India is sort of seen by many American BCS as this great untapped country with 1.5 billion people but we see it a bit as a monolith out of the 1.4 billion people about 600 million people in the labor force out of which about barely 10% are in the small economy Highly Educated affluent well earning it's
still significant that's bigger than you know Germany for instance right the any Indians have access to English and use English just a gatekeeping device I haven't got a single Indie email in all the years ago there are not too many products that appeal to the entire Indian
[Music] population well hello everyone it's Jim oasy with yet another infinite Loops my guest today sjit pie is one of the most respect people in the inbian tech industry he's a GP at Bloom VC and he's also a very prolific writer I've read much of what he's written he's a
wonderful writer and what I love about it is the transition s from two decades in media entertainment and then staking your claim I think it was in 2018 by joining uh uh Bloom BC first off welcome thank you thank youim it's a pleasure and it's an honor and if you wouldn't mind uh one of the things that
I have been learning a lot about that I'm sure that many of our listeners and viewers don't know too much about is India is sort of seen by many American BCS as this great untapped country with 1.5 billion people but we see it a bit as a monolith and and you've dis at least youve disabused me of those
Notions and I and it would be great if you could uh help our listeners and viewers understand it's it's not that at all you've said it's three maybe four different countries and that you really need to understand so if you wouldn't mind walking us through kind of a 101 on the Indian opportunity and many of the
misconceptions westerners have about it no I'd be happy to a lot of folks outside see India has this large like you rightly said 1.4 1.5 billion uh population country with a rising middle class and because a lot of um I would say folks in the west interact with very smart Indians and especially if you're
in Silicon Valley you know like Indians are a substantial portion and even in us corporates and as well as British corporates are full of uh very success ful Indians so typically the notion is that there are a lot of people like them in India right um but when you actually
unpa the data you find that that kind of uh you know population Highly Educated affluent well learning uh is actually a very small portion of the Indian population uh so I look at India as what four countries but really three of them are uh are the ones I think uh it's best
understood as it's sort of a pyramid uh India 1 India 2 and India 3 India one is like the smallest market and the fourth country is really a subset of India one which is an extremely uh kind of rarified Set uh which which I I'll not talk about so let's go back to the three countries India 1 India 2 and India 3
India one is about 30 million households about 120 million people but 9 to 10% of the overall Indian population but and it accounts for about $15,000 per capita income and they are the ones for example buying Apple fores uh having Starbucks Coffee offices a franchise in India or Dunkin Donuts uh buying
Samsonite suitcases and what have you um a lot of people think this is a majority of the Indian population but it's actually just about 9 10% but the fact is because they're 120 million people it's still significant that's bigger than you know Germany for instance right that's bigger than the
UK so so the fact that's an interesting Paradox of India that India one is just about 9% of India but it's still larger than many countries right India too is a second nation and that is really aspiring India they're about 70 million households 300 million people they they can use the internet but they can't
consume their users not consumes and uh they account about $3,000 per capita income of like a Philippines but Philippines population is about 100 million this like an Indonesia with the with with the per capital income of the Philippines uh India one is like a Mexico like you
think of it as a Mexico siiz country and India 3 is really Beyond The Pale they're like they completely loged out of the markets economic markets uh they're not making too much money, per capita income really it's struggling to buy no disposable income and so on really these are the three nations and I
think what western companies or any company outside India needs to keep in mind this there are not too many products that appeal to the entire Indian populace yes there are companies like unil proor and gamble more unil and there are a few companies which have products that cater to the entire you
know 1.4 billion people but really most products really appeal to 30 million households 120 million people and if it can appeal to India to then it's really a big big big big product uh so that is sort of the three nations and sort of the teasing a part of this I want to take a pause there and
let you come back into the conversation thank you um and how do you navigate between these three countries do you do you aim at that tier one or are you looking for Founders who you think might be able to go into country two and ultimately country three I think all of us in Venture are
were really launching uh say um most consumer products have really uh kept India 3 out of our calculations uh it's a very large country 1.2 billion uh people uh but or one billion people but it's really outside of our concentration set now uh one thing to keep in mind is it is not
like India one is concentrated in a few cities and India one is uh in certain regions it spread across India so sort of a good way to understand is if India is water or milk and the India one is like the cre that kind of spread across it's concentrated in a few regions but there's no one part where it it kind of
like people talk about ital and says southern Italy versus Northern Italy Northern Italy is far more prosperous nothing like that in India there are some Trends where the southern part is southern western parts are a little more richer but nothing Des is it but s of spread across and all of us really keep
India one and two in mind and if we're lucky if the product can also appeal to India 2 very few products appeal to India one and India 2 that's because the hooks that are needed to grab onto the landmar of India one are not sufficient are not relevant to the hook to know to
grab on to the landmarks of India to what I mean is India one speaks a lot of English they're very comfortable with uh uh what's happening in the US uh consumption patterns you see them as really and I like to think of this metaphor that India won as a 51st state of the US really okay so so so that's
and because watching Suits or friends and what have you uh they're really consuming us culture uh but India to is not a native English speakers they can see English some of them can understand English but they're largely vernacular language speakers while they can use the English internet
they're not native and they don't leverage it well some of them have started using it for learning some of them use it for shopping Etc but they're not native users the pattern the the way in which uh so India one is very used to clicking on colored rectangles on flat glass scenes and buying but India to
likes to use voice and increasingly a lot of a lot of apps have started giving back uh you know interface using the LA voice interface and it'll be interesting if AI in the next few years can use this voice interface to help make the internet palatable for India too so this
is sort of the lay of the land when it comes to venture funded start have been largely focused on India one and we have direct experience with that in one of our verticals uh infinite books on the audio book we are looking to be able to translate it into the very many languages spoken in India and the AI is
getting better and better and better at that so we think it'll be an interesting experiment at least um we uh and and by the way we're doing it in enely experimentally uh we we don't have any preconceived notions about how that might or might not work but you've also written elsewhere that India is a low
trust society and are Are there specific things that you look for E first off I guess this is a two-part question is that is that top uh in country one that is very uh comfortable with us culture Etc is is that still a low trust cohort or are they a high or are they more like
the United States in in their trust and then the the second question would be how do you build apps that work and appeal in a low trust Society yeah I think that India is a low trust country uh there are parts of India I guess the startup ecosystem uh which is really the Venture ecosystem is a high
trust market so there are parts of it that are uh you know very similar to how it would work in the US I think the Venture ecos system here is very highly involved and that's a high trust the parts of the market where there are a lot of American banks that are operating or even Indian companies right uh so
concentrated in bond Bay some parts of other cities like Bangalore uh okay and some parts of Delhi would be high trust but on an average even India one would be uh I say low trust but lower and the trust levels than I would say Western countries and a lot of it has to do with
