Latest / Mork Unfiltered / He Scaled To 100 Million Users. Here's Why He Quit.

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He Scaled To 100 Million Users. Here's Why He Quit. · Mork Unfiltered

• speaker-0: No matter what you prepare, you're not ready for what gets unleashed. speaker-1: How do you deal with setbacks? I mean, you mentioned that there's been times where it hasn't worked. speaker-0: If you want to do something different you got to have the ability to do what you're not expected to. speaker-1: What's the impact on the way you see the world? speaker-0: World the inevitable is machines are smarter than people. Machines don't need time to think, they don't need time off. speaker-1: What would you tell people who perhaps know they need to make a change but they're too afraid to do so? Welcome back to Mork Unfiltered Folks. This is the podcast where we go beyond the highlight reel and into the messy middle of success, the setbacks, the reinventions, the hard truths that nobody talks about. Today's guests started as a management trainee in Hyderabad, India, and over the next 29 years built customer operations for one of the fastest growing telecoms launch in the history of that country. Where over 100 million subscribers signed up in something like Six months. He then went through a series of moves and transformations across different industries in different countries, which eventually led him to move his family to Durban, South Africa to run the contact center of one of the world's largest brewers in the country. And then during Trump's first term in the middle of COVID, he decided to pack up everything and move to the United States on his own visa because he said, I'm on the wrong side of my 40s. If I don't do it now, It's never gonna happen. Today he leads global operations at Unify CX across seven countries, navig navigating one of the country and the region and the world's biggest disruptions which any industry has ever faced, which is how AI is transforming the future of work. This is Morgan Filtered, and this is Satish Veranazi. Satish, welcome to the show. speaker-0: It's so great to be here, Patrick. Thank you for having me on the show. speaker-1: You're more than welcome. You you've got a fascinating story, which is full of of challenges and kind of like moves from one end of the world to another. But one of the things that struck me most when when we you and I last talked was it seemed that you grew up as the middle child of three siblings. And I was just wondering, you know, when you grew up as the middle child, what kind of is the what's the impact on, you know, the way you see the world and the the way you kind of like become in terms of your personality and the need to go out and do. Really hard things like you have in your career. speaker-0: I never thought about it for many years. Only when I kind of grew up and, you know, got to some place in my career did I kind of ever sit back and think, why did I do some of the things that I did? Being one or three is, you know, and being one or three when everybody's two years apart. I've got an older sibling two years old and a younger sibling two years younger. There is the firstborn and there is the youngest. And then here you're in the middle. And when you're growing up, unconsciously you kind of clock into saying, I need to do something to demand attention or to kind of get attention. And I think that kind of made me become a rebel without a cause, especially in my teenage years. I just wanted to do what everybody else didn't do in the family or just not conform with the norm. It kind of became a streak. I mean I'm I'm sure my parents even now talk about it. There were some very troublesome years. But what it did give me is kind of help me unlock the need to do something to do better. Right. Things that I do growing up with I got a sibling who's got, let's say 90%. I wanted to get just ninety one percent just to kind of say, Hey, I can do better. But what it did kind of instill in me really is the competitive spirit and saying, Okay, I gotta get this done. ⁓ you gotta get this done. And then I found a way to channelise some of that rebellious energy to what I did. Kind of became second nature by the time I finished school, did my grad and kinda got out to in the working world. But that was really, really helpful growing up. I love both the siblings. I think we still have a competition. You still have a competition about who's fitter, who can run who can run, you know, the mile the fastest and who can kind of lift more weights. But it's been healthy. But I think growing up that was one of the things that kinda defined me is the ability not to give up and the need to go and do better than the sibling. Which even today is still a a theme that runs in me. If I'm in a situation where there is more than one company providing services, you want to be number one on the scorecard. Wanting to be number one really came from there. Whether it was through school, college, or later in life. So I'm thankful for it. But I think it's more an unconscious decision than anything else. And speaker-1: Much of how much of an influence did it have in your willingness and your decision to take risk? Because definitely when I look at your career, you know, that's that's one thing that stands out, right? You've moved countries, you've moved industries, you've taken on very challenging assignments. We'll get to the part of of of of reliance show in a minute. How much of a how much of a impact did that have on your willingness to take on this risk? And and why do you think that that was so important? speaker-0: So I think a couple of things that had a big role in my ability to want to take risk is because I wanted to prove myself. And proving right my look, I've got some very accomplished siblings. Right. ⁓ and then when you're born into an Indian family, your parents have a certain expectation of what your career is gonna be. So there was always the need. And wanting to take a risk came from the fact that I wanted to do something different. And pretty early on I did realize to say, if you want to do something different, you got to have the ability to do what you're not expected to do. And therefore, you know, decision I made in what career choice did I make and which what did I want to do for my undergrad ⁓ was all from the fact that I wanted to do something different. And then taking risks became a natural way of saying, I got to beat the name. I got to do something different. And that's what kind of pushed me in the direction. And slowly I did realize there were some really good positive impacts of this in the sense that I did not feel constrained to live in the same city. did not want to do something I did not enjoy. I always wanted to have, you know, a career that gave me the satisfaction, gratification, and the ability to contribute. So as I kind of understood that, I started to tap into it. And that's what is driven across my across my career the ability to take a risk. And the very fact that I met my now wife when I was still in undergrad school and she was extremely supportive of everything that I did and I continue to do. made it easier for me to make decisions as, you know, I can we got married and we had children and we had to move. And I think she's moved I've moved about sixteen homes, six different cities, three different countries in the last twenty-nine years. I'm about to make a I'm about to make a move in the same city to another home. So hope we are hoping this is the last of the moves. We hope 30 is the charm. That's the lucky number and we don't move any further. So I I think that's really what taught me the ability to take a risk and seeing the positive payoff. from every time you did something different, it did yield a better result. Not always, but you know, I always had a progression in my career and my life. So I think now it's pretty much second nature to what I do and the way I think. speaker-1: So many people, you know, I find stay they get stuck, right? They get stuck in a career, they get stuck in a city, they get stuck in a country, they get stuck in a situation. And oftentimes the thing that that that holds them back is just this fear of the unknown, right? I was I you know, I I live in Miami and I was I was being driven in a in an Uber by this this driver, a young young young man, probably in his early thirties, and he was complaining about how expensive Miami was and how tough it was, and the fact that he was like juggling three different jobs. And I asked him, I was like, Well, how old are you? And he was like, Well, I'm old already, I'm thirty two and I just started laughing because you know, I like I haven't been like an entrepreneur several times over. I'm fifty four, I'm starting another company. And ⁓ what would you tell people who perhaps know they need to make a change but they're too afraid to do so? You know speaker-0: I