Summary

The Offline Network Episode 2: Satellites, Wealth & Culture (aired 2025-09-03). Guests: Awais Ahmed, Sandeep Jethwani, Amarjit Batra from Pixxel, Dezerv, Spotify India. Awais: "The relevance for us and I think for the industry and India in general is that with this recent launch last week of three Firefly satellites, it adds to the three Fireflies we had launched in January of 2025." Awais: "And we say do not open in big words, very bold, because you don't want to be opening the satellites in non-contaminated environments." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, health tech, space tech. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.

Key Quotes

"The relevance for us and I think for the industry and India in general is that with this recent launch last week of three Firefly satellites, it adds to the three Fireflies we had launched in January of 2025." — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"And we say do not open in big words, very bold, because you don't want to be opening the satellites in non-contaminated environments." — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"So obviously there's been ISRO for the last three decades that have been launching rockets, so they're still the only option, but there's a few other options coming up in the near future." — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"But then when SpaceX came into the picture, they changed the game because they could now reuse the rockets, right?" — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"Yeah, so I think space agencies like, you know, I think India is like a top four or top five space country in the world, just because of what ISRO has done, right?" — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"And the reason for that is you can't hire Indian citizens in the US because of something called ITAR." — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"You get to go to exotic places like Svalbard, Rio, maybe the Antarctica at some point, but Svalbard was because we use ground stations to communicate with the satellite and they need to be specific ground stations." — Awais Ahmed (Pixxel)

"Actually, if you go back in time and look at how wealth management in India has evolved, there is evolution happening at two levels." — Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv)

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: All right. Hello, folks. Welcome to the very second stream of D.O.N. We've talked about AI, consumer investing, and network states. Today, before we welcome our awesome guests, I want to just cover a few news items just so that you're up to date on what's happening in the world of startups. So SEBI approved 13 IPOs worth 16,000 crores. Two names really stood out for the startup world, Boat and Urban Company.

Dhruv Sharma: What's up? Do you remember there used to be a time where venture investors in India used to be asked, where are the exits? And look, look how far we've come.

Utsav Somani: Some big winners there as well, right? Axel, Elevation, Bessemer, Tiger Global.

Dhruv Sharma: Oh, yes. And also, I mean, it's a sign of coming of age for retail investors also where they've moved past just value stocks to now growth stocks. And of course, it comes with expectations. They expect all of the companies from our ecosystem to have the same KPIs, the same metrics as their public market peers. And some companies have shown that they have incredible what's called operating leverage. When your business gets to a point where you know that one rupee into the business is going to come out as two rupees, investors take note and they're happy to invest.

Utsav Somani: Absolutely. And many of them have performed well as well, like Eternal, Zomato, of course, a consumer favorite. I mean, some would say at expensive valuation, some would say discount to the future. But I think one interesting trend that's really stood out is reverse flipping. Many of these companies went to YC or other global accelerators. And they paid a huge tax bill just to come to India just because of premium multiples that they get on the Indian exchanges. They couldn't miss out on that. So Razorpay, Zepto, many of them have paid a huge tax bill. They're in the queue. They'll be going public soon.

Dhruv Sharma: And I'm sure that I'm sure the current set of companies have learned from that experience, because this is also like a full circle moment. Razorpay and others who've had to, you know, for that hefty bill, mostly in ESOPs, you know, was early stage capital available to them when they started right at home in India? Maybe not. And so they looked towards YC. And when it came to, you know, listing, then this just ended up being a more favorable market. And it's their home market. And retail investors are ready.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. And talking about retail, UPI has been this awesome public tech good that India's unleashed into the market. RBI was hard on credit cards. So there is this new beast that's come up, UPI AutoPay, a company just raised 28 million. And in this space, they're building this new education platform for Indians to learn anything under the sun. So what's this company? Seekhope. They've raised 20 million. Right.

Utsav Somani: And they're basically teaching a wide variety of Indians, a wide variety of topics. So it's honestly just penetrating. It's the next edtech wave where people are not really learning hard technical skills, but they're learning everyday skills on Seekhope. But the key thing is the UPI AutoPay has enabled many such companies to do that. You will do, of course, your regular insurance payments, your credit card payments as well, and many other payments. But UPI AutoPay is accounting for 53% of all recurring transactions on the UPI network.

Dhruv Sharma: So it's just when we set up standing instructions, and then there's just a bank to bank transfer, there's no third party card network that gets involved. And I can totally see why RBI is in the favor of these transactions taking place on the UPI rails and not on a global card network. What volumes are we looking at right now? Do we have? 20 billion monthly transactions, 20 billion.

