Summary

The Offline Network Episode 26: Cross-Border Money & The Jewellery Market (aired 2025-10-29). Guests: Ashwin Bhatnagar, Rumit Dugar from XFlow, BlueStone. Ashwin: "So a good way to perhaps like model us is, you know, anyone who's looking to move money into and out of India, right, that's the space that we're really looking to get deeper into." Ashwin: "I think like messaging systems, once prevalent, right, they're just really hard to replace." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, crypto and Web3, consumer brands and D2C. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hello listeners, you're watching The Offline Network, a live tech show where Utsav and I park the curtains and bring you on a journey where we see moment in time thinking from India's best founders and their, you know, their operating teams. Today we are going to be speaking with two very, very interesting guests. We have Ashwin who leads a company called Xflow. It's a cross-border payments company. And we have, if I'm not mistaken, our first public company exec joining us on the show, Rumit, who's the CFO for Bluestone, the jewellery company, the well-known jewellery company. Utsav, how are you doing? Good to see you. I'm well. Rested after a good weekend. And we're going to go over the news segment very, very quickly. Why is Hummingbird, our friend Akshay's firm, in the news Utsav?

Utsav Somani: So Akshay was there with us on episode 17 and man, their strategy really works. Like they have been talking about this concentrated approach, staying under the radar and finding founders in very offbeat places like Turkey, that gaming company that they did two gaming companies there. And now they've done and made success from their first biotech investment. They own 22% of a company called Billion to One that went for a $5 billion IPO. And I mean, that's a big, big payday. So the strategy really, really works. I don't know what they have in the Hummingbird office or what are they drinking, but man, it's working.

Utsav Somani: Do you know anything about the company?

Dhruv Sharma: I'm in fact, I just got to know about this company. I'm learning pretty much as we speak more about what they do. But apparently the story is, so Turkish founders and they were biotech researchers to start with. And this company works pretty much the crossroads of biotech and machine learning. They started with prenatal testing and then what they're best known for now around the IPO is early detection of cancer, which of course is one of the dominant conditions of our time. And it's an incredible problem to be solving.

Utsav Somani: Absolutely. And solid, solid, solid work. But I mean, just to give you a sense on how hard venture is, I saw this tweet by an old many, but he said that, and he recapped some numbers as well from this article, Lenskart went for an IPO today, by the way, muted listing, but still not something that we shouldn't celebrate. Charite Ventures, which was previously known as IDG, owned 45% of the company at seed when they invested at less than a 50 crore valuation back in the day. But they did not hold onto the stake, which would have been worth a lot when Lenskart just went for an IPO at $10 billion, almost like a 7, 8 billion valuation, I think, would have been worth a lot. And yeah, I mean, they sold all of their stake between 2016 to 2019 and now just left with 2% of the IPO when they were less than a unicorn valuation as well. So it gives you a sense on how hard this industry is and kudos to Hummingbird for holding on.

Dhruv Sharma: This is what we were discussing with Karshesh when he came on as well, how cap tables morph pretty much from one round to the other. And yeah, whoever gets to stay the longest and if assuming the company does well, gets to write the success.

Utsav Somani: All big ifs. But what's happening in the world of Sam Altman?

Dhruv Sharma: You know, I figured this is less news and more interesting things we saw on the timeline. So Sam Altman was doing a lot of media, let's just say. He was doing a lot of media and so were people in his team, yes. So and I was telling you about this, I was working out one and I had the PG2 pod on sort of running in the background and Sam is talking with Brad Gertz now of Altimeter and Brad asks him a question basically to the effect that, you know, you're like earning 10 rupees or 10 dollars. How are you going to pay? How can you possibly have, you know, have committed paying 1200 rupees or dollars in the future? That's like the 10 billion dollars in revenue right now, which Sam clarified is not 10 but 20. But they have 1.2 trillion in spending.

Utsav Somani: So they are, I think it's 14 or 15 maybe and they should be at 20 billion end of this year. That's what he's projecting. But it's still 20 and 1400. So yeah, big difference. And that's why the CFO comment also got picked up, right, where she used that word backstop, which I mean, of course, if people read in the full context of what she meant was OK. But I mean, media had a field day with it.

