Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners, it's been 280 days since our first stream and here we are today is our 100th live stream and this episode is going to be a very very special one. We've got five iconic companies, six guests from those five companies and our first guest for today is Sri who's the founder and CEO of Servify, a company that has touched many of our lives. Sri, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you with us.

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: Thank you Dhruv, thank you.

Utsav Somani: Thank you for coming on our show, this is really special for us and glad we're starting this with you. So most customers, of course, like you manage over 700 million devices given that you have tie-ups with all Apple, Samsung and many of the biggest brands in the world but most customers do not hear about Servify. So in your words, what is Servify for our listeners?

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: So we are the engine that keeps running. So those who know V8 when they drive a car, they probably know the engine configuration but they buy the car for Range Rover, right? So we are the V8 engine behind it so it might be an Audi platform, Volkswagen platform but the brand might be something else. So in our case we are the platform behind the brands and I think our job is to run that platform going and customers happy. So we are okay not to be known and that makes our life much easier.

Utsav Somani: But what all does this platform really cover?

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: So our business is managing the entire life cycle of a device and therefore the consumer using the device. So right from, except for discovery, I think we come in every part of the life cycle for a customer. So which means extended warranty, helping them sell their old product to buying a new product, then extending the product life, then repairs and service and support and then of course again the same life cycle back with the same brand or with some other brand. So that's what we do and in that we touch the entire ecosystem. We get the whole ecosystem together, both offline and online which includes, so for example for a sale you need to go to a retail store or an online platform. We are integrated there and from there to the service which is including call center to repairs, to logistics, to parts and then of course when you sell your old product again you have buyback partners, again the logistics payment gateway. So all of that we kind of get on our platform. So we are the platform or the engine that makes this journey seamless and maybe hopefully customers happy.

Dhruv Sharma: So Sri, on devices you work with both Apple and Samsung who in the marketplace compete fiercely and yet your company stands equidistant from both of them. Can you share some lessons from what it takes to navigate that relationship?

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: Sure, I think right from day one our objective is very very clear. We are not in that sense exclusive to a brand but I think this is a service that is required by every brand. This is a platform that it's almost like an ERP for businesses. So we are not really one specific brand centric. The whole idea is there has to be some platform that connects the whole ecosystem, delivers that experience. Of course the rules of engagement are still kind of decided or designed by the brands. We are only a conduit that makes it happen which means again if you see for example logistics, the same Apple uses probably a DHL and Samsung uses DHL. So but at the same time who brings them together on a common platform and therefore delivers that experience is us. Similarly payment gateway, similarly retail. There is no exclusivity per se but I think what makes it different in our case is we kind of own that experience and therefore it's not just the brand, we also equally put our skin in the game to deliver that experience. So which means our success or failure is also dependent on the NPS of the customer. So if we deliver a bad experience then we get penalized. Unlike a retailer who can still sell and say that you know product but in our case if it goes bad or any experience goes bad we are equally responsible and that's our commercial model also and that's the reason also I think brands love to work with us because we are really somebody who kind of gets aligned with them but at the same time we remain neutral. So we're not really you know kind of aligned with one particular brand we are very neutral and there is therefore a lot of trust because we since we are neutral we will not I mean we handle a ton of data right. I mean I can tell you probably if you give the serial number of your product whatever product you use TV, washing machine or a phone or a laptop I can tell you where you bought from when you bought probably how much you paid. We have all of this data but at the same time that data is never used for any commercial purposes. So I think that trust being neutral and of course platform being the core of it I think is where we work with all of them but at the same time we have our own experiences of different brands having different styles of working and that's where I think it makes it all the more interesting.

Utsav Somani: But after sales service I think that's when a customer is mostly I think I mean highest level of frustration at that point of time right when that word comes into your mind and brands want to protect that relationship because that's when I think an experience can break for a customer So how do you tell the brand that hey I'm trusting you trust me with your customer in the moment where I think things can go wrong. So what was your pitch originally when you pitched to Apple, Samsung and many other brands for the aftermarket.

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: So I think what's up the difference is we are not in the physical delivery business which means we don't run any service centers, we don't run any logistics, we don't run parts hubs that's where we said look you still need people in the picture but we bring the process and technology to enable that delivery experience better and that's exactly what we do which means almost in every scenario we take out the dependency on people to make those biased decisions. For example if you are setting up an appointment which is what gives that comfort to a customer think of it like an uber experience right it's not the driver who decides but somebody else based on multiple parameters decides he's the right driver for the right customer right and that's what kind of at least at a very high level we do. So right from you know kind of eliminating that I mean most of the time if you see think of let's say you have an air conditioner now you call the call center and call center speaks whatever they want right instead we kind of control that language. Now with AI of course lot of additional benefits can be offered which you know you don't even know whether it's a machine talking or a real agent talking you don't even realize right. So where you can really control that experience to then deciding which engineer to come at what time rather than somebody making a manual decision to send certain engineer.

Utsav Somani: Do you have a patent for this also remote diagnostics as well?

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: We have a lot of in fact we've got almost 20-29 patents now on the smart digital devices we have a lot of them because we can identify even a fake component within a device to you know remote diagnostics to crack screen detection. I mean think of it now typical customer may may not be a real customer it may be a service center trying to flee the system by saying that sir warranty now how do you really know that it is actually broken you can trust and give them a free replacement device or a screen which again costs for example for an iPhone screen 17-16 screen it's 40,000 rupees right versus a platform making that decision and that's not dependent on people right it's that's where the brand C1 you know it helps bring efficiency but also ultimately it delivers the right experience for the right customer. Now there are also probably half a percent one percent customers who try to game the system but then they don't get the desired service that's how it differentiates good and bad unfortunately in every business where there is risk whether it is an insurance whether it is a lending whether it is after sales service it's that five percent customers who kind of spoil the 95 percent other customers experience right that's where you start with think of it in insurance everything starts with a question doubt sir approve you prove that you met with an accident you prove that you had a surgery right versus in our case we try to not have that approach by saying okay let the platform identify genuineness here and that's where remote diagnostic comes in play that's where and we have made it very very non-intrusive I mean the whole idea is think of it in our insurance business when we sell an extended warranty how do I know that the customer is not buying after there is a breakage or a retailer is selling on a broken device right that's where we have those integrations where we know the date of purchase and the point of sale data so I know that if it is sold on the same day and then somebody is buying an extended coverage on the same day I don't need to do any remote diagnostics I don't even ask the customer for a bill at the same time if the customer is buying let's say within 60 days 90 days one year then customer has to just give a consent and within four seconds it tells the results that whether the product is good bad rather than customer again having to go to a service center or asking someone so we kind of changed that approach which was historically done very very manually and that's where I mean the brands love us because it brings down that cost but at the same time doesn't impact experience and again our belief is we want to start with trust rather than mistrust I mean it's it's those five percent customers who are really gaming the system right so why do you make 95 percent of the other customers suffer by uploading documents pictures giving explanations so we said let's let's commercially solve it also if there is one or two percent fraud but 98 percent customers who are genuine should get the right experience I think that's been the principle which is where platform and tech and all of that made a difference

Dhruv Sharma: Sri the internet as we all know has been a great equalizer for for extending opportunity and you know devices are a big part of it India is obviously a very value sensitive market can you talk to us about how many of these affordability solutions have come into being and what it takes to deliver them like trade advices and refurbishment yeah so you know like

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: like rightly said India is a affordability sensitive market right so almost about 40 percent of the smartphones are sold on affordability and sponsored affordability when I say affordability sponsored but I'm not including the discounts right I mean talking about the no cost TMI card cash backs and all of that again when we run some of these on behalf of the I mean again the brands want to extend this benefit to the customers but they don't have direct access other than their own stores or dot com or the websites right and that's probably less than five percent eight percent of the total sale but 90 percent plus is done through physical retail and that's where our platform again comes in play and we kind of ensure that all of that benefit goes to the customer real like when you do a trade-in if you get a bonus 5000 extra for trading in your old phone and buying a new let's say iphone how do you know that the customer is actually traded in a device because all that you need is an old serial number that's the only requirement in the system language right but the retailer can give you any serial number if they want so in our case that's where we come in picture we physically validate the device there is a platform that we build where diagnostic happens and then you know that it is being sold to another party so the entire transaction trail is also kept only to such customer the 5000 or whatever money goes directly again without again going through the retail ecosystem where there is possibility of a leakage so i think a lot of these things is what we enable similar is the case with loans a lot of the times again loans do happen without actually a device i mean again like i said it is one or two percent of the cases that's where the technology makes it again you know activation data is captured real time linked to a loan and then you know that there is a bank behind it so multiple places we kind of intervene to ensure that all these benefits given to the customers are really genuine and again it is seamless so i think affordability again is a key aspect i mean it's now not just in india in multiple other markets where people identify that you know this one or two percent is where their you know commercials go for a toss and if the customer is not really getting the benefit where does it go so again our platform is now being used as a kind of audit tool so to say which never was the idea our idea was to deliver that experience to the right customer but i think it's now becoming kind of

Utsav Somani: a benchmark and some of these integrations that you mentioned uh including the tech i think must be really hard because you we've highlighted apple and samsung but those is the brand side uh you might have to tie up with like telcos and many other partners which one was harder to crack

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: in that journey oh i think i mean i think all of them probably the problem is you know these are large companies so you can imagine you know in our case our entire sales cycle a typical enterprise sales cycle uh anywhere from 12 to 18 months just to go live with one program i mean i'll give an example uh let's say i'll give you two examples one an oem partnership like a samsung or an apple i mean i'll take samsung as an example i know this is live so i will probably talk about what i can talk now if i have to enable samsung care plus on a samsung ecosystem i have to integrate with samsung.com which is where product is sold i have to integrate with amazon flipkart second integration the customer can also buy from the physical retail so obviously all the retail channels that includes the widget sales and the chromas and the smaller ones to the bigger ones the customer can also buy from samsung's own exclusive stores again therefore integration of the samsung retail platform then the customer can also use the same galaxy app which is there in the device for every support experience so samsung galaxy integration then we have to integrate with service system of samsung gspn or service power or different systems because a customer can ask for service later then you have to integrate with their activation systems the block material system to know that whether the product is actually owned or manufactured by samsung so it's just seven different systems now this is one country systems and probably across countries as well across countries now different countries may have different systems because all this you know royalty settlements their sales data in india they may use an sap in the us they may use a you know some other erp so it's not just one system in many countries used by some of these global brands because they've grown so big each country has adopted their own kind of you know preferred crm or a retail platform or an erp and that's on the oem side obviously then when you talk about the telcos the complexity goes even one notch higher i mean because some of these like at&t i think we did some 17 different system integrations within at&t to go live now think of it right from the sales experience or bd efforts which probably takes 3 6 12 months then you go through a contracting phase which is like 6 months 8 months in some cases 12 months we've had that also and then you have integration which is where again you need to have resources available on the other side so again all that timing so in some cases we win a contract on year one we go live on year three i mean we have one large computer brand which is we've contracted i think in 2025 24 december we've still not gone live this is 26 june right because we're still in the middle of integration we took about a year plus for contracting we've won 17 or 18 countries to go live and the unfortunate or the fortunate part which is where you know we have stickiness all these individual countries are pnl for them individually so the every single country we have to sign a contract and that is where it takes time but the beauty is once you are like the some of the big brands that we have apple samsung etc today we've done this over multiple countries already so once you have that again then you have to expand by channel so you go through offline mode first then online channel then exclusive channels or website so again we have a kind of you know roadmap so i mean i'm not complaining it's a very very hard business to really scale but the beauty is once you are in it's almost like a you know very very sticky business because if they have to replace it or change with someone again they have to go through that entire cycle unless we do such a bad job i don't see a reason why people should change from us.

