Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Karthik Sundaram on Approaching Life as a Collection of Journeys (#009)

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Karthik Sundaram on Approaching Life as a Collection of Journeys (#009) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: I start my day with ambiguous.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: I have not closed that I stuck my day is going to look like.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I enjoyed that.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: If I know that I have a calendar, then I then think set on it.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Over to my conversation with Kartik.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Kartik.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for uh taking time and uh joining me on this Contraminds podcast.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: So as I was preparing for this interview, Kartik, I couldn't uh help but notice that you've taken multiple risks, various leaps in your career from being an engineer to being an advertising professional to being a designer to be a content uh specialist to actually running probably one of the most reputed firms in B2B marketing in Silicon Valley.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, as I talk about it, I want to first know what was your upbringing like?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: How did you decide to become an engineer?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how did you get motivated to really look at some interesting takeoffs in your career?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, can you talk about that a bit?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Samin.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for asking me to be on this uh podcast.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: My um upbringing was um a combination of where my father was in the Air Force, my mother was uh school uh uh math teacher in the uh Kendri Vidal A system.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: So um it was a pretty, I would say semi-conservative family.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: We uh we came from Chennai, we came from Tamil Nadu, very conservatively grown parents, but exposure of their careers uh helped us look at things differently all the time.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my biggest influence has been my uh mother, my grandmother, and my aunt, right?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So uh my family was very powerful.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: They were very they were a group of very empowered women, very, very forward-thinking people who believed that the the biggest achievement in life is to have multiple journeys without wondering or worrying about the destination, right?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that was very early on, uh, part of both my sister and my psyche, if you will.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that has helped me be where I am today.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: So when you really ask me that I've taken multiple risks, I think I want to read the reword that as I've taken multiple journeys, right?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, the destination isn't as important as the journey.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why if you look at my LinkedIn, you probably see a whole host of logos out there that I'm starting up.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the goal in that for me is to just experiment, see where it is, take it to completion, right?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the biggest things in life is when you start something, you want to see it completed.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, seeing it completed doesn't necessarily mean that that has to be successful, it could be a failure too, right?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But to seeing it to a completion to me is an achievement by itself.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the amount of learning that I get in that is you know unheard of, it's off the charts.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one reason why I'm constantly experimenting.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: That is just how I am as of today.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: So uh school was pretty boring.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I got into a lot of trouble.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um had to salvage me out many, many, many times, much to her embarrassment.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, for for for a family that's in Chennai and you're done your 12th, there were only two or three options in those days.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: You do either engineering or you go to law school, which was very rare, or you go to medical, which I had no interest in, or you go do the traditional BCOM or do physics math, whatever you want to do at that point in time.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I joined engineering, I thoroughly enjoyed the college.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Four years was a lot of fun.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things being in a semi-rural area like Kanamlay is that you don't necessarily stay there most of the time, right?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody, especially city slickers like uh us, typically came back to Chennai almost every weekend.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I had my roommate who used to launder his clothes every week and come back only with five sets of clothes for the day a week, right?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So um so one thing I discovered other than you know the the traditional engineering was you know, there was a dental school, there was a medical school, and a lot of us used to travel together on the trains and buses back and forth between Chennai and Chidamburam.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we got into you know going out for debate competitions, all these cultural events and so on and so forth, so much so that um you know I I pretty much paid for most of my engineering fees winning competitions out there.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and then I uh you know, I then you get onto what I call the pig bacon machine, which is basically you join a caterpillar or you join Hundastan Motors, and that was that I think was a double-edged sword.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And one way it gave me a lot of exposure on engineering, and I went into so I was in the whole vendor development space where you had to go develop new vendors to build new components, and it was amazing.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've seen um you know uh metal stamping machines where the stamping die was actually powered by bricks, not even by steam or fire or any one of them.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: There were actually bricks that they would load and it will fall physically.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: That was it was as rudimentary as that, but the end product was fantastic, right?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I discovered this whole concept of end delivery being you know the only outcome that you're measured on very early on in life, right?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: So people measure you only on what you produce, they don't care about what journey you went through to produce that.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And on the other hand, getting on a bus at 6:30 in the morning and going to office was not my style at all.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like this doesn't work for me.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so one of my seniors had gone to this institute called the National Institute of Design out of engineering.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um he right now works in the East Coast in Bank of America and all of that.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he had he had come back from the interview, and uh when I was in third year, he was in the fourth year, and he was like super excited about this.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Hey, there's this institute in Amdabad, it's like beautiful and all that.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh that kind of remained in my head for a long time.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking, you know, how do engineers, what is design?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was nothing, no books, nothing to even go read about what design was all about.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was really, really early days to even think of design as a career, right?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: The exposure of design in Tamil Nadu was zero, I would say that, right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because NID being in Amdabad, you know, there were a lot of uh, I mean, for some reason, there were a lot of Kerolites, Bengalis, and of course Delhi Bombay Amdabad people who all knew about NID.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Tamil Nadu was completely unexposed to the concept of design at that point.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, there were two or three options, right?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: One was obviously you apply to go abroad and study, you apply to the IAMs, and then you applied to whatever you want to do, or you do an MS in engineering, and I wasn't very keen on doing any of those at that point, so I said, why not apply to NIDE?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think was one of the best decisions I made in life, because uh, one, we had an amazing set of faculty at that point in time.