Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, today is a special one. We've got our first guest with us, Paddy Upton. I don't want to welcome him without introducing him. He's done so much. Just before the show started, we were talking about this new challenge that he's taken up, but I think he's been through so many different challenges and coached some of the most elite athletes of our times. So let's welcome him to the show. And I think we'll do a cinematic opening once he's here. Paddy, welcome to the show.

Paddy Upton: Awesome. What's up? Thanks so much for the invitation. Look forward to having this conversation and sharing with your listeners today.

Utsav Somani: Thank you for dialing in from South Africa. So I think let's start with cricket. 2011, India's chasing down 275. 31 for 2. Sachin and Sivag are back in the dressing room. What's happening in the mental... I mean, in the mental conditioning, coach, mind of yours, that you're in that room, that you prepared the men in blue for this particular moment when they actually have to perform and deliver and overcome this challenge. What was happening in that room?

Paddy Upton: You know, we identified about 13 months out from that final that no team had ever won a World Cup final at home up until that point. And the understanding was that it was probably because of the pressure of playing a World Cup sort of to that size at home. The pressure was just too much on the host nation. And we knew already that far out that if India did make the final, we'd be playing in the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, which is the loudest stadium in the world, just the way that's set up in the acoustics, in front of Sachin Tendulkar's home crowd in his last World Cup, his sixth and final. The only trophy he didn't have in his cabinet was the World Cup trophy in front of the most fanatical sports-watching population in the world. Never mind cricket-watching population, the Indian cricket followers. So that was going to represent the highest amount of pressure any cricket team had played under literally in the history of the game of cricket. There was no bigger game up until that point than India playing a 2011 final in Wankhede Stadium. So we had prepared players at every single team meeting, every practice, every game for 13 months. We used the language when we play the final on the 2nd of April or when we play the final in Mumbai. Not if, but when. And we never spoke about winning it. We spoke about playing it. So every single conversation we had with the team for 13 months in the lead-up was preparing for that moment. So when it arrived, there was no surprises. There was nothing special. It was business as usual. And as much as it can be business as usual for a final. And I think that was probably one of the master strokes that when players arrived there, there was nothing that they weren't significantly prepared for both strategically, game plan wise and the mental game. But of course, when you're chasing a title, you've got Sevag and Tendulkar out and you still got a fairly sizable target to chase. The pressure was really on. And we knew going into that final, we had two, what I would call high-pressure experts. Those are players who the highest amount of pressure gets the best out of them. There's very few highpressure experts in the world game. Most international athletes at an international level, I would sort of call them sort of medium pressure experts. And that just goes according to the natural bell curve. And our two highpressure experts in that team, well, I'll ask you, who are the, in 2011, who were the players who you think were the high-pressure experts? Has to be Dhoni, I think. Well, we definitely know it's Dhoni. He's proven over and over when the pressure is really on, he delivers at his highest level. And when the pressure is not on, Dhoni tends not to deliver his greatest performances. So absolutely, he's an obvious one. Was Dhoni. And there was a second. Who was the other one? Was it Virat? The other one was, no, it was Gambhir. Virat went on to become, and he is one of the greatest high-pressure experts in a chase now. And back then, he hadn't figured his game out. So he wasn't the one. Gambhir was the other person. So even though Sevag was a player who we knew if he batted for 15 overs, he takes the game away from the opposition because of how attacking he is. And of course, Sachin is the biggest name, the person that the most hearts in that stadium in India were following. So they were two very big names. But in terms of a chase in the final, Dhoni and Gambhir were the two players I wanted at the crease because I knew that's the best possible chance. And as it turned out, that's exactly what happened.

Utsav Somani: The two of them brought us home. And you mentioned something about Kohli is one of the best prepared minds to go into a match. I mean, he's probably not the most naturally talented batsman out there, but the Kohli level of preparedness for a match. What goes into becoming prepared like Kohli? And why I ask this, because founders also have to prepare for board meetings. They have to prepare for, I don't know, firing somebody in the team or many other challenges that they face on a company building journey as well. So what can founders learn from the Kohli level preparedness strategy?

Paddy Upton: I think that's a great question. And what they can learn is the simplicity of how important and valuable the basics are. So people look at Kohli and what he's delivered in the last 15 years. You know, he spent 10 years as one of the top three batsmen, world-ranked batsman in all three formats of the game for 10 consecutive years. So everybody looks to him as this unreachable superhuman superstar because his results are unreachable. Not many, I don't think anyone's going to do that for 10 consecutive years in all three formats of the game. But when you break it down, you're quite right. He's not even the most talented batsman in his suburb of Mumbai. He doesn't sweep. He doesn't ramp. He can't take a batsman, a bowler apart in one-day cricket or test cricket. He's quite limited actually in where he scores his runs. But what he has got so right is he's fitter than any cricketer in world cricket. And fitness is just stuff you do in the gym and the attention to detail in the gym. A lot of players are spending time in the gym, but no one spends as much attention to the minor detail as Virat does. He eats probably more diligently than anybody in the world. He pays attention and he values his sleep better than probably any cricketer in the world. He doesn't practice longer. He doesn't have more talent. He doesn't spend more time in the nets. He doesn't have more strategic brilliance when it comes to chasing a total down. He's very simple in terms of his game plan. What Virat's done is he's become a master of mastering the basics and just getting the basics right better than anybody else. And for founders, you don't have to be the most brilliant mind. You don't have to have the most brilliant product or the most brilliant go-to-market strategy or the most brilliant marketing campaign. It's got to be very good at that level. But then it's the small attention to detail that's getting the basics right consistently over time that starts separating you out from the rest. And as I said, in the Indian team in the last 15 years, there have been 10 batsmen more talented than Virat. And there's been 100 more talented batsmen in India. But no one has got the basics right as well as Virat has.

Dhruv Sharma: But I'm wondering, how is it different to coach a team versus coaching individuals?