culture and uh the the the fact that uh you know end of the day we are $2,600 per capita income country right we're 140th on per capita income uh and it's only some parts of India which which really have uh uh like anything about 10 thou 105,000 so lot of that permeates itself
through the cting um with regards to your second question how do you build products uh which are high trust uh very interesting and I'll give you an example of a particular feature which is somewhat unique to India uh and challenges it creates so in us if you want to buy a product from Amazon Amazon
has one click shopping right in India it doesn't work I literally have to do like six seven clicks because the Reserve Bank of India RBI which is very powerful which is one of the few institutions like the FED but much more trusted they said lot of customers are accidentally
paying because Amazon made it one click and could pay no we want you know more friction in buying so literally have to do multiple tricks then there is an OTP that I get an it's called a onetime password which comes on my phone so uh and uh not only do I have to put my CVV sometimes I have to put it each time
or I have to give special permission then the OTP comes so there's lot of friction in buy and it takes me five six clicks whereas when the US everything is designed maybe just separate money from me like an in an ined Dr but in India there's so much friction uh so that is one example for India one even for India 2
uh and uh or even uh parts of India one e-commerce is a good example we have something called cash on delivery so now this interesting uh us you have to prepay for any anything you want at your house or whatever in India you can opt for cash on delivery now now uh what it means is I do not believe
that what you're sending me is the right thing I want to say I want to see it I want to make sure it is and then I'll pay so cash on delivery still is a majority of Indian e-commerce and fact is people do pay digitally but they want to see the product in their hands now this is an
indicator of what a low trust economy has engendered the fact also is that our addresses are very hard to make out they're hard to pass they're as simple as us addresses 1320 Maple Drive ZIP Port right uh they like half a mile long and they give you interesting things like come behind the temple give me a
shout and someone will come and you know it's a fourth door with this so one of the Indian apps swiy even has a option for photographing your door and adding it so that people who are delivering can see the door so uh so so so so this interesting this not related to trust as
much but so much as so what it means is aligned with cash on delivery aligned with the fact that addresses are hard to pass and Etc they have return rates which are very high some of our apparel companies which do fashion uh e-commerce have return rates as high as 40% uh it's a nightmare to deal with
like you know because it it it it it vitiates unit economics um so I'm giving you a lot variety but I thought two examples of what low trust mean like India one and India 2 so as I listen to your response I can't help but think that both of those were problems in the United States way earlier right so cash
on delivery cood was very popular in the United States as we were emerging as a more unified country because the states were very as you probably know the states have their own constit tions and they have their own rules and regulations and all of that and so most things were set cood because in that
regard we were low trust and then the friction on the oneclick payment same thing happened here when the internet started to dominate right and uh I think it's probably an apocryphal story but it illustrates the point it was really the p uh Beanie Baby phenomena in the United
States that got uh people willing to put their credit card on eBay most people when uh Amazon was brand I was a real super earlier adopter of the internet and I still and I'm a journal keeper too and I just found something from like the mid90s where it says I don't know if I'm ever
gonna put my credit card on the internet and and then of course we became accustomed to it do do you see similar things progressing that way in India as well I do I think over the last um I would say like 20 years uh internet has 20 plus years like you know 30 years if you take 94 as sort of the early uh kind
of wave of internet in India I would say yes I've started seeing this trend towards more trust uh less of fiction more people willing to use credit cards or at least digital payments so certainly in the right direction um but I would say a lot of this is much faster in India 1 little
less faster in India 2 and non-existent in India 3 and uh so I I have been very bullish on India Indian people I mean the profile is and and now I'm learning I'm probably profiling that India one uh but um Highly Educated um uh incredible work we have a joke at OSB that if an Indian CEO gets installed then
yes yeah uh so we view it very positively but as I listen it seems to me that penetration into country two and Country Three is going to be a very long adoption curve and and what are your thoughts on how that might happen uh I could probably understand how you penetrate the aspiring country number
two that's just below that 30 million figure you gave uh for the the the top one do you ever see it like getting and permeating the the third level yeah so India one has about 30 million households and 120 million people uh million India about 70 million households and about 300 million people
I would say say that uh I'm very hopeful of India too uh much more uh okay uh for one the per capita income is around $3,000 and uh typically that have low But Rising percentage of their earnings as disposable income and typically around $4 to $6,000 uh the disposable income becomes
material enough to start influencing the Indian consumer market and at that point we'll start seeing them becoming a force what is interesting is that there are people there are companies which have been able to successfully sell into India too uh some of them are startups
some of them are not necessarily startups in the trest sense but they are really larger companies uh you know launching Brands and one successful company is zudu Z diu it is from India's one of India's largest conglomerates the Tata group The highly respected Tata Grill uh everything from Salt to
software you know uh they run aeroplanes as well uh so they launched one of their companies launched PR called zodio effectively it is it is like a uh Indian Zara H&M but much lower priced uh less than $10 uh typically right you know and uh theyve basically what they did was
they worked backwards they said this is the price I want to kind of offer and this is the margin that I'm comfortable with uh hence this is what I need to manufacture it at they give a large amount of volume to their suppliers and they were able to get Goods at much lower prices the markups were lower and
they sold the product at lower prices and extremely they were extremely successful uh so uh so this it's it's it's it's it's kind of said uh that uh Indian consumers are not low low price but the high value more than low price right and that has turned out to be true so uh second when it comes to for
example uh India is a big market for two years so uh so so there have been for example companies which have there's a company called heroon sorry hero group they earlier had a joint fure with hero Wonder but now they kind of separate so hero group so they they have a very
successful two- wheer brand which is very popular in in like in in India too and a lot of it has to do with fuel efficiency so they basically said we will do what it takes and they created this you know fourstroke engine so there less power but it gives tremendous mileage and that really matters in India
so these are two examples and uh and there are many more of companies really uh you know working backwards from the price that they have to sell at uh making sure that the product has features which are relevant for India too and uh and being able to kind of provide that value uh and uh they've
done very well um there is a gentleman CK prad um not so well known now but he's he's passed away he was an American academic he was at the University of M ARA he wrote this book called The Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid where you talked about how Indian companies can actually sell into India 3
um you know with with deep respect to Mr prad uh I think India 3 is a little tough um I guess you qu if you're selling products which are like Consumer Staples maybe salt or green or something like that but uh and and and and another mode that's worked well is to do what's called
stiz which is really the challenge in of making big packs like you go to Costco and you see these jumbo packs they won't work in India you need like much smaller so sachet because Indians don't have very high Income At One goal um and very few Indians have are part of the foral economy uh there out of out of the 1.4
billion people about 600 million people in the labor force out of which about barely 10% are in the small economy which means they get regular income every month and uh the you know stuff like that uh the blue color population uh is is about oneir of this and the white color is about 2/3 of this so so