Utsav Somani: Not payment volumes, like number of transactions, 20 billion. 20 billion. And also, I mean, it's not absurd to hear of GST and UPI numbers making records every month. So these numbers are not fascinating, but of course, they're huge. I think nobody else in this world has been able to create such a hugely successful and widely used payment network. And you can see, the funny thing is that number of coins being minted in India are going down. I don't know directly correlated to UPI or not, but yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: I can't recall the last time I even transacted one to you.

Utsav Somani: I mean, I've never seen you pull out coins. Probably not. Living in the digital world. So Elon Musk, can't talk about tech without him. Tesla India launched recently. They got 600 bookings only. Yeah. Were you one of those 600? No. And surprisingly, when they first launched pre-orders in India, they had this thousand dollar thing where you can put a pre-order on their website and almost everyone in the ecosystem was putting up their screenshots. Hey, I booked a Tesla, thousand dollar paid, all of that stuff. I don't know if it was status signaling. But what do you think is the key reason for something like this to happen? Like 600, too little, too late? What are the cars priced at?

Dhruv Sharma: They're priced over 60 lakhs, mostly because of the import taxes. Maybe that's the answer. And what are the alternatives for those who want an electric vehicle, but maybe not a Tesla?

Utsav Somani: IBM, MG, India is a very value conscious market. So you've got Mahindra launching these awesome feature rich cars. You've got BYD from China. So all of these Indian overseas manufacturers have really stepped up the game. Like I think Tesla has been slightly too late and overpriced. They've also launched Model Y, which is not one of the most affordable models as well. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: And how many showrooms do they have right now? Just that one in Bombay or no, there's been a Delhi launch also?

Utsav Somani: No, they've opened one in Delhi as well. So if you're planning to get one, I think that's the place to be.

Dhruv Sharma: I don't know. Maybe our listeners will find this one story interesting where the BYD founder, his starting point was importing 50 EVs and stripping them down and reverse engineering and building his way up from there. And look at the journey that companies made.

Utsav Somani: And interesting. But before we get into all of the other things that we talk about, the space stuff and this thing, what do you make of different industries? Like I think consumer brands like Blue2Kai Coffee have raised capital as well to go international. Have you tried the coffee or what do you make of this whole coffee wave that's happening in the country where third wave coffee, first coffee, up coffee, like, I mean, there's like too many of these. And this isn't even a plug, but that's actually what's in here. It's Blue2Kai. So love the beans. Yeah. I'm consuming it almost daily. Yeah. They've raised 25 million recently. And I think part of that expansion plan, they mentioned that they'll be shifting focus internationally to UAE and Japan.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting is Blue2Kai also has a, it has a thriving peer set. And the great thing about coffee companies in India is each one's found their own niche. And so someone's doing flavors and someone's got this great experience and someone's created a great brand.

Utsav Somani: When you were over that day, I made you this nice coffee. So I've gotten to study this thing much more closely. It's become one of my weekend hobbies as well. And third wave and Blue2Kai exposed people to this third wave coffee movement, right? Where it's more micro form or refined and more proper cafes like Blue2Kai. Starbucks was probably the second wave. First was Barista, Cafe Coffee Day. And then the fourth wave is happening now where people are saying that it's not common for us to have like these 350 rupees iced lattes every single day. So these first coffee and our coffees of India are capturing that market, which is serving them at sub hundred rupees segments as well.

Dhruv Sharma: I was just saying, you remember Arjun was telling us something when he was over just the day before about how consumers are just paying more attention to what they're consuming might be leading to more category creation. And so you'll remember a point in time when we had a first cup of coffee, like who knew what's in that thing, right? It came out of a machine. I think people even purposely misspelled what it was called.