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, right from the dean, if you will, all the way down to some of the junior most faculty.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: They were all people who were really committed to design, they were all graduates of NID.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that whole culture of you know, doing and learning versus um measuring on outcome was the core of core philosophy of the institute, right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you were trained to do, you were trained to learn.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And as an engineer, it was very hard for me to go there and figure out that you don't need to produce anything, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: As long as you learn and you show them that you're learned, you're good.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, obviously I was I sucked at art, I sucked at drawing, I sucked at a lot of things, but eventually I learned how the system worked and started exploring more and more.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the best things that they had was a fantastic library.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in in 1990s, this is I'm talking about early 90s, 91, 92, when you know shipping in books was expensive.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: We used to have these international design magazines that I used to like literally crave for every month, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I used to mark it by the day on which the mail should come, and uh you go pick up the first copy, and you know, the smell of printed ink was still fresh and on your hands, and you don't have those joys these days given that everything is digital at this point.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: But so um I kept, you know, I kept reading, I kept reading, I kept reading, my mind was blown, right?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was exposed to concepts of cognitive psychology, I was exposed to ethnography, I was exposed to a whole bunch of things that were completely alien to an engineer.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me, uh Karthik, how was NID in the 80s and how was the teaching methodology different from engineering?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Which now, when you look back, what teaching methodology methodologies would help?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Say, if you were in engineering, would inspire somebody like you?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because you are somebody who's an engineer-turned designer.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look at engineering, uh, I think there's a very big component of UX UI, which was not even there in those days.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, therefore, what do you think was the teaching methods different there?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: How did it motivate you?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you really use that in say the making engineering more interesting?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Great question, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: So NID at that time, and this is all my time, so I have um I haven't been into NID after that.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: NID always had this system of guides, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have a teacher, you had a guide for a subject, like say rendering or perspective, you had a guide, and then the guide would come and sort of show you the path to an exploration and say, go explore.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: His all the participation would be probably the first day of the.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we had rendering would be for like two weeks, right?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Every day you just sit and you render, you don't do anything else.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like eight hours split into eight classes each for an hour and lunch break and all of that.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: So you had only one faculty, uh, or you had only one guide, and they would guide you and say, okay, these are things that you need to do.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then you go refer books, you go do your own journey, and as you build your journey, you go back to them every time and say, Hey, this is where I am.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they'd give you suggestions, they'd give you feedback, and they'd they'd let you fail all the time, right?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Their biggest point of intervention in your journey is to help you figure out where you're uh not doing the right thing, and then do the right thing from there, right?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about correcting you or and then there's no brain dump.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Engineering was very books, right?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: You you go through the books, there's very little laboratories, those labs were old and cantankerous, and half the time the machines wouldn't work, and then you had some lab assistant, and uh that was it.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: So there was no connection between your hands, your brains, and your subject in front of you.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Then I ideally, like say a mechanical engineer, right, today should be sent to a motorcycle repair shop down his street, ask them to strip his motorcycle down and rebuild it all over again in less than three weeks.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's when he'll truly learn what's an engine, what's a transmission, what's gearbox, what's you know, brakes, what are chains and drive systems, what are gas tanks, and how does fuel economy work?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: All that was just theory.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: What would you do with that theory when you can't apply it in real life?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: So when people come out, they are like zombies.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: You their head is filled with books, and they're going to figure out zero connection.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then the best part with NID was the material labs was open, the physics labs, you can go and build a furniture, you could you can go build a chair for all they care.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: As long as you are able to connect it to why you are doing it and what the journey is all about, right?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that was the beauty of NID in the sense that one, exploration was the key.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And two, your learning from the journey was more key than the outcome of the journey.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: They don't care about the outcome, right?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that really set my brain in a buzz, right?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And as luck would have it, I uh in the in my final year, uh I just on a BIM wrote to a design firm in the US and said, Hey, I saw one of your products, I'm very interested in this, and I'd like to come and work with you.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And very graciously, they just sent back saying, What do you want to do?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And this is in '93.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Everything was done by airmail.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: So your average speed of responses was like three weeks, right?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I had no clue what I was going to do.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: I just said, I want to come there and I want to work.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, Yeah, come on over and work.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And they sent me my uh, you know, whatever letters and stuff like that.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh next thing I knew, I was flying out to the US.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, as a student, most often what you really see is you want clarity about what you want to do next.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: But in real life and work, you really don't have clarity about what's going to happen.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, in this case, what you did, you uh you know, you went to fitch, you start to you know look at a phone company called Nokia.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: You really don't know, you do an internship there, correct?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, so clearly there was lack of there was ambiguity, if I were to call it, in what you wanted to do, and you wanted to explore how important is this kind of a discovery by you know figuring it out?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: How important it is for a student to ensure that he has a passion and purpose later in his life?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, another great question, right?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: So ambiguity is absolutely the most necessary element in a student's psyche, right?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: If a student student is given a path and said, go follow this, he's not committed to that path because he's only been asked to do something which is follow that path.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna, he or she is gonna say, Yeah, okay, I'll follow the path, and the outcome is the outcome.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas you say, go discover the path the first time, then you're making him or her responsible for it.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Then the path becomes more important than where it leads to.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Even today, I mean, the this this is at 53 years old running a multimillion dollar company, multiple startups, I've helped you know three, four startups into very successful exits, taken two companies into an IPO situation.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I start my day with ambiguity.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: I have no clue what the rest of my day is going to look like.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I enjoy that.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: If I know that I have a calendar and there are 10 things set on it, I hate that day because I've got to sit down and commit to that calendar, and that just is a nightmare for me.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is one way of operations.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: People may say, hey, that is so disorganized, that is, you know, yeah, that's my life.