Dhruv Sharma: Sree there's a question from someone who's listening in on youtube alexandra and she asks what percentage of customers who purchase an extended warranty actually end up using it this is a question i've also always had excellent no it's i mean any

Utsav Somani: typically i've always had this question before like i mean when you're checking out and buying an iphone it says apple care plus do you want this thing and then you make that trade-off that if i use it with the cover then i won't have to like buy it yeah so that's a very valid question

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: no i think it's it's you know like any insurance product or any risk product it's only a small percentage but i think the fee you pay for the convenience is far more valuable than the sorry is far lesser compared to the value you get if there has to be an incident so it's almost like your car insurance right you don't want an accident to happen but if there is an accident then there's a cover so very similar it's generally in single digit percentages on an annual basis so maybe six seven eight percent again it varies by country like in india the percentage is slightly higher because large population moves in two wheelers and you know the conditions of the roads at times versus some of the western countries where people drive on a car and even i mean the drop chances of a drop are much lower so again it varies by country and therefore the pricing also obviously because at the end of the day how do you price this offering is based on the frequency of failure and the average cost of service during a failure and again damages and extended coverage again all of the mechanical or you know manufacturing issues are also covered so again it's a combination of that failure percentage or frequency and what is the average cost of serving during a during such an incident is what determines the cost of this offering so basically it's a single digit percentage in most cases at least i would say at least for almost all the electronics category it's slightly higher for some other categories but electronics it's single digit in a year i mean think of it if 100 people buy maybe seven people come with the claim but the beauty is those seven could be you right one of the seven could be you and if you have to pay from your own pocket then it's like 5x 8x the amount you pay for this

Utsav Somani: coverage and congrats for the scale that your business has hit uh it's a beta positive now and in device protection market where is the real money made is it underwriting risk which is the insurance and other things is it software or is it the repair after sales repair market like what

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: how is the revenue shaping up for you yeah so it is the retailers who make the most money because it's a value-added services they sell right so obviously it's an assisted sale so they deserve to make money i mean i'll give you an example if you i mean i'll give you in ir terms and then i'll also probably give a dollar term comparison if you are selling a 1 lakh rupee iphone as a retailer you may end up making 2000 rupees because of the fierce competition cost of financing obsolescence inventory carrying cost all of that right so you end up making a net of one to two thousand rupees because you have also models that keep changing so sometimes you have excess inventory so you have to discount and you have always competition so that's how retailers make money which is very tiny so compared to the investment they make it's about one or two percent right one lakh rupees and they make about two two thousand rupees but when they sell an extended warranty on the same iphone which may retail at let's say nine thousand rupees for customer they end up making nearly four thousand rupees and the beauty is it's a digital product there is no upfront cash so it's a negative working model uh capital business for them because they pay us after the customer is paid so they collect the money upfront and then there is a credit cycle with us so typically it's a very interesting business for a retailer forget us or anybody for that matter this business is a negative working capital business for a retailer and in terms of the net money you make this is far far better money right i mean straight away profits so at but at the same time it all depends on the attach you don't sell external warranty on a hundred percent of the base it's only a certain percentage maybe 20 15 20 25 customers who buy so but at the same time when you look from a retailer's lens financially this is one of the most profitable businesses for them like your accessory business so it's typically the value-added services business is where the retailers make telcos retailers that's where if you see globally telcos like at&t or a verizon or a t-mobile like at&t example i'll give you public information about 180 billion dollars of total revenue and this is handset sales included network service included and out of this about six billion dollars is device protection extended warranty in which they make a net profit of about two and a half billion dollars now top line it might be 180 but the profits they make from a six billion dollar business is two and a half billion and from all others is about seven billion so you can imagine this is like one third of the total profits that's what the retailers love so if you ask me retailers make the most money in the pecking order then is where oems or the service providers make money in this case because we work with only oems because our belief is customer deserves to get original support global coverage oems backing and all of that because at the end of the day you still bought an iphone or a samsung phone you've not bought an at&t's phone or a chroma's phone right so our belief is it has to be still supported by an oem and globally and therefore the oems deserve to make that money and of course they make money from the bill of material difference between the bill of material price and the cost of actual repairs so it goes back to them and of course there is a there is a map there and in our case because it's also a model where we kind of share certain you know royalty money because we get to use the brand name so that's the second revenue so basically after sales service which was earlier a cost center is now a profit center for most brands okay so they make money third is of course everybody else in the ecosystem whether it is from the underwriting profits because we pay apparent premium and they get to enjoy the float or us and in our case the more efficient we become because ours is a fee business we don't charge the full money to the customer or anybody or nor do we consider in our revenue right our revenue is just the fee we make so it's whatever that tiny five percent of the total value or eight percent but for us it's a high margin business therefore but still it's every dollar that we by bringing in more efficiencies controlling risk better or distributing it more so i think all of that therefore you know in the pecking order retailer oem or the service provider and then

Dhruv Sharma: people like us who are administrators and shree as you think about extending the survey offering beyond laptops and mobiles to uh you know consumer appliances home appliances obviously over there you know those a lot of those appliances have to be serviced at home how are you guys thinking about will the service network look markedly different what are your thoughts so again in our case our

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: approach is oem only which means we again integrate with the oems but we control that narrative in terms of when there's a failure the service request generation to the entire experience is what we control so again for examples for samsung or lg or for panasonic or many other brands in india the extended warranty for all the white goods is also powered by certified so which means if the customer has an issue again if they go through the same support channel it could be samsung helpline samsung.com samsung gap app but all that experience in terms of scheduling to transparency to service delivery is kind of controlled by us because ultimately we own that experience on behalf of the customer so again we use the oem network so luckily for us we are an asset light business like i said it's more of a platform business for us rather than a people heavy business unlike many other you know competitors who run their own service network by appointing third parties etc in our case we don't have that second we get to work with a controlled channel oems authorized network is always a controlled channel because there are audits there are systems and practices in place oem does a lot of you know kind of intervention in terms of the delivery quality to parts to all of that right unlike a third party who can use whatever parts they want in our case it's therefore much more controlled and therefore customer gets a better experience but at the same time it's fully done through oem network only we don't we don't really in fact we made an acquisition which actually does service on ground which is again

Utsav Somani: aligned with all the oems so a two-part question what part of your business is global uh in terms of just percentage of revenue and also second it is a heavy regulated business in many countries right device protection and after sales market so do you approach different countries differently or do you just stay away from some countries uh how has your approach been when you scaled up over

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: 40 countries fantastic question so yes about 55 today is global business international business and 45 49 is india obviously because we started from india and india had a head start before and our belief is in fact you know until two years ago we used to say that building from india for the world now we are saying that we will be an india dominant business because the opportunity in india think of it i mean us 350 million people india 1.5 billion 1.4 billion people right now imagine if eight to ten percent of india becomes high net worth individual which is what is expected in the next five years or so that's 150 million people which is almost like the affluent base of us right so our belief is india will evolve to that and business like ours which is a very very low attached business because of i mean people don't even buy health insurance in india right so imagine if that starts changing and things become much simpler like monthly billing etc which is what we've started even in india i think india will continue to be a dominant uh you know share of our business but again at least for now 55 is india and in the next three years at least as for as per our budget india will be about 25 to 30 percent and 70 will be international uh because everything is growing in india too uh in terms of the compliances yes it's a heavily heavily regulated business in most of the markets i would specially call out europe uh compared to all others as the most difficult one probably most bureaucrat bureaucratic approach to this and i think it's probably because you know insurance is a very very evolved business there uh there are a lot of rules we need to get all the licenses uh filings so in terms of wherever we enter the approach is obviously there are three things that we see in our you know launch cohort if i have to see one is how big the opportunity is is it our existing partners asking us to go like an apple or a samsung because then we have already an existing partner like when we sign with some of these brands we sign multiple countries at once like we have not entered latam yet now we are under pressure to launch later because we have two or three large brands like apple samsung etc telling us to go there so obviously the brand and therefore market share because if you are already entering let's say i mean with due respect maybe uh let's say you know one tiny brand which is telling us to launch in japan we will not even start right because it it takes a lot of effort for us to get the license have people set up integrations all of that so obviously we need sizable business opportunity so it's one the partner who is asking us to launch how big the partner is second is the asp in that market again for us if it is below 200 below 250 it doesn't really make sense for us uh the product has to be at least 250 dollars and above so therefore apple samsung and high-end brands make a lot of sense third is the ease of doing business in that country like we've entered or similarity to india structure so we've we do business in turkey we do business in saudi which are extremely complex distribution heavy potentially you know risky markets or i would not call it fraudulent but high miss or malpractices but technology helps you arrest all of that that is where for us it's highly efficient business in fact our saudi business is profitable from the second year turkey is profitable from the second year because the technology brings so much efficiency right of course it's a tiny business yet compared to uh india or us but again the way we approach the with tech first integrations and all of that with less people i think really helps us bring

Utsav Somani: efficiency and i think as a final closing question because we're almost at the end of time for this segment uh today is apple's developer conference wwvc i'm an apple fanboy since a very very long time so how does a man from dharavi uh go to apple park convince them that they have to become a

Sreevathsa Prabhakar - Founder & CEO, Servify: and also get to meet tim cook yeah so i think i would say uh it was just sheer luck in fact the story is when i uh i last worked with nokia and of course nokia was the largest brand electronics brands or mobile phone brand in the world with 70 market share in india 40 globally and i had seen iphone launch and i used to travel a lot uh i had experienced apple store and all of that and when i wanted to start my first business in 2009 i wrote to a lady called tara bunch who's now the i think she just retired as a ceo of airbnb she was the head of care at apple and sustainability and multiple other initiatives i wrote to her random email saying hey you know i want to replicate the replicate that experience in india she responded she said yeah come and present to me and i said well she said yeah come whenever you want i said i'm from india she said okay set up some time i mean i think that's the openness that brand has and i think that's the culture steve job has built and from then uh i would say no no looking back uh of course a lot of people helped in the journey right from people like ashish bali in india who was the head of service back then who was the first person to really push and i we had some of our own requirements saying you know we will intake we need integration with apple systems so we can deliver that experience i don't think anybody would say yes but apple said yes they said okay we want to make sure that you can manage our data safe so i signed some 700 page contract including probably potentially going to jail if i misuse but i think all of that some company had that openness and i think that's the power of brand like apple which is where you know they are still number one when almost everybody now tells that they have stopped innovation right but they are still what they are so i think that was great and then i got to meet tim cook also because we became a preferred partner we delivered experience consistently and i think in this kind of business affordability apple care and multiple others i think we did way better than anybody they could think of so i think that was i think hard work really paid paid off i would say

Utsav Somani: shree thank you so much for coming on our episode 100 thank you sir thanks thank you fantastic yes thank you all right listeners we're moving on to our next guest kanika of square yards kanika welcome to the show in your thank you for coming on our stream number 100 this is special for us so thank you for giving us the time can you explain what square yards does in your business uh in your own words i think we're having some internet issues

Dhruv Sharma: looks like yeah oh as i keep saying this is just proof that we do this live

Utsav Somani: hi kanika sorry i think uh yeah just just a second do you quickly want to run through through what the news was i think we've shortlisted some things that have happened in the last week especially the spacex ipo that's happening this week i think that's pretty exciting 920 million a month compute deal they've signed with google so everyone was writing off elon and xai in the ai space but i think they're really getting 11 billion all right let's bring kanika

Dhruv Sharma: on again kanika can you hear us while we wait for kanika to join us he was saying so either never count never bet against it on he's back yeah 11 billion just from this deal and i think

Utsav Somani: all of this coming at a good time because now i think the multiple on spacex ipo has gone from 100x to 50x so it's looking 2x more attractive now to enter this and apparently the ipo is also oversubscribed they've not mentioned a number but uh 75 billion uh dollar ipo uh they're raising from retail mostly uh is uh oversubscribed so i think that's a solid solid thing and did you read the anthropic letter that just came out where they're saying that ai is already building ai and that all labs are signing a letter or suggesting a letter where they pause air development activity just so that the world can catch up in terms of regulations and just being

Dhruv Sharma: prepared from a security perspective i think the naysayers are going to say they've run out of compute again and every every time that happens they put out a public call to slow things down but once they figured out things are accelerating again yeah i think it's uh pretty i mean it's just

Utsav Somani: insane like what's truly happening like i think some of the companies in the startup world are saying that most of their code is already written by claude and i think it is yeah some people are saying that they've not written code in like over two uh over two years now actually so i think it's pretty becoming pretty exciting and that's why the bots are now outnumbering humans online for first time in history that bot or agentic traffic on the internet has overtaken humans so exciting stuff happening i think overall in this agentic ai space as well and soon they're

Dhruv Sharma: going to be shopping for us as well so yeah looks like kanika's back kanika you know i think what would be best is uh that we just start from the beginning and uh yes just from from the beginning have you talked about square yards very quickly for those listeners who may have missed out what

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: you said and then we'll take it uh so sorry for the confusion earlier so let me start with let me do square yards again yes same here so uh square yards like i was saying is largest prop tech platform in india we facilitate end-to-end home buying journey we help people search home transact home finance home and renovate homes last few years have been fantastic for us we've grown at 50 growth rate we ended last year at 20 80 crores and 175 crores of EBITDA we are one of the only consumer tech startups to operate at a trisection of growth scale and profitability currently in india and building this two-sided marketplace in a sector

Utsav Somani: with both buyers developers i mean this whole industry has worked in a certain way before and how did you decide to build in this space and have you faced resistance yeah the hard part

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: in fact isn't even the technology it's the behavior so um if if you see like both sides uh you know whether it's uh buyers or developers have had decades of habit and mutual suspicion a marketplace only works if each side genuinely gets more than the other way gave them right so to build a buyer side trust we had to build transparency tools like verify listing data analytics 3d walkthroughs so when a buyer walks in they are informed rather than dependent on what just a broker is telling them and to win the developer side trust we brought predictable large-scale demand and a professional sales engine and we became a channel that they could rely on not just another listing site and uh over time this trust compounds um we then invested in services like after sales mortgages revenue renovation which is where the most player dropper

Dhruv Sharma: so that that's what worked for us kanika what uh what did it take to get to convince people they could actually buy or rent a home on the internet in the first place it's the last thing

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: you would you know buy off the internet yes directly said property is such a high ticket emotional and infrequent purchase that people don't like just check out right a home it's it's not like any other uh grocery or uh gadget you're buying so online couldn't mean replacing the human it had to move uh mean like removing the blind spots before a human conversation according to us so our job was to make the digital experience richer than a site visit in some way which we did through 3d walkthroughs digital twin experience real-time pricing and fixing everything in one place like putting all the information together and the most important leg which we solved for a consumer was a democrat democratizing the actual transaction data and bringing transparency into real estate transaction which was not there initially uh when we started

Utsav Somani: and you guys were an nri couple in hong kong and you couldn't buy property online or couldn't find a convenient way to buy a property in india so that's why you decided to start square yards but now you yourself operate in many other markets so how does a consumer and the market behavior uh vary across the different countries that you work in maybe give us a landscape of

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: the different countries that you're operating right now yeah so we operate across india and middle east uh we've got a small presence in australia and canada and cross-border business where this is like 20 right now of our transactions so i've seen a lot of these market uploads and what's uh really different or what standouts in these mature markets like in canada australia uk versus india is that most of these market have clear titles they have mis style data very standardized financing procedures the data is very very transparent and very democratically available whereas in india it it doesn't exist right for fragmented it was very well for decades it was very fragmented informal opaque and which most people saw it as a problem for us it was an entry point because we weren't entering an organized market we were betting on the asymmetry which existed right so rara came they changed the rules land records were went digital there was already a lot of formalization which was happening when we entered and that was uh not just the problem this was just tip of the iceberg the real problem was the sheer scale which kept me up at the night when we started india needs to build 50 million homes over the next two decades and right now it builds under a million over a year so there there is a huge difference in the demand and the supply and this gap is not a crisis this gap is the story of the next generation of indian real estate where we see an opportunity and this is the billion dollar opportunity on which square yards would uh leverage can you go we were just talking with

