.

Utsav Somani: That brings me to my next question or this thing. Like, how do you deal with conflict of interest? Because you said that you sell the tool to the university as well and also you're making, sort of helping, I mean, them build a funnel as well of students. So, I mean, conflict of interest arises.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Sure. So you have students who go to the Ivy League, Ivy minus one or who go to public universities in Germany, Italy, MBBS. There's a very clear charter out there that we make money from the students in those cases because we don't partner with the universities there. And in all other cases, which is 80% of the entire admissions business, because you're partnering with the university and we essentially going to take a finder's fee from the university side. The student clearly knows that we can't make money off them. Now, if I was a small moment of store who was doing like a few crores of business, I could essentially make money on both the sides and because nobody would know. But because I'm representing the university either exclusively or sign exclusively in a given region now, I'm not allowed to make money from the student because the university is paying me. My invoice says that they're paying me for admission advice or application advice on behalf of the student. So if I'm doing this, if they're paying me on behalf of the student, I essentially can't make money on the student side. In fact, while again, when we have an outside in perspective to the sector, we feel that, OK, there could be a conflict of interest, but the typical student who's looking at me or any of my peers, they're very self-aware. So if somebody would essentially say that, hey, give me something in return of this university, hey, but you partner with the university, right? You're going to make your money from there. So I'm not supposed to pay you.

Utsav Somani: And if somebody tries very smart these days, kids are very smart these days.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): The model is very well established. And and they would also say that, hey, you know, this is you're trying to Harvard boss. Harvard does not need me. I'm essentially helping you build the best possible application. So in that case, you essentially make money from the student.

Dhruv Sharma: Awesome. Anything to close this out through? Actually, two questions for Akshay. So number one is when you look at the full student experience, right from the time that they decide what they're going to study to the time that they get a job. Which parts of that experience are you satisfied with? You know how you've been able to solve them? I'm sure there's a part of you that's never fully satisfied, but still partially satisfied. And where do you think there's an opportunity to do a lot more? That's one question. The second one, very quickly, we want to understand how the brand journeys played out. I still remember the first time I saw an airport ad. It was in Mumbai. You know, the leverage banner. I still remember the first time I saw a YouTube ad. So tell us about both of those things and then we let you go.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Sure, the first one is more interesting. I think we still see ourselves as we have peers who are kind of trying to figure out who they really are. And I might have, I think, let me correct myself. I might have said that we are a horizontal platform, but we essentially see ourselves as an education platform. Everything else is a value add. It's a top on. And I don't plan to be a financial services company or a real estate company or any of those other things that we essentially kind of trying to close the entire loop. So we are very proud of the fact that we keep innovating on getting the right program for the right student. How well are they being matched? How are they able to essentially get a job? How are they playing out their life in a new country couple of years out? What is their experience been? So a lot of focus on that. I think there is a lot more to do on the financing side. Unfortunately, we aren't able to because we don't control the whole funnel. In fact, I was having this chat with a very large private equity that is investors in one of those large partners that is going IQ right now, 40,000 crore loan book. And I was saying that, hey, these guys are so stuck back in time that they're only giving education loans to students who are going to top 30, 40, 50 universities in the US 10 programs. And you have a large set of people who they can essentially be lending to and make a much larger chunkier name. But for that on day one, you will have to and forgive me if I'm kind of going over time, but I'll just take 30 seconds to elaborate.