Dhruv Sharma: We have we have a CFO coming on the show later in this. I don't think we should ask him and so forth. But so Sam's response to Brad was, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. And the, you know, the Internet didn't take to that very kindly. And then he was also on he was speaking with Tyler Cohen where, you know, he asked him a question about the government being an insurer of last resort. Sam sounded like he thinks the government's an insurer of the first resort. So he came out and, you know, there's a long there's a long tweet and X where he clarifies that there's going to be that he did not, in fact, at any point suggest there should be a government bailout, a federal government bailout for open AI, that the market will sort itself out if any one big company goes down. And he also said the government, if anything, should be spending money on a public AI infra build out and any money that comes out of it should again go back to the government. You know, there used to be this economist called Mark Green who popularized a phrase called which is very popular in America called, you know, like privatizing profits and socializing losses. So basically, this entire saga was to was to clear the air around basically that. And yeah, that is that on Sam and his tweet.

Utsav Somani: Sam, no, thanks for breaking it down for us. And Sam also, I think, posted a post about open AI where he thinks that 2026, we should be able to make minor scientific discoveries using AI. So, I mean, excited to see where Chad GPT-6 lands. But one fun tweet before we head into the guest segment, our very own founder of Dhan who's become very vocal after turning a unicorn as well. And he also commented that he can now post all of this because he's never needed VCs. So it's good to hear his perspective as well, that whenever, I mean, he was under the radar when he was not a unicorn. And now suddenly that his company's turned unicorn with that notional mark of a billion dollar in valuation. He's getting these invites for meetups, catch ups, seminars, podcasts. So I tried reaching out to him and bringing him on our show as well. But it seems like he's taking his own advice way too well. Yeah. All right. Are we ready for our first guest segment? Uh. Just hang in.

Dhruv Sharma: All right, so I find it's in two minutes, but I was just as you were speaking about what Praveen tweeted, so why do VCs get so much flack? And why is it that founders can once in a while even playfully trip on VCs, but the reverse can be like a career ender.

Utsav Somani: I think it's just generally social media lore that people think that VCs are an easy job. Like VCs still have to raise their own funds. Like I think anybody who's raised even a million dollars will realize that you have to have serious, serious sort of sense of responsibility towards capital. And that, I think, comes with the perspective that you have raised external capital. So VCs, just like founders, also have to raise external capital. But I think the thing is that VCs get multiple shots at goal, right? And the founder gets to spend 10 years of his company diversified. Yes. I mean, it's this is not their only thing. That's not the only thing. So that's why in terms of like what is tougher, like founder life is always, always going to be much harder and up there in terms of like just the seriousness. All right. Before we go on, let's welcome our first guest, Ashwin. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Dhruv Sharma: Hey, Ashwin. Good to see you, Ashwin.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah. Hey, good to see you both, Dhruv and yourself.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. So for our listeners who are hearing about Xflow for the first time, can you break it down in two minutes? What does it mean? What does it do?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah, sure. Two minutes is plenty. So so we build cross-border payments infrastructure with a bunch of X stripes trying to do for payments infrastructure in the cross-border world, what Stripe has done, you know, in sort of like the domestic card acquiring space. So a good way to perhaps like model us is, you know, anyone who's looking to move money into and out of India, right, that's the space that we're really looking to get deeper into. So we we help kind of like move the money. And we also build software that helps solve associated problems with the money movement.

Dhruv Sharma: Ashwin, let's do a quick capsule on globally. How has money moved up to this point? What's the SWIFT system?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Sure. Maybe like a good way that I describe the SWIFT system is it's basically a bunch of intermediaries. Right. So why don't we actually just do like a like an actual example, right? Utsav wants to move money to Dhruv, Utsav is in India, Dhruv is in the US. And so what Utsav is going to do is Utsav will say, well, I don't really know how to get, sorry, what Dhruv is going to do is he's going to say, I don't really know how to get to Utsav. So he'll hand money off to an intermediary, say Ashwin, and Ashwin knows how to get to Utsav, right? That's your best case scenario, right? Remember, right, there might be multiple intermediaries between Dhruv and Utsav, right? So for your listeners, I would say that's probably the least technical explanation that I can provide. So maybe like another way to.

Dhruv Sharma: Maybe correct me if I'm wrong, like, I mean, if there's three banks, A, B and C, and A and C don't have a direct banking relationship, but A has a relationship with B, B has one with C. So that's why you need intermediary banks to transact globally. Historically, that's how it's worked.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yep, that's exactly how it works. And, you know, one of the fun facts about SWIFT is maybe a good way to mentally model SWIFT is it's really just a messaging system. That's all it is. It's like, it's like sending somebody secure email, right?