• 18:38
  unknown: Yeah.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, uh, the other thing I wanted to talk to you, which caught my attention and uh was your blog post in uh the 25 years of completing uh your graduation from Anamala University, where you wrote about this thing called stepping sideways to move forward.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it was it was beautifully written, and you really ask questions to your own classmates saying, Did you do anything different?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how important is that for somebody to succeed in life?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's a very beautifully written article, and we're going to definitely put it in the uh show notes in the podcast.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how important was it?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because many a times people just, you know, live by the day, live by the task.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is something that caught my attention.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And why do you think that was so important?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And why did you ask those questions?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Three key things, right?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh after 25 years, when I met a lot of my classmates, I would say, at least in the mechanical engineering division, 90% of them had switched over to becoming a SAP consultant.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: 90% of them, right?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And out of them, 20% were without a job.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: They were between consulting gigs, you know.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh another 20% of them were staffing guys who were just doing body shop exercise and so on and so forth.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Your four-year mechanical engineering degree was not put to use.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're not going to use any bit of mechanical engineering in going and coding an SAP ecosystem into place.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not that that's a bad thing.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: All I'm saying is, you know, your four-year degree was was done.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's its life cycle was over.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you have stepped sideways, right?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: You or for them, that was not even stepping sideways.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: They stepped into a completely different zone and carving themselves out.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: More importantly, I think the way I would put it is they went with the flow.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, that's really what it is.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: It just it just is not about what I want to do, but it's just going with the flow, right?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm really surprised when you tell me 20% didn't even have a job.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I can tell you there are enough people here who have who are in their 50s who came in, you know, on degrees of various kinds, and they are finding themselves very, very irrelevant out here because out uh uh I mean even in India, I'm thinking you gotta be constantly upgrading your skill sets and doing a bunch of things to learn new things all the time, right?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't do that and you take things as it comes along, then you gotta accept what what you get.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Which was what happened with them.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: That they said, oh, mechanical engineering, I'm not gonna do this.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Software guys are making more money than I'm doing that.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: So switch to switch to software, find that you know there are other sharpshooters out there who can eat you for breakfast and go along.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Then you're you got to accept what you get at that point in time.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um the challenge for all of them, like like you said, not even.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Going with the flow, they made those choices either deliberately or by force, and they have to live those choices.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's no other choice.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very difficult to live a life where there are no choices.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's the most degrading element in a human's life that you wake up every day and you say, Oh shit, I gotta go do this all over again today.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Your tasks are set, your goals are set, your outcomes are set.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no real excitement in that.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Which is where I feel that building yourself the ability to explore every day is what keeps you alive.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: When I go in into client meetings these days and I look at how they struggle to either articulate their stories or figure out their sales channels and all of that, it seems very, very obvious to me where they are missing those key triggers of how to build their own marketing.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now you see how my engineering skills, my design thinking skills.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the most abused words in today's dictionary is design thinking, right?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at LinkedIn, almost one out of ten people will have a thing, have a title.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know of people who run an ad agency and their title says, I'm a design thinker.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, God, this is like saying you're breathing and you're a breather.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Breathing is for life.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you got to, you've got to be breathing to live.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: The same way design thinking is a process, it's not an outcome.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And suddenly now it's become an outcome.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh gosh, I mean, why would people even want to do that?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: But again, right?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the fact that uh some of the software companies have suddenly made design thinking as one of those cool things.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody wants to be known as a design thinker or whatever it is that they want to be.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So coming back to that uh blog post, Karthik, this point that you said, that you did those stepping by the side and moving ahead.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, so literally you would have seen a lot of blind spots.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And can you kind of walk me through that?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's important for people to understand the challenges that you faced.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's not easy.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the fact that you know, moving from say uh mechanical engineering in anomaly to an NID, then suddenly I see you doing at Illinois Institute of Technology technical communications.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would I would want to know that uh we will park that for a conversation.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: But what was the challenge when you really you know went and started exploring things you did not know?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, very simple, right?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is so 2000 uh 2000.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was in Singapore working for one of the uh creative agencies there.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and we had offices in Singapore, in Hong Kong, Malaysia, all those places.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: And um 2001, the whole economy crashed around our ears, right?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know the dot-com boom.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Singapore is a very small state.