Dhruv Sharma: the diaspora earlier and they happen to be active home buyers in india can you share lessons from serving them as customers uh you know we have different startups building different uh products and services for nris right now i was talking with one founder and he said you know we're not really selling this product what we're selling is peace of mind so talk to us about what it what it takes to serve diaspora with with any product or service for that matter yeah so recently we

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: started uh home interiors as a segment and uh this was just uh an add-on service on top of uh the transactions which we were doing on the real estate side and nobody talks about uh what happens when you buy a home and everything just falls apart right so we were sitting on thousands of customers who had just bought a home the transaction was done but their stress wasn't so they had to make it livable right and they had no idea where to start uh what with that thought we built interior company which is now a tech-led design and innovation platform you can see your home in 3d before a single nail goes in what you see is what you get and uh no surprises on design no surprises on budget and the market responded faster to that than what we expected interesting

Utsav Somani: but uh talking about some uh big developments in the company on the company front you guys are going public uh and in the process of going public i think you filed for papers or preparing to file papers uh what do you think will change as a company yeah going public is just another milestone

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: in our journey and i think uh a journey of building legacies it does mean more accountability in my view more compliances more transparency but we're up for that challenge we've been doing that for a few years now so hoping everything turns out just fine and wish us luck wishing you all the best i

Utsav Somani: think uh life shifts from a private uh to a public one where i think uh founders have to live quarter on quarter we've had uh i mean founders on the show run ipo startups as well ipo tech companies and such and they say that not much changes but on the outside you're judged every quarter to

Dhruv Sharma: quarter yeah but kanika i don't know now is going to be the time for doing it but there's one problem i think only you guys can solve which is for a lot of founders getting a home loan becomes problematic because they're not drawing regular salary etc again just from the ecosystem remains an unsolved problem i think we'd love to see you guys take a crack at solving it whenever you know

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: whenever the time is right yes so in fact our home loan business is equal or probably doing better than our initial transaction and that's just again goes on to say that when you solve a problem you start solving it from the bottom and then you realize there are more ends to it more poles to it and you go deeper and deeper into that problem and eventually those parts bigger

Utsav Somani: than the initial problem which you had thought i have a personal question i think a lot of people on our youtube chat live stream are asking about what is the average homeowner look like today like in terms of age when do they decide to buy their home have you seen those changes across generations from jenna i mean gen uh my uh sorry gen z's millennials and boomers like how is that uh i mean shift happening the combined uh journey of home ownership journey of home ownership and

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: other things like preferences and other things so india i feel is an urbanization growth story like previously said uh majority of the demand which comes and people who are buying home are first-time homebuyers so that would typically mean somebody who has just started job or done it for four five years uh so 30 to 40 year is an ideal age uh most of these people are uh coming to metros who were living in tier 2 tier 3 cities and they've come to these cities for jobs so uh it is more of uh buildings and uh projects by developer high-rises rather than standalone properties and um the the problem at hand is that there are so many metros and so many urban cities which we already have and if we have to move from a demand of a million a year to eventually 10 million a year we would have to come up with bigger cities newer cities newer hot centers and that's where the government is doing and focusing a lot to come up and you know bring up more cities where this urbanization and this development can in fact speaking of kanika outside

Dhruv Sharma: the tier one where is the greenfield development taking place right now on the map yeah so there

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: is a lot of development in a newer upcoming cities like mdabad uh like the whole gujarat belt and there is a lot happening in karnataka uh hyderabad so these are the newer centers which are developing where we see uh there is a huge rise in uh young people who are buying properties first-time uh homeowners and that's where the volume explosion is happening current

Utsav Somani: and how is real estate changing in the world of ai like you said that ai is of course driving a lot of changes in terms of technology and the experience for buyers but can you highlight some specific changes that you are seeing uh at square yards and people who are transacting with

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: you so ai is a new to us we've been building for this since like a lot of years since we started we in fact did an acquisition of a company called prop yard uh which was a trendsetter and industry leader um seven eight years ago and we acquired that company uh it does 3d visualization it builds digital twins of properties heavy data analytics across the platform what's changed now is the speed with which everything is happening around us in the world and uh recently uh we announced that uh today itself that uh we've built a captive ai app uh which went live first native app which went live on chat gpt we're building a captive agentic ai processing thousands of call records to standardize a product and service opening improving efficiency um which you know humans miss at a scale and on consumer side like i said at first native app chat gpt app went for real estate life with this to make property search conversational instead of transactional so you don't have to go through hundreds of listing to decide what you want you ask like a friend that hey i'm looking for a property in bangalore which fits my budget uh there is my office this is the school my kid goes to can you suggest the ideal fit and that app will give you suggestions um the hype is when ai becomes a marketing word to me and reality is when it changes what your customer actually feel and this is what we're trying to do and outside of uh ai i'm curious

Dhruv Sharma: like what are some cultural expectations indian home buyers have in terms of fast or having a prayer room or like a mandir or something in home that just make this a very unique market to serve also do you find similar expectations in other parts of the world as well

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: uh every country every part of the world and this comes more from my experience interacting and designing homes for people on the interior side is is very unique how we uh approach a design home um in a place like dubai would be very different from how we would approach it in india and that's what you know makes it interesting that's what makes it uh very engaging for us as a company as well as uh uh you know trying to solve real problems trying to understand what a customer wants and give those customized tailor-made solutions to everybody's requirement

Utsav Somani: and where does indian real estate go from here i think a lot of people are debating on x about hype bubble overpriced underpriced some other new pockets coming up so where do you think it goes for the residential real estate market of india from here india is a

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: long-term urbanization story there will always be you know peaks there are all there will always be phases where uh the demand would seem uh like unjustified in terms of pricing but at the bottom of it from the long-term perspective uh indian market has to explode it has to go in that direction because we have so many people who need homes like all these new people when they migrate to city they will need home so what we need is the market to organize itself from a regulation from uh structured financing from digitization of records i feel it's a one-way and the buyers they are changing with it as well they're going to expect search transaction financing interiors property management to feel like one seamless experience it cannot be somebody just uh telling them that this data to buy and exit that journey and that's what we are trying to build with square yards a data and transaction backbone for the entire home ownership journey which is a native and obviously profitable it cannot be a cash burning business uh unlike a lot of startups uh there was a wave uh from the very start our goal was always to bid build a viable profitable business and the goal is simple to own the entire home ownership journey not just the transaction not just the search and every decision every step every market

Utsav Somani: then stacks up and we should end this uh session with some lessons for founders uh what do people usually misunderstand about building a company and oh that you have i i feel build uh like

Kanika Gupta Shori - Founder & COO, Square Yards: being an entrepreneur feel very glamorous from outside uh my advice to people would be that don't do it till you're absolutely passionate about it it is not about valuation it is not about funding rounds and instant gratification it is about building and believing in a legacy which outlives you and uh perseverance is a very overrated and uh you know a very very uh abused word but um i feel it is absolutely critical and the most important values uh system which any

Utsav Somani: founder needs to succeed awesome thank you so much for coming on our show canega this was special for us lovely talking to the very best such a pleasure thank you thank you thank you thank you all right listeners we're moving on to our third guest uh we have our next guest with us now ronnie scruvalla ronnie welcome to ton this is episode 100 for us really really special

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: a lot of people just missing their centuries uh in ipl so i guess it's much more relevant but you

Utsav Somani: century this time so let's let's i mean you've had so many colorful chapters in your life so i want to do a recap and ask you how you answer this question so utv started in 1990 exited to disney by 2012 upgrad in 2015 rsvp in 2017 50 million deep tech fund in 2025 those are five very different chapters so when you sit at dinner table and somebody asks you what do you do how do

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: you answer that question now actually my dinner tables are quite quiet to be honest they're very quiet so not too many of those dinner conversations but on a more serious note i think if i were to describe cable tv and toothbrushes i would call that the sort of opportunistic stage of life you're naive and you're opportunistic i think when i started to build a media company and utv came about and that 10 to 15 years journey i think was more creative uh scaling creative innovation and i think today when i'm looking at brandon asper's foundation i think it's much more what i would call just institution building so i think that's that's the way i would do it i think if i were to describe earlier chapters i would say speed was important you know and today i think for me compounding and impact is much more important and that's the evolution that is sort of taking place and in you know when you're in your 20s you think of things from weeks when you're in your 40s you think of things maybe with two to three months of water but i think when you're institution building you ever think in five years i'd love to say decades but i think in three years and five years but the decades are getting irreverent today

Utsav Somani: and your dinner tables are not that quiet you hosted a deep tech founder dinner at your home recently the pictures look really cool i remember seeing the airborne founder i'm an investor in that company as well uh naman's a great great founder he's got a show before as well but dj anthra so you're keeping yourself busy with these young founders as well talk to us a little bit

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: about that yeah i think left brain right brain you need to keep both active uh so for me i think just identifying with different people and what they're doing especially in the fields of space ai deep tech robotics i think those are the ones where i'm not that deeply involved when i'm looking at education in a different sense so to me this is like keeping up with things but also right through my life i think my sense has always been one step trying to be three steps ahead and innovation is something one did in media i think we're doing that in education we're counterintuitive so meeting with counterintuitive people i think is very

Dhruv Sharma: ronnie typically when people have like their first uh taste of public success they have two options either they can go on the front foot or the back foot so when utv happened for you how do you make a decision on what you were going to do next so i don't know about the front foot or back foot right

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: i mean i think um by the way serendipity plays a big role and i know it's an evolved word and people use it a lot but i think it's it's quite relevant so i think firstly you don't plan some of the situations i think i was if somebody asked me when i was in media would i be doing that for the rest of my life yes highly impactful highly innovative highly creative highly disruptive highly scalable so all of those were very much there but i think at that trajectory and stage where we had a very good partner they popped the question it made complete sense and then we moved on but i think that one year of separation when i kind of moved out of not just utv but but media was a good thought-provoking year right it was a question of me getting into investments and looking at wearing a squashy bc hat on i was also looking at our not-for-profit and seeing what we wanted to do and scale that up and i think quickly in the first three to four months i realized that i'd love to interact with and invest in companies but i need to build something back again on my own because i think um when i started off um and i wanted to be an entrepreneur at the time it wasn't that respected my punchline to my parents which they told me you know if things go wrong we can't help you or bail you out was i really think i want to implement my own vision i don't think i'm going to be able to implement somebody else's vision so when you're a vc you kind of back people and look at them i think ironically many years later uh with bob eiger at disney when i was moving out even though they empowered us to be really a strong entrepreneur here there's the same question i just don't see myself building somebody else's brand disney's an incredible global brand i couldn't connect of how i could build that and it had to be mine so that context was important so that's when i decided that i want to start something and do something all over again and build something and i think both on a not-for-profit business and a for-profit

Utsav Somani: let's talk a little bit about upgrade uh where is that headed you're seeing a little bit of a consolidation happen you've touched on academy you've acquired intern shala as well so what is upgrade covering for everyone into your one two three series there are 170 million working professionals upskilling foundational coaching foundational test prep coaching it covers a lot

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: now yeah firstly i think consolidation for the sake of consolidation never works right just so i don't think we're consolidating i'm not consolidating from from a business or an identity of the sector because i think the first phase of what happened here overall and i won't use the word edtech because i think that sector is not how it is rightly defined but but i think the first five seven years of this entire sector that needed to disrupt how people were going to learn for the rest of their lives specialized generalized etc was more what i would call point learner you know where either you were in test prep or you were in k12 or you were next or you were in skilling or you were in certification whatever else so today to me the consolidation is the whole food chain the whole value chain the whole learner journey so i don't see it as corporate consolidation i see it more learner journey consolidation both on the x-axis and the y-axis the y-axis being the whole journey whether from school to college to when you're 45 and 50 and you need to be skilled and the x- axis being all the aspects of of whether it's from a pricing point of view an ambition point of view a learning point of view a specialization point of view so to me the upgrade axis of x and y-axis is pretty much that because this is not about selling faucets right at the end of the day a learner or a working professional is coming to you because he wants career optionality he wants to so for us we're not here to figure out how to sell a course we're here to say how are you going to really be relevant five years from now ten years from now 15 years from now in 20 years when i look at it with that umbrella then consolidation

Dhruv Sharma: is a very difficult one and ronnie what's happening in education and learning and development is obviously going to happen in other sectors as well so if at a future point in time there are acquirers and acquiree who want to learn from ronnie's experience trying to you know bring this market together what lessons would you share with them you're saying specifically in this sector yes yeah like from this sector but general lessons that can be broadly applicable across

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: other sectors as well the mindset of an acquirer mindset of an acquirer but just so that i can give you a little bit more of a specific just i didn't fully get the context yes you know i was saying so

Dhruv Sharma: upgrade has become a little bit of an m&a machine in a sense and so i'm sure you've been presented with deals you've said yes to you've said deals that you've said no to and so for people who are eventually you know going to be in in a position like the people you said yes to and no to give can we have you give them like a window into your thinking yeah so again i'd just be repetitive on

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: the fact that firstly we're not a machine under any circumstances second i think consolidation for me is exactly the whole lifetime journey and that's what one would look at so if that fits in is fine clinically and technically when you're acquiring it needs to be whether it's value augmented in some form or the other are you enlarging a particular sector are you consolidating a sector or you believe strength in another sector so that will be my second criteria i think the third one is founders right because when they come in normally it's very difficult for everyone to feel that i'm going to be here for more than two years but they've built their businesses so most businesses are at a fragile stage where they've got an outlive founders including many others so i think judging that element because it's not yet institutionalized when you buy market share on something it's very different this is still the very early stage but a lot whether it's the product or technology or whether it's the offering whether it's the customer obsession it's all built a little bit founder there so one has to be a lot more sensitive on

