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How 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV | The Untold Amagi Story · The Neon Show

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Manageta Road is actually running Olympics for the US.
0:04
SPEAKER_06: 73% of the revenue comes from US, 20% of the revenue comes from Europe, and recently listed the company at$825 million.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Very brash and arrogant sort of a vision we started off.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: People laughed at us in 2016.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: Today, roughly almost 60% plus of all of US TV channels runs on an Amagi infrastructure.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: One point in time, we just said, enough of this hardware mess.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Let's only do it on the cloud.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: That moment was the transformative moment for Amagi.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: NBC Comcast, largest media company in the world, they said, hey, we cannot sign the order because we want to know your financials.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: And I was scared because we are, I think, less than$10 million.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: And the deal was a$17 million deal at the time.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: How do we sign a$17 million deal?
0:46
SPEAKER_00: We were discussing, do we really need an IPO?
0:48
SPEAKER_06: Because you guys also bought back shares, but most of the founders wait for the events of liquidity.
1:00
SPEAKER_06: Hi Shrividya.
1:02
SPEAKER_06: Hi Baskar.
1:02
SPEAKER_06: Welcome to the new on show.
1:04
SPEAKER_02: Hi.
1:04
SPEAKER_02: Hi.
1:04
SPEAKER_06: I'm so excited to be talking to you both today.
1:08
SPEAKER_06: And I am just so amazed and so proud of the journey you guys have lived in the last many years.
1:14
SPEAKER_06: You guys are building a global streaming infrastructure company.
1:18
SPEAKER_06: Uh 73% of the revenue comes from the US, 20% of the revenue comes from Europe.
1:24
SPEAKER_06: And recently in January, listed the company at$825 million.
1:29
SPEAKER_06: What an amazing milestone.
1:31
SPEAKER_06: And truly a classic example of you know starting a company in India and building for the world.
1:38
SPEAKER_06: And it all started with three friends in college in Koimbathur who decided to build a company that too for the next 30 years, right?
1:47
SPEAKER_06: And it should start uh in India.
1:50
SPEAKER_06: So, like, why all these three things were so important for you guys when you when even the product was not there?
1:57
SPEAKER_00: So maybe there's two parts here, right?
1:59
SPEAKER_00: So if you look at it, when we when we got out of college, we were fairly clear that we wanted to start.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: So, and uh Srini Vidya and myself said, okay, let's let's go try.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: We were like 24, didn't have anything to really lose, if you will.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: So we said, let's go just try something.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have a product, we didn't do anything about it, right?
2:16
SPEAKER_00: So when we started, it was a more of an unconscious.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: The first company that we did, which is what's called Impulse Soft, was an unconscious venture.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: What I mean by unconscious, I don't think we were thinking about, we were just young folks trying to do something together.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: Came together and said, let's go do it.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: We didn't think about the future, we didn't think about what's going to happen and all of that.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: And uh obviously five years later, we sold the company.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: And uh I think so.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: We didn't know why we were building it, we didn't know why we sold it.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: To some extent, it was by at 29, we had actually exited.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Our first exit has happened, and we're trying to figure out what we want to do in life, literally.
2:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: At that point in time, I think we started becoming more conscious about if we're going to do a second venture.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Then we needed for legacy and longevity and wanting to build something much more mindful.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: So that's the reason at that point in time we stopped and said we will actually first understand where we want to go as individuals, as well as from building institutions, rather than trying to look at what's the business plan, what's the idea, those are all coming next.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: But the value system and the reason why we're doing this has to be fairly clear.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: That's where we started.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: This whole thought process came in.
3:23
SPEAKER_01: So basically, when we started working in TI, and after under having an understanding of how software is being built, you know, how can you contribute, what can you do?
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Soon we understood that we can do products for the world.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: That was very clear to us after a couple of years in uh TI.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: We call it STI.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: So I think after about two, three years, he came and asked, saying that, hey, uh, it's my dream to build a new company and uh you know, I want to start something here, I want to be an entrepreneur, you guys want to join me.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: So we said that uh why not?
3:52
SPEAKER_01: Definitely let's do something.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: So the whole thing was about trying out new things.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: So while it from the external point of view, you feel that uh I've they've left a cushy job.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: The way in which at least I convinced my father was what big deal?
4:04
SPEAKER_01: If this doesn't work, you can always go back.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: So, but let's try.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: So that's how we started.
4:10
SPEAKER_06: And then you both were already reading when the first community was started?
4:13
SPEAKER_00: No, we were not actually.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh I think uh we were good friends in college.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: So we didn't even, I don't think we ever had any sort of relationships.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: Literally, we're like friends.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: I think once we came to Bangalore, then we thought we're starting together.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: And actually, we we got married after our first startup was founded.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: So it was not a this was also Basker's idea.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: This was both of us.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Who proposed?
4:35
SPEAKER_01: So in fact, uh someone else also asked me who proposed first.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I didn't know.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: So actually the marriage happened after the acquisition?
4:44
SPEAKER_06: No, 2001 we got married.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: In the midst of the journey of when we started, actually.
4:48
SPEAKER_06: So and then uh tell me one more story.
4:52
SPEAKER_06: Uh I was reading about it that uh when you guys sold uh the first company Impulse Soft, and when you were brainstorming about the idea, and you were sitting in the park and a palmist came.
5:04
SPEAKER_06: What was that story?
5:05
SPEAKER_06: So very interesting for our audience.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, essentially in 2008, we were like uh we had quit the company which we sold, and then we were coming out of the company which acquired us.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: There's a company called Surf, which acquired us.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: And uh Vidya was pregnant with our second son, and uh we were kind of starting to debate what's the next one that we want to do, and we didn't have a space to go, we didn't have an office to go.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: So we used to sit in the JP Nagar uh there is a mini forest park.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: So we used to go there in the morning, sit there on a bench there, and uh spend half a day debating what's the next thing to do.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: That was that was our real routine in some sense.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: I remember on a Monday morning we were sitting together, three of us uh again, we were like heated debates about why we should do things, and uh obviously all of us have strong ideas in life.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: So we came to kind of discussing it, debating, and uh to a point where we were discussing about targeted advertising.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: We were thinking targeting is going to be important, and we were kind of debating.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that point at that point in time, a small young boy walked up and he was like talking starting to stop us saying I thought he he thought we were fighting with each other stop us, but to some extent he stopped and I said, What do you need?
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And he said, No, I'm actually a Palmist and I can actually tell you a future.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Like, we're really debating something interesting, so don't worry, we don't need it.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Then I struck, why think about that?
6:23
SPEAKER_00: That boy he understood that if you are in 11 a.m.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: on a Monday morning sitting in a park, yeah, three young people, literally you're jobless.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: That means you better know your future.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: So your future is completely uncertain.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: That's the reason you are in a park at this point in time.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: He's targeting us very well.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: So he knew that you need your future.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: So that was the kind of uh You got the validation in the park.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: So I was telling them, See, here is what targeting works of a person.
6:48
SPEAKER_06: How much time did you guys take uh after the company got acquired and before?
6:53
SPEAKER_00: We had a two-year deal with them.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: So a couple of years we spent with them, and uh pretty much after that we left.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: So after the transition, uh we left and then we started debating what to do, uh right, and then we started a market.
7:06
SPEAKER_06: And there was always uh this clarity that you guys would start the company together.
7:11
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
7:11
SPEAKER_06: We told them upfront when they acquired.
7:13
SPEAKER_06: So we've got to be.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Three of us also were always like feeling that I think we need to do together.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Always we've been like that's something of a almost unwritten rule, at least three of us had that whatever we do.
7:24
SPEAKER_06: And how would you uh divide the roles and responsibilities?
7:27
SPEAKER_06: Because I remember Vidya talking about it in one of the interviews that initially there were no roles, designations in the company.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: In Amagi, we had no roles, designations for everyone.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: Basically, it will only tell role was there, designation won't be there.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: It'll never say VP or anything like that, including the founders.
7:45
SPEAKER_01: It'll, in fact, my role was basically I'm an engineer.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: I I love to solve problems.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: That's all I had written.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: So, so yeah.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: So between the three of us, he's the dreamer.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: He dreams and he comes up with an idea.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: And for him, once the idea is appeared to him and you know, he kind of does all the mental uh thing, and for him it feels like done.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: For me, I have to realize the dream, yeah, then it feels good.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: And for Srini, it requires um, you know, a numerical analysis as the business should make sense, it should make sense, right?
8:20
SPEAKER_01: And uh he is a number man.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm a person who needs to do, I need to do and see it work, only then I'm happy.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: He is the one who envisages the ideas.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: This is how I mean we didn't really say that Baskar, you do this, we have Srini, you do it, but eventually it became like this.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:40
SPEAKER_06: But if you come with the idea and you have to convince the other two people, doesn't it feel you know a baggage on the shoulder?
8:47
SPEAKER_06: What if I it goes wrong?
8:49
SPEAKER_00: No, no, we've done hundreds of money.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: No, no, it will always we have done hundreds of mistakes as a team, right?
8:55
SPEAKER_00: One unwritten rule that three of us have between us is very simple.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: Once we align on doing something together, we will never blame each other for what we do.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: That's like a what it doesn't matter who what decision we make, we will all make the decisions, we'll make mistakes, but always the three of us will back each other in does not matter what it is all about.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: We go together in whatever decisions.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: So that we will never have this uh you told me we did it, not because we've always been that way.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: And that's an unwritten rule in the way we operate.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: And we have no fear to discuss an idea.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: In fact, what we used to do was we'll discuss an idea and we'll see if that idea lives with us for one week, two days, two weeks, one month, then it's something that's worth pursuing.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: Because uh, if it goes away after some time, because you have found some problem, then it's not worth pursuing.
9:43
SPEAKER_06: Right.
9:43
SPEAKER_06: Can you recall some of the fights or some of the disagreements that happened?
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Not so it happens pretty regularly, I can tell you.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: The reason is they are distinctly different people uh by definition.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh I can tell you when we were kind of uh pivoting the company in 2016, wanting to do this whole cloud-based approach of broadcasting and all this stuff trying to do.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: I remember a conversation Shini Vidya and me were discussing, and uh we were proposing saying we'll do cloud play out and all of this.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And Shini, as usual, went and looked at the TAM, came back, said the total market size is$10 million.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: What are we doing here?
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Sort of argument with him.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: And Vidya is saying, how will it work in the cloud?
10:20
SPEAKER_00: We don't even know.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: And uh I was of the view that hey, I'm able to imagine it.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: Let's let's try.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: Worst case, we're gonna fail, but at least let's try.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: And I think fortunately, all the three of us said, okay, let's go.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Because the choices were very less anyway.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: So we said, let's go.