Utsav Somani: I think it was spoilt for choice. Indian consumers are spoilt for choice. But I think speaking of hard technical problems to solve separately, we're welcoming our first guest, Awais Ahmed, the spaceman. Awais, what's happening? Congratulations on the recent milestones. I saw some awesome pictures. You're lying on the floor in the space factory. Tell us a little bit more, break it down. Like, I mean, what's the significance of putting these hyperspectral imaging satellites in space? Like what does it mean for you, for the Pixel team and just the Indian space story in general?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): Yeah, no, I think exciting, exciting few days. You know, we had a literal launch party where there was a rocket launch that took our satellites up to space. The relevance for us and I think for the industry and India in general is that with this recent launch last week of three Firefly satellites, it adds to the three Fireflies we had launched in January of 2025. And so with a total of six satellites, we can provide a global revisit on a daily basis, right? So anywhere on the globe, we can go and image an image. Basically, if I'm imaging Mumbai or Bangalore today, being able to come back and image it again in 24 hours. But very importantly, it's what we have on those satellites that makes it important. It's a thing called a hyperspectral camera, which is kind of like an x-ray machine for the planet or like an MRI machine for the planet. So just like a normal phone camera won't tell the doctor if there is internal bleeding or if something's gone wrong health wise. Similarly, we need to be seeing invisible things like gas leaks or oil leaks, pest infestations in crops, pollution levels, contaminations. And that's what our satellites and cameras can help with. And now it's not hypothetical anymore with the satellites up there and the launch happening. We're starting to deliver that to customers across the globe. So this is the first pixel constellation, one you have up there now? It is. It is Pixel's first constellation with a total of six satellites that was going to be the phase one. It's also India's first ever private satellite constellation. And it's also the world's first hyperspectral satellite constellation. And have you started getting a feed from them already? We have. Yeah. So I think when we launched in Jan, it took about a couple of months for us to get the data. This time we were able to turn that around in two days, 48 hours. So images are starting to beam down. The satellites are healthy and deliveries from these three satellites will start soon to our customers as well.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of regulations, do you run into regulations? I'm guessing your client base is mostly global, right? Do you run into regulations in different countries, different times?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): We do. So I don't think we run into any problems as such. Thankfully, it's been a regulated space since the last three decades globally. In India, it's a little bit more recent. The regulations only came in, the policy only came in last year. But what we need regulatory approvals for are if we can launch the satellite. So if we don't have the approvals, we can't even put them on a rocket and the rocket won't launch it for us, you know, whether that's SpaceX or ISRO or anyone else. And we need regulatory approval for disseminating or selling data. But once the satellites are up in orbit, it's kind of like free market, you can, as long as you're not selling to any of the sanctioned countries and sanctioned companies on your government's list, you're free to sell to North America, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, anywhere you want. But it's the regulatory part for launching the satellite, not really for the data. Interesting.

Dhruv Sharma: I remember you once telling me that the satellites are made here in India, at your facility here in India, but they're launched from elsewhere. Do you want to tell our listeners how you actually ship the satellite in parts and make it launch ready?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): I mean, we use those trucks that you see on the highways here to get them from our facility to the airport, and then it's basically cargo on a flight. So we have launched with ISRO, that's an easier transport. Do your boxes also say fragile? They do. They're super fragile. And we say do not open in big words, very bold, because you don't want to be opening the satellites in non-contaminated environments. So we just put them on a cargo airplane and then they are transported like any other cargo, just that we put a lot of padding and a lot of bubble wrap to make sure nothing...

Utsav Somani: Is there insurance for this as well? Because I remember Meta's satellites on one of the early SpaceX launches, I think got, I mean, that thing blew up, right? So Meta had a lot of satellites as payload. That's right.

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): Yeah. So we have insurance for different parts. We have insurance for when the assembly and integration is going on. So let's say an earthquake happens and then the satellite that is being integrated falls down, we get paid back for what the cost is. There's also transport insurance. So as soon as the satellite leaves our facility and until it reaches the facility where it's integrated with the rocket, if something goes wrong or it breaks during transport, there's insurance. There's insurance for the rocket itself in case the rocket blows up, which is what happened when Meta's satellite was on that SpaceX rocket. You usually get back the money for the satellite as well. And finally, there's also insurance you can get for in-space operations in case the satellite stops working for whatever reason, you get paid back the amount you've insured for, just that the rates differ quite drastically. You know, AIT to in-orbit, it keeps on increasing in terms of the percentage you have to pay, but the insurance is like any other market.

Utsav Somani: And what's happening in the India Space Mission? When do you think we'll be able to launch these payloads in India?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): So obviously there's been ISRO for the last three decades that have been launching rockets, so they're still the only option, but there's a few other options coming up in the near future. So what ISRO has done is they have transferred the technology to private consortiums for both PSLV, which is the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, the big one, which is the most memorable one for Indians. And then there's the SSLV, which is a Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, which has also recently transferred over to a private consortium. But then there are also a couple of private organizations like SkyRoute Aerospace. They did a suborbital launch up to 80 kilometers a couple of years ago, and then you had Agnikul Space as well, based in Chennai. They did a suborbital launch to 8 kilometers or 10 kilometers last year as well. So I think in the next two to three years, we will see at least three to four of these options becoming an option for companies like us as well to launch from within India. But as of now, I think SpaceX really takes the cake in terms of how often they launch, which is the biggest factor for us. And also in terms of the price, because they can just reuse their boosters.

Utsav Somani: Would India be cheaper? I'm guessing significantly cheaper. But in your experience, where do you think the price advantage lies?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): Yeah, I think that that's one of the counterintuitive things. ISRO was the cheapest for a long, long while, until five years ago or four years ago, where it would probably cost half to one third or one fourth of what you would pay for like a European or...