have a habit of reading books and especially growing up. ⁓ that is one way of kind of learning what people do, right? What do people do? I've I've been heavily influenced by some of the books I've read. You know, I kinda remember reading when I was in grade twelve somewhere to say to be able to change is the only constant thing in the world and to be able to deal with the change, you gotta have a changeless core, right? Kind of Stuck with me, didn't understand it the first time I read it. I went back and thought about it. The fear of unknown is a fear. And the only way to figure that out is to take the leap. Now there are two consequences that it can happen. It can consequence can be positive as you imagined it, or it could kind of go go back. You've got to take the leap. There is no other way to figure it out. You gotta try it. But then you also always have a backup plan to say what if it does not. Because there's always a probability and the probability is a coin toss. 50-50. So I think it's probably Earlier in my career was maybe just let's just do it, right? You got a long career ahead of you. What is likely to happen? If this doesn't work, you can always go back and read man. Sure. So one and two, to be able to make a change, to be able to deal with the fear of unknown, a city, a job, something you haven't done before, you should have the ability to deal with the changes and therefore you probably gotta be prepared as well. As they say, you're lucky when, you know, you're prepared and prepared when you you can you can make your own fortune. Or you can say you're lucky provided you're prepared. And to be prepared with what are the universal themes, toolkit that you think can help you deal with the change. speaker-1: What do you do to prepare yourself in a situation like that? I mean, obviously as you get older, the downsides increase, right? It becomes harder to change cities. You have to, you know, think about schools for kids. You might have to think about a different culture, a different way of doing things. What do you generally do to kind of like prepare yourself to manage that fear? speaker-0: So I did two moves with the kids, which I think was quite quite risky. Moved them from India to Durban, Durban and then into the US. So you know, as as the kids grew older, you gotta consider those. So I made a move to Durban, knowing fully well that my older child was in grade ten. I needed him to run through ten, eleven and twelve, which means no matter what happened in the move, you wanted to stay for those three years because that he needed to finish high school. ⁓ so you gotta kinda consider and say, Okay, I'm gonna make the move. I've made the move. Do I like what I'm doing? Whether I like what I'm doing or not, sometimes as you're older, you gotta make sub you gotta subordinate your need to what you want to get the kids to get a stable education. And then I said, now it's finished grade twelve, now I can move because this is where I wanted to be. Right? So you gotta consider those y at the youngest time, you know, when I was younger in my career, it didn't matter. You were in grade five, I know I could move your school. But the moment you're in high school and you're about to hit college, then you gotta start thinking about it. But also at the same time ⁓ I would probably do a thorough scan of what I'm likely to do, why the decision, what are the pros and cons. I'll not just make a mental list, I'll actually make a physical list. Say these are the th these are the reasons why I want to try this and what are the what is the upside and what's the downside. If there is a downside, what are my good options? And then my buffer is my wife. I will talk to her and she probably ⁓ she doesn't give a lot of importance to what I do at work, but she's she's a great sounding board. I think she's got the most Amazing insights into what I'm thinking kind of helps. We are like a team, we sit down and do it. We do it a formal process, not rush into the decision, but make a considered decision and having looked at pros, the cons, and what's the fallback. Right. I think more often than not it's paid off and there are times which hasn't worked, like a switch in a courier or switch in a city hasn't worked, and I've had to move back from the city. So there's been those instances as well. But the only way to do that is to try it, but Be very careful, be very considerate, be prepared for the consequences, both the good and bad. speaker-1: How do you deal with setbacks? I mean, you mentioned that there's been times where it hasn't worked out. I mean, when you look back on one instance that didn't work out, what happened? What did you learn and how do you how do you process that? speaker-0: So I did move to South Africa. It was great for the kids. It was great for the family. Not the not the greatest in terms of what I wanted to achieve professionally. But then the calibration was pretty quick. Six months in, you know that this is not your final destination. Then what you're trying to do and what I did for the rest of the almost the three and a half years that I had left once I realized this is not the final destination was to try and see what is the best I could do in the current situation. You know. I wasn't I wasn't it wasn't very fulfilling professionally because I wanted to do more. But at the same time you gotta consider what the family wants. And then putting down those routes, spending the time with the kids, I kind of repurposed my disappointment of saying Visa is ten, eleven and twelve, he's gonna finish school, he's gonna go to college and that's it. You know, I'm not gonna see him. So being spending time with the kids at that time and learning to go back to the gym, to go back to running actually did help me repurpose and focus on something more positive. And as luck would have it, in those years, COVID struck. So for about eight or ten months I was stuck in South Africa. Which had one of the most brutal lockdowns in the sense that you weren't allowed to leave home. Physically, you couldn't just leave your home. You were home bound. So I think when you things like that happen with some which are unexpected, some which are out of your control, the only way to do that is to kind of say, What are the options again? What can I do best in the situation? And what can I achieve out of something that's not going in my direction? In this case, spending time with family, and those were the three most beautiful years I spent with my older child. simply because I have traveled away so much at the time when he was growing up. So I mean, it's a happy, happy memory I cherished. You know, I learned to get back, prioritize health. And then we had great family life. Right. So I either you could be disappointed with what did not go your way, or you can look at everything and say, in totality is it a good decision? I could have probably done better things in those three years, but you know, having moved to the US now five years, I don't regret the time. That time is extremely valuable because, you know, Work is not the only part of your life. You know, family is equally important to me and to many of us. Those three fulfilling years are not gonna come back. And I think I've got a rock solid relationship with my older son because we I was able to lock in and spend some time, go to a game, for example, watch him play the drums or go to school, which would not have been possible had I continued to keep the same trajectory that I kept for a very long time. So speaker-1: That's a very that's a very balanced way of looking at it. Yeah. speaker-0: I mean you gotta find a way of, okay, this is a situation that's not what you anticipated. Can you get out of it? No, you cannot get out of it. If you cannot get out of it, what are you going to do with the time that's left out of it? And then I started to kind of explore and say, you know, what does how does a visa regime work? How do I get to the US? How what do I need to do to prepare for a visa and so on and so forth? So I think it gave me the time to do ⁓ two things. You know, prepare for what would come after, which I did not know at that point in time. I kind of started to see which direction I could take the career. But then it also gave me the time with the family. It is the most beautiful three years I've four years I've spent with the kids was, you know, in South Africa, enjoying a great balance of life. speaker-1: It's interesting that you say that. You know, I think in the work that I do often with executives and founders, ⁓ I use a tool called the Wheel of Life. And it's very interesting. I don't know if you've come across it. It's ⁓ the idea is that your your life is kind of like a bicycle wheel and you have eight different dimensions to your life. You have obviously your your professional career, your health, your wealth, you know, your relationship with your partner, relationship with friends