10:35
SPEAKER_06: This is a very interesting segment.
10:36
SPEAKER_06: I'll talk about it in detail.
10:38
SPEAKER_06: Absolutely.
10:38
SPEAKER_06: But uh before we talk about Amagi and this pivot, uh Baskar, if you can just give us uh some sort of elevator pitch, like with the biggest achievements uh you guys uh have had at Amagi.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
10:53
SPEAKER_06: So a little bit of introduction and then the achievements.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: Amagi, as we are a media technology company.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh from founding days, I think we started with the assumption that we will build something which will disrupt the market.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Whatever the market we get in, we should disrupt it.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: It should be large enough.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: And it should be for a long time that we should be able to build this as a kind of an and we don't call it a corporation, we'd like to call it an institution.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'll come to some of the value systems that we follow and why we kind of treat it that way.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: So that is the first uh uh thing that we started off with.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: Amagi started in what's called geotargeted advertising on TV, which essentially meant that if you're watching a Z or a Colors in the 2010-12 time frame, for example, you would watch the same ad spot if you're in Bangalore, you will see a different ad, what you'd see in Mumbai or in Delhi or a Punjab or a UP.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: So the idea was that we split the satellite beam across the country.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: So every part of the country will have different ads on the same ad spot.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: This was the core idea that we came in with.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh obviously it was crazy as hell.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: People said it won't work in India because of the complexity of cable and satellite.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: It won't work, people don't pay money, a whole slew of uh no's that was there in that sense.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: But we kind of been bullheaded, we said, no, let's go do it.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: If somebody says no, it's actually exciting for us to go about it.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: So we took that as a challenge.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: The next six years, we really launched the company and actually do it.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: And I feel very proud of what we could build as at that point in time in terms of targeted icing, because we built India's largest targeted icing infrastructure.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: We had the likes of Unilever, Vipro, Glaxo, PNG, everybody operating on the platform.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: So that is a big, big uh milestone for us.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: For a reason we had to pivot and we'll talk about it later.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: But that's a great milestone for us.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: When we started this part of the business, which is the new Magi, what I call the two-auto version of it, we started with the fundamental assumption, very simple assumption.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: If you look at any media business, for example, there is a camera on one side and there is a TV or a screen or a phone where we are watching content.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: We naively so started with the assumption that everything in the middle should run, there'll be no hardware in the middle from the point of a camera till the point of the TV set.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: Can we take everything as a software infrastructure on a cloud that we can actually run the largest TV networks in the world?
13:08
SPEAKER_00: Very brash and arrogant sort of a vision we started off with.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: People laughed at us in 2016.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: But what's happened in the journey, and I think we have also been lucky and fortunate of the journey, the industry started changing and the industry started adopting cloud infrastructure over the years, for example.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: Two big changes that we've been part of.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: One is called FAST, which is the free ad-supported TV as a model, started coming up in the US in 2016-17 timeframe.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: We were very fortunate to be in the right place, right time.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: We became the technology backbone for this whole industry.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Today, roughly almost 60% plus of all of US TV channels in this whole thing runs on an Amagi infrastructure in the back end.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: And that's been, again, we got an Emmy Award last year for that, where the TV industry worldwide actually awarded Amagi as uh a pioneer in bringing a technology which actually changed the industry.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: And that's coming out of India and coming there is a very good broad moment for us, for our teams and engineers who actually built this whole capability for us.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: The second thing that's interesting happened is 2020, uh, the TV, large TV networks worldwide started to wanting to change.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we started working with NBC Comcast, which is the largest media technology and media company in the world, wanted to move to the cloud.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: And uh for some reason, they decided they will work with a small company out of Bangalore to kind of go through that transformation journey.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh, today, I'm proud to say that in the last five, six years, we ran Super Bowl for them.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: We ran the Olympics for them with all the window olympics.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: So we've become the backbone of this company in terms of all their live and linear playout systems today, for example.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: So, like I think uh one of the investors is telling me that Banagata Road is actually running Olympics for the US to watch, a Super Bowl to watch.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: I think that's that's been a fascinating journey for us as a company.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I think we're in a very early phase of the transformation, and we're extremely excited about the next decade of what's going to happen.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: So the public, going public was a milestone as well for the company, which I think is a is we thought it's going to be a normal.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: We didn't obviously we when we started the company uh slightly uh over arrogant, we thought we will actually be public.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: That's no big deal.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah but that didn't happen for a long time because we had to go through the pivot.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I think it was a very good, humbling experience to get there, do that particular milestone.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: But truly, we feel much more responsible now for the next 10 years in building this capability.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: That's where I see.
15:35
SPEAKER_06: And why do you say it's you're still very early in the journey?
15:38
SPEAKER_06: I remember you talking about that uh it's just 10% of the market that you guys have captured so far.
15:45
SPEAKER_06: Can you Yeah?
15:45
SPEAKER_00: So the basically, if you look at it, the modernization of this, see, these are all all these industries which have been Lagardish and adoption technology are moving through a giant transformation.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: A transformation where hardware and satellites and Obi-Wans and everything that you see as a lot of infrastructure in television has always been very hardware and people-driven.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: That is a big change happening in the industry where everything is becoming software-driven.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: We truly believe that it's in a very, very early phase only, just 10% of the largest TV networks in the world have moved to the cloud.
16:15
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: And there's 90% worldwide.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: And this is a television is a global business.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: So all of this has to eventually transform to the cloud.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: And we truly believe we have the right to win to kind of build those capabilities.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: And uh, that's the reason I think next 10 years is extremely exciting for us as a company.
16:31
SPEAKER_06: And uh let's also talk about the pivot that happened you guys did in 2018, right?
16:38
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
16:38
SPEAKER_06: And uh so the whole geotagging technology you worked on uh from scratch, right?
16:44
SPEAKER_06: You built uh the whole technology from scratch.
16:48
SPEAKER_06: So when he said that let's just move to cloud business, how was your reaction to that pivot?
16:55
SPEAKER_01: No, no, we he was saying it for a reason.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: So the reason which he said we'll describe later, I'll describe it now.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: The biggest challenge with the geotargeting business was that basically it was cannibalizing the business of the TV networks.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: So let's say I'm a TV network salesperson.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: I'd have gone to uh GSK and asked for the deal for Nashali.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: Now GSK was saying, no, I need only West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and I can take it from Amagi.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: So it was cannibalizing their own business, and they they started giving us a lot of constraints about whom to sell, which uh agency to work with, and so on and so forth.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: So at one point we felt that the business will not be as profitable as it should be.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: So at that point, we had no other choice that we were left with except to you know try this out globally.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: By the time we had gone to, I think, one show, one or two shows in the US, uh broadcast shows, uh, where people come and look at the technology, and there was a reasonable interest.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: So that's what he was trying to pick up.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: So while it hurt us, like basically we had built a sales team which was doing the sales and we had to let go those people.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: It was a painful exit for them, right?
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Like, but the point is that there was no other choice.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: We at least have to try the second one.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: So we took it, it was difficult, but we took it in a wholehearted way, and we decided to try it in a wholehearted way.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: And the good news about the second part that Amagi 2.0 is that when we did Amagi 1.0 itself, we were doing everything on the cloud.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: So therefore, adopting the technology into uh the new products that we were trying to do was not such a big challenge.
18:24
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
18:24
SPEAKER_06: And what was the scale of the business before the pivot?
18:26
SPEAKER_00: Old business was roughly about 180 crores of business.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: So it is actually so we didn't pivot when the business was not doing.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: We were pivoting when the business was doing well.
18:37
SPEAKER_06: That was the most difficult part, right?
18:38
SPEAKER_00: Correct, correct.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: And again, this is like, see, we had raised about almost 25 million dollars by then.
18:43
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: We had spent 20 million dollars, we had 5 million dollars at the bank.
18:48
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: I remember the distinct conversation that we went to the board and said we want to shut this business down.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: And we had doubled that business that year in terms of revenue, at least from a top-line standpoint.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: But like what Vidya pointed out, all the structural deficiencies we felt, if you're going to run it for the next 30 years, we knew that this is not a structurally solid business design that we were actually doing because we were dependent on three large TV networks, uh, literally being the mercy of them in terms of cost structures and all the compliances.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: So that was fairly clear to us that we have to pivot.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: But I think our board was like, we had a thesis on which we actually put the money.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: And we had$5 million in the bank.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: We told them we're going to really pivot to a business.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: They said, How big is that business?
19:29
SPEAKER_00: It was a few crores, I think two, three crores if I remember right.
19:32
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: And it was a hard conversation.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: But I think good news is they trusted us.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Eventually they trusted and said, folks, you know it best.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: And they knew us that we obviously we had built it for the last eight years by then, and we're actually saying that we'll kill something for what we did for eight years in our journey and restart from scratch.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, we diluted the whole business both for ourselves and obviously for the for them.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: They thought it's a write-off, literally.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: And and uh they said, Hey, we cannot put any more money in the business because we don't know your new thesis.
20:03
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, we said, no, no, we don't need it.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: We'll take the five million dollars, rebuild the business again.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: So we went back pretty much as a startup to some extent after eight years in the journey.
20:11
SPEAKER_06: So we didn't raise any new money, just using the money.
20:13
SPEAKER_06: We didn't raise money at all.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: We raised we said we will sit tight, we'll just move everything back.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: Um that's why you had to let go of the team, otherwise you would have kept them.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: No, not that they were actually local salespeople who are selling at sales at sales.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: So we cannot, I cannot use them.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: That is the reason we had to the engineering team remained intact.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but uh but the people who are involved in operations on the sales had to be let go.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: How big was the team that time?
20:38
SPEAKER_06: 120 people.
20:38
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, 120 people.
20:40
SPEAKER_06: And now how big is the team?
20:41
SPEAKER_02: Thousand.
20:43
SPEAKER_06: How many of them are in Bangalore?
20:45
SPEAKER_06: 700.
20:46
SPEAKER_06: Uh seven, yeah, out of yeah.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 700.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: 700 plus 650 to 700 as well.
20:50
SPEAKER_06: 650 in India and the rest of them are in Europe and Europe, US, US is big.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: I think almost 120 people in the US.
20:57
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
20:58
SPEAKER_06: And then uh just uh maybe if you can talk about uh more more about this part that uh you had 5 million dollars in the bank account, and then what happened in the next few months?
