Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: This is a test. Hello listeners, welcome to the Monday stream of TUN. It's good to be back and my colleague and co-host Dhruv was doing a very good job. So thanks for tuning in. And yeah, today we're going to talk about content and minus one to zero journeys with our guests today. So let's start with the guest, uh, first guest, uh, Anirudh, welcome to the show.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yeah. What's up? Good to be here.

Utsav Somani: Congrats on the engagement post you clarified just before the show.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yeah. No, thanks for that.

Utsav Somani: Uh, any ideas of, uh, when you're going to get married next year, enjoy the worship period.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Uh, yeah, I was saying it feels more important than a fundraiser announcement.

Utsav Somani: It is. It is. That was a beautiful picture as well. So congrats to you both, uh, for listeners that hearing about Pepper for the first time, you've done a rebrand as well. What does Pepper do?

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: So, uh, we're basically a content led organic growth engine, which is helping mid-market enterprise companies show up more on LLMs. So we started off from being a content company and evolved into content led outcomes. So what we realized was a lot of content we were doing pre-GPT, we produced about half a million content assets, and most of that was for SEO. And we realized that what if we own the entire outcome from not just content production, but also to help companies scale their organic search and organic footprint. So anything to do with content led growth for an enterprise, that's where Pepper comes in. And we use this combination of human plus AI agents, which kind of work together to deliver enterprise services in a never like seen before manner.

Utsav Somani: And you were early into observing this trend, right? Because you wrote, I mean, one of the tweet songs that went viral, where somebody broke down how you've approached, uh, Sam Altman before, uh, I think that GPT was big. I think it was 2020. And now you've built and scaled to a 10 million ARR business as well. And you've got access early. So give us, how did you, how were you ahead of the curve?

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yeah, no. So it's a, we've been around now seven years, uh, as a company and, uh, our original avatar was more around being a marketplace for content production. And like I said, having done half a million content pieces, pre AI era gave us a lot of exposure to content workflows, uh, you know, obviously a huge manual process that we'd automated through one of our platforms, but, uh, a very early insight into GPT-3. Uh, in fact, I remember, uh, this was about December, 2020, December, 2020, when, you know, we had just raised money from Lightspeed and one of our investors, uh, sent us a tweet saying GPT-3 just launched and they had fundamentally invested in a content production business. And they were like, how are you ready? How are you preparing for this? And we didn't have an answer. And, you know, we wanted to move.

Utsav Somani: Can you disclose who was the investor?

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: This was Hemant Mohapatra sending me the tweet about GPT-3 launch. And I was like, you know, they just put in money. Good thing is money's wired. So we now have this money to figure things out. But, uh, we move really fast. Right. Then I cold emailed Greg Brockman, um, who's the co-founder of OpenAI and, uh, told him, hey, this is a use case and so on. And we were the first 50 users to ever get access to GPT-3 worldwide. And then I also went to Bay Area in 2021, met Sam Altman, uh, in person, um, kind of, you know, they were also, you know, uh, at least in the Bay Area circles, they were starting to get a bit more popular. And this was a time when Copy.ai, Jasper.ai, all of these big companies were also, you know, starting to grow and scale in one year. So we, what we did was we start continuing with the marketplace business, but we launched a SaaS tool called PepperType.ai. It was a short form AI content generator app that went from zero to half a million users in one year. And, uh, that was crazy scale. We saw we were number two on G2's top AI rating softwares globally, where Grammarly was number one. We were number two and, uh, Jasper was number three. And, uh, obviously that space erupted, but very soon we learned that, uh, once ChatGPT launched, it felt a lot more like a commoditized wrapper. And you, especially as every enterprise is now realizing, right. Uh, we took a fundamental call as a company that we wanted to build more for mid-market enterprises, which meant that AI had to become part of workflow and how we deliver outcomes. So I think that became a very, you know, critical part of how we then started going far more deeper into AI. Today Pepper has about 500 plus customized AI apps, which run for over 250 plus large enterprises that are hyper-personalized, uh, workflows that drive content operations at scale. So if you see any content that's written in a phone page app, including push notifications and app content, or anything you see on Zepto in terms of the performance creatives or push notification in Telugu, all of that is being powered by, you know, Pepper's apps, which is fundamentally writers and editors, turbocharged with AI, creating content at scale. So we do see a huge, you know, um, scale up now, and we are now bringing these workflows, not just from content, but we're evolving that to SEO. And we plan to expand this across every marketing service that an enterprise uses. We are agencies and so on and trying to productize what an agentic form of a marketing advertising agency looks like. So the model and the visions evolved a lot from just content to full-stack marketing outcomes. So when you see A16Z or General Catalyst talking about AI native legal firms or accounting firms, we are trying to build the new age version of an AI native WPP or Publicis. And collectively these agencies do $75 billion of revenue today, disruptable through the model we are trying to build.