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: If California sneezes, Singapore will catch like a severe cold.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Forget about the US sneezing, right?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just California sneezing.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously I lost my job.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: What do I do?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I there's no way I'm gonna go find a new job at that point in time.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, look, this is a great time to go recharge your batteries.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I went back to grad school.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: I said, what's what's the next best thing that's happening here?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: How do you want to go recharge your batteries?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: I figured out, you know, one of the courses that really had interest for me was information design as to, you know, the latest thing was all about how people are building more and more software into everything, into everyday use cases.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you then organize information?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was saying, okay, what should I do next?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, from contract days and from ad agency days, writing was one of my uh skills that I actually, you know, honed into a perfection.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so using writing, I could get into technical communication.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Using my design skills, I could get into information design.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it seemed an ideal, very ideal program.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote to the head of the department and he said, Yeah, of course, I'd love to have somebody like you come and graduate from my program.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he waived half my tuition fee and gave me a scholarship.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he funded my whole education in 2001 when there was no money in the market.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Serendipity.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if I had not opened my eyes around and looked around, I would have probably had to go back to India without a job, sit there, figure out what to do next, and things would have, you know, taken a downturn.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, just keep again, right?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you own the path, then you're going to keep your eyes open.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you're walking the path, you're going to be blindfolded and you're not going to worry how the path is.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So true.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So true, Karthik.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: What did you uh what did you learn?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because you are somebody who's done double masters, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you kind of done your uh design masters and then you went and did your technical communication masters.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that you learned in the technical communication masters, which you applied to your work today?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: So TCID was a great program where it actually brought in computer science graduates, um, you know, uh engineering graduates from other engineering programs.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: It taught us some great subjects like rhetoric, um, you know, just ethnographic research, studying how information should be set up and you know visually presented so that you're able to guide the user through what he or she should be looking at.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: So a whole bunch of, you know, um, I would say again, like NID, it was an exciting program of how to organize your you know mental noise.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, education is all about how do you control the noise in your head.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: We forget that and we say, no, just we'll dump a few bricks in your brain, and that's all that you need.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, to me, if you if you really look at some of the some of the most successful people, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, all the they they spend 10% of their time working.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: 90% of their time is spent in thinking.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot think if your brain is uh you know noodle soup.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: We live with so much noise in our head that it becomes difficult to recognize that it is noise.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And thus we are sort of giving in to that because we have no other option, and then that turmoil leads us to just be zombies, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Controlling that noise is the biggest thing that teaching should do.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's why exploration is the best thing that happens because your mind is now completely focused on what is in front of you and what you need to do to get from one place to the next step, put one foot forward from the other, versus if you're given a set of tools and say, okay, go do this, then you're not going to be using brain power.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in that blog post, uh, I'm coming back to that because for me it was very interesting.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I could relate to that.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about engineers being poor communicators.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Zero.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh today you help large technology brands really communicate the propositions very well.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, what what are the toolkits that you use there?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And can you kind of walk through the nuances of B2B marketing that today you are a craftsman in this area?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a the the the basis hasn't changed.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of it, any B2B customer is a human being.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he or she is again dealing with noise.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Her she doesn't wake up and come to the office saying, I need to go buy this software to do this.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: She comes to the office saying, I need to get these few tasks done.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I need to get it done in the most efficient way that I'm able to make progress, one for myself and two for my company, and three, that my whole business unit starts looking good.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: We forget that.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: We forget that, right?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: As as techniques as engineers, the first thing we say is, well, this product can do these 10 things.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen actual demos where you know the audience on the other side, their eyes have glazed over and they're like, oh my god, what did I get into this morning for this demo?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Why aren't you telling a story?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Why, why, why, why are stories the most important, Swami?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, why do stories help you remember things the most?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: How does it do that, right?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with a challenge.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with how a hero or a heroine is facing a cliff, it starts with how some guiding force comes and helps that hero or heroine cross the cliff, and then there's a happy ending at the end of it, right?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: So you remember that.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: You remember how the hero or the heroine solved the problem.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Human beings, humans are doing humane things, right?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's why stories are so memorable.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why is software so terrible at building stories?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: They just can't do it because they think that, oh, my code and my feature set and my product bullet points are the most important, so they'll throw the kitchen sink at you.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Literally, I mean, if you go look at the top five IT service companies out of India, you name them.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I can go out on a limb and name them.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: I TCS, Vipro, Cognizant, all of them, just go look at their websites.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Same old bunch of bullshit, like, oh, we do digital transformation, we do this, we do that.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, who cares?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me, look, look at on the other hand, go look at a McKinsey.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, how can you embed smart cities into your roadmap by 2025?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm giving you a vision suddenly, right?