and kids, et cetera. So you have these eight different criteria and they are plotted on a scale of one to ten, ten being you know, absolute best, unbelievable, one being absolute dismal, you know, nightmare. Right. And the idea with this, with this exercise is that once a year, you look at these 10 variables and you assign a number of one to ten in each variable. And when you're able to do that, two things happen is first, you become more aware of certain areas of your life that are going really well that maybe you're not being grateful enough for. You're not assigning enough value to, like in your case, your relationship with your kids and and the quality of life that you had in Durban. I mean, Durban, I've heard is unbelievable and beautiful and an amazing quality of life there. Yeah, it's stunning. And and so it's it's it's it's interesting because, you know, it sounds like you kind of were able to make this this decision, you know, consciously to focus on other areas of your life and kind of like increase that that points, right? You know, get get get better areas of your life. Whereas maybe in the professional sense, maybe you were at a five or a six out of ten, which isn't exactly where you wanted to be. But ⁓ but I think what I find interesting about your your perspective and your story there of that experience in South Africa is Far too many people, especially in this country, the United States, you know, are so focused on careers, so focused on financial health that they forget about these other areas in their lives that they have, right? Relationship with their partner, relationship with their children, physical health, spiritual health, you know, community and things of that nature. I don't know how you see it. speaker-0: But I think it's it's absolutely right. So it's not that it happened so organically, it wasn't that easy. So when I was struggling this struggling with it, my wife sat me down one one day and said, Let's kinda talk about it. What you're not happy? You live in a beautiful house. You're you're ten minutes away from the beach. You could go to the beach, literally run down to the beach and go grab a coffee. You can see your kids, you can go to the game. ⁓ you still have a job. You're not necessarily totally enjoying what you're doing, but You know, you've got all of these. There's so much to be thankful for. You and I actually are spending more time. So I think when you kind of sit down and have that and when you have a sounding board and we have something to connect to, it does make a big difference. And now in the hindsight, I can now see the difference it made to the kids just being available. Being available is a big thing. And I think ⁓ now when the kids are teens and they finish school and go to college, that's it. They're done. Right. So they're not going to be around. So yeah, I'm thankful for it in the hindsight, but It's also the ability to think and the ability to have somebody that you can talk to and bounce your ideas off is what helped me deal with it. I mean, look, it's it's not happened once, it's happened multiple times. That things don't go your way. But at the end of the day, kind of the way I look at it is it's not a it's a it's not a it's a marathon, it's a long race and it's not a quick sprint. So things sometimes will work, sometimes won't work. You just gotta last it out. Right. So when you kind of take like speaker-1: Now you seem to have sorry, go ahead. speaker-0: No, no. So I you know, twenty nine years, if I had to draw a graph, it would be like a stock exchange graph, up and down. But when you kinda draw it, it's it has been an upward swing. So I think I've plenty to be grateful for. ⁓ there's always you could always find a way to say I can do better. But pretty happy with where I am right now. speaker-1: Now, you know, your first job out of grad school, tell us a little bit about that. Because it it sounded like, you know, it wasn't necessarily the best job, the most glamorous job, you know, it wasn't like it doesn't sound like it was like super well paid either, especially compared maybe to some of your friends, you know, who were in more prestigious jobs. What what did you see in that role and why did you take it? speaker-0: So it's kind of interesting. I was doing my MBA. ⁓ most of my I mean, either you did marketing or finance. So I decided to do marketing and HR. Now HR way because it's easy to get a second specialization. I could not manage the rigors of doing finance. So I did marketing. And then I'm like, okay, what am I gonna do? So you know, what do you do in an MBA school? Somebody comes to your school, you get a campus placement, you get an interview. I did a summer intern at ⁓ manu capsule manufacturing facility. And I kind of learned the first principles of total quality management on the shop floor. It was fascinating. Industry is fascinating. It's still a fascinating industry. When I was kind of talking to them, I happened to meet the CEO one time. Then he said, Hey, you really want to make money? You should go and do what your school's gonna offer you as opportunities, you know. Some of the financial institutions, big FMCG companies and so on and so forth. You want to learn, I've got an opportunity for you. So six months passed. kind of came to the final semester and then I was thinking about it to say what am I going to do? I said, maybe I should kind of go back and chat with him. He said, I've got an opportunity. I'm going to give you an opportunity as in my EA. And then I'm also going to let you handle a few accounts, which are large accounts, enterprise accounts. And you can learn. He said, I'm not going to pay you the most money. You're going to probably get paid much lesser than what your colleagues are. I promise you the two years, the three years that you put in with me is going to be a life changing experience. And truly it was. Being in EA to an MT Teaches you stuff about business that you would not have had an opportunity if I was doing what I did. Because it was a ringside view into how somebody's brain works. If you are the MD of the largest, second largest manufacturing or capsule manufacturing company in the world at that time, now they are the largest. Then you've got to have a vision, you've got to have the ability to execute a plan. You've got to have the ability to kind of imagine things. And what I learned in those two years a lot. lot of hard work, very long hours. Extremely grateful for the ability to peek into the mind of a CEO when you're fresh out of college. You're like a sponger absorbing everything. And a lot of things I saw and a lot of things that I kind of absorbed have been have stayed with me for a long, long time. And I kind of did see the same CEO many years later at an airport. And I said, I'm ever grateful to you for having spent the two years working with you. Because those two years taught me what would have probably taken me another four or five years to learn. Just the ability to sit in and take notes when you have the head of a manufacturing of a plant or quality control or CEO, sit and have conversations was it's priceless. Absolutely priceless. speaker-1: What was what was what were one or two of the of the biggest takeaways you had from that time sitting at some of those meetings as as a young ⁓ speaker-0: Things that, you know, customer matters the most. Number one, number two, and the last thing is a priority. And ownership. In the sense that I've never seen a person that I worked for who has demonstrated greater extreme ownership about how he felt as the CEO of the company. It didn't matter. You're the CEO of the company. You reached out to me. I'm gonna go out and do it myself. I've seen him go and fix air conditioning because you know you needed to transport the capsules in a air conditioned truck. It didn't work, it'd get on the truck and go take a look, take a temperature reading, or go to the shop floor. Nothing was out of box. Customer called me. I got to know if a customer complaint. I gotta fix it. Customer is always important and ownership. Two things that I walked away with from that assignment was this. And till date, that's probably the defining thing that kind of dictates how we how I operate at work and how I asked my teams to operate at work. Those are timeless. They never change. Doesn't matter what happens in the industry. Those two things remain true. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean customer is always number one. And I think, you know, your other point is al is a great one too, right? Which is ⁓ you have to model the behavior as CEO that you want to see in your organization. Right. I mean, if if something breaks and there's nobody else to fix it, you roll up, you know, your sleeves and and and you do what's gotta be done. And that that sends a message to everybody else. I mean, people do not realize how a decision or lack of making a decision is something that everybody sees when you're a leader. speaker-0: Right. Absolutely. speaker-1: So for fast forwarding a couple of years, let let's talk about your accidental fall into the telecoms industry, right? And and you you get there and it sounds like you were like you're selling like sales training or something. All of a sudden there's this unique opportunity to go into setting up the customer success thing with some absolutely absurd goals. Tell tell us a little bit about that story. So speaker-0: That's right. I finished the being a management trainee, a sales guy. Then, you know, one of the large training companies which had a sales training organization, Arm said, You are a great sales guy, why don't you come and train us? I'm like, fuck. I like talking to people, I like kind of standing up, you know, doing talking to people, talking to sets of people and convincing them. I said, Let's let's do it. And I kind of learned a few sales techniques. They trained me, trained the trainer. I became I used to sell training and then train the clients that I sold training for. Telecom was moving into India at that time and you know, a bunch of the companies were Indian companies were partnering with, you know, a lot of the telecom giants from this part of the world. So ⁓ Bell Canada came in into India for a tie with the Tata Group and they formed a joint venture. They were going to launch basic landline cell phone services on C DMA technology, which means you could pick up your landline and walk with it. It's not a wired phone. Right. ⁓ so it's quite interesting. They were looking for people who could do methods and training, write a process document in train. I'm like, this sounds like fun. Maybe a part of me was young, maybe a little bit reckless and said, okay, let's try the next thing. I went and did that. And that's how I accidentally fell into telecom. I've stayed in love with it since then because then I realized what a world it is. How much technology has always been an enabler in that sector. How people have constantly look when you look at IVRs, you look at the industry that I'm in, that's the pioneer. sector, a pioneer, set a in industry that first outsourced. If telecom didn't exist, outsourcing would not exist. If outsourcing did not exist, many people like me would not have had so kind of on that side of the house, watching setting up in-house teams and learning how to do process mapping. Because the process mapping again clocked into I saw things on the short floor. So I could kind of imagine and say how a process floor should be. Because I had learned that on the shop floor in the manufacturing company. To be able to put some of those together And then I was just fascinated. ⁓ the industry has evolved since then. The wireless tech has gone from where it was to where it is today. Exciting, exciting, exciting. And that kind of has helped me through my career, through the multiple transitions that I've done on either the telecom side, go to the BPO side, and then go back. ⁓ that knowledge has been core to the way I operate. Right. How much I know about the industry and what I know about just the contact center industry. You know, the technical working, how things work in a telco. Some things are just timeless. So it's been absolutely fascinating. speaker-1: And so you you're like you were employee, I think, number one, or like among the earliest employees in customer success and customer service at Geo, right? And you guys go from like zero to nine and a half thousand people in customer support in in something like six months. That's right. Right. You you described it in our earliest conversation as like, you know, building like a $22 billion startup in three years. Walk us through. speaker-0: That's right. speaker-1: Some of the some of the more challenging, darker moments of that, because obviously, you know, people only see the end result. But what were some of the biggest challenges? What were some of the toughest times that you experienced while doing that kind of breakneck growth? speaker-0: So I think credit due to where it is due. It is India's largest telcope today. They're doing some absolutely amazing things. The latest that that company is doing is building a data center. Not a data center. Yeah. A big data center for Mark Zuckerberg in the city that they operate. It's probably gonna be the largest data center in that part of the world. They continue to do amazing things. I joined them in twenty fourteen and the company only did go live in twenty sixteen. So it was about Two years of two years and four months of preparation before the first trial customer was signed on. Which means that you had people who would participate in small trials. When the scale of the vision is that large and the project is that large, I did it does get overwhelming because you have so much that you see sit in a building, there's no paucity of resources, there's no possibility of expertise that you can draw from. But what it comes with the opportunity comes the risk. Because if you are assigned the ⁓ responsibility to say you've got to get our customer success side of things up and running. And when you walk in and see all that you have is a plan and a paper and a whole bunch of SOPs and what other people have done. Right. And the objective is right, we don't want to do what other people have done. We want to transform, we want to revolutionize. I don't want to have anywhere near the same number of calls per subscriber. So what are you going to do? Audacious that whole project and the whole team And the way that group imagines things even today is absolutely audacious. But to go in and be a part of that can be quite unnerving because it's the it's the unknown. I have done it, but I've done it in a different setting. Now, what you've done in the past, you're being asked to tear up the rule book and reimagining it. So you have an idea and you there is a vision that the leadership has, and you've got to take that vision and make that executable. And all good strategies of no good if we cannot execute it. And to execute it comes with the risk. You r write a blueprint, you write a plan, and I c I I can't even I for I've lost count of how many times the plans would have changed. I probably have the launch document, about thirty-eight versions of it having been made, being presented, and changing it. Things like what is the number people are gonna call? How should you imagine the desktop of an agent gonna look like? What technology, what access are they gonna have to it? Right. The easiest thing in all of that was actually setting up the physical centers where people could walk in. So which you could kind of get a BPO partner to say, go and staff up now. Everything else was before that. What is gonna what is your agent desktop gonna look like? What's the number they're gonna call look like? How does the calls get collected? Who do you who talks to the IT? How do you alliance with the IT? The fear of unknown and the fear of failure, because you are going to fail when you do a startup like that. Right. And the only way to find out is to try something and trial it on a small basis. It doesn't go right, then you go back and redesign. ⁓ you know, the The hardest thing at that time was the resilience needed till you went live. And we'll always be kind of saying, Okay, it's three months from now, it would move again because we are not near perfection. And it's like a whole symphony of everybody getting together. Customer success is one arm. There is the network, there's the billing, there's everybody. And you're involved in the testing, high pressure, long hours, but absolutely fulfilling. And then we were told consciously, I mean, we it was a given thing to say the day we launch. We will do a million subscribers acquisition a day and we'll do it in hundred days. Hundred days for a hundred million. And in reality, it was pulled off in 89 days. Stated goal, stated ambition. So which simply meant you knew what was going to happen. You've got to go back and calculate why would people get in touch with you? How many times? How? And then the whole thing would be how do you avoid them from having to get in touch with you for things that they can do self-service? And remember, you're talking about 2014, 2016. in this era of what we see as AI, completely primitive in terms of stone ages compared to what we have today. But I think just to imagine with and the resources are unlimited. You could go ask for anything. But then you had to get this up and running and you had to deliver this. So I could only really truly find out when the acquisition started. So you can test as much as you want. You can predict whatever modeling you could do. But when things start to go in and then because we had that amount of time prepared for everything back in, put a plan for execution together, get a sign off, do the contracting, do the partnering, bring BPO partners. And