Dhruv Sharma: Anirudh, that's a lot of threads to pull on, but how have the conversations with CMOs, how have those conversations evolved? I believe you guys also do dinners and roundtables. Yeah.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: So we do 48 dinners a year. So, you know, safe to say we meet 500 CMOs and that's kind of the power of how we decide to build our product roadmap and company strategy and approach. What we're hearing is CMOs care about outcomes. See today, the biggest, you know, play where AI has immediate value that the boardrooms also subjecting pressure on is marketing because they suddenly see a huge spend that they want to obviously optimize and automate through AI. So CMOs are being told to do more with less. So they want partners, which can be very outcome oriented. And that's why, you know, we had a choice between us to either become a full stack SaaS company and become a full stack AI native company and a full stack AI native company in enterprise marketing warrants outcomes where can we get them that organic traffic lift? Can we get them to show up on LLMs? Can we increase demand generation and pipeline? Can we drive more conversions and activations? So the nature of our conversations are very strategic. And to give you some sense, our average ticket sizes range from $100,000. That's where they start a year enterprise ACVs and go as up to half a million dollars.

Utsav Somani: So that's really interesting because you just said that you want to connect it with outcomes, right? So I think it becomes very real because if the cost of generation keeps on going down and there can be infinite content, I mean, the outcome is the only thing that matters in the end. Yes.

Dhruv Sharma: And, you know, pre-AI, post-AI, how have user expectations changed in the sense that, you know, earlier you heard content, you primarily thought text. Now even you guys have gone multimodal. So how has that journey been?

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: See, I think this has been the writing on the wall for quite some time and it's very much linked to content consumption patterns. Video is huge. We at Pepper are betting very heavily on what AI native video and AI native creative approaches looks like. Because brands out there now, like I said, everyone wants to do more with less. So people want, people have those tools, have those abilities to accelerate. What we're seeing is the benchmark for quality is still going up because what's happened is he has also democratized it so easy that there's a lot of AI slop out there. So you'd be surprised to see a lot of our customers come to us and say they want humans in the loop. They're clear that I want better premium and quality, and I'll pay higher for that because there's so much slop in the market.

Dhruv Sharma: And everything that you read or see now, how much of that is AI generated versus AI? I don't know the word you guys use, but augmented, I guess.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yes. See, I think fundamentally everything, almost 80, 90% is AI assisted because the good thing is people are smart enough. People are using AI to generate scripts, concept notes, anything, right? When you're also crafting an email, I'm sure you're not spending time of an hour writing it down, right? You want to get your first draft ready and moving. So I think AI tools are getting you to 25, 35% of what you want to get out already. So I would say everything is AI assisted anyhow. AI generated, it's a hit and a miss. And I'll tell you why. When people think only from creation perspective, it feels very easy. But when you connect it with outcomes, you'll see only AI generated content doesn't perform. Like at least for SEO, I can tell you purely AI generated articles, you see a spike in traffic and then it goes down because machines recognize that it is bot generated, very little human value, they're not ascribing to it. So there we realized you have to actually, and that's why the debate we are having is not about content production and the process that used to be there two years back. Now we are saying, what does it drive from an outcome standpoint? And I think that has value.