Paddy Upton: The principles stay the same. The principles of performance, they've been around forever. They haven't changed. They're going to be around forever. Even though at the moment we have a lot of social media influencers and so-called experts coming along with some brand new seven-point step to getting the summer body or getting that six-figure or listing your company, there's no quick fix. So the principles stay the same. Just the dynamics or the application of those principles are very different from a team in sports to an individual sport. And even within a team sport, you have people who are early on in their career. You have people who are very experienced. You have extroverts. You have introverts. You have leaders. You have people who are just individual performers. And it's uniquely tailoring the approach to suit each individual. It can't be a one-stroke-fits-all approach to working with a team. And the same with individuals. It's understanding from a coaching perspective, understanding the individual, understanding their makeup, understanding their needs, their values, what's important to them, why are they doing what they're doing, and then helping them become the best version of themselves with their unique makeup. So leadership really is, and coaching that I do, is not so much arriving as the expert. It's arriving, helping people become the experts in their own game. And there's a fundamental difference when it comes to whether it's coaching a team, leading a team, leading a business. We're moving from an era of the expert telling people what to do that is no longer relevant in the age of AI because the expertise has now moved into the machine, and everyone has access to that. Now it's about the leader not so much imposing their so-called expertise, but it's helping extract or surface the expertise and the uniqueness and the ingredients that sit within each individual and within the team within the room. And it's making the most out of what sits in the room, as opposed to yesterday, leaders, what they did is they imposed their knowledge onto the room, and we need to be moving from that. Unfortunately, most founders have figured that out naturally.

Dhruv Sharma: You also talk about harnessing what the team knows about each other to make the team as a whole better.

Paddy Upton: Yes. The sports teams that go on to win finals, World Cups, et cetera, they're not the most talented team. If you assemble the most talented, most expensive team, we can just look at all the years now of European football, the most expensive teams don't go on to win. The teams with the best coach or the highest paid coach or the coach with the biggest reputation doesn't necessarily win every season. It's about how well do the team work together? How do they pick each other up when someone's struggling? How do they pick each other up when the whole team's struggling? When they're doing well, how do they sustain that high performance? When one individual does well, how does everyone feed off them and support them as opposed to feel jealous and try and pull them down because they've stood out? It's really how does the team dovetail? How do they communicate? In so many businesses, one of the narratives I hear over and over is people are operating in silos, and there isn't really good cross-functional communication or collaboration. It's because people aren't harnessing the full intelligence or wisdom that sits within the entire ecosystem, and it's the same with sports teams. It's the teams that make the most out of what's inside the team. The only way you can do that is when you understand each other, you understand each other's strengths, you understand each other's preferences, and you're there actually to serve the system ahead of serve your own individual agenda. Again, which is something that holds a lot of teams and a lot of traditional corporates back is you have people who are climbing the career ladder, and anyone climbing the career ladder tends to have more of a focus on themselves and their journey up the ladder as opposed to working with others to make the unit or the system successful.

Utsav Somani: And let's stick with cricket and founders for a bit. Cricket and startups. So there are some similarities. There are some differences as well. Cricket is 11 people in a team, defined rules. There's a referee. There's a scorecard at the end, and you know that the game is going to end after a certain number of hours, a certain number of hours being bored. In startups, I mean, of all different shapes and sizes, it's usually David versus the Goliath, right? There's no defined end. And the mental state of a founder varies on a very, the time horizon is much more different. So how do you stay consistent for that long? And how do you, I mean, what can founders steal from elite athletes when they perform for 90 minutes in front of, 90 minutes in terms of football, or maybe like a hundred over game for an ODI match? What can founders truly learn on this long journey that they have from elite athletes?

Paddy Upton: Yeah. So, I mean, as you say, there are some similarities and we can, founders can draw and business can draw from sport, but there are differences that really need to be considered. So just, there's so many answers to your question, Watsa, but some that come to me is a founder, when they start the business and they maybe have a co-founder, they would, that's sort of synonymous with being an individual athlete who delivers runs or puts points on the scoreboard individually. And the better they do, the more the scoreboard rises. As a business grows and you sort of start maybe having your first eight, 10 hires, that founder can't continue to be an individual performer. They now need, using a sporting analogy, they need to have become something of a selector because it's critical that you employ the right people within the business. And then they also need to be a captain because now you're coordinating a group of other high performers. And generally within a startup, your first five, eight hires, most of them need to be real A team players. It's only when you get much bigger that you start hiring potential B team players. So they need to be putting the individual performer, putting runs on the board. They need to be the selector and they need to do that job very well, which is not natural for everybody. And they also need to be captain. And we know from sports teams, not every great individual athlete makes a really good captain. Sachin Tendulkar, a great example, one of the greatest batsmen ever. He's just not a natural captain. There's nothing wrong with Sachin. It's just Sachin's makeup. There are other people who lead better or able to do a better job of leadership. So the founder needs to graduate from being a performer to a selector, to a captain. And as the business grows and maybe gets to 15, 20 plus people, that's the time they probably need to step back and say, okay, am I going to continue being an individual performer? Do I need to keep putting points on the board? And if so, maybe I need to get a professional CEO in to come and run the business, or I need to step off the field, get up out of my tracksuit and become coach. And even at a point, team director. And again, not all founders are natural coaches and team directors. They are excellent individual performers. And that's obviously an interesting conversation that needs to happen as the business scales and goes sort of get to series B, series C funding. Those are important questions. One other thing I just really want to highlight is startups very much mimic a sports team in a promotion relegation season. And that they've got six to nine months to make the cut or they fall away. The funders in the sports team, the sponsors leave, money dries up and the team ends up moving down to second league, third league. And founders very much find themselves in that when they get some funding, they've got a very short runway in order to deliver to stay in the big leagues. And the challenges that the biggest difference I see between a really high performing founder and a high performing athlete is the founder is always on. Six, seven days a week, all waking hours, and they're burning the candle hard. Very often they've got a family or relationship to navigate as well. Very often their health takes a knock. And what athletes have realized in the last five to 10 years is that time away from the sport, time away from the game is not time away. It's actually an investment in their career. So, and I'm seeing that's something that a lot of founders really haven't got right. They constantly, they're always on, they don't take time to switch off, to get away from business, to get away from the office, get away from work, switch their mind off and engage in something else. And we're seeing that with a lot of cricketers, for example, these days, the cricketers who play all three formats of the game, plus the IPL, someone like a Virat Kohli, he is, we're talking earlier, he's unbelievably fit and better prepared than anyone else in the world. He's been injured the least, but he still had mental burnout. He still had quite long, low runs of form. And that's because he is being asked by the BCCI, by RCB to be always on, always delivering. He doesn't have a volume button where he can operate at 80%. He operates at 100%. So time away to re-energize for founders is really important. And I haven't come across many who do a very good job. We plug our phone in every single night to charge because the batteries run down during the day. It's the same thing as humans. We need to top our batteries up. And the way we do it is by unplugging from work and having quality time away from the sport, away from the game, even if it's for an hour or two a day or an hour a day or 30 minutes a day. But that's key. And there's a lot of other things.