21:09
SPEAKER_00: So I think uh first thing is obviously it was an emotionally hard moment for the team because I think we had a fantastic team.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: The team actually had put all their heart and soul in to get this where we were as a company.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: So these are they were more friends and family for us rather than actually employees in some sense.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: So we had to call them and then say, you know what, hey, we've tried this.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: At this point in time, you know the hardships we're going through as a company.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: You you know, and so it was kind of a bittersweet sort of uh moment for all of us.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: Even today they're all good friends and we kind of talk to each other.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: And so we had to first get that done.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: And simultaneously, we had to build this business to start off with.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: The first principle we went back to first principles and said, let's get first we had to bring the cost structures down to where we could afford it.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Number one.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: Number two, we needed somebody in the US because we were all in India.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: At the point I'm Shiny, everybody's in India.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: So the biggest call, I think, uh so we Got Srini to take his because Srini was always a go-to-market person.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: So he had to approve his family completely, like what I'm sure all the founders do.
22:08
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Had to take them back.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: And he had kids who were in the ninth grade and sixth grade, for example, at the point in time.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: So they were always, they were born and brought up in India.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: But here was a situation that we had to do.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: So he took that call to kind of pretty much approve the family from here, take them to LA, settle them down.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: We didn't even know how big the business was, but we had to take that call to do that and settle and kind of completely new lifestyle that he settled in there, for example.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Fortunately, he went to LA where I think that the time was timing was right for the business.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: As I told you, the fast, the free ad-supported model was starting to work.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: We found that to be the right place, right time, where we could be the technology vendor.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: And that was the moment I think we felt, okay, now we got a product market fit of some fashion.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: So I think good news is obviously three of us are pretty much operating the business, literally, in that sense.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: We were kind of hands-on.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: The company was a 40-50 people team at that point in time.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: We've already become small.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: So I think that was the core of the business for us to kind of start, restart the journey for all of us and start rebuilding it.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: So every night he used to call, and then Vidya and Shini used to talk about what to get done.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: The rapidity at which we could deliver things, our customers are surprised.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: Because by 20, we used the leverage of 24 hours very well.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: 12 hours discussion.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: And then Shini used to call in the evening, late night.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: The team starts building things out.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: Next day morning, when Shini is there, he actually got a product which he can actually show to customers.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: So that is the sort of agility that we could show.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: I think made a huge difference in terms of our own success.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: I think the sacrifice of Strini to go there and do that and the ability for the teams to do it, I think it's been a great journey.
23:42
SPEAKER_06: And how old you guys were when this um pivot happened?
23:46
SPEAKER_00: We had already, I think we had spent eight years, I think 29, 30.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: Oh, we are like almost close to 40, right?
23:52
SPEAKER_06: 35.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so 37 to 40, right?
23:54
SPEAKER_06: So the time most of the second time founders start.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Pretty much the pattern I'm seeing.
23:59
SPEAKER_06: And when the next round of funding happened?
24:02
SPEAKER_00: So what we did is we with five million dollars, we actually became profitable as a company.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: By 2020, uh, I think uh we had become we had we were doing about 20 million dollars of business.
24:12
unknown: Yeah.
24:13
SPEAKER_06: Okay, wow.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: So we're like from zero, we just kind of rapidly grew.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: And again, the company was pretty much doubling and tripling and some other time.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: So we were kind of growing.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Given the size of the teams and others, we were already profitable as a company.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: So we didn't actually need money technically.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: Only reason is in 2021, I think uh our investors who had invested in the early part of the journey.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the timeline had come where they had to exit.
24:37
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: So a couple of those investors came back and said, Buskar, I we love the business.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: What are you guys trying to look at?
24:43
SPEAKER_00: Really looks interesting, but we cannot, our journeys have to end here.
24:46
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: So incidentally in 2021, early 2021, we did a deal with uh Axel, the Norwest, and others only as a secondary transaction.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: We said, we don't need the money.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: So we didn't take any primary in the company at that point in time.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: We said, if you want to, they are ready to sell, folks can buy.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: We're not going to get involved in the business, right?
25:03
SPEAKER_00: That's what it is.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: When they came in, I think before that, in the next six months, we actually already doubled.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: The company had started becoming almost$30 million plus.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: At that point in time, I think uh we all sat together and said, okay, now it looks like we can build a billion-dollar company at some scale that we could potentially build.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: Is it important for us to go look for some sort of money to be raised?
25:24
SPEAKER_00: Because that will help us to kind of expand the team.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: We were like having seven people sales team, which is driving a$30 million ARR business.
25:31
SPEAKER_04: Wow.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: So it is, I don't know, it's sometimes super efficient, sometimes it also burns out people.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: And we had a team which is very small in India as well.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: So we didn't have a next level management teams at all.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: So at that joint is where late 2021 and 22 is when we raised capital, uh, largely to kind of now fund the business at the next level.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: And that's been the journey we started off.
25:51
SPEAKER_06: And how big was that round?
25:53
SPEAKER_00: First one we did about$100 million.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: The second one also we did$100 million.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: But I think partly there was also secondary because we wanted our teams to also get money back because it was almost a time to kind of give back as well, in some sense.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: So we did that in two rounds.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: And then uh I think about$80 million, plus$80 plus$80, almost like uh uh we had about um almost$150,$150 million of primary capital came in.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: $50 million was all secondary century.
26:18
unknown: Okay.
26:18
SPEAKER_06: And in uh if you can talk about the next phase of the growth after this funding uh happened.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: So after the funding happened, like how did we use the money?
26:27
SPEAKER_06: What all happened?
26:28
SPEAKER_00: So obviously, see, we uh the we had more money than what we could spend, even today, and that's the way the company's been like one is uh we've been always a very capital efficient company because we are always a software company, doesn't need a lot of capex in some sense.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: And we didn't need a lot of marketing because it's a vertical um business that we are in.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: Our biggest costs are people and nothing else, literally, right?
26:49
SPEAKER_00: So that's the way the business has always been.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: So although we raised, I think one raise that two raises we did, out of which I think close to$100 million was in the bank even when we went public.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: So the money was not even used in the whole system, for example.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Having said that, the first thing we did is to obviously build the next layer of management teams.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: So we brought brought in head of sales, we brought in engineering teams, engineering heads, and all of that.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: We kind of started building the next layer of teams, for example.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: And that was a two-year journey where we went through, again, we took a loss with the business because we had to build that whole capability and capacity building that we did, after which we again came back to profitability.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: So that's the only space where we actually spent the money.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: And uh, else we are like coming from middle class families, and we are like at some point, we're not a very brash sort of uh, we don't spend a lot of money in most things in life.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: So it's literally getting our office to a point where it actually looks good for everybody to work and getting things done.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: So we are like really uh basics are covered.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: I think we are happy with that sort of uh stuff.
27:47
SPEAKER_06: And uh before uh the IPO happened, company was valued at I think some 1.2 billion dollars.
27:54
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
27:55
SPEAKER_06: And the IPO happened at uh$825 million.
27:58
SPEAKER_06: Correct.
27:59
SPEAKER_06: So if we can just talk about that.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: So essentially, if you look at it, uh going public provides the liquidity.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: There's a liquidity premium in India, right?
28:07
SPEAKER_00: So it's important.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, again, as if you look at the goal, the genesis of why we did the IPO.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: See, our investors, none of them wanted to exit because they are like they were just four years, or some of them are only three and a half years into the IPO, right?
28:19
SPEAKER_00: Into the company.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: So none of them wanted to, there was no exit pressure for anybody to do it fundamentally.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And there was no exit pressure for us as individuals.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: We're like, I think we're well settled.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't think we needed any sort of stuff, exit or liquidity to the right step, right?
28:33
SPEAKER_00: So the only biggest motivation that we saw is for our teams and employees who kind of struggled with 1.2 and a 2.3 cycle.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: And we had people who spent more than a decade with the company.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: And the the emotion, I think, I think Vidya pointed out the emotion when we started, three of us are discussing, and I remember sitting in Sunnywhere.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: How should we do IPO?
28:52
SPEAKER_00: Sunnywell, we were discussing truly, do we really need an IPO?
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Because the company is profitable, we're growing, our investors are happy.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: There was no good reason to go IPO.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: Should we do that at all?
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Fundamentally, right?
29:02
SPEAKER_00: And we don't have this uh ego trip of wanting to be a public company.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: So we don't have that as well.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: And we know all the challenges if you're a public company.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: So we kind of understood the balances.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: It was a very balanced call.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: The only big emotion, I think, when Vidya pointed out was hey, our teams need liquidity.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, these people have been with us for so long.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: How do we enable them to buy their houses and car, whatever they want to buy in their stuff, and at least have a legacy for saying, hey, I worked at Amagi, I got something done with this whole thing, is an important emotion.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: I think that is the core emotion that drove us.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: The secondary part was our customers are starting to become larger and larger.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Enterprise customers are starting to come.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: For them, they wanted the longevity of this, because our our business is an enterprise business.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: So people want to feel comfortable that you have you're going to be for a long time.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Public provides that credibility, the transparency, and eventually the respect in the industry that, hey, here is a company for longevity that we can trust with our infrastructure because these are mission-critical infrastructures that we run for our business, customers.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I think in that sense, that was a real decision process that we went through.
30:07
SPEAKER_06: And you guys also bought back uh shares, right?
30:11
SPEAKER_06: Uh, but most of the founders wait for the events of liquidity, right?
30:15
SPEAKER_00: No, no, see, we are really this for us is we're leaning in heavily.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: This uh we would have loved to have more shares in the company, technically.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Yes, company.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: I think we truly believe strongly the next decade is a transformation.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: And again, we conviction is extremely high.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: And that's the reason we want to lean in.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: We if you look at it, we didn't liquidate any, so not a single stock.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: In fact, we had a challenge even getting our investors to liquidate the stock because they knew that the business is actually doing well and getting through.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: So it's always been a that's that's the only so high conviction is a very important part of it.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: We want to lean in and do things because we truly believe there's a big opportunity in front of us to kind of build it up.
30:51
SPEAKER_06: So and then if you guys can talk about the version 2.0, like um if you can break down the business model of Amagi 2.0.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: So if you look at it, so fundamentally it's a software business.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: We are providing software to a TV channel.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: So think about any TV channel today, for example.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: When they want to create a live sports or a news or a or an entertainment channel today, for example, they buy hardware, they set up a studio, they say take their cameras to all the field, uh, they bring what's called an OBAN, it's a satellite, which actually captures all the content and the cameras, sends it back to a production center, and the studio is in one location where you create all of this, and eventually send it to homes through distribution, either through satellite or or through IP networks or internet that we all watch content, for example.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: It involves a lot of hardware and real estate, which actually drives this business.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: What Amagi does today is to convert that into software.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: And when we converted a software, the biggest change we did was start, it was a CapEx intensive business.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: You have to buy all these equipment, create all of this.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: What we did was to convert it in an OPEC business.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: What do we do?