Utsav Somani: And the term that you have mentioned in a blog post that Dhruv also shared with me as well, GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. So that's the next evolution of SEO, right? Because Google PageRank will not matter that much. Google itself shows the AI mode now. And for one of the points that stood out, that context matters more than your PageRank and actually the backlinking and everything that you do. So maybe explain that for our listeners.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yeah, totally. So Generative Engine Optimization, we call it GEO. There are a hundred terms like AEO, LMO, there's something called agentic experience platform, which is a new version of what the website is. See, consumer behavior has changed. Today, everyone is going out on LLMs because LLM is like that, you know, smart friend you have that you can access to without feeling ashamed about knowing something or not. And today people are very specific about what they want. The hyper-personalized searches have scaled up at a very crazy pace. And if you already have a chat GPT subscription, your LLM already knows 10 things more about you than a generic search on Google will ever get you towards. So the way consumer search has changed, brands need to change how they approach search as a lever as well. So today, historically, what everyone did was they would have been companies who would have created hundreds and thousands of articles on the internet and stuffed everything with keywords and all of that. And they would have created 3000 word long form articles. Now, the interesting part is no one cares about reading a 3000 word article. People want 15 second summaries or 5 second TLDRs. They want a crisper content. And you'll see platforms like Reddit are seeing huge scale, right? Because Reddit fundamentally scaled up because of the leverage it had with UGC. People also care a lot about who's used this product. What is the value it's bringing in? So social signaling suddenly has a lot of value. And you'll also see when you search something on LLM, you start seeing infographics and videos. So I don't know if you know, Instagram is indexable on Google. That just happened recently. And especially because Google has YouTube, which is its own company. YouTube links are starting to get embedded in AIO views. Now, LLMs can go through a video, create a transcript of that and directly point you towards the part of the video it wants you to watch. It won't make you watch the entire video. So fundamentally now the transcripts are in a sense, machine readable and machine readable, but there's no transcript concept actually drove. It's created on the go. So even if it is normal video, the LLM is auto creating a transcript, reading what part and phrase match happens, and then trying to correlate it with what you are. And as LLMs become better, even things like, you know, facial expressions, emotion, you know, where you from, all of those heuristics will become more personalized and personalized. So to you and me, it will give us an Indian, you know, reference compared to a foreign global reference. So all of this is changing. Now imagine, because this is already out there. It's not like it's the algorithms and the LLMs already getting this out there. A brand now has to re-update hundreds and thousands of their pages on their website to become LLM ready.

Dhruv Sharma: Anirudh, I have a question for you.

Utsav Somani: Yes. Does it mean become LLM ready? Like maybe, I don't know, if you open a Flipkart website to buy, say, I don't know, a flask, what do they do differently? Or what can our listeners do differently to get more traffic to their sites? Of course, apart from working with Pepper.

Dhruv Sharma: I really want to add to that question, please. Which is that if you and listeners want to, you know, come to Pepper for a workshop or a clinic and just try and understand how they can start appearing in AI searches or improve their visibility. Could you do something for them? Can we offer them something together?

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yes, if your employee size is 500 employees and upwards, we are more than happy to take you. But yes, we can support. And that's the part of our strategy technology talent model, where Pepper is consulting. We have the technology to implement it and then also have the talent to scale content production up. But I'm seeing what's up question, right? See, as brands start to think about and for a user, right? Zepto has an MCP with chargeability now. So Zepto has an integration. Walmart and Target also have an integration. Now, imagine earlier I was creating a grocery list and maybe let me talk about a metropolitan evolved user. There are different variations going on. I tell it that, hey, this is create my grocery list. I like gluten-free food, say ABC, more heuristics and so on. Now tell me all the products in the market that are, you know, endorsed by people who have already used it and has created value for them. Could be weight loss or could be whatever. It will start curating a list. Now, how is it curating this list? It's going through on all these Amazon and all these D2C websites. It's going through all the reviews people have left on Reddit, Quora, Medium, and so on. It's going through LinkedIn posts. It's going through Instagram and TikTok videos and YouTube videos. And then fetching all of this content, which is both owned as well as third-party. And LLMs are preferring third-party mode because that's more endorsement of your own, you know, thing. And then putting this together. Now, and you'll be surprised, some of our biggest customers who are embracing these GEO services from Pepper are actually FMCG, CPG companies, which are some of the biggest brands out there in India, who are now suddenly caring a lot about what LLMs perceive their brand as. So actually, GEO has evolved from SEO or a number-driven discussion to actually a brand sentiment discussion, because you don't want the LLM to say that, Hey, use this product versus this product, because these are the five negative reviews or things about this. So I think it's a much larger problem. And every brand out there in the world now faces this very important choice of how LLMs perceive them. Because that's how a user will, in face value, take what their brand has to, what the brand means for the internet.