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the reason why you know we have this big dichotomy in in storytelling.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is we come from this very engineering, okay.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: We know what we know, we are going to dump it wherever we we can, and we let the buyer go and figure it out.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the the more successful of the consulting companies have figured out a way of, hey, here's how we can tell you a story, come and listen to an IoT story, come and listen to a security story, come and listen to a retail story.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: They tell you stories, and suddenly you're like, oh my God, I gotta work with these guys.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that to me is the biggest dichotomy of how we are highly successful in engineering, but we are terrible in terms of being good storytellers.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: So uh when you talk about storytelling, uh, there's an interesting story that how you got a job sitting in a flight with Silicon India, and that gave you a huge exposure to CEOs, to technology folks at MIT, Stanford.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, what did you learn in that stint?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Silicon India was my you know, three years of PhD, I would say.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: I came in.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: If you had presented a word called database on a silver tray to me, I would have stared at it and wondered what the hell you are talking to me about.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Zero software knowledge, zero technology, I mean IT knowledge, if you will, right?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: I had enough engineering skills, but I had zero software skills.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: All I knew was boot up a Mac, open up Adobe Suite, and work because I was uh we we came from a design school or AutoCAD or I could operate software.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: I never could know what what went behind in building that software, right?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, with with much gratitude to my former boss who hi who just hired me, he said, I know you'll do a good job.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I know you don't know software, but why don't you come and take a shot at it?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: We said, Yeah, okay, we'll give it a try.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: Six months, it doesn't work, then we'll part.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the first month when I went in, went out for writing stories and interviews, I had zero knowledge about what that startup was doing.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever the startup it could be, one of the things I told them was, Look, I have I have no clue what you're doing.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: So unless you explain it to me in human terms that a layman can understand.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm telling you, when I'm a layman, I'm like this guy who doesn't know how to plug in a computer and start working.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you got to explain it to that level.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all these guys were all brilliant engineers, right?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: So now they were forced to explain things to me in very simple terms.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: So they actually used whiteboards and told me, okay, here's how networking is, here's the data layer here, and this is where we fit in.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that starts making sense to me.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I carried that kind of mental map with me everywhere I went, and then pieces started falling into place, right?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's at the end of it, it is a stack, right?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the tiered architecture, right from the, you know, uh what do you call the infrastructure layer, the data layer, the application layer, whatever it is.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's all it just took me three years to figure it out.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, I had fun doing it, absolute fun in building that kind of a magazine and a portal and the kind of audience that we built.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then I realized, of course, that we were doing terribly bad because again, 2002 and 2003, the economy was stanking, and I had to figure out how a way to salvage the magazine.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I realized that you know, CIOs were one of the most targeted people at that point because everybody wanted to sell to the CIO.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so I organized these breakfast with CIO events.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Boom! Suddenly I had like 300 people, 500 people attending each breakfast, making money hand over fist.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it was a great learning experience, but end of three years, I knew that my time was up.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: So running a magazine gives you storytelling skills, it gives you marketing skills, uh, you're learning something new every day.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in your job, if you don't have these components, you don't get prepared for the next decade, right?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this is a very important point that you are talking about.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And at every point in time, whether you are a home-centered designer or whether you did your technical communication or whether you went to Silicon India, every part of it, what you are saying is you are doing the work, but you are upskilling yourself in that job, being uncomfortable, and you are preparing and reskilling yourself for the current and for the next five years.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is very, very critical for anybody to remain relevant for 40 years, 50 years of work life.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Is that not important?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: And do you think it's a it's a critical aspect that people miss?
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: Great question.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I would again, right?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: I relate to it in terms of what I'm most comfortable describing it.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, reskilling and all are big terms.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: To me, it's journeys.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at it as a journey and not worry about the destination, your enjoyment is going to be like tenfold.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna say, Oh, I need to learn Python, I need to learn the Ruby on Rails and all these kinds of things, then it becomes a you know, it becomes an outcome.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: You learnt, and then you're saying, Oh my god, I'm not getting a job because people are now saying I'm a fresher at it, and even after upskilling, uh now now it's Angular and not uh a Ruby on Rails, or no, it is JSON and it is not Java.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think technology challenges, right?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, technology changes every hour, right?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Some nerd is going to come out with a new set of code and disrupt the way you've been thinking about business.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: That to me is not the value of being in this Silicon Valley.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: The value of being in the Silicon Valley is you're you're how comfortable are you being disrupted every day?
