Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Srikant Sastri on Entrepreneurship and Building World-Class Products in India (#008)

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Srikant Sastri on Entrepreneurship and Building World-Class Products in India (#008) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the sequence of events startup founders believe that they need to follow, one, create a startup, find co-founders, think of a product, and the next milestone is let's get funding.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's the immediate milestone they want to hit.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that takes over all their waking and sleeping hours, actually.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I would put a big part of the blame on economic times, your story, and all these people who glorify people who raise$50 million,$100 million,$200 million.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: You're putting in place the wrong role models and setting people up in the wrong direction.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another direction of controversy.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Over to my conversation with Srikant.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Srikant, welcome to the show.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: You had an amazing career so far.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: You are uh you know IIT Cantor, IMC Alan, you have been a CEO, you've you've been a co-founder, you've started businesses, uh you've uh been an advisor to companies, you've uh done something which is incredible with uh you know Professor Ramitabha Bandopadhyaya on the ventilator project.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you have a lot of deep insights uh on business, uh on entrepreneurship.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh really looking forward to this conversation.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, my pleasure, Swami.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the fact that we're getting to spend so much time after what 25 years, 27 years now, that itself is something I'm looking forward to.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: So looking forward to a great evening with you.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, uh thanks Shrikant.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I remember uh uh you know coming to you as a uh young MBA grad and uh you taught me a lot of things, so I'm from your school anyway, so therefore uh uh you know it's great to connect back with you and uh I have some great memories of working with you.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, thank you.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Good to hear that.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so my first question, uh Srikant is uh I'm very curious to know, you know, what kind of a student were you in school?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was a very boring student.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I was very boring, obedient to my parents, obedient to my teachers, the as straight as you can get, completely naive as far as the real world is concerned.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I grew up in a small town 60 kilometers from Mumbai and completely ignorant of the ways of the world, particularly those in big cities, which is where I live now for the last so many years.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, uh I was an obedient student but had studied well hard, studied well.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh parents would get shocked, my classmates would get shocked if I didn't get first rank in a particular term.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but played every sport under the sun: cricket, football, hockey, cubbard, cocoa, you can think of it, and those were the privileges of going to a Kendriya Vidyalay or central school in those days, where uh the fee was one rupee per month till class five, uh, two rupees per month till class eight, and three rupees per month from class nine onwards, and which is why uh uh everything, a lot of what I've done in my rest of my life has been out of that sense of gratitude because which other government will subsidize education that much?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, uh for me it was a carefree, fun-filled school life, but completely straight and boring as far as today's kids are concerned.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me, Srikant, uh having tracked the IIT and the IAM, uh where did your uh uh inspiration or motivation uh come from in school?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, uh what kind of uh books would you read there?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh very important for uh you know us to understand where did these uh uh interests really come from for somebody like you?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Interest for business and entrepreneurship?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh interest in uh you know engineering or in business, which is really uh your uh uh work and things like that.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I'm gonna separate the two.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Interest in engineering actually never came, so I went to IIT by accident.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Come to that in a bit.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: But interest in business and entrepreneurship in many ways was ingrained as I was growing up.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was a chartered accountant, and he uh we lived in this town which was 60 kilometers from Mumbai.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: He would take a local train from Ambarnath and go to Viti every day, uh four days a week.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: One day he would work at the local factory.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And in Mumbai, uh my dad was a voracious reader, as was my mom.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: So he uh my dad was a subscriber to Time, Newsweek, Far East Economic Review, and he would get a variety of books and magazines from uh library.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: I still remember the name of the library, Jane Pettit Library in Fort.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a lot of reading content.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: So interest in marketing and business came through many of those cover stories in these magazines, including uh Indian magazines, India Today and Sunday, and so on and so forth.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I still remember one of the early stories of marketing that piqued my interest was about the soft drink wars.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was about uh what the soft drink wars in the 70s were, for example.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: So those were some of my early memories of marketing and business, for example.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, interest in doing business and being an entrepreneur came in a completely different way.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the company that my dad worked for, uh, like most other companies in those days, was owned by uh Gujarati business family, where there were three brothers.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now, look at it, it was a very company that was doing very, very well and uh family-owned business, but a lot of professionals like my dad were working there.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I was very, very curious, and I would say negatively curious, was everyone would call the three brothers Setji, Pratab Seth, Dhiru Sate, and Deepak Sate.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say, look, highly qualified people, why are they calling their boss Seth?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're too it's too early in that stage of your life when you're in class 5, 6, 7, 8 to say, make a distinction about what's good or bad, but it just struck me as being odd.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I also saw when these three brothers were owners of the company would come down to the small town to visit the factory, it was like not just a red carpet being laid out, it was like the way when today politicians visit a town, people are so obsequious.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I saw that happening with all the senior managers lining up.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And somewhere in my mind, uh it registered subconsciously that I don't want to ever be in a situation like this where I'm playing, uh paying homage or in the service of uh someone who's probably less qualified, and that is when I say, look, I'm gonna do something on my own.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh obviously, startups, entrepreneurship, those terms did not even exist remotely in my radar.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: But that's where the first, I would say, seeds of saying, let me do something on my own arose actually.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Engineering happened completely by accident.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I was because my dad was working for a chemical company, uh, all the people my dad was the chartered accountant, but around me, most of my dad's colleagues were engineers, and most of them were chemical engineers or mechanical engineers.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, the general view was you have to become an engineer or a doctor, and uh you either did your class 12 and took VJTI or UDCT in Bombay or you appeared for the JE.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't even thinking about it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Class 11, I came to Mumbai.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, those days I was the first batch of 10 plus 2 in CBSE.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I came to Mumbai and uh was first year junior college in SIES College Cyan actually.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that was one year.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: There were two years of exception where uh J you were allowed to take after class 11.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't even thinking about it.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh some people in the college said, you know, our college is organizing special sessions to coach anyone who wants to enter.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: So my granddad said, why don't you fill a form?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I filled a form, attended those classes at SIS College, and got a rank, I still remember, 662.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh which was a terrible rank in those years.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So my first preference was to be closer to home.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: I could not go to IIT Bombay, so I went to IIT Kanpur.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I was meant to be a bad engineer, and I'm I remained a bad engineer.