Utsav Somani: And what LLMs or infra players are you working with right now?

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: We work with 10 LLM providers at this point, all the top 10. So we work with ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Cloud. We also work with DeepSeek because some of our customers are based out of Singapore and seeing growth. So all top LLMs that matter in the industry. And the interesting part is how these LLMs operate is also different. Perplexity has different weightages for something. ChatGPT has something. Our recommendation to a brand is Google does 20 billion searches a day. ChatGPT does 2 billion searches a day. Perplexity does 25 million searches a day. So if you can optimize for Google and ChatGPT, the rest will get taken care of. Market is covered.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. Interesting. And I mean, do you have any preference for which model works best or that's always evolving and you keep...

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: That's always, there's always evolving and you know, it's a bit so fickle that...

Utsav Somani: Something might be better for video or something. So it's just always a different...

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Yeah, it's fundamentally so fickle right now. So that's why our advice to brands is go heavy on video because YouTube and video search is going to drive a lot of the growth and will power a lot of those results. Restructure fundamentally all of your content to make it LLM ready. There are checklists, summaries, to-dos that you can do. Be active on these platforms like Reddit, Quora and so on, but not like pay them money to get you out there. Build community. Like building community has a lot of voice because suddenly you have active endorsers of people in your segment. So platforms like Reddit have huge value there. These are some of the things that we're advocating.

Utsav Somani: Amazing. Anirudh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yes.

Anirudh Singla - Pepper: Thank you so much.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you, Anirudh.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners. Our next guest is here. Prateek of South Park Commons. Let's welcome Prateek to the show. Prateek.

Utsav Somani: So for our listeners who are hearing about South Park Commons for the first time, please describe what does the business do?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Sure. At the core, we are a community of people exploring what's next. And for most high quality builders and operators, there are often times in our lives when we go through these, I would say, slightly confusing, bewildering times where we are trying to figure out what is it that we want to invest the next 5, 7, 10 years of our life to. And specifically in a country like India, where talented builders are supposed to have answers and not questions. They're supposed to have clarity and not chaos and confusion. I believe and we do believe here that we need to have a space which is both intellectually safe and emotionally secure. For people to be able to explore in a meaningful way. And typically people come into the community as members. They spend anywhere between, let's say, on a median of about 6 months in the community exploring what do they want to do. The answer to that might be, I want to start a company. I want to join somebody else on their mission. Or you know what, at times you've gone through intense journeys and all you need is time to rest and recover. So the answer to that might be, you know what, I'm still tired and burnt out from whatever my previous adventure was and I want a little more time to rest and recover. And frankly, all three of them are good answers for us, right? But if people are starting a company, our expectation is that they will pitch to us, right? We don't have a roofer, we don't have a roofer. But it's more of a gentleman's handshake that if you're starting something and if you enjoyed your time, you'll pitch to us. And if we are as excited about what the person is building as they are, we would commit with our capital. So we typically commit a million dollars to a team. 400k at the pre-seed stage, 600k at the, at least 600k at seed stage. And look, some of our members are also very well known in the ecosystem and they might just raise, just off the bat, a decent sized seed round. And there, in those cases, we'll also possibly come into the seed round as well. Yeah, so that's our promise for you.