Dhruv Sharma: Where does the room for cost optimization come from of theirs?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): So I think mainly the fact that I think labor's cheap in India, that led to the cost being lower. But then when SpaceX came into the picture, they changed the game because they could now reuse the rockets, right? So they're not building a new rocket and no one else in the world can do that. So they slashed the prices from what was generally the market price by one fourth, further one fourth. So it went down all the way to like $5,000 per kg. It used to be about $20,000 per kg to $25,000. So SpaceX is actually the cheapest in the world today. Now we are not yet at the place where we know what the future launch options in India will cost. But the hope is that they'll at least be able to match SpaceX, if not bring that down further. But I think SpaceX is just like much further ahead in terms of tech and reuse. And that will be the challenge for Indian launch companies as well.

Dhruv Sharma: And tell us Avesh, when you compare space missions across countries that have them, where do public space agencies have an edge? And what are private operators like yourself doing differently across the world? And does is SpaceX like an NF1 organization? Does it have a very unique place?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): Yeah, so I think space agencies like, you know, I think India is like a top four or top five space country in the world, just because of what ISRO has done, right? Private companies only come up in the last four years. NASA is the leading space agency given the budget that they have and the interplanetary missions that they do. And that was something that was unique to India is that ISRO was not only responsible for research and development activities, but also for some commercial activities, right? Being able to commercialize the launch vehicles, commercializing the data that was coming down, which is generally not what space agencies do or should do. So what has happened now is in the last four years, five years, private companies such as us are taking the commercial aspects away from ISRO so that ISRO can, you know, focus with its limited budget on the pure R&D activities. You know, only countries can at this point in time, apart from SpaceX, launch humans to space. So with our Gaganyaan 3s, with, you know, Shubhanshu Shukla and the three others that are there, with us wanting to build the Gaganyaan space station, which will be India's own space station, and eventually putting Indian men and women on moon and Mars. That's something that now ISRO is focused on, which means that they are not going to be focused on, can we build more launch vehicles and make revenue from that? That's something the launch vehicle companies will do. They're not going to be worried about selling imagery, you know, that's companies like Pixel will sort of take up, right? So I think they need to work together to make sure there's indigenous capabilities for these down-to-earth related technologies, but then ISRO can focus more on the interplanetary ones.

Utsav Somani: Agus, can you tell our listeners, I'm sorry, do you want to go? In terms of talent, like you mentioned some names there, what has been your best source of talent? Like do Indian engineers go overseas to train or learn for this and then come back and help you build companies like Pixel and Skyroot in India?

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): We've had a few, not a lot. I think most of our talent comes from within ISRO, right? ISRO has a wonderful talent that, you know, people have been working on satellites and rockets for quite a few years, but you also hire quite a bit from adjacent industries like electric vehicle space, like the, you know, proper aerospace, airplane space. We also hire from, you know, semiconductor space, right? So these skills are transferable, just that you need to build them to a different level of standard. But we also have had probably five to six folks, if I can recall, that have come in from European space agency or from NASA, but that's still very far and few between. And the reason for that is you can't hire Indian citizens in the US because of something called ITAR. It's only US citizens and permanent residents. So there's not a lot of those folks that would have been in NASA that would have wanted to come back, right? So it's kind of different from the software industry in that sector, but a lot of talent within India itself. Interesting.

Utsav Somani: One final question for Avaiz.

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, Avaiz, do you want to tell us and your listeners why you found yourself once in Svalbard, Norway for work? It was also a location they had in the last movie in the Mission Impossible franchise.

Awais Ahmed (Pixxel): What do space entrepreneurs like you have to go there? I think that's one of the perks of working in a space tech company like ours. You get to go to exotic places like Svalbard, Rio, maybe the Antarctica at some point, but Svalbard was because we use ground stations to communicate with the satellite and they need to be specific ground stations. Our satellites are in what you call a polar orbit. They go through the poles. And since they go through the pole, every orbit, we need a ground station that is near the poles, either the North or the South, so that we can be in touch for a longer duration of time. And there is a Norwegian company that has a set of ground stations at that island called Svalbard. So we got to go there to check out how our antenna will look like and got to see some northern lights in the process as well.

Utsav Somani: Fascinating. That was a life in the day of a spaceman. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And now we return back to Earth where I think still dollars and rupees make the world go round. So welcome, Sandeep. Our turn to ask the questions now.

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): So good to be here. Hey, Dhruv.