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because but uh because that's not my cup of tea.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and but soon uh at IIT I realized that look, while I could do well if I worked hard, but I wasn't enjoying it.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I got involved in student associations, student council elections, and so on and so forth, and that's where I found my niche in terms of being saying, okay, organizing things, doing things, more action-oriented.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that became the path of doorway to the world, so to say, actually.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: How was IM Calcutta in the 80s?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because people know I am Calcutta now, but uh, how was it in the 80s?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh how did you uh think you got trained in the uh art of marketing at IMC at that time?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: So IMC was completely different from IIT Kanpur.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: IIT Kanpur was about training in life because you spent five of your formative years away from home, made friends from across the country for the first time.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: So IIT was coaching in life, and even if you're meant to be a bad engineer, it trains you in analytical thinking.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that's the way I would put IIT, but uh to me that was the most uh important period of my life.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: I am, on the other hand, I went in with my eyes completely open.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: I went voluntarily.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: IIT, I did not go voluntarily, went because of family pressure.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I am I went in knowing fully well that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, uh, but I also in my mind the goal was five years after working, I would uh become an entrepreneur.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I went in saying that look, I must learn marketing and finance, and those are the two majors I picked up, and I thoroughly enjoyed the courses.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we had great finance faculty.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Marketing, the full-time faculty was terrible, but the visiting faculty was great, and therefore the learning was great.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I thoroughly enjoyed it.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Most people spent those two years having fun.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: I can say that, and you ask any of my classmates and say, look, this guy never he was the one of the few guys who studied, and I'm actually proud to say that because for me it was total value for money.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: I spent time and I got every ounce out of it, actually.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, it was great fun.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: My foundations for both marketing and finance, both topics actually.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Even while running my businesses, I would still go back to my finance one course.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh debit, expense, credit, sales.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: I would go back to the basics even in the initial years, and I it to me it used to come back like a fresh memory every time, actually.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: After uh your IMC, you went to Ponds and you worked there for four years and then you went to McCant.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I still remember that as an agency you were responsible for getting coke into India and uh then you started Result McCant.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: You had a very different thinking in marketing at that time, right?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So uh how did that interest in looking at marketing not from just above the line, but looking at it from a more integrated marketing perspective, which is really fashionable today.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, how did that happen in those years?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it happened partly by accident.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: So my I went to McCann because I've said I've done four years of sales and ponds.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: If I want to do something in business, I must understand brands also, which is when I said, let me go to an advertising agency as opposed to looking for a brand management role.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: After spending three years at McCann, I got a good grounding.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was the pre-Mekann Ericsson days, Tarasena was running it.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: 1992, I was about to leave.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: I said, look, let me go and start something on my own.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was all set because it was already seven years after my working career, of my working career, my original goal was five years.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: When I started to leave, Tarasana said, don't go.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have this subsidiary company called Result, which has been languishing.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you stay back, apart from being an account director at McCann, you can also run that as CEO and I'll give you a 20% stake.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how I got involved with Result in the first place, actually.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: And when I got involved with results, so I was wearing three hats actually.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: The McCann hat for advertising, client servicing, result, and as also spending a small part of my time with Admar, which is a marketing research agency of McCann, actually.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, but I found result very interesting because uh at the end of the day, I while positioning, brand building, etc., great, the rubber hits the road when uh things get sold or bought or activation happens, and I found it very, very interesting.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, look, that's something to for me, it was uh a learning experience.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's also it was also an opportunity uh while I owned only 20% stake, it was an opportunity to run a business independently, which is why I sunk my teeth into it actually.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I want to spend a bit of time on the result mechanic experience, where what you really did at that time, if I remember right, was uh you went into book publishing for brand.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: You really looked at doing a catalog, which is really direct to uh consumer kind of a catalog for brand.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So your whole host of category development in India uh was done by you.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh where did you pick up those ideas from?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was not available in an MDW, it was not available in any book.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did you pick up these uh ideas and where did you get the inspiration from for somebody uh you know who's listening to this podcast?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do you really pick up these uh you know interesting uh ideas for them to kind of look at uh you know building these things?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's for me has been the fun part of my life throughout, whether at result mechan or even now when I hang out with young entrepreneurs, the brainstorming an idea to do things that have never been done before.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: What can we do to think out of the box?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let's come up with as crazy an idea as possible with no boundaries, without any constraints.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the inherent uh for me, that's the fun part of getting into a new area, whether I got into Result Then or whether I started a company called Solutions later or whether I do what I do today.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for me, getting involved in a new industry or area, the fun part is saying it's completely unexplored.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, no one's drawn artificial boundaries, and therefore you can have complete and utter fun exploring it.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: But there is a flip side, and I'll come to that later.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: When you do that, you obviously make many mistakes.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you because someone who follows you will say I should do this and should not do this.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: But for me, that's the fun part actually, and that's what keeps me going to say, look, let's have fun.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: You'll make mistakes.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you won't make as much money if if I unlike if I had done it straight and narrow.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that's the fun part.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: You just wear your ideation hat and just think out of the box and see what is required to um make the needle move in this particular situation, and that's where it comes from.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's just utter creative ideation and brainstorming and nothing else, Swami.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, fantastic, Srikant.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great uh answer.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, one of the key transitions that you made was uh from being a professional to working in a uh agency in almost like a quasi entrepreneurship, and then you went fully into solutions as an entrepreneur.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me what was going through your mind uh before you started the venture because you are a first generation entrepreneur.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what was going through your mind and the pre-startup anxiety is always uh something that I would like to hear from somebody like you.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if I did a startup today, I would be a lot more anxious, and the pre-startup anxiety would be a lot more today.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, when I look back at that particular time when I started it, when I look back and say, was I so naive, foolish, and stupid to take that kind of a risk?