Utsav Somani: And what does the application process look like? And how does acceptance work as well at SPC?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Great question. So the access to the community is either by invite or application. Applications to the community membership are always open, right? So people can just go to southparkcommons.com slash apply and share some details about them. And then we get back to them typically within 7 to 14 days on how we are thinking about that application. And then we take it from there.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of acceptance, do you have a particular preference for technical, non-technical? I mean, there's so many different questions. It's just amazing what you've built. And Dhruv and I were recently having this conversation because A16Z put out this new community initiative that Eric is leading with David called A16Z Build, which sounded very similar to what you are doing at SPC. I'm sure you guys saw that as well.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Sure. So the way... Look, we have a very high preference for strong builders. Now, strong builders in today's point in time often are technical, right? And by technical, you don't really... It's not somebody who's coding here and now. But somebody who understands technology is curious about that, right? And is able to leverage that to solve the problems that they're excited about, right? So that's one. We have a lot of bias for exhibited excellence in the past. The way we think about us is that we are a zone of excellence. So in that context... So there are people who exhibited excellence in the past who are... So a large number of our members are second-time founders or people... And actually founders who have also had some exits. So our founders have raised anywhere north of $150 million for the last startup to possibly have had a mildly successful exit. And now they want to go after something that's widely successful. Then we have a bunch of execs from startups that have done really well, right? People who are fundamentally responsible for the success of a lot of the startups that you see today, right? And now what's happening in the Indian context is a large number of startups are seeing liquidity either by IPO or some kind of other exit event. And the leadership and talented builders in these places are now at a place where fundamentally their professional adventures can be dealing from their immediate financial outcomes, right? And then they're truly free to take really wild swings. Then we have some young and cracked builders who are young but are exceptionally spiky on a few things, right? Either curiosity or build... Have been in some kind of a deep exploration for a while in their lives and have done things which are very, very interesting. We actually also have sports people in the community, right? So one of my favorite members is Somdev Dev Varman who played tennis for India, who's India's top-rank ATP player ever in men, right? He was AP rank 61. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of diversity, right? And that's my design. We do believe that excellence feeds off by itself, right? And high talent density attracts higher talent density. And the best way to actually draw inspiration is to get inspired from people who are fundamentally better than you are on some axis, right? And that really pushes you forward. So that's the broad idea. Surround yourself with great people. Pursue whatever you're pursuing with a lot of curiosity, ambition and urgency. And another thing that I do talk to people about, right? Look, India is now at a place where we are beyond building X for India. When people like me started their journey in consumer internet, right? I'm talking about more about 2010, 2011, right? Most of the startups and even the one that we were building at that point in time, Zovi, he was Wankel for India, right? And you could see a lot of people in the Indian startup ecosystem who were bringing a certain form factor to India because India was just coming online. And all of those need states were going to become very interesting for Indian consumers. Now, what we are seeing is a lot of first principles sinking, right? Because the economy is larger, the talent pool is deeper. A lot of people, because of the reasons we just talked about, are fearless and are far more generative because when you look at the opportunity in here and now, there are many problem statements that might feel very interesting. One of the things that we, one of the roles that we have in this ecosystem stems from the belief that ambition, creativity and ability to be generative is a function of your own personal vantage point, right? And often that vantage point, and that's the reason why I say me in 2010 is fundamentally very different from me in 2025, right? Because I have seen so much and my vantage point fundamentally has transformed. One of the reasons why South Park Commons is a global community is that we do believe that our members should get that vantage point, right? We do encourage a lot of our members to travel to SF, to spend time in from our SF in New York offices because that ecosystem works at a different cadence. The level of ambition, the belief that everything will be rewritten in the world is very deeply held out there, right? And it's amazing when people go there and come back and have a different level of, at least...

Utsav Somani: You point out things, yeah. Like mind expanding.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Mind expanding experiences.

Utsav Somani: Few times and it's been always... I mean, the ambition levels are definitely higher. But like you rightly said, as liquidity comes into the ecosystem, a lot of people will take the wide swings as well. And look at Deepinder Goel as well. I think he's doing something fascinating with Temple. And of course, he's receiving flack for it because people just have enough time on Twitter to rip things apart. But I mean, you've got to take the shots. Even with LAT Aerospace, what he's doing, I think it's phenomenal.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: 100%. You know, I do believe that only dreamers take the world forward, right? You can be a skeptic. And I think, yeah, you can be a great... You can get good followers on Twitter because of that. But if you're actually pushing the ecosystem forward, you are fundamentally a dreamer at your own...

Dhruv Sharma: I think if there's someone who's watching this, who's, let's say, either mid-career or a senior person navigating a career transition. Now, given what you do, you've been very close to the journeys of people whose chapter one or chapter two has been phenomenally successful. You're sort of catching them in those blank pages between chapters, right? Can you share some stories of people's deeply, you know, people who on the outside are supremely successful, but they're deeply personal struggles through those periods just so that anyone else navigating a career transition can also maintain heart and come out stronger?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Sure. You know, I'll not take names, right?