Utsav Somani: No, thank you so much. And just to kick things off, we were talking about IPOs earlier. There's a huge amount of liquidity coming into the ecosystem, ESOPs finally getting their share of the market returns that they deserve, all the hard work that's gone by the employees into building these companies as well. So you've taken a view with Deserve that the wealth management industry for these new age HNIs is broken. And why is that? What's broken? What's Deserve doing to fix that?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): What's up? Actually, if you go back in time and look at how wealth management in India has evolved, there is evolution happening at two levels. First is the how folks are evolving when they talk, think about their wealth, right? There was a category of people who had surplus money, let's call them savers. Money was largely sitting in bank accounts, fixed deposits, etc. Then we had this category of traders, people who are looking at identifying mispriced opportunities and futures and options and even in stocks, right? And now India is seeing a third big category emerge, which we call the investors, people who are thoughtfully creating lockdown to be able to compound their wealth over a period of time. The second way to think about it is who are these people and how is that context changing? If you go back, majority of the folks who had wealth were generational industrial families. And I grew up in a time when we were serving primarily those in the early parts of our career. Today, we are seeing what we call first generation wealth creators emerge who are creating wealth, you refer to ESOPs. These are senior folks in companies, CXOs, leadership teams, etc. Just on the ESOP side, there's close to 14 lakh crore of wealth that has been created in India across public and private. And then you look at other areas, right? There are professionals like doctors, lawyers, consultants, who for the very first time have meaningful sums of money to invest. You have SMB owners, who are, you know, in significant wealth. And then there are founders like yourself, who are also creating meaningful wealth. So we are seeing the merger. I think it's all relative itself. So I'll let that pass for now. But the fact is that these guys are digitally savvy. They're expecting a combination of technology and human interactions to happen seamlessly in an integral way. Their expectations of transparency, how they want to be communicated, how they want to be spoken to, their understanding of investments is also significantly more. So I think this convergence of an investor archetype with the new wealth creator archetype, I think is a fascinating point in India's wealth management industry.

Dhruv Sharma: And Sandeep, when you think about serving your customers, how much of the experience like at an overall level, how much of the experience is automated away and is productized? And how much of the experience is still, you know, high touch and led by a human, by someone at your end?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): True, I think, you know, when we serve clients, you have to tailor your experience to the end client. There are folks who expect a much higher degree of human interface. There are folks who actually don't enjoy human interface as much as a great digital experience. The way we think about it is that our platforms, both on the human side, as well as on the technology side should be strong enough, sharp enough, able to let the client decide to force fit a mechanism of engagement on the client. I don't think we'll be there, but I think, yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: Operationally set yourself up in a way that you can serve different segments, depending on what their preference is.

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): Absolutely. And you know, over time, even engagement modes of the same client are also evolving. Yeah. When we, let's say think of folks who are slightly older, you would have thought that they would want to do more human interaction after they experienced the technology aspect of things. They're saying, look, I don't need it as much today, courtesy of AI, the communication that we can do with clients in a way that is custom bespoke, and yet timely, I think is fantastic. And once they experienced that, they don't want to go back. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: And the wealth management industry, you mentioned very interesting terms, AI and the tech and part of like all of this process powered by data that you've collected with your clients as well. So is trust the biggest mode or do you think tech and data is a big advantage now or the only advantage?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): The bedrock of any financial services business itself is trust. And everything that we do, whether it is the human interaction, whether it is the technology interface, whether how you run portfolios, how you communicate it, how you charge fees, all of that adds to trust. And, you know, we've often like when we get asked this question a lot, like, how do you hack trust? And frankly, the answer is you cannot. You have to think about each of those individual points of where the client experiences you sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and sometimes on a delayed basis, you have to continue building it. For example, how you run the portfolio, are you able to on a timely basis, readjust the portfolio, and very quickly communicate to the client that this is the readjustment I've made for these reasons, that in itself is a trust builder, I able to create fee structures, for example, which are aligned to the client, that again, is a big part, how I'm looking at security of data at my end, is important, what content and communication am I making to them? Is it educative? Are they smarter for it? Those are all elements that add up to the to the trust element.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of a median line for deserve, what's the typical persona? And what's their average portfolio size? If your median portfolio size on deserve if you're comfortable sharing that?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): Well, absolutely. I think on an average clients have anywhere between two and a half to five crores with us. I think the investor persona, I think is a very interesting one. And you have folks at both edges, but I'll describe the persona in three buckets. One is let me call them digital aliens, folks like my dad, who prefer an RM to come home and use that word soon, walk them through the MIS, etc. So that is one and we have a large part of those. And on the other extreme, we have digitally native folks who are saying that look, I do not want to talk to an RM. Can you can the technology interface do everything for me? And in the middle, which is the bulk of our client base is what I call the digital savvy. They're adapted using technology. And yet, every once in a while, they want a human interface. The interesting thing in our industry is that, you know, actually, in India, retail audiences have had better technology experiences than India's wealth creators or people who are in wealth. And I think that's the big opportunity. Can we reshape the experience that they get?