32:02
SPEAKER_00: We lease cloud from the likes of Amazon and Google and others.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: We host our software on the cloud, and we pay money to an Amazon on a per month basis.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: Similarly, we are customers paid us on a per month basis.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: So we made it a subscription model for the business, which allowed them to pay us on a per month basis, and we are able to kind of obviously the transaction is where we pay for the cost of goods, or in this case, the cost of this servers and the software for the cloud that we pay.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: That's the core business model.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: So suddenly customers can launch their channel, run live sports and news by paying on a per month basis.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: Although contracts are longer periods, but they're paying only on a per month basis.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: That's the core big change that we did for the industry.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: And this is our genesis of SaaS.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: That's been there in every other part of the business.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: For the broadcast world, we brought in the idea of SaaS, of how they buy software and replace their hardware with the software and a and an OPEX sort of model.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: That's the big change we brought in.
33:00
SPEAKER_06: And uh, like we talked about before this uh conversation started, that 73% of the revenue comes from US.
33:09
SPEAKER_06: And uh the the the kind of logos we have at Amagi, how do you convince them?
33:17
SPEAKER_06: Because uh this is the advice uh B2B founders keep hearing who are building for US market that you have to not just the tech team can be in India, but uh for a business team you have to be in US.
33:29
SPEAKER_06: So, how hard uh it is to sell to US uh market and the kind of logos you have being a local uh company.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Two parts, right?
33:40
SPEAKER_06: So And how was it before and how it has changed now?
33:43
SPEAKER_00: It's changed dramatically, and I can tell you, right?
33:45
SPEAKER_00: So if you look at it early days, I think we were uh see nobody believed that a company out of Bangalore will be in broadcast tech.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: We were never known for tech and more importantly, broadcast, which is like a very mission critical software technology.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: So I don't think anybody thought that a company out of India would actually kind of be able to support them and run the most critical workloads ever, right?
34:07
SPEAKER_00: Two things are happening.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: One is I think Kivan Shini was there, I think it helped us to create the presence of saying, hey, we are local.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: We are we are in the US.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: And we have, and people understood this whole idea of uh having GCC sort of operations environments in India.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: So it is not like India was not in the place where people thought uh it's not something that they didn't know.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: They knew that India existed.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: So they treated us as a somewhat of a local sort of presence to that extent that helped a lot.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: And I would think that having a founder having the presence is super important.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: If it is any other sort of uh, hey, another head of sales there, you wouldn't bring the emotion, the passion, the ability to convince people.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: Founders being there was a super important part of the journey for us.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: I think from a success, I think that is a very critical part of it.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Number one.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: Number two, if you look at it, is no large broadcaster decided that they will work with the maggi in one day.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: So obviously, it was a big journey for everybody to go through the process.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh, what changed is obviously the industry change forced them to look at it.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: And what we've seen, again, again, this is something that we learned over the processes there.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we follow a book called The Crossing the Chasm.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: So, this is a book by a person called Jeffrey Moore, right?
35:17
SPEAKER_00: He talks about a mechanism of a almost like a Gaussian curve or binomial distribution curve that you see is the way how industries perform.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: There is the early adopters in the first part of the graph, uh, visionaries, early adopters, pragmatists, and legards.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: That's the way the bell jars are replaced, right?
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the early adopters and the visionaries are people who are irrational in the decision-making process.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: So it's important, and I think we were kind of lucky to work with companies and the CTOs and the decision makers in these companies who are irrational to some extent.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: Because if they had started calculating numbers, assessing Amagi as uh, hey, is it X to Y?
35:59
SPEAKER_00: I put an RFP, figuring it out, we wouldn't have crossed any of these milestones, literally, right?
36:04
SPEAKER_00: These are people who felt, hey, here is Srinih coming in and actually talking to me.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: I feel the passion with this person.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: They're delivering things in my POCs and stuff at the speeds at which I've not seen it with my vendors.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: It's worth a bet.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: I know it's irrational in my heart, but let me take a bet and look at it.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to give the highest workloads to start with.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: I will give my fringe projects to you.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: Show me what you can do, and then let's see the whole process play out.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: I think that's where the journey starts.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: And we were very happy to lap it up.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: We said, okay, let's get into these large organizations and demonstrate why we can be world-class and do that.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: But the beauty is we could be able to quickly get through that ramp curve of trust, right?
36:46
SPEAKER_00: Today, some of our customers run tens of billions of dollars of content through Amaki's infrastructure.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: Now, the sometimes, and I feel I joke to my customers that the tide has turned, where they call me and said, hopefully you guys are clear because you are my you are the backbone now.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: So we would we you cannot afford to fail.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: We cannot fail today because that actually will be a big challenge for them, for example.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: And now the brand, the trust is so high in the industry today.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: For example, I think uh we just came from a show where I think all the top-tier customers worldwide could want it to be a Damagi where they said, okay, I want to meet these guys.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Looks like they've been always innovative, creating new things, big trust.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, that's been earned over a decade.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: And fortune also matters, luck is matters in all of this, being the right place, but also being choosy about which customers you start to work with who can kind of carry you in the journey.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: So for us, I think our biggest success is our customers who actually took us where.
37:40
SPEAKER_06: Who were these early customers?
37:42
SPEAKER_06: Who were these early customers?
37:44
SPEAKER_00: Early, for example, NBC Comcast.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: I think they took a took a bet.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: I think in 2019, they decided to uh start the project with Omagi.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: I think that was a big bet for them as a company.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: If I'm NBC, I think they were like, uh, I remember the day they said, hey, we cannot sign the order because we want to know your financials.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: And I was scared because we were like, we are, I think, less than$10 million, and the deal was a$17 million deal at the point of time.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: So we're thinking, I have a whole company with$10 million.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: How do we sign a$70 million deal?
38:14
SPEAKER_00: Then I remember uh going to Premji Invest, who was one of our investors, to get a blank, pretty much a blank commitment from them saying they'll support the company.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: And I go, I had to give that letter to NBC saying, you know what, trust us, we have backing which is really solid.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we had to bank on Premji's brand and Premji's invest, saying that they are ready to back the company for whatever time and get it done, right?
38:37
SPEAKER_00: So, because their finance teams and procurement are saying, who are these guys?
38:40
SPEAKER_00: Like, where are they coming from and why are you giving them projects to them?
38:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: So that's so some of this also about the the journeys was a lot of these moments were the lucky moments to some extent, having the right people made a lot of sense.
38:52
SPEAKER_01: I want to add something.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, please.
38:54
SPEAKER_01: So basically, um, yes, founder presence is very important.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: The customers were coming to us, but media is a very brutal operation, right?
39:01
SPEAKER_01: Imagine you're watching a match and something goes blank.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: So actually, our customers were very scared.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: Initially, Srini, I was running this pre-sales customer sex, all of those.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: So Sweeney used to tell me that, you know, I need people in the US, I need people in the US.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: And I used to say, no, no, no, we'll do it from here.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: We'll be available 247.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: We are available in midnight.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: But customers were never convinced that that was really true.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: And then slowly I turned and then you know, we hired a team, we set up a customer success team, we made sure that people are there, they saw the commitment, they saw that there is some phone number to call locally and somebody will answer me if there is a problem.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: Once that trust comes, that is when you know uh people start trusting you a lot more and uh things become easier.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: So we we built a reasonable size uh you know GTM team.
39:46
unknown: Uh uh.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: And and what are the other customers we have?
39:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh we are uh we have 450 customers now.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: For uh for the top number uh names we have Sinclair is one of our top customers, Lionsgate, uh DaZone.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: They are actually the you can say call it them as a Netflix of sports, they're based out of Europe.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Um then uh A Pless C, which is now called Hearst Networks, Fox the History Channel, Fox, Wanna Media, WANA Media Discovery.
40:13
SPEAKER_06: Uh how do we sign these contracts?
40:15
SPEAKER_06: Because this is such an sensitive uh you know job.
40:20
SPEAKER_06: Uh because, like you said, if a second of screening goes off, uh it's a total mess, right?
40:28
SPEAKER_01: So they act, they also take a lot of time.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: That's why closing some of these deals take time because they also uh go through a process wherein they look at the technical architecture, they compare, they do a proof of concept, they ask you to show the redundancy, switch off one region and show that the whole thing works.
40:43
SPEAKER_01: All those they would also do.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: And um and then you have to give the SLA commitment and make sure that you stick to the commitment on a monthly basis to ensure that the product really works the way in which it should.
40:53
SPEAKER_06: I also remember you talking about this part in detail that uh uh there are some other clauses also in the contracts.
41:00
SPEAKER_06: If you can just talk about those clauses also.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: There'll be a lot of clauses.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: So, like first time when we had to do this SLA, I couldn't understand the actual meaning of 99.99.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: So that 99.99 means of a whole month.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: So you take the number of seconds, then you take like point not one, say one uh of the total seconds that's available, right?
41:23
SPEAKER_01: That's about I think 99.99 will give you about um 30 seconds, right?
41:27
SPEAKER_01: 40 seconds.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: No, 99.99 is 17 minutes.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: You have like less than two, we had about what two minutes was the downtime that we could do in a year for 99.999.
41:37
SPEAKER_00: So we had a finine class.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: Finite class to the customer.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: So all of these you need to understand, and you need to make sure that you know you put in the thing which is uh which is something achievable, uh physically achievable.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: And if you mess up with that, no, largely two two two parts, right?
41:52
SPEAKER_00: So customers uh when you write a contract, typically customers are wanting to protect themselves.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: So that's what it is.
41:59
SPEAKER_00: But what we've seen realistically is customers are really wanting to know your intent.
42:05
SPEAKER_00: And uh obviously we've never been fully perfect ever.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: I don't think any of us could be perfect, and they didn't expect us to be perfect as well.
42:12
SPEAKER_00: All every time they want to know intent-wise, are you going to go solve these problems for us and actually become better, right?
42:19
SPEAKER_00: So, as a company, if you look at it, one of the value systems that we really espouse is called be vulnerable.
42:25
SPEAKER_00: Vulnerability is a very important uh trait for us as a company, but not only internally between our teams and leadership and everybody else, but also with our customers.
42:35
SPEAKER_00: With our customers, we always have a relationship where when something gets screwed up, we call them and say, you know what, we screwed up.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: We would never give them saying this is something that we should have done.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: We have not solved it, it's our problem, we will go fix it.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: And proof point is obviously we fix it and demonstrate that we actually fixed it.