once it went, it was like just watching magic. Everything comes together. But I think this the serious thing is that you don't know it's gonna work. And there's a lot of pressure on you as a leader to say, Hey, you you f you rise with it and you fall with it. And you h have to have a single neck to choke or one person to hold you responsible for. And it was my job on the customer success side. It was great that I had a a boss who believed in me because who had seen me in another company, but it was a ton of pressure. Putting the team together, bringing the team together, stitching it up was just a lot of work, a lot of work. speaker-1: What what was the most chaotic or difficult moment that you faced putting together that machine and and and how did you hold it together? Do you remember like a specific day that was like extremely difficult? speaker-0: I mean, I there are there were so many days it was exceptionally difficult. And I can tell you, when the chairman of the company wants to listen to the test calls and they're not to his liking, and then when you're running customer success, you've got to own it out. Right? I can give you one example. And second is when you put all of these things together, when you want to do the call routing or when you want to design the agent front screen and how that's gonna look like, etc., when things don't turn out the way you want to, and then you're presenting it or showcasing it to, you know, the the all of the senior management and it doesn't work, it's it can be quite scary. It's a setback because you know your system didn't flow, the call flow didn't happen, things didn't work, routing didn't work. Many, many times when I was thinking, is this the best thing that I'm doing? Because waiting for about two years and four months before you can test it out in reality can be quite a long time. It simply meant that you prepared. Now what happens if it doesn't come to fruition? Because before the launch happened, this pressure was different. The moment we said yes, please come in, ⁓ we couldn't keep up with the pressure. More people wanted to come in, things would not work. I think what six months was completely sleepless. None of us slept. And no matter what you prepare, you're not ready for what gets unleashed. When people have waited for two years for something like this, and you said all everything is free. Come in and sign up. That's literally what the sign up was. Come in, be a customer, enjoy our services free for the next six months. People would just sign up. ⁓ my processes would break and then the Answer that you've got to go back and give and your customers don't get serviced, because you've had two plus years to I mean, those are those are and there have been some reviews which have been very tough, right? Customers are complaining. ⁓ man, I can give you examples of many. Customers would complain and say, I can't get through to your contact center. And then you kind of walk in into a meeting full of everybody and say, You had two years, we gave you everything you wanted. Why does it not work? How do you control some of these? speaker-1: Give us an example of what? speaker-0: Why is the call routing or why is the way in which you treat the customer in the IVR not working? Did we not invest in that? Yes, we did. But I think as they happen in real time, you can do as much you can die you can do simulation on a test drive, but when you drive, the experience is different. So I think handling that time and steering the team through it and kind of walking through that time was exceptionally tough, but very fulfilling because you know what do you do? I mean, there was one time I remember I had Maybe put eight hundred calls wait an entire day despite having about six thousand people on the phones. So there is no way I can answer it because service servers are gone, experience is gone. How people experience a brand is being impacted and it was the biggest brand launch. Right. So what do you deal with it? So I think how do you kind of de there's only that much you can do to put more bodies. Handle time's gone for a toss. People are talking longer than we thought in the assumptions they would. So I think all of those then you gotta you gotta pivot, right? You gotta pivot, you gotta fix. I think those six months taught us a lot. But in the f first six months after we launched, things settled down quite a bit. So it it was speaker-1: And you said that, you know you said that, you know, in the end reliance was not exactly the easiest group of people to work with, right? And and I remember in our previous conversation, you said that once you work for them, you don't really have a lot of places to go in India because of how much they control in India. At at what point did you decide that you'd had enough and that it was time to leave? speaker-0: So I think two things, right? ⁓ one is I actively knew what I was going into. So I'm fully responsible for the decision I made. So that's not and I knew this like actively, right? The reason I did it when I did it is I was never going to anywhere on the planet ever learn that much. And I was not necessarily young. I was younger, not not really a you know, a young buck. I'd kind of made that active career choice. Now, at what I always knew that my job was to come in. To craft the strategy to put it into practice, to get it up and running. And when it's up and running and it's reached a certain scale, that's the time for me to move on. Because not everybody in every context is useful for the business. Right. And my my strength at that point in time lay in I knew the contact centers, I knew the contact center tech, I knew telco. And I knew and I also knew that there was never going to be another telco, because by that time India already had 11 companies that had launched. They was not new. But there was never going to be another alliance. We all knew that. So I decided to kind of jump on that opportunity, took the opportunity. I kinda said probably somewhere in twenty seventeen, I started in twenty fourteen, I was gonna call it quits. And I did leave in twenty seventeen, July. So nothing unexpected. And the thirty six, thirty, thirty nine months equals to probably double the time that I've spent in any other organization, just in the amount of hours you put in. I'm Literally what that project demanded, that project demanded that kind of attention. And I know thousands of people who've logged in those many number of hours. If it's not for the faint hearted, you should not join or take an opportunity like that. I have no regrets, but it was tough but very rewarding. I can the fact that I can tell a story years later about what that is, ⁓ I knew it was going to be once in a lifetime opportunity to do something at that scale because there's nobody else who does anything at that scale in India compared to the group. And so very, very rewarding, very, very fulfilling. I did know when I took the opportunity it was never going to be like a five or six year journey. Because, you know, it was not going to be. So when that happened and, you know, there was enough team that I hired who could kind of carry on the business. And many of them are still there. Been ten years, almost nine nine years since I left. Many of them are still there running the business very successfully. A part of my mandate was come in, set it up, get the people in, make sure that you're ready for succession. It's time to move on. speaker-1: So you so you move then, you know, you move to South Africa, right? You run South Africa's largest contact center, CCI. We already talked a little bit about how that was not necessarily from a career perspective, you know, what what you was hoping it would be, but you found other ways to kind of like, you know, ride it out by by investing your time in other areas of your life, your health, your family, your kids. Then you decide to make this move to the United States. Walk us through a little bit that conversation. with your wife and what that was like. And then of course your one of your kids ends up having a serious challenge when you move to the US. How do you go about making that decision and and how tough was that conversation with your wife? speaker-0: Yeah. So Think the easiest conversation was with my wife because we had kind of said that hey, South Afri South Africa is not the final final destination. We've got to go somewhere. So the idea was let's go back to India, right? He finished his twelfth grade. Right. He was always going to come in and ⁓ study, do his undergrad in the US. It was done. He wanted to do computer science. He was gonna he was US bound. Easy for us. ⁓ the fact that both my siblings and my parents live in the US, ⁓ kind of first he was coming to the US, COVID happened. Like, you know, we'll go back to India. That's fine, because that was the only known path I knew. Because I didn't want to do an H1. There was no way I