Utsav Somani: Dhruv and I used to work together at this company called Angels India Vishnav. Dhruv was the CEO of, and our founder, Naval Ravichandran, he tweeted where he said something very interesting, something along those lines as well, that work like a line, like either rest or sprint. I mean, fuel yourself, take some rest. Because sometimes, like, I mean, the best performers actually, the output comes out in short bursts rather than like being a consistent, straight, linear line.

Paddy Upton: I mean, I love that analogy of, yeah, so I love that analogy of Ravi is Navals around being a lion. But a founder, an early stage founder can't be the lion. They can't be sitting and waiting. They need to be moving the whole time. Be the lion around the big deal. But that lion, the early stage founder has got to be really, really busy. Maybe it's a slightly later stage founder when you have other people dealing with the day-to-day stuff that you can afford to have a lion mentality.

Dhruv Sharma: Paddy, let's stay with this for a second. When you're up to something where, you know, the reward is at the end of a distant horizon, you have to, you need to tank up for the long haul, right? And the other way to think about this is if you're a surgeon, you come out of the operation theatre, you get like, you know, full, you know, you close the loop. If you're a pilot, you land the plane, you close the loop, you feel good. You know, if you've done well, you haven't done well in the moment. But if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a researcher, if you're an inventor, you do these long horizon tasks. How do you keep yourself motivated when the results aren't immediately evident?

Paddy Upton: Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. One of the first things that I start working with when I work with any athletes or team is to really get clear on the difference between me as a person, my performance as a professional, and the results of my performance. And too often, people collapse me and my results. So if I do well, I feel great. And if I do badly, I feel like a failure. And I'm so busy chasing results that I take my eye off the process of the performance. So collapsing myself and results is a problem. And also collapsing performance and results is a problem. Where if I'm performing in order to deliver results all the time, I'm constantly chasing a success and constantly running away from a failure. And generally, it takes some time of making mistakes to recognize. And people talk about focus on the process and leave the results to look after itself. That, for me, is the Ferrari of or the McLaren of mental sayings. But the thing is, we've all heard it so many times. It's like everybody owns a McLaren. So it's not sexy anymore. But the reality, it's still a McLaren. Can you genuinely focus on the process, focus on your performance, and allow the results to take care of themselves? And when you have that long, that medium to long game performance that you have in business, it's to chunk it down into what am I doing over time? But chunk it down to today, this week, this month. What are the key things or this quarter? What are the key targets we need to hit? And by key targets, it's two or three things. What are the really important things so we can keep the important things important? Chunk it down and focus on performing around those particular processes. And then you just stay with the process, stay with the moment. That helps keep us present. Whereas if we're chasing an IPO or chasing the next round of funding or chasing the next product or chasing the next area we're going to, whatever it might be, we end up living too much in the future and having then performance anxiety. And performance anxiety and pressure comes from the mind living in the future. And fear comes from the mind living in the failure that we're trying to avoid at some point in the future. So living in the future when the results really does undermine performance, undermine mental well-being significantly.

Utsav Somani: And would you use words like ego and self-aware in this description as well? Like the people should separate the ego from the, by attaching themselves to the outcome, they should keep their ego out and just be more self-aware.

Paddy Upton: Yeah, it's very easy to say that. Often say with ego, just like it should keep your ego aside. It's so easy for us to sit here and say that. But to actually do it is a lifetime journey. But our ego is the part of us that does attach us the results because ego, the two biggest things that every one of our ego seeks, it wants to look good. And it gets to look good through success and through other people's eyes and the compliments that come with it. Is the one thing that ego wants to look good. That's why it's attached to success and constantly chasing results. And the second thing ego really wants is to not look bad. And that's so our ego is terrified of failure because failure is like an ego death. I'm a failure. I've done badly. People criticize me. I don't look good through other people's eyes. So it's actually the ego in us that is almost always over-attached to success in the future and over-attached to trying to avoid failure in the future. And part of separating ourselves from our results is deepening the roots of our self-esteem, our self-awareness, our character, our values, our purpose, and finding the power or the source of power from that. From who I am being as a person and the way I operate in the world as a person, knowing that success and failure will naturally happen and none of them define me. Results do not define us. How we behave around our results defines who we are.

Utsav Somani: And you've been, I mean, so just extending that question a little bit because you've described Gokesh, who you've worked with for six months as one of the most self-aware athletes that you've worked with. And sitting in front of a chessboard four hours alone, like that means some strength in your mental capacity and your will be empowered and thinking and I mean to a whole different level, like something that we cannot even imagine. And at that young an age and founders are fairly young themselves as well. What is one key characteristic from your time with him and being with Gokesh that you would like our founders or people working in high-performing jobs within startups as well to take away?

Paddy Upton: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. There really are good crossovers between a chess grandmaster and an early stage founder where you're in it alone, you spend a lot of time in your room, in front of your computer, designing, creating in your own head, in your own space. There's something about chess where there's a real strive for perfectionism at a grandmaster level. Everyone is striving for the perfect game. And there is a danger of being over attached to perfectionism. And we know that when it comes to product, comes to the standard age, it's not about getting it perfect. It's about getting it really good and getting it out there and then iterating, not waiting to get it perfect. So a lot of chess players will sit and they will overthink a move, seeking the perfect move in that moment. And then they find themselves in time trouble. So perfectionism is something to watch for. The other thing is certainly in chess, every mistake is so visible. It is so consequential. It is so unpacked and discussed by everybody who's watching the game. So there's such a limelight on mistakes, which creates something of a fear of mistakes. And that is coupled to perfectionism. That's something that I've worked with Gitesh, being okay with making mistakes. Not okay with setting up to make a mistake. In other words, not okay cutting corners, not okay cutting your preparation. But once you've done everything you can to set up for success, expect to make mistakes when they happen, accept them, learn from them and move on very quickly. We have to leave mistakes in the past too often. I would say probably the single biggest mental obstacle to success for any athlete is not being able to let go of a mistake that they've made in the past. And they overthink it. They get stuck in the past. And when we overthink a mistake, it drags our confidence down. It drags our energy down. It starts creating self-doubt and it holds us back from moving forward and designing whatever the solution might be in future. So the other piece is to have a healthier relationship with mistakes. And then I guess the other thing is loneliness. You know, it's lonely at the top. Even a Virat Kohli who's in a team sport, it's very lonely at the top. Even though he's in a team sport, he doesn't really have genuine peers and friends around him or not many. Not many top athletes have it. And we know from the CEO's journey, even though they're in a huge company and they're around people all the time, they're sitting in meetings, it's lonely at the top. And similar for a founder, it's a lonely journey with the pressure on you. And it's to recognize that and have strategies in place to avert that loneliness, to really connect deeply with the small few people who are important and make sure you maintain those connections. Because those connections are independent of results. Those important people in your life, they don't love you less if you do badly or love you more if you do well. They love you the same. And those relationships are really, really important to help avert the natural loneliness that a founder would experience.

