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- [00:00]
A
All right, Heymanth, welcome to the numberstate podcast. So you want to introduce yourself? You're at Lightspeed. We worked here at a 6 and E. Go ahead.
- [00:07]
B
Yeah. Thank you for having me. Been looking forward to this for a long time. Malaji. Yeah. So for the folks that don't know me, I'm Eamond Ayman Patra and all the partners at Lightspeed. Lightspeed is a global venture capital firm that invests across different regions. Basically, we are aware where entrepreneurship is.
- [00:22]
A
And India is like 1.8 billion, something like that.
- [00:25]
B
India, I manage about 1.5 to 1.8 billion capital. Very early stage focus. You also have a growth fund there, presence in China, presence in Europe, presence in the US and together we don't have an office or team. We certainly have investments like maricard, African Vacuums. Yeah. And then before Lightspeed, I was at CNC when I met you. And then I was like, yeah, I've known you for maybe seven, eight years before that even.
- [00:47]
A
Oh.
- [00:47]
B
Which is a fun story that I don't think you would remember.
- [00:50]
A
I didn't notice it.
- [00:50]
B
So before E16Z, I was at Google.
- [00:52]
A
Yes.
- [00:53]
B
And I was part of this small team of people led by a guy named David Glazer. Genius Lily Guy was trying to. Who kind of saw the wave of his thesis was that in 10 years from then the next Nobel laureate in biome. Pa. Biostratistician. Not. Yeah, Marix. Not a. Not a MATLAB.
- [01:14]
A
Which has happened with domestic.
- [01:15]
B
Yeah, this happened recently, two years back. So. And what was Google's role going to be there? You were going to be the computer. Computer triters for that. So you pulled together a small group of people and they called you Blue Genomics. And one of the people you wanted to work with was a company called Consul.
- [01:32]
A
That's right, my friend.
- [01:33]
B
Yes. Yeah. So you were there. So I remember getting on a bunch of phone calls, trying very hard to get in touch with you, and then getting on a phone call with you kind of convinced you to use Google Cloud to do all the analysis.
- [01:43]
A
I may remember this. That's right. And I think we were. I think we were using AWS at the time or something like that probably. And I was just like, I mean, Google was great. But I remember actually was that the time of App Engine.
- [01:55]
B
App Engine was popular there. Yeah.
- [01:57]
A
And the problem was App Engine before Google Cloud was something that if you're just doing exactly what Google wanted you to do, it worked. But then if it was almost like a blog where like if you, if you Want to do just a blog, it was fine. But if you want to do something outside of it, it wasn't right.
- [02:13]
B
It was just like Java. I don't know, I think about Java is it let you not do anything stupid, but won't really do anything smart either. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
- [02:21]
A
That's right. And I think, I mean, cloud has obviously evolved a lot since then. And with the whole genomics thing, by the way, what's funny about. Sorry, were you going to say something more? No, no, no. Yeah. So with the whole genomics thing, that is a space which should be much bigger and it's kind of being quietly growing. Like, I mean, 23andMe recently went bankrupt, unfortunately. But with 22.3andMe ancestry.com, like, sequencing has really radically increased. Right. But it hasn't increased as much as it should. Like everybody should have a personal genome on their computer. And so it should be an important file, it should be an app that's top of mind. And part of the reason it hasn't is that FDA attacked the whole space and basically said that you can't offer interpretations of genetic tests and results and so on and so forth. And we're now very fortunate that it's gotten beaten back because with AI, you can now interpret genetic tests. Diagnostics software can do that. It can do that better than a doctor can. Right. The entire concept of, oh, you can't use AI to interpret your own test results was the kind of thing that FDA would have blocked AI from doing and said, it's an unregulated medical device. All those things have to be censored. It has to be bottomed through a doctor. Right. So we may be able to take another crack at that now that the regulatory state can't block that anymore. Right. Or at least it's much less powerful than it was. And so AI enabled medicine is going to be a big thing, but it required so much infrastructure to sort of break past the regulatory state, the American regulatory state, in order to do that. And I don't know if. Did you guys, was that on your radar at that time? No, not the regulatory part.
- [04:00]
B
Probably the regulatory part we did not care about. Google did try a lot to get to what you would call the baseline study of human populations, so at least have a baseline genome kind of ready. And then, you know, because Google, being Google, they tried it in a way that people did not like.
- [04:15]
A
Yeah, very sussed. Right, right.
- [04:17]
B
Couldn't trust a big conglomerate like Google so nobody would upload their genomic data.
- [04:21]
A
This is a Google Health. And they tried.
- [04:23]
B
Yeah, exactly, Right. So my team learned a lot of that and it didn't work out. And we wanted to build a federated data set that Roche could use at some time or Pfizer could use, or Bayo Clinic could use for germline studies or specific, you know, like rare diseases. And rare data really mattered a lot and we just couldn't get there. That's the context of that. We met very briefly and I remember I've tracked your journey for many, many years and you know, glad we paid in touch and we thank you finally.
- [04:49]
A
Yeah, it's good. And I think in E6 and Z, one of the reasons I got into BTC was because. And crypto. And so, and so is that only when I started a company did I understand how big a deal the regulatory state was. And it was only it was DNA that in a sense made me get into btc. Right. Because as an academic, the government is basically friendly to some of the ED address. Once you go to.com, they think of you as like an evil for profit company. Especially in a regulated industry, the regulators are like the police. Right. And if you understand how there can be sometimes bad police, you understand how there could be bad regulators. Right. And so this was something where I realized actually, you know, do you go and try and reform this? Do you make this or that, edit around the process? And certainly people have tried that. But ultimately I realized it's actually easier. Just like it's easier to start Bitcoin than reform the Fed. It's actually like actually easier to do that. Right. It's easier to get a new jurisdiction than to form the fda. Right. It's easier to start a new city than reform San Francisco. That's fundamentally the premise, Right. And there's a lot of people who are working on reform and you know, reform, there's power, it's 99 to 1, something like that, more than that. 99.9, 99.99. But we do need to be able to opt out the existing system and build something else right out. And it's funny, there's all kinds of verbal tricks that people will use to keep you within the existing system and say, oh my God, you're a trader, why are you leaving? You're right. Or, you know, you're a coward, why don't you stay and fight? Or something like that. Right. Or, you know, you need to be part of the process. You can't just, you know, leave, you know, this kind of thing. And I Understand where that comes from. And sometimes, obviously you don't leave in a precipitate way. You know, you try to fix it and so on and so forth. But at a certain point, and everybody's points is different, you realize that system cannot be fixed. Right. And further capital, further time, further energy going after it doesn't work. That's when Elon just realized. Yeah, he literally tweeted out. Did my best.
- [06:56]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [06:57]
A
So you know what comes next.
- [06:59]
B
Right.
- [06:59]
A
Anyway, go ahead.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah. This is interesting because it reminded me of. And we should talk about your bitcoin journey a little bit. Very curious about that. So it's what you were saying about it is sometime easier to create a new system versus change an existing old age system. It seems to be true as long as Matthias, as almost as far back as Indian mythology has been around. And even then it was easier to build a new heaven versus to elevate yourselves into the old heaven. So it makes sense that you're trying to do what you're trying to do. I admire you for us.
- [07:31]
A
Yeah. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. And I think. Well, you know, one thing I want to do is actually. So speaking of India, let's maybe why don't we talk about India for people who don't know anything about India and then India for people who know something about India, especially Indian tech. Right, Right. So, you know, the thing about India is for people who are Anglophones, right? Like basically English speakers, they could essentially, especially Americans, not the British, of course, because they had a long history with India. But most Americans, many Anglophones, could ignore India until pretty recently. Right. Until last, the Indians were more and more prominent in tech, starting with Vinod Khosla and so on and so forth and more and more in the 2000s. But really India has kind of only popped on the radar in the last few years. For example, Ukraine is the first international issue where I can recall Americans, Europeans and so on being concerned as to where India's position was. Nobody cared where India's position was on Iraq that I can remember. Nobody cared what its position was on the financial crisis that I can remember. Nor on Syria that at least that I can remember. Right. Like, but it has now become enough of a global player that people did care about its position on Ukraine. And so because of that, people need to know something about India. Right. So Obviously the basics, 1.4 billion people. It's, you know, this multi thousand year old civilization. One thing most people don't know is India is actually a union like the European Union, like The United States. Right. Why don't you talk about that? All these different cultures and so on there. Yeah.
- [09:07]
B
So I'll go very far back and very quickly come to the present day and tell you what's been going on. Very old piece of land, lots of complicated history. It used. It used to be a union more around different religious practices that ended up becoming tribes, and tribes ended up becoming states, and states ended up coming together to build a nation. But from the very beginning, it was always five or ten tribes that were kind of dominating in India. There were southern tribes, there were northeastern tribes, there were, you know, northern tribes and so on, eastern tribes. And we expanded, you know, all the way out to even Afghanistan for the longest time. So the first, you know, maybe 4,000 years ago, 2,000 BC, 3,000 BC this was, you know, what Indian diaspora looked like in ammunition of a variety of cultures and so on, spreading, you know, all the way to Afghanistan, Iran on the left and then, you know, to the right. And at that point, and for the longest time of India, India's history, we were almost a quarter to a third of the global economy.
- [10:14]
A
That's that chart that shows. Yeah, that chart, yeah.
- [10:16]
B
It goes from 30% and then it kind of very quickly shrinks in the last 500 years, 2% with the. With the rulers that have come from pretty much everywhere around to occupy India. But so long as time, China and India were the dominant players in the global economy. And the global economy was part manufacturing, whatever manufacturing meant back then, part trade and so on. Agriculture, obviously, was a big part. And then that probably stayed till that for about two to 3,000 years, that kind of stayed very stable. It doesn't really change that much. There's a bit of up and down here, but it doesn't change much. And that's been the history of India and also to a certain extent, China, 4, 500 years ago, of course. And we'll talk more about that. The bigger you get, the more attention you grab. And India build roads to the world. The roads also come to you. It becomes easier for people to come to you. And that's what started to happen. A peaceful land, peaceful people with, you know, not so peaceful people coming. Right.