could have come in at that time and you know been successful. And too many Indians come in on H1. There's a whole other controversy that's going on going on around it. So at the time when I was looking at it, there was this opportunity to come and join. Right. So it was supposed to be for a software company that I never ended up working for. Absolutely outstanding people. They helped me get my O1 visa. I did get it. It was too easy. I'd never assumed that that'd get that category of visa. I'm like, yeah, what is over? I didn't know anything about it, applied, got through. No rejection, no RFEs, it just happened. And then getting the visa stamped was a challenging most the most difficult thing off that move because everything was shut, NBCs were shut in South Africa, in India, no visa processing. Yeah. So I had to find an appointment in India, go get it stamped and fly. And remember I was in Africa, there were no vaccines. So I think ⁓ the Easiest conversation was with the wife. Right? The kids were excited because they were gonna come in. My son was like super excited. He's like, that's fine. Now I'm going to be in the US. I can see you guys. I was happy to be coming in because my family's been here. Siblings have been here for a very long time. I'm like, that gives me an opportunity. My parents moved here in 2018. I'm like, okay, and the last one, maybe we'll give it a shot. So it was that tree that kind of spurred. ⁓ it was not necessarily always planned. The opportunity came in and never joined that company. Then I went and joined Taskers who were looking for somebody for transformation and I had done enough of that. So I kinda came in. The move was physically challenging because of COVID and you know how many hoops I needed to jump through to get my visa. Easy conversation was with the wife. But I think for my younger child, it was a transition time again. You know, you kind of walk in, you're in grade four, you've gone to grade eight, you're gonna go to grade eight and I move him again. India to South Africa is different. South Africa to the US is different because They went to private school, they they went to public school in the US. Now you gotta make friends again. So the sport that he played, which is cricket, which is what a lot of Indians play, and he cricket is big in South Africa as well. And he was doing well, he used to play for the school. He comes in here and he now realizes he's too small, too tiny, too scrawny to play any of the physical contact sports and then takes up tennis. And I think he wrote it in his college essay. Even some of the words he'd use are different. So, you know, get made fun of. He never said a word when he was in grade eight. I think grade eight when I came in, the year I came in was tough. But when he went to high school I think he found his bearing. A resilient kid. ⁓ all kudos to him. And he enjoyed his high school years, right? Nine through twelve. But I think that was a difficult transition for him. We knew it would be tough. We didn't know how it would play out because each of you are children are different. So even today my older s older son does not have friends in San Antonio. 'Cause he went to school in Seattle, he works in San Francisco. So he doesn't have school friends, so to say, in San Antonio. It was tough for the kids, but they're resilient kids. So the toughest part of the transition was for my younger child. My job was easy, visa was tough. And then I kinda land in San Antonio, go to Walmart and they're kinda saying, Hey, you want to get a vaccine shot? And I'm like, Okay, sure, I'll get a vaccine shot. I spent a year being in isolation because I could get one. So I think, you know, ⁓ the And then the thing that was tough for my wife though is that you gotta do your own dishes, you gotta drive your car. And you live in Africa and you live in India, you're spoilt, you know, you've got help, you can get somebody to drive you around. So I think that was the thing and probably on a lighter note, the toughest thing she always tells me today is she's not been able to use her China crockery at all when we have big guest parties at home. She's like But you know speaker-1: You know, as a as as a father though, I I you know, I I I I went through the same thing, right? My you know, we we moved from Silicon Valley to Chile, then from Chile to Miami. My son, you know, did three fantastic years at one of the top schools in Chile, had friends, was a star player of the basketball team, then decides he wants to do a senior year in the US. And it was one of the toughest things. It was a brutal year. He struggled for many, many different reasons. And I was just wondering from your perspective as a father. You hear the, you know, the the the issues your your eighth grader is going through, right? You you see them struggle and you see the impact on your kid and you know that as a father, you're the one that made that decision ultimately to move to the US. What went through your mind when you saw your your youngest going through that? speaker-0: It breaks your heart, you talk about it, but you also know that you caused it. But kinda think about it in the hindsight I always knew in the long term that was the right thing for him. Because coming to the US would unlock opportunities that would probably not have happened in Africa. And I also knew for the fact that, you know, after when you see your kids grow up, you know they have the ability to adapt and not. I'd already seen him as a little kid go from India to South Africa, complete a different system, settle in there, and then make another transition. It does make you think at the end of the day, is this the right thing you did? You know, is it worth the pain? ⁓ but I kinda said, You gotta subordinate this to what is likely to happen, play out. Right. I did not know at the time how he'd deal with in high school. And then one of the things that I kinda said, there was a Boy Scouts meeting next door. I took him to a Boy Scouts meeting and said, Would you want to go and see? Let's go to the meeting. We got invited. I kinda took him. Boy Scouts, people start their journey when they're Cup Scouts and you're much younger. He decided to go to Boy Scouts because he said, Okay, this is a place I can hang out. He's an Eagle Scout today. Right? I think some of the things that he was able to do and things that he kind of latched onto his opportunities and his reasoning was, You want to play football? Do you want to play, you know, ⁓ you know, do you want to play r you want to do wrestling? He said, Have you seen my size? I'm skinny, I'm scrawny, I'm gonna get just beat up, I'm not playing the sports. He switched to tennis. He did Boy Scouts. I think there's a lot that he did himself. We kind of took him there and said, Do you want to explore this? Do you want to find an alternate sport? What do you want to find? What do you want to do? So I think it was a process pretty, pretty tough. But when he was writing his college essays, he's a senior, he graduated from high school this year. He was so proud about writing about that story. So in the hindsight, it's heartwarming to say it kind of had a positive impact. It could have been. It could have gone either way. There's no ⁓ there's no two ways about it. But I guess speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Goes back to the point of you take a risk, there is always a consequence. There is always a consequence to a decision. Yes. And you never can predict how it's gonna be. But I think we wrote that together. More credit to him than to us because he had to deal with it. He's dealt with it well. He spoke about it, not even his eighth grade, he spoke about it when he was in grade eleven on terms of what the impact was in grade eight. ⁓ so I mean it it was tough. It probably is Out of all the transitions I've made, this is probably the toughest because eighth grade and ninth grade can be tricky years. And ⁓ you know, certainly in high school it can go the other way. The reason why I wanted to move when he was in eighth grade was still gave him a chance to finish the middle school and go into high school. He went into a high school, found a good group of friends, and then, you know, kinda took him a while, but he found his bearing and his footing because some of the kids he met in Boy Scouts also ended up being in the high school with him. So I kind of helped him. So but I think more credit to him. For me and my wife is quite nerve wracking, to be honest. It's not easy at all. speaker-1: Yeah, no, I mean I I I went through something similar and the only way that I could reconcile my drive and my ambition with the impact on my kids was and what I always tell people, parents who are considering moves like this, is that children are much more resilient than we give them credit for. And in a world of constant change, which has never changed more rapidly than it's changing now, resilience