Utsav Somani: Most trusted, I mean, global financial system. Like, can SWIFT be replaced?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): I think it's very hard. I think like messaging systems, once prevalent, right, they're just really hard to replace. Maybe like another good way to answer the question is, you know, can currency be replaced? I mean, we have cards, right? We have UPI, but currency is still pretty prevalent, right? So I think like once, you know, once some kind of money movement system gains legitimacy and scale, it's really, really hard to rip and replace.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, go ahead Utsav. Is that what Ripple was trying to do as well? The company based out of SF and has an arm and leg in crypto?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah, I think like many, many, many companies have tried to kind of like replace SWIFT. Ripple tried to do this. For the long tail of countries, not really sort of like the main countries out there. But now you see sort of like companies like Stripe and Circle trying to come up with their own sort of like, I call it, I call them payment blockchains, right? So these are like, I think Stripe released something called Tempo, Circle released something called ARK. So they're all kind of looking at what SWIFT is built as the holy grail and they're trying to go after it in different ways. But yeah, I think like once payment systems achieve some kind of scale, some kind of legitimacy, some kind of trust, it's super hard. I mean, just to give you a sense, right? Like, like SWIFT is present today, you know, in about 11,000 banks across the world, right? And so now if you, you know, if you go and tell these banks, well, look at this new thing, this new shiny thing, why don't you go and take this for a spin? I think it's pretty hard, right?

Utsav Somani: Let's do it another way. If you were to design a better SWIFT or replace SWIFT entirely, what are the features that you would do or how would you convince the banks to this thing? Is it a cost thing? Is it a speed thing?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah, I think it's not really a cost or a speed thing. I think the first thing that SWIFT brings is trust, right? How do I know that, you know, when I receive a payment request from somebody, that somebody is in fact legitimate, right? And I think like that's one of my biggest learnings of being in the payment space.

Utsav Somani: Counterparty risk is what they're solving for, basically.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah, I mean, think about it, right? If Utsav says he's good for the money, how do I really know whether he's good for the money, right? And so to me, counterparty risk, just trust in a transaction is super huge. And I think like trust, you know, downstream of trust, you know, there's the standard stuff like, can you move my money faster? Can you decrease settlement time? Can you move it cheaper? Can you, for example, you know, when money is sent from one end, can you capture some information in terms of why this money is being sent, right? Those sorts of things. But I think like the single biggest thing is just trust, right? Like, I think like, you know, all of us over here probably use like UPI and probably use like cards and stuff, right? Like when you pay a merchant with UPI, the merchant knows you're good for the money, right? Like very simply, the money will arrive, right? Now imagine for a second that there was no trust in the ecosystem, right? Then I think the merchant would be like, you know, no, I'm not getting paid with this, pay me via something else.

Dhruv Sharma: And we'll steer the conversation back to Xflow, Ashwin, in just a bit. But for the fintech nerds out there, other than SWIFT, what are some other common standards that banks in the global sort of, you know, payment, global financial landscape agree on and utilize on a daily basis?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): From a cross-border perspective, Dhruv?

Dhruv Sharma: Cross-border payment infrastructure perspective.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Okay, awesome. No, that's a super cool question. I think the thing that people actually forget about is just cards, right? I mean, just to give you a sense, Visa and MasterCard are amongst the largest cross-border money movers in the world today, right? Just to give you a sense, right? Let's assume for a second that, you know, cross-border flows around the world totaling up to say like, you know, $150 trillion, just to give you like a rough sense of the ballpark, right? Like Visa today, you know, is slightly north of 10%, right? And so, you know, that's kind of like how large they are. So I would say cards, very big, SWIFT, super big, and obviously sort of like the new kid on the block are just like stablecoins, right? And so I would say stablecoins are also picking up pace, but I would say still a ways to go.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. In terms of UPI going global as well, it's now accepted in many other countries, including our bordering nations as well. And I mean, even UAE, Singapore, all of these places, what is the secret sauce behind all of this? Yeah.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): I have a simple question, actually, genuinely curious. Have you guys tried it?

Utsav Somani: I've not actually, because you need to apparently like only some apps work on it, like PhonePe, this thing, I'm a Paytm user, but...

Dhruv Sharma: You guys have a really funny Coldplay story though, which... Oh yes. But that was like a, I mean, man... You have to tell that story. I should...