Dhruv Sharma: Pari, speaking of Gokesh, I think one observation as a spectator is that Gokesh and his peers from this current generation of Indian grandmasters, from the outside, it looks like they have very high level of composure, keep a very even keel. And their competitors like Magnus, famously every time he makes a mistake, he has a very visible reaction. Do you view and why the current crop of Indian grandmasters, so young, actually managed to maintain such an even keel?

Paddy Upton: You know, that's a good question. Different people are wired differently. So we have M.S. Dhoni as an Indian captain, who is cool, calm and collected, doesn't show emotions. The next captain after him or one after that is Virat Kohli, who is very expressive, who is very emotional. Now, it's important that Dhoni stays Dhoni and Kohli stays Kohli. And it's just a very different wiring. Those different wiring do play out quite differently in their leadership style. So there's some areas where Dhoni's cool, composed leadership really is an advantage for his team. But there's places where the lack of emotion might make him slightly less of an impactful leader, for example, if somebody is really struggling. Where someone like Virat, when people are doing well, he brings this incredible upliftment, incredible energy. But maybe if someone's doing badly, his expressiveness around the mistake can actually create something of a fear of failure. So it's not better to be cool, calm, composed and collected than it is to be emotional. What's important is to understand what is my natural wiring as a human being, as a performer. If I'm naturally more emotional, how do I use those to my advantage? And there's always two sides to the coin. Where do I need to do some work to help keep my emotions in check, either for my performance or as a leader for its impact on other people? And similarly, if you happen to be more composed, where's the real strength in that? And if there are places where I can step just a little bit out of myself to be a little bit more compassionate, caring, kind, empathetic, whatever it might be, otheroriented and actually show an expression or connection with others, where can I step outside of myself to be a little bit more effective? But it's not for Magnus to try and become like Gakesh, and it's not for Gakesh to try and become like Magnus. It's to stay in your natural sweet spot and to grow from there.

Utsav Somani: You've written a book called The Barefoot Coach, and there's a chapter that's, I think, stuck with a lot of readers. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Losers. And where you say, and you make a point, that teaching athletes that losing is also a skill can be done well or badly. And for founders, I think the maths is always against them. Most startups fail by default, by just the sheer lack of opportunity. So what can founders do to lose badly versus win badly? I mean, how do you help them frame this?

Paddy Upton: I think, for me, it boils down to real simplicity. Is when we're in a performance environment, business or sport, we go through a journey of success, failure, and everything in between. People say that failure is a better teacher than success. That's rubbish, according to me. And to explain that is when we succeed, what do we generally do after success? We celebrate. When we fail, what do we do immediately after a failure? We interrogate. Or we review. And what is a better teacher? Which process teaches us more, celebration or interrogation? And the answer is very obvious. So the best athletes in the world, whether they succeed or fail, they treat the post-mortem in exactly the same way. And it's some version of asking themselves only two questions. What did I learn from what I did well? Because even if you fail, often you do get 95% of things right and you fail. I can tell you that sports teams, when they fail, an IPL team gets 95% of things right and they lose. The team that wins gets about 5% of things wrong. They just get slightly more consequential things right and the other gets the consequential things wrong. So win or lose, ask yourself, what did I learn from what I did well? And spend the same amount of time, win or lose, ask yourself, what are the things that I would, if I had the chance again, I would do better next time. And you interrogate both success and failure. When you do that, they both become great teachers and you walk away more experienced and hopefully grateful for the lessons the experience delivers. That's after the fact, is review them both the same way and be equally grateful for the lessons. Because either way, if you extract the lessons, you become a more experienced operator performer. And before the time, it's really, really simple. Again, is number one, expect failure. I often say it's like having a, if I said to you, I drove in the next two weeks, sometime in the next two weeks, a really unexpected and unwanted visitor is going to arrive on your doorstep and you're not going to know when, what time of the day and night, but in the next two weeks, they're coming. When you get that knock on your door at midnight, you go downstairs, you open the door and there is the visitor. You knew that at some point was coming. It's a much different experience. Ah, I was expecting you. I don't know when you come, but here you are. But if you don't expect that visitor and you get a knock on your door at midnight and you wake up and you go down your underwear and there is someone you really don't want to see, you will really lose your shit because you haven't made me prepared for them arriving. So when it comes to failure, expect it. It's an unwanted visitor that is arriving on your doorstep. 100% guaranteed. We just don't know what it's going to look like and when it's going to arrive. Expect it. Number two, when you open the door and you see that failure has happened, accept it. Ah, here you are. I knew you were coming. And then you immediately move to fix it up and then move on. So expect, accept, fix, move. No blame, no blaming, no stories, no victim because you knew it was happening and move on. That's what the best do. Most of us, it takes a while to get to be able to do that well. We spend time worrying. It shouldn't happen. Why has this happened? What's wrong with me? Who's to blame? It shouldn't have happened. Donald Trump, it's because of tariffs or some geopolitical thing or COVID or we blame someone else for something and this shouldn't be happening. We get stuck in the traffic and we get angry with traffic. It's like, dude, what are you wasting your mental energy for? It should happens. Accept it. What are you going to do about it? Move on from it.

Utsav Somani: And fame and public criticism for many of the athletes that you work with, I'm guessing that's also a big concern, especially somebody who's come into fame very recently. Was to say somebody like a Satyen or Virat who's been through that journey for a long time.

Paddy Upton: Yeah. I said earlier, one of the most powerful things you can do is separate who I am, my performance and my results. When somebody comes into the limelight for the first time, they get treated and celebrated because of their results. This young Suryavanshi is hitting all these fours and sixes, the 15 year old in IPL. People are loving him because of the fours and sixes he's hitting and his performances. It's very easy for them, for him to then get attached to hitting all these sixes and producing really good performances. That becomes a real problem because that athlete then starts what we call in psychology becoming externally referent. They start focusing in their results. They take confidence from the results. They listen to the outside voices and the compliments, the criticism, the media, whatever it might be, the purple cap or the orange cap. And the more we listen and are affected by outside noises, the more we are going to have mental trouble, the more we'll become distracted and the more difficult our journey becomes. Almost every serial founder later on in their journey, almost every athlete later on in their journey, they realize that what other people say has got nothing to do with me, what the media says has got nothing to do with me, whether I succeed or fail, I take the lessons either way. And we become more and more internally reference or internally referent that my compass, my feel good, my motivation, my inspiration comes from within me. It's not attached to results or other people or comment and fame is all about how other people are looking at me. And if we get caught up in that, we are already in trouble. And everyone early on in their careers, particularly if they're successful, get caught up and get blinded by fame. A lot of people, their careers end because they become too blinded by the fame. Some of them end up seeing that it's just a distraction. I cannot be living my life according to what other people want, other people's expectations. And for founders, you have other people like, for example, your investors, they do matter, but you still need to be coming back to myself. What am I doing? Am I doing everything I can to set myself, my business up for success, despite the noise from the markets, from the investors, from the funders, from the VCs, the PCs, wherever it might be. And it's really difficult to become more and more internally referent, but then we are more in control and we have more mental clarity, stability, consistency.