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: So while I did make a business plan and I still carry a copy of the business plan because those were pre-soft copies, pre-internet days, I still carry a copy of the spiral-bound business plan.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: I have preserved it for posterity.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: All that part was done.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I'll tell you the part that I completely missed doing and I regretted it forever.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this is an advice I give to any entrepreneur today.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I tell entrepreneurs that all the gatherings I meet them before you decide to go it, uh, go down that path.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you're married or if you're in a relationship, ensure that for the your family expenses for the next two years are set aside in a separate bank account that you have no access to.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Only your wife, spouse, or partner has access to it, so that your family part is completely secure.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I did not do that.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: As a result of this, here's what happened.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: To start the business, I put in all my Provident Fund withdrawals from my Mekan and Pond States.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I had a Maruti van, which I sold and put that money in.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: I had five credit cards which were fully maxed out.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Not only that, I borrowed money from my wife's account and put it into it.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: I got equity from my two of my wife's brothers and put into it.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I did not follow that basic security principle of keep two years of expenses in the account.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, in year one of the business didn't matter didn't matter because we did outstandingly well.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: We exceeded the targets in our business plan.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Got completely cocky and stupid.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, year two and three, we stretched ourselves.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we didn't grow as fast as we could, ran into a cash flow challenge, and all hell broke loose.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, all the founders were six months behind on salary payments.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh pressure on the home front.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: My second son was getting born at that point of time.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have money to pay the hospital bills, for example.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, the as I said, when I look back now, the pre-startup anxiety was not there because I just planned it badly.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if I had to do it now, I would do it very differently.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's so when you think, that's when anxiety happens.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: When you don't think and then jump into it, there is no anxiety.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: You only get the anxiety when you're deep into the deep end of the pool, actually.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the other thing that I saw you talk about was you did not take a VC funding, and uh, you know, those were the times when these kind of terminologies like a VC was not even there.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that also seems to have shaped a lot of your thinking on how startups need to think, especially from the VC funding side.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, can you tell me some principles that you know people can pick it up from?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the key mistake that I caution young people today is people say the first, if you look at the sequence of events startup founders believe that they need to follow.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: One, create a startup, find co-founders, think of a product, and the next milestone is let's get funding.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's the immediate milestone they want to hit.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that takes over all their waking and sleeping hours, actually.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I would put a big part of the blame on economic times, your story, and all these people who glorify people who raise$50 million,$100 million,$200 million, you're putting in place the wrong role models and setting people off in the wrong direction.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, what you need is to create a product or service that meets a genuine need or solves a genuine problem in the market.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then, with that in mind, uh, once you kind of prove that you're actually delivering value to your customers, customer revenue should be your primary source of funding.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And if you won't need money, you should do it at the point of time when you need money to scale up.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's like saying I've driven a car with two liters of petrol from point A to point B.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now I need to drive the next 200 kilometers.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give me petrol?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I reach that destination, I would have really arrived at a big destination.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: So people make the mistake of raising money early without having figured out the basics.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: Do I have a product or service that genuinely solves a problem?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And am I delivering value?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the objectives are all wrong, which is why I'm completely in favor of people being very frugal in the initial stages.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: I also tell people that look, you must start by putting in your own savings.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's when you know the value of money.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: After that, please go and raise some money from family and friends.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Most people in India are very, very shy of doing that.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: How can I go and ask my family and friends for money?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: My logic to them is completely inverse, actually.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I tell them, look, they're not doing you a favor by investing in your business.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Look at it this way.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow, if you become a massive company, they'll come and tell you, why didn't you offer me shares in the company?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're doing them a favor by asking them that look, I have made progress in my business with my own money.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Before I go and raise money from VCs, would you like to come and buy some shares in my company?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're not putting moral pressure on them, you're not putting any pressure on them, but you're laying the offer on the table.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Not everyone will take it, but some of them will, and that's your family and friends round.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a mental inhibition I try and get people to overcome.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: With your own money and family and friends round, you can pretty much build a small business which is showcaseable in the first 24 months.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: At that stage, if you have a viable business, VCs will line up in front of you, you won't be chasing VCs.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's the fundamental principle that I pushed, actually.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the points uh I wanted to talk about was uh your crossroads in 2004.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh where after having done solutions, because knowing you, uh uh when you started solutions, uh I've always known you uh saying you want to retire with solutions, right?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because you built a company, you don't build it to exit.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the crossroads at 2004 is something that I want to talk to you about.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: What was going through your mind and how did you apply that learning to your next venture?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh actually the crossroad was for a completely different reason.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: We started in 95, 2005 would have been a 10-year mark.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so when I sat down to think in 2004, we we had come out of our worst period.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Our worst period was 97 to 99, and uh when we kind of hit all our cash flow challenges and all of that.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my worst period during that day, and worst day during that period when I was down to the last 10 rupees in my wallet physically, zero in the bank account, and five credit cards maxed out, and I was driving the small Maruti 800, I would drive to work, and there was one day when it seemed like a Rajnikan movie, actually, Swami.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: In the sense, um the question was will the petrol in my car finish first, or will the 10 rupees in my wallet finish first?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: If the petrol in the car finishes first, I don't I have only 10 rupees to fill uh in my petrol.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Or if on the other hand, can I reach home safely and park my car?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like that kind of a race that day.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the lowest point.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: The other lowest point was when we had those cash flow challenges, I had suppliers knocking at my door.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, we were in marketing services, so we were dealing with printers and travel agents and all of those.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a well-known printer, I still remember his name, New Tech Printers.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: The owner was an old man called Mr.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Schroff, very nice gentleman, but he had also got worn out by endless promises we had made that we'll pay you tomorrow, we'll pay you day after tomorrow.