42:53
SPEAKER_00: So trust gets built when you go through this process.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I remember some of the enterprise customers came in and asked us the first question they were asking us is how many times have you gone black on the screen?
43:05
SPEAKER_00: The the naive answer is if I told them never, they wouldn't have signed the deal.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: They told me very clearly.
43:12
SPEAKER_00: If you had told me never, I the the way I would see it, not because you you are telling, not telling the truth, but we would believe that you've never done real broadcasting.
43:22
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: Because if you've really done real broadcasting, nobody gets it without a black screen.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: So everybody goes through the process.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: The question is, how did you come back and recover?
43:32
SPEAKER_00: And what you do is much more important for us, or somebody naively telling them that it'll never go black or it'll never fail, for example.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: Those are all in a complex business like what we run today.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: It's the ability to know that failures will happen, but ability to recover from those failures and more importantly, fix them forever so that you don't come back.
43:50
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the success of all of these systems because the systems are becoming more and more complex on what you're trying to do.
43:56
SPEAKER_06: And so far we have talked about uh the crucial Milestones of Amagi, the pivot happened, and how uh did we decide for the whole IPO thing?
44:07
SPEAKER_06: What are the other five, you know, major decisions you guys have made?
44:12
SPEAKER_00: I think uh I think the first decision of starting together uh and Amagi, as I told you, one of the first things we did was to what are the tenets that we would like to do?
44:20
SPEAKER_00: Because as you said, the big decision we made is next 30 years, we'll try to build it.
44:25
SPEAKER_00: I think that was a decision which I um which is a very deep decision, not easy.
44:31
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think at some point we also thought we will be successful, which which didn't happen in the first part of the journey.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: So it was a decision we stood together.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's not like at the pivot level we said, okay, now oh, it's not working, let's let's kind of do quits.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: We didn't do it.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: Three of us said, no, let's double up and let's do that.
44:48
SPEAKER_00: So that is a very important decision we made.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: At that point in time, we also took the decision to do something in India for India at that point in time.
44:56
SPEAKER_00: That was a decision we changed in the midst of the journey for the business dynamics of what it was.
45:02
SPEAKER_00: But I think we kind of stood with that decision for a long time.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: And at some point, I think I remember one of the investors in the middle of the time when we were doing the India business.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, we were trying to raise money, we were talking to him, and he said, I think, guys, the amount of work that you're doing in India, the same thing if you do it for any other country, you would have been a much more successful business than what you're trying to be in India.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: Why are you guys wasting your the prime part of your lives trying to do that?
45:28
SPEAKER_00: I think we heard it, but we didn't want to, we didn't want to pivot because no, no, it's happening in India, we'll make this worse, right?
45:34
SPEAKER_00: So that is the second part that I remember as part of the journey that's important to look at it, right?
45:38
SPEAKER_00: The third is the pivot itself, which is a big uncertain event for the company.
45:42
SPEAKER_00: And uh, we had to take a call to drop something which looked like success because the revenues are growing and others.
45:49
SPEAKER_00: And yet, in our minds, we never thought we'll be able to build a long-term in a 30-year view that eight years was worth sacrificing to some extent.
45:57
SPEAKER_00: And eight years is long.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: So lots of people felt we are illogical and irrational at that point, trying to take a call to go to a very small business which never existed and try to build it versus try to take this.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: I think that is the third big decision that I feel truly about, right?
46:14
SPEAKER_00: Fourth, I think Strini always comes back and tells me that by shrinking and making something more focused helps you rather than trying to do too many things.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: So when we started the new part of the business, the first thing we decided that we'll do only one country, which is US.
46:30
SPEAKER_00: We'll only do one product.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: We'll only do one cohort of customers that we'll go to.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: So by sharply focusing ourselves, not trying to do, oh, what happens doesn't fail.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: We said, okay, it doesn't matter.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: We'll put eggs, every egg in that basket.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: Make sure that we'll make it successful to an extent, till the point we know it's not successful, we'll move, but we'll do that actually.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: I think that was a critical stuff where we could just truly by folk, focus brings a lot of strength to the whole thing.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: Because everybody in the company is focusing on one thing, one geography, one time zone that we had to manage, one language to worry about, one standards to everything was like much more sharply focused.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: I think this was a big learning for us as both as three of us as founders, as well as for the company itself, how focus can make world-class companies get built completely.
47:17
SPEAKER_00: I think hindsight, that is easy.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh, at that point in time, it is scary because you're taking everything and putting it in one basket.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: Would it all fail?
47:24
SPEAKER_00: What happens?
47:25
SPEAKER_00: You'll be back to the drawing board to some extent.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: Should you do three things, two things, which you can do it?
47:30
SPEAKER_00: I think at that point in time, trimming it and saying we'll only do one thing in one geography, I think is a big decision that we made as a company, literally.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: You also wanted to add.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:40
SPEAKER_01: Actually, there was one technical decision which we took.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: For me, it looked like the biggest thing which changed the history of the company.
47:47
SPEAKER_01: So, in the first phase between 2008 and 2015, when we were building, we were using the cloud, but we had to install hardware in the and the they call it as hidden, the cable center where where the splicing happens.
48:01
SPEAKER_01: What Bosco was saying, the splitting of the satellite beam happens.
48:04
SPEAKER_01: And then later on, when we decided to pivot in 2016, we started with the Intel servers wherein we were putting the software.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: I still remember a lot of time where we have to take the box, go install in a in a location where they are transmitting the signal and all that.
48:20
SPEAKER_01: But at that time, one point in time, we just said, enough of this hardware mess.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: Let's only do it on the cloud, which is basically, as he explained, renting data centers in the cloud from public cloud companies like AWS and Google and doing it only in the cloud.
48:34
SPEAKER_01: We took that bet and we ran the 24 bar 7 running linear channel on that.
48:39
SPEAKER_01: And then we started pushing that to the customer.
48:41
SPEAKER_01: That one moment was the transformative moment for Amagi.
48:46
SPEAKER_01: That is how the cloud-based uh SaaS solution came in.
48:50
SPEAKER_01: So that is one that I could remember.
48:52
SPEAKER_01: And now the recent one, we recently took a goal saying that you know, we will bring in all the AI products uh from Amagi in the next two years, and we will make sure that our significant portion of our company's business runs uh through the AI softwares.
49:07
SPEAKER_06: What are the questions your investors and customers are asking regarding AI?
49:11
SPEAKER_00: So the way we present to people, and that's the way we at least are have high conviction internally, is when you're an infrastructure business like what we are today, for example, where we're running the gut of the systems for our customers, that is not a reasoning system.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: It's really a video fabric, a pipeline which is running ample versus an application business is very different.
49:33
SPEAKER_00: So the way we delineate to them is hey, we are a mission critical infrastructure which is sitting in the pump pipe there, and nobody's gonna go wipe code that into it because you don't want my tens of billions of dollars running on a wipe coded business, for example, right?
49:45
SPEAKER_00: So those are the ways where we think there is a and this is now providing us a huge opportunity because of the tectonic shifts.
49:53
SPEAKER_00: Now the transformation is happening on top of the infrastructure.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: We own the infrastructure.
49:58
SPEAKER_00: Now we have the right to win to building everything on top of the infrastructure for our customers.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the biggest value that we're able to drive value.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: And again, that's but again, there's a vantage point of one company the way we see it.
50:09
SPEAKER_00: But if I'm an investor, truly it's very hard.
50:12
SPEAKER_00: And I'm an investor myself personally.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: And when I look at a lot of the companies, I've it's very hard for me to feel comfortable.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: Is it a one-month away problem or is it a one year away that somebody is going to just be able to do that?
50:23
SPEAKER_06: Some examples, like some companies.
50:25
SPEAKER_00: See, lots of uh obviously lots of the SaaS companies which are in the application domain is a hard problem because will it be something that we can actually make them survive and grow?
50:35
SPEAKER_00: It's a hard problem.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: Truly, and not because it was all very sensibly good businesses uh 18 months back or 24 months back, and that looks like that's that can eventually be replicated in a few months or few weeks.
50:47
SPEAKER_00: The moat of these businesses and every business, including us, I think the transformation is going to happen.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: I feel that we uh there's a person called Hamilton Helmer who's written a book called Seven Powers of Strategy.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: And uh that's been a very timeless book to some extent.
51:03
SPEAKER_00: It's over the last 20 plus years.
51:05
SPEAKER_00: I use that as a framework through which you apply for every business.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: And because that's not changing.
51:10
SPEAKER_00: The the strategy of the businesses, and so sustainability has to come through some sort of business mode and not through just technology mode alone.
51:18
SPEAKER_00: Because there's nothing called a technology mode, and that's gone for everybody, right?
51:21
SPEAKER_00: It's become a zero-sum game for all of us.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: And when software becomes close to zero, then the modes are going to be the business modes and what you try to drive at.
51:30
SPEAKER_00: So that's my lens of even evaluating ourselves, our businesses, as well as any other business that I see today.
51:35
SPEAKER_06: So, how are you planning the next five years considering this AI?
51:40
SPEAKER_00: I think for us, I think it's uh two parts from a vantage point of where we are, for example.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: Our customers, like what I think Vidya pointed out, right, are seeing, hey, can I, where is my operating leverage because of AI?
51:51
SPEAKER_00: That's one big question for them.
51:53
SPEAKER_00: Where do I think I can now I have a specific business competency, which is content creation and storytelling.
52:00
SPEAKER_00: Can I make my storytelling better?
52:02
SPEAKER_00: Can I really bring it to new audiences, for example?
52:05
SPEAKER_00: So these are genuinely large opportunities for them and for us to leverage the whole AI as a capability to transform those capabilities.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: For example, right?
52:14
SPEAKER_00: And again, there are many, many such examples.
52:16
SPEAKER_00: Today, for example, we we had launched a product called NewsPulse.
52:19
SPEAKER_00: It's actually a four news channels.
52:22
SPEAKER_00: Now they want to target the Gen Z population.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Local news in the US is a 40 plus sort of age group viewership audience, for example.
52:32
SPEAKER_00: But over years they built billions of dollars of infrastructure and business to kind of get to cater to the community.
52:37
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: Now, but that's not the most attractive component.
52:40
SPEAKER_00: You want to be able to get to the next year of population audiences, for example.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: What do we do?
52:44
SPEAKER_00: We take their existing content that's already been, they have hundreds of millions of dollars of studios and production and stories coming in.
52:52
SPEAKER_00: We transform that into tweets and social sharing and others, for example, so that we're able to reach audiences in the devices that they actually do today, for example, not on the television sets of the past, but in the phones of the future that we're able to do.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: That's one example of where we're able to carry these customers to the new journey.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: And all of this is done through AI infrastructure and agentic infrastructure.