Utsav Somani: Adi, I think we've taken too much of your time, but Dhruv, one final closing question from you.

Dhruv Sharma: Adi, do you have a favorite locker room speech? That's a good one.

Paddy Upton: Favorite locker room speech. I love those sporting movies with a locker room speech. And I even love more the courtroom dramas with a courtroom speech where the person gets to give that amazing. And I'll tell you a brief story is that I got my opportunity or I knew 13 months out, if I go back to what I was talking earlier, from the World Cup final, we were preparing the players. And each time I've come back from those meetings, I think to myself, if we get to that final, I'm going to be the mental conditioning coach and I'm going to get to give that locker room speech, to get the players up for this World Cup final and ready to run through the wall for each other. And there's that famous sporting movie, any given Sunday. And there's some great speeches and I was going to get to give that. And I spent 13 months slowly mulling over in my head, different versions of how am I going to give this motivational speech that if we win, maybe someone records it and it becomes a artifact in history. And I always remember standing up the night before the final in the team meeting, when my slot was to give the speech and my speech was nothing like I ever planned for 13 months. Because we had spent the time preparing the players that when we get to that moment, we know exactly what we need to do. There's nothing new. And my speech, I'll tell you exactly what it was. I said to the players in as calmer voice as I'm speaking now, I said, guys, tomorrow is like a Bollywood movie. We have the actors, we know our script and all that's required is for us to go out there and perform the roles we are so prepared to perform and we will cross the line ahead of the other guys. It was just a statement of fact. So it wasn't a high powered speech in any way that I thought it might be. It was just a confirmation or statement that guys, we're ready. Let's go and do what we do. And then we're gonna have the best chance of getting across the line. And thank goodness history will record that we did. Again, thanks to Gambia and Tony, the two big match temperament players taking us across the line.

Utsav Somani: Cheers to that. This has been super fun and informative and both Dhruv and I would have, I mean, we've learned so much. I think let's say that. Thank you so much for your time and have a safe trip to India and we'll hope to see you very, very soon.

Paddy Upton: Awesome. Thanks Dhruv. Thanks Utsav. And thanks so much for the listeners for giving up your time to listen to this conversation today. Thank you.

Utsav Somani: Listeners, we're moving on to our next segment. Our guest is already here. Let's welcome Brij from Spry. Brij, did I get the name right? Sorry, I always get it wrong. It's been a long time.

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): It's been a while. So it's Brij, yeah. Brij is right. How have you been? I've been really good. I've been enjoying. I think we've been having fun building Spry. Moved to a new city since we last spoke. Oh, nice.

Utsav Somani: Where are you based now?

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): I'm based in Pune now.

Utsav Somani: Okay. Awesome. So for our listeners who are hearing about Spry for the first time, can you introduce the business?

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): Sure. First of all, thanks, Dhruv. Thanks Utsav for having me on the platform. I think it's great to be here and Paddy is a great act to follow as well, right? So thanks for that. Spry is an operating system for clinics, specifically physical therapy clinics, rehab clinics out in the US. What we do is we help therapists, providers focus on care, right? I think we don't let them get distracted by any of the administrative burden they have to do to the doctor. Scheduling a patient, doing the paperwork, getting the money from the insurance company, right? Let doctors be like, they say, let kids have fun, let kids be kids. So we let doctors be doctors. Let them focus on treating the patient, taking care of the patient, engaging with the patient rather than worrying about all this administrative layer. We automate all of that for them. We streamline all of it for them. And that's what we do, right? And we work with physical rehab clinics in the US, chiropractors in the US, mental health therapists in the US, I think the one you had before. So we work with them and we take care of all the administrative work so they can look after the patient more diligently.

Utsav Somani: And how did you identify this opportunity? Because just before the show was starting, Dhruv and I were discussing that healthcare is such a vast space and there are so many niches and white spaces. And I mean, large players that breaking into these relationships with the hospitals and these providers as well is extremely, extremely tough because many times what happens is that a large product offering, which is already servicing that customer tends to expand into these different adjacent verticals as well. So how did you think about the idea as well?