Utsav Somani: I mean, please carry on.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): You essentially. So somebody has to so all of these things that we're doing, we're focusing a lot on nursing pathways into Germany, health care workers in Japan, teachers in Washington district. So somebody can essentially come in and back these skilled immigration pathways of a student going for AI programs or sports programs or luxury fashion management programs. But for the first couple of years, there's going to be high NPA in this. It's not going to be 0.31 percent. It's going to be 3 percent. It's going to be 4 percent. So you need a $250 million round into a large NBFC that sees a couple of seasons of NPAs. And then gradually, this NPA comes down and then you would have essentially expanded the time to a next level altogether. But given where we are, given in the education lending space, people largely thought that sector as NPA is going to be even less than a home loan portfolio. Let's focus on this. Let's take this to IPO and then like Jingalala, who, who, whatever that be, I'll make my own money. So I think that's been a challenge of sorts. Because all these companies are now at a near IPO or IPO plus stage. Nobody's willing to take the risk. So there's a large, large, large opportunity for somebody to come in and do education lending at scale. And there is enough and more, I would say, credit parameters that companies like us have to help them kind of write a much better credit story. So yeah, I'm not looking to solve that problem. But I think that's a problem that hopefully will get solved at some point of time. On the brand piece, very, very quickly. I think different companies behave differently. In our case, we always saw that we will build a B2C GTM company as compared to B2B as most of our peers are. So take a lot of pride in if you put me versus all my peers on Google Trends, you will see leverage right up there. And all my peers are on an x-axis. And the reason for that is that we always focus a lot on ensuring that students are aware about these different options and different pathways. And because a lot of these questions around conflict of interest, around, hey, is education abroad really expensive? Am I really kind of worth it? Is it only about the US? No, it's about hospitality in Malta as well. No, it's about getting an automotive job in Germany as well. No, it's about closer home, Dubai and Singapore as well. And you can essentially get much better opportunity as compared to what you might be doing in your home city. So I'll just kind of end it by saying that I also come from a place where the existential question was not what you will become. That was a very luxurious question. We always take it for granted. The question was that so it's like if people are able to figure out from their small village or town, wherever that be, then they kind of figure out to graduate to say that, hey, what will I become in life now? And I think as we solve that for a lot of people across these 15, 16 different emerging markets that we are essentially presenting today, we'll get to a place where we can build our respected, well-deserved brand that can hopefully 80, 85, 90% speaking in numerical terms, 90% of my CAC can completely be free CAC and we're just doing great service and printing free money at the same time.

Utsav Somani: Amazing, Akshay. You built a solid business. Kudos to you and more power to you as you scale new heights. Cheers. Thank you for coming on.

Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder & CEO, Leverage): Thank you. It's a pleasure. Cheers.

Utsav Somani: All right, folks. Our next guest is Mr. Ravi. You must have seen him famously on Twitter. I'm very, very excited to have him on the show. It's a Friday. So the first question that I'm going to ask him is when was the last time you had a beer, sir? You post good, unhinged photos about your beer and drinking habits online.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): So I actually spent the last seven, eight days in Singapore. Yeah. And definitely tried a bunch of beers over there. Which was your favorite? Polliner was something.

Utsav Somani: You didn't try any of the Singaporean ones?

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): The Singaporean ones I've tried a lot before. So I was staying in Marina Bay. So they have a Polliner brewery over there. So that was the experience. Plus, they also had a, what do you call it? A sort of an Oktoberfest stuff going on.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): So they had those giant pretzels and sausages and everything. So it was a fairly nice experience. So actual Germany is probably a little while away. But till then, we'll make it.

Utsav Somani: I mean, you're building a new company as well. You sold your first one to an academy. And Oktoberfest, actually, one of my friends told me it is celebrated in September in Germany, by the way.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): Yeah, yeah.

Utsav Somani: So it starts in, yeah, so it starts before October as well, because it gets so cold people won't come out for it. But yeah, it's a great experience. Yeah.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): So what I remember is it ends in the first weekend of October. It starts at the end of September. So it ends in October. That's why it's called the...

Utsav Somani: So I won't dispute you there. But for our listeners, what are you doing at the new company?