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Every day, not every week, every month, every day.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: So the magazine gave me that exposure to meet so many of these young, hungry entrepreneurs, even seasoned entrepreneurs who are all doing these great products, great projects.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: And again, the most successful of them, very surprisingly, did not worry about where their outcome was.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: The most successful of them were enjoying the journey.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he here's a clue, right?
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you're you're spending eight to ten hours of your daily life, a majority of your daily life inside an office, right?
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, uh, oh, I don't have time to go out and disrupt myself or do anything of this point in time, right?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: How many times have you gone out and lunched with somebody that you never met before?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have no clue what they're doing, but you just said, hey, you know, let's go meet for lunch, and and suddenly you're learning a couple of things.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: I would say for the last 20 plus years in my life, uh before the pandemic hit, of course, I've not lunched at home once, right?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: My my wife is kind of furious at me.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, you've eaten at the best restaurants, and every time we want to go out on a weekend, you're like, oh yeah, I've eaten at that place and you don't want to go out there just because you ate during the week.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's very unfair on all of us.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I just meet random people, people who have no connection to what I do.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have no sales agenda, I have no, how do you say, uh, any planned outcome out of that lunch?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying, you know, both of us are hungry.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pick a spot, spend 40 minutes of good time facing each other.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see where the conversation goes.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Then at the end of it, exit.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: I have met the most brilliant people, Swami, that serves to every day as an excitement and inspiration for me to live the way I live.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, how is it uh so I tend to stay away from most of the networking events because I find that at least over the last you know five years or 10 years or so, uh, it's all become mostly a sales event.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: So everybody's out there with a sales agenda, not really much of a networking, networking event.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it to me, the best networking is when you meet one-on-one and you're you're you got time without an agenda, like even in a networking, it's a one-hour session.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, oh, how many hands can I shake and how many business cards can I get?
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's your outcome.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: And anything that has an outcome stresses me out because then I have to follow a certain path.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas a lunch is my journey, absolutely, right?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I I think the the point that I was asking Kartik was uh the lunch was for you a learning event, right?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because you would meet a great mind.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, how is it like, you know, if you were talking about learning through such events, how is it uh, you know, for somebody uh to apply it in their own day-to-day life?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: How do you how do you think, you know, because it's important to meet somebody whom you don't know and you then start to converse in topics which you really do not have comfort with, right?
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because suddenly somebody would be talking to you about supply chain and you really do not know anything about supply chain, and you have you have you're founding a you know venture called the future chain and you are running it, right?
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, therefore, how important are these kind of conversations?
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: All the time, right?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: They the most significant value you can do, you can deliver to yourself is being in that state of discomfort all the time.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the reasons are twofold.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: One, it pushes you to ask, right?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't know, ask.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: And most humans don't want to do that because they consider that the other person would consider you as inferior.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: No, the other person will not do that, the other person will be more than happy to help you.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, one of the, you know, there's this joke in the Silicon Valley is that if you want venture capital, ask for advice, and if you want advice ask for venture money right so so the key is to ask and if you ask you will get answers so that's one point of being in a state of discomfort two is it should instead of making you fearful it should keep you in that state of excitement that oh my gosh here's something that I'm learning every day and so that should inspire you to do something different from what you're doing every day right so I have this you know uh one of my great friends on from college here in Chicago she works here and she has this whole playbook on how to be how to shop local and she says you don't need to make a big effort on doing anything start with just one small thing which is if you're going if you're buying bagels every day at a chain store go to a local bagel store and buy yourself a bagel one step at a time right that's a journey again what she's unconsciously