53:14
SPEAKER_00: And uh, we launched perhaps the the only agentic AI infrastructure software today, the in the in our business, for example, which helps our customers to do that.
53:23
SPEAKER_00: And again, this is one of a battery of new offerings that's going to come in.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we'll be done.
53:27
SPEAKER_00: Look at all of that right now.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: But the idea is that we're trying to build those journeys for our customers.
53:31
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
53:32
SPEAKER_06: And maybe after the podcast, I'll also discuss the startups that you evaluate.
53:36
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, absolutely.
53:37
SPEAKER_06: Very excited for that also.
53:39
SPEAKER_06: And Vidya's journey is even more interesting.
53:42
SPEAKER_06: So I would want to talk to Vidya.
53:45
SPEAKER_06: Uh, I think Anjali also talked about this in her LinkedIn post that Vidya is um not just one of the few women techies in India.
53:56
SPEAKER_06: Um there's also someone who has led the company throughout all these years and even took the company to public.
54:05
SPEAKER_06: And how you started, you worked in a global company also, been a 2x founder, now uh, you know, building a public company, leading it uh on the front.
54:16
SPEAKER_06: How has uh this journey been for you, Vilya?
54:20
SPEAKER_01: It's very fulfilling to say, as Basker told, I love the job that I do, and I do too with utmost passion.
54:27
SPEAKER_06: But Baskar has so many examples.
54:29
SPEAKER_06: There are so many men who have done it, right?
54:32
SPEAKER_06: But for you, when you were, you know, in that room uh where you only said that there are so many women investors you are seeing at one place, right?
54:40
SPEAKER_06: You don't know that we have so many women investors in India uh that you got to see uh in that room that day.
54:47
SPEAKER_06: So for us, we don't have those many uh examples.
54:52
SPEAKER_06: Examples.
54:53
SPEAKER_06: You are one of the very few examples.
54:55
SPEAKER_01: How do you uh feel about it?
54:57
SPEAKER_01: No, I I think I've told about this many times.
55:00
SPEAKER_01: See, in the role that I play when I even when we were building the software or whatever, gender should never come into play.
55:06
SPEAKER_01: If gender comes into play, it becomes very difficult to do.
55:09
SPEAKER_01: For me, the role models are all the you know, people whom we all looked at, like you know, Pete from the founders of Apple, founders of Microsoft, all those stories we have heard.
55:18
SPEAKER_01: And you know, we have seen the software that they've built, we have seen, we have studied computer science with utmost interest.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: So the interest was in what you can do, how can you build?
55:27
SPEAKER_01: And slowly it goes over time.
55:29
SPEAKER_01: I've been lucky and I've been fortunate to be associated with these guys uh to have built this company.
55:35
SPEAKER_00: No, no, foundation again, so two things that in my mind at least comes right.
55:39
SPEAKER_00: At least Srini and me never took Vidya as a oh women founder.
55:43
SPEAKER_00: We I don't think I think for me also personally, if you look at it when we built it from the trenches in the last 30 30 years we've been together.
55:50
SPEAKER_00: I think in the last few years is when we really thought, oh, women found us is something that's distinctly different.
55:55
SPEAKER_00: Because I I don't think we treat each other as oh, women, male, female.
55:59
SPEAKER_00: It actually doesn't gender as a good Vidya pointing out.
56:01
SPEAKER_00: We never had that in our in our and that's the way the company behaves in itself.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: So company behavior is like nobody thinks it's like ho.
56:08
SPEAKER_00: And um uh lots of people who join us sometimes don't even know that we are actually spouses.
56:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
56:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's a bit confirmed.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: And the name uh is very confusing, right?
56:19
SPEAKER_01: Because my last name says Srini Vasan.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, even if they think that they were spouses, they would think that Srini is mad.
56:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's been the one.
56:28
SPEAKER_06: So we kind of kept that but you intentionally uh kept it like this.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we should try people should work with you because of what you are, not because you know your so-and-so's husband or wife.
56:39
SPEAKER_01: So that's how we looked at it.
56:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that is one, and I have struggled not to say that uh this was easy with the kids, especially.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: I've struggled a lot, yeah.
56:48
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, juggling between guilt work and uh doing things for him.
56:53
SPEAKER_01: But I've been fortunate to have a fantastic family, especially my mother-in-law is staying with us and she helped us all through this time.
57:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, if it is not for her, we wouldn't have had both company and uh family uh, you know, growing up at the same time.
57:08
SPEAKER_01: It would have been extremely, extremely tough.
57:10
SPEAKER_01: So we have had a fantastic family support to have uh we to have been able to do this.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: And we've taken our kids to they come to office.
57:18
SPEAKER_00: So and we we were homeschooling both.
57:20
SPEAKER_06: But we don't have any other choice when both the parents are so middle school, they were homeschooled.
57:24
SPEAKER_00: Homeschooled, fully.
57:25
SPEAKER_00: During their middle school.
57:26
SPEAKER_00: So both of us were teachers.
57:28
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I actually I think I remember.
57:30
SPEAKER_00: I remember um I think I don't have a photograph yet.
57:33
SPEAKER_00: It's about when our kids were young.
57:35
SPEAKER_00: I think uh the one was I think uh eight eight, they're 18 months apart.
57:40
SPEAKER_00: So one was a young baby, and she was kind of obviously feeding.
57:43
SPEAKER_00: So she had taken brought both the both of them to office.
57:45
SPEAKER_00: So we are having a meeting in the office where everybody's sitting together, she's having the baby with her, and the other one is running around and we were having a meeting.
57:53
SPEAKER_00: So we've kind of been uh people also understand that hey, this is a work environment, and that's that's the reality of things.
57:58
SPEAKER_00: So kind of we've been very and some of our meeting room boards will have trigonometry questions sometimes because we bring them to office and actually, yeah, whenever there's a break, we teach them.
58:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
58:08
SPEAKER_01: They when they saw me juggling, they they really did it.
58:11
SPEAKER_01: But I think we as parents, we have done, I feel that at least we have done justice to both your education with whatever we could, yeah.
58:18
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think we have covered most of the questions I have here.
58:23
SPEAKER_06: Uh, we can start with the rapid fire round.
58:26
SPEAKER_06: This is the last round.
58:27
SPEAKER_06: We have already recorded for one hour.
58:28
SPEAKER_06: So I'll ask a question, you both can jump in and try to be as quick as possible.
58:34
SPEAKER_06: So I think uh Baskar has already talked about one book.
58:38
SPEAKER_06: So maybe another book or uh Vidya can talk about Built to Lost.
58:42
SPEAKER_06: Huh?
58:43
SPEAKER_06: Built to Lost.
58:44
SPEAKER_01: Built to Last.
58:45
SPEAKER_01: B U B-U-I-L-T.
58:46
SPEAKER_01: Built to last.
58:47
SPEAKER_01: Want to talk about the book?
58:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that talks about companies which are built to last for decades and ages and maybe hundreds of years.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: Jim Collins, by it's written by uh author Jim Collins.
58:58
SPEAKER_01: That is the first book one of our friends and earlier colleagues of our first company introduced us to.
59:05
SPEAKER_06: That's why the 30-year framework came out.
59:08
SPEAKER_06: That book is uh laid the foundation for where we are right now.
59:11
SPEAKER_06: And it it helped you guys, right?
59:12
SPEAKER_06: Because it's been a long journey.
59:14
SPEAKER_06: So you never thought that it is going too long because you were already prepared for the next 30 years.
59:19
SPEAKER_02: Correct, correct, correct.
59:20
SPEAKER_06: I'm sorry.
59:21
SPEAKER_06: And one founder in one company that you both admire.
59:27
SPEAKER_00: I think I have many actually, but uh anything specific?
59:31
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't have anything specific.
59:32
SPEAKER_06: You can name two, three founders.
59:34
SPEAKER_00: No, largely again, just to give you context.
59:36
SPEAKER_00: Maybe not uh today.
59:37
SPEAKER_00: When when uh uh we were in college, for example, right?
59:42
SPEAKER_00: So obviously Bill Gates was the the the kind of the the entrepreneur that we were looking forward to.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, Apple is not there at the point in time, so we were like ahead of that time.
59:50
SPEAKER_00: I remember seeing a byte magazine, those days no internet.
59:54
SPEAKER_00: Um BYTE was a magazine, byte magazine.
59:57
SPEAKER_00: So I remember getting to college and looking at that stuff where Windows, I think 3.0 was launched, not even 95 was launched, 3.0 was launched, and there's a big sheet where it actually done, and then Microsoft went public at the point in time.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_00: I think that was an aha moment for me personally, was wow.
1:00:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is a moment where, and uh and all of us loved software.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_00: So there's a I think the curiosity of wanting to build software always, even today, I think that's a common strand of wanting to build things as a builders, right?
1:00:24
SPEAKER_00: So that moment is what actually started saying, okay, we can be entrepreneurs, we can actually write software and actually build a and change the world was an opportunity.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_00: I think till date, I think that's been a that passion existed to see that sort of a journey.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_06: Any company uh where you really love the journey they had as as a team, not just the founder, like Amagi is one example, right?
1:00:51
SPEAKER_06: Um because uh Amagi is very uh Amagi is a great example for a fund like Neon also.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_06: Because when we talk to our investors who are outside India, we show them that Amagi has done it, right?
1:01:04
SPEAKER_06: Mo Engage has done it, Capillary has done it, Unicommerce has done it.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_06: And this is just the beginning because it took a lot of time for these guys, but now that the younger founders have these examples, correct, have these playbooks for them, the this number will multiply only, right?
1:01:20
SPEAKER_00: Correct, correct, true, true, true.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_00: Now I think see overall think this is like uh I think when uh Elon Musk actually brought the rocket back and actually brought it to the ground again as a reusable rocket, till that point, uh people are not convinced that it'll ever be done.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_00: But now we're seeing Blue Origin doing it.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure every founder now today in that particular sector.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_00: So always I think the first thing is to kind of go through that certainty of at some point and saying it's doable.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah from India, we can build it for the world.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_00: I think that once some one person crosses the journey, yeah, I think it's a flood that we can actually create it.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I'm seeing all the new founders have.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_00: I really find it very exciting because of the uh again, I'm I travel a lot and I'm seeing uh other parts of the globe and other stuff.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_00: The excitement, the passion, and more importantly, the brashness and the confidence that Indian entrepreneurs have today, I think is something that I can only see in the valley.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_00: Beyond that, you don't see it anywhere else.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the biggest change.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: The ability to say, let's go hate for the fans and play it big.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, the access to capital and access to resources existed, which didn't exist.