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): Essentially, say around five years ago, when I sold my company, worked with an academy for a couple of years and realized that I had decent money in the bank to just stop working. And I'm a lazy person. I don't really like to work hard. Definitely not as hard as Akshay is talking about. I'm tired even listening to him. Speak that first. And I started talking about it, that you actually, if you live in India, you don't really need that much amount of money to, you know, quit your work or perhaps move to a job that you don't hate. A large number of people, at least in my peer group, and I used to teach MBA aspirants. Nearly all of them were running after the simple idea that, OK, I'm earning 100 rupees right now. How do I take it to 110? And how do I take it to 120? Instead of that, can I actually make do with 60, 70, 80? Yes, you can. So I started talking about it and a lot of people started contacting me that, OK, because you have reached a certain position that you don't need to work for money. Please tell us how to do that. Now, I can't go and explain to all of them that I got incredibly lucky. I ran a business, the business worked, the business exited. I never had any dependents. My parents are independent. My wife is financially independent as well. Not everyone is that lucky. And I don't know enough about managing money, definitely not enough about helping you manage money. And even if I do, I need a lot of information from you. OK, how much money you make, how much you spend, what sort of inheritance is coming your way? All of those are very important questions. People don't want to share that information. They just want you to tell me the name of the stock or mutual fund. I should put that one lakh rupee into. And that's when I realized that a large number of people are being misguided either by their bank relationship managers or their real estate broker or their mutual fund distributor into just buying product X versus product Y. There exists semi- registered investment advisors. Those are the real advisors who will charge a fee from you and give you unbiased advice. But there are less than 1000 of them in India. And, you know, as you can understand, and even those 1000 guys, so they will probably cater to people who have a net worth of 5 crore plus and stuff like that. So you go to someone like Julius Bear, they'll not talk to you. They'll literally not talk to you or even offer you a cup of coffee if you are less than 5 crore of investment.

Utsav Somani: And many of them probably wouldn't even beat the markets, right? At that level, if you're looking at the markets charge you an absurd fees. So yeah.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): So what's the solution for that? So the solution for that, I believe, did not, was not really possible three years ago, two years ago. Around six months ago, I started working on a chatbot. Now what the chatbot does is I call it Honda Uncle. It advises people on two things. A, based on what my personal investment philosophy is. And much more than that, I come from, I used to be an art teacher. So I come from the angle of a teacher and dumping down concepts and making boring stuff interesting with throwing quotes in and stuff like that. So finance is intimidating for a lot of people. Maybe not for you, maybe not for me, because we have been in this space. But you pick up a random guy on the street, even if he has money, he's really scared about, okay, what do I do with that money? So that's how I build a chatbot. The idea with the chatbot initially was, okay, it's something, you know, which can actually help people. I had no intention of making a business out of it because again, building a business is a lot of work. So, but it did, you know, really, really well. I have a couple of friends of mine. So Vikas Bansal, who used to head investments at Giraffe, he reached out to me, the bot is doing really, really well. There is potential for a business here. And then we thought that, okay, fine. I understand that there is a business potential here. You understand the finance, but we actually need someone to build the product. So that's when third co-founder Madhukar, who is essentially now the CEO and he's leading the team got on board. And okay, fine, we'll build a product. The idea behind the product will be that it will give unbiased advice. Just the fact that your advice is unbiased and you're not pushing it any product makes it better than 90% of the alternatives. Because everyone else is doing it for some sort of a commission. They have some sort of an interest, some sort of a conflict of interest, which does not exist with AI. So that's what we are building. We have applied for the necessary. It's a highly regulated sector. So we have applied for the necessary licenses.

Utsav Somani: I put my portfolio, very small, basic portfolio. I put it up on ChatGPD itself. It could tell me in Indian context, what I should buy, how I should reallocate all of those things very personalized to me. So how is your chatbot different from say ChatGPD that has more memory and context about my personal investing?