- [11:22]
A
Especially you're in the northwest, you know.
- [11:23]
B
And probably more ambition, it's fine. I mean, it's fair to say they may have had more ambition to occupy. They may have had more ambition to.
- [11:31]
A
Starting with Alexander or going even further back.
- [11:33]
B
Yeah, correct. So cultural differences. And then I like northeast that much.
- [11:37]
A
Because it's impassable to the Himalayas. Yes. Yeah.
- [11:40]
B
Yeah. So majority of it came from the left and the.
- [11:42]
A
Yeah.
- [11:43]
B
And then we once a state like that, which is anyway loosely put together a group of people that are somewhat cooperating versus collaborating. When it starts to crack, the cracks don't, you know, disappear very quickly. So we had one crack appear with the Islamic State coming in and occupying and then attract continued reserve, you know, extend from there. And then of course the Britishers came and at one point, I don't know the math, but then they took out about $40 trillion of you know, some gave very large number, very large number in today's dollars back to, you know, gave dominions. And then India basically shrine from being a hyper capita GB country with manufacturing, trade, tagriculture to basically subsistence level GDP and primarily a resource state for other countries. And then that was. This is fast forward to maybe, you know, maybe 100 years ago, like 50, 70 years ago roughly. And then we got independent from independence to now. And I had the story of how states change shape and philosophy. I feel like. And maybe this has happened with other companies and should talk more about that. You have this period of shape country goes through a period of shape and a country goes through a period of regret, a period of realization, a period of hard work and then a period of ascendance. Yeah. And these things can take 70, 80, 100 years sometimes. It depends on a lot of factors.
- [13:16]
A
Of course it's usually say of regret. Right. Because I would not so the realization I'd say 1991, when India liberalized hard work may last 30 years and now a sentence. Right. Why would you characterize regret as. Or is that not the right word? I call it socialism. Yeah, right.
- [13:34]
B
Socialism.
- [13:35]
A
Yeah.
- [13:36]
B
I don't know if the population regrets it. I certainly think people who could have taken decisions differently might regret it. But an element of shape that we were.
- [13:48]
A
We messed up.
- [13:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, we were that.
- [13:50]
A
Right.
- [13:50]
B
I mean look at our history and all of that and you carry it with you. But then you look at the president like, oh my God, like I'm a 2% GDP country. I learned what. And where was I in my own memory, you would say 100 years ago. You probably were in powerful state back then. So that regret leads to, you know, hard work and eventually, eventually hard work.
- [14:09]
A
Once there's acceptance of we're not great anymore and we marked down and we're at zero and kind of people keep quick thrashing and screaming, they're like, okay, we have to build our way back up, nothing but for it. Right?
- [14:22]
B
Yeah.
- [14:22]
A
And you know, it's funny, like, Argentina seems to have maybe bottomed out and may finally be there. El Salvador maybe bottomed out and now it's like on its way up. China bottomed out. It's on its way up, you know. Well, is Venezuela improving? I think. I don't know if it's bottomed out. Yeah, like, but they definitely have crashed. Right. Vietnam bottomed out as long as way up. So, yeah. So, okay, so basics. India has so one thing, it's a union. Right. So a lot of people don't know that India has like, in a sense, the difference in a. Like a Tamilian or Telugu person and a Gujarati is like the difference between Italian and a Finn. Right. Because, like, you know, the north and south, like, these are pretty different cultures. There is certainly now an Indian union and people travel from one part, another to India, trade across India and nobody really thinks about it. There's a currency union or the rupee. There's transit links. English and Hindi have become nationalizing languages. People marry across various religions and regions and so on and so forth, actually pretty frequently. And so all of that, the union has actually become a real thing.
- [15:30]
B
In a sense.
- [15:31]
A
India is more unified than at any point it's ever been in its history, I think. Would you say.
- [15:36]
B
Know, I feel like it's a little bit. Having lived in Europe for a while, I feel like it feels like the European Union.
- [15:41]
A
Yeah. With more nationalism than Europe.
- [15:43]
B
Yeah, more nationalism. So European Union with more fluid and weak memory of individual cultures that don't go as far back.
- [15:54]
A
Interesting.
- [15:55]
B
Because I'm from Orissa, but I know there is a culture like from Kalinga days, like thousands of years ago when Ashoka was part of that and all that. I would have such a strong memory that attaches me to Kalinga.
- [16:07]
A
Interesting.
- [16:08]
B
But a German would probably go by thousands of years and remember what you're.
- [16:11]
A
An Italian as Rome and stuff like that. So if that's less cultural memory.
- [16:16]
B
Less cultural memory, even though it's loosely put together union of states, it has less cultural memory specific to the state.
- [16:25]
A
I guess language is the main one.
- [16:26]
B
Language is the main one.
- [16:28]
A
Gujarati, Malayali. Correct.
- [16:29]
B
And there is some literature that is more specific and I would say maybe Even the last 50 years that memory has faded. 50, 60, 70 years ago, Bengal used to be the literary hub of the country. AB Tagore was part of that and Satyajit D. Was part of that. And today, I don't know. I mean, there's a South that has a Bollywood type industry called Tollywood. And there's whatever. But then I, I still personally don't feel like there is that much dense cultural memory that used to exist probably ended 200 years ago.
- [16:58]
A
Why is that? Do the British and then the Mughals before that?
- [17:02]
B
Yeah, English has played a big part. It's become the common time thr. And you know, over the last 30, 40, 50 years, like you said, trade has become a little bit more easier between states and you know, travel, you know, it's. You don't require a fast boat to travel anywhere in India. Currency is the same and you are, you basically still harken back to a single citizenship. So you have that, you know, that kind of thing that ties it together. So it feels like a more tightly put together European Union with less cultural memory of individual states that create that union.
- [17:38]
A
That's why I compare it to. It's closer in some ways. I, I would never have believed this in the 1980s, 1990s, when, you know, we were growing up, but I assume you're like, also roughly. Yeah. So I never have believed this, but in many ways, India is now more similar to the America of the 1950s, where it has like a unifying national ideology. And many, like, just like you had Poles and Italians and, you know, English and Germans and all these different European ethnicities in America, but there was like a common creed, common culture, common currency. That's kind of what India is to, to an extent that I wouldn't have actually believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. And one of the consequences is even though sometimes it's like two steps forward, one step back, like the public infrastructure is radically improved. Radically to an, like an unbelievable level. Like, you know, Bangalore airport. The airports are basically like world class. Yeah, yeah, they're world class. They're clean, they're. They're beautiful. And you step outside and there's paved roads and they're new and, and there's stoplight. I mean, this kind of stuff sounds so basic, but the basics are actually hard because you have to coordinate a lot of people. You have to get permissions to build. You know, the government can't be corrupt. And so, so sometimes it. Two steps forward, one step back. But for anybody who's like part of the Indian diaspora who hasn't visited India in the last five or 10 years, you definitely have to visit India and just see how much it's improved. It's radically, radically, radically, radically better than the 80s in the 90s and 2000s.
- [19:11]
B
Absolutely. And I remember growing up and I mean, there are things so Coming back to your question about what is this? Where did you grow up? I grew up all over India. I was in the military, so we kept loading a cigar.
- [19:21]
A
You have the military jaw.
- [19:24]
B
I don't know where I existed. Okay.
- [19:25]
A
The Chad. The Chad jaw.
- [19:26]
B
The Chad jaw thing. Thank you. I appreciate it. But yeah, I grew up in the 80s and I frankly grew up without, you know, I grew up in a small village called D Mark, which is, you know, like as a crow flies, maybe 60 km from the border somewhere. Where, where, where is that? It's place called. Used to be called UT K. Now it's called it. This was part of up earlier.
- [19:51]
A
Okay.
- [19:52]
B
Northeast. And it's not northeast, it's more like closer to Yamun Kashmir and then.
- [19:59]
A
Oh, okay, north, North.
- [20:00]
B
Yeah, north, North. And here, Fino Badinath, that religious place. It's the last stop before you got to start walking or take a meal.
- [20:08]
A
Okay.
- [20:09]
B
To get to that place. The roads don't really take cars. I didn't used to at the time. Yeah, at the time. So grew up there. You know, we would have basically no hot water and gonna boil it. We didn't have heaters. So we would have wood in a thing called Bukhara, which you put wood in. It had a chinny that goes out of the house. You don't die of monoxide poisoning.
- [20:27]
A
Just literally growing up, no hot water.
- [20:29]
B
That was low in a very cold place and no electricity. Because you remember, used to use this thing called Petromex to study at nine and all that stuff, which a beautiful part of my life. I remember I would in a heartbeat retire in the Himalayas.
- [20:43]
A
Because the thing is that like, because of that, because so many Indians have an upbringing that's like that. They are in general, like there's a daily setback or something like that. But in general, the trajectory has just been up.
- [20:56]
B
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. Two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes two steps back. But there is absolutely a crediting ferocity that's happening in India. Like gradually you are ferociously moving up and up and up.
- [21:08]
A
Yes. And from no hard water to finding hot startups.
- [21:11]
B
Yeah, finding hot startups. Yeah. So now let's fast forward a little bit from the 80s, 90s, which was, I would say maybe the transition period for India when in 90s Man Singh kind of opened up the economy and then, you know, foreign companies could come and, you know, create competition in the local economy. Before what was called license, Raj. Like to get a license to do a business, you had to get a license from the government, it was kind of ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not, I was not a VC back then. I don't think you could ever do anything like that. But risk taking was essentially not allowed, frankly. A lot more socialistic 90s we opened up and then I think since then, you know, we were, I don't know, maybe 500, $600 million GDP country. And now we are sitting at roughly 4 trillion. And a lot of that growth has happened in the last 10 to 15 years and we've gone through multiple regime changes and demographics have changed. And now I feel like now it's coming together in a way where society is hungry. There is a government that is not a group of politicians who are politicking. It feels like in good pockets, good number of pockets. It's a government that is interested in administrative because for India, one of the.