Utsav Somani: that and you've had a profitable year but overall for the education sector with an element of tech involved so edtech naturally becomes the name that is assigned to the sector where do you think this sector is headed is it expanding is it just consolidating right now is it going to be flat like what are your expectations for this industry going forward so you have to just you have to be

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: we all have to understand what the sector means right because firstly education for a lot of people meant school and colleges it meant graduation and then for the rest of your life guaranteed a job and it also meant that this is a not-for-profit sector the schools and colleges so if you look at this environment and then you look at what the challenges are it's very different from banking or airlines or telecom or some of the other sectors where you're breaking up so i think the soul for here if you just look at the energy of the national education policy for example where we are 25 percent of people who should be informed learning are informed learning 75 percent now are we going to try to solve for that it's a massive but with that we now need to solve for are you going to be job ready so that's the big question right where the 200 million good jobs going to come from from where i sit where i've read since we're equally worried about the other underemployment as much as the unemployed and the reason i differentiate between the two is unemployed is you don't get a job sometimes underemployment is actually more frustrating because you've got a job but you spend so much time and money and investing into a career but you're getting paid one-fourth of what you're actually doing but you've just taken that job that's actually sometimes even more miserable so these are some of the questions so i think an upgrade for us we don't we look at this as an entire ecosystem that one is trying to build here then you look at the cabinets much larger which is we're going to train solo programmers we're going to train entrepreneurs we're going to be people who want to increase their productivity ay not with ai not get sort of intimidated by it or scared but look at that more as an opportunity so i think it's not about just being job ready you want to look at people so they can be more and more relevant on the basis of every three to five years if you look at that sector then you won't look at it a little bit today as to there are people in desperate there are people in this there are people in that all that ecosystem is going to consolidate and i repeat again consolidation is not about companies together it's about how this ecosystem very interesting and ronnie of course we we're

Dhruv Sharma: talking in the context of the knowledge economy uh if we switch focus to the industrial economy that we in fact on the show we're covering this new scheme from the government called the bhavya scheme you know new manufacturing parks everyone knows that's the need of the hour so far it's been like the public sectors sectors prerogative right it is and imparting vocational skills giving people dexterity etc do you see an opportunity for the private sector to step

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: up and get people job ready like on the shop floor yes but i mean today what what the reason my apple is really using for example this india is a country where we can do that a lot of electronics so a lot of what would have been for the prerogative of a courier of taiwan is moving to india having said that it needs to it's come with an extremely captive training base i think the earliest stories were you know marcus suzuki right but if it wasn't for suzuki you wouldn't have a monkey if you wouldn't have met that they wouldn't have 50 percent of the market share of what remains still in india so imagine a company 40 years back still relevant because they put training and focus and captive there and they still have 50 percent in a whole massive market like india because they've ever spiked that so is this hope in in buckets and in particular areas yes is our mindset that global thinking in terms of production i think it needs to be dragged in that direction because we haven't had that comparative enough training to set up benchmarks this a little bit of that approach is is very high a little bit of the entitlement approach is even higher i've done my college i've done my this where's my job so i think that off the table uh there are i wouldn't say just green shoes on that but there are places in which we've done that but i don't think yet we can manufacture we can talk about the prowess of what we have of what maybe you know korea and taiwan do on one side

Utsav Somani: obviously china and india is doing a lot like india semiconductor mission 2.0 and many other initiatives but where is india's place in this world of ai and how should talent think about it how should companies position themselves to be global leaders in offerings because there is a narrative going around that the indian it sector of course the stocks have taken a hit because of everything that's happening in the world of ai coding and all these lnm models enabling work to be done by agents and stuff so how is india going to position themselves how does an indian talent

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: get ready for what's coming so i would say that's two parts right one is a government statement and the position of india in the pecking order of are we going to be the top five nations like we are in space in space today we're in the top five nations of the world so if you look at that and there's a lot of ai that goes into that but we don't talk about that in some of the other sectors of deep tech and space we are in the top five reckoning of countries that will give you an indication that we're zeroing on something that will happen so what is from the government point of view the other one is how is the workforce so i mean there is a fair bit of narrative i don't think you always need to equate it firstly with it companies because for multiple reasons they were an arbitrage model very incredibly efficient one but it was an arbitrage model but as you know maybe two weeks back said the it companies spent a lot of time doing buybacks of their own shares rather than investing into the future so i don't think that's the benchmark of what you will look at for ai so my simple answer would be from a working community people need to harness it because it's going to augment things from a government perspective and positioning we have to we'll have to walk the talk a lot more is there a lot of opportunities here yes is there more opportunity that global mobility of talent will expand and a lot of people trained from here may need to go to other places yes because this is not the hub and spoke of it but i think in some sectors like robotics drone space in ai we can actually see the march because we've actually got a head start and i think we have to look at it like that one from a general workforce we'll have to all adopt it because we don't have choice ronnie you've done so many ventures of your own

Dhruv Sharma: i'm assuming you get pitched i'm sure in fact you get pitched many many ventures day in and out uh you know we're talking about ai one of the other things ai is doing is just doing is every morning you wake up and it's solved more problems either it's drug discovery or something and so i'll

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: tell you one thing but it also creates a problem yeah is getting ai uh ai pitches pitches generated by jack gbd and and you know and flawed you can see that now you can see a reply you can see a and i think i pressed the delete button faster than anything else because if that's how you think you're going to be an entrepreneur forget it yeah which actually brings me to my question

Dhruv Sharma: which is you know if problem solving is getting somewhat commoditized with ai maybe problem finding is what we need to spend a little more time on and so you know um with your many many years of experience what can you share with us about picking the right problems to solve

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: but you know you need to be motivated you need to be inspired you have to learn from your own mistakes problem solving is not solved necessarily by some data analytics it definitely is an incredible prompt sheet but i can tell you today whether we want it or not your best learning is going to come from your failures you'll have to fail as a manager it's important that i let people be able to do that and go forward so i think those are not going to come from these lessons that you're going to do that just the data and the prompt sheet of what we would call it this is not to undermine it but there are incredible amount of things that i think are just going to be very much there it has to be part of the dna and the people who mix and match and accept that are going to do much better than the people who think this is a quick fix

Dhruv Sharma: can i ask you a question about failure from the movies business because you know to us is as the audience it seems like every new movie is like a fresh roll of a dice so as tech entrepreneurs what can we you know what can we learn from people in the movies business about bouncing back from you know one or two or a string of failures well i mean my ratio of success to

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: failures and everything that i've done in life is eight failures to success but that's my formula that means i'm a little bit more risk-taking because the failures will have a binary output of minus one x but because i have i'm a risk taker my upsides have got multiple x's so the probability that the two that really work much work much bigger than if i was a little bit more hedgy that would kind of work and i think that's how it works coming back specifically to movies i think there is a sort of over-dramatization because everyone looks at the the weekend box office and forms a jury before that it used to be 10 critics who didn't really have much to view never made a movie in their lives over critiques that would base that so i would say creativity is the core of creating something out of nothing but it's a very powerful storytelling so if i made a movie calls for this it didn't do well with the box office at that day but till today 20 years later i've still got enough people catching hold and say i came back to india because i saw your movies for this and it's still evergreen on ott platform so i think storytelling remains overgreen the platforms have changed it the box office has changed it so it's not as binary the same would apply to companies the problem is that we press the button on saying this is what i need to do and the first two failures most people walk away the first time you run out of funding you walk away the real challenges when you run out of funding four times you're still in business so the binary input is self-created because 90% of the time we don't want to stay the course in the movie business building a slate is part of a successful forming which means like a bc formula if i was if i was doing it in business and did what we did we would have to have nine or twelve movies that three would do very well three or four would recover their money four would be box office flops but have a good lifetime outside of that on television and on ott and many others and i think the real world of entrepreneurship is in that same

Utsav Somani: manner stick it out i'm gonna draw some uh connect the dots thing here because you've now started investing in deep tech and with rsvp you're producing some of the most distinctive movies uh so you're trying to be ahead of your time basically you said three four steps always ahead that's uh ronnie's ruvala for you is it true uh that you are risk-taking even in your movies slightly more uh than say uh even your deep tech bets see when you're deciding when you're deciding

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: on the basis that this is a big risk for this is a gamble when you're going to a casino you know the odds are whatever they are so at the time in which i'm got a self-conviction that this is a story i like to tell and i green light a movie i'm not looking at it as oh it's risk-taking and there's a binary output i'm looking at it that this is the conviction i'm here to make it work and i think that's the best way you can get into a venture you can't get into the venture with always looking for the exit sign because if you are the probability of you moving towards the exit and gravitating towards that is going to be very high so i don't look at it in that context of every decision that i'm taking is a risk the risk is there ingrained in anything else but your self-conviction can

Dhruv Sharma: propel a lot to make a success running i think we've we've got we're getting so many lessons that if you are i'd love to ask you like what's what's your process for crystallizing these lessons do you write them down i know you've written two books do you do you share them with

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: young people uh do you reflect a lot see i think sharing see i think mentorship is overrated passion everyone says the passion yeah i'm passionate i think that's overrated you finally

Dhruv Sharma: started doing less of that by the way you don't hear that word as as often as you used to like

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: three or four years ago yeah yes because i think so to me i'm not someone who's saying i've got it here this is my experience it may not be somebody else's experience each one has to do that so if i was to if i was to answer the question which somebody had i first only part with lessons based on that and second i put a context to that by spending a little bit more time of why i thought at that particular point in time that would be relevant to me but today it may not be because i think this context that look this is what i did and this is how it gets done and this is how i did when i was young and when i was middle-aged whatever else is totally irrelevant totally irrelevant for the next generation for what business business personal ambitions everything so it has to be contextualized but am i documenting it i don't think so i'm not i mean we're having this conversation so i think we're doing it on your behalf it sparks a few things you're doing a little bit of acupuncture by nerve responding and i'm telling you what i think what if it comes up right now based on your acupuncture questions but the severe your acupuncture questions maybe the more relevant my answer and let's stay with your investing uh for

Utsav Somani: a bit more so you did well with lens card at unilaser and now with the 50 million deep tech fund uh you're investing heavily into deep tech uh companies i think you want to go go more concentrated 15 companies one to three million dollar checks and digiantra is one of the company which i think you've doubled down on with reliance digantra sorry my bad yeah i mean that's a fascinating company talk to us about the tech there what excited you about that investment

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: so i think space as i said really it is it forget the fact that you know in star wars this is the next frontier but i think india is well positioned there um the lower orbit space has now become not a sort of a government proprietorship around the world and a little bit thanks to elon musk and starlink because of their 15 000 satellites in lower orbit 13 000 belong to starlink but today you've got a situation where you're launching rockets to let smaller satellites go in there the whole price context is going there the life of the satellites becoming shorter there's debris in inner space there's debris in lower space there needs to be refueling espionage is at a much higher level your ability to track anything and everything that's going on on earth so between the politics the espionage the technology the ability to do that uh it's it's it's it's a fascinating world out there and um i think if you can find people with that wire to make a difference and impact there it's huge and you

Utsav Somani: also made a statement where you said that indian deep tech is patronized by indian capital is that

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: correct i would say uh yes because silicon valley feels nobody else can do it outside of them and so want to self-fund themselves which is bully for them and great for that but i think it's good that it is happening from within the academy to quite an extent right you know speaking of silicon valley

Dhruv Sharma: ronnie there was uh we saw something on uh on twitter now x uh recently unfortunately we don't have a copy of it to show on our screen just yet but it basically said that the year stripe was founded you know payments was not the coolest uh team in the in the year the the annual was founded you know again defense hardware was not the well so so where i'm getting going with this is how have you come to sort of developer knows for what's around the corner because everyone knows what's you know what the hype cycle is what's consensus right now but that's not where

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: investment alpha lies so you know consensus is not mentality consensus is not mentality there's a fair bit that yeah i think uh i think it's a combination of a few people who want to be counterintuitive i think the real entrepreneurs uh and when everyone says it's really lonely at the top when it really gets lonely what are you doing actually you are not because when you want to stay the course and i you know but if i would give a punchline to entrepreneurs today it would be the first thing if i was if i was in my 30 years of experience it would be the the negativity that comes your way and i don't mean negatively in the back just that constantly everyone will will not look at you with that with that sense there'll be a lot more naysayers so i think that you want to you want to look around the curve you have to not listen to naysayers you have to actually figure out your own being and your own headline to be able to look around the curve and i think for that you need to be counterintuitive but trust me when you are you have that conviction and your wife then your wiring becomes different and then you can invade much better where does ronnie screwwaller go for new ideas uh walk on the beach uh talking to an incredible amount of young people making the investments and having that a little bit like the dinner that i have basically referred to a little earlier um yeah yeah but i think or frankly in a shower so i hope i go on the shop if i see you as a tweet that i read that also fine today i found uh having a power nap between 2 and 4 p.m uh sparks a lot of good ideas do you follow any of the health

Utsav Somani: and longevity stuff that brian johnson has been talking about are you excited about that space in

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: general no no i don't think there's any wrong with it i'm not being judgmental but i'm just saying i don't follow that i think this the artificialness of this i'm a little worried about i think i managed trying on my own and my parts so i'm staying with that

Utsav Somani: there's a tweet that i read uh very long back i think a famous person wrote this that if you're not thinking about it in the shower then you're not obsessed with it basically but uh i mean what does 2029 look for you three years uh from now there's so much happening in your life i mean deep tech investments you're making movies you're running upgrad you're scaling up glad uh there's so much happening so the age foundation as well i think we should talk about that also but 2029 what does it look like for ronnie's ruwala so i think goalposts move right from time to time