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: So one day he came to my office in Kalkaji.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: He caught hold of my collar and said, Are you paying up now or not?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I have every intention of paying you, but I don't have the money to pay you.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: You'll have to give us time.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: He went and filed a court case against us.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh eventually we settled out of court and we became great friends, by the way.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there was another day where a travel agent showed up home on a Sunday saying, Please pay me, Kirke.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, having gone through all that and having gone through a period where I realized that I hadn't provided for my family's security, I was from a first-generation entrepreneur, not that my parents had left any inheritance.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Look, I can't take this risk for my family over and over again of not providing them security.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, I must find a way to monetize my first business so that I don't have to worry about my kids and my family and their security.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it is driven entirely.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: So while you spoke about pre-startup anxiety not being there, this is in the midst of a startup and anxiety to say, look, I can't put my family at risk.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I've already put them at risk sufficiently, and therefore let me monetize it by bringing in a partner who I can sell part of my shares to.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: So in 2004, what I did was I still remember July to September period, uh, I had a very smart person, Vikram Alwa, who's doing very well right now.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's based in Mumbai.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: He was my executive assistant.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: I got him to draw up a list of all the uh global holding companies, uh, who are the CEOs, who are the people looking after international business.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I went on a world darshan, actually, so to say.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, started in the US, went to UK, went to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and came back.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: I had I met nine agencies or holding companies, every one of them you can think of.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, and then out of those nine, about five, and my pitch was very simple that look, we are India's largest marketing services agency, India is a hot country.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Do you if you're looking at coming to India, we could be a great partner, shall we talk?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: So five out of nine were interested, three got into serious conversations, which is how the publisher's deal happened, actually.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that's the crossroad I was talking about.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: The crossroad was uh there was a serious thinking of saying, look, instead of doing that, should we just continue building the business on our own?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I just said, look, there's no guarantee you will not run into bad times again.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to put my family at risk.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: That was fundamentally the crossroad, actually.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: So from that venture, you moved into Crayon Data.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: You moved from a services company to a product company.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was the difference in running a services company and running a product company?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I must tell you this, by the way, there was a parallel act happening along with solutions integrated.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: We had a second company which was running, which got sold to a Dutch group also.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was called Team For You.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I will leave that aside.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: But services to product, this is how it happened actually.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I between uh solutions got sold to publicists between 2005 and 10 uh as a uh sold in tranches.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh 2011 to early 2013, I stayed as India chairperson of the media and digital agencies.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh during that period, you get irritated with the slow pace at which multinationals move because you're spending all your time on global conference calls, which are completely meaningless.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, once an entrepreneur, you're itching to be in the midst of action rather than talking to global people wanting to know one line item on an Excel spreadsheet.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so as it happened, my friend and classmate from IM Calcutta, Suresh Shankar, who's living in Singapore, he had sold his analytics company to IBM, Red Pill Analytics to IBM.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he was also around the same time frame, and he was also serving his time at IBM.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh from IBM, and we'd always said, let's try and do something together.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: And from within IBM, he had a bird's eye view for how uh analytics were shaping up, how big data was becoming important given how technology was allowing so much of data to be handled.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we started talking.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then uh when we started talking, we said we kind of crafted the whole proposition to say, look, how can big data be applied in the marketing or consumer context and for helping to solve specific problems for enterprises?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's when obviously that play could have been a consulting play, which would have been services, but by then uh because I'd spent enough time with uh the startup community, mentoring startups at places like Thai and Indian Angel Network, the whole concept of scale was well entrenched in my mind and also for Suresh saying a services business is harder to scale up, and a product business is what can be scaled up, which is when we said let's build a product out of it.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I must tell you, we made a hash of it in the initial few years because neither of us had ever built a product before, and we did not bring in a senior product person as part of the founding team.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: So here were two services guys trying to build a product business, and uh every time we would go to a client, the client would say, This is the problem, can you solve it?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: We would wear a services and consulting hat and said, Yes, we can do it, and we would come back to the company and tell the product team, can you do this?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: So by the time every day the product would keep changing because every time we met a new client, and the product mindset was never there actually.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's not true.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did you juxtapose the best practices of services thinking in a product company?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are some great practices in a services uh business that you can bring it into product.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did you juxtapose those learning into a product company?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, leaving aside the uh initial pitfalls I told you about the product getting completely messed up, leave that aside.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: But effectively, because we wore a services mindset, uh when you're in a services company, Swami, you know as well as I do, you listen a lot more to clients, you have conversations with them about the problems they face and the brief that they have in mind.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: So when you do that, when you do have those conversations, you effectively start co-creating a solution with them.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we brought the co-creating mindset to our product also.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: So when we co-created the so we picked two or three verticals initially: the banking vertical, the hospitality vertical, the airline vertical.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: So when we spent time with those clients, we came back with so many insights uh that it helped to uh, and more important, in each case we had an anchor client, a big bank, a big airline, a big hotel.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so when you co-create it with them, you're telling them, we'll create it together.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be my biggest client, because of which I'll give you a lot of benefits, not just in terms of price, but the kind of features you get to test out.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And those learnings in terms of what works, you come back and then transfer onto your products.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: So co-creation of products working with clients is probably the single biggest learning that you bring from a services environment, actually.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: After that, uh Shrikant, you took an advisory role.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: You started the IG3 uh advisory network.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you explode journey from uh you know being a student to a professional to a founder operator to an advisor.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: How do you find the traits are in each of this?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Very different from being a professional to a founder operator or a founder co-promoter to being an advisor.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: How do these traits change and what adaptability that is needed for each of these roles?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: So when when you say a professional, I'm assuming a professional working in a large corporation, for example.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, true.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean, why at the risk of sound making a generalization?