- [22:30]
A
That'S, that's a big thing. Like the government is actually now interested in building the platform that Indians can build on. Right. As opposed to just taking the money or what have you got? They've come in a positive direction, which is it's way easier to have a garment that goes corrupt than to one have one that actually ascends and becomes, you know, better.
- [22:48]
B
Yeah. And it's, it's, you know, it's a, it's been a journey. And I can tell you very openly, corruption is still a problem in India. Maybe the lower level stock is still hard to do, but again the whole point of being, you know, stepping forward or slowly but stepping forward but not moving back, I think that feels like it's monotonically increasing pace that India is at. And I, I was in the US, I grew up in India. I was in the US from 03 till 2018 and I moved back in 2018 and I remember writing about it online, a piece that even though if you Google return for India, this still shows up in the first page. And I was quite shocked that it showed up because I was getting so many people thinking me on LinkedIn. I'm like, how are you finding this space? I remember bling it out. This is actually become a popular piece. And I remember talking about it that when I moved back from US to India in 2018, I had to change very little about my life. I replaced Hulu with All Star. Netflix worked in the US the same way in India. Amazon worked the same way it worked in India. I had to replace Lyft with Ola. And Uber works exactly the same. And I still have my US credit card on my Uber because There's no ADP stuff going on. It just goes through. And what else? Like, you know, WhatsApp has payments and all those things just worked out completely fine for me.
- [24:10]
A
That's because I think intranet first is actually the way I think about the world versus country first. Internet first.
- [24:17]
B
Right, yeah, that's a great point. I was living in, I didn't realize it. I was not living as much in the physical infrastructure as I was living in the digital infrastructure in the us and all I had to do was I literally moved back to back. It's two bags of 15 years of life, two big bags which I had to buy it or loan it.
- [24:35]
A
It was the offline stuff, the FIAT stuff that took longer. The cloud stuff. You could just log in and get back to work. Right.
- [24:40]
B
I had no house, I had no car, no scooter, no motorcycle, nothing.
- [24:44]
A
Yeah, the only thing you had to change, like maybe you had to get residency. You have OCI or.
- [24:49]
B
No, I'm your OCI. Yeah. I was an H1B for 15 years in the US.
- [24:52]
A
Oh, got it, got it, yeah.
- [24:53]
B
And I just didn't have a green card, but I just ships it, so that was easy. Yeah, that was easy. Yeah. Yeah. But even if I were a green card holder, OCI now is easy to get. So you basically have a digital passport of sorts and you still live in two countries, overseas citizens. Yes, it was a very smooth move. Now again, I'll talk more about the India move if you're interested, but yeah, it felt like a pretty straightforward move to me. And then, yeah, there was a bit of this, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you would feel this culture shock. I didn't feel any culture shock. You were 20 years ago, you would feel an infrastructure shock. I felt a lot less of the infrastructure shock. Sure, there is pollution in India and Delhi is much worse than Bangalore and Goa is much better than many cities here in the us. And there is traffic, of course, but I remember being stuck on 101 NSF for many hours. So it's not that better or not that different, except somebody drives you much more cheaply in India versus in the US and politics is, is nowhere in the world is, is good. Great. So India is basically no better rewards than any other country.
- [26:02]
A
I, you know, the thing is I, I disagree. I actually think India will be, India is going to be, I think, a dark horse in terms of. It's surprisingly well run. What's one example? The votes for the recent election, they were counted in a day, Right. For a Billion person country. And so while the US it took like weeks, months to get it done. Right. And that just shows that state capacities on some axes actually flipped. Right. UPI is very, very good. Other is very good. You can have criticisms of these systems, but an identity system that works for a billion people, a payment system that works for a billion people, a voting system that works for a billion people, that's pretty good.
- [26:46]
B
Yeah.
- [26:47]
A
Right. I mean ISRO is land of probe on the dark side of the moon. We have these new trains, we have these new highways in stu, all this kind of stuff that the airports. Right. And yet it's still at the J curve, it's still at the bottom of the upward trajectory. And the way I think about that, and I'd love to know your thoughts on it, is now that it's overlayance geo we have cheapest, you know, the cheapest 5G Internet service in the world. Right. And all of these things we observe in India and that's actually quite new.
- [27:22]
B
Yeah.
- [27:23]
A
You know, what else am I missing?
- [27:25]
B
Those are pretty.
- [27:25]
A
There's a whole tech ecosystem there. Right. Yeah.
- [27:28]
B
Go down. Yeah. So absolutely right. You're not missing anything big. Maybe what I would add to that is India a bit of JIO thing that happened nine years ago now I think India has one of the most digitally awake population in the world in terms of volume and a time they.
- [27:47]
A
Spend some few periods about Blasia.
- [27:50]
B
Yeah. So in 2015, Vokesh Ambani, who's one of the main guys at the biggest conglomerates in India called Reliance, basically took this generational bet. He said that I'm going to spend 10, 15, $20 billion and literally put it in the ground. He dug up places because you know, you can't when you're that way. You can take anything you want and the government will let you do it. But he did it in a way that actually was quite strategic and really has changed the nation's trajectory. He essentially provided literally free Internet to the entire country. Indian in India. For those that. For folks that don't know the price of 4G and now 5G is. Let me tell you what I pay. I pay about 170 rupees per month and that about two and a half, two dollars odd roughly.
- [28:47]
A
For 5G Internet.
- [28:47]
B
For 5G Internet. And I have a 3Gd per day limit.
- [28:53]
A
So you don't hit that.
- [28:54]
B
Basically I never hit that. And if I don't hit it, it sometimes there are some plans that it rolls over to the next one sign TV on Netflix on, it's like basically.
- [29:02]
A
100X that amount in, in the US yeah.
- [29:05]
B
So it was crazy for me and.
- [29:07]
A
The cherry, something like that.
- [29:09]
B
Yeah. And Netflix in India is 699 versus whatever it is in the US I mean, so on and so forth. Sure. So digital infrastructure has become so cheap and cell phones cost maybe less than.
- [29:20]
A
$100 and they're 699 in the sense of 200 rupees.
- [29:23]
B
Rupees, yeah. Okay, rupees. That's about less than $10. Yeah. Um, so when, when, when, when Jio essentially digitized the entire country, they became the rails on which everything else kind of got built out.
- [29:35]
A
Quasi public, quasi private infrastructure.
- [29:37]
B
Quasi public, quasi private. They had the spectrum and you know, kind of all that good stuff. And now, now we've got world's cheapest phones. And then most people have several phones. Like, you know, I know people that are in the up and coming part of society that actually have two phones. You drive in a, in a oral rickshaw in India you'll have two phones, one for Ola, one for Uber and you can take rides on both. And these are both phones that probably cost less than 10,000 rupees. So that's been very interesting to see. And on top of that you could then, you know, when you get distribution, mass distribution, it can build interesting companies, it can experiment more quickly and learn what works for a consumer versus not. So we start to see this venture ecosystem come up and take more bets and founders coming up and you know, going on building riskier, riskier things. And then, you know, then we saw, you know, essentially this massive amount of entrepreneurial energy sort of just really coming out and just like bursting at the seams. So last 10 years in India, you've just been there six years now. I think it's been a remarkable shift in terms of the risk appetite the nation is willing to take in terms of the infrastructural build out the country is doing. We spent more in infrastructure built out in the last five to six years than we spend in the last 70 years since independence. And we are spending more than what we spend in the last seven years. In the next five years.
- [31:05]
A
Well, the nuclear reactors are coming online. That's a really big one. Brownouts will be a thing of the past, hopefully if those come. India is actually either number two after China or it's either. There's a graph of nuclear reactors we can put on screen, but planned nuclear reactors, I think India's number two actually on lots of graphs for Example steel production, China's far and away number one. But then when you delete China from the graph, India is the real distant but real number two. So that's on steel, that's on nuclear, so on solar, it's on the number of unicorns, for example, it's us, China. Then India is like distant to China, but it is number three solid. Right. So it is actually really rising and really I think underpriced in a sense. And on, on the world stage. Right. And of course it's possible to overhype it. It's possible, but it's also possible to underhype it. Right. And you know, in a sense I'm, I think I said to you, I'm moderately bullish in India but extremely bullish on Indians. Right. So India as a system is getting good enough to be a launch pad for the world.
- [32:08]
B
Yeah.
- [32:08]
A
And you know, one of the things I think a lot about is this a very. And maybe you have some estimate. So there's about 7 million or so Indian Americans, right. I think that's a rough, rough number. And they're doing pretty well, right. Like they are, you know, producing now, now that the second gen has kind of, you know, started to grow up a bit. You've got people in politics like you know, Vivek or Usher Vance or Cash Patel, you have people in media like lots of, you know, like M. Night Shyama was one of the first. But lots of other folks obviously tech, very, very gas based finance and so on and so forth. But there's like way. And of course medicine, lots of other professions, engineering, blah, blah. But there's an interesting, and the diaspora has done pretty well in other countries and it's certainly in Dubai and the UAE that's like about 80% Indian and that's a country that's doing extremely, extremely well right. At the uae. But the question is how much potential is still in India, right. Because there's a degree of selective migration, right. There's not many people are coming to the US or places they have an engineering degree or do some qualification. So how many back in India are at that talent level? And Even if it's 5%, I don't know the exact number, right. If it's 5%, that's like 70 million people out of 1.4 billion, right. That's like 10x what the Indian American population is. So that's a massive new economic disruptive force on the global stage. That's like a new Germany coming on ga, right. A new Japan kind of thing. You Know, like at that scale coming online and you know, maybe you have some thoughts on that.
- [33:49]
B
Yeah, I think, look, I mean we obviously are very bullish on India. I mean we have continued to double down in the last 10 to 15 years in India. We, we feel like this is where, you know, the maximum alpha is right now. And you're right, I think India feels underpriced even at this point in time.
- [34:07]
A
Or Indians.
- [34:08]
B
Indians under price. Yes.
- [34:11]
A
Where the finishing. I'll say something.