Utsav Somani: So democratizing access to these tools and learnings, and I think a lot of the content which is out there, like I think in terms of social media, and in terms of these fin influencers, educating the people and sometimes misinforming people as well. I think that's a worry as well, right? I mean, trust can be taken away in a jiffy.

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): Yeah, absolutely. I think there are two elements there again. So the first is that for most people, the influencers did a fantastic job in level one content, what is an SIP, what's a mutual fund, FD versus mutual fund loan, versus redeeming the portfolio and those kinds of things. I think now what is becoming important is level two, level three content where people want to go deeper in their portfolio, and be able to give that nuanced view of what is right, for example, on ESOPs, right? At the very high level, some people understand what ESOPs are, but it's a very complex topic. Every company's ESOP structure is different. Can I educate someone on that? And in that context, we have a book coming out now because we couldn't put it in a blog. So we had to wrap it together in a book with case studies and so on. So I think we even on the content side, we need to go much deeper and create unique pieces that actually relate to people's problems in the category.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of asset classes, like I think we've always loved gold, we've always loved real estate. Are those discussions still valid? Like are people diversifying or open to trying out new things now across your client base?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): Absolutely. I think there is a lot of interest in doing innovative and exotic stuff. But when we go back to clients, and we look at their portfolios, we realize that even in the core equities bucket, they are significantly under invested. And this sounds surprising coming on the back of a multi-year bull run.

Utsav Somani: I thought everyone is expecting 12-15% annually, but they're not exposed enough.

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): The issue is that you can get 12-15% on 10% of your portfolio, life won't change. And the fact is, is equities a meaningful part of a relatively young person's portfolio who has 25-30 years ahead of them? Is there enough time that they're giving to equities to compound? I think not yet. So even on the equity side, I think there's a long way to go. The second thing when it comes to equity is most people think that it's the more interesting stuff, the latest stock tip, or the most interesting idea that they'll hear at a party, which has allocation. I think, frankly, the boring, the compounding stuff is what actually makes money. So our job as good Samaritans and as good wealth managers is to ensure that the allocation happens in the right way.

Dhruv Sharma: And Sandeep, what do you do when clients come to you and they don't have clarity in their own goals?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): And that's our job, Dhruv, is to actually sit with them and help them understand their goals. In most cases, when they have that conversation with us, it's the first time they're seeing their goals together on a single dashboard. We are trying to help them put it together as a part of what we call comprehensive wealth management to say that, when do you need this kind of money? What are the horizons? What's the quantum of capital? And actually help them with thinking through the amount of money that they'll need at different points of time. That's number one. The second, I think, which is the important part, but it's understated, given that we've seen a secular bull run almost in the last few years, is that explaining to folks what volatility really feels like, what happens when markets go down. So when I, when we create portfolios for clients, one is led by goals, but also that in case markets fall, in case a 2008 event happens and portfolio falls 60%, a 5 crore portfolio becomes 2 crore rupees. How would you feel at that point of time? And then using that input to shape what kind of asset allocation you should have, how much equity, fixed income, what is the timing of deployment within equities? How much risk will I take? All of that is built as a function of that.

Dhruv Sharma: And maybe just one final question, Sandeep, before we let you go, you obviously built a very solid foundation for your company and congratulations on that. Personally, for you, what are some long-term priorities you're spending time on?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): You know, when I think about the blue sky, when I started my career, the entire mutual fund industry was sub $10 billion. I'm so old that that industry is now nearly a trillion dollars in the last 20 years. India's combined financial savings right now is $12 trillion. In the next 20 to 25 years, we will add another 80 to 90 trillion dollars to take it to a hundred trillion. There is no way that you will not need a lot of high quality wealth managers to help these folks who are creating this quantum of wealth. So I think the sky is the limit.

Dhruv Sharma: Do we have a stat, by the way, on how many RMs or wealth managers we have per capita, like in the segment that really needs the service?

Sandeep Jethwani (Dezerv): So there are 1 crore crorepathis in India. I'm rounding it off for effect. But to our mind, there are anywhere between 9 to 10,000 relationship managers to serve that 1 crore base of prospective clients. I think this is not only category creation happening at the client level. There's a category creation that needs to be done on the service delivery side. Also, you need to create a carder of wealth managers who think long-term, who are aligned to the interests of the client, who are smart, sharp, educated, and digitally native themselves. So I think there is a lot of work ahead of us.