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: but i think today as i said institution building when it comes to upgrade for me it's a very complex problem that we're trying to solve not just and i don't want to say only i'm hoping that another 50 such organizations help solve it it's not the government's problem to solve i think their role is to be a great catalyst in many ways and then open up the sector but i think from our from the from the whole skilling learning education part of it yeah that's a serious commitment that i've made from for better or worse money to see through i think for studies for me it's a little bit on the big city power code right i can see it from the lens very differently uh which is that we're not going to be able to be a modern nation in 24 2047 if we don't solve a little bit for what the other 600 million people who we don't really count too much in our day-to-day lives is going to solve because we're not going to be able to do it just with gdp like america we're not going to be limited by china we'll have to do it our own way so to me so this is a very strong link and a balancer for where one can connect with real india for us to be able to figure out what we need to all do i think the the fun part obviously you know as a hobby is is storytelling it's very powerful it keeps your creative juices going in a very different manner and i think the the vc part is a less about money and funding and i don't want to sound facetious because everyone say what do you mean once you have money you can say it's less about money i don't mean it in that manner what i meant was if i wanted to be a vc person then i'll have to start doing a funder but i'm doing it out of my own personal interest with my own funding which is what i'm doing with storytelling and movies also right and the reason i say that is when it's your own money you can say no 99 times and yes only once when you're doing it on a treadmill and a business you may need to do some things you have to do something you want to do and some things you just have to make a choice based on business so i think that's the that's the less onerous part for me i'll set up a graph which is onerous swadesh which is onerous because it's got a heavy sense of accountability of what we want to achieve and the movie part of it the storytelling part of it the vc part of it is very optional but very

Utsav Somani: rejuvenating but tell us maybe a little bit about swadesh foundation like some of the recent

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: projects that you've done there so for us the project is not projects right i mean i think we basically take a large i think we're a unique model because as entrepreneurs both my wife's focused on the fact that we want to be execution we want to be an execution foundation so at first the idea is to understand the problems and solve them second we think the whole problem of solving in rural india is a holistic one third we have to eradicate mental poverty before we can change physical poverty in many senses so how do we raise aspiration levels for people who don't have an earning member some of them have migrated may not have the basic infrastructure and don't think they can make it in life so if you look at some of those problems i think there's so much to be done there but the soft aspects of that are as important as the hard aspects so i think that's something that is a continuous continuous process ronnie i do have one final question for you for young

Dhruv Sharma: people mostly i i think the future of work is changing very very rapidly and you know one can't really see people having this one long continuous sort of career you know being at the same org or the same company for their entire lifetime so what lessons can we actually draw from the lives of creatives entertainers where they don't think of their life as one long arc right it's it's mostly the body of work where they've done projects yeah i would just say two

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: things here i i and i've said this a little bit more and maybe it's misunderstood but i'm saying yes you should have more than one interesting job in life and people look to live but i'm doing 13 hours of job on one job what do you mean i go about another job i guess what i meant was anyway today there is no job gap therefore the more you can fixate with the passion project and make it part of the optional work life it will balance a lot second if i was an employer i would encourage that because i think the productivity and the element of fun and the element of inspired people and the people are happy workers will be ones who are have a better balance than this constant frustration of whatever so that's how i would kind of kind of view the ability for just that next level of where people need to go and ronnie what's that one story that you're

Utsav Somani: most excited to tell in the next uh year or so through your movies i still have to read some

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: actually i have to say in the last one to one and a half years i've lost touch with what audiences are looking at i think um there's so much of good writing that's happening on multiple platforms uh but today i think people are falling in love with characters even as much as they're falling in love with stories so i think that's where i want to spend a little bit more time

Dhruv Sharma: we're going to ask you a question knowingfully well you might shoot it down but say 50 years out if someone's making a biopic in your life what would you like it to be called

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: oh what do i like to recall first see i would i would leave it down and say don't waste your time on that because if you ask me with my context of hits and flop ratios this would be more a flop than a hit this would be my first piece of advice for that point of view but i think you know i mean it's almost like asking me so how would i like to be remembered i'm saying actually it's not relevant what you what comes on a tombstone i think today i'd like to just live life on my own terms and that's what i think i'm doing so if somebody were to say live life on my own terms i think that's good enough it won't make a great catchy title we'll have to find a translation for it but otherwise that's what i would say

Utsav Somani: but we love it and ronnie i don't think it'll be a flop i think it'll be a hit and you've inspired so many around you and you're doing tremendous work with sudesh with your fund with uh with the investment that you make and with upgrad as well so kudos to you and thank you so much for

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: coming on our show no thank you thanks for some really good uh interaction between us thank you thank you much congrats on the 100th episode thank you very much all right listeners we're

Utsav Somani: moving on to our next guest uh we've got weber of shadow facts with us weber welcome to our 100th

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: live stream hey what's up hey through thank you so much uh and thanks ronnie

Utsav Somani: so whenever somebody takes a company for an ip whenever i get a chance to interact with a founder who's taking a company to the public markets and my favorite question to ask them is how did it feel the night before what was going through your head

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: a lot of emotions uh obviously we did get asleep uh and uh when when we uh listed uh so normally it's a it's a big affair for your families as well so all our close relatives friends families were also there so there were a lot of goosebumps uh but yeah i think we we just went with the flow there are just too many things that you need to do while you are listing so uh in the end you just feel happy uh that you got listed but does life really change after

Utsav Somani: listing like quarter to quarter pressure targets all of those noise online about the stock market and stuff like does it affect the team morale and stuff or have you seen that it's not really

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: that much of a difference so initially yes uh i think when we when we got listed we actually went below our ipo price as well and we felt that we had priced uh our ipo appropriately as well so there were a lot of jitters there were a lot of confusion on why people are not buying on our story uh did we do anything wrong out there uh we honestly consulted a lot of our good friends and well-wishers and they just advised that keep doing what you are doing uh once people gain confidence on your numbers i think all of these things will start falling in place well so that is that is what we did we we had a leadership meeting as well and we just focus wrote down our focus here and then back to drawing board on executing it again and again and i mean e-commerce

Utsav Somani: set this expectation over 10 years where it said that one day delivery is going to be the norm but now what quick cost has done in the last two three years i think they've made 10 20 minutes as the new norm and that's happened at a very fast pace so logistics in itself is changing how do you think

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: you're positioned to do this well it's a it's an interesting time to be in logistic space to be honest see if you look at uh maybe every three years we are we are coming up with a new model uh of e-commerce in india so uh me show for example which revolutionized the value commerce aspect that's also a recent phenomena the quick commerce was nothing maybe three three and a half years back as well and even in the first year itself it was facing a lot of backlash that who would want such a service as well so uh that's that's the beauty i would say of the sector right now now it's it's uh quite uh exciting to solve some of these difficult problems and go into depth of it and especially work at a good scale from that aspect now with respect to shadow our motto or our thought process has always been that if there is a new model uh that customers love if there is a model which brings more people uh into digital commerce we will be the first one to crack it from a logistics standpoint and that is what keeps us uh restless that is what keeps us on our toes that how do we innovate see either you could innovate on i mean the innovation for a value commerce is slightly different from that of a quick commerce person and that's that's something that uh the team here at shadow fax is constantly working and innovating in that direction there do you think we can dial the clock back a little

Dhruv Sharma: bit and try and understand from you i mean so you know quick commerce makes it appear like 10 minute deliveries we just will them into existence but no they're possible because there were these fundamental building blocks that you know players like yourself laid over many many years and some core innovations along the way and we'd love for you to tell us like like a historical sort of outlay of how what makes quick comp possible today so again see

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: the first and the foremost thing for quick commerce is getting the inventory closer to the customer that is the number one thing uh in earlier days when the quick commerce fad wasn't there it used to be recommendation engines which used to identify that people in this particular pin code would want these many products of this particular type and people like amazon for example they have actually written a blog around it they even without customers placing the order they used to ship those order closer to the warehouse so that the next time when you open your app and see you could actually see that if you place the order within next 10 minutes you will get it in the same day itself so that's the first philosophy around it how do you get the correct inventory at the right location and a lot of work that has happened on the recommendation engines on how do you know that in which area which set of people would want to order which item of which brand see in just taking an example of quick commerce it's not simple that i just have to stock tour down i have to know that which brand do i need to stock in do i stock how many packages of 500 gram or how many packages of 1 kgs and all this is underlying there's a lot of recommendation and ai that is running at a localized manner out there from a logistic standpoint it is immense see when we started shadow fax and dialing the clock back at that point in time there was no geo i do remember we had to pay our delivery partners 400 odd rupees to take a mobile plan which gives them 1 gb a month so in those areas in order to have that location stack because when you are placing an order with e-commerce the important thing is et you need to know that if i place an order how much time will it take for the order to deliver and eta you can only forecast if you have humongous amount of data that is there you need to know the localized patterns you need to know how much time will it and the travel time that will take but it will also you need to take into account how much time will it take for the last 100 meters so see google maps can give you for example from point a to point b but there is there is no map that is there which can give you that in a particular society where

Dhruv Sharma: tower e and and one would imagine that even the bottlenecks the weakest links have changed over time so you're saying right now it's the last 100 meters we've literally brought it down to just

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: yeah i mean that's exactly the thing i mean when we started there was no live tracking for example for any of the thing that we had now live tracking is like bare minimum i mean people do not see you if you are not giving live tracking for example so from those era where there was no live tracking from those era where there was no location map that was existing even for the smaller granularities that were there to a time where we are now discussing how do we solve the last 100 mile 100 meters that's the evolution that uh the scenario uh has come in and a large part of it is also on the front that i mean your allocation engines for example see uh quick commerce is a highly repeatable scenario and when you have repeatability your allocation engines also need to take into account the uh familiarity aspect as well and those algorithms actually gain though give you leverage on small small parameters as you scale and that's that's uh that's something that uh i mean we are also excited about in doubling down on how to

Dhruv Sharma: maybe make them more intelligent and you also related but sorry the related question like um so with respect to demand fluctuation i'm assuming it was very different for ecom because you could see it coming right diwali is going to happen or this sale or that sale but how does demand fluctuation work in a quick commerce stand like your setting and how do you create a system that's elastic enough to be able to surge and then you know sort of flatline yeah so uh and that's a

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: beautiful question and uh when uh so in the earlier days when we were starting at that point in time e-commerce was there your regular typical e-commerce four five days of delivery of shipment that would be happening when you have that much sla you can still work with non- automated systems when you are working with smaller slas so we started as a hyperlocal company and our hypothesis was clear that if you can deliver food to a hungry person in 30 minutes you can actually deliver a lot of things so when we started building that so our entire philosophy was that all these decision making need to be automated so i i mean that was coincidence at that point in time when i was starting i was working with a hedge fund us-based hedge fund and i used to design algorithms on how do you trade on stocks at a high frequency and similar philosophies kind of apply here you have so many different parameters you have demand going up and going down at different levels you have your supply which is also variable how do you match both of them and just building that underlying infrastructure those algorithms that is that is what has actually made all these decision making possible you just cannot run a quick commerce setup manually you you need these fundamental building blocks

Utsav Somani: and you've i mean staying with that data and optimization for a bit you built your own maps as well over a billion deliveries your routing engine has been trained over a billion deliveries so how does that give you a competitive advantage and talk to us a little bit about how that competitive advantage keeps on becoming a defensible mode for you

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: fair see if you if you look at indian addresses and as simple tests that i often do or some of us we often do we just go to google and search our hometown addresses and we still do not get the exact pinpoint location on the map now in india the problem statements are much more diverse i why we are not able to get the exact location because a let us say our addresses are written in english but they are actually in our home languages so somebody like vikas as v i k s somebody would write at v i k s as well so we homophonically translate it depending on our sense then there is no standardized sequence as well your locality can come up front somebody would write the landmark up front and in some cases the landmark would also be a reference yeah so in those cases see you need to identify what is the exact lat long of an all because whatever route optimization algorithms that you build you run you actually need a lat long your system cannot understand an abstract address you need the lat long to be there and that is what we started with in building sf maps so in sf maps what we have done that historical data where we have delivered to all the customers all the delivery partner locations that are there we have tried to map it with the way indians write their address with the way indians annotate their their references and we have built this graph which is entirely built on the local data set that is now from a scale standpoint see this is an interesting observation so roughly 8 to 10 percent of indians they do not know their exact pin code and the entire e-commerce parcel system that runs on pin code only so if your pin code is incorrect then 8 to 10 percent chances you will land up in a different hub or a different area from which this order cannot be delivered and then you have to reroute it to the correct hub and then deliver it there two to three days are already lost in that so if you do not have you're solving with sf shield so this is something that we are solving with sf maps okay so now my shipment actually reaches whatever the pin code the customer is given the shipment reaches the exact hub where it is the closest to be delivered from the customer prior to this our misroutes used to be in the tune of uh seven eight percent after this our misroutes are now in the tune of one one and one point two five percent so and each misroute helps you reduce your cost it also improves the speed at which the customer gets the package and what is sf shield so sf shield is uh is the code name for our fraud detection and intelligence platform basically so see when you are working at such high scale and there are so many stakeholders that are there your delivery partner is there your seller is there your customer is there at a different levels uh there are there are chances of gaps that could come in uh how do you identify uh those gaps and correct them so i'll give you one example so one of the primary offering for us in the market is reverse logistics so let's say you uh ordered a t-shirt and or a shirt you didn't like the fit and you would like to return it back now at the doorstep the delivery boy actually needs to do a quality check whether the correct item is actually being returned by the customer or not now the problem with okay now our offering to the market is that for the brands we say that we will ask you for a premium for every doorstep quality check but if at any point in time it is that if we have picked an incorrect product we bear the entire debit of that order so we basically underwrite that product so if if our engine is saying that yes a correct item is being picked up and an incorrect item is delivered to you you uh you will get the full amount back to you so we have built uh we have recently uh actually launched uh launched large language model on top of it where the delivery boy just have to click an image and the model is able to identify if it is the correct product correct brand correct size etc and consider it from a perspective when i mean when you are comparing the images uh the model uh which who is wearing the image is actually wearing a entire t-shirt but when we are returning we are returning it in a flow folded manner the the engine is such is so strong that it is able to identify the patterns even within a folded ecosystem so that's uh that again i mean as i mentioned the end i mean the cost of doing or picking up a wrong product contributes to our losses and that's why any improvement that we do