- [34:14]
B
What do I think about the potential of India? What of it is starting to get realized? What of it is, is still latent and will be realized. Oddly enough, I have been a lifetime skeptic of governments and in the context of India I came in skeptical. And one interesting thing that I realized is there are two things. One is if you are a government who's not proud of your country, you're not going to improve the country.
- [34:50]
A
Right.
- [34:50]
B
If you are a human who's not proud of your body, you're not going to improve the body. If you're somebody in a relationship, you're not proud of your relationship, your partner, you're not going to improve your relationship. For the longest time I think India suffered.
- [35:01]
A
They didn't have a sense of national self.
- [35:03]
B
And prior I never had a sense of national self. And there are shades of gray in there. There's a lot of, you know, places you can slip and fall and. But I think it is an important thing that ties India and Indians together wherever they are. And I think that sense of national self was not there for the longest time. When I was growing up, people just woke up and complained about India all the time. Right. Or very.
- [35:27]
A
In the 80s and 90s.
- [35:28]
B
Yeah, 80s and 90s I was working. It took two years to get a telephone in your house and for a TV or I was having line somewhere, blah, blah. Now I think there is a sense of rising optimism. There are pockets of pessimism for sure, but the sense of rising optimism as a whole. And so for. So where am I going with this? I think for a country as large as India, 1.4 billion population, you have a challenge that requires, requires a platform level change to happen. JIO may have been a platform level change. Policy is another platform level change. The kind of Governance and Administration.
- [36:02]
A
1991, Liberalization, 1991. So basically that was a moment for people who don't know from independence till roughly 91, India was. They actually wrote socialism into the constitution of India, like the socialist state of India or something like that. And so of course Thebian socialism arguably was the second colonialism, Right. Because Fabian socialism came from Britain. And so it was something that kept India poor. And it was, you know, all these NGOs were handing out arms. Like the whole Mother Teresa thing is meant for a country that's prostrate. Right. And like, basically, you know, it's not actually meant. It's investment is more. Investment is a real charity in a sense, because charity keeps somebody dependent and investment makes them independent. Right. So charity, you know, like it's a. If you give a man a fish, you keep them independent, but if you invest in their fish company, they might actually do something. Right. So until basically the late 80s, early 90s, India was essentially socialist. And the license, Raj, it was impossible to do anything. And talented Indians were just either, like, kept poor or they left. Right. And then 1991, because of the crisis, the Soviet Union fell and so on, and socialism was clearly not the way to go. India made the right turn. Now, by the way, that wasn't guaranteed. Like, Cuba remained communist, North Korea being communist. Right. So it was the right leadership who saw the right opportunity at the right time and took the right door. And India went at least somewhat capitalist. Yeah. And there's still a million criticisms you can have. Like air conditioning is taxed and it's. By the way, if there's one thing we should get all Indian VCs, founders and so on, basically repeal the tags. The luxury, like the Indian air conditioning tax, of all the things. That's a very simple line item thing to repeal. Will completely transform India. Right. Do you know that tax?
- [37:55]
B
Yeah. We have a new thing where you cannot put your air conditioning to 19 degrees Celsius.
- [38:00]
A
There's something really, something stupid like this. Right. But at least that one is a little harder to enforce or whatever. Right. The AC tax, though, is just, you know, Lee Kuan Yew knew air conditioning was necessary.
- [38:13]
B
Right.
- [38:14]
A
It wasn't like an option in like a sub, you know, like a, like a tropical kind of environment. Right. But where'd I get on that? Right, so. Oh, yeah. So after 91, capitalism hit India and started to grow. Right. For China, it was 1978. So that's why China's in some metrics, roughly about 10 years, 13 years ahead of India.
- [38:37]
B
Roughly.
- [38:38]
A
Other metrics, it's way ahead. Other metrics, you'd argue it's even behind in some metrics, but like China's diaspora doesn't do as well as India's diaspora. China plays a better home game and India plays a better away game. And Vice versa, I'd say. Right. But so that was the moment that India turned capitalist. That's why India is actually rising now. And I think over the years to come, you know, China was always the number two communism after the Soviet Union for, you know, what, decades. But then the Soviet Union made a bunch of bad decisions and basically tried to ideologically reform for economically reform. And then it just blew apart in the late 80s, early 90s. And then China, in a sense, became, quote, the leading brand of communism, Right. Even if it doesn't export communism, even if it doesn't think its system is the ideal system. It became the living bread of communism and Vietnam and others, you know, like, basically all look to China or what have you. And now I think we're on the verge of something similar happening in the Western world where the US and other Western countries, like what they call democracy, is going to financially, socially, politically, physically melt down. Right. The sovereign debt crisis is going to hit. And I think that if India can weather that, that it actually will keep, in a sense, the flame of monarchy alive. It'll be like China was the number two that then became effectively the most pragmatically run country. Whether it was actually, quote, communist or not, it preserved the name of communist. Right. So India becomes, I think, the world's leading democracy by the late 2000s, early 2000s or thereabouts. I think really the Internet is also a big part of that, because the Internet allows us to do cryptographically verifiable voting. It allows us to do votes where you can. Not just your vote counts, but you can count all the votes. So the Internet also is a big part in kind of guarding, quote, democracy. Because communism will be very strong. Chinese Communists, I think, will be. A lot of people will think that's the way to do things after the sovereign debt crisis. And I think it's going to overcorrect in that direction and we'll have to have a counterbalance to it. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Just the fact that India can count all the votes in a day, for example, healthcare, not a small thing. It's like in detail, though, that shows that operationally it's actually able to do that. And somehow on net, it's working within India.
- [40:58]
B
Yeah, I think so. I mean, coming back to your point, and I'm gonna merge the two, about the potential that India has beaten to realize and the potential that's latent. I do think some of these big ships happen when big bets are taken and Some of these, some of these big bets can be taken by large conglomerates and lock gomens and policies and all of that. And I think that's what's begin to show some promise and results in India. And the kind of stuff you see in India different from 20 years ago is over die. And because the government and the conglomerates have done well, it is creating a sense of optimism and is becoming a petri dish where ambition and risk taking can survive and thrive. Twenty years ago, when I was in college, if we were to start a company and entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur, you would not get married. Now if you're on Tinder, I think if you're a founder, you get a lot of dates is what I hear. So that cultural shift I think allows ambition and it doesn't tamp it down, actually says, yeah, you could do this and you know, go on that journey and there are people who back you and if you come back failed, you're not a joke, you know, you simply get patted on the back in a bar.
- [42:08]
A
So again, the failure tolerance, the cultural shift is important as opposed to only taking the safe job of engineer. Dr. I mean of course being an entrepreneur is a kind of engineer, but. Yes, correct.
- [42:18]
B
So now I think that petri dish is somewhat ready. It still will take a decade plus multiple decades perhaps to get it ready to the level where we need. But now I think we are starting to see ambition and risk taking happen, get back to and get results. And we're probably in the first cycle of that. And you could argue the first cycle was 2013, 2014. And now it starts showing up in public markets in India where good companies.
- [42:41]
A
Just hung out with Bini Bond sold Flipkart.
- [42:44]
B
Right.
- [42:44]
A
And so we put up a clip. He was from a friend of both of ours. He's on the POD before and basically he was the first large exit in India. $18 billion for Flipkart and kind of showed it was possible. Right. And you know, now, you know, one thought you have a thesis. Why don't we get to Indian tech for a second? You have a thesis on Indian tech? I have a thesis. I'd like to hear yours. I'll give you mine.
- [43:10]
B
Yeah, yeah. Thesis on India Tech. It's a broad question.
- [43:15]
A
Yes.
- [43:15]
B
Thesis of India Tech.
- [43:18]
A
Should I give you my in the group first? Yeah, please.
- [43:20]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:22]
A
So my view is that India itself is a market. Yes, but it's, I'm actually more interested in India for the producer side than the consumer side. Let's say I'm more interested In India as a source of talent for engineering, for finance, for media, for basically Internet first. Basically all of the, you know, AI is amazing, but AI needs prompting and it needs verifying. That's actually the new bottleneck. Right. Because the prompting is actually writing programs in a higher order language. You have to be verbal enough, you know, to be able to do that. So that's Indians winning spelling bees as a. So you heard. Yeah, right. So you have to, you have to be able to know all kinds of crazy vocabulary terms actually. Like for example, art history is now an applied subject. You know why? Because if you can say Cezanne or Picasso or something like that, then you can invoke that as a library call when you're using. Using AI. Right. And so every subject, the more vocabulary, not just vocabulary, the more terms, concepts, because using them correctly, you can prompt it better, you get a better result. And then verifying it is if you have expertise in there. So AI doesn't take things away, but take jobs away. But what it does do is it shifts them to people who will have time to do prompting and verifying.
- [44:37]
B
Sorry to reject you back. I don't know if you saw that recent video by Karpathi where he kind of does his analysis of GitHub code. Yeah. And more and more now the GitHub repositories have English embedded in the code because now the code itself is becoming natural language more and more.
- [44:53]
A
Yes.
- [44:53]
B
So a lot more dense. So yeah, back to your point about.
- [44:55]
A
Yeah, that's right. And exactly. Like prompting, programming, assembly, like, you know. Right. And. And India is good in English or at least a lot of Indians are good in English. And it's in some ways depending on the numbers you can argue India has already actually become the number one source of English speakers on the Internet Right. Over the US which used to be the default. Right. And I think as more and more Indians acculturate English, that will become completely true by 2035 or 2040 or thereabouts.
- [45:24]
B
Right.
- [45:24]
A
Because they can learn languages quickly or what have you. So my view is like if we're sitting on this chair, this chair doesn't feel like a Chinese chair. Right. It may be made in China, but it doesn't feel like a Chinese chair. In the same way, I think, like, what is a thesis for Indian Internet entrepreneurs? They'll build software that's just globally competitive software that happens to be made by an Indian or even in India. But it is Internet first. It's not India first, per se, it's Internet first. It's almost a little bit like Europeans who, if they're in a small country in Europe, they have to actually think Internet first if they're an entrepreneur because their whole market is just not big enough. And so the translation has to be there from the beginning and they have to be Internet first. That's got its problems because that's a tax if compliance and stuff you have to do, but it's got its benefits because you have a holistic view on the world. And so build in India or build by Indian, sell to the Internet. That's the kind of business I'm interested in investing in, which is an Internet first business that happens to be founded by Indians. Now of course, sometimes it may turn out that something like Olaf, for example, has necessarily got a very local and geographical component, right? Some businesses will be built which are, you know, necessarily going to be domain or geo locked and you have to start there. And I'm not saying India is a pretty big market. You can definitely get to a pretty large market over there. But I do think Internet first is.