Utsav Somani: Awesome, Sandeep. Thank you so much for educating us and our listeners today and hope to stay in touch and catch up soon. Thank you so much for coming on the show. See you soon. Thank you. Awesome. So that was Sandeep of Deserve. So if capital allocation is culture for money, let's switch gears up and bring the person exporting culture from India via music. Amarjeet, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here with you and Dhruv.

Dhruv Sharma: Hi, Amarjeet. It's always such a pleasure to see you.

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): Always. Anytime. And I think love being there and it's a great format.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. We have a lot of questions for you. Dhruv, do you want to get started? Yes. What are you listening to these days, Amarjeet?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): There are different things. Latest, I was listening to jazz because I went to a pretty interesting jazz show recently. But mostly I'm listening to IPOP, Punjabi 101. And I'm working on some of the interesting African markets. So I'm also listening to some Swahili music right now.

Utsav Somani: Wow. And in terms of your role, so you're covering a whole bunch of different geographies. How does that play into your decision making process? Because every region is different, right? India is probably the fastest growing market, but one in terms of which is still playing catch up in terms of revenue compared to the more developed markets and say more developing markets like Africa coming up with their own musical taste and culture. How do you balance all of these decision making parameters in a daily role?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): Yeah. No, thanks. I think this is my region is South Asia, Middle East, Africa. But I play two roles there. One is I continue to remain as MD for India. So that's a market I go really deep. I've been building it for the last seven years. And in Middle East region, as well as Africa region, I have a very strong leadership there. So they are the ones who are leading. I'm just working very closely with them. And I'm a great soundboard to them. I think I'm also like a coach. So in a way, I get a chance to, you know, play different roles. But to your question specifically, I think it's all about learning. I think these are all emerging markets. And there's a lot of similarities in these markets, a very strong heritage markets, if you look at the history of this region, and they have a extremely strong local culture. So there is so much interesting learnings that we are seeing that it passes from one region to another. And we do that a lot also. In fact, we just last week, we did a session called Spotify learning across markets, which I've launched in my region, where I'm now getting all my teams together in specific areas like cultural area or category, you know, marketing and so on. And we discuss what we do in each markets. And that allows us not only me, but I think people in my different teams to learn from each other and what we are doing. Because I don't, we don't want to reinvent wheel again and again, you kind of just go back and learn from each other, copy, innovate, and so on. I think that's what we're trying to do here.

Dhruv Sharma: And speaking of learning Amarjeet, how long did it take to get the pricing equation right for India?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): I think it's still on the journey. I think when we started in India, I think we were seeing that there was no propensity to pay for music. The market was broken. I think if you take it to a situation many years back, even when you used to buy, people used to do digital marketing, people used to sell these CPCs and for really, really interesting and CPMs came in, you know, differently much later. So India, you know, in the initial stages, we've seen that everything becomes, you know, raised to the bottom. And I think that was what we were going to. And I think the last six, seven years, the big thing that we have been working on and changing is that we're trying to make people aware that if you're listening to music, then the better way to listen to music is to go for a premium subscription. And I think that transition is currently underway. I'm very, very happy because we are seeing a faster growth in our subs number, which is a subscription numbers than our overall MAU growth.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Do you want to share some numbers, anything that's public?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): Public numbers? I think we talked about Comsco numbers for our MAU base. We are just six and a half years into the market. The Comsco number says 100 million plus. So it's not for India alone. So it's a good, we don't, we are a listed company. I don't talk specifically about deeper metrics as such, but all I can say is that if I look at the market, we are the one company which is literally trying to lead the way on how Indians pay for music. And I think that is a challenging one.

Utsav Somani: And you mentioned India. I mean, there are 22 different languages in India or maybe even more. So how do you, do you build one single product for all of this? How do you cater to these different, culturally different parts of India?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): So India is one market with many, many India's inside that. But if you look at Spotify, we are in 184 countries. So there are many markets with Spotify anyway focuses on. So the product is built in such a way that it can go across languages. So India, what we did was we, there are two parts to this. One is to have the right content of the platform. And that I think we ensured much earlier that we should have every, all types of Indian content. And that's today we can say proudly that we are pretty good there. The second is how people view or use your UX in your language. There we have seen that in terms of the population of the market versus, you know, I gave you a broad number, a lot of people still use English UI. Though we have about 12 languages where you can actually, you know, use your, change your UI to your local language, but we've seen that most people are still on the English UI. The third is recommendation. I think that's a tricky one, because when you listen to different songs, different places, how does the recommendations work for you? There, I think we have done a pretty good job. I think Spotify is known for its personalized recommendations. So people in most cases are able to get different music. So suppose you listen to Hindi and Tamil or English and Tamil or Hindi and Punjabi or something like that. So you will get recommendations based on your music. And there are very interesting, you know, features on recommendations. Like we have something called Daylist, where you can see a playlist six times a day, six times a day produced for you specifically out there. And I think that what you should be listening to or what you are probably listening to. So there's a pretty interesting recommendation engine which works behind that. So these, with this, I think overall, so far, I think that's going very well. But as we go deeper into this market, I think we'll probably learn more.