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): So as of now, there are a couple of things that it does. A, now you might understand what a PE ratio is. Now you might understand what sort of a, what's the difference between a direct fund or a regular fund and all of that. ChatGPD will give you, you know, complicated terms. Also it, you know, you ask ChatGPD, okay, should I invest in ICICI stock or an HDFC bank stock? It'll do an analysis and it'll tell you. 99% of the people should not be investing in the stock market directly. They do not have the know-how of when to buy, when to sell. You might be able to do that. ChatGPD at that point of time might be able to tell you that, okay, at this point of time, this looks better or worse. If you try the same thing on Honda Uncle, it'll tell you, boss, do not buy those stocks. It will, so, you know, it essentially put boundaries on the ChatGPD response. It'll guide you towards simple philosophies like, okay, invest in index funds. Because anyways, 80% or for individual investors, I think 90% of them are not even beat the index. 80% of fund managers are not able to beat the index. So to limit those responses, there has been a lot of effort has gotten to that, that, okay, you come to me, you talk to ChatGPD about crypto. It'll talk to you about crypto. You come and talk to Honda Uncle about crypto. It'll tell you, you know what, crypto investments are not for you. You talked about individual stocks. It'll tell you individual stocks are not for you. You go and talk to it about, say, for example, what should you do with gold in your portfolio? ChatGPD will give you a response that, okay, this is what gold is doing. You should have this. Honda Uncle will follow certain asset allocation rules. It'll tell you, okay, depending upon what your profile is, it will do that. So that's the current version. What we are trying to build is that once we get the license, we'll take the account aggregator. And based upon that account aggregator, we'll have your entire financial history. And then not just your financial history. So we will also have your end. So the way you have input your portfolio, you might have missed out on something. And plus, you might say that you are a high risk investor. But what did you actually do in 2020 in the market time? You might talk about asset allocation and increasing your gold portfolio today because gold has done really well in the last one year. Should you be increasing your gold portfolio today? Well, it depends upon what were you doing with gold three years ago? What were you doing with gold five years ago? So all of that context comes in. And, you know, so ChatGPT has a lot of context about you. But I would argue that even you wouldn't know very well that last year, how much money you spent on a monthly basis. Let's say you have your health insurance due in October. And let's say you have your car insurance due in November. Do you actually remember in July what is going to happen in October and November? If I analyze your last three years financial statements, I'll be able to tell you, OK, this is an expense which is coming up. SIPs are another example. We do SIPs because they are simple. They are great. But they are not that efficient if you think about it. For most people, what happens is if you have a 50,000 rupee SIP running, you'll still have 15,000 rupees left in the bank on some months. You'll have 80,000 rupees left in the bank in some months if you got a bonus. So maybe that 50,000 rupees is not an appropriate. It's a simple decision. That's why it works. And it can continue to work until and unless there is someone to tell you, OK, this month, this is what you should be doing. And that's what I believe Handa Uncle will be able to do. Once I have your total A, your data and the market data put together, I'll be able to guide you much better. Or rather, Handa Uncle will be able to guide you in a much better fashion where to put your money.

Dhruv Sharma: What's the most common financial mistake you see people making, Ravi? Thinking that they're very smart.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): So they take individual calls that, OK, I have made those mistakes myself that, OK, fine, I do believe ICICI Bank is really undervalued right now. So I should buy it. No, you don't. You do not know more than the market. You do not see until and unless, you know, someone at the leadership position of ICICI Bank, you have no insider information. Whatever information you have is already priced in. So thinking you are smarter than the market, trying to do that doesn't really work.

Dhruv Sharma: And you having, sorry, Dhruv. Oh, no, I was just going to say, having the first touch point, having bought in the first touch point, do you think it helps people lower their guard and be more generous in sharing their misgivings and whatever they've done up to that point? Absolutely.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): Absolutely, it helps. See, this is what has happened to me. People come to me. So suppose Utsav comes to me and says that, OK, fine, this is roughly, you know, OK, I'm saving two lakh rupees a month on average. Where should I invest that in? Now, if you ask the same question to me, my follow up will be that, OK, where are you spending and OK, how much, you know, are there expenses that you can cut out and stuff? People are not comfortable. In India, money talk is taboo. I have had so many people tell me I personally, I talk very openly about my finances, about how much money I have, what my portfolio looks like and etc. People have come to me, OK, 100 years you should not be doing that. Why shouldn't I be doing that?

Utsav Somani: You'll get a bad eye.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): Yeah, but people don't really share even with their financial advisors, your bank relationship manager, people don't share with their bank relationship managers also. With a bot, obviously the guard goes down. Do you hide information from Google sheets?

Dhruv Sharma: Or your doctor for that matter, right? Like you go and disclose whatever symptoms you have.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): Yeah, so with a doctor you do because there is an implicit trust that exists with a doctor. With a financial advisor, because there are no financial advisors, you have a deep mistrust of the bank relationship manager that, OK, he will stick something to me and go. I had heard that, you know, and it has happened, nearly every family will have some story. They are very aggressive salespeople. So yeah, having a bot helps. People are much more comfortable sharing that information with the bot than with me. I have had people, you know, who have had conversations with the bot and then they come to me, OK, 100, you don't have access to that bot, right? Because I have put my whole life's history on it. So money is very, very personal in nature.