- [46:54]
B
The way to go and I think.
- [46:54]
A
Crypto is going to help with that a lot because it means global rule of code, right? So an Indian may be a second class citizen in America where, you know, H1BS and so and so are becoming much more attacked and so on in the US and they're, they're basically, they haven't eliminated them, but they made them so much more of a pain in terms of forcing people to go back every year rather than every few years and making the renewals more longer and uncertain. That's not a small issue. That's a big issue because it means you can't. First of all, just the fact people may not know this, but as an H1B you have to periodically go back to India, wait for a consulate appointment, then come back. Now if you're just working at a job, this is like, okay, I need to pause, I need to take an international flight, I need to wait for an uncertain duration and then come back. And that is a pain. Even if it's like a day on both sides. If it is an uncertain multiple month thing over here, you can easily just lose your job in the US it makes hiring an H1B something where the bureaucratic overhead means you wouldn't do it, right? So their point is to make it, their goal is to make it disadvantaged enough where the program still exists in Nim, but not in substance, right? So as that door closes and I don't think that Indians should go to America Anymore. I think if you're you, it just like a big not welcome sign is being put there. If you're a CEO, the much of the American left hates you. And if you're an Indian immigrant, a Gachenko American, right. Hits you. So just listen, you know, to the signals there, right. And just don't go to America anymore. And this is true for many other countries as well. Like even German tourists are getting strip searched and what have you. Right. America does not want immigrant entrepreneurs to come there anymore. It just doesn't. Right. So where do they go instead? Somewhere else. Right. And so we have network school, you know, we've opened that. There's Dubai, there's tons of other countries that have digital nomad programs. And of course there's India itself. And finally there's the Internet, right. Which you can be on from anywhere. You can be a digital nomad. Right. And I think that shift, I'm starting to see that shift. Somebody posted the other day that like there was two really great Indian entrepreneurs that just chose to, you know, not take their U.S. offers, just, you know, stay in India instead. And I'd love to hear your or, or go to Dubai or go to Singapore, go, go to something like an S and so on and so forth. I'd love to hear your, your thoughts on that.
- [49:13]
B
Yeah, I, first of all, I drew agree how high you came back. I came back, yes.
- [49:17]
A
In the US and then you're an early adopter work. Yeah, that's right.
- [49:19]
B
Yeah, I came back before it was, I mean, yeah, there were a couple of waves in India that people have returned to India. One was in 2010, I think 29, 2010. 2010. And then next one probably again around the time I moved back to Bell, but mine was not really in wait there, just moved back. I wanted to move back. But I do remember how hard it was to get my H1 Vista guards stuck in Mexico in a place called Matamoros for six days to get my visa appointment. And it just kept getting delayed. And that place was literally bombed out a week before because people had stayed and hidden there. Drug dealers had hidden there. So the Mexican police had literally had to bomb them out. So the far hotel was actually a big circular hole in there. So we were living there anyways. It was an interesting time. But yeah, it is getting harder and harder to stay in the US or enter the US and we're all about.
- [50:10]
A
Thinking about the 5 and 10 year and 15 year horizon. Right. So you make an investment, say you're thinking about where the world is going to be in 10 years.
- [50:16]
B
Correct.
- [50:17]
A
Is America going to be more or less welcoming to immigrant entrepreneurs in 10 years? I think it's going to be much.
- [50:22]
B
Less welcoming, much less welcome. That's what I hear.
- [50:24]
A
I have friends. Worse meaning worse than today Worse. Right, yeah. So if it just is getting worse, you never want to bet on a curve that's going like this. You want to bet on curves going like this.
- [50:33]
B
Yeah, it is, it is much harder now. My friends that are living in the US 10, 15 years are afraid to come back to India to see family because they feel like when they go back to the US or legitimately stamped for B, they would be stuck at the border. And so I think it is getting surprisingly back. I was quite shocked to hear that just a couple of months back when I was in the U.S. it's also.
- [50:53]
A
The thing is just the randomness of it deters a trip.
- [50:57]
B
Yeah, right, right.
- [50:58]
A
Because if you have a 10%, like you're spending money on this plane, flight, on this hotel, all this kind of stuff and then you can be just randomly stopped at the border. It's almost like an investment. Why'd you make an investment that can randomly go to zero? Right. Why'd you have a conference in America, like a tech conference if you can't have international guests? Right. Tech is an international thing. You embase it there.
- [51:19]
B
Right, yeah.
- [51:19]
A
So it has lots of knock on effects.
- [51:21]
B
Yeah. I mean the, the debasing of the institutionalization, our institutional powerhouses of the US is quite, and it's quite sad to see because I kind of really benefited from it. It was probably one of the things that made it a superpower to begin with. So yeah, I think it's sad to see and I don't know if the trend line is ever going to reverse, but it seems to be accelerating and going forward. Yes. Yeah. Now, coming back to your question on India and tech thesis on India. Again, it's a hard question for me to answer because like at the end of the day we are in the people business and I'm not in the business of predicting what future needs to exist. I'm in the business of just understanding the motivations and intentions of a founder that's trying to create a future of certain kind. And even, you know, as any, you know as well as anybody else, they are primarily in the people business. So my intention is to keep the best people in India, stay in India and build in India, even the best people from around the world to move them back to India somehow. That's My primary. Interesting. Okay, yeah. So now what's interesting about India?
- [52:25]
A
Do you only fund entrepreneurs in India itself?
- [52:28]
B
There has to be some connection for the India fund. We the. We have the back entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia and India. Okay, got it from a global fund, different regions and different funds for us. So what is interesting about India, I think you mentioned this earlier biology that India actually lives in the cloud a lot more because it's much cheaper for us to go live in the cloud than any other country. Everybody literally lives in the cloud. And India has all free time and they watch the same movies as the Americans do and they play the same games as, you know, popular around the world. And you know, they are all sitting on Reddit and shit, posting everywhere, they're on Twitter and all that stuff is happening. So the more unplugged you become from the physical infrastructure, the more plugged in you are. The digital infrastructure, that is a very fungible thing that you can move people around with. So they are much more at home because they speak English, they are culturally, you know, easy to assimilate in any other culture and they can move around. So what you might be seeing, and I would love to hear how you're seeing in that school, I think you began with the idea that you can literally put together a set of people that believe in a similar vision, that have similar culture. And the culture is not regional related. It's more about a digital culture that exists in the clouds and sorts. You can institutionalize that and create a movement around it. And I think Indians are actually a really strong and a great perfect fit for this new world that is emerging, which is going to be this network state of sorts where they are the native citizens already.
- [54:04]
A
Yes.
- [54:04]
B
And they will have the least friction to get a passport and get citizenship in this new world that you are creating.
- [54:12]
A
And what I mean by that, by the way, is it's a little bit like people understand fiat currency and cryptocurrency now that there's like an Internet native version, there's a land native version. I think the next step, which we've kind of already in the middle of, is fiat identity and crypto identity. Because, for example, your Google login. Right. Is in a sense a digital identity. Right. A very important one in fact. Right. Your crypto wallet is another one. Your pass card to your hotel room, your Tesla digital lock that opens it, whether you use a phone app and your 2fa, right. All of these kinds of things are pieces of digital identity that eventually I think will get consolidated into like effectively a Crypto passport, digital passport that gets you into online and offline property seamlessly. Right. And India's part of the way there with other and other things, right. Like that actually can log you into online services, but it also gets you offline, right? Yeah. And they have. What's that thing at airports where it's just like face recognition?
- [55:16]
B
You get digi atra.
- [55:18]
A
Yeah, digi athra. Does that work?
- [55:19]
B
Yeah, it works beautifully. Yeah, I don't have to carry my.
- [55:21]
A
It's all the matter.
- [55:22]
B
So digi autra is this digital identity that, you know, it essentially scans your face at the airports and then now you are, you know, you are in the system and then you don't have to carry your passport. Well, for international travel you still have to. But domestic travel, you know how to carry any entity approved. So what you do is you just stand in front of the screen and then it takes your, it scans your face and the door opens and you get into the airport. And it used to be a few years back and it still is there for majority of the airports in India you have to show it and you take your wallet out and you carry. If you forget your identity card then you got to go back home and pick it up. And today I don't really carry anything to be card with me. I actually don't really carry my wallet. I don't really remember carrying my wallet when I'm in Singapore right now or the US And I tend to forget you don't need a credit card, debit card. So digital UPI and QR code base, you don't need to carry ND card. I have this thing called Digilocker which keeps my DD and it's a legal, as a legal way to show your NDD to people. You cannot be denied entry if you show that and so on and so forth. So now when you combine this digitally, native cloud, native population of, you know, very, very young people, really hungry, really ambitious and you combine that with the infrastructure the government is providing, combine that with the venture money, that is then to take risks with very young and.
- [56:45]
A
Unproven founders and also pretty capital efficient there.
- [56:48]
B
Very capital efficient, yes. Right. Then you get this in. That's where the future of India is. And on top of that you have this fast growing MIDI floss that higher and higher disposable income in frankly, India has obviously multiple parts. There is a really, really rich part of India has very high per capita gdp. There is this middle part that behaves differently and there is a bottom, the bottom is really quickly Coming out of poverty and below poverty line. It's coming out of poverty to have some disposable income, and then they are very, you know, aspiring to be somewhere the one or the middle. What does that mean? What it means is they want to go take, you know, take their girlfriends and boyfriends to a movie once in a month, once in six months, take them out to lunch or dinner in a small restaurant.
- [57:42]
A
Consumption is starting to increase. Yeah.