is a muscle that they need to train early. Right. The earlier they build that resilience, that ability to bounce back, that ability to deal with adversity, the better prepared they will be for whatever comes their way later. I I think parents sometimes do their kids a disservice by by taking a risk and by saying, No, we're gonna stay in the same town or in the same city their whole lives because it's safer and we wanna protect them. And and I think particularly in this country, there is a tendency to cocoon and to protect kids. more than when you and I were kids, right? You remember when you and I were kids, our our parents be like, Are you gonna walk two miles to the bus bus to the bus stop? Tough shit, you know? ⁓ it's raining and you're walking in the rain to the bus stop, too bad, right? Just deal with it. Right? It's it's rain. And today it's like you y y you you see these parents that called all their kids, you know, and and and well no, you know, don't walk two blocks to the park by yourself. But but but it's okay to leave them on their phones for five hours, you know, exposed to whatever's on the internet and whatever's on social media. speaker-0: And then the other thing I've always said is it completely I think the other thing that kids do is in a situation like home, it's true for work as well. People learn by not what you tell them, people learn by what they see you're modeling as behaviors. Right? How you behave. Who you are, who I who you are doesn't matter as much as how people perceive you to do what you do every day. And I made a few switches which the kids I think got to watch close quarters to say there is speaker-1: By my speaker-0: There could be an upside when you take a risk, when you take an opportunity. There could be an upside. And they've seen me kind of do a few changes. They learn a lot more by just observing what happens day to day. And we run a very open household where everybody sits down and has a chat. Yeah, he was maybe too young to kind of have a very formal opinion, but you know, they learn by observing. And, you know, I think that is true for life and for work. People will observe who you are and then follow you for who you are. And they learn more by what they observe. So I do think that the changes that I made, the transitions that I made, ⁓ somewhere would have had a ⁓ you know, at the back of the mind to say it's it's okay to do it because I have done it so many times. But you're right, kids are far more resilient than we believe. And I have two two kids who are exceptionally resilient kids. I mean, in fact I moved my older son in grade ten to South Africa. Must was a tough one to leave friends and just go to another country. But he was excited to get on a plane and get there. speaker-1: In the in the last kind of like segment of the show, I wanted to switch a little bit to kind of like, you know, BPO and where you are today and and you know, particularly the leadership challenges, right? I mean, you look at BPO, there's a lot of changes happening, right? There's a lot of questions around how many people do we really need, you know, what are we gonna do with technology and artificial intelligence versus what does a human being need need to do? The convergence of the two. And of course, there must be, you know, there's an uncertainty in the entire tech industry. about, you know, are people gonna have jobs in six months and twelve months, where are we all heading? When you look at the BPO industry, you know, in a world where AI can do in seconds in some cases, what, you know, teams of people it used to take days to do, where do you see the industry heading? I speaker-0: It's a interesting question, one that has been said so many times. People have written the, you know, epitaph of the industry and said it's not going to survive. AI is going to take away jobs. I've heard this chatter now for better part of six years. I haven't seen really the jobs melt away. I think the way to look at it is, is the AI going to change fundamentally the way we work? Yes. So what it's going to do is and a lot of people say, right? A lot of companies also claim that we've automated X number of processes. If you take a whole spectrum, they probably would have taken away a big chunk in the middle, which is easy to automate, and push the edge cases out. For the edge cases, you still need a person. Right. You need them on the phone, you need them on the chat, and you need them on the email or in the app. It doesn't matter. You still need a human being. So what's gonna happen is what is my what am I supposed to pay you? What's my bill? Is not does not need to be answered by a human being. It used to be, it does not need to be. You know, you can have a bot do it, you can have an app do it, you can have your AI do it. It will take you five weeks to train somebody, it probably will take you now two weeks to train somebody because you got so much help in tools and technology. So the fundamental ways in which the industry operates is gonna change. So therefore, what kind of skills will be left for people to do on the service side, on the customer service side of the house, the jobs will be tougher. The tougher questions will remain. The easy ones will be done by a bot, by talking to a chat bot, whatever. But just to think about it, right? If you want to train a robot To do a certain task, somebody's got to train the robot. Autonomous cars that run by themselves do not learn the autonomous ability to do that by themselves. You've got to have people train them on the task. That's what there's a large number of people doing that, training the LLMs and training the technology and working with those companies that are trying to enable them. They're digitally native. They'll it'll never be the case of where you would have thousands of people in a telecom doing this, you know, simple calls. It would be people that will need to adapt to the different industries. And there are so many companies that outsource that I worked with in the in the recent past who will say that here is a set of people whose job is to do, train this project, and move to the next one. So that will still remain. So people that are needed to do the jobs will be slightly different from what they are today. People will need to learn to pivot and to learn, and more to learn with tech. So the the age-old question is. Is AI going to replace or is AI going to augment human capability? The answer is more the latter. That's my view. There's always going to be a human in the loop. Without a human in the loop, you lose the empathy. You lose the ability to connect. And that's what this industry is built on. So will it kind of take away some of the simpler jobs? Yes. So will can companies have to learn to pivot? Yes. People have to do fundamentally what is all companies in the industry have to do fundamentally what they do not like. If I make money because I have X number of people. Would I be ready to say I'm willing to cannibalize 10% of my revenue to move up the value chain? It's a hard decision. The bigger you are, the tougher the pivot because you can't move an organization. I think there is a space for organizations that can do both, but it's more a leap of faith. It's more a decision to say we are okay, we're doing this, you know, leap. And there is a scope. But fundamentally the way we interact today to get answered to our queries is fundamentally going to change no matter what. Right. People can talk about let's maximize the tokens, but who's gonna pay for the tokens? Right. It's not just it's not just doing it. I think there is going to be a space for the BPO. It's not going to be the way it is today. About the industry isn't going anywhere. It just isn't. speaker-1: You know, la last last last question, ⁓ because this is something that comes up so often and I'm very keen to get your perspective before we close out ⁓ the episode today. You know, I was just in Mexico ⁓ at the one of the largest digital digital technology digital transformation and AI conferences where I had to give a a a talk on leadership and then and then a closing talk on on resilience. And one of the pieces of feedback. One of the questions I got from audience members, which I'm keen to hear your perspective on, is how do we help people overcome their fear in using these new AI tools and processes and agents and automations when that fear is unjustifiably sometimes that that, you know, they could be made redundant. Right. There, there's so much fear right now, particularly mid-levels of the market in in many industries where it's like, you know, I I Everybody's telling me I should use these tools, these agents, these processes, these tools, because they're gonna make me so much more productive. But am I going to am I going to engineer my own demise if I do this? How do you reconcile the two? How do you navigate that with people in a company? speaker-0: So I think the path that