if you ask me a lot of these factors also play itself in like this trend towards satiation because when you don't have regular income you're not able to save towards a lot of things then and you you very careful what we going to spend it on and that brings to mind the stat that kind of blew my mind uh which
is only 1.5% of the total population in India pays an income tax yeah this yeah yeah so what's what noting is and uh uh and and this is how our two countries have evolved the US is a very local that the local um municipality the states have a lot of power so the center has uh the union has
power that is not B to the states right so um India is other way around uh we the states have power that's not there that that's not be to the union the union is very powerful in India and that's just the way we've evolved because we basically adop we basically adopted whatever practices the British
had laid down and the British because they governed India as a colony they had a very strong Center uh and we and and so we kind of just took over from that and what's worth noting is unlike uh the us we have very few local taxes I do not pay local taxes Jim uh I only pay the
income tax and I pay the goods and service tax which is an indirect tax but the fact is there are very few Indians kind of being that and I think um over the last few years and uh there's been of very different discussion and I I probably shouldn't go there uh there's also been uh a desire by the Indian
state to not expand the tax base the the the direct tax base uh so sort of uh there's a saying right in the US no taxation without representation it is it is it is is a very important say in in in the History of the United States uh so in many ways I think the Indian powerful Indian State
uh is kind of uh can goes by the philosophy of no taxation no representation so what it means is that if you're not paying tax then you do not have the right to ask for a lot of things so the center can is not held accountable for a lot of things and uh uh and it it and so of what has happened
over the last many decades is the Indian Elite has sort of uh segregated themselves from participating in the public uh in public goods so we live in so the elite of India uh live in large gated complexes today which is sort of the equivalent of the white suburbs in the US we sort of okay so not all the
Gated complexes are in the suburbs in India some of them are in the big middle of the Cities but they LGE gated complexes they have security uh they drive large cars and there's a trend towards uh richer households buying more and more cars while public transport is used not enough public transport is used
there is a saying in the west that a rich country is one where even Millionaires and billionaires travel by public transport uh it's it's not so true in India so uh we kind of a roundabout way but it it's sort of uh this 1.5% or 22 million Indians paying all of the tax has many implications and uh not
all are necessarily healthy implications do you think that that is somehow a remnant of the case system in India is that still influencing the way things are going or or or not uh not this specific one but I would say that um uh if you take the Indian cast system uh a lot so India's unlik the Bri
like the like UK where there's a class system and I mean you know uh India is yeah the cast matters far more and uh it has not gone away completely uh uh uh you know so I would have expected um uh you know I would expect it to kind of come down every year and it is reducing
in large cities it's not as important uh but then again as a member of I'm a privileged member of the apas so uh I won't see it it's sort of uh it's hard for me to kind of uh see the much like for example if you're a member of the minority in the US uh you will encounter for more challenges which which for
example the white American will not encounter right so uh so I I may not say it as much uh I would say it's C down um there is a strong correlation with with income uh and I would say uh cost uh it is not decisive there are a lot there are reasonably large but a reasonable number
of lower costs who have done well or middle class or have done well but increasingly I think a majority of the people who have whove done well economically well off are I would say uh certainly the upper casts but with tax so that has an implication in who pays the tax uh you know so that's
the way some of my younger colleagues in racy Ventures who are working from India and are Indians obviously uh often joke that um the the largest variable whether India can be the PowerHouse of the 21st century is the government and and they say that to me uh often enough every
time I ask a question like well why why aren't you do why isn't this happening this happening this happening and then the refrain from them always is look you're right we've got all of those things that you're mentioning you know Highly Educated highly motivated you know Capital formation is uh DCS like
yourself but they're like the government is our greatest exogenous risk here what what do you think about that idea to give credit to the government uh they do understand that uh if they don't reform India uh they're sitting on a time bomb uh because this is a country
where uh there's a large number of people who are less economically well off uh unemployment is reasonably High uh so to their credit uh all governments uh especially this government has been very proactive uh uh you know in in in in in I would say Investing For example uh where it comes
to roads Railway infrastructure for instance as in through dramatically um that's it um I would say two areas where I would say um you know um we should see uh a little more intervention uh the first uh would be uh the tax uh one I think uh the the Indian taxmen can be uh uh you know very temperamental
uh uh uh for example they can come back and say you owe us money uh for the last 10 years and uh there's there's no statute of limitation there and that does create challenges uh the second is to do with uh interpretation of laws and uh uh I would say uh there are enough examples
of um sectors where um the certain laws uh fumbled the growth of the sector now things are changing but for a long time India's drones had to be within line of sight so they couldn't be used in agriculture they could be used for many things you to get lot of permission uh so as a result uh the
biggest news case for drones was weddings and because Indian weddings are you know this talk about big fan Greek weddings IND weddings are boy oh boy they're bigger and fatter and you had this trend where every wedding had a drone going up shooting it from multiple angles Etc so uh so yeah so that's
that's an example of uh you know how we can of law hbling the growth of the Drone sector now things are changing uh so I think these two are areas where I think we need to kind of see uh the engan state ease up a little uh but otherwise I think theyve been fairly fairly uh um you know uh uh being open
to the idea that they have to invest they can't stand in the way of growth the other minor risk and this is not so much for Indian companies but for I would say global companies is that there is a uh and and this not only India there is a sort of economic nationalism that is kind of in Rising
and what that means is the Indian Indian State wants no control road we seeing some of this in Brazil uh as we you know we saw it with x/ Twitter being shut down by by the Brazil Supreme Court and uh there is a case that is slowly proceeding through uh the Indian legal system on WhatsApp uh uh and uh the the the
contention is that WhatsApp should give the encryption keys to the Indian State because they worried that WhatsApp being you and WhatsApp is what the country runs on uh uh I sitting in the US you probably don't understand how important WhatsApp is it's a bit like how China
you know the 10 cent uh uh and and and uh you 10 cents messenger is is so Central the country so uh we'll see how this goes at some point they will uh you know understand and probably uh you know get agre to some sort of middle ground but we so I would say these three uh a little bit of of temperamental tax
treatments uh uh laws being uh you know applied kidos uh a little indiscriminately and the third thing that I was mentioning Jim is about economic nationalism uh so if you came into mind these three uh you know temperamental tax treatment uh you know uh uh sort of uh uh very uh uh kind of
treatment of laws in a kind of in you know indiscriminate Manner and finally economic nationalism these are sort of three ways in which the government sort of kind of uh you know you know creates challenges I would say yeah we are investors in a fund uh that concentrates on Bangladesh and one of the uh GPS
there said to me that uh westerners get most uh things wrong there and he gave us an example um he was talking to a potential LP and the lp said yeah well I was looking at adoption rates of internet in Bangladesh and they're they're microscopic no nobody seems to be using the internet there and he
smiled and he goes That's because they don't ask the right question if you look at a a survey that says when was the last time you were on the internet it might seem a long to a Westerner right but if you ask the question when was the last time you were on WhatsApp or when