- [57:43]
B
Yeah. If you look at the number of iPhones India buys every year, it's quite massive.
- [57:50]
A
That's another important stat that I was surprised at seeing recently. India's risen from 1% to 20% of iPhone manufacturing, which is, again, it's like. It's rare that something keeps surprising me to the upside.
- [58:04]
B
Yeah.
- [58:04]
A
You know, like, as you said, like, governments, things tend to, you know, somebody said something like, India disappoints both the pessimists and optimists.
- [58:12]
B
And optimists. Yes, exactly Right. It's true for. It's been true for India for the longest time. It probably won't be true forever. But that's what's interesting about India. Now, why is that happening? Look, 10, 20 years ago, my parents really saved up their entire savings to buy a house or for somebody's marriage, or they would buy gold or they would buy a vehicle. The new India doesn't care about that. Nobody wants to buy a house. Their kids don't want to buy a house.
- [58:46]
A
Interesting.
- [58:47]
B
They don't care. They don't want to have possessions. They want to rent.
- [58:51]
A
Yeah.
- [58:53]
B
Now, to wear gold in public is tacky for the young people. So they don't want to buy gold and keep it in their locker. Where does money go? They don't want to buy a vehicle because they want to just take Ubers everywhere.
- [59:03]
A
Like, oh, so they are Internet first. They've leapfrogged into that.
- [59:06]
B
Yeah, they don't really. Yeah, they want to have. They want to plug in, plug out of infrastructures, banking infrastructure, you know, vehicle infrastructure.
- [59:14]
A
So it's a lifestyle of sort of. The San Francisco Tech guy is actually the default lifestyle, albeit a much lower price point, but actually comparable quality. Honestly, it's like maybe 10 or 100x in some cases cheaper than California, but it's comparable or better quality in many cases, like food delivery, like Uber. All that stuff exists. Right. You know, you can. You could be completely productive with great coffee, MacBook, air conditioning, everything there. And. And it's not like super expensive or anything. It's like, accessible to a very large number of People.
- [59:48]
B
Yeah. And you can get all of this stuff in 10 minutes in the big cities. Yeah. And pretty soon in the K2, K2 cities in 10 minutes. Because economics doesn't work out.
- [59:56]
A
Now the one thing I will say is when people go to India they'll find places and there are plenty of places that are still filthy or there's terrible streets and something like that. And that's absolutely true. And a way I've actually started to express it is India is like California in reverse. And what I mean by that is California is fractally getting worse.
- [60:18]
B
Right.
- [60:19]
A
So everything that's old is like beautiful and it's got like amazing, you know, Spanish roof architecture or its speeches. Very thing new is like in California it's like a homeless encampment. It's like a burned down town. It's like a Waymo set on fire or something like that. It's like the new stuff is bad unless the buildings that are new are bad because they're not buildings they're destroying really. Right. And maybe it's the opposite. The older it is, with some exceptions like the Taj Mahal, which are really, really old. Right. But in general the older stuff is like, it's like a slum or it's like a bad street. Though poverty is radically reduced in India. Like the rate of extreme poverty has dropped off a lot. Right. So it's like, you know, it's like a messy street or something. But the new stuff, it's like a shiny new Apple store or it's a new restaurant or something like that. And importantly, a lot of the people are very, especially English speakers. And of course not everybody speaks English and so. And so. But a lot of people do are very okrant with Internet memes. You know, they're like, they're extremely conversant with everything that's happening on the English Internet. Right. And so that's surprising to people if they haven't had, you know, time there. They may, you know, because people type without an accent. Yeah, right. You type without an accent and so they're completely conversant in written English and there's like a slight accent in. Within India. But even then like, you know, because Indians learn languages reasonably fast, so it's fractally getting better. That's kind of how I think about it. Let me know.
- [61:43]
B
Yeah, yeah. In.
- [61:44]
A
Is that because you've also lived in California and India?
- [61:46]
B
Absolutely. I think in India you can, you can visit three to four countries in a day if you wanted to. If you go to Mumbai, you can.
- [61:55]
A
Tier One tier, two, tier three. Yeah, talk about that pretty much. Right, so you go to a Zenal Shahs.
- [61:59]
B
I think, I think he mentioned that perhaps. And then our friends at Bloom Ventures, I mentioned that in his recent, I think it was last year, a couple of years back in his publication. He does a really good job on that. It's called Indus Valley Files. And I think he's got this really, really interesting observation that, you know, in a single day, I don't know whether he said this or not, but this is my interpretation already a single day you can, if you go to Mumbai or Bangalore, you can land in a, in an airport that looks like a seven star hotel, drive on a highway that looks like absolutely brand new and flowers and trees on both sides and feels like you've come to Singapore. So you land in Singapore, you can then reach a city that feels like Mexico in the middle of a sweaty afternoon. And then you could, you could pass by something that looks like a Brazilian fagala. I probably offended multiple countries in a single statement. That's interesting. In India this is what, you know, there is a pocket of massive improvement and there is the messy middle and there is a. Yeah, but if we.
- [63:05]
A
Look at the graph over time and like, so there was a tweet on Indian infrastructure that I put up that actually Prime Minister Modi retweeted that showed the like, you know, for example, illumination, like lights or highways or you know, plumbing, all this stuff just radically improved.
- [63:23]
B
Over 10 year cycle. It's completely different. Yes, the 10 year cycle, the connectivity, the electricity, you know, consumption. If you look at those graph, you look at the road network that you put this up, I remember seeing that, a train network, the flight networks, the airport infrastructure, we're looking at 10 to 15 year graph. It looks like it's a radically different country.
- [63:43]
A
Yes.
- [63:44]
B
And you can still go, you can find whatever you want to find in India. The optimists will go find the Singapore in India the pessimists are going to go find something else.
- [63:52]
A
Yes, well, but the pessimists have, if you look at the graph over time, it is, it is very hard to be pessimistic on it. Right. And that, that I think is. Unless you're calibrated on the trend line. Right. It's kind of like people can take a beautiful photo, there's still beautiful areas in California. But the trend line from, you know, because I Was there almost 25 years, right. From 1997 to 2020, 2019. So 22 years, something like that. Right. The trend Line was just definitely like this. Like it hadn't yet hit zero. But and how, when were you there? You were there from 15 years. 15 years. So 2003 to 2018. Right. So you definitely saw it towards the end. It was like much, much, much filthier from. Right. So it's funny because we're in a time where I think previously these sort of civilizational level changes happened over decades, but now they're happening over years or they happen over centuries. Now they're happening over decades. The rate of change is so ridiculously fast. And we can quantify that. Actually, have we seen the graph of. For example, I think it was whether it was Internet adoption or. Actually, no, it was E Commerce. E commerce spend had been growing as a percentage of total spend X percent a year until Covid. And then it actually literally increased 10x in a year. Right. So that's like the Lenin thing. Like there's years where decades happen. That actually was a year where a decade happened where the rate of change just went like that. Right. Things that people had known were happening just went vertical like this. Now Covid in India, actually, I mean, interesting macro settings. Covid in America after that, like the society has just felt worse off. Like people say, people often post about this. Like, maintenance quality has dropped off, you know, polarization has increased even further. Service quality, like, you know, it's like everything in terms of maintenance, all that stuff is kind of broken down. And whereas in China, for example, somebody went there and they said, post Covid. And you know, China was really ruthless during COVID They locked open rooms and so on. But they also. A lot of the things that people used to do in China, like, you know, spitting on the street and stuff like that, like a lot of that is actually dramatically being curtailed. And China feels more Japanese. Like there's a greater degree of public, you know, cleanliness and so and so forth. Perhaps as a. The system got pushed into a new state as a function of COVID And I actually think India on balance, because of the Internetification, on balance, it actually feels stronger after Covid. Like the sights come together more and so and so forth. I don't know if you have me thoughts on that.
- [66:31]
B
Yeah, there's a funny tweet somebody put out a few days back that the world has not been the same since somebody ate a bat.
- [66:40]
A
So it actually appears to have come out of the wet lab, the, you know, as more than one.
- [66:45]
B
Okay.
- [66:46]
A
Because there's enough data on the NIH funding of the COVID you know, like the COVID 19 labs that it's more than incidental. There's too many different connections for it.
- [66:57]
B
To be, I think structured.
- [66:58]
A
Yeah, I could go through all the genetics of it, but it looks, it looks, looks positive.
- [67:01]
B
So, yeah, I think, look, India and Covid was brutal time. It's very hard to compare which country had the worst of it. India certainly didn't do well. And the first wave was fine. The second wave was brutal. People did come together quite nicely. The society which was really great to see many of us and I remember like being part of a lot of this Covid drives in the line. We would call off hospitals and figure out events. And I think, yeah, it was a tough time. It does feel like it did not change society in a way that you could pinpoint pre and post and say we are a different world now. Like what you're saying to China or perhaps, you know, the U.S. it doesn't feel like it's very different. So I think we did come away not getting too deeply impacted culturally or economically or Covid. It could be because India by itself is a little bit conservative across, you know, pistol policy and monetary policies of.
- [67:52]
A
Kind of soon do the big print.
- [67:54]
B
In the same way we didn't do the same thing that we did. And the healthcare infrastructure, you know, it's not as massive as it is in China, but it gets the job done.
- [68:05]
A
And India did have its own vaccine.
- [68:06]
B
You did have your own vaccine. And I took the Renian vaccine, not the Pfizer one, and felt like I think we came out of it okay. I'm glad to see that it did lead to a lot of like the demonetization wave made sure that people don't really care about carrying money anymore. I think it did lead to a lot of the digitization of services urban company. You could get people to come to your house and clean up and you could get quick commerce picked up during that time and deliveries of all kinds of things. And I caught Covid in the US and it was so hard to get medicines delivered to you. You just couldn't get medicines delivered to you. Covid and Nai just comes to your doorstep. Even during COVID you will come to your doorstep. So I think those things start to get adopted. And one of the funny things that happens during COVID is, you know, even grandparents were had to learn all the stuff because many times they were living by themselves or if their kids were, you know, ill or sick, then they had to take care of them. They learned how to use Digital Services at 70, 80 years of age. So it led to this mass coaching of the entire country to learn, to take classes online, to transact online, to get services online, and so on and so forth. So I think that led to a behavior that has stuck around a lot more so on. The whole feels like it did accelerate our digitization journey, which was already kind of really getting there, but it's really accelerated.