saying is a journey that you've got to go through to do this right which is kind of the central theme of my life which is if you're not on a journey then you're not uh exploring enough right so again supply chain I have four probably six customers in different parts of supply chain right doing multiple things somebody's automating the whole procurement business somebody is automating how distribution is happening somebody's so today everything is AI machine learning deep learning and sensing and responding in real time because the pandemic really proved that America supply chain was one of the most fragile uh businesses and you know so all my clients were rushing to sell different kinds of software to supply chain leaders and a couple of them uh I went on sales calls with these people right and I found that the supply chain leader was you know very sharp number one and two pushback with a lot of challenges that what my clients thought were products were not actually features that he would want to buy a bar and he pushed them to think about different things and I said man this is something that I would like to get my hands into because at the end of it somebody said this statement I don't know who it is brands don't compete on markets brands compete on supply chains brilliant right think about your Apple experience you walk into an Apple store they say that I have this product but I don't have this watch color in these watch straps Apple can really tell you okay you're in Walnut Creek the Pleasant store has it go and pick it up or we'll order one for you you can go pick it up or it'll ship to your home tonight and the person swipes your card on his mobile phone and the inventory is actually marked in real time over there.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: How smooth is that experience right instead of you doing the shopping the shopping comes to you.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: So which brings me now to your purple patch business which you founded and today it's a multi-million dollar business uh in one of the interviews you're really talking about how B2B marketing is not just a spray and pray kind of marketing but it's very focused.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: So would you have some kind of a framework to say this is really how B2B marketing should be looked at because B2B is not fashionable right B2C always gets the attention but probably out of many people whom I know in my you know three decades of experience I don't see many people focusing on B2B marketing.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what is really the framework you think given you know so much of digital and IoT and embedded devices that are there how do you how do you see the component and framework changing for B2B marketing from what it was say 15 20 years back to today and how would you see it in the next couple of years?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you know you and I know this famous saying right I know only 50% of my marketing budget works I don't I just don't know which of the 50% is actually working right so consumer marketing while it's sexy is um you know if you if you if you look at say um everything's about oh somebody uh they liked something on Facebook so we're going to show you more ads and more this and more that and so on and so forth um it's it's sort of the sheep following the sheep up the hill into the cliff right whereas in B2B the biggest biggest difference is the buyer knows what they want the key is finding out that buyer journey right again you you you'll find journeys one of my most often words being used right if you know that buyer journey then you should be able to build your marketing journey alongside that right and and what that really does is help you one use low much less resources than what you should be using and two be much more focused because if you if you if you look at the Parito principle 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your customer base most of the engineering software companies operate without knowing who the 20% of customers are.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: They think that spraying and praying is the best way to do which is a very consumer driven marketing principle that if you hit a million customers at least 10% would you know hook.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: To me that that's a waste of your resources.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you know your buyer journey then you should be able to fine-tune your you know marketing journey your content journey and your you know your demand journey alongside that and that's your path to success and the journey should be full of stories because a customer doesn't buy uh you asked me right why stories I'll tell you this when you're going through a product demo and you're telling them different stories hey this customer used this product for this this customer used this product feature for this and so on and so forth I have seen in many many demos the clients stop and say hey hold on you told me this customer uses this product feature for this particular use case can you tell me how they did it that is a sales conversion not 20 people sitting on the demo silently and saying okay we'll come back to you in two weeks right then that's why you want to build your demo with stories don't build your demo with feature sets build your demos with stories once you do that customers start listening to stories they are now processing in their own mind hey how does how is this contextual in my ecosystem right now?
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: What can I do with this feature set?
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: He's saying it's gonna be improving governance in my company can it not just do governance but can it do something else in my that something else is what is going to get you a purchase order not not this you know 10 hundred pound kitchen sink that you're throwing at them saying here are all my features now you go figure it out.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that I think is the key to what what we are trying to do at this point.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: You also are somebody who manages other ventures so you have an organic mom and pop store venture you have a venture which is uh you know future chain and also you know there is something to do with uh you know skill design that uh you know design spread that a company that you kind of uh run so how do you manage multiple ventures and is that a DNA in Silicon Valley or is it something that you kind of learnt it uh the hard way having done it over years?