Utsav Somani: And short form video content has really taken off, right, in the last few years, especially since the pandemic. Do you think that's eating away time from music consumption, or that's maybe increasing discoverability of music in a certain way?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure about how India is shaping up on the short form. If you look at the two types of short form content, one is the YouTube shorts and the reels and so on. And second is this short term dramas and things which are coming, which is like, are you referring to the second one?

Utsav Somani: No, I'm referring to the first one.

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): First one. Okay. I think there is a discovery part to the short form. So the first one is happening a lot, which is I think is a good place because a lot of people are discovering new music also through that. In fact, the only difference is that if you look at the music, you know, music content, the way people consume, there is something called new music. And then there is something called frontline music. And there's something called catalog music. And the new music is literally the latest music six months and so on frontline is the last couple of years. And then the catalog is what is the main one. So generally, people listen to a lot of catalog. But the ones which we see in action, you know, in everything, because new music is being promoted, new films are being made, is all the new music and a lot of frontline music. So short form content we've seen actually works very well for discovering catalog music. Yeah, you know, because people kind of pick up an old song, sometime they create a reel on that or a story around that. And I think suddenly, it goes viral and that kind of thing. So I think in a way, I believe that for catalog content, YouTube short form music is amazingly good. But for new, there are so many other ways it's getting discovered Spotify itself has a pretty interesting playlist where we have a flagship playlist. For example, if you want to listen to the top Punjabi song, there is a new Punjabi music Friday, which is going every week. It changes at such a fast pace, you'll be surprised to see how songs change there. And then there's a Punjabi 101, which is a top flagship playlist. So that is also the Spotify's, you know, IP. So that people listen to for all the top music in Punjabi, and then there is Hot Hits Punjabi. So Spotify offers all the types of music, where if anybody's particularly interested in the music.

Dhruv Sharma: Marjit, given what you do, are there a lot of artists who asked to meet with you on a regular basis?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): They do, they do. I think they are the real stars. I think we like the hotel industry. I think hotel industry comes from the front doors, they come from the workers, they come from the back door. I think I personally feel I'm one of the guys who's supposed to serve the industry. So I love meeting stars. I am very lucky that when we do some good events, we did an event on Karan Ojla recently, last week or so, and we released his album. So I got to meet stars. So was actually meeting his top 0.01 fans. We did an event for that. We recently launched an album for Kuli, which is a Rajinikanth film. And there we had Anirudh, who's a singer, who was there and Nagarjun was there. So we are very lucky that at Spotify, in fact, not only me, everybody at Spotify feel that we get to meet some stars, but that's part of the game here.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. And in terms of what's happening in the world of AI, one final question, maybe to wrap things up. World of AI, compared to other artists encouraged by it, are they actively using this in their music building journey or are they completely shunning it away right now and probably will adapt it or adopt it later?

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): I think there's a lot of action happening around that. I won't be the best person to answer that. But what I've seen is that there is a music getting produced with the aid of AI. And I guess that there's a lot of things which happen within producing of music. The jury is not out on what exactly how this will pan out, but it will help people become more creative. And the ease of creating music is going down. And a lot of us, I mean, they can do one thing well, and the other thing may not well. So I think my feeling is that the chances are there are more people who will be coming out there to produce music and that will fuel creativity. But that said, the artist will still remain at the center of the whole thing.

Utsav Somani: Any final fun question for Amarjeet before we let it go? Or an observation, maybe.

Dhruv Sharma: Amarjeet, so I think a lot of us love the Spotify rap that we get at the end of the year. And I think it singularly does more for your self-awareness than anything else. Because you know what you're listening to not just that year, but also over the years. And so thank you for having something like that.

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): That's something which we're really proud of. And I think this people, everybody's looking up to it. And sometimes you're scared of because some songs are not something that I want to share. Yeah, but no, thank you so much. I think this is this is lovely that really nice meeting you guys. We're still building this market and be so happy that you guys are Spotify users and looking forward to more interactions.

Utsav Somani: More power to you, Amarjeet. Thank you so much for dialing in today.

Amarjit Singh Batra (Spotify): Thanks, Roh. Thanks. All right.

Utsav Somani: So we've had a chance to discuss wealth. We've had a chance to discuss music. We've had a chance to discuss satellites. And this is the kind of stuff that we will bring to you when you tune in to T.O.N. every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at four o'clock. See you on Friday at four. Bye-bye.