Utsav Somani: Hey, what is the story? You and I want to know. It's a really funny story. Me and my colleague, we were in Barcelona. We got scammed. We bought tickets from Viagogo online and apparently somebody sold us tickets, which were already used or somebody had entered on them before us. And funny enough, like, I mean, we meet like this group of four other Indians in Barcelona, just outside the stadium. They had two extra tickets and we paid them via UPI because we didn't have cash with us to the concert. So that was our international use of UPI, but it was peer-topeer, not a peer-to-merchant transaction. But honestly, I blessed our payment infrastructure that day.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Okay. That's super cool. Um, um, okay. I am, I, you know, self-professed, uh, you know, as big a fintech nerd as they come, uh, right. Like I, I read payment books, right. Like, like for, you know, like for joy. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I'm one of those, uh, and, and, and, and honestly, like, like, you know, I, I, you know, when I was in Singapore recently and I was actually looking for a way to pay with UPI just because, right. And I'm still not able to find it. Uh, uh, uh, so apparently if I go to the Eiffel tower in France, apparently there's a way to pay with UPI, but again, I'm yet to find it. But now to answer your question, how is sort of like the rails being designed? Uh, essentially there are bilateral agreements, uh, between, you know, country A and country B. Obviously one of the countries is India and then country B is sort of like on the other side, uh, where essentially some, you know, something like a UPI, uh, rides on a local payment rail, right? So in the case of say Singapore, uh, this would be, uh, this would be like a local payment rail, like EFT, right? So it would ride on that. It would settle with somebody local in Singapore. And then, uh, you know, on some kind of a weekly basis, money would be exchanged via Swift. Right. That's really sort of like the way it works. So it's, it's a little janky. It's not like, it's not like perfect. Um, uh, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting.

Dhruv Sharma: Sorry, I said it can't even be real time settlement then.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): I mean, technically it can, right. Because, uh, sort of like the counterparty, let's assume NPCI on, on India, on the Indian side can actually just choose to settle real time. Uh, and then they're, they're running a net deficit, right? They just kind of like make themselves hold on a weekly basis.

Dhruv Sharma: But to me, it appears that it makes sense to export UPI only to countries where we either have an active trading relationship, like commercially, or where we have extensive people to people contract, uh, contact.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah, actually there, there is a past kind of, uh, you know, uh, sort of like an example for this. So if you look at, uh, payment methods like Alipay and WeChat pay, right. These payment methods actually made their way out of China and they basically just followed Chinese tourists. So if you look at sort of like Chinese tourists as China kind of like began its upwards climb, uh, you know, along per capita GDP, GDP, you know, Chinese tourists started to travel to Singapore, started to travel to Australia, right. Uh, these are the countries that they went to, and these are the countries where, you know, these sorts of payment methods first appeared, right. Otherwise, you know, like there really isn't any point, uh, for someone to pay why Alipay or WeChat pay in these countries, right. So as the Indian diaspora sort of like, you know, goes outward, right. Uh, that's when sort of like these payment methods distribution starts to make sense.

Dhruv Sharma: Maybe let me now steer away from sort of global, the global payments masterclass, uh, Ashwin and bring it to Xflow, uh, moment in time thinking, right. How are you thinking these days about product partnerships, licenses, and then we'll take it from there.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Oh, wow. Okay, cool. That's a lot. Um, okay. Maybe let me, let me start with sort of like the last thing, right? So, uh, the way we think about ourselves is, you know, and by the way, here's a litmus test, right? Whenever you want to find out, you know, if a payments company is really a full stack payments company, ask them how they are organized, right. And any payments company, right. Has, has a four part structure. The, the part right in the top is legal slash regulatory. Next up is partnerships, risk and compliance. Then comes product engineering design. Then comes sales and marketing. Okay. And so that's how we are organized. So right at the very top, there's legal and regulatory for us. And so, uh, you know, uh, we received our in-principle authorization for the PACB license. We're licensed in Canada. We had an MSB, uh, in the U S we've applied for a license in Singapore. Right. Uh, so that's sort of like the top layer. Then there's the partnerships and risk and compliance layer. So we partner with banks like JPMorgan Chase, uh, right. Like with ICICI, right. To actually move money. Then there's the product engineering and design side, right. And that's entirely in-house, right? So if you think about it, right, like in some sense, that's easier, right? Like I can build stuff myself. Right. Uh, uh, and that's kind of like the third layer. And then the fourth layer, right. Is the sales and marketing side. Uh, so in some sense, payments companies are really boring. And I mean that in a very good way. I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all. I mean, like we build roads, right? Like building roads is not, it's not supposed to be super cool. Right. But we, we think it's super cool. But you know, if you ask like the ordinary bystander, they're like, no, this is a really boring business. And we're like, yes, very astute of you to catch that.