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): Yeah, it's a combination of things. But that's the right question to ask, right? Because sitting up far, everyone gets excited, okay, US healthcare is a $4.5 trillion opportunity because then the GDP of so many countries as well, including India for that matter. But no one looks, but the right way to look at that is, I think, 100 or 1,004 billion dollar opportunities. And each of those opportunities is an island of opportunity, right? And you need to focus on that, go deep on that, right? People have tried to do a lot of superficial work, which has made an impact, but it's also, let's mean, two steps back, forward, one step back kind of a scenario, right? So if you want to really solve the problem that exists on the ground, it's important for you to work hand in glove with the doctors, how they think, right? How they treat a patient. And that can only come from going deeper. You can't be at a superficial area, like connecting someone and just building a tool in a toolbox. If you go deeper and actually solve the problems, that's where tech can build meaningful outcomes, right? So I've always believed that tech software has to evolve from being a tool in a toolbox to actually owning the outcome. And when I say owning the outcome means patient getting better from the patient, from the clinical point of view, and from the financial point of view, the doctor getting the money from the insurance companies and the patients in time, right? So when you think of that as an objective, okay, you want to be a participant in the outcome, then you have no option but to go deeper. And that's when you identify the opportunity. Now, why physical therapy? Why physical rehab? Again, I don't know. I think it's something for my stream to answer someday. But this is my second startup. I've done a B2C startup in India, which was doing public transport. I was a CTO at Ola. And now I'm doing SPRY, focusing on US markets. So many of my friends, including VCs, also told me that, you are an idiot, you know how to B2C, you know India, and you're going completely opposite. You're going B2B and you're going to the US. Somehow does not make sense, right? People looked at it from the B2B, B2C lens. You want to be working on a platform which you like. And I, for some reason, like mobility, right? Anyone who's met me, anyone who's seen me, will attest to the fact that I don't like to sit still. I'm always going around, meet in office, meet at home. And as fate would have it, my wife is exactly the opposite, right? So if we have gone on vacation, she would like a resort vacation, but I would like to go around. So she ends up calling me a hippie or whatever it is. On weekends, you would like to go from one place to another. So I always like moving around. This is my sixth house in the last eight, nine years as well. So I've kept moving around. This is my fourth of its city. So I like mobility. Mobility is freedom. And startups of solutions, which help you with mobility, are what appeal to me, right? So Riddler, my previous startup, was about helping people get A2B, meet a bus, meet a taxi, meet a metro. And physical therapy is actually someone who helps you move better, right? So freedom is, in my view, mobility. So that attracts me. I think the second from the business lens point of view, it's an attractive market, right? One in every three people have some form of physical disability, injury, a health span, life spans have gone up drastically. Health spans, not necessarily. We're right. We're still working on that. So the opportunity to the big market, growing market, I think as a businessman, that appeals to me. And the opportunity to make an impact, right? I think we know what Ola did, what Uber did. Today, my mom, when she was alive, or my grandmother, she could book a cab and she had full mobility. She had freedom to move around from a place to. She didn't depend on me. She didn't depend on a driver. But we could give them. When we give back freedom, when you give that mobility to people, it just unlocks a lot of freedom, right? And that's what I think the bigger purpose mission is. So physical therapy is the gateway to movement health. And if you improve movement, if you get mobility, I just think it makes the world a better place, right? And all of us realized this during COVID when we were all confined to homes. There was a lot of initial excitement. And then people started realizing, well, this is not what the life we want to live. And as you see, when the world's waves ended and COVID started subsiding, gym membership started going up pre-COVID levels, right? Right industry, right healing, where I was actually participating, started going up. So we would like to be out, right? I think so that's a bigger mission to solving. There's a combination of my personal whims and fancies that I like moving around, a big market from the business standpoint, because we have to make money. And then the ability to make meaningful impact in the long term, right? It is what attracted me towards physical therapy. I think, yeah, that's what I would say. I'm an outsider. I didn't know the physical therapy, nor do I understand how insurance works in the US. But I think just that the mission was so strong, I had the inclination to learn all of that and make it into the business that we're doing today. Yeah, but that's a long story.

Utsav Somani: No, thanks for sharing.

Dhruv Sharma: Brij, help us understand that before Spry appeared on the scene, how were clinicians sort of juggling these different point solutions? How's that leading to burnout? And how's life changed since then, since you guys appeared?

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): That's a very good question, right? And I think setting a fire, we would think that this would be a solved problem, right? If I can book a cab, on the click of a button, I book a cab and the cab comes to me, or if I order a pizza and the pizza comes to me in 15 minutes, why wouldn't patient flow be streamlined? That's a simple question that you would ask yourself. And I ask myself as well, that am I foolish that I'm looking at solving such a fundamental problem? Why is it that a patient walking into the clinic does not have a streamlined experience or the therapist treating a patient does not have a unified experience? And then you have to go back and look at the history of how digitization has evolved in healthcare, right? So, I think 15 years back, 2009, 10, a lot of digitization did not exist. Most of the notes were written on paper, software was archaic, et cetera. The first wave started when Obamacare happened, right? Obamacare happened and President Obama pushed for digitization of health records, also incentivized a lot of providers to digitize health records, right? So what happened? That was the first wave of digitization. What happened? The medical records got digitized. So today we sit at 98% of health records are digitized, et cetera. But the patient journey, digitizing a health record is only a small part of the patient journey. It's only a part of the patient journey, right? The whole process starts from the time the patient expresses interest to come into the clinic, book an appointment. So there is a lot of work before the patient comes into the clinic. And after the record, after the patient leaves the clinic, there's a lot of work after that, like sending the claim to the insurance company, getting the details out, right? So people will digitize the health record, but forgot to do the first and second part. And the incentives were aligned to only digitize the health records, right? So that's how the evolution of tech happened. It's not that people didn't know that how to do digitization or the other parts of the care pathway. So in this decade, people have started realizing that that's broken, right? When you have only part of the system, which is digitized and the others not fully integrated, it actually creates more work than automation, right? And it increases the adventure to overhead, et cetera. So I think that's how the evolution of healthcare happens. And then there have been evolutions in technology. For example, how we had a UPI or the movement in India. They have something called a clearing house, right? But all the integration, all the insurances were brought into one platform through clearing houses. So some of those improvements happened as well. So combination of how healthcare has evolved in the US, aligned with the policy because it's a government-backed thing. And how other evolution has evolved is the way technology has evolved. So before Sprite, to answer the question, people need fragmented tools, fragmented processes. There were three or four different tools, right? A tool to ingest the data, a tool to schedule the patient, something to record, and then a third-party billing company who downloads all of this and sends it manually to people, right? Now, when all of this is happening in isolation, then the ownership is on the person who's integrating all of this to stitch it together because these are not open platforms. These are very simple, easy tools which don't talk to each other very meaningfully. And who is that person that does that? The clinic owner who's supposed to be treating patients, who's supposed to be taking care of his therapists, who's supposed to be building his network of patients, right? And he or she is busy changing all these tools, which was not the right thing to do, which like sitting afar as a software person when I started looking at the industry outside, just didn't seem right to me. This is what was happening. And I think a combination of incentives, combination of tech has evolved, is what led to this fragmentation happening, right? What changed after? And I think why are changes happening now, right? People don't like change. We all know, right? We all hate change. But why is it happening now? And I think I trace back to history, right? All change, all behavior that you see today will be traced back to some kind of a survival instinct or economic incentive, which would have happened a few years back, right? The most common example is I use this rice growing population in South India versus wheat growing population in North India, right? That's where you see a bigger participation of women labor in South India versus North India. That's how the thing just evolved, right? I just think there's a bigger economic shift happening post-COVID in healthcare. If the reimbursements continue to drop, because it gets funded by the government, Medicare drops the reimbursement, commercial insurances follow. And what's happened after COVID is two things have happened. I think inflation is high. So therapists, providers are demanding a higher pay to catch up to the lifestyle. And then many of them have burnt out, right? COVID was, yeah, COVID was once in a lifetime moment for a lot of these Black Swan event, as people say. It burned out a lot of providers. It burned out a lot of therapists, a lot of people in the medical profession. Many of them ended up leaving a profession, which was already supply constrained, making it more supply constrained. So the cost of therapists went up further, right? As a business owner, but this is the most exciting time for me to be in the industry, because demand is to the root, right? More and more people need physical therapy, more and more people need it. So you're caught between rock and a hard place. You see that there's one place there's a demand growing, but on the other side, there are tailwinds, which is dropping reimbursement, higher cost of salary, higher cost of staff. So what do you do? OK, you change your systems, you automate your systems, you advance your systems, you upgrade your systems. And that's where the opportunity for someone like us comes in, right? So a combination of a lot of incorrect things that happened in the past, no end point thought process. And now the economic shift, which is happening, is where people like Sprite can actually come in and make an impact, right? And that's what we've been doing.