Dhruv Sharma: But... No names.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: I will... Actually, I'll give you my own personal example, right? You know, in my... When I moved on from Scriptbox in 22, one of the reasons why I did not start up immediately was that I had been a long journey for seven years, right? And I did want to spend more time with family, right? And I thought, you know what? I'll let me take a... Let me become an exec at a listed company, right? And that's what I became. And somewhere in 2024, I knew that what I enjoyed the most was possibly slightly different from my immediate context, right? And I was doing my own minus 120, as we call it as SPC parlance, but without SPC, by the way, right? And pretty much doing a similar track, trying to hang out with smart people under the radar, creating my own cocoon of people who I could be vulnerable with, right? And it's just serendipity that I ran into Binny and Aditya and we decided to start South Park Commons here, right? And this is one example, right? In terms of you going through... You go through your own Brownian motion of sorts before you get to a point of conviction. And I've seen this over and over again, right? People come in and these are people who are very well respected in the ecosystem, right? Very well known names. If you go to LinkedIn and see South Park Commons, members at South Park Commons India, you'll see a bunch of names, right? And many of them came in with ideas which were not immediately inspiring, right? They felt like, you know, run of the mill, just a little bit of incremental thinking on what they were already doing. And as they came in, they first... And we have this internally believed that you have to discard the good for the great, right?

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, you guys talk about that a lot. I believe even Ruchi says, you know, there's no point... Life is too short to spend time working on the wrong problem or wrong idea.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, for example, one person was thinking of building an enterprise security, right? And now they have raised a reasonable size seed round, right, for building in professional alts, right? So that's, I would... I can talk about multiple such stories, right? People came in with something and actually have gotten onto something that seems to be very interesting and exciting.

Utsav Somani: I think it's a good point to plug in this blog post that Dhruv was sharing with me on idea generation. Dhruv, please bring that up.

Dhruv Sharma: I will have... Yes, just give me a moment. I'm going to... So that's a slightly different perspective from the one you have... Got it, I'm trying to locate it. Now I've found it, yes. So, you know, many years ago, Sam Altman had written a post about how Vicey had tried an experiment when he was president. And of course, if it's Vicey, we're talking about people who are generally 25 years of age. I'm going to quickly quote Sam Altman. He said, Vicey once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. And then he says, I think every company in this no idea track failed. And then he says a few other things.

Utsav Somani: So apart from this as well, I think the concept of idea generation, that minus one to zero. So the whole article in the blog post in itself, I think, how does one know that it's a bad idea? Like, I mean, Uber at the point of the pitch deck said the market itself could be a billion dollars, right? Or Shopify, like, I mean, there were like 50,000 stores maybe and they said, even if you capture 50% of the market, it's not going to be large enough. So how does one go about validating an idea or getting to the point where they even have an idea worth validating or that irrational belief? Like so many different thoughts that you have to balance at the same time. So at SPC in Bangalore, like how have you seen founders do these thinking exercises?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: No, that's a great question. Look, and having been a founder for long enough and having been a startup for long enough, right? It's a hard journey. It's a long journey. And you don't become a founder to create something of value. You fundamentally become a founder because you're obsessed about a problem, right? And there's something about building a solution or changing the world in the way it functions in a particular space. It's what is driving you. Of course, you want to make money. Of course, you want to be successful. Those things are given like for any person who's ambitious, those things are table stakes, right? You are nobody's out there. Nobody's achieved professional Nirvana doing this, right? But for most founders where they find energy is in areas which are authentic to them. Areas that they have a unique perspective on, right? And areas where they have possibly seen the future which others haven't seen yet, right? And there's a reason to believe in that future. And that's the reason why they'll do irrational things, right? Otherwise, if you are in it just to generate wealth, I think there are many better ways of generating wealth than just being a startup founder, right? Given the success rates which are there. And hence, I think what is a good idea and what is a great idea is very personal, right? What is great for me might be fundamentally very different from what is great for someone else, right? Because eventually, each one of us have our own unique superpowers. And each one of us have our own lived context. And whatever we want to do is often a function of what we have done earlier, right? And what are the deeply held beliefs that we personally have. So eventually, it has to be authentic to yourself. And if it is something that you are fundamentally excited by and you have a unique vantage point on, right? I have seen that most successful founders have a way of getting the world excited about what they're building, right? And I would say we are very, very vulnerable to founders who are charismatic and who are going to be like the exceptional builders out there. So yeah, so that's our lens of looking at what people are building.