Utsav Somani: And how do people discover you? Why would they work with Xflow? I'm guessing many of them come to you. I mean, correct my understanding. Uh, but do they come to you for like paying in their foreign exchange rates? Is that the main reason why they come to Xflow and discover Xflow?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Yeah. So, uh, it's of a really sort of like our go-to-market model is where we actually partnered with platforms, right? So I'll give you an example of a platform, right? Say someone like a drip capital, right? So someone like a drip capital, uh, you know, uh, provides financing for exporters in India. Right. But they use us for money movement to actually make, you know, to actually get financing into the hands of these exporters in an ideal world. I don't ever want my exporter to know that they are using Xflow. As far as I'm concerned, my partner is drip capital, right? And so consequently, the way people discover us, uh, is maybe they probably don't discover us as in they don't see the brand Xflow, but what they really see are sort of like, uh, you know, these platform partners that we have out there and we're just going to market with them, right? We do service some segments directly. I think you can go to xflowpay.com and just like find out about us and start using us. So we have different ways to go to go to market, but that's sort of, sort of like how I would ask you to think about it. Uh, you know, there's platform partnerships, there's coming on the website directly and so on.

Dhruv Sharma: Ashwin, I really want to ask you a question about Stripe's documentation culture and more broadly things that you learned at Stripe that you've brought to Xflow as well. Yeah.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Uh, okay. I think Stripe's documentation culture is awesome. Uh, but then remember, right? Like my, I, I was at Amazon before Stripe. So I think like, you know, sort of like the documentation culture was kind of like ingrained in us. Uh, so coming to Stripe was actually pretty easy. You know, uh, we don't do a lot of decks at Stripe, you know, we write a lot. Um, in fact, you know, the funny joke, uh, at Stripe is, you know, everybody writes to the point that it's hard to figure out what's the latest version of the doc because somebody may just have floated like a newer version, uh, or something like that. Uh, but yeah, I, I feel like, uh, writing is awesome. It clarifies sort of like the thought process. Uh, you know, uh, just like, uh, it's, it's something that we do a lot of, uh, at Xflow, we just expect it to. Um, so yeah, strong believer in the, in the writing culture. In fact, I'll give you a funny story. We were, uh, you know, we were, uh, even like in our fundraising, uh, rounds, uh, we actually don't make decks. We actually prepare like a, like a written memo. Uh, and that's actually what we, what we give to investors, uh, or potential investors, and then, you know, we actually ask them, did you read the doc? And if you haven't read the doc, why don't you take like the next 20 minutes and just read the doc? It'll actually help you.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Nice. I always think that notion memos work better anyway, but, uh, when a charity recently launched and, uh, they wanted to do the UPI thing, the, I think partnered up with type as well. And a lot of people were complaining about why it's not working well, or they were payment failures. What was your, um, read into this whole situation, uh, as a X type person?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Um, yeah, I think like sitting on the outside, I probably don't exactly know sort of like, you know, uh, what, what happened, but I mean, openly, I going with Stripe just makes sense. Stripe is their payment processor. Uh, you know, uh, I mean, openly, I basically asked Stripe, Hey, listen, open up sort of like local Indian payment methods for me, Stripe probably, you know, went and partnered with somebody locally, uh, over here, right. And, you know, probably like, you know, the day one or day two launch probably didn't go as well. These things happen. I'm sure they'll iron it out, uh, and, and, and figure it out from there. I, and I think like the last thing that I heard was, uh, I think chat GPT just solved it by saying, we'll just give one year free to everybody, which was, uh, which I thought was such a, which I thought was such an opening. I think to do right. Uh, like solve the problem very simply.

Dhruv Sharma: All right. Pretty much out of time. Maybe, uh, in parting, uh, do you want to give a shout out to any of your buddies who are FinTech nerds also we can invite to the show?

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Oh yeah, sure. I think there are just so many, uh, so many cool, uh, FinTech folks that, uh, I would love to see, uh, on the offline network. Um, I think maybe what I can do through with, I can just like drop you like a WhatsApp message. Uh, but yeah, I'm like huge fan of DBPN, huge fan of what you guys are doing at D O N. So, you know, I wish you all the, all the success.

Utsav Somani: I shouldn't one final question. It's burning, uh, inside actually transfer wise. One of my favorite businesses globally, but they've not done well in India. Capital controls is one reason. But how they transparently display the rise to a consumer in terms of international Forex movement, right? Can a business like this be built out of India? What would it take? Of course it can be built out of India. Uh, I just haven't done it then. Like, I mean, I mean, transfer wise, I think you can only receive, I don't think you can send from India.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Okay. Uh, yes, that's true, I suppose. But again, you know, just kind of like, um, and reasoning about this. So transfer wise, if I remember correctly is now an 82 licensed player in India, which means technically they can actually enable outward. Maybe this is a function of prioritization on their end. Can't speak for them that much, but yeah, I'm a huge wise fan as well. I have one of those wise multi-currency cards. Uh, uh, but, but yeah, I, I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll launch something soon itself.