- [69:36]
A
I think the digital part is what really accelerated after that. I think if you looked at a few graphs. So society is at least the same, if not better, but it doesn't seem to be badly correct. The digital part radically improved.
- [69:50]
B
And we are much younger population.
- [69:51]
A
So color was like a big deal.
- [69:53]
B
That's right.
- [69:54]
A
So hit us hard. That's important.
- [69:55]
B
And it did. Frankly, India.
- [69:57]
A
That's a good point, actually. The demographic aspect of it is underappreciated.
- [70:00]
B
Yeah, yeah. And frankly, India doesn't listen. Like, it don't listen. Right. It wasn't like people were still walking around and getting beaten up by the police. Like, bunch of funny tweets coming out and. But people just began to mingle, like in other countries, people protesting against during. So part of it was India are both docile and don't listen as a weird combination. Tell people to wear a mask. And many people as well. So that was good. And then sometimes people just don't care. Just mingle around anyway. And both of it kind of worked out in a way that the country came out of it okay. It was quite weird to see.
- [70:40]
A
Interesting. So, okay, let's see other things. I mean, you basically, you left in 2018 for India and so. And when did you come. When did you come back to India?
- [70:51]
B
When I come back to India.
- [70:52]
A
You came back in, like, January 2018?
- [70:54]
B
No, I came back in August of 2018.
- [70:56]
A
Okay. So it's only a year and a half before COVID hit.
- [70:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [71:00]
A
So then.
- [71:01]
B
Yeah.
- [71:01]
A
And so what was the, like, the venture environment at that time was, I mean, 2021. Just talking about that for a second. Right. A lot of deals that got done in 2021 in the US had this giant. I mean, like, markets are just going like, bananas at that time. Valuations are out of control, all kinds of stuff. And then inflation obviously went vertical towards the end, and finally they acknowledged it was doing so. And then they had to hike rates and not had to. I actually think both the printing and the hiking were both disastrous policies, but they felt they had to do it. Fine. How did that. Like, to what extent was India's economy also connected to, like, the Western Gyrations of markets versus how much was it kind of its own thing?
- [71:50]
B
Not very much. Yeah. So if you look at the, if you kind of go back and maybe you can show that in 2020 when the COVID hit, shock happened, the market's gonna drop in the US by what, 20, 30% or less. Two months in India was probably more like 7 or 8%. So the shock because the first wave.
- [72:07]
A
Wasn'T as bad in India.
- [72:08]
B
Yeah. Also we are not as, as connected to the US stock market, you know, as perhaps other countries might be. So, so the shock was there, but it was, it was less and, and then it just continued on. So yeah, on the venture side there was a massive gold rush even in India. Like seed rounds were getting done at 20, 30 post money and the six months ago they were happening at 10 and 15 post money. So really double overnight CDCs were happening 100, 200 post money, half a million dollars of revenue, especially in SaaS. So SaaS category kind of really blew up massively India and majority of the deals that happened there were probably SaaS and software kind of you can deals. And so snap, the snap up into Covid frenzy. Lots and lots of capital went into different companies. I think at that maybe don't quote me on this, but about 30 to 40 billion dollars of capital went into India across early mid and grow.
- [73:13]
A
What's funny is that's a large amount for vc, but it's a small amount in the grand scheme of things, you know, like because so many hundreds of billions of dollars. But yes, this is a big chunk for me.
- [73:23]
B
Good chunk of money. And for a while you were the world's second largest pool of venture capital going into the market. And China was third or fourth at the time. So I think now we have kind of stabilized in the snap back out of COVID was also very brutal. Many companies, you know, going into Covid, especially if they were offline, right. Really struggled. And then they use the times, the good ones, the good management teams use the time to really, you know, get leaner and get more hungry and powerful. On the way out of Kobe, all the companies that were building into the COVID way, what people used to call pandemic market fit, they also lost that and lost a lot of capital and you know, kind of lost the thesis and they eventually died. So that all, all that happened in India in two years and I had a few of my companies just blew up to a billion dollar and then blow down to zero gain in like two years time. It was crazy at the Same time crypto was happening, you probably know this. And then tons of tons of companies and the NFT way was picking up. It was. Well, it was a frenzy feeding frenzy and defi was picking up and after you in India. So we saw a lot of that. Lots and lots of gold rushes all happening simultaneously. And it was really hard to keep this straight ahead and figured out what kind of entrepreneur you want to back and what companies and waves you want to back and what will sustain what will not. So we need to look at the best we could and I think most investors around the world struggle with that period and we'll see what that vintage looks like in the next 10 years. But it'll be challenging if you have been a bit, you know, more indiscriminate in deploying capital within that time and didn't care about valuation and resume the over days of stay and I think they, you know, lose a lot of money.
- [75:04]
A
Yeah, interesting. I think in general the one thing that is good about those boom times is, you know, the Carlo Perez thing that we talk about a lot of these things. You gonna talk about that?
- [75:18]
B
Go ahead. All right. Please go ahead.
- [75:20]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's like in a sense the dot com bubble was a global search to find Google and Amazon, right. So all the capital that went into did more than that. But if it just did those two, you can also add Netscape and a few other things, right? Which obviously Netscape is very important. If it just did that, it's worth it, like all the cap, right. And so if that 3040 bill, if it generates $1 trillion company, even $100 billion company, you can argue it's worth it. Right. And, and it probably will, probably will do. Do quite a few like, you know, you, I think, I don't know if pressure responded in that, but that'll probably be there, right. So. And you know, it's because the thing is that entrepreneurship is hard and rare and so you kind of need to take the whole thing and you know, toss it on the table. Another example is you remember the chatbots boom of the mid 2010s? This is around the time of Tay and Microsoft. And so, and so there's like 2015ish.
- [76:27]
B
2016, like floor type stuff like a, like a programmatic. Do this step one, step two, if else chat. Yes, that's right.
- [76:35]
A
And there was Microsoft Tay, which was like an, like a B0AI chatbot. And I remember seeing all that and I remember, I'm not sure if I wrote it as an Async memo or something. But I remember writing something like for people to make this work, what they're actually what they really want. As people are talking about with chatbots, I'm like, what they're asking for is iterated at Google. Like what they want in its full generality is to say something in natural language, get back a response that uses the entire Internet to make the response and then do another query. Right? That is iterated Google. So if you can do that, of course it's amazing, it's more valuable than Google. But that's the scale. The problem we're talking about is like beat Google, right? I remember writing that and that's actually what happened, that ChatGPT is actually iterated Google and it's actually better than Google and it's actually taking share away from Google. But that was the scale of the challenge. And actually Greg Brockman actually got interested in AI because I'm part of the chatbot, he's written about that. Right. So in a sense, all the capital that went into that, if all it did was get Brock and an interested in chatbots, it paid for itself. Yeah, right. So that is like a really right tail way of thinking about some of these bubbles or what have you.
- [77:49]
B
You know, it's crazy how powerful the power law is.
- [77:51]
A
Yeah, exactly. Or actually.com bubble, when it also did is did PayPal, right. So did Netscape. It did PayPal. It did Epinions, which novel. You know, Epid's a real company, but you know, did Google, it did Amazon. Right. So PayPal gave teal and then LinkedIn and everything else from that. Right. And YouTube and blah blah. Then there's Google. So just that search for those entrepreneurs was kind of worth it. Yes, right. And that's so funny because that's not the way that people normally think about it. They want to score every investment independently and of course that's worth doing. But it's sort of like no bubble actually goes to waste in the long run. I shouldn't say no bubble, but you know what I mean. Many of these ostensible bubbles actually are search function, which actually pay dividends in five or 10 years. So.
- [78:35]
B
I agree. I think if, frankly, if I were to redesign the venture world, I would sort of say it's going to become, I wish it were a lot more bimodal where the extreme right are these absolute wool shots. You know, I'm not sure working. But if it does work, it's like, you know, you cure cancer and do a lot of stuff on the extreme left is I don't know, roll up companies, guaranteed performance, but you know, 15% coupon year over year and everything in the middle may not be as interesting. That's one way to think about that.
- [79:05]
A
That's interesting. I mean the thing is I think it's hard to do the left hand side company nowadays.
- [79:13]
B
It is very hard.
- [79:14]
A
And the reason I think it is hard to do that is like the argument, you know, for example, the so called lifestyle business argument that 37 signals made for a long time. The problem I always have with that is if you don't intend to scale a business, then you intend to run the business for the rest of your life. So the lifestyle business is actually the rest of your life. Whereas it's actually easier to build a business that is a gigantic thing because then you can sell a piece of it at some point unless. And yeah, sometimes it's a project you do want to run for the rest of your life. Right? Yeah. But unless you want to run it for the rest of your life, you want to actually build it as a company that you might be able to sell and then do something else in life if you want to do something else. Number two is a lifestyle business is not necessarily more competitive in the market than a scale business because it is attracting almost definitionally less ambitious people. Right.
- [80:07]
B
That's the bigger problem, I think that's right.
- [80:09]
A
And so the ambitious people who want to conquer the world will optimize the heck out of every screen and every flow and so and so forth. And even something we think of as, you know, simple like a, I don't know, nowadays people, because something is easy to them. They sometimes unless they're experienced, I think it's easy to build like WhatsApp or Discord. You don't necessarily feel like you're doing something very sophisticated when you're using it. You're just typing in some chat stuff to somebody on their side. It seems basic when you want to implement it and actually make it work at the scale that it works. It's actually quite challenging, quite hard. But just video uploading from, I don't know, Brazil and having it viewed in India and America and Japan all at the same time seamlessly with replies coming back and you know, deliver at least one semantics and 500 other kinds of things. It's hard. Right. So the, the lifestyle business kind of thing isn't thinking about polish, I think on something. Right. So that's my, my counter argument is I'm not sure the low risk business exists as much.