was the last time you were on Facebook it was today because there the and this is echoing the importance of WhatsApp uh in India as well and the it it seems to me that if the state really wants the uh country to emerge as an economic Powerhouse they would at least understand the the the universal uh
importance of those apps or am I just a Westerner totally getting it wrong yeah I think I think they do understand uh it's just that I think there are very powerful forces uh uh and and it's not unique to India alone uh we're seeing that in Brazil we're seeing it in China the
state today uh uh and uh sometimes ended on by uh the Dynam dynamics of politics internally and having to Pander to a certain constituency uh sort of takes the stance that how can they how can we surrender to the heom of the West right and and we now need to kind of regulate these um
who sometimes it's good I I I I do appreciate that the a uh has uh helped regulate Apple to change the lightning port to the USBC port and and that is that's a god Set they can use different charges now I'm not reliant on the Apple charger but uh sometimes it can get uh you know uh overtly kind of uh awward
and I do hope that uh some of this regulation doesn't leer secution where uh you know um which leads to someone exiting the country like X De ex you know exit there the force to uh so I don't know if it will happen tomorrow in India but yeah I mean these are risks that sometimes you run but I think
overall I think India is far more Progressive I mean I must tell you that and I think there is a keen understanding that he India is is is far more connected into the global economic system and India stands to benefit far more from it and uh there are enough pulls and pressures enough
constituencies um you know that sort of a middle ground will be reached in India do you still see a diaspora of people of some of the brightest minds and who would make natural or uh has that um them leaving for places like the United States or uh other much more uh conducive to Friendly
uh laws and terms around uh Venture is is that still significant or are you seeing that slow down I'm not seeing it slow down at all uh I'm actually seeing it rise uh in certain parts of India uh if you go to Punjab which is in the north of India on the border with Pakistan uh historically it used to be
India's most prosperous State uh that's because it's fertile farmland and uh they benefited from irrigation projects laid down since the British time and uh they also did very well when we had What's called the Green Revolution uh you know when when when when we got these Saints uh
but over farming uh over fertilization and many other challenges uh including some us of terrorism Etc um uh has led to um uh declining incomes uh a lot of Farmland being not productive anymore and as a result a lot of the youth in Punjab not finding gainful employment because industry has not
grown there as much as a result a lot of uh punjabis uh who want to kind of migrate out and uh I was recently reading this uh podcast where the economist editors in India were being interviewed and one of them spoke about how when you go to Punjab almost every hoing you can see is relocate to the U
UK uh apply to this University in the UK visa for Uki uh etc etc so uh so there are parts of India where that's the that's particularly uh kind of prominent uh there are for example the state I come from Kerala sends a lot of people to the Middle East they work uh not always in white color a lot of it is
blue color so similar to Punjab so what we seeing is the rise of blue color migration uh has really gone up uh when it comes to white color migration I think uh it is not the case that in in in the 60s 70s a lot of Indians migrated to the US because jobs were not hard to come by so
that's not true for white colar jobs are easier to come by uh but the absolute numbers have gone up because there are a lot more of them Etc and uh and there's nothing wrong in it many of them want to study things many of them get scholarships so uh it's it's net positive for everyone because many of
them send money back but what we're seeing in blue color uh kind of migration is uh been is something that's very interesting and uh uh I I I do think a lot of it has to do with the challenging economic circumstances that they find themselves in and um I kind of talk about three a
in one of my reports uh uh and one of them is English so uh the elite uh Indians have access to English and use English as kind of a proxy or English is a gatekeeping device the second is exams so one way to break into uh India one for India two people is to do well in one of the government exams all
government jobs are two exams and it's crazy how many years sometimes people take to kind of uh uh pass these exams and effectively passing an exam guarantees you a regular income and given that only about about about 50 55 million people in India have regular income you can
imagine how how big a difference just 4% of Indian population have you know regular income the third e uh the first was English the second was exams the third is exit when you don't have access to these two then you look at Exit as as one way and they're seeing large numbers of that and you wrote a very interesting
piece uh that looks at what you call the English txt uh talk a little bit about about that and I thought that piece very uh intriguing so the English tax is essentially uh fact that much of the Indian internet much of uh Elite India's communication uh much of public science in uh India tend to be in
English when it say public science I mean it's changing now uh so for example if you go to a hotel uh and and uh like like a five star rottin um you will see most of the signs in English uh if you go to a Starbucks in India you won't see anything inside in in in in Hindi or Bengali or what what
Tamil you see it only in English when you go to Turkey or Germany the all of the all of the signs will be in German some of them in tourists like in Istanbul you might see a little bit of English but if you're going to anara or something in Turkey you would only see it in
Turkish uh that's fine because much of the population speaks like like very few people speak English in India the fact that India one all speaks English and this fluent in it mean that much of the sign boots Etc are uh in of English this concept of English tax came to me because one day I was sitting in the
Bangalore airport and I saw that almost every sign internally inside the bandor airport was English but other than like the transit signage only the transit signage was in the local language Hindi and English and all the shops were in English Etc and I said imagine and I saw
a few couple of people sitting there an old man and a woman they were wearing Indian dress uh like he was wearing a doti a song equivalent and she was wearing a Sor of okay and they were old people and they were sitting peacefully and uh you know this seemed um you know uh I can't prove for sure but this they
were speaking in Canada and I thought like it probably where as went in English and I wondered how intimidating this would be for them like you know everything in English Etc so this is what I call the English tax the English tax is something that we enforce on uh on on on non- English speakers we a lot
of apps in India are in English a lot of uh like literature that comes out much of saying is in English uh so for example if you don't have access to good English you're shut out of a lot of writing a I should change it because translation is very expensive so hope I
will change some of these things for the better so this is what I mean by the English tax the English tax is the preponderance of English uh across um like you know uh uh apps uh signages uh literature so as to make it overwhelming uh for a non-english speaker uh or non-fluent English reader
to kind of interface yeah and I I really identified with that because when I was in uh Japan in the late 1990s the first call I made was back to my wife and I said I don't understand anything here I mean I felt entirely like a foreign man in a foreign land because I couldn't even make a phone
call you would pick you would pick it up and and they would give rapid fire Japanese and you'd be English and then it would just come rapid fire Japanese and and and I when I was reading the piece I was like wow it I I understand that deing do you say and my I agree with you that I think that Ai and AI
translation is going to help tremendously with that uh but do do you think that that was just a remnant of the English Raj or is is that also a gatekeeping mechanism I think a lot of it is uh uh not gatekeeping as much as so much as uh just the fact that a lot of the elite Indians are very comfortable with
English uh it's it's it's worth noting that most of uh the uh I would say the LA the the foral uh kind of uh uh formal jobs uh I would say English uh is used I would say more about 50% of the time uh about 50% of the time they would speak in a different language but if it is at the Top If it's really uh like you
know in Senior Management for instance largely English uh all written communication is largely English all emails are English I haven't got a single Hindi email yeah single Hindi in all the years of wor uh and uh it is uh shocking uh I mean I would have expected at least one