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: A professional in a corporate environment is operating within boundaries that someone else has laid out.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that someone else could be sitting in US, Europe, or India, uh, but you're still operating within boundaries.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: While there is scope for creativity and innovation, but some boundaries are laid out and you can't expand them.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, it's your ability to deliver outcomes or be accountable for results within those boundaries that makes you a great professional, and your ability to work with peers, managing seniors, managing subordinates.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's what distinguishes a great professional.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're working as a professional, you also need to deal with organizational politics, there's a rat race and all of that.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the professional world.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: When you go in as a founder, it's a completely different world.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the trait is you have to be completely self-sufficient from getting your own cup of tea to booking your own flight ticket to uh finding the office space to hiring an employee to getting your first customer to ensuring that money at the end of the month to pay a bank.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: There are no boundaries.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: There are no boundaries to the work that you do, but there are no boundaries to your ambition either.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you're only accountable to primarily to yourself.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: As if later on, obviously, if you are VCs and other investors, you're accountable to them, but you're primarily accountable to yourself and your team members.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're accountable to your team members because you sold them a vision, which is why they joined you.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you're accountable to your team members because you have to have money to pay them salaries at the end, 31st of the month.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: So accountability is to you and your team members and to the vision that you laid out.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the difference for a founder.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when you then go in uh as an advisor, uh it's very it's it's it's very, very different.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I today when I play an advisory role to very different kind of companies, uh for me the key trait is to be able to connect many, many, many dots.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what my clients value in my advisory role is the 20 different experiences I might bring to the table to help them think through a particular challenge.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that is one trait actually.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: What did I do when I walked into my first banking customer in New York for Crayon Data?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: What did I do to generate a sales pipeline for crayon data?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: What did I do to raise money for uh uh XYZ company?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: What did I do when I hired that great employee vis-a-vis a bad employee?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, when you bring all those experiences to play to solve a particular problem for a client, that's what the client values you.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing, the other trait that I personally it's not true for everyone else, someone like McKinsey comes in, people value them for just their advice.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: In my case, it's actually advice with sleeves rolled on uh because I stay on and work quote unquote in a build-operate transfer mode uh last year for an ed tech company which wanted to get into B2C while they were only in B2B.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: I spent nine months helping them to set up the team and actually build the B2C business from scratch.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of nine months, hand it over when they were doing 25 lakhs a month revenue, handed it over to the new hire and moved out.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that to me is that's the kind of trait I bring, the ability to work with people.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the people I work with are in their 20s or at most early 30s, and that's the other trait.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: The ability to, in an organization, when you're a professional, you're managing your superior, you're managing your subordinates.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're an advisor, the kind of advisory I do, it's the ability to work with people who are 20 years younger, 10 years younger, or your age group, or work with external stakeholders, and the catch word is work with.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: You're not managing them, and ability to carry all of them along with what you're doing, actually.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a completely different experience, but very, very enjoyable actually.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to gears a bit, you know, I see that you are now involved with the IM Calcutta Innovation Park, uh, you know, with Thai war with Birak.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: One of the questions that I have is if you really look at uh the kind of companies that are being built in India.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do you want to break up world-class execution with world-class exports?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe entrepreneurships can break that.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the challenge is how to break that because if you really want to create a concept in India, you really need the world-class institutions from our country uh working very, very closely with companies, and you know, you need to bring the bridge together.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you enable that and what do you think are the challenges that we face?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, I'm going to give uh before answering that question in general terms or abstract terms, I'm gonna give you two examples and then converge it to articulate some general principles.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: The two most fascinating things I've seen in terms of my experiences or engagement with entrepreneurs, and you'll find them as polar opposites actually.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: One is uh I work a lot with companies, startups in the biotech, life sciences, medical space, actually.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I do that.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: There are 60 bioincubators across the country, and I'm on the board of two of them, and at BIRAC.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I get to interact.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: The founders are invariably PhDs in biosciences, bioengineering, biotechnology, biomedical PhDs.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they've done their PhD in the best universities in the US and have come back with a vision of creating life-changing products and the kind of products uh that these PhDs are creating.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: How can I use AI to detect early onset of breast cancer without passing the woman through a mammography, without it being invasive?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: How can I do it with a simple AI device that is held remotely, for example?
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Great product.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Another product, how can I restore the power of speech to someone who's lost it because of throat cancer, for example?
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Can I use uh innovative biotechnology to increase the productivity of agricultural crops, for example?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, these are all bright PhDs or masters who come back and applying, and in many cases, they're applying the core thesis of their PhD to transfer the learnings to build great products here.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard work because unlike other startups, which can raise a lot of money, get to market quickly, products in this space have a longer gestation period, three years, because just transferring from science to a lab scale prototype, from a lab scale prototype to a slightly bigger prototype, clinical trials, and then taking it to market three years.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: You need patience and persistence and resilience actually.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, the government has played a very good role through BIRAC to support 800 odd startups over the last six, seven years with funding for those three years.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that is a great inspirational example of the kind of products that are now in the market at an early stage to impact our healthcare, our environment, and our agriculture, actually.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that's the intersection of academia, research, and entrepreneurship.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, so that is a great example of products that can solve problems of India.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, a completely different model of startup, which is a fascinating startup I've seen out of IM Calcutta Innovation Park, it's an entrepreneur called Kalyan, who's in a rural village of Bengal.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: He set out to solve the problem of poor goat farmers.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Bengal is the biggest goat meat consuming state in the country, and therefore there are many goat farmers, and they're all suffering from the problem that the goats are not healthy and therefore don't fetch a good enough price in the market or don't give enough milk.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this guy first worked with the government lab to create an artificial insemination technique so that you can create more goats and make them healthy.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a small part of the innovation.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: But the big part of the innovation is he said, Look, I'm sitting in one village where I am, he's got a goat farm where he's creating this bank of artificial semen.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: How do I take it to the last goat farmer in the smallest village of West Bengal?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: How do I build a distribution channel?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know what he did?