Dhruv Sharma: increases our profitability noticeably so we have two questions one you've you know shadowfax has clearly solved a lot of problems along the way in-house but do you guys also have a co-op dev team that you know that's always on the lookout for other smart teams small young teams that are

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: solving problems that you know you haven't yet absolutely i mean so we do not uh have a formalized structure per se but uh we we are happy to engage with a lot of companies who are solving a lot of deep tech problems in this space so be it on smart locks be it on automated sorters that are there uh or be it on i mean so these are these are uh more towards the combination of hardware and software uh so those are the areas where we are actually actively focusing and the

Dhruv Sharma: second question ever was just generally as a logistics leader so we've spoken a lot about private innovation but you know logistics can't exist in a vacuum like roads rail air all of those are public goods uh do you want to say something about like state-led government-led um you know physical infra initiatives that have you know changed the game for logistics

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: absolutely i think uh the work uh that are uh i mean the ministers they have done from a role road and activity is commendable being the travel time and the tarnage that can pass through in the requisite slas that have improved massively for us uh from a time that we started and as as a country if we would want to go into a zone where our cost of logistics uh moves down such building blocks are a massive massive help for us another area actually i missed one of the area where we engage with a lot of new companies is on the ev space that's also uh interesting space uh that we as a team are exploring and is that to bring

Utsav Somani: unit economics more favorable uh ev is reducing the cost and carbon footprint also

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: yes so uh i think it's a win-win scenario on both fronts i mean you you do get benefit on the carbon footprint uh at the same time uh from a uh from a cost standpoint or from the use case standpoint it's actually a massive uh unlock so when you look at quick commerce for example uh your uh travel distances are not that high and your speeds are roughly similar whether you drive an ev or whether you drive a bike in those cases uh using an ev actually helps you with optimizing on the cost also uh at the same time it makes it much more easier to tap on to a larger supply base so uh the good thing that has happened in the ev ecosystem is the financing model that has uh come up well so it is much more easier for a gig worker to take a daily or a weekly rent of evs and work with us and other players in the market uh to deliver shipments and make money

Utsav Somani: out there do you find time to sorry what's up given your vantage point in the 3PL logistics space as well third-party logistic space what are the top two challenges that you're seeing

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: the industry is facing right now uh see i think uh number one uh number one i would say is how can uh more digital penetration increase for a country like india uh if you compare it with some of the mature companies countries we are still lagging massively they're still in single digits whereas uh even our southeast asian neighbors are on the higher side as well so that is increasing how do we get more and more customers uh purchasing online is is uh is a major unlock for everyone and that will uh i mean it will work at multiple levels uh and we also would want to participate in that journey whether it is on the value side of it or whether it is speed side of it velocity side or whether it is versatility perspective as well so that's that's that's one uh one angle uh that is there second uh i would say uh see i think from a third-party logistics ecosystem one often thing that people uh keep debating on is how much would the right insourcing happen or what would be the right outsourcing uh will happen uh by bigger players that are there now see on that end uh because that uh i mean on that end the core core philosophy is as a as a country we need good capacity to be created and that capacity creation is the most important thing that can be done so the the amount of commerce that is still not reachable in the right manner is is humongous and if the right capacity levels can be created uh that capex cycle that investment cycle all these things will definitely help both ppl uh as well as our clients as well uh we'll be able to get in more users so far we've only been asking you very very

Dhruv Sharma: serious questions so i will there's this fedex story right of of fred smith's uh once actually so uh so i don't know if you know this story but fedex at one point came down to its last two thousand dollars and fred smith the founder took that mind and we're not saying you know gambler you've been a you know you've been a high frequency trader etc any such fun stories from shadow faxes early days etc that people haven't heard before that you'd like to

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: share with us so uh are you are you aware uh shadow fax is named after lord of the rings character yes no i have no idea so shadow fax is gandalf's horse yeah yeah so if you've seen the movie there was a dialogue uh come on shadow fax show us the meaning of haste when gandalf the white was there the interesting part is all our servers all our databases all our services they are named after

Utsav Somani: lord of the rings characters oh wow all of you uh big fans lord of the rings yes all of us big

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: fans we actually so the initial team was bigger fan i would say the founding team was bigger fan so every time when we used to launch a new service uh we used to all sit together and discuss what should the name be so you'll have frodo rivendell erindale uh gimli everything everything in our in our horizon here and uh these names are done in a sense that uh so the moment uh so the role that sauron would play in lotr the similar thing uh that application would play in our infrastructure

Dhruv Sharma: as well and bevin do you find the time to just take a break from the here and now sometimes travel the world go to logistics hubs and just see what the future is like what china is doing with embodied ai or you know autonomous deliveries happening in the u.s or elsewhere what can you share with us that you know we don't ordinarily come across um on an everyday basis see two

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: interesting things uh one i wish to travel i love to travel uh though i don't want to visit

Utsav Somani: hubs when i travel but uh vacation basically where you work for two days and then take a break for

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: two days right so yeah i mean uh so i have visited uh an amazon facility uh in la and uh visited uh china facilities as well uh in fact abhishek also visited the korean logistics korean facilities as well so the clear signal is the amount of capex or the amount of automation that these guys have done in their warehousing tech is massive and they have uh they have been very innovative and frugal as well in designing those solutions so one one example that we took in so earlier your entire convener belt had to be established in one single unit in the warehouse what some of the players have done is they have built lego blocks of those uh sorters such that they are they are not fully automatic they are semi-automatic but they are lego blocks so you do not need a big space you just need a small space and you can stack so if you want four is to one you have one uh one machine there but if you want eight is to one uh then you can combine the two machines yeah modular so they have actually made it very modular so that's a very local innovation because uh i mean then uh it

Dhruv Sharma: makes it simple stuff works in logistics right if it weren't for the container there would be no trade

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: exactly yeah exactly and out of curiosity are you containers there's lots of uh depth in how to design the container how do you fill that container how do you load that container into uh into the respective vehicles for example sorry you were saying no i was just curious if you were ever

Dhruv Sharma: like as a student a fan of operations research because that is your life yeah i mean i i in

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: general like uh solving solving problems i mean uh the way they and maybe more inclination is towards solving problem in human intersection uh and that is that is something what shadowfax is more it's it's not about writing a code or writing an algorithm that will work so one of the learning was we we wrote a root optimization we told our delivery boys please follow it then they came and told us you are missing important factors in this so for example when we book an auto late in the night they reject us saying they are so riders they also want care if you can give me the last order of the day which takes me closer to my home i'll be more sticky with you even though it may not be most optimum route so these yeah no no things which so when when your technology has to marry the uh the human power that is where the real magic comes in uh so a lot of times earlier we used to be very naive and say okay i mean we have written the code or we have built the tech but it is not being adopted and then when we visited ground then we talked to riders we even uh do deliveries on our own as well so uh the top leadership once uh once a quarter uh we actually go out on ground and do deliveries meet customers meet riders as well as a part of a mandatory thing a lot of us we do it more frequently as well but when we went on ground we realized yes it is not only about these theoretical algorithms that is uh that the entire journey is and as a

Utsav Somani: closing question web of uh in 2025 i think you made a statement about agentic commerce becoming a reality very soon where agents are going to do most of the shopping for us uh so what does that future hold are we going to be expecting uh shadow packs to get into drone deliveries what what is the world of logistics and deliveries look like maybe three four years down the line

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: i'm bullish yeah i'm i'm decently bullish on agenting commerce or agents taking over a lot of things from us uh because see uh these agents will be super personalized they would know what when where uh do i do i order or what is my preference and the the underlying systems will also be more agile to understand those agents there so for shadow facts leveraging the agentic ecosystem is one of the top most priority for us we are extremely bullish on the kind of activities see logistics is requires a lot of human historically has required a lot of human in order to execute a lot of repetitive tasks and some of these tasks we now have the power and the technology in place which can be automated which can be given which can be executed by an agent which gives you both scalability and reliability and that is where we are bullish on we are we do look forward to uh autonomous drones as again see uh the current thought process is that they can work very well from a middle mile ecosystem so let's say if you are fulfilling your dark store from your outside the city warehouse where both the both the units or both the ecosystems are owned by or are governed by a single entity that is where things can be very uh can be can be hugely helpful from a drone setup so your fulfillment rates actually become much faster from a last mile standpoint or whether the end customer will start getting drones uh i mean orders where drones i do not see that in the next three to four years or maybe even later there are a lot of lot of challenges

Utsav Somani: in that space and yeah all right thank you for coming on our show uh this is special for us

Vaibhav Khandelwal - Co-Founder & CTO, Shadowfax: really appreciate it thank you so much congratulations uh for your 100 and yes look

Utsav Somani: forward thank you all right listeners uh so now we will move on to our final guest segment india's first unicorn uh two co-founders are with us uh what a fitting end to this uh special live stream uh episode 100 that we'll do so first let's welcome Mohit and Abhay of InMobi guys welcome to the show welcome to the show thank you very much thank you for having us with you guys this is special so thank you for your time and let's dial back uh history time so Naveen and you guys were at dinner and that's the origination of InMobi as a company you've done this for almost two decades does InMobi still feel like a startup to you

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: oh absolutely it is a it is a fantastic startup uh i feel we've been reinventing ourselves at every stage uh and this time is just fabulous isn't it a great time to be uh doing a startup at scale at which InMobi is running and the first unicorn tag of india was or was it a boost i think it was a pretty big uh pat on the back uh look when you start a company you never start a company thinking that you will become the unicorn let alone the first unicorn so when that happened that was like uh we've arrived little did we know that uh you know when you get a tag like that it's only the beginning of a very interesting journey uh a journey that you never want to finish uh a journey that you never want to stop a journey that has its own ups and downs and that's interesting so i think that that tag or that achievement just probably gave us the ticket to a ride that has probably never gonna stop uh abhay mohit i'm curious like uh you know

Dhruv Sharma: from so you uh like abhay said you've constantly reinvented the company but what have been those key pivotal moments both in the uh in the ad tech uh category but also the technology industry that have created opportunities for you to reinvent along the way look i think uh you know i'll just

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: start with the previous question that you asked also uh you know when we were starting this company uh one thing we were very clear all four of us that you know we want to build a global from this part of the world and and you when you have that kind of ambition i think time as a quantity uh stop coming in your way you know so so for example i think for me you know in engineering you say it's a roll forward release you know you only roll forward there is no backup or you don't come back and i think that's how we see our journey and and this question uh get asked quite a lot these days you know you you have been over here for 80 90 years how is it i said yeah just starting you know if you look at tata ambani's or even google or microsoft you know i think bill gates you know he's still there so i think when you build those kind of organization and you have that kind of vision in your head i think 20 year is a very short period of time you know in japanese they say the company generally have a 300 to 400 years of span so you know you we are still very young the demo quarter is 25 years to the japanese exactly so and then the other part is uh i think one thing was very clear when you are building a global uh company uh based on technology uh then foundation needs to be very strong and at the same point of time you need to have all the hooks for it to adopt to the changing needs of the company and i think that is one thing that we have done very well whether it comes to business product uh and tech and even today you know me and abhay when we work together uh the single biggest question i think most of our interaction is not what is happening today but uh how do i think ai is going to change engineering or how abhay is thinking ai is going to change product so i think this question is we always have bifocal lens one is what needs to happen right now and what needs to happen uh you know two years from now and our job is to basically build those hooks build those foundation platform now so that company can make that transition quite swiftly and and i think that is that is what i would say is is is a iterative process that we keep doing and in both your words can

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: you describe what the inmovi group looks like right now yeah i'll start i mean inmovi is a consumer internet company that is built in an ai era we have two scaled platforms we have a scaled advertising platform and then we have a scaled agentic commerce platform primarily as an organization we are very very innovative in terms of what and where the consumer attention is or going to be in the future when we started about 17 18 years ago or maybe two decades ago the consumer attention was beginning to get shifted on the mobile devices and if we look at over the last three to four years it's obvious that the consumer attention will be on the ai interfaces or ai surfaces now the future of the ai surfaces may look very different than what they are today but one thing that is absolutely true that all these investments that is going in ai will need to be paid for and and two scalable models to make money on ai is going to be advertising and commerce and inmovi is playing the role in both of them uh in a very very um we have a front seat to both of those uh changes in the ecosystem and if i if i were to just add

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: and give you the analogy on the technical side i think these foundations uh are built on the platform that are very similar you know in advertising what we try to do is basically where monetization is part of your content you know it should feel like it's very related to what you are doing and and in just in time context and you know it doesn't on your face kind of thing over there and what glass is also doing is basically it's a consumer uh consumer property a customer is already in sort of a context so you you get first-hand information what is happening over there and since commerce a glass is becoming one of the largest agentic shopping commerce uh platform so monetization come very naturally underneath the platform and that is what our legacy has been for so many years where uh the ad is nothing but the understanding of the context you know what is leading a user to make certain kind of decision is actually advertising and and that's where they fit so well on top of each other

Dhruv Sharma: as a category defining company i'm wondering what mental model are you currently holding for the relationship between advertisers and publishers and end users look i think uh drove