Utsav Somani: And do you want to share some stats on what the community looks like now in Bangalore and globally as well?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Sure. So we are based out of three offices, right? Which is SAF New York, Bangalore, right? And specifically in Bangalore, we've had close to about 80, 85 members over the last 16, 17 months, right? And we have backed north of 15 teams and startups, right? And a bunch of them have gone ahead and raised for on rounds from all the well-known funds in the ecosystem, right? And I think globally, we've had close to about north of 1000 members, right?

Utsav Somani: And yeah, and- There are no economics involved in the sense that when you're accepted as a member, you don't have to pay a fee. So you don't have to, I mean, you mentioned there's no promise of equity also.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Yeah, so when you become a member, there's no economics, right? We do not, yeah, we do not pay anything. We do not expect to be paid for this, right?

Utsav Somani: And there are dinners and events that you organize or there's more structure?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: That's a great question. So what is membership, right? So we are an in-person community, right? So we do expect people to spend at least three days a week in office, right? We have a workspace. So when we say, we have a workspace in New York, in SF and in Bangalore, right? People come in every week and we are a build-first zone, right? So everybody who's here is often building and is possibly building in public instead of community, right? And the idea is to add momentum to your exploration. You take your time, but a little quickly, right? So you explore, you try and figure out who in the world is possibly gone over the same piece of the land, looking at what the opportunity is and you collaborate, you engage and you show up with a lot of intensity, right? So that's the fun factor. You have access to- Is there internal tooling that sort of tracks all of this and helps people make introductions apart from just a regular- Yes, we have used both third-party tools and we develop tools on our own, right? We actually have an engineering team as well. That's just out of the Bangalore office now, right? And we are all builders and I would like to believe good quality builders. And the defining feature of all great builders is that they're lazy, right? They don't want to do the same stuff over and over again. So we are trying to put tech to work to both accelerate the way we do things and reduce the effort that it takes us to do the same stuff, yeah. So that's been the broad nature of both the community and the staff out here.

Dhruv Sharma: I wonder if you still have more time with Pratik, but I've been meaning to ask one question. Pratik, I've attended a couple of your events.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Oh, you have?

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, I have. And I absolutely love them. They're always very high energy and they have great turnout. How do you guys put events together? Give us a sense. And you also once had actual llamas at an event in, I think it was in New York, right? When you were hosting Zuckerberg.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Oh, yes, yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: In SF, yes.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Yeah, of course.

Dhruv Sharma: What's the secret behind SPC events?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: What's the secret behind SPC events? I think we have great guests and we have great hosts. So, and with a little bit of, I think when you add, put the two of them together, mostly you will have an engaging conversation. But jokes aside, you know, we, because we approach this as, with a builder first lens and all of us have ourselves been builders earlier and we've also gone through the ups and downs and the vicissitudes of a startup journey. It is possibly one of the reasons why many of these talks feel authentic and are authentic. And that's the reason why it resonates with a lot of people.

Utsav Somani: And just to close things out, Prateek, what are you most optimistic about and excited about, given that you're living with people who are experiencing the future, building the future, what are you most optimistic about for the next three years, five years?

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Oh, lots. Yeah, lots. You know what? I think when we started SPC, there was a common narrative in the Indian ecosystem that, you know, in the world of AI, we are possibly going to get left behind because we have not made the investments and public investments haven't happened. So the scientific community lags what has happened in both China and US. Also, it felt like Indian founders did not have the same vantage point, right? Which as you earlier referred, some of the ecosystems have. But I am seeing a new bunch of builders which is completely fearless and extremely creative, right? We've had one of our portfolio companies which is building the voice foundational layer, right, for the world. Maya Research. We have Arctis, which is building high altitude UAVs, right? And we have Aira, which is rewriting the entire insurance infrastructure for the insurance industry, right? What I have now seen is that there's a lot of belief in the founders that literally everything in the world is possibly going to change. And as founders and operators, the only opportunity that we have is when things are changing. Because if things are not changing, then what is, there are no cracks in the doors that we can push our way through, right? But when things are changing, suddenly everything starts looking interesting. And in general, our approach is also the same, right? We call it these axes of curiosity that, you know, only when things are changing, something underlying industries start changing and it creates opportunity for founders. And today I'm seeing a lot of interesting Indian founders going after opportunities without previous baggage, without any priors that are holding them back. Which is something that I'm personally very excited about. And we are becoming a large market and we have the talent pool that has the energy to go after large opportunities. And we have, thankfully, I think now where we are, South Park Commons five years back, I'm not sure how, whether I think we possibly would have been a little early into the market. But now where we are with a huge supply of talented builders coming more into the founder ecosystem, I think I'm personally very optimistic about what all of them are going to build.