Utsav Somani: So you have a software element where you're covering the full customer journey for somebody coming to these clinics, but you're also doing, I mean, payment transactions for them also, right? So for you, I think, what are you most proud of? Like, is it the number of clinics that you work with? Or do you think you'll be valued by the transaction volume that passes through Sprite?

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): Yeah, I think both. I think in terms of value and just mathematical impact, it's going to be the value, right? I think the value of transactions that flow through Sprite. We handle around 10 to 15,000 appointments on the Sprite platform daily. So if you think of it, that's around, and every appointment pays you around $100 to $150, right? So that's around a million to billion and a half dollars worth of claims just flowing through Sprite on a daily basis. So that's obviously helps impact the financial valuation, the financial metrics. It directly has an impact on the revenue, etc. And then there is the other impact, right? As to why you start bigger mission, bigger purpose, etc. I think what I, what for me has been the most startling moment is not just bringing efficiency, but changing the nature of the profession. Any, any administrative work is a chore, right? I call it the work and the toil framework, right? I think you do your work, but anything that you need to get your work done is called toil. You don't like doing that. In my case, making a sale, going on a sales call, presenting my solution to the customer, signing the deal is work. But updating sales force, updating notes is actually a toil, right? I don't like to do the toil, but it's a necessary part of the job. I think what we've done for the therapist is reduce this toil significantly. So what you should take around 30, 40 minutes, write a note, we've brought it down to five, six minutes. And the second part, which is second order effect, which I never visualized, which I never envisioned doing, we made the whole process fun, right? Interacting with the agent, write the note, interacting, having a companion to the lonely job has made the whole process fun. So I think for me, while the valuation is important, the money is important, I think the biggest impact for me has been bringing joy back to the profession for a lot of people, right? Where they now say that writing the note is not the most difficult part of the day or not the most boring part of the day for them, right? It's actually the other part of the day. And if you can make a boring... Sorry, go ahead, Dhruv.

Dhruv Sharma: Just gonna ask, would you say that ironically bringing an agent into the room, an AI agent into the room actually makes the human connection between the doctor and the patient even deeper? Because the doctor doesn't have to do mundane...

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): Exactly. And that's what we've heard. So we just had a webinar a few weeks back and that's what exactly the doctor said, the one of the users, that I can actually talk to my patient. And the second order, third order impact of that is very high. So what happens is you're not looking into the screen because you're not anxious about writing your note. You're just talking, really. The agent is doing most of the work in the background. Now what that helps is that feels the patient feel much better. The patient feels that the doctor is listening to me. The doctor is getting connected to me. And what... The second order effect of that was that the plan of care So in physical therapy, you can't just... It's not a one and done kind of thing, right? You don't come once and you get done with the meeting. You're done with the appointment. You have to come for seven, eight, nine times. So that's for the plan of care. So patients came more often to the plan of care. Adherence to the plan of care was much higher. And there is enough documented history that if you adhere to the plan of care, you will more or less achieve your medical outcomes. So the impact... So as I said, a simple tool, which you thought of as bringing efficiency, helped improve the patient-doctor connection, which helped improve the plan of care adherence, which helped improve medical outcomes. So the impact of that has been... That's why I said, I'm very proud of the impact that we've created with this solution, right? Obviously, financial impact does matter. And that's what we need to keep going as a company. But the impact that we've created with something like this is phenomenal, right? And that's something I'm very proud of. And I think we've changed the mission as a company. We don't want to be the company which is only increasing, helping increase your revenue, reduce your cost. We'll actually bring the human element back into the software. Any boring software, be it a Salesforce, be it Jira, is painful to use, right? But it's an S3 wheel. How can you make that software more fun to use? And I think agents give that away. And I've experienced that in my personal life too, right? Where I... If I'm making a deck for an investor, or if I'm writing support, now there's a fun element to it. I'm not doing it in isolation. I think that's what we want to bring to the boring B2B software.

Utsav Somani: And AI and healthcare, just staying with that thought, I think the cost of, I mean, being wrong in this industry is extremely, extremely high. So when you're talking about, say, the AI agent doing transcribing for a doctor or assigning tests or making other notes as well, or even speaking to patients for that matter, or pulling up the records, is there a human in the loop? Or typically, like, how do you ensure that the failure rate is, I mean, almost close to zero in this case?

Dhruv Sharma: First, let me just say that I think it's a good thing that agents are writing the notes because they've never understood doctors and writing.

Utsav Somani: And handwritings, yeah. But for some reason, I mean, the chemist always understands them.

Utsav Somani: So they're the true agents. He was the agent before the agents came, right? Chemists would have, like, I mean, a doctor would have written something like this, random scribble, and he's like, oh, you need a record.

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): Exactly. With a level of confidence, with a high level of accuracy, I've been amazed at that too. So how do we remove something like that happening, basically? Yeah, I think, so it's obviously impossible the volume that we operate, right? If you think how physical therapy clinics operate, we're seeing a volume of patients, seven, eight, nine patients, every therapist a day. Imagine a clinic with five therapists, there are 50 therapists, right? It's impossible to put 50 people monitoring every interaction that's happening. So there are two parts of how you do this. One is you start involving the clinicians or the providers at the beginning when designing the process or designing the workflow, right? That's part one. So what we do is we work very closely with the clinical team. We have a team of clinicians, ourselves, Menal Patel, who is a clinical officer. She heads the clinical team. We understand how therapists want to do their workflows, how they like it, how they don't like it, etc, right? And then we, the technology guys institute that. So we have guardrails, which are instituted by the technology team. The QA is also led by the providing team, right? It's not something that technology or the engineering team does in isolation of what matters. So that's the first level of it. So you allow the noise from actually going out, as in, right? Second is you don't, it's as I said, it's impossible to put 50 people to monitor these notes, right? So you make it easy for the therapists who is using Scribe to actually review the note, right? So we, our agent does not operate in isolation. Our therapist can instruct the agent what he or she prefers, what he or she prefers, what they don't prefer. They write it as a set of serious instructions and it's easy to prompt it out there, right? And also before the data makes it to the final database, they have a view, they have an opportunity to view it and edit it. And the edit frequency keeps reducing as they use the platform more and more. So the agent learns what their preference is and they keep on editing it. When we roll out something, something meaningful, we have a curated list of providers, 20 or providers who are more willing to experiment, more willing to try out, more willing to give us feedback. So we do everything with them first, right? And they are the ones who are more watchful, ones who are more diligent. They tell us what's working, what's not working. And then we roll it out to the bigger audience, right? So I think this is the process we've done it. Like when you say man in the middle, there are men in the middle and women in the middle, but it's not at the time of doing the process. There are a lot of work which is happening before and there's a lot of work happening after, right? And the idea is that the number of people that you need in the middle should only keep on reducing with every iteration. That's where the power of agents come. Agents have a bunch of memory. You can train the agents. The agents learn from the past interactions and then you keep on iterating it. So you can start with a threshold that you get. to go down to 1% over the next three, four months, right? So that's how we maintain scale in the way we do things.