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: with and and it's true for all of us as consumers if you look at the way you've been experiencing internet uh i think internet has stopped being uh personalized and has become personal it is actually being generated for every individual uh and if you stretch this further uh i mean you're beginning to see new devices come into the play you're beginning to see new ways of interaction coming into the play so i actually believe that with every change in technology there is a complete paradigm shift in how new developers come about and and and how a new monetization model emerges so in our sense one thing that won't change is we have to be absolutely guided by where and how consumers are spending their time and for that we don't have to go and look far we can look at each of our experiences and we know how we are interacting with internet and the second is we know that all of these interaction need to be paid for in some sort of a financial model which works for the industry subscription-based models which are today funding the ai experiences have a natural ceiling and they are not going to go and fund all the capex investments that are going on in terms of the ai experiences so as newer and newer ai experiences will emerge for the consumers there is going to be a valid commercial model either driven through agentic commerce or through advertising so in some sense the relationships is not going to look very different consumer is going to give their attention whether directly or through their agent advertiser is going to pay for that attention through either a direct ad or through an agentic offering and there's going to be publishers or developers in the world that are going to create new surfaces and new experiences on which consumers will be interacting in fact glance is one such scaled surface in the world and there are many such scaled surfaces that are getting created where the consumer interaction is now moving to so i believe the relationship is going to live economic relationship is going to remain the same but the way it is going to manifest

Utsav Somani: is going to look different and more you as a ctu have lived through three different eras like mobile ads programmatic and then now ai which i think you described as glances agentic shopping experience what changes do you expect in the world of advertising now when agents are doing the decision making or sort of helping you in shopping in commerce look i think one thing which i would

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: say blessing in disguise for us was when we started with the mobile building anything at scale from this part of the world was very hard mobile is very unforgiving surface at that point of time huge latency challenges you know in 2008-9 the network very unreliant network you know call drops so you can imagine what would happen to internet so i think that has led to a very disciplined approach for us to build the software that can run on scale and it can handle any kind of failure you know that is fundamental to anything that you do on engineering and it doesn't change then come the era of programmatic where you have to make very highly complex arbitrage decision at a fraction of time with the trillions of you know iteration on single day basis so the problem remains same but it it got compounded you know so your engineering and your discipline further went into hyperdrive at that point of time that what i what i would call you know the second phase of our growth ai was still there you know if you think about it today we associate ai with chat gpt or llms you know neural net transformer these models were there in 2016-17 as well and we have been using dn and even that point of time it's just that now you are able to converse with it and the new model as i was saying you know new searches now conversations with the chatbot they started to come into the play so a lot of our model which used to be pure mathematical regression or statistical have moved on to more frontier and foundational model you know especially on the glance side you know where you have to do a lot of imaging but i think what as an engineer one thing that i want to tell you is that's five percent of the problem even when you build a very complex very high performing ai system the llm and that setup is five percent of the problem the 95 percent is the classical engineering that you always have been doing you know how to optimize for token how to make sure your input that is going to llm is right way otherwise you'll be losing your shirt by throwing so much tokens onto the model once the output is there how do you sanitize it how do you moderate it how do you basically render it so i think all that takes a really good amount of complex engineering and and since we have been doing it for so long it was quite natural for for us to basically make the transition as well and not just glance in fact our template on the advertising side are all aistest they they are stitched on the runtime

Dhruv Sharma: and if if you were to ask you to pull out a few pages from your global expansion playbook so that it can be relevant and useful to founders you know who are a few paces behind you in their journey what would you pick and what would you share with them i think so global uh the first

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: principle is basically for building any global system or businesses that you have to dissociate scale of your system with people if you think that hey if abhay comes back and and this is actually what abhay did you know he used to go uh and i'll have abhay share the story but he would go to china he would go to southeast asia he even went to south africa nigeria and whatnot and if he sees the opportunity he would come back and he would tell the product and engineering team hey i want to go live in south africa and the question is can we do it in two weeks you know and if you have the software that is built to scale you know it's a horizontal scaling you know all you have to do is deploy some more server your software gets over there it connects to your mothership and everything works like a charm uh all these design initial days it takes little time it takes little discipline and obviously competency and skill uh that we invested early on but once you figure out this script once you do this hard work early on when you are still small enough to deal these kind of complexity you know i remember some of the people would come and say hey why you are setting up second data center you don't have enough load but the second data center that we were setting up in us it was never about the load it is can i maintain the latency can i basically make my us publisher happier us user happy where my ad is loading in in few millisecond uh that was a problem that we were solving and we invested in it whenever the scale was very small so so right problem got solved at the right place imagine if you are dealing with a very big scale and now you are trying to take it to the next geography you have to go with a bigger problem so i think take the hard cause early on uh design your system where lack of humans should not impact their scalability and stability uh i think these two things they go long way and then and a classical first principle thought process when you are architecting and designing your system

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: is very important and and maybe if i take this question a little bit further look i think look i think first first of all being global is a mindset uh i tell this example to a lot of people that uh you know creating a good business is like solving a rubik's cube you can't solve it one surface at a time if you need to succeed you need to solve all six surfaces together uh which basically means that your product your global gtm your your platform everything needs to be operating in a sink for you to be able to solve this and that is one of the biggest learning and lesson that we have had that it is actually far easier to develop in india uh and it is far easier to sell in the us in fact a lot of times a lot of people think oh selling in the us is very complicated believe me the kind of challenges that india offers in terms of the complexity is is is orders of magnitude higher than what it is in the u.s. u.s. does not have so much of language complexity u.s. such not does not have so much of regional complexities and so on so forth so it is far easier to develop for the u.s. if you can develop for india and it's far easier to sell in the u.s. than it is to sell in india because india is still i mean it's growing it's a beautiful market but it is still relatively a smaller market with a far higher competition than in the than in the u.s. so i tell to any founder that i work with that look aspire to be global you can only succeed in in in global market when you believe that you can succeed in global market there is no other way and you can't do it sequentially you need to absolutely do it beginning the day one now capital is important technology is important right team is important risk taking is important none of that i'm taking away and that i think entrepreneurs take it from the day one but it's the mindset that is probably one of the most critical one so you know going and expanding in southeast asia and dubai is not going global uh is what i'm probably guiding to a lot of

Utsav Somani: interesting but can you also share your perspective and just to double down and maybe go one level deeper is i mean you've held your ground as an independent player against google and meta and what can you share from defending your position in a world that's coming up with ai and llms and everything and agentic uh commerce as well how did you build and transfer these modes to the world that's coming up i'm also going to bolt on to that

Dhruv Sharma: question and just ask you what how different is it to serve the android ecosystem the ios

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: ecosystem maybe you can answer all of that together look i think when you uh when you go to compete you got to compete like there is really no i i can't make it any more easier or more difficult uh you know it's it's a it's like if you decide that you got to play in eden garden then you will prepare accordingly versus playing in you know outside my house uh in a gully cricket so what what i would say is that if you're competing you got to compete very highly now you also need to make uh interesting decisions like for example if i were to take some example uh from one of the most important decisions and this kind of goes back to 2011 and 12 when we were expanding uh look in india we're always a mobile first market because we never had desktop and or internet prior to it so kind of india grew up with mobile and mobile economy we have an app for everything in the first five years of in mobi going global when we will be going and selling in the us people would be thinking mobile as an add-on device it wasn't the mainstream device and we would go to china and and india and nobody talks about internet on the desktop so clearly when we were going into the mobile uh sorry clearly we were going into the us we had a lot of temptations from our advertisers to actually expand and become an omni-channel omni-channel player from the day one now if we would have become an omni-channel player at that point in time which clearly was the strength of our competitors in the us we wouldn't have been around at this point in time because you can only compete in an area where you are really good at you can't compete in an area where everybody is like we don't want to compete in a red ocean so good point about in mobi is we found our niche we stuck to our niche in fact it's only in 2023 where we decided to expand to an omni-channel player and we started to bring web and ctv into our foray even till today 90 plus of in movies business comes by mobile app uh advertising where we are one of the largest distributed sdk globally and that is the power of compounding so in some sense if you go to compete in in in a market as large as u.s you cannot be everything to everybody you need to be really really good in your area and then keep going extremely deep in it and that market really respects and pays premium for being a specialist this is absolutely contrast in india like in india if you look at traditional businesses they are very generalist like they would do everything because probably the market does not still have depth in each of the areas and hence there is a lot of you know journalism like if you're a product company you would also do services if you're a services companies you will also do support etc etc so that was i think one of our biggest learnings and that's why we remain very very focused in fact glance has been launched in the u.s only in the last six to seven months we were preparing it perfecting it testing it out with hundreds of millions of devices in india and when we felt that we were really ready with our agentic commerce is when we are taking it to the u.s and long before we know it's one of the most successful consumer properties now so in some sense what i'm trying to make a point is that if you go to compete in the u.s you got to really compete with focus intensity and perfection in the area that you're choosing and not really defocus and diversify into many areas because that's a sure shot way to fail and the

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: other aspect that i just want to add what abhay is saying focus along with that is i think having a aspirational competition is actually really good because what it does is you know you really have something to look up to you know and your own benchmark you know to do good gets all of a you know you raise the bar internally so i think right from the day one we were competing with google and facebook uh and rather than basically getting intimidated by this by them all our conversation used to around that how can my system be that good you know their search scale is this their web server is like that you know so i think it has really done wonders to our engineering that was one of the part the second part is look i think we have been we all know this there is no shortage of talent in india we are just scared by our own imagination and we you know we have not taken those aspirational battle early on which we are taking right now all across so i think once you have the aspiration ambition and you have the talent i think you can actually compete with world class that is the beauty of free economy and competition led world you know so same goes for glance same goes for advertising you know we compete with them with facebook in their backyard on their turf and and it's a fair fair for all game for all of us it pushes us to basically deliver product that can compete with them and win on its own merit

Utsav Somani: and i mean uh there are two questions uh there's one in the audience and one i have what is the scale of the different businesses that we're discussing right now in terms of just numbers or any reach numbers that you can share with us and from the audience when it comes to ai

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: what would a winning moment for india look like so i'll give you some numbers with respect to our scale in mobi currently processes about two and a half billion dollar of media across about maybe about three billion consumers across the world on different properties we serve close to about two trillion trillion ads in a month uh uh on pretty much all sorts of devices whether it is you know mobile tv web desktop uh etc etc so and we do that you know across about 117 180 countries in the world so it's a very large scale global operations and thanks to mohit and all of our team uh at in mobi we've managed to run a system that is uh that has very very high availability at precision and scale that world-class systems will uh will rival off in fact we've gotten a lot of accolades from our partners on having the lowest latency having the best throughput uh and having some of the algorithms that are actually delivering results in microseconds so it's a it's a very very evolved system to deal with the scale and in our industry typically you know the complexity increases multiples with the scale so if you're actually not planning the systems to be operating at this sort of a scale you'll you'll actually crush uh under your own weight and that is the problem that happens with a lot of large-scale technology systems uh in in the in the world uh and then i think your your next question that you were asking what what could be the uh shining moment for india ai could be um i'm actually a very very big believer that um as india we we do one thing extremely well we are great in developing applications and we are great in testing out that application into the diversity that is india so i think the shining moment for india ai in my view would be if we can come out with a maybe n number of uh ai applications or ai experiences that can scale globally and i'm seeing bunch of examples glance is an example uh pocket.fm is doing an amazing work in in terms of taking it global and there are so many different entrepreneurs that i'm aware of who are all taking this change or shift in technology and actually thinking with a very global mindset so and the beauty with india is you know one success leads to thousand more people in india trying stuff and out of those thousand people ten will succeed and those ten will lead to ten thousand more people trying so we have this very huge exponential growth curve where if we can just keep trying and trying and trying i'm sure we will land at much more greater opportunities than what the world has seen and that is i think india's biggest shining moment

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: and mohith do you want to add something to that yeah i'll just add two things so uh you know i think our our scales are so we are a global company all the way from japan to hawaii you know almost every every continent every country every state uh you know in mobi services are there in terms of either glance or our advertising units so there is never a dull time you know so now china traffic may be going down or going up europe will start to pick up and then us and so on so all our systems are always humming with millions of qps uh so if there are engineering folks in crowd that's a pretty massive volume uh very few companies in single digit who handle those kind of volume uh our systems are also quite advanced you know even even some big player uh you know we use gcp azure all of them uh even they have to plan for months to take our new region you know because our our volume comes with so much uh daunting workload that you know you you just can't escape so that's one thing that you know uh i'm quite proud of and something that you can always relate to in mobiscape the next thing as abhay said you know we we have a very uncanny ability of building product for the world at a price point that is never seen before i think that is one of the things i i believe ai is still quite expensive and the way we are doing things on glance or pocket of m or many other companies that are going to come i think we can really lead the way to do it at a price point where it will start to make sense for entire developing economy you know not only just india but entire southeast asia and africa who can spend 200 a month you know just doing the chat on clod it's just unfeasible you know so so i think if we have to make ai useful for everyone every corner of the world i think that is that innovation is going to come from india the way we launch mangalyaan with 10 million dollar budget i think fairly soon you will see that this country will show the world that how do you use ai at a fraction of the cost that can be consumed any place in the in the world i think i want to ask

Dhruv Sharma: you gentlemen as a consumer what is the bold but realistic expectation i can have from in mobi and your peers and partners in terms of creating a you know a a jaw-dropping sort of buying experience that is so personalized across the device and then you know like even the invisible advertising infrastructure behind it that completely blows my mind look i think first of all a great technology