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: He said, one thing we don't have a shortage of in in India is of unemployed men and women who are youth.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: So he has created a distribution channel.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine the MWA model being replicated in rural India with thousands of unemployed men and women who come to him, buy the doses of artificial cement, take it back in cryogenic cans to their village.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: They are trained on how to inject it into the goat, look after the goat, and work with the goat farmer.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: They buy each dose at 30 rupees, sell it at 100 rupees when they inject it.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: The 70 rupees margin enables a few thousand unemployed people to make 10,000 rupees a month.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine the downstream effect of employment?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: That to me is the classical entrepreneurship model that India needs, which is that successful entrepreneurship should lead to livelihood creation and not just wealth creation for the VC investors.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: That to me is the key metric.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the metrics I'm pushing actually, the incubators I work with, it's called jobs created per crore of capital deployed.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: JCPPD.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: So to give you an example, 25 lakhs is the money that IM Calcutta Innovation Park has given this guy.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: And he's provided livelihood to 2,500 people.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: So if you now say for a crore of capital deployed, what is the JPCCD?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's 10,000.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: Come back to the nifty listed companies on National Stock Exchange.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: All the manufacturing companies put together have a JPC CD of 0.8.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: For crore of capital deployed, they create 0.8 jobs.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Which includes LNT, Reliance TIC, all of them.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: Services companies, because they are job more people-oriented, still do between four to six jobs per crore of capital deployed.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: Some startups, on the other hand, startups like this, when they can do 10,000, this may be an outlier, but startups can create, if you create employment-oriented startups and put money there, you can actually make a difference and solve the employment pro unemployment problem of India.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: So those are the two models that I'm totally fascinated by and where I spend most of my time actually.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: I really love the metric, Shrikant.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because we need uh we need to metricize on our own terms because we tend to aid the West in terms of metrics.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's very important to.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the kind of metrics that you are talking about.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: I also know you do a lot of work in the education side because that's another area where it's almost like how you started talking to me saying, I was never meant to be an engineer, but I went to IIT Concord and uh, you know, but I found my calling in IMST.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that uh I am fascinated about is education at a very young level where you really need to inspire children.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, I know you are involved with a lot of education uh initiators.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: How do you think that change has to happen in India?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: The way I'm seeing is there's a difference between education and learning.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, how do you get that change at a granular level?
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll try and give you a few examples.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think a lot of the criticism about education in India is that it's divorced from uh actual reality, it's divorced from uh what you eventually do in life, it's theoretical, it's rote learning, etc.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the areas where I've been deeply involved is uh, and these learnings have come from many different directions.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's about connecting dots.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one of the things I do, I am a visiting faculty at Ashoka University, for example, where I oversee what is called as the experiential learning module for 190 students of their postgraduate fellowship.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating because these 190 students are divided into 38 groups of five each.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: So they're working on 38 projects through the year as part of their curriculum, credit course through the year.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh many of these projects are sourced from clients.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a year-long project that clients have given them.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the clients are in not-for-profit sectors or socially impactful sectors, but there are commercial sectors also.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: But during the course of the year, they're actually work, and it's a serious project, unlike those Fatru internships that all of us did when we went to uh engineering college, for example, where you whiled away your time in the summer, the organization didn't know what to do.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: Here it is very, very well curated.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, for example, to pick the 38 projects that were to be assigned, we had 110 proposal requests coming in from clients across the country.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: We we send an outreach saying if you'd like to give a project to our students, fill up this proposal form.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: 110 proposals came in.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: We look at it to see if this is a serious client, is this a serious project, is this a project that will lead to certain kind of learning for the student, learning in terms of problem solving, innovative thinking, uh, teamwork, etc.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: And those 38 projects then get executed through the year.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: And my role is to ensure that uh the learning objectives are being met.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So while even when they're working on a client project, they come back to me periodically and I grill them to say, look, uh, what are you uh if this is the client objective and scope, uh, it's just like what you would do in an agency or an organization.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're asking your team whether they're on the right track with strategy, with execution, and I'm questioning them all the time.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: And as a faculty member, I get to grade them on that.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, I'm pushing them on that direction.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Out of these 38 projects, this year introduced a new innovation.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: We said, look, some of you who want to be experience entrepreneurship, instead of a client-centric project, we invite you to design your own project, think of a problem you want to solve.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, form a group of five, and this is your opportunity to be entrepreneurial to solve that problem.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they work directly with me.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm their client in this case.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll give fascinating examples.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: One of them said, I want to solve the problem of the carbon trail that mobile phones leave behind.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one of the biggest sources of carbon footprint is the mobile phones and what goes inside it.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: So these guys are creating a Chrome plugin.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: So every time someone goes to an e-commerce website to shop around for a mobile phone, the Chrome plugin says, I'll tell you which brand leaves what kind of carbon footprint, what are the relative ratings, and if you want to make an informed choice, all things remaining equal, to buy the brand that leaves the least carbon footprint, I will give you the advice.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is one project, for example.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Another project is again environment focusing.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: Can I create a marketplace for all recycled, upcycled products across the country for people who are conscious of the environment?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: Someone else is working on education, someone else is working on something else.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, experiential learning to me is a big, big way of ensuring that you make a connection between what you're learning at the university and what the real world needs and what is required to solve India's problems.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we've taken this uh so this learning and the learning from my ventilator project, where we compressed 18 months what uh MNC takes to build a ventilator into 90 days.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: Last year, I took both these experiences from Ashoka University and the ventilator project to IM Calcutta.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: So when the new MBA batch was being oriented last year, I mooted to the director and said, why don't we introduce a new experience for them?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: Let's create an experiential learning module.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we said we'll pick the top five startups at IM Calcutta Innovation Park and let's constitute dedicated task forces to support each of those five startups.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: So in the next six months, the startup must become investor ready.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: And to help them, we said there will be two students, one faculty member, two alumni, and one staff of the IM Calcutta Innovation Park who will interact every week.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it became experiential learning for the MBA students, actually.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, these are the different forms of learning that are bringing the real life perspective into learning through an experiential module, actually.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: So great fun.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and because I'm doing this at four or five places, the ability to connect dots, transfer learnings is truly enjoyable actually.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant, brilliant.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, which brings me back uh to the ventilator project.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know you are a colleague uh with IIT Kanpur and uh you know uh the kind of work that you did there.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about compressing the product lifecycle uh just now.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I had a question on that.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what is the difference between building a product in a crisis versus building a product in no crisis?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you know that is a very, very big mindset difference that I see, which you're covering it in the book, but it's a big, big mindset change because you would have seen the difference when you're building it in crayon data versus actually the ventilator project, right?