Dhruv Sharma: Because in the consumer AI world, we have a lot of, we see a lot of what I'd like to call like just productivity theater. And now, you know, in an enterprise context and you're a seasoned engineering leader, how does one design systems in such a way that you're not over-engineering it? Because there are humans in the room. It's a very high touch, you know, workflow. So how do you not over-engineer it?

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): I think we focused on the outcome, right? I think a lot of, we are very sure on what outcome we are driving towards, right? We are not building something which is, as I said, going to change the world in a way, right? I think we know what the outcome is. So when you're tethered to the outcome, so any product feature or any product requirement or any capability enhancement that comes to the table comes with a view of what metric is that we are trying to improve. We don't do things for whimsy and fancy just because we look cool, right? I think that's one of the differences between enterprise and a consumer startup. I ran an enterprise company, right? And at some point, I was trying to build a Twitter on the road. It's a very random idea, right? For Twitter for road users, right? And that's not something we'll do for enterprise. But I think we'll attest ourselves to the goals. So any roadmap item, any capability, it starts with the objective, like what is the objective that you're trying to do? And objective has to be broken into different metrics, right? So you maintain that rigor and discipline. You're not building software for yourself. You're building the software for someone else, right? And what is the object? What are the objectives of the customer that you're building for? And if those objectives are well aligned, then a lot of things get taken care of at that stage itself. So you break the objective. What are the current metrics? What is it that you're seeing currently? And what is it that this enhancement, this feature will make a change of? Now, people don't have an answer to that. You don't allow for that to go through. That means that process is not fun. And then break it down. And then obviously, there is engineering discipline that you roll it out to a smaller audience, see the impact. And then if things work out, you roll it out to a bigger audience, right? But as I said, a lot of these problems can be actioned when you start thinking upfront. You do a lot of thinking upfront. I think in the AI world, agentic world, when the cost of getting work done, the time for getting work done is actually reducing so much. You can actually spend a lot of time upfront thinking through some of these things, right? Thinking through this activity and things and actually spending a lot more time than you could do earlier. But this is a practice we've instituted from the beginning. We look at metrics. We look at impact. And only if we think that there is a sizable, reasonable impact, then we actually go ahead and do that. And then things get to take care of itself. But you do that at the planning stage. Then at a later stage, you have to do a lot of firefighting. You cannot do firefighting in the business that we are doing. Spry is being used by therapists for seven, eight, nine hours a day. They're on Spry. The joke is that you spend more time on Spry than you spend with your spouse any point of time, right? They're using it for seven, eight, nine. Every patient interaction, the appointment, the notes, the billing, it's all happening on Spry. You cannot even be down for five minutes. So if there's a minimum, there's even an iota of disruption, a button changes from here to there, people get impacted because people have trained themselves on their workflow, right? We don't want to do that. So we don't have that level of experimentation thresholds, margins that we can. So I think we do a lot of work upfront to make sure that that, because at the same time, you have to keep evolving, right? You can't be stagnant, especially in the world today when building is so much easier. There are new things happening. There are new capabilities that are coming up. But I think spending a lot of time upfront, planning through it, thinking through it, discussing it, is a way to get rid of these downstream issues that come through.

Utsav Somani: As a final closing question, Rich, what's next for you? What part of the workflow are you excited to, or what part of any clinician's job are you excited to help automate now? That's right.

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): So what's happening in US healthcare is, I think it's one of the unique models in the world, right? Where the insurance payouts and the way insurance pays out, there's commercial insurance. And there's a famous graph, right? That the number of people who they've hired on the administrative front, it's 10x of the number of people on the provider front, the therapist. They've had 10x more administrative staff than providers in the last 15-20 years, right? And these are jobs which ideally no one likes to do, which shouldn't have existed if things were linear, right? So there is so much more to be done now, and agents make that possible. The whole act of just calling up a patient and ensuring that they do their digital intake correctly, right? I think just make sure that you have filled out all the paper correctly. Work with them if they have any difficulties, right? And get it done. I think the whole act of sending all your documentation to the orthopedic and keep them informed on the patient care, okay, this is what happened, this is what did not happen. The whole act of making sure that the clinic is fully compliant. There are so many of these toil items that I call about in a clinic, which is considering the 25% of the cost, right? Which can be fully automated or can be enabled with agents, right? Today we are only touching the tip of the iceberg. We've looked at the software time, we looked at software opportunity, we looked at the revenue opportunity, which is RCM billing, we've looked at, right? But a lot of these jobs which shouldn't have existed or don't exist in other parts of the world in the same industry, jobs which are boring, people don't like to do, they would rather be focusing on patient care, RCM being automated, right? And that constitutes to 25% of the actually cost structure that existed. So that's the big opportunity for us. And essentially, right? I think the functional part is obviously doing that. The second and the most exciting part as I told you earlier is making this fun. How can I have fun by doing this, right? Why can't I talk to my agent in the front office? Okay, what does this patient reply? Is this patient out of his mind to say something like that? Why did they cancel it? I can actually make it more interactive. I can make it more humane, essentially do that. So that's the challenge, right? I think, I don't know. I don't know if gamification is the right word for it, but I think just making more fun will be a good product challenge to solve for.

Utsav Somani: Awesome, Rich. Wishing you the best. Thank you for coming on our show.

Brijraj Bhuptani (SPRY): Thanks. Thanks. So thanks for having me over. It's a pleasure to talk to you guys.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners. We're wrapping up this special conditioning special, let's call it, because physical conditioning and mental conditioning, we've covered both with our speakers today. Dhruv and I are taking a break on Friday to process all of this. We'll be back on Monday. See you at four o'clock.