Utsav Somani: All right. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Ashwin. Amazing.

Ashwin Bhatnagar (Co-founder, XFlow): Take care, everybody. See you. Bye.

Utsav Somani: Thank you, Ashwin. All right, folks, uh, staying with the world of finance. Our next guest is the CFO of a company that just went for an IPO. Uh, so Rumit, welcome to the show. And also we can disclaim it by saying that, uh, since you're the CFO of a listed firm, please feel free to ignore some questions and say that you cannot answer this, uh, we're live streaming this. Welcome to the show.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Thank you. Thank you. And I'm getting used to that last thing that you mentioned, right? Filtering stuff out.

Utsav Somani: So the fifth amendment, uh, whatever the Indian, uh, awesome. How's life been this year after the IPO? What's changed?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Um, um, yeah, pre-IPO was, you know, all you, you have a destination and you want to get this thing done. Uh, so, but I think post IPO, we are kind of getting used to the, uh, so we have had two results, uh, post our listing. Uh, so we're kind of used to getting to that quarterly treadmill, right? Uh, so that three monthly treadmill, the whole governance structure, uh, obviously it becomes a lot more demanding. Uh, so those are the kind of things that we are kind of getting, uh, getting used to and watching the stock prices, right? Like, so I have to write rather all of us have to hold ourselves back and say, look, don't look at stock prices every day. Don't look at your share price.

Utsav Somani: That is what I think somebody mentioned in a book or on a tweet where I don't think it was the binders book, but somebody said that, I mean, employee morale also gets affected by that. Do you sense that maybe in a soft conversation share price?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): It's too early, but generally I think what we, what we tell people is look, you, I mean, the way we were building in the private ecosystem, the customer product proposition do the right thing for the business. And obviously you will try value creation, but the advantage of the private ecosystem is there is no mark to market, right? There is no price that you see every day. So, so everybody is kind of aligned to that larger vision. So just keeping people, you know, aligned to the longterm value is, uh, does get a little harder because they see the stock price every day. And, but I think we'll know in time too, too early.

Dhruv Sharma: Rumit, when a company decides to go public, uh, what changes inside of the company, like when you flip that switch on, what happens?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): So I think bulk of it is, uh, really how your internal governance structures are, right? So the lot, the big change is obviously on the governance structure side. Uh, you know, getting, uh, ready to operate in a public market governance ecosystem, getting ready to declare numbers, aligning all your, uh, financials ecosystem, et cetera. So a lot of it is, you know, on the finance side and on the governance side. At the business side, I think it's more mental that now you are being judged on a three month basis. Earlier you were just probably on like one year, two year kind of timeframes. When you were in the private ecosystem, uh, but now you have to start getting used to market kind of judging you on a three month basis, but I think it's important to still hold that, you know, two, three year timeframe, uh, even in your decisions, because you may have that temptation, uh, you know, uh, do this thing for the next quarter kind of situation. So you have to kind of be guarded against that temptation.

Utsav Somani: And how long was this journey for the prep? Uh, I mean, leading up to the IPO.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): It, uh, it took us almost a, almost a year, uh, uh, you know, filing, filing the DRHP is a six month process. And then, uh, and then depending on the market, et cetera, marketing. So it's at least, at least a year, year and a half, the, the, from flash to bank, year, year and a half.

Dhruv Sharma: I'm curious if, uh, given the nature of, of your business room, I mean, from your seat, right from the CFO seat, if there's something that's unique to jewelry businesses, only channel jewelry businesses that, you know, other OEMs don't even have to worry about.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): So one of the unique things about this, this category, uh, or jewelry retailing is, is, is as much as a balance sheet business as it is a BNL business. Because, uh, uh, the moment you go from, uh, you know, pure online to omni channel, you have stores, which means you have inventory and, uh, to grow inventory, you need to bring in capital, right? So you need to grow the balance sheet first before you can actually grow the BNL. So I think that is what makes it quite unique as a consumer category. Most consumer categories are, you know, BNL categories, right? They're not so much balance sheet categories. This is obviously both, uh, but you need to have a large balance sheet.