email to come to me I'm not got a single email so if you work if you going to work in corporate India you can speak a little bit of Hindi or speak a little bit of Tamil and that's fine right but any written communication is is almost entirely in English and um so uh it is
not intention there I mean yes it's so gatekeeping is is an outcome of that uh and but what it does is uh if I'm comfortable in English and I know that people come into these jobs they come through the right colleges they're comfortable in English uh you know and it it just turns out that people use
English and uh it's it's it's how it is there a lot of path dependence that's really uh emerged because when the British were there the elite now so there's this gentleman called moli okay so he was a uh kind of a British administrator and he spoke about creating a middle race of uh Indians who
would uh be able to mediate between the native Indian stents speak English and the British and uh so sort of English speakers in India and what I call mes children uh okay and uh so a lot of the people who did well where people who knew English and who got into the bureaucracy who got access to the top
jobs Etc and so that sort of continued and uh and and I I don't think it's very intentional gatekeeping but certainly uh it helps that uh you know uh uh you know only a certain percentage speak English and these speakers get access to the best jobs uh it's it's it's it's it's it's sort of a happy alome for the
English speakers yeah and of course it's not unique to India it it part of the emergence after World War II was English essentially becoming the world's language uh against many people's desires of course especially the French uh but like for example the most prestigious uh scientific journal in
Germany is published in English not in German and uh because of that universality and and I also think that English is a fairly easy language to learn how to speak poorly um it has it's a ton of idiom especially American English is filled with idioms I I once had a guy who was a
native Spanish speaker worked for me and uh he was telling me a story about how proud he was of he's from Colombia where he studied English and and everything and uh had an MBA from uh a great institution here in the United States and he had his first job um and he said he went and he was quite
pleased and everything and he said by the end of the day he went back and his wife said how'd it go and he was just crestfallen because he go he looked at his wife and say I don't speak English at all and and he was specifically referring to American english's richly idiomatic right like water off a duck's
back and and things like that and he he was like water off a duck's back what does that mean and so I think that that is part of the challenge with the emergence of English kind of as as the de facto uh World Language but you've also written about what you called one of India's newest casts wh which is
highly educated affluent the but intercast marriage inter religion marriage um and and you say the Paradox there is there at once the most visible but also an invisible class talk to me a little bit about that yeah that was uh my first big hit when it came to writing I've been writing for a long while and
then I wrote this article and it just went viral across India uh I got a lot of fan mail and I got a lot of hate meal uh and uh the fan maal came from people who said oh my God you have described me this is my identity I an Indo andian every year I get one such meal now it
used to be a lot more earlier uh the hate meal came from people who said you don't use cast so loosely young man like you don't know anything about sociology you don't know anything about politics you don't know anything about and whatever right you know and you're just using cast like you know uh of course uh
you know um it I shouldn't have used cast so loely but uh what I was trying to say was uh typically the Indian cast system has uh you know brahmans at the top and I said there is a cast which is more Elite than uh like you know this sort sort of other way to look at it to
say that they broken free of the cast system and sort of they are parallel to that because anyone can be part of this uh sister and uh all it requires is for you to speak English fluently uh but the the the objection was that to speak English Floy you need to be a member of
the privileged cast and well I mean it's it's hard for me to win every argument but essentially um for example in my house my family speaks in English and one day we were in Hong Kong and I remember we speaking English and a Gentleman asked us where are you from and I said India like okay you are
Indians but where are you from I said India oh but you speak so good English like you know said yeah but you know I I not the only person um I don't have the exact numbers but I would say there is a segment which are called India 1A or India Alpha which is sort of a subset of
India one uh about 8 to 10 million households uh about oneir raing of the households 25 30 million people who speak English very fluently uh at home and uh are not uh are more comfortable in English than in uh other languages and uh one way uh is one way to kind of become a member of this is typically uh
be from when you and your wife are from different communities two languages um and often uh the K you know uh speaks in English because it's still confusing for the kid and the husband and wife also don't know each other's languages so they use English as an intermediating
language like a lingo franka as you see and the kids start speaking that uh so I spoke so so I would say uh but me and my wife we don't speak a language called K but we don't speak K as much and my hypothesis is I haven't been able to prove this but I'm trying to prove this is that Indian languages have fewer
words uh which this describe emotional situations or context right I was reading this podcast uh where Charles do is an author um uh who has written this book called Super communicators where he talks about language language having three compents uh you know uh there is uh the Practical one please get me this
this book uh then there is soan how are you feeling Jim and the third one is Jim what you told me uh did not make me feel good uh I think there was a banol what you said or something like that right uh so the third one is is is is is is the a challenging area uh for example
in the language that we speak I there are I know enough words relating to the first practical context I know enough words relating to the second social context but when it comes to very emotional conversations with my wife Etc we going to talk about issues ETC we tend to use English a lot because
English has far more emotional range so one of uh one of uh it's I mean I'm willing to even pay a student to a PhD or I'm willing to kind of pay someone to do research I want to find out how Indian languages rank my vocabulary do Indian languages have few words B do indan language have fewer words in the
emotional bucket three do does the average Indian speaker have much more limited vocabulary especially in the emotional bucket if if what I'm saying is true then that explains a lot uh of why the elite use English a lot more because the native Indian languages don't have enough temp range especially
on the emotional side to exess themselves wow that is such a fascinating thesis um I I now now you've given me something that I'm gonna have be thinking about for the rest of the day because I I had I had a colleague who was Japanese um and and he and I got to know him really well and we were
talking about language and he said and and I asked him do do you think differently when you're thinking in English vers Japanese and he looked at me and he goes Jim I don't just think L I act differently and I went well what what do you mean and and he said when I'm thinking in English I'm much more
like proactive we can do this let's go you know let's go take that hill and he goes when I'm thinking and talking with colleagues Japanese I go to a much more consensus oriented do you think that maybe taking that hill over there would be a good idea or no and and so the I
hadn't thought about it from the point of view of a lack of the ability to express emotions in that native language because ultimately I think that's one of the things people get really wrong about capitalism like if if you're going to to be an incredibly successful founder you better understand emotions
because emotions are ultimately would drive a tremendous amount of decisions even for so-called rationalists right what they'll do is they'll make an emotional choice to buy a product to subscribe to a service Etc and then they'll paper it over after the fact with all the rational reasons for why
they pick that particular product Andor service and and so I that is really fascinating and I and I will be thinking a lot about that um you also mention something that I found really interesting especially given the fact that you in your three e exams being being so important and credentials being
so important you you once said that you would rather get rid of the degree on your CV then stop writing so this is kind of a two-pronged question you've also mentioned that there aren't very many in the inventure capitalists who do write a lot like you do so my first question is why is that