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I think two or three differences.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: When you build a product in a crisis and you bring people together, there is a higher purpose that rallies people.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's no longer just about making a product a commercial success, it's about solving a challenge or a crisis that the country is facing.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the higher purpose galvanizes people like nothing else.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's one difference.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the second difference is that in a compressed time frame, you're able to get people to do a lot more because you bring in a lot more people.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: So when I said that we were able to build a world-class product in 90 days as opposed to MNC staying 18 months, it's because we brought in 20 different kinds of experts.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're working parallelly and not sequentially.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Why does it take an MNC 18 months?
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because you hold one meeting today where you're discussing the product design, and then you say, Okay, let's reconvene next week where second iteration is done, and it takes you three months to create the first design version, then you bring in the manufacturing team to weigh in on that, and it just happens sequentially with no sense of urgency.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: When you do things parallelly with 20 people with diverse expertise, thinking together, working together, and have a sense of urgency, and you bring in people with 30, 40 years of experience, uh, you just are able to collapse the time frame.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: The third dimension, which the pandemic, a normal crisis would not have caused it, but the pandemic did.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you're no longer dependent on people being physically in the same room to work on a project.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we had our best product guide was sitting out on New York.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: He works RD head of a global uh med tech company.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he would he give us the initial guidance.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there was a doctor in California who initially said, okay, to the prototype.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: In a normal world or in a peacetime, as you would say, you would have waited for that guy to take a flight and come in, and by the time this meeting could be scheduled, it would have been three months.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: Here, it takes you uh the next day, you can have them on the call.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so the mindset has changed with respect to how people collaborate, and that was the big difference, actually.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: But that change is now here to stay, and that's very, very important for us, actually.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're working on the oxygen concentrator project.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a lot of work that you're doing there.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, how are you bringing these diverse teams and where do you see it uh really taking shape?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, how fast do you see that you know fructify in your mind?
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh there are similarities but yet differences between what we did with the ventilator project and now on the oxygen project.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: In the ventilator project, while we did 90 days and uh 90 days is a short time frame compared to 18 months, but here for oxygen we don't have the luxury of even 90 days because oxygen is required now.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh therefore we said it can't be about nurturing one startup, getting them to design the product, getting them to manufacture the product and bring it to market.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Here we said we'll have to jump several steps quickly.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we said uh we we need to get many manufacturers across the country simultaneously make oxygen plants and oxygen concentrators.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's available in large quantities across the country.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, this game is more about rapid manufacturing and but supporting those manufacturers, but those manufacturers may have adjacent skills, but they may not be in the oxygen manufacture business.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you equip them with the right product design?
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: So the effort was to initially bring the right experts to create designs.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, once again, we had people from across the world contributing ideas on the product design, academicians, practitioners, researchers, everyone.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that design is being made available to these manufacturers to say, go run with it.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: We will have manufacturing experts who will guide you on how to apply this design.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Equally important, in the oxygen concentrator and the plant, there are two critical components which are in short supply across the world.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: There is something called a zeolite, which is a molecular sieve that separates the nitrogen from the air and leaves you only with pure oxygen, and then there are the compressors.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them are in short supply, and the manufacturers on their own will never be able to lay their hands on it.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we've scoured the globe and every part of India to source it centrally.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we said we will help you with design, we will help you with manufacturing guidance, we will help you in sourcing these critical components, and we will also arrange CSR funding because when you make a plant or a concentrator, someone's willing to buy those and donate it to the needy hospitals.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: So this one was critically focused on manufacturing scale, whereas last year it was about making one great product with one great startup and bringing it to the market actually.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: So similarities in terms of the way we've got task force working, but difference in terms of the emphasis.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the emphasis on manufacture of large quantities.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Today, Srikant, uh, we have a model in India where the best Indian talent builds products from outside India.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what does it take for the same talent to build world-class products for the world market from India?