Utsav Somani: Coming to personal money, two part question. You've popularized the FIRE movement in India, right? I mean, you've given maths key 5% withdrawal rate, 4% withdrawal rate. So first explain what the FIRE movement is. And second question which ties into this is, a lot of people form their identity basis their work, right? I mean, if I don't have something to talk about with my friends on what I'm doing or just overall in life in general, how do you get that meaning or that sense of purpose?

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): OK, first one is a very simplistic short answer. FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. The idea is that if you have enough money in the bank, then you essentially don't need to work anymore because your portfolio would generate enough amount of money with which you can live on.

Utsav Somani: And by the way, we had Neil on the show as well from Mint. I know you guys had a debate on what that number looks like. What is that number according to your calculations? How many times your annual expenses?

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): 20 times your annual expenses is more than good enough as per me. And it's not as per me. There is huge amount of research that exists. For example, the popular formula has been the 4% rule, which means 25 times your annual income should be enough. The guy who actually said this rule is a guy called William Behnken based on US data. He himself has started talking about 5% now. There is a lot of Indian research based on dynamic withdrawals. And there are lots of strategies that you can follow. Essentially, a 5% number is what I believe will be comfortable for most people. See, the idea of the 4% number is that in a worst case scenario, you will be able to do with 4%. But we are not going to be in a worst case scenario. So I would rather suggest that, okay, let's start with a 5%. At a 5%, you have an 80% probability of not getting into any issues. And let's say if you get into any sort of issues, maybe you can cut down a little bit on your spending. See, anyone who is going down the fire path probably has done well in their career. And they have a lot of expenses which are discretionary in nature. For example, vacations are a discretionary expense for me. Instead of taking two international vacations a year, if the market does poorly, I'll take one international vacation for that particular year. It's not going to make too much of a difference to my life. So if you're making to make a little bit of these sort of an adjustments, probably 5% works. Now coming to the second part of it, that yes, for me and most people I know, identity is an issue and identity is linked to what you do. Because the first question that you get asked is, okay, fine. First thing is, hi, who are you? What's your name?

Utsav Somani: I mean, the spending part, discretionary spend. Sorry, this topic is fresh in my head. I finished Morgan Housel's book recently over the last Diwali. I mean, this Diwali break, the art of spending money. So a lot of spending for people is because of mimetic desires or his social standing. Like the point that he makes across the book, I'm TLDRing it, where commercities you think gives you, I mean, in your head, it might give you 10X happiness, but in reality, it probably just gives you maybe less than half X in terms of the respect that you think you will get from your peers. So he makes a very interesting point on most people go broke spending, trying to look rich rather than feeling rich.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): I don't really think that happens in India to be really honest, because most people that I come across, or maybe some sort of a sample bias, they're not really spending that much money. I would rather make that argument that, yes, people should be spending more. Now, what they spend on is important. As a matter of fact, when I quit work, the Mercedes question was there, okay, would I want to buy a Mercedes? Yes, I would. But for buying that Mercedes, I'll probably need to work another year or a year and a half to save the amount of money. Now, as much as I would want to own a Mercedes, am I willing to trade one and a half years of my late 30s, early 40s working on something that I don't really enjoy? That's when it became clear that, okay, maybe Mercedes is nice, it gives me a certain status symbol, but I won't really do that. So for people, yes. Say, for example, if you ask me the same question about whether I would work for a week more or a year more if I can always have Lagavulin 16-year-old single malt whiskey, yes, I would, because that makes me feel good about myself. So that, what you spend on, whether it's things, whether it's experiences, Morgan Nelson has talked about that, you know, you should spend on experiences only. Fine, good for him. I believe in the power of stuff. Stuff matters, man. Stuff makes you feel good. You look at the, you know, maybe it's a phone, maybe it's a watch that you have. If it makes you feel good, yes. So there is a lot of power and stuff. I'm forgetting the name on that.

Utsav Somani: I mean, materialistic thing. He makes a case about utility. I mean, he's done this over. I mean, the book, and it gives you perspective to zoom out and think through.

Dhruv Sharma: Do you have thoughts on boredom?