and then secondly I am fascinated that given how important externally exam results and credentials are you you you you understand that the writing is even more important and I'd like to hear your version of why we take the first one why Rees don't write I think it's got a lot to do with
the fact that um in India uh while the Venture industry is reasonably sizable um uh and uh there are a rising number of VCS now I think the power imbalance is still much more in the VC's favor unlike the us where the power imbalance is in the elite Founders favor in India to it is
changing but slowly so what happens is when there's a power is a symmetry in the VC's favor the VC can sit back and wait for the founder to approach Hima in the US it's such a large Market there's so many Founders and the market is relatively uncapped that means if you miss out on something that's big that
could be hundred billion dollar right or more whereas India is relatively capped the sense we have the largest Indian Venture is $36 billion which is fit cart majority owned by Walmart uh the next one is 1/4 the size uh sorry next one is half the size lat and uh the third one is 1/4 the size so
relatively mistakes haven't been as expensive as in the in the US when the power changes like for example there are a lot more Elite Founders uh uh and those Elite Founders then have to pick you which is how great wer happens you have to be picked by the founders it's unusual that uh someone
once described Venture as not an asset class but an access class where the the the the the G trick is really getting access to the best Founders and the only asset class where the asset picks the investor like you know which is which is sort of the founder so so that so so now in the US I'm not surprised that
many misses are writing because they're signaling to the founder he hey like you know I'm relevant for you I know the space Etc they're trying to make themselves useful uh in India I think there are some ways off from that because relatively the VES have more power uh and the founders have to go to
them uh so uh and there are much fewer quality VES and every founder knows that uh unlike in the US where there are many quality VCS uh and uh in India there are much fewer quality VCS uh they have to kind of they no choice but to go and like you know they can't uh be Pickers
there are few Founders who can be Pickers because they they they like second time Founders Etc it's changing but it's slow so this is one reason why VCS don't have to Market themselves I however uh choose to Market myself through writing and for me writing was the one way I could make an impression
um I remember reading this uh Scott Adams article uh about uh how to be the owning uh where he said that look uh you you you there are many Japanese speakers there are many marketers who uh you know but if you are a Japanese speaking marketer in the US then unique right like you know like so you be the only so
I said there are I will never be the best wec I I don't know maybe I will but as of now I don't know if it's a realistic ambition to have uh I will never be the world's best writer but can I be the world's uh best writing we see okay that's tough too but can I be the India's best we see who wres yeah I
think so yeah and and and I think that's the slot I've kind of carved out um and it's worked for me because I came into Venture at the age of 43 i' not been a Founder i' not worked in a startup i' not been an investor and I sometimes uh don't know what Karthik ready saw in me of course I
he told me what he saw in me was was was a person who reached out to me he founded blue but uh he did reach out and uh and uh it and it kind of um heard him out and I said yeah sure I'd like to kind of give Venture a shot and uh it's worked well for me but because I was like an outsider coming into Venture I
wanted to Market myself to Founders and I wanted Founders to find me and hence writing became very critical and uh the reason why exams don't matter enough is the feel like that doesn't help me stand out as much because even if I pass the toughest exam in India typically uh the
IIT exam uh uh it is it is not going to make me stand out because there are many VES who are from my it but there are very few VES right like you know so uh and that's what helps me stand out very smart um and uh that also leads me to what skill sets did you bring from
your longer history in entertainment and media that that were sort of immediately applicable uh on the Venture Capital side so what for a long time in a company called The Times of India crew it is uh um India's largest newspaper company sort of like ganet in the US very well-run uh privately held uh very
profitable and there was a well there's no word for it but there was a way of uh and the companies IND the name uh was Bennet kman and Co the official name you know because it was a British company which was acquired by Indians they kept the name Bennett K but uh and uh they were uh kind of the the the the
T was there was a Bennett approach or the times approach uh to uh kind of look at the business and uh through a lens and uh we we work with this gentleman called Samir chain who's sort of uh the owner of the group and he's sort of a brilliant mind uh and uh he uh looks at
the world in a very unusual way and there were a lot of principles that uh he looked toward world through which I learned I work with him closely I was his chief of staff for a while and uh and it's sort of this Bennet approach or the Benet way or the times way was something that I kind of brought in in
addition at I me working for about two decades uh you worked with a lot of people so and uh uh for example I had worked with a lot of sales people and I understood that incentives matter a lot um and one of the unusual things I found was Founders uh uh startup Founders did
not pay attention to incentives so like I would ask them okay this is the goal uh which is to enter this Market uh and uh like who's driving this and so say XY Z so now tell him okay if this succeeds how much will XY Z make say why would he make more has asops make now I would say okay but he'll make that even if this
doesn't succeed in the company does well right so uh and I would find that there's like a blind spot and I would say like oh okay on for example U like like I would say like you need to send the incentive such that this person makes money only if the next person's incentives go like if if
I'm I'm I'm the sales person and if you pay me we uh if you pay me my incentive uh but I don't once I once I can of convince the customer to give the money uh you know I just uh take it but the onboarding is a failure and the client then walks away I still get my money and
I would say how can you kind of design your incentives like that you need to design your incentives that it you only get money after 6 months 9 months Etc like you know when when the customers like on board it and like you know it's it's it's a working partnership so so I think incentives was another kind of uh
area where I was able to kind of really help my Founders the third one is really strategy and I find that like sometimes uh you know bringing the lens of strategy uh was very helpful a lot of Founders sometimes intuitively get it but they're not uh they they're not business students they're not studying
business and uh I find that U uh this is sort of a I would say like a like like a gray area for them and these were the areas strategy incentives and sort of this unique times approach to looking at data for instance where would say like don't look at the average break
up the uh de aage everything and really look at what is really working and what is not uh not that Founders wouldn't do it but I was able to kind of stress that to agre to and that's part of what you also call narrative Capital right um where where they have a strategy they have the incentives
right and what you're helping them do is tell tell the story better and it listening to you it sounds like helping them understand GE these things over here really really matter and and you need to think about them more um I are are you finding that there's push back on that from your Founders or are they
just thank you thank you no no they push back uh yeah Founders you know they have the mind of the road and in India extraordinarily hard to start up it's a very difficult place to do business uh which is why when Indians come to the US they they just find that look it's such an easy
country to do business in like you know like if you take care of the basics you will do like you know they just can't believe it uh the taxman is grading them you know etc etc uh but India is hard business and so it takes a special kind of person to be founder in India and uh I would say that I don't have it easy with any
founder and I'm grateful for that I don't want any founder to just accept what I say at face value I love it with the push back and then I can push back and finally end of the day it's their business they need to run it they are the like as Rosell says men in the arena
or women in the arena and I respect that uh you know and I'm the person on the stands uh but yeah I got to be a mirror for the founder I got to kind of show his or her face ws and all so that they're able to kind of take the corrective missiones and you've also said uh that uh really India is kind of