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: No I think oh I mean there's always um you know there's always a garage startup in every garage right that's the DNA of the Silicon Valley to me all these are again journeys right um a friend of mine and I we were going through a conference in in Baltimore and uh there was another conference going on and honestly they were it it looked a lot more exciting because there were a lot more people there.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: We said hey what the hell is happening let's go take a look at it we found out that it was an organic health and beauty product show so guess what next two hours we spent walking around this trying to understand what the mechanics of such a program was and my friend is uh you know he's a he's just a financial geek and he did the numbers and he said dude this is making a lot of sense why don't we go experiment with this so guess what we just started uh an experimentation in uh organic and natural products all in the beauty space and it's going pretty well um design spread was predominantly to help clients go through workshops for helping them solve their own problems by looking at it through a different set of lenses which is what design thinking is all about so we are trying to help implement design thinking as a model within their company so that's a subsidiary of Purple Pass that helps do those so I bring in consultants from other places to help engage on this.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not something that I do on my own.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's all so again right a journey is much more fun when you have a lot of people doing that with you versus you doing everything on my on your own.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I do that future chain again Greg and I have known each other for the last 20 plus years and when I was talking about it he was like hey I'd love to work with you and I'm like yeah go for it and so he's actually running the show all I'm doing is you know the titles are misleading I would say so co-founder doesn't mean that I'm I'm doing everything at this point in time co-founder in this situation means that I I probably signed the tax uh invoices at the end of it but a lot of collaborators come in and enjoy the ride with us right so and that's kind of where where where all of these ventures are fantastic what are the books uh if I may ask you that have helped you through your journey what kind of books have inspired you tell us some books that you know you read which inspires you is it largely technical or you know are you uh do you read a variety of books tell us some books that have inspired you the biggest book that has inspired me or rather uh like I read all these books of great personalities of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and all of them I mean to be honest with you I think it's a lot of rara and some of the books that are very memorable are all the PG Oto's humor because I think you know Bertie Wooster is another guy who just ambles through life in journeys right so uh so I wouldn't say I I read a variety of books I don't particularly uh read any genre of any kind saying deliberately oh my god I got to read this book and I got to this one um so yeah I mean great so one of the uh uh questions that I have is if you have to do continuous learning in your career what would you recommend one should do to do continuous learning first is to learn not to say no a lot of people the first thing is go learn something no that's not relevant to me don't worry about the relevance of it today learn for the sake of learning again consider that as a journey you're you're you'll again think of it as an end path and that'll become a convoluted experience right so the second thing is don't learn with the oh where am I going to use it learn with where does this get actually used those those are two different questions it may sound similar but they're extremely different questions right if you understand where it gets used you are now basically understanding the implications of what that journey is going to be doing then you're owning the journey right those I think are the two key things to continuous learning because if you look at the outcome and say what am I going to get out of this zero great I want to finally ask you one question uh if you were to write if you were to write a letter to your 10 year old self and advise him what you would what would your advice be uh now that you have seen uh you know so many decades of working reading learning uh education what would be the advice to your 10 year old self drop out of school and experiment more honest answer i'm not saying I'm not saying anything about filtering out a bunch of things right if you don't like something that you're learning at school and don't see an application for it get out of it I mean not that I buy into the whole concept of no education and let everybody be a free form builder and all of that.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes you need a whole bunch of basics drilled into you but if that schooling system or that system of learning is boring and you don't see the journey for yourself.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean by the time you're eight or nine your journey models are pretty much set right I I used to finish my math lessons you know at least 20-30 minutes ahead of time and I used to be sitting there and sketching people and getting into trouble because I sketched the teacher and it didn't turn out too well and she got pretty upset at me.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I used to be fooling around and I'm saying that fooling around is what has kept me or brought me to where I am today.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: So to my 10 year old I would say if you didn't have fun fooling around then you should be doing it more often than than before.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: So on the ending note right uh a lot of people ask me why did I become a pilot?
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to give you that as the ending note to your 10 year old self right be inspired.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: Every day you've got to be wake waking up and saying whoa this is mind blowing right that's the that's the life I'm leading right now.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: So people ask you why did you learn to fly?
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever left the security of the earth without knowing what the sky is going to promise you you haven't flying teaches you that sense of being uncomfortable with yourself.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then when the weather takes a bad turn you're learning to fly by the seat of your pants which is basically you feel the plane's movements in your butt right that no this is an honest physical thing Swami it you in your lower back you're going to feel how the plane is yawing and rolling and pitching and all of those things when you're in turbulent weather.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: So when did you learn to fly I started at a very grand old age in 2012 okay you learned flying uh in 2012 yeah okay and uh what is the reason for you to look at being a pilot what was the inspiration discomfort you're leaving the security of the earth when you're at 3000 feet away all you're trusting is two wings and one engine how does your family take it they love it think about it that's the way you want to be in your life where you don't have the security of the earth underneath you don't know what is the sky going to do for you but when you look at the car outside the cockpit and you see this huge beautiful panorama of the earth spreading behind you beneath you and you're recognizing places and you're seeing mountains and rivers and forests and and everything that is just gorgeous and you realize aha this is life and this is beautiful you're in that Zen moment of just letting go of everything and enjoying what you're doing.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: So how often do you fly and do you have a plane on your own private plane on your own I used to I used to have a plane till 2019 um I just got uh sold it out but I'm gonna be doing one more maybe in 2022 once all this pandemic settles down and how often do you how often do you fly?
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: I fly probably um anywhere between I would say six to eight hours a month so it depends on when I find time or whether I need to go from one place or the other and and and and do things like that right so you know the the the key is why I learned to fly was that every time I take off it's a completely different journey.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can't say that one takeoff is going to be the same as the other right every time you land it's a completely different airport completely new set of coordinates weather how the aircraft is how you are you know the flying is that one I would say art where close to you know 10,000 different factors can inflict an impact on your aircraft in less than one second.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you then manage that discomfort and and you you're you're only one or two people in a cockpit you're not like a company with an 800 pound gorilla organization you're one or two people and you know the weather is not forgiving it slaps you it slaps you right so so again that to me is the ultimate manifestation of my comfort with discomfort if you will fantastic