Utsav Somani: Amazing Pratik. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Prateek Mehta - SPC India: Thanks for having me. Pleasure talking to both of you.

Utsav Somani: Cheers. Thank you. All right. So that's it from our guests today. We've got one quick thing that we saw on the timeline. I think it was discussed widely on the weekend as well. Starlink India has launched in India 34,000 one-time hardware, 8,600 per month, unlimited data. I don't know how much of this will work in India in terms of pricing, but the more interesting fact is the company behind it, SpaceX, is going to the public markets. Dhruv, share more.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. I mean, this news is about three, five days old, maybe itself. But the company was started in 2002. So it's been a 23-year-long journey. So some people say its time has come. And there was recently a second transaction, I believe, Baron Capital and a few others, some of the employers also sold some of the stock that they had. And some people say it was to level set the valuation for an upcoming IPO, potentially in mid to late 2026. It may spill over into 2027. Again, the speculation, or you're trying to refrain from speculation, but the speculation is that, you know, Elon wants the company to list as something close to a trillion and a half. And the last time such an event took place was in 2019 when Aramco listed. Of course, they both have, yes, they both have different sort of revenue levels. But SpaceX is two or three, you know, different businesses. There's of course the communications business that you just said, the Starlink business, there's the launch business. With Starship, the game changes a lot. And then Elon is going on and on and on about data centers in space and who else can install data centers in space. But SpaceX, I have some very interesting stats that I can possibly share about what it will take to get to Mars. Do you want to hear?

Dhruv Sharma: So Elon's calculations are that, you know, to set up base, we need to move roughly a million tons to Mars, which is going to take, he says, some 10,000 launches. And it'll take a thousand Starships because even though they're reusable, you can reuse them up to a maximum of 10 times. And each launch costs $100 million right now. And so just the launch cost alone of setting up, like setting up shop on Mars is going to be a trillion dollars.

Utsav Somani: So he's geared up for that. I mean, the market capital they're expecting is 1.5 trillion. And recently the tender offer that you mentioned closed at 800 billion. So of course, I think we'll get there in time. But Starlink is one of the interesting businesses. That's the one that you can touch and feel right now as a consumer. It accounts for 60, 65% of that revenue at 8.2 billion. The pricing for India is off just because I think, I mean, of course it's expensive hardware, but the aim is to increase rural connectivity. And I mean, a rural audience.

Dhruv Sharma: It's fascinating, right? That Starlink does more in revenue than the launch business itself, which gets so much noise around it.

Utsav Somani: I mean, it's just fascinating, right? When SpaceX's third Falcon launch failed in 2008, Founders Fund wrote them a $20 million check. And you still have that famous photo where Elon is analyzing all that. Those crash paths. Yeah. I mean, iconic picture, right? And I think the, I mean, any Elon company, I think we'll have that premium attached to it as well. Just like Tesla, just like his other companies when they go to the public market. But crazy for Founders Fund to put in approximately 10% of the 220 billion fund into this. I think they're gonna be sitting on a big, big gain.

Dhruv Sharma: And then it's Elon. He has experience taking companies public, sometimes taking them private, or even more with X. So with him.

Utsav Somani: And I mean, talking about Elon Musk for a while, X payments. Internally, all the X employees have access to it now. So I think by next year, he'll have license for all the states in the US and he'll probably launch X money as well. The handle X money is live on Twitter. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: Full circle moment. That's, that was X was his contribution to the PayPal effort, right?

Utsav Somani: Ecosystem as well. Yeah. All right. Let's close things up. We'll see you on Wednesday. Thank you so much for tuning in today, listeners. Bye-bye.