a digital Warfare State what what what exactly do you mean by that yeah digital welfare uh is a term uh that's kind of coined I don't know who coined it but but uh I like it uh because it describes two parts one is digital and the other is and digital means digital public infrastructure is
one of the big innovations that India has done in the last I would say decade and W uh digal public infrastructure stands for uh broadly digital Lego blocks basically the product sets around identity payments and data exchange so identity all Indians have something called an Adar
number so like a social security number and an a number did exist uh payments we have one of the most frictionless payment system called UPI where I can send money like a message uh there were about 15 million transactions that happened last month on UPI like it's crazy right yeah 15 billion
transactions the third is data exchange like for example uh I don't need to carry physical copies of many documents like my driving license uh my identity card I have something called digil Locker where I can store it and now beauty is people can access the digital document and I don't and remotely if if
I give them the right and uh and this can be used for other services like What's called the noo customer kyc which is needed for financial transactions Etc so these digital the most important thing in this is digital payments and the digital of digital payments and the welfare state that is a lot of Indians
are poor and what the government has done is use the digital payment infrastructure and the the the the the fact that people you know a lot of people economically L talk to give subsidies to them rooted through this so uh theare state is really what this particular government Mr Modi has done
well they have kind of reinvented India as a digital welfare state where uh while it's it's it's it's there is a certain uh kind of uh DNA of socialism like you know making sure and they need to it can't be hard cap because India is not a country which is uh2 per capita
income like you know large masses in poverty they've had to kind of uh you know they have to take care of them and what they've done is cleverly used um the digital public infrastructure and digital payment infrastructure to drive the V uh and and that is why it call India digital welfare state and you also
refer to it sounds like you've mentioned a lot of uh things that in what you've call called Tony Wang Trifecta um and and essentially that's cheap band with smartphones uh and uh friction list payments smartphones in every pocket and that that was a huge inflection here in
the United States as well when the iPhone for example in 2011 started putting GPS uh in the phone itself that opened up a huge number of markets that would have been impossible prior to that right like uber lift all of the delivery services Etc and and are are you seeing things right now if if you if we have
some listeners who are thinking hm India looks like a very attractive Market um and you have said not for beginners but um what are you seeing emerging from that Trifecta and that welfare digital welfare that you see is could be a a very very big thing over the next 10 years yeah so a lot of uh
these examples like the digal welfare state Etc has come from this particular uh publication that we do uh which is what kind of very well-known you uh it's called the indust valy report uh and it's online uh you can access it so the indust value report the latest one which we published around Feb uh late Feb
early March every year uh what we did is say we actually cataloged uh interesting examples of digital public infrastructure uh so there's something called uh autopay UPI autopay UPI is really the uh like the payment thing uh uh uh so uh so UPI has autopay system where uh so if you're a subscription
product for instance a customer can set it and then they don't have to think about it and what that has done it's led to uh growth uh for uh a lot of companies uh which earlier struggled with getting consumers to pay uh and there were a lot of Indian interesting I give you two
examples there was a company called share chat in India and share chats uh think of it as Twitter or Instagram but in non- English languages so they have different channels each language is a channel and so you go into your channel and kind of get a lot of content and uh
and Sh had struggled with monetization uh because they try to when valuing but because lot of the people who are on it not necessarily asent Indians uh you know so they couldn't monetize those iols uh so however off late a lot of Indian media apps started monetizing so we have a company called state which
does oneac content they've been able to monetize Furious what made the difference was UPI so customers could not only pay UPI searly they could pay very small sums this again goes back to stiz so it's so we and so it's just $5 from the year okay and uh content is produced very cheaply
because they work backwards from what customers can afford to pay and UPI autop means customers subscribe then they just Ren so so I can of spoken about how stage leveraged UPI autop here I won't go into detail but they for example we have invested recently in a company called namay okay and namay is
uh it means uh our our travel and uh um uh sort of think of it as indan Kuba but the difference as follows uh nayri is built on a open- source protocol called the Beck protocol and the beckan protocol is created so that companies like nayri and others could leverage this protocol for
Logistics transport of goods or transport of people and they finded a very interesting model where they actually charge uh 25 rupees which is sort of 30 cents every day to a auto rine driver which is like a Tuk Tok or and eventually they'll get into cars as well but they don't charge anything to the
customer so this different Uber Uber if I pay you know Uber takes 20% of the cut so this is actually kind of a different model and it was made possible only thanks to the digital public infrastructure that kind of came about so I would say if you're in the US and you and anyone can operate
on this Uber in fact is thinking about how to get out Leverage The Beck protocol what I would say is digital public infrastructure and a lot of the digital public goods that are emerging uh whether it's Adar for identity UPI for payments uh data exchange through digil Locker Etc and a lot of the other
Goods now for example Health there something called Aba which I won't get into the full form of that but essentially it's like all your health records are available owner then you have account aggregator network with if I'm a business and if I mean to and get access
to debt like booking Capital Loans I can show that you know I can I can give access to my bank account it's it's tokenized it you know it's it's and people the bank can see that hey he gets regular payments and this is enough of a credit history for us we don't need to to ask him to mortgage his house or
anything like that and historically the challenge has been that India is under penetrator credit because a lot of credit in India uh is given only on the back of assets okay uh now because land records are so poor in India H not been what unless you typically have you're member of the
elite like middle class or upper middle class that is why gold is very popular in India why do Indians hold so much gold why is India SLE for all the gold in the world because gold allows me to get access to n so so there are all of these interesting uh uh also the fact that like we spoke about
trust low trust also manifests itself in a poor credit Market uh because I will not believe you and I will not believe your credit history uh but I want hard assets but now things are changing because uh your credit history is now like visible like you can be accessed more easily and sort of what the
government is trying to do is bring more people into the formal economy through this that's fascinating because another one of the thesis that I have is that in the United States we are in many respects hampered by our very efficient paths and I and I use our our installed uh landline system uh right as digital
was coming online and uh Americans uh the adoption curve in America for digital was actually quite a bit slower than the rest of the world and one of the reasons for that was the rest of the world did not have the kind of really efficient infrastructure that the United
States had developed so in a way it hampered our ability to embrace the new digital networks and digital payments and all of those types of things what are C another few examples that you would think that would fall into this line that it doesn't get develop excuse me it doesn't get developed in the US
because you know we already have that infrastructure that you can take advantage of in India that wouldn't be uh a obvious to an American investor one interesting example I would say is broadband internet or wired internet uh with just about 30 million wired internet connections in India they
about 20 million wired phone lines in India fixed for lines it's just plummeted people are giving it up my parents had wir phone Jim there was a time when we to wait 10 years to get a for line I'm not I can you not like you know uh in the 870s in the 80s when India was socialist it was so difficult to get a