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): I would argue that all of us are very bored. I don't know if you've read that. It's a way, one of my favorite books called The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. So there is a Greek myth of Sisyphus, which talks about, you know, he's cursed by the gods and he is supposed to push up a stone up a hill. As soon as the stone gets up the hill, it rolls down the other side. And his punishment is that you perennially keep doing that. It goes up, falls down, he pushes it up again, it falls down. What Albert Camus argues, and now it seems like a punishment to anyone that, you know, completely futile existence for eternity. What Albert Camus argues is, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because this is the thing which is giving him purpose, which is giving him something to do. And that's what I believe about boredom as well. That, you know, you might feel that having nothing to do and you might get really bored, you might get really depressed and all those things. Fair, that's possible. That might happen with some people. That happens to a lot of people. But people with really hectic life, they get bored as well. They get depressed as well. And, you know, I would rather be bored than have a knife in my back and my boss shouting at me at 2am in the morning, which is the sad reality of work for a lot of Indians. I've learned to deal with boredom probably better than most people.

Utsav Somani: Maybe we can go on for a while. But Dhruv, anything to wrap us up? There was a question from our community as well. Do you want to bring it up? Let's ask that. Let's ask that question. Yes.

Dhruv Sharma: So when people found out that you're coming, Ravi, obviously, lots of questions started coming in. We, Utsav, you'll have to help me who we can attribute this question to. So the first question, Ravi, is a piece of advice for our Gen Z audience who are, you know, early in their careers. How do they balance the joys of life with investments? Yeah. This is the other thing that we see on Twitter is like an entire generation is told that 5,000 rupees SIP is going to be your pass.

Utsav Somani: Live long, pay later, generation. I will follow from Instagram. Her handle is rawdiaries.in. She's the one who asked this.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): Well, I would argue that, you know, A, you shouldn't really be thinking too much about investments and where to invest. If you are young, the biggest thing that you have in your favor is time and your skill set. So focus on making more and more money. Spending, well, it's a double-edged sword, to be honest. I would argue that, yes, this is the age where you can have the most amount of fun with your money. But you also need to be disciplined enough to know that, what you're doing at 25, you're not. Maybe at 25, you're spending 100% or 95% of your income. That's fine. If you're still doing that at 35, that becomes a problem. So if you understand that, okay, right now my income is less and that is why I'm spending 95% and eventually I'm going to become better at it. Perfectly fine. On the other hand, if you don't have that maturity, then 5,000 rupees SIP really, really helps because it builds a discipline. So it's more about habit formation. So if you are someone who believes that, okay, fine, I will be able to change gears at a later stage and a lot of people are able to change gear at a later stage, you should spend. So I was not someone like that. I started saving fairly early from the first salary that I got. I first saved money for a Honda Activa, then a laptop and then within the first year itself, I started saving money in mutual funds for the long term. But now I realize it would have been better because if I had spent that money, because that's 5,000 rupees does not make a difference when you're earning 1 crore and probably 15 years down. So someone who is at 25 right now.

Dhruv Sharma: But you're right, the habit stays and you can keep stepping up that amount. I'm Ravi, I'm reminded of, you know, something very simple and basic. A police officer in one of our neighboring countries had told me like 10 years ago that when you're young, you don't have money, but you have time. When you get a little bit older, you don't have time, but you have some money. So that ends up being the case for a lot of us.

Ravi Handa (Co-founder, Handa Uncle): That's the entire point of the FIRE movement that, you know, you don't keep on working till 60, 65, because when you have the money and, you know, you don't really have that many traveling years or the standing years left for 65. And so maybe, you know, plan things a little bit better, save a little aggressively so that you can, the 45 to 65 period when you can still enjoy a lot, do that. Spend time with your kids. If you enjoy spending time with kids.

Utsav Somani: All right, Ravi, we'll have to wrap this up. This has been super insightful and super fun. Thank you so much.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.

Utsav Somani: Bye-bye. All right, listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in. Whenever you're getting a podcast, you can listen to the audio version of this on Spotify and Apple. We're all there as well. And we'll start separating the news segment out as well in a separate format for you, because a lot of people have given us the feedback that they just want to listen to the first five, six minutes as well and focus on the guest segments for a later viewing as well. They don't tune in live, many of them. So enjoy that and hope you're not looking too rusty after the Diwali break. We'll see you on Monday at four o'clock. Cheers.