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that change is already happening.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there are two or three things actually.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: One is because the world is now virtual, uh, so one is you can keep hoping that Indian talent will come back to India and start building products from here.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: That will take happen over a period of time.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's already better now compared to what it was two decades ago, three decades ago.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: But what's already begun to happen is people sitting in the US are or anywhere else are getting involved with products built in India.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: Ventilator project, I already said we had people from the US helping, a doctor, a product expert.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: In the oxygen project, we have a very senior expert from Canada who's literally been working 24 by 7 to guide us.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Indians living abroad are already contributing to great products being built here.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, right now, the product we're building is for solving India's problem and crisis.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: But in both cases, the ventilator project and this one, the mindset we've kept is design and manufacture a great product which is good enough for the international market.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: Also, don't cut corners on reliability, safety.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: And equally important, Indian products, even when they're reliable, tend often to look clunky and ugly.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I mean, it look, imagine the world before Steve Jobs and world after Steve Jobs.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's the mindset you need, and that needs to be ingrained right at the beginning.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can't suddenly come and put a layer of packaging six years later saying, I want to go to the international market, now let me make it beautiful.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Indian consumer expects it now.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because all of us as consumers have got just used to better products, and therefore, we might as well design products that way when you want to eventually sell it to the world.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: And fortunately, I think a lot of young people realize that now that you need products that uh are designed, built for the global market, even when initially you're selling it for the Indian market, but Indians are equipped to sell to the world.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's like saying if you can drive a car in India, you can drive it anywhere in the world.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: The traffic and roads can't get any worse.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: So if you can sell a product in India, you can sell it anywhere in the world.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, it's the tools to sell it globally are now become easier.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: You don't necessarily have to send salespeople all over the world.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: SaaS products are getting sold remotely.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Even enterprise products, the customers overseas in the post-COVID world don't expect you to be sitting in front of them.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: They're willing to see a demo or a zoom call.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the circumstances are favorable for us to sell products globally if we can build great products, actually.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things uh you talk about is when you talk about doctors.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: I saw you talk in an interview saying they have something called a continuing medical education, right?
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some great work uh happening uh you know for them.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: But when you really look at a career like ours, which is an engineer or uh, you know, an MD or a chartered accountant, we tend to think that once we graduate, the learning almost stops.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh for somebody to kind of uh be relevant, for somebody like uh youngsters and you know middle, you know, middle level professionals to be relevant, the importance of continuing medic uh continuing education is very, very critical.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: What would you what would your advice be for them to be relevant and how do I be a continuous learner?
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I think uh the mistake that most people make is uh if you look at continuing medical education, uh either the hospital or the medical college you work in or the medical association or the medical sellers, they're organizing those continuing medical education.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's being literally being offered to you on a platter.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: Likewise, engineers who are working in corporates or companies usually sit back and say, if I need to be trained, it's the company's responsibility.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: Very rarely do people take the responsibility on their own.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: But uh if you look at entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, particularly in the technology world, who are charting, uh going into uncharted territories, no one can teach them.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: They have to learn on their own.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give you a simple example.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: The ventilator project, the two founders of NoCarp Robotics, had never seen a ICU ventilator in action before they designed the ventilator.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: So on a crash basis, they read medical textbooks, they read everything they could do on the internet to understand the underlying science, the underlying medicine, to be able to build that.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where the learning happened for them.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, to me, uh all learning has to come out of an innate curiosity.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: If people sit back and say, look, I'm going to be working in this company for the next five years at their responsibility.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think that person's going to be obsolete very soon.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think people, while there are some catchphrases saying tomorrow's world is going to be AI, if you don't know AI, you're going to be obsolete.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Some people will go out and try to learn it.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's about just being observant around you for all the trends.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, by the way, on AI, I must tell you this.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's while I've done many things of self-learning, I actually, when I first started as a I was the first salesperson number one at Creon Data, I said, Look, I can't approach it just from a business sense.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: I need to learn AI.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually enrolled for an AI course on Coursera.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: But here's what happened after that.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: It said there are two prerequisites.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: You must know Python programming and you must also refresh your high school calculus.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now I had to go back to the basics on both.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: So first next, I signed up for a Python programming course on Coursera and I started looking for my old calculus books.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I must tell you that I gave up very soon because trying to do all those three things while doing a day job was impossible.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that was one of the places where I failed with respect to that.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I just think it has to come out of an innate curiosity.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: When you're exploring uncharted territories, there's no option.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: You have to go and learn actually.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the onus is entirely on the individual, no one owes it to the individual to provide that kind of learning or training opportunity.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to do it yourself, is what I would say.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so my final question, uh Srikant, is if you had to write a letter to your 10-year-old self today, what would be the three pieces of advice you would give him?
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is a difficult question.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: 10-year-old myself, right?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, correct.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because now that you've had a 30, 40, 50 year experience, I uh uh I assume that you know you've gone through schooling, you've gone through work, you've gone through entrepreneurship, and I'm sure today when you look back, what would you write yourself to say what's the advice you would give yourself?
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, assuming that uh that 10-year-old is living in today's day and age and not when I was growing up.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: So one thing, what the first advice would be please learn coding even as you're 10 years old, fiddle around with build things because tomorrow's world you can't live without coding.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're a great coder, then there are many avenues that will open up to you.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: That would be advice number one.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: Advice number two would be don't be the good, obedient boy at school that you were.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: Break as many rules as you can because it's when you break rules that you get the mindset of going and creating things that the world has never seen before.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: That would be the second one.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the third one would be that look, don't wait for 10 years after you finish.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: I would still go and do my engineering course, but uh this time around, I would probably uh get into more like uh computers rather than chemical engineering or mechanical engineering.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I would not wait for 10 years after my education to become an entrepreneur.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would uh my advice to you would be even while you're studying your engineering, please begin your first startup while you're still on campus.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh make mistakes, and uh there are there are very few downsides to doing that, and don't wait for 10 years.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: That would be my third advice, actually.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic, Shekan.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant advice.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think the way you came up with the answers was really, really good.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh thanks for your time and uh great experience for me.