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: is the one that absolutely feels like magic uh and you know if you if you have got a chance to use glance app on your phone at at any point in time i i would just ask you and your listeners to give it a spin and you would actually feel it to be almost like a magic look our entire view with glance started with a very simple thought that the more visual a category is for purchasing whether it is your clothes or whether it is your eyewear or anything anything that is very visual it's very hard to buy it online because you just you just can't figure it out how many of the times we would have you know gone to a glasses shop and put the glass on my eyes and looked at my wife to say how how do i look or or how many times do we wear a shirt in a dressing room and then came out and show it to our partner into saying that does this shirt look good on me or not because that's how usually the visual category products are bought and i can go on various different categories but the behavior is kind of very similar and and our simple insight there through was that how do we make sure that you can see a product on yourself and not only on yourself but you are also able to share it with your loved and near and dear one and take their feedback before actually making a purchasing decision and all of that you can do from your own couch without having to leave and you know brave the bangalore traffic which has its own its own mind so certainly this this insight isn't possible when you stay at the word personalized you have to go towards internet which is actually personal which is created for each individual on the basis of that individual's liking and and in achieving this vision we've actually ended up creating a shopping model that is currently being trained for uh over 300 million users and imagine this personal concierge becoming ready for each individual this concierge is going to know your preference this concierge is going to know what you like this concierge will recommend products for you this concierge will tell you that if you're going to wear a green pant you actually shouldn't wear a a black shirt with it you just look ugly but probably if you have a green pant then maybe you can pair it up with white shirt that would look better and so on so forth like all of these things we need literally a personal concierge with us and we're training glance ai to be most intelligent personal shopping assistant at every surface now whether you're on your tv it's going to help you with that if you're going to be on your phone it's going to help you with that uh you're going to be on maybe other devices in the future as they will come up glance ai will find its presence in all of those devices so it almost feels magical while the 1.0 of internet shopping solved for efficiency and effectiveness i believe glance ai is going to solve for inspiration and that's the magic that we believe this this technology era that we are in can really really make it possible you've gone

Utsav Somani: through so many changes as a company uh all different platforms all different kinds of businesses as well and i mean technology winds have changed so many times during that time as well 2007 is when you started what was one company building advice that both of you received individually uh i want you to answer this which was true back in the day but it's not true now

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: uh for a founder look i'll probably tell you the thing that haven't changed uh and uh because you know it's like uh and it's not an advice that came from somebody it's something you know the beauty of doing it for 20 plus years is you get to make a lot of hypothesis try to see an experiment and see whether that hypothesis is actually true or not so one of the big hypothesis that we have we have literally made it into a mantra within the organization is that attitude comes before smarts comes before uh skills now skills are the easiest one to interview for skills are the easiest one to hire for and 90 percent of the people get hired for their skill set or their smartness but the longevity of a person and the longevity of an organization really really depends on the attitude of the people with it and that is a principle that has not changed in Inmobi you tell about 20 20 plus years i don't think Inmobi is going to change for the next 30 plus years no matter how much technology trends are going to come you'll always find it us on the right side of it because the people that we have are the people that have that entire attitude of being on the right side of any change so both Mohit and I we are so humbled by having this crew with us that can literally take any shift in the industry and bring us on the right side of that shift fairly quickly and that hasn't changed uh you know so tomorrow if something else changes that's fine i'm not worried about it because i can i can be on the right side of that change fairly quickly

Mohit Saxena - Co-Founders, InMobi: yeah i think two things that i will add is uh you know i think when you start early on and we were quite young at that time as well not that we are not young now we are young we're still young so i think you know you you're so eager you want to do things so fast and i think you learn the value of patience you know all the good things in the world they require patience they require deep thinking so i think i i think we are much more wiser now and we know sometimes if you are trying to do it uh you know as you said you you want to blow the world with some new new product and glance we know it's going to take time and we have that capital in terms of patients right now so i think that is what i call a institutional maturity that we have achieved as a company and the second part that i would say is uh your ability to deal with failure you know because failure can bring you down you know initially i remember if our system goes down once for first 30 minutes you you are paralyzed you are sad you know why it happened versus that you know you go that failure will happen but how quickly i come out of it react to it and then make sure it doesn't happen again i think our ability to deal with failure has tremendously improved as an organization as i was saying we really trust people we believe in them and we give them the charter to go out and try things nobody's going to hang you up uh for the dry outside you know you can you can fail as many times as you want as long you are as long as you are giving 110 percent of it and and and we are quite surprised you know what people do if with that kind of fearlessness in their mind.

Dhruv Sharma: I'm also curious how you yeah i do have one uh maybe you make there are closing questions so you know um in the different chapters of Inmobi up to this point and we know the book is still being written how have your investors stepped up and been you know helpful and useful what was it like in the early days what is it like you know again through the various chapters.

Abhay Singhal - Co-Founder, InMobi: Look our investors have been you know we wouldn't be here without the support of you know so many people who believed in us believed in our mission uh supported us with capital supported us with connections supported us with introductions and and and and so many things i mean i i still remember our good old uh we were the very first investment of Mumbai Angels back in 2006 and 2007 and when they were giving us the kind of money that they were giving each one of them was very nervous because it was also their first investment and and for them to be backing us and and backing us until now is just tremendous i still remember bunch of those people they and Inmobi's previous business model was a search-based business model and they used to come with us stand in the high street go to the shops sell with us etc etc so i i have seen the entire investment ecosystem in the world or especially in India also grow over the last 20 years along with us and of course availability of capital is much easier now than what it was probably earlier but the capital is also now coming with various different colors there are investors that are willing to go all out and and and help you there are large investors which are largely financial investors and they can open up the markets for you very differently and and so on so forth i mean SoftBank was one of our best supporters in making us go global and this was before SoftBank really became a vision fund and and really started to come along whether it is with glance i mean we have gotten funding from Google which has helped us you know in in so many different ways Jio Bukesh bhai and Reliance is an inspiration to learn from on how to create global businesses and businesses at scale so i would say that look investors are what investors are they are in the business of investing and getting the returns but at the end of the day investors also believe that it's the founders and the executives in the company that are really trying to run and we've been incredibly lucky that every one of the investors that we have had has kind of never doubted us and always let us truly be imaginative in terms of our global growth.

Utsav Somani: All right, Mohit Abe, this was phenomenal. Thank you so much for making this special for us. Thank you for having us on this great thing. All the best.

Ronnie Screwvala - Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad: Thank you very much.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. All right Dhruv, it's you and me. I think there are a couple of things that we should cover given that we were at episode number 100 now. What has been the experience for you like?

Dhruv Sharma: It's been fun. You know there's this thing I think I tell you every once in a while which is it's a little bit like running which is you know every time the camera comes on and we start start streaming live it doesn't get easier maybe you get better a little bit you know with every stream.

Utsav Somani: But I mean for our listeners who are tuning in I mean for the first time or seeing this let's describe the feeling like 15 minutes before the show, 30 minutes before the show, on the day of the show. I think that'll be phenomenal for them to just see what it feels like doing a live stream show Monday, Wednesday, Friday every time at four o'clock and trying to be on the ball because I mean there are things that can go wrong. We've all discussed like camera, electricity, lights, flickers.

Dhruv Sharma: I literally had this camera drop in my hand once you remember I had to hold it.

Utsav Somani: So I mean let's take a I mean how is the day-to-day preparing for the show? What do we do before the show?

Dhruv Sharma: You know what I'd say is the show is a little bit like an iceberg product in that you know you only see the surface there's a lot that goes into the making of each episode. I would actually say that for each minute of screen time maybe there's 10 minutes of prep that not us but our team puts in whether it's Yashwin bringing the guests in or preparing the brief and then another maybe 20 minutes for each minute of you know show time for you know after the show to create all of those fantastic clips with you know with our colleague Pranav and others and of course Ashok, our producer who ensures that the stream goes live and there have been others who've been a part of our journey as well. You guys know who you are. Everyone's equally special and then yeah as for us I don't know what it's like for you but for me 15 minutes before the show I'm kind of like I'm a little nervous obviously because you know we know who the guests are but we're still trying to figure out what to ask them. One of the things I've started doing more recently itself is of course we have the benefit of a great brief but I just sort of leave if there's something I find interesting about the company or the guests we're going to invite I just leave some words on a piece of paper so we can string questions as we go along and hopefully some of them benefit our listeners and again the show would be nothing without the listeners and of course the founders

Utsav Somani: and we've done this for 100 episodes 200 plus guests and I think 150 or 160 companies and funds and other sort of funds and VCs and solo GPs and all kinds of different people that we've covered from the ecosystem even top operators we've done one master class as well and some of the episodes have been just phenomenal we've had somebody as young as 18 Suhas to somebody as old and experienced as KK sir from Mindtree so I think the range has been phenomenal we've also had Paddy Upton who was a mental conditioning coach for Virat Kohli, Gukesh the chess champion

Dhruv Sharma: and many others I mean just I love speaking with the young founders by the way whether it was you know the one you mentioned or Naman for that matter or Shripurna or all of the ones who are in their early 20s etc.

Utsav Somani: We speak about India's future as well right and we've not focused on just one particular category we've run D2C, we've done deep tech, we've done SAS, we've done AI, we've covered so many different things that it's always good to have so much perspective we've also put out the transcripts on our website as well so you can see and read through all of this use your favorite AI LLM chatbot and parse all of them through and you can extract some learning for yourself apart from the clips that we put out on our social media as well yeah but I mean Monday, Wednesday, Friday like I mean the first thing you wake up you know that something is coming like it's a show then you go to the calendar or notion and prepare for it some shows feel very different like today was episode 100 I mean this has been in the making for over a month I mean kudos to Yashvi and the team for pulling this off I think just the sheer nervousness I mean we've spoken to somebody who's running a listed firm I mean Ronnie Shruvala has produced some of the most iconic movies he's running and just a solid personality in general and in movie the first unicorn of India two others which are filing for an IPO or going to file for an IPO so imagine the context switching that is needed to chat with five different people on a live on a live stream show man like I think it's a lot of people don't appreciate that fact enough so that's why I want to keep on repeating it the original inspiration I was in touch with somebody from TBPN and honestly they mastered the show it feels like a sports center slash ESPN for tech and we wanted to give India something like this because you see these fine edited podcasts which sometimes don't tell you the raw unfiltered version that we want to bring out onto you and that for us was key

Dhruv Sharma: that I think that's the key insight that you had right which is when you first and I if you'd like I can share the story of how I got pulled into this project which is really funny I don't think I don't think we'll get to that story in just a bit but that's the original insight you had right so which is that there are all of these headlines that we are seeing across the publications and then there are podcasts that get into origin stories that are really backward looking and there's nothing in between so how do we sort of go beneath the surface of those headlines and that's really been our endeavor with this and the thing with TBPN right of course great inspiration by the way it wasn't until the first month or two of the show that I even saw what a TVPN stream

Utsav Somani: looks like yeah but they're slick I mean they do this full-time of course yeah very refined product but I think for us the idea was not to build something that's too heavily edited because not even edited I think the idea was not to build a product I mean you go to our first stream you'll see all the errors and issues and the bad screen that we had now we have a proper background and better camera and better mic and better setup just so that we think visual appeal does matter to some extent if you're giving a product then it should feel nice for people who are giving you the time and the effort you're paying with your time basically to tune in to TON and we want to be respectful of that so that's why we define the product to a point where at least it's appeasing

Dhruv Sharma: to the eyes and I think like with the TBPN reference right like I think it's obvious that TBPN is not going to come to India and cover news in India and so we borrowed from TBPN what TBPN likely borrowed from ESPN and you know that's the way you know you you build stuff over a long period of time 100 percent how did we get you onto the show Dhruv okay so funny story now I have my version of this maybe you have a different version of this but if I recall once you saw TBPN we'd started chatting about what TBPN is but I thought it was another cool thing that you'd seen and sure I was supportive but I had no idea that you know you're actually going to pull something similar off for India and then I remember I got added to a slack channel and I had no idea why I was there and then I remember this one time when Hyrox happened last year in July I was coming back from the race and on that slack channel you sent me a poster which has my picture on it and you're like what does the poster look like I'm like the poster looks nice but what are you doing with my picture and next thing you say that the equipment is here you know come home and pick it up and here we are episode 100 the reason for

Utsav Somani: that is that I know Dhruv because of AngelList India and we spent a few years working together at AngelList India and also after that as well we maintained a good working relationship and we become personal friends also and you can see the difference in our questions like I am more financial pointy chill casual at some point Dhruv is very well read like I think he's read probably more books on more different topics than I can probably even if I start now I won't be able to complete Ashok cut the stream I think this is very I mean he's so well resourced and I mean you can see as an audience I think you can tell the difference in our quality and depth of questions as well so I cannot imagine doing this with somebody else apart from Dhruv and truly I that's why I didn't check before putting a photo on the picture but you know honestly

Dhruv Sharma: also I think the real stars of this show are and always will be the founders and also the listeners who you know who devote their time and that's why I mean you know I mean nothing against Shark Tank, Shark Tank is amazing but it's not clear to me why the stars of that show are not the founders but the sharks I mean you know that's for entertainment to be honest I

Utsav Somani: think that role but I think Shark Tank probably have like anything yeah so I think I mean of course it educates people in some format but I think most people tune in for the entertainment aspect of things but I think here we're trying to give you a 20-minute segment with the founder who's probably made news recently or will make news in the recent times or in the near future and just break down the headlines in their industries like I mean if you tuned into even 50% of their episodes you're probably learning more about the state of affairs of startups, deep tech, company building in India than you have maybe while even doing an MBA for that matter to be honest I think it is pretty exciting. TON is a capsule MBA. Yeah all right so here's to the next 100 episodes of TON. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll take a short break. This two and a half hour stream was definitely something that the team has worked really hard to bring to life but so let's take a week off. We'll see you next Wednesday. Thank you so much again for all the love and support that you've given us. Thank you. Bye-bye.