Utsav Somani: We're talking about balance sheets. Like, I mean, uh, yours must have moved up significantly because of the gold prices going up, silver prices rising as well. I mean, thought process in a business where you've probably never seen this kind of gold, uh, movement before.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): It's, uh, it's super challenging because even if it's going up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, uh, it's very challenging because your capital employed keeps going up effectively because when you're, when you're replacing the inventory or even if you're hedged, et cetera, uh, so, uh, so it's super challenging when the gold is going up because your balance sheet is expanding and you, you necessarily, that's not always a good thing, right? It's just that balance sheet expansion is driven by commodity prices. Um, and on the other side, the consumer demand kind of then fluctuates depending on how fast the price is moving up and down. So you have one balance sheet actually moving up and then consumers keep reacting to how the prices are. So it's quite challenging.

Dhruv Sharma: And now rumors with your CFO hat off, uh, speaking of consumers and, you know, trends and expectations, what are the last 12, 24 months been like? What's the, what's the consumer, consumer asking you for?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): See, I think one, one big shift and, uh, I think jewelry is seeing the similar shift is all consumers are experiencing their categories, um, in, in both physical and digital, digital world together, right? Um, so now every consumer category, you can actually go browse online. So you have endless aisles, continuous browsing. Jewelry is a very, very unique category because in the physical world, you can't create a aisle based browsing experience, right? Is, is impossible because of the nature of the product, right? In every other category, you can create that. And thus online is the only way, uh, where a consumer can meaningfully browse and interact with this category. And if you look at most other categories, the whole consumerism happens when you're able to interact and browse the category a lot more, right? Like if I would ask you like how many types of shoes are there, uh, formal shoes, you would probably list out four, five, six, uh, Oxford, Derby, this, that. But if I ask a woman how many types of thumb rings are there, she probably won't be able to list out. Uh, and then, and the difference is really just how much you interact with the category, right? Without being forced to buy. And that is a pretty secular trend, which is what we bring to the table where consumers love to browse. And if you give them a meaningful browsing experience, we see a huge pickup, uh, in terms of browsing. And that is what then eventually converts in the store.

Utsav Somani: And in a jewelry business, uh, do you build trust by going offline? Uh, and what percentage of your sales are offline versus online right now?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Uh, I mean, this is very interesting. So, so the answer is yes, right. You need to have physical presence. So one is the trust factor. Uh, yes, but this is, uh, also a pleasure purchase kind of category. Like, uh, it's not just about convenience, right? Online can bring in a lot of convenience, uh, and can solve problems like as I spoke about on browsing, et cetera, but you still want to touch and feel it. Right. So the physical world also kind of gives you that. So trust plus the experience, um, in, in terms, uh, uh, in terms of, uh, you know, scaling, et cetera, obviously the offline, uh, you need like a lot of. Lot of demand, pre-demand aggregation, et cetera, because scaling offline is much harder because you don't know where demand, uh, demand, et cetera is. But, uh, but consumers use the two channels very, very differently.

Dhruv Sharma: And a related question, Rumit is when, when you have to, I mean, what's the calculus behind launching a new store? How do you identify a location, the right format? I mean, you know where I'm going with this question.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Yeah. Yeah. So see the big advantage that we had through was that when we started in 2011, 12, uh, we were pan India pretty much from day one, right. And we were online only until about 2090. So the hypothesis was that, you know, a lot of the demand is kind of aggregating, um, or we seem like a big browsing pickup, but we are not seeing like great conversion, right, without the offline store. And that is pretty much our cue card of where a store needs to go, because we know where the demand's aggregating, you know, the pin codes, we know how much traffic is getting generated. And that is typically where we go and open our store and all that funnel that is kind of generated online, uh, then starts to convert in a store, which is, which is why it's hard to say whether you are an online business or an offline business, because without, without each other, I mean, we would, we would not have a business, right, of this scale.

Dhruv Sharma: Two sides of the same coin.

Dhruv Sharma: Do you have global stores also, Rumit?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): No, not, not yet. Right. Like, I mean, the category that we are operating in, it's a, we don't do wedding, uh, wedding jewelry, or we don't participate in the wedding segment, but the nonwedding segment in India is a $45 billion tab, uh, right. So I think we, uh, we have enough and more right now.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. And Len Scott, we just went for an IPO. I think they have some global stores. I remember seeing one store in Dubai, then I Googled, I think they've opened in a bunch of places as well. I think they've acquired a Japanese company, uh, also.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Yes. Yes. No, I, I, I think a lot of the new age or, or the new consumer brands potentially have a more global appeal than the brands that got built, let's say in the last 30, 40 years, right. Uh, uh, because those brands are very, very localized, right. And then the brands that are getting built now. So I mean, in general, my view is you are going to probably in the next 10 years, 12 years, see a lot of multinational consumer companies coming out of it. Yeah. I think Len Scott is, is, is obviously there. Uh, yeah, because the way that supply chains are structured, product first companies, a lot of product innovation, et cetera. So I do feel that you're going to see a lot of multinational consumer companies out of India in the next 10 years.