1:02:23
SPEAKER_00: When we started in 2000, there was nobody to fund any of our companies.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_00: There's no venture capital.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_00: So we had to self-fund the first company fully, literally, right?
1:02:31
SPEAKER_00: So versus now, I think that's a big, big change.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's going to change the country dramatically.
1:02:38
SPEAKER_06: And one single most counterintuitive thing you have learned about the US market.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_06: Like because you guys were selling to India market, and at one point in time you decided that you would just focus on India market, uh, US market.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: I felt the ability to take bets and try new things.
1:02:59
SPEAKER_00: Um there's no conservatism.
1:03:01
SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of people who'd say, okay, let's go bet this, let's figure it out.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_00: And it's a new company, new technology, new idea that they want to try.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_00: I will try it.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_00: That level of openness of trying new things uh is not something that I've seen in India easily.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that everybody's like that, but India businesses, for example, because it was a B2B that we were running, for example, businesses are very conservative in terms of adopting new things and wanting to try new things.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's changed a lot over the last 10 years.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: But when when we went to the US, the most refreshing thing was people are actually lapping up the ideas that we were telling them, saying, hey, when we tell them, they'll say, okay, wow, let's try it.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_00: We'd like to look at it and then pay for it as well, right?
1:03:43
SPEAKER_00: I think that was a big aha moment for me, at least personally.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_06: And the paying capacity also.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: Paying capacity to really say, okay, let's take a bet because this looks interesting.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_06: They still um see the uh pricing over the value that they would be getting, right?
1:03:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, see again, like it's also about how we are wired economically.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_00: If you look at it, is in India we we value money more than time.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_06: But do you see that changing?
1:04:07
SPEAKER_00: It's changing in the younger folks, but not in the larger businesses yet.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we are valuing money more than time.
1:04:15
SPEAKER_00: And uh the vantage point that I've seen and learned from the US is that time is more valuable than money, to some extent.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's a big change that I see.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_06: It's it'll take some time.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: It'll take some time, but I think the younger folks understand it, get it.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I'm having a lot of challenge conversations, and where we are in our lives, for example, I feel money more than that is time is really, really valuable.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I'm kind of trying to count every minute that I'm saying, hey, where am I spending my time?
1:04:41
SPEAKER_00: Because that's actually more valuable than uh the money, right?
1:04:44
SPEAKER_00: Beyond a point, it doesn't make sense, right?
1:04:46
SPEAKER_01: So you want to add something?
1:04:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, one counterintuitive thing I had in the US with this business is that I knew, I mean, yes, I after some time when uh Srinese presence, we understood that yes, if you show the commitment, people will buy.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_01: But then when he was asking for the local team, I thought that it's global software, it's a SaaS software, everything can be supported from here.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_01: Why can't you do it?
1:05:10
SPEAKER_01: I just didn't understand that you know the nuances of mission critical software, yeah, of how media is treated.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_01: That it took me some time to understand.
1:05:19
SPEAKER_00: The human touch was needed, independent of even if it's uh internet-based software delivery, the human touch in an enterprise was something that I don't think we anticipated.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_00: That's what issues.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_06: The most important was one founder had to move.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_06: That is something you guys already uh did, right?
1:05:35
SPEAKER_06: And the second most was having a local team also.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_06: Local team.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: Having a local team.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: I just didn't understand.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_01: It's software, it's running on the cloud, and you can access it through a website.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_01: So, what's the problem?
1:05:45
SPEAKER_01: Kind of thing.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: The naivety I had until I realized that media requires that support.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_06: I think all businesses, not just media, I'm sure any enterprise will be connected.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_06: And you both have a history of moving.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_06: Long before the market is ready, right?
1:06:02
SPEAKER_06: Whether it was Bluetooth in 2000, Cloud TV in 2008, what is that one book or technical paper or any post movie that fundamentally shifted how you're thinking about the next three years of Amagi, let's say?
1:06:20
SPEAKER_06: How you always make sure that you're ahead of the curve.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: So I helps you guys.
1:06:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I follow Andrew Ing's uh uh Andrew Ng, or Andrew Ng he's called.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_01: Basically, he's uh uh he runs a company called deepmind.ai and uh he's uh you should say pioneer in AI technologies.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean I follow uh the blogs that he writes, the the documents he creates, and uh Andrew Karpathi also.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_01: We look at it in detail.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_01: And some of those the foundational things which were done with transformers and uh you know um the ability of large language models and fundamental video models that we saw are the ones which made us feel that you know AI is a transformation.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: Andrew NJ often calls AI is electricity, it's AI is the new electricity.
1:07:05
SPEAKER_01: What can you do with the new electricity?
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: Is what you should see.
1:07:07
SPEAKER_01: I and I kept that to my heart saying that it's a new electricity which is available to you now.
1:07:12
SPEAKER_01: Let's see what new applications can be built.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm uh I'm I'm uh culprit of I've always been a culprit of always being ahead of what it is.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_00: Whenever I speak any idea in the company, people say Basker's idea, okay, two years later, we'll see.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_00: We don't need to solve it right now.
1:07:32
SPEAKER_00: So that's been the challenge for me personally.
1:07:34
SPEAKER_01: Is so at one point we I had to tell him like every two days he will draw some new PowerPoint, a new presentation, right?
1:07:40
SPEAKER_01: And say let's work on this.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_01: So we have to tell him, stop, we are not able to do at the pace at which you're thinking.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_06: So after um so many years of building a Magi and after the successful IP you guys had, what keeps you both ambitious?
1:07:56
SPEAKER_06: Because you are you both are so full of energy and very excited that the other kid would also leave the house, you'll have more time, more bandwidth.
1:08:05
SPEAKER_06: And obviously, you guys are so excited about the next phase of Amagi, right?
1:08:10
SPEAKER_01: So today morning he was talking about it.
1:08:12
SPEAKER_01: Uh actually, we wanted to work on three things.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_01: He was just telling.
1:08:16
SPEAKER_01: So we in India, especially for India, right?
1:08:19
SPEAKER_01: Education.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: What can you do with education?
1:08:22
SPEAKER_01: What can you do with health?
1:08:23
SPEAKER_01: What can you do with food?
1:08:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, can we contribute in some way towards this before the end of our lives?
1:08:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: This is what we were thinking.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, we wanted to give get free education, basically give somehow enable people to get free education.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_01: That is uh one of the goals.
1:08:40
SPEAKER_01: The second one is with food, he's working on uh he invested in um some companies, and we are trying to get healthy organic food uh grown in India.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_01: At scale, at scale, at scale, healthy organic uh you know, agriculture at scale in India.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_01: So that's what we are working on.
1:08:57
SPEAKER_01: The third one, um, with respect to health, uh, we want to do something, and that's why he's uh studying and he's like learning biology to how can you marry biology and computer science and build something which is which can change the lives of Indian uh people?
1:09:12
SPEAKER_01: So that's what uh we are looking at, and that's what is actually exciting.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_01: In fact, today morning I was telling him, hey, these guys are now no longer going to be here.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_01: We'll get more time, let's do more things.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_01: I hope they don't see this part of the podcast.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_02: They know it.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
1:09:29
SPEAKER_06: What's that one belief you hold about media technology that most people in the industry would disagree with?
1:09:36
SPEAKER_00: The Peter Thiel question.
1:09:39
SPEAKER_00: No, no, we've always been contra to the business.
1:09:41
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you look at it, every time we've come with what's called a counter-intuitive approach to this whole business.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_00: I remember 2016-17 when we went to the show and uh we're showing cloud play out.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_00: I remember a competition, one of the one of the largest uh broadcast technology companies.
1:09:59
SPEAKER_00: I would name them here, but I remember a lot of those people were walking around.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: We were a small booth sitting in that uh in a show, for example.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_00: They said, What are you guys talking about?
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: Cloud play out?
1:10:09
SPEAKER_00: And they were the largest leaders.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_00: They said, nobody moves to the cloud, uh, folks.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_00: You guys said that too.
1:10:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they said, you guys are naive.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_00: You don't even know what it is all about, right?
1:10:17
SPEAKER_00: So that's that's why the journey started.
1:10:19
SPEAKER_00: We said, no, no, no, we'll see, figure it out.
1:10:21
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, then they this is like what I think the Mahatma Gandhi quote that you first they laugh at you.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, then they start start kind of fighting with you, and eventually you go, they're scared about it and then you win, right?
1:10:33
SPEAKER_00: So that's sort of the journey that we've gone through, through this process.
1:10:36
SPEAKER_00: So for me, I think we've always taken a counterposition in the industry.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_00: Whenever something is changing, we are kind of ahead of the change.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: And uh and we try to go back and actually convince our customers that the change is going to happen.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_00: First time people didn't believe us, but now we have some sort of credibility in the market to say, okay, oh, these people.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_00: So, in fact, this time people said, Okay, what is innovative?
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: What are you bringing to the table?
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what is new?
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: I think that has been a now a practice at Amagi that people are expecting us to bring something innovative and to change the industry a bit, right?
1:11:06
SPEAKER_06: So uh just one thing, one example, if you can share.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_00: So if you look at it, uh the truth of that cloud will become the way of how you operate television.
1:11:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nobody believed it.
1:11:20
SPEAKER_00: The whole industry was against it.
1:11:22
SPEAKER_00: There was not even a market study on that, fundamentally.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_00: As I told you, competition didn't believe.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_00: Our customers didn't believe for themselves that they will ever move to the cloud, for example.
1:11:32
SPEAKER_00: So that was a truth that I think we believed strongly, which no industry believed it in those days, for example.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_00: As we progressing, if you look at the next 10 years, for example, the challenge in all of these industries is people, the the change that AI is bringing in.
1:11:48
SPEAKER_00: I don't think people understand the magnitude of the change that's happening.
1:11:55
SPEAKER_00: And where these are exponential changes.
1:11:58
SPEAKER_00: Like human minds cannot take exponential changes.
1:12:01
SPEAKER_00: I am seeing our customers and the ecosystem again at a place where they're underestimating the change that's in front of us.
1:12:10
SPEAKER_00: Rather than trying to, they're hearing a lot of AI.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_00: They don't know what it means for their lifestyles, businesses, and their careers and everybody else.
1:12:19
SPEAKER_00: But they're not reacting to it.
1:12:21
SPEAKER_00: They think it will go away or wish away that sometimes this is yet another automation that will happen and life will move on.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_00: Versus what I see in our lifetimes, this tectonic change can be transforming everybody and everything, right?
1:12:36
SPEAKER_00: Not to be fearful about it, but be able to embrace it in the best way possible.