we are down as an industry, as a general industry usage of AI, the inevitable is machines are smarter than people. Machines don't need time to think, they don't need time off. That's gonna happen. So you can't fight it. You fight it, you're gonna find yourself becoming obsolete. And it's happening across the when you see the layoffs that are happening in the industry simply because you're refusing to evolve. And who are the people who are most resistant to change is the people in the mid-level managers who are not doing enough of any deep work. If all that you're doing is to manage people and you don't necessarily do some like for example, if I had to put a presentation back together, I don't need three days and four people in data to crunch it. I could just get it off the AI. Right. So I think, you know, people who are resistant to change are going to find it tough. And people also need to have, like I said at the top, it's so changing. You got to make a commitment to say, I'm going to work with technology, it's going to make me better, it's going to augment my capabilities. It will probably make some of us redundant because their repeatable jobs are going to go away. So then at that point in time, what is there that I can do? Or how can I harness the, you know, the impact that AI will have and how I work with it is probably going to be the toughest question. Middle management in most companies is going to be the most stressed. Because what do they do? If a dashboard is going to come at the click of a button, then my entire reason for existence is being questioned. So I think in a software companies they'll say you got a code. I'd say in a BPO company, you've got to be able to go make the difference to the customer. But all said and done, let's not undermine the fact that you need to there is a segue between the machine and the process and the automation, which is the understanding of the business. And that's where I think middle managers need to find their space. There is no more to say, all I'm going to do is to do reviews on PowerPoint. I'm going to do reviews. Those jobs are gone. You should be able to operate at a level of detail. That you have not done in the past. I feel that the frontline agents are dealing with the change better than the managers and managers in our industry and at the client side, that's the fear. If I introduce a lot of this, it's going to take my job away. You go and talk to people in Q quality in workforce, you introduce automation tools, then the position that you needed to maintain that is not needed any longer. It's a real rational fear, but one that we cannot run away from. So I think finding the right medium and finding the right balance to do both is what is going to define success. For the industry in general, for any organization and for any leader, you can't fight it. It's here. Like the amount of AI I use to do my analysis packs, data packs, is even compared to six months ago, it's completely different. I was talking to a I was talking to a colleague and saying, you know, I needed to run a few regression models and Six Sigma models on some data. It had taken me four days and three people in a meeting room to do that in the past. Took me forty minutes with the AI. I mean, yes, you need to prompt it, but I think that's the change that's happening. It's happening in each and every single one of our roles. You can't fight it. As scary as it is, I think that's the future. speaker-1: Absolutely. No, look, I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, we could we could probably spend another half hour, forty minutes talking about how you do that, right? How you actually create psychological safety for teams. How do you inspire people to get curious and try new things that are gonna make them more effective, more productive, and enable them to get out of what they're doing, which is tedious work and do more value added work, which which would be beneficial for the company and more interesting for them. I mean, that's a separate conversation I would love to have with you regardless, because I think it is such a challenge. To, you know, push people to say, Hey, it's gonna be okay. You're gonna have to do stuff you've never done before, but guess what? It's gonna be so much more interesting. It's gonna be so much more exciting. You're gonna grow and learn so much, but you have to let go of all this other stuff, which is what you've been doing for the past three years. Yeah. speaker-0: Right, that's I I think it's the middle managers who are struggling everywhere. Doesn't matter which industry. Because they don't know what to do. For so long you've gone got away with not having to be in the detail. I think this is interesting time. speaker-1: Absolutely. And not having to be accountable oftentimes, right? It's it's so many of these roles. There's there there's no clear performance measurement, there's no pure, you know, metrics for success. So to some extent, I'm not blaming people, right? People people are the way they are. They've been able to get away with just kind of doing very basic work, which can now be automated and not having goals. speaker-0: You can't hide behind excuses anymore. It's gonna take time. That's not even a factor because it doesn't take time and you know that. So I think people are getting found out and that's the set of people that are struggling and companies equally. Yeah. speaker-1: Absolutely. Satish, this has been amazing. ⁓ you know, I have my my our lightning round of questions, three quick questions, three quick answers. We go through with this with every guest and then we close out. The ⁓ the first question for you ⁓ today is if you had one superpower, what would you choose? Which superpower would you wanna have? speaker-0: I wish I could switch my weight on and off as I wanted it. So ⁓ that's that's been a battle for me. So that's the one thing. If I could just find a secret way to kind of say I want to lose weight, I can't. speaker-1: All right. Okay, interesting. And if you could have dinner with anybody in history, alive or dead, who would you covey? Interesting. The author of seven habits of speaker-0: Stephen Cowie. Yeah. I have read every single book he's published ever, every single piece of paper he's ever written. Every single video I've consumed it. He's a big, big part of my life and the cradle that I live. And I discovered him when I was just out of high school. Yes, that's the one person I wanna have dinner with. Yeah. I really wanna I have so many questions about I even did go to the Franklin Covey Foundation to get training. I have so many questions I wanna ask him. speaker-1: Cool. Very cool. And last question, if you could give one piece of advice to a young person, you know, looking for a career of meaning and purpose, what would you tell them? speaker-0: No is not an answer. Never take no for an answer. And you just gotta ask. I would say two things. Never take no for an answer, ask. Just ask. The art of possible opens up when you learn to ask. speaker-1: That's great. Thank you so much. Satis, thanks for your for your honesty. You know, the conversation right here on Morgan Filter, this is what it's all about. You know, it's about the messy middle. It's about, you know, ⁓ the cost of making the choices that we make, you know, those moments that are difficult, the risks involved, how you navigate that, and you know, how you look at the positive side of things, whether it's something that impacts you directly, as it did in your decision to go to South Africa, or whether it's impacting, you know, a family member or or or a or a kid, right? Which which it has in your case, it did in mine. I think ⁓ you know, one of the things I'm taking away from this conversation is, you know, there there really is no such thing as setbacks and failures. You know, there's only kind of like the opportunity to grow, to challenge ourselves, to try things that are hard, because ultimately I think that helps us make ⁓ become the best version of ourselves. And ⁓ and to everybody out there listening, you know, if if this conversation hit home, if you felt like you you you learned something about this, about life, about Satisha's journey. Please leave us a comment, like the episode, subscribe to the channel because obviously that helps us grow, reach more people. And ⁓ and there's a lot of people, you know, dealing with the kind of issues that we were dealing with today. And this is going to be ongoing, you know, for for quite some time as we navigate an era of tremendous change, but also an era of tremendous opportunity. So ⁓ this is us signing off from Morgan Filtered. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you in in the next episode. And ⁓ Satish, thanks again for being on the show. speaker-0: Thank thank you so much for having me on the show. An absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Patrick. speaker-1: Like what's up?