Utsav Somani: Amazing. And one personal question for you, please feel free to skip this. We're leading up to the IPO. What is that one hardest week that you had and why, what went on behind the scenes?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): I think the, to be very honest, uh, the hardest, uh, uh, the hardest week was actually post IPO, you know, the first result, you know, uh, so that was, you know, IPO, you are generally mentally prepared for that grind, right? So you align yourself that, okay, you're going to have price negotiations, discussions, this, that. So you're mentally more aligned, uh, while it may be actually draining. But I think post the first result that we posted and how the, how the market will accept those results and how will the stock price react. So, and that is something also we don't control, right? So that creates a little more anxiety on things that you don't control versus things that you can do control, right? So I would say the night before the result. Yeah, I think I was most anxious.

Utsav Somani: Did you sleep, uh, the night before the listing day? Yeah.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Yeah. I slept very peacefully because the IPO had happened, right? So I, I was, I was super peaceful the night before the listing. I was more anxious on, on the first result, less anxious on the listing.

Dhruv Sharma: Has there been an unexpected benefit of going public? Umit?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): I think, uh, not, I mean, not in such a short timeframe, uh, that I can, uh, I can figure, but I, I, yeah, I think maybe we'll, we'll know those benefits. I mean, theoretically, we know those benefits, right? I mean, to raise capital and all of that. And given our business is a balance sheet business, it does, it does, uh, it does matter, uh, so theoretically we know, but we have to execute on actually those benefits.

Dhruv Sharma: All right. I think, uh, Dhruv, any final question for Umit? Uh, maybe one. So Umit, uh, again, globally, even in India as consumers, what can we be really excited about? Like what's going on behind the scenes of jewelry retailers and, and like in, in terms of material fusion, in terms of lab grown diamonds, what's the new stuff? Like how are you using AI for design? What's some crazy new stuff happening behind the scenes?

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): So I think a lot of interesting stuff. Uh, uh, one, there is a lot of innovation that can be brought on the manufacturing technology side, right? And we are one of the few companies which is vertically integrated into manufacturing, right? We are not only in brand and detailing. So there is a lot of stuff, uh, experimentation with alloys, metallurgy, et cetera. So there is classical manufacturing innovation, uh, that is going on. On, on the other hand, on the technology side, I mean, to give you an example, we have zero merchandisers in the company, pretty much. So we have more than 300 stores and no, nobody's deciding what piece should go into which store, et cetera. So, uh, so we use a lot of ML algorithms, et cetera, and they decide pretty much everything. So there are tremendous amount of use cases that can be built, um, uh, around your adoption of, call it AI, call it machine learning, call it expert systems. Uh, in, in, in consumer, in, in customer experience, in merchandising. So we are bringing all of, all of, uh, all of that. We are, I think we are probably one of the only jewelry retail company in India, which has no merchandisers.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And I think Dhruv was mentioning LabPro and Diamonds as well.

Rumit Dugar (CEO, BlueStone): Yeah, you have to see it. So India is a very, very, uh, a different kind of market. Um, I mean, the jewelry category in India has existed for thousands of years. So it's a very matured category versus the Western markets. Uh, like a share of a single product will not be more than like 5%, 7% in the overall pie. While if you look at Western markets where LabPro and Diamond adoption has happened, like probably an engagement rank is like 60, 70% of the market, right? So, so different markets have seen different adoptions of LabPro and Diamond Early days, uh, I would say, I think Indian, Indian consumers are still kind of looking for jewelry as a sort of store of value or precious or status, aspirational. So I think those things are not kind of gone away, whether it creates another category, which in, which never existed in India, which is costume or a very affordable kind of jewelry. I think we'll have to see. So early days.

Utsav Somani: All right. Pramit, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. All the best for the next quarters and million more quarters to go for Bluestone. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me guys. Thank you. Cheers. Bye-bye. Bye. All right, listeners. I hope you've had a good Monday with us. We'll see you on Wednesday at four o'clock. Thank you. Bye-bye.