1:12:43
SPEAKER_06: As another massive opportunity that you saw that time.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_00: Exactly, exactly.
1:12:48
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think uh the industry is at a point where they are actually thinking that this is this change is tectonic.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_00: They think it's an incremental, yes, it's a great technology change.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_00: They're seeing it's a technology change.
1:12:59
SPEAKER_00: I see it as almost a human-scale change that's happening, which means the existence of these businesses in the way they exist might be a challenge in itself.
1:13:10
SPEAKER_00: So there's going to be several trillions of dollars of businesses which will transform for good or bad, it's not a different problem, but at least it'll transform.
1:13:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't think that realization is sunk in enough for these businesses to understand the change.
1:13:23
SPEAKER_06: So a lot of young startups, like how young Amagi was, would be challenging a lot of giants.
1:13:29
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely standing right in front of them.
1:13:31
SPEAKER_00: And again, some I so I went to some of the largest studios right now, right?
1:13:35
SPEAKER_00: Studios in uh Hollywood.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: So I was actually walking in this time, and my I remember going there five years back and feeling in awe with that studio.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_00: Wow, what a big studio, what they've built, how these movies and Hollywood movies are getting created.
1:13:49
SPEAKER_00: The fun of looking at it was like very exciting.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: When I went this time, I was looking at it.
1:13:54
SPEAKER_00: Wow, this is all going to become dinosaur because content is going to be created by AI.
1:13:59
SPEAKER_00: What the what will happen to these studios?
1:14:02
SPEAKER_00: What happens to all these large infrastructure, the people working there, the whole things that's happening, for example.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_00: So this the emotion was very different when I walked in this time to the studios to see that, right?
1:14:12
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think people there were like realizing the change that's really in front of us.
1:14:17
SPEAKER_00: The tsunami is going to be massive.
1:14:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and uh that that's that's what I feel.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_06: Um this is for you, Vidya.
1:14:27
SPEAKER_06: You founded your first startup when you were 23, right?
1:14:30
SPEAKER_06: Uh, what do you know um now that you wish somebody had told you?
1:14:35
SPEAKER_06: Like about life, maybe.
1:14:41
SPEAKER_01: Earlier, I used to be very impatient.
1:14:43
SPEAKER_01: To do all of these patience is very, very, very important.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_01: While you can have bias for action, yeah, just because you have the bias, it doesn't mean the other person is going to reciprocate.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_01: So that is something that I learned over time.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_01: But is it a good thing or a bad thing?
1:14:57
SPEAKER_06: No, basically maybe you had high bias for action, that's why you could, you know, take those.
1:15:01
SPEAKER_01: No, no, basically, what I'm trying to say is that things take time and uh you need to keep trying.
1:15:08
SPEAKER_01: And uh at the same time, there is a nuance, like sometimes it's not like believe in yourself, but also have faith in the process.
1:15:17
SPEAKER_06: Some example didn't exist, what would have happened to the broadcast industry?
1:15:27
SPEAKER_00: I think we at least accelerated the trend, is my feeling.
1:15:30
SPEAKER_00: I I'm not saying that we are so arrogant to say, oh, cloud do not happen, but I'm sure we were a big accelerator to this industry in some sense, right?
1:15:40
SPEAKER_06: And the last question is what's the biggest mistake you have made at Amagi that you have never talked about publicly?
1:15:49
SPEAKER_00: We've done tons of mistakes.
1:15:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to think about it.
1:15:51
SPEAKER_06: But you can share that you have not talked about.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, we have many, many things, right?
1:15:54
SPEAKER_00: So um I think uh if we look at it, choosing India was in some sense.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_00: At that point in time, there was a lot of opportunities.
1:16:02
SPEAKER_00: We had we had see the first company was actually international, fully.
1:16:05
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:16:06
SPEAKER_00: So by contriving ourselves to a choice of building a technology company in India was, I think, in a decision, hindsight could be said, hey, why did you take a very bull-headed decision to only do it in India?
1:16:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:16:18
SPEAKER_00: Right at that point in time, was and streaming was not happening, uh, internet was not there.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_00: We were taking a bet which was kind of very odd bet for what we were trying to do.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_00: I think that in some sense is uh hindsight, if you look at it, is a mistake.
1:16:31
SPEAKER_01: But you know in a larger arc of what we see, for example, I don't think if we because of what we did was what we could do this, because we learned the I always used to tell him that because of the kind of effort that we have done in India when we went to international, any any change, anything that happened.
1:16:49
SPEAKER_06: Pressure tested, we were it is pressure tested.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_01: Seriously, I'm saying, even now, I used to tell even the new uh product that we released, new spurse.
1:16:56
SPEAKER_01: I was saying that I'll go and find one Indian customer.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is very important.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_00: So it'll battle test you a lot.
1:17:03
SPEAKER_01: It can battle test it.
1:17:04
SPEAKER_00: So, in that sense, that I felt because why should we have spent the eight years doing that is a different thing.
1:17:10
SPEAKER_00: But that but again, in the in its foundation, it happens, and then we just took it by the chin and moved on in life.
1:17:16
SPEAKER_06: But any advice because you guys also building in vertical uh space, any advice you would go uh give to because a lot of our uh listeners are founders or you know aspiring founders, anyone who is thinking of building in AI or still in a vertical AI or still in very early stage, any advice you would want to give who has just started in Bangalore, planning to move to Bayer, uh planning to sell to US market or people who have some customers in India.
1:17:45
SPEAKER_06: And sometimes when you get traction in India, you get you know attach.
1:17:50
SPEAKER_06: And uh and if it is the traction is coming inbound, you want to you know just uh be at it, right?
1:17:57
SPEAKER_06: That maybe 10 more customers, 10 more customers, and you're just giving them demos and the loop is not ending, you're correct.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_06: Not preparing yourself for US market, right?
1:18:07
SPEAKER_06: So, how to do both or leave everything uh and just focus on US.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_06: Once you have enough fraction in US, then focus on India market.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_00: There's no one formula that I would try to record because depending on the very situation of the companies and where they are, right?
1:18:21
SPEAKER_00: The only way I think um I've seen or strived for clarity is by saying, let's take a slightly long-term view of where we would imagine, if we're imagining the future in our minds, that would allow us to kind of take the right decisions in the present.
1:18:38
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I feel that we don't.
1:18:40
SPEAKER_00: So the first thing I ask my teams is, what do you think will be next April?
1:18:44
SPEAKER_00: Let's close our eyes and say, what would we term is a good success for ourselves as individuals, not as a company or other individuals?
1:18:51
SPEAKER_00: Do we will we feel fulfilled at that point in time for something that we did for the last 12 months?
1:18:56
SPEAKER_00: That allows us to have some sort of clarity to come back saying, you know what, is this path going to take me there?
1:19:02
SPEAKER_00: Or should I do something else which will actually take me there rather than actually going the barking the same tree and then trying to do that?
1:19:08
SPEAKER_00: That's been sort of a way to kind of drive a lot more clarity in our minds in terms of what we want to do.
1:19:15
SPEAKER_00: The other part is the slippery slope is every entrepreneur' tenacity matters.
1:19:23
SPEAKER_00: And uh I sometimes I feel there are a lot of impatience in some sense.
1:19:27
SPEAKER_00: So I see quite a bit of founders who say, you know what, they've raised capital, they've raised things, but they feel okay, it's not working, and let me drop it and go do something else, for example.
1:19:36
SPEAKER_00: There is a balance between when would you want to pivot out of something versus how tenacious are you in that sense?
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: It's a very, very thin balance.
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: One side looks like stupidity, and the other side looks like uh an epiphany that you have changed, right?
1:19:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:50
SPEAKER_00: So you need to, that is something always is a very hard problem, too.
1:19:53
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you don't pivot and you continue it like a stuff that's also bad.
1:19:57
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_06: Sometimes you're not tenacious.
1:19:59
SPEAKER_06: Give that time and then things work out.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_00: Correct, correct, correct.
1:20:02
SPEAKER_00: I think that is a very tricky sort of an environment for founders.
1:20:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's where I think external depends company to company, like company to turn.
1:20:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and external mentorship sometimes helps to see one of the things is entrepreneurs get into an echo chamber for themselves.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_00: And they are kind of fighting the battle every day and then things like that.
1:20:19
SPEAKER_00: That's where I think boards and investors and uh as an external party can be really good advisors, not because they know the business, because they're outside the business.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_00: The emotions are not connected to the business.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_00: Where you're able to bring very unemotional thought process and get things done.
1:20:35
SPEAKER_00: Where entrepreneurs can have a different point of view, albeit sometimes against what you think, but at least you know there is other counterpoints that you might want to consider.
1:20:45
SPEAKER_00: I think those are ways to kind of take decisions rather than uh, and I'm not saying always the external party is right or the entrepreneurs right, but at least you are able to kind of get viewpoints and get things done.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_06: Very exciting.
1:20:58
SPEAKER_06: And what are your biggest dreams?
1:21:01
SPEAKER_00: Because I think we've I truly believe I think we've had a very fortunate life.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_00: I think uh from where we all came from and what it is.
1:21:09
SPEAKER_00: For me, it's like uh I think every day for for us has been a I think uh I I I prioritize happiness more than anything else in life.
1:21:17
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't at every point in time being happy is so important for me than um any other thing.
1:21:23
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter.
1:21:23
SPEAKER_00: So success for me is a measure of what are we doing today.
1:21:27
SPEAKER_00: Am I happy today?
1:21:28
SPEAKER_00: And that's the only way kind of measured life till them.
1:21:31
SPEAKER_00: To that extent, I would think that I think I've been extremely fortunate to be where it is.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_00: And uh and this is the way I kind of uh imagine myself is if I'm not there tomorrow.
1:21:41
SPEAKER_00: I think it's been a fulfilling journey at any point in time.
1:21:44
SPEAKER_00: So that's the way I see it.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_00: Nothing to look forward to, yeah, but there's a lot of exciting things to do, but uh that's it's not about being full fulfilling as today.
1:21:53
SPEAKER_00: I think it's today is really fulfilling.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_00: I think what what we've done and what we could potentially obviously, potential always exists in terms of what we can do.
1:21:59
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, thank you so much, both of you.
1:22:03
SPEAKER_06: I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion.
1:22:05
SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
1:22:06
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
1:22:07
SPEAKER_06: Learned a lot of things, saw the whole media industry from a different lens today, and got to live the whole journey of Maggie in just last minute of our.
1:22:18
SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much for your time.
1:22:20
SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much.
1:22:20
SPEAKER_03: Enjoy this.