phone I remember that I we would get a phone call uh we would give the number of the neighbor and phone calls would come saying that somebody's passed me or something like that and you know those are only emergency calls would come or somebody's passed an exam or somebody's
getting married and then we my father would go then when he hit like a certain level in his his government job he got access to a house with a phone then you got access to a car so I've seen how hard it's to get phone line and then one day it all changed anyone get a mobile if you put in the money you could
get a mobile and uh so we've just have about 18 or 20 20 million phone lines in India uh whereas the US is far more and because India is a late frog Nation right you just l frog to uh uh to uh uh the mobile headset and WiFi uh uh like what my my the conversation is on Wi-Fi but a lot of
Indians don't use Wi-Fi they use mobile internet because Wi-Fi means your house has to have good power regul power and uh and if you don't have regular power then you can't take really Advantage wi because comes and goes so only what 30 million Indian houses have wired Brad Cor cards only 40 million Indians have
credit cards uh you know and uh 40 million Indians they have two three cards so about 100 million credit cards in India it's very small okay what we what we really Le frog to is the mobile internet mobile equipments and which is like UPI so India is kind of if you have a log nation and I think that's a that's
that's another metaphor for India which which I like teams yeah I think that that's the way I think about it as well so what what are you most excited about in terms of both the ability to Leap Frog um and sort of the novel way uh what companies are really you're looking at you're just like
here's a classic example where we get the leap frog and also this is an amazing idea yeah so I see one way that uh one trend line uh that is happening in India is a move from unorganized to organized so uh there are ways of doing business which is on paper which is on trust within a small
community uh on high interest rates because are long payment Cycles uh which is now changing because you can use a mobile phone uh to kind of transact between each other you can use the mobile phone to discover each other the one ve that I'm seeing is really more and more Indian commodity markets
coming online Okay so we're beginning to kind of see that uh this is this is this is really one clear tendency the second is that you can uh you can so B2B marketplaces is the most obvious uh you know manifestation of that Trend uh which is unorganized to organized because earlier you would do a
transaction in a particular region between trusted groups Etc now you can do transactions all India Etc someone can watch for that so that is something we are quite excited about um apart from that uh there are also um I would say very interesting unique Indian models
emerging uh and uh which are uh we not find it anywhere else in the world uh it's a combination of access to the mobile uh and and the unique uh kind of uh UI and ux that it enables as well as the nature of India as a low trust country uh the the the the type of uh you know technologies that are available
Etc so one is companies there's an interesting company called friend if far in D and uh there are a dating app but dating here doesn't work the way dating works in the US here the challenge is that the two genders don't mix as much so friend says don't worry about dating let's get you talking and
what it does is it creates a chaperon who will help the two play games right and get comfortable with each other when the chaon is there and then if you want to DM directly and you want to pay up something right and and sort of stuff like that there's an interesting app
string it means Temple like you know uh honorary Temple whatever and uh it's fascinating because you know Indians like to do what's called Puja just like you know and they can attend virtual temples and do Pua and that's a very unique Indian kind of then there's an app called jar which is which is which
is uh where people can save small savings like you and you can you can transfer it then buy gold with it and like every if you transer like 40 rupees it you'll buy 40 rupees with digital gold so the very interesting uniquely Indian apps born out of Indian consumer psychology like unique
interfaces that like Indian internet offers as well as the low trust nature Etc so I'm quite fascinated by all of these Trends and we really looking at these spaces so one company with bet on and which succeeded well was stage which just mentioned which is really about vernacular content so sort of like
Netflix for India but they have very distinct indan cont produced extremely cheaply and uh they they kind of cater to people who don't get the kind of content that like like they they would like to kind of enjoy and now they get access to that so these are these are all opportunities that I'm excited about
I think it's a tremendously exciting time uh for India um and I think uh I I'm fascinated by the differences but also by just the hu just like the opportunities you just mentioned I I those are very exciting to me because they're very unique uh to to the country itself and yet there there might be
people who pay attention to what's hot elsewhere might be able to adopt it uh to to their home country at least in in the strategy of being able to think about things like that well this has been remarkably fun for me to listen to you I love what you write um and and we have a final
question uh here that's kind of fun we we make you emperor of the world you can't kill anyone you can't put anybody in a free education gamp but what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire popul a of the earth whenever
their next morning is they're going to wake up and they're going to have those two things that you say they're going to think of as their own wonderful new ideas and they're going to turn to themselves or whoever their significant other is and say you know unlike all those other ideas that I had in the
morning and were inspiring but I never acted on I'm going to act on both of these ideas that I got today what are you going to incept into the world oh my God how yeah a surprise yeah um well I think uh and these ideas could be any any anything any any anything anything
anything oh certainly um I think the world is a very unfair unkind place and uh I I I would certainly want one of those ideas uh to be uh uh one where uh we able to kind of uh uh be a lot more Kinder so uh and so perhaps uh it could be in the form of you know I'm I'm probably kind of
rambling now but uh being really able to kind of understand the like the other person so whenever you talk to a person you a to kind of immed understand challenges that they have right you know and uh you you and you immed able to act based on that so sort of like a magical power whereby like I'm
talking to you and uh I'm not shouting at you because you done try to understand what is it that you know led to this one and sort of I understand intent uh really well and able to kind of understand the intent so so and I I understand what is driving you to make that action and I can of see you not
take the action but the intent and the circumstances that led to it would be one where I would say people should kind of have more and more understanding of that inent and the second would be to just reduce the religiousness of the world like and if I could say everybody
could become irreligious like you know uh I'm not saying people should become less mindful there s many aspects of every religion that I found fascinating but the Jewish uh to to to Buddhist Meditation Etc but I would certainly want religion as we know know it to just disappear from the
world so I would say um intent not actions is is is the way to understand people or understanding circumstances not actions or behavior okay and second would be to kind of remove religion from the map uh probably make the world a kind of safer place those are those are both absolutely fascinating and I think
I agree that both would make the world a safer place the ability to as we would say in America walk a mile in that person's shoes um and and understand what was driving them is something that is sorely lacking and then the idea that traditional institutionalized religion
you you could have a very healthy debate on whether that has been a net positive or n negative for the World At Large and and I do love your distinction you're not talking about meaning you're not talking about all of that I think what you're getting after there is the tribalism of certain religions and the
animosity and hurt and pain that they cause probably a net negative so I think both of those are are excellent things to incept in the world thank you so much for joining me in for your time it's uh you have a wonderful perspective and we will make certain that all of your links everyone will be able to find you uh
when we release uh the podcast we release both in video and audio but uh all of the links to finding you will be there and I'm certainly glad we found you and uh thank you so much for giving me so much of your time thank you Jim been a pleasure thank you so much all right cheers bye-bye for