- [81:16]
B
You know, you're Right.
- [81:17]
A
Low, low, low capital though, to edit what you're saying to. Let me, let me, let me take part of what you're saying, which I do agree with. I think the small business exists. The small business with a few people that with AI and with crypto and with Internet distribution can do really well. Like Telegram is only 30 people. Right. And WhatsApp is only 55. Instagram I think was only like sub 20 people. That business definitely exists and that business will continue to exist. It's just an edit on what you're saying. Perhaps not low risk, but low capital.
- [81:48]
B
Yeah. And then I guess the thesis that some people have and I don't know how it's going to play out, but you're absolutely right. I think what you're saying is, quote unquote, you put 10B plus people and put them together, they could be 10 companies. Less ambition, less finesse or whatever. The combination becomes a C minus automatically. It doesn't become 10B plus, does not even stay B anymore if you got less. Exactly. So I totally get that. I think you're also right that if the job of a business is to suck in $1 and spit out $3 through productivity gains and high margin work or higher value add with AI, maybe you suck in half a dollar and come out with five. That may be possible because all this sprinkled magic of productivity and quality and scalability now finally gets solved with AI. So instead of one coming out with four, you have half coming up with five. And we'll see. I think it's showing promise at small scale. The challenge is that when you add 10, 20 of these 0.5 capital suckers and will 50 come out of the other end? We'll see. That's.
- [82:59]
A
Yeah. I mean the big thing about AI is. I mean there's a lot of big things, but the fact that it has scalability and consistency and low price, even if it does make errors, is still so insanely valuable because you are just hyper deflating the cost of the legal consult from a lot of, you know, from a lot of people. So yeah, I think, I don't know.
- [83:25]
B
And you have a lot more resilient P and L, what happens today if you're building some of these old school businesses, you are more people heavy. So if you don't control demand, which small businesses don't have a lot of.
- [83:38]
A
Control on, actually just go ahead, finish what you're saying.
- [83:41]
B
I'll say sorry. So you have a fixed cost, you have people sitting on the bench and there's Nothing to do, you know, figuratively speaking, but the AI and if you have agents doing the job and what point it'll be able to do pretty much end to end, open variety of things.
- [83:55]
A
Okay, I'll come back to okay.
- [83:57]
B
And then what happens is you can, then you can just purely focus on scaling demand because supply can scale infinitely when demand. So you shift your fixed cost into an operating cost, you lose operating leverage, but you are essentially scaling a business with the exact same repeatable, scalable, predictable cash flow profile. You know, the moment you get 10x demand, you can copy paste 10x agents with the same quality of service and the cost will become variable because now you're paying more for infrastructure for 10 times more agents. But you are essentially in lockstep with demand. Demand goes out, the customer says you're not good, I'm gone. You can kill agents and you're, you're back to lockstep with the demand. So your revenue and margin profile stays pretty much in lockstep. Your but. But you are a lot more resilient through the cycles, which is important for a small business. Large businesses obviously control all of the stuff. That's what we're starting to see now happen because of. Yeah, please.
- [84:57]
A
Yeah. So I think the only part I'd be disagree with you on that is the end to end part. I think it depends on the task. So if it's a robot placing things, that is something where the verifying of whether it's placed is easy, but many other tasks it's actually middle to middle 10 more. So you will have to prompt it and you have to verify it.
- [85:19]
B
I see.
- [85:19]
A
But AI is mil to mill and then you take care of the ants.
- [85:22]
B
You do that and you can't scale that when you say.
- [85:24]
A
Yeah. So basically all the depending on how much the middle part takes in any process, the part after prompting and before verifying, that now compresses to prompting and verifying. But it means, for example, as a coder you have to specify it and then you have to review the code at the other end and then integrate it. Right. And that's like the job of an engineering manager who's actually higher skill than the job in somebody who's an engineer. And so I'm not saying it's not a productivity winner. It is, but it is amplified intelligence in many ways rather than fully agentic artificial intelligence.
- [85:53]
B
Right.
- [85:53]
A
So the smarter you are, the smarter it is. But I will give one analogy. Ugur, you say something.
- [85:57]
B
I was saying that verify, prompt and verify loop. I think it's a shifting window where things you have verified prompting verify enough times where you get auto verified in auto conflict.
- [86:09]
A
So the question, I mean in the last two and a half years of AI, since the chat shifting moment, I don't feel that's true yet.
- [86:18]
B
Recording it's begging to be true.
- [86:20]
A
Well, I don't think, I think the verifying part is still hard because actually, let me be more precise on the front end for images and for video and for front end code that you can verify with a different thing, which is you verify with the GPUs. From your eye, from your brain, you can instantly see something is wrong because it's like two hands or it's got a messed up button or something like that. So that's where verifying is cheap. But on the back end for logic, for database code, for crypto code, security code, that is actually where verifying is expensive. Maybe we can turn it into something which is visual and so you can visualize it almost like for example an audio file you can turn into a spectrogram and you can see if there are some giant spikes of amplitude and that looks broken. You can quickly see it with your eye, but you can't quickly listen with your ear. Right. So it's possible we might be able to for example, generate some visualization of the code so you can quickly visually verify it. That generation itself has to be deterministic code rather than probabilistic. But that's why I divide, I'd say the front end stuff, the images, videos, that's what AI is amazing for. Because the verifying is cheap, but, but the backend code verifying is expensive, which is a non obvious division. I think that, I don't think I had tweeted about that, but I don't think people have made exactly that division. I give another analogy, which is many businesses, for a long time until you know, basically the 80s, they were doing their accounting with piece of paper, not spreadsheets. So the instruction of spreadsheet compressed that whole middle step of adding up all the numbers. They used to have a mail room at companies rather than email. And then the church of email just basically tipped that completely away and it pushed it to other things. And as another example, when running a clinical lab, because we started it in such a way that it actually had a database epic core, I could run a query and it could just give out all kinds of analytics and stuff like which variants were present with which other variants and which insurance companies and all this kind of stuff that it cost millions of Dollars for a traditional clinical lab to try to find those analytics on some process. For example, bottleneck identification worked as follows. Because every station in the clinical app, when you create a record in postgres you get a create an at timestamp for free. That meant that later when we had we wanted to approve turnaround time, we could take every station station one through station, let's say 20. And these are in a complicated order because sometimes you have to revert back to a station. You can take a sample and you take its created at timestamp at all these stations and you can make a graph of the sample moving through stations. Then every edge between them, you have the time that it took and you could start making a histogram of like oh, did this have a long delay at times? Right. Or does this have a high variance so you can make the edges wiggly if they're high variance, you can make them red if they've got a long delay and so on and so forth. And this fashion on a big monitor you can instantly visualize all the delays and you're like oh right, there is the highest variance and slowest step and we need to add three more picogrins or something to parallelize that. Right. So that kind of analytics you couldn't get. And so that's how I think of AI becoming the brain of many companies. Right? Lots of processes that were previously as manual as a mail room or previously as manual as count again numbers. AI just takes care of that middle part. But then you still have to kind of do the end caps.
- [89:48]
B
Interesting. Yeah, it's interesting to look at it. You've been thinking about this quite a lot and I think of again, I'm not diving into AI. The course is fantastic. You're familiar with formal theory, right? It's almost like formal verification. Formal verification, right. So you almost can verify the output within the system itself is actually accurate. And I think it's an NP hard problem because you don't know what other accuracies are there that you're not covering because you're not programmed to to measure it. But I think of AI systems because they're probabilistic. It is much harder to measure accuracy. And how do you measure accuracy for a poem that you write as Shakespeare? You just don't know if it's accurate or not. It's a field survive. But I think the next revolution of AI will happen when you are able to formally verify output and quality of output in a way that is that closes the loop on the proc that begins the production of the tokens that you see as photos, videos or whatever, Whatever that means. Most AI systems today are actually open loop systems. They're not closed loop systems. Take for example Clay AI. Fantastic company. Many of our companies use Clay AI. It takes inputs from a CRM6 Sense or a ZoomInfo. It'll do some research. It can figure out this person Amond is a VC here, age, whatever gender, whatever, living here or there. It'll write me a beautiful customized email to me. It'll write million copies for million people and then pushes into a HubSpot. And HubSpot does the programming and has the candidate. Yes.
- [91:26]
A
Because the problem is now I don't want to read those emails.
- [91:30]
B
That's another problem to solve. There's AI to sort of fix that. But where does the loop get open? Is that now these emails have gone to HubSpot. HubSpot puts a tracker in there. It puts a headline in there.
- [91:41]
A
No, I know, I know. But what I'm saying though is when AI increases the generation of stuff to such an extent, it'll break that channel that was working. And I don't even read email anymore then. And then I kind of don't already. Basically someone's like, oh, I sent, you know, go and look or whatever. And so instead you go to other channels that are high trust channels if people don't have the number to. Or something like that. Right. And that's where actually where your true messaging is now AI can't get in there. The whole point is not an AI.
- [92:09]
B
Right.
- [92:09]
A
So I think that there's a window right now. Yes. Where generated stuff from AI will overwhelm all kinds of existing channels and there'll be a reaction against it, which I'm already seeing where people are like.
- [92:23]
B
But the reaction is where the loop gets close. Okay, go ahead. Because when you send this out to upspawn and you say, I don't care, I will never open an email that looks like the other email. That information is not coming back to Clay today. It's staying in WhatsApp. It's staying.
- [92:39]
A
Sure. Yes.
- [92:41]
B
They have put the trackers in. They don't know what kind of subject lines people open and what times when you send it people open. Or do you have it in STML or with Nvidia embedded in it? And HubSpot knows, so click does not know how to improve its AI, how to make it better. So you open it tomorrow, day after, one year later. So that loop never gets close. And these are software loops that are either layer.
- [93:03]
A
Fair, that's true. So one part of that I do agree, which is the closing of the loop in terms of open rates and so on. But the under part is just that systemically rates will trend down when as people are increasing the number of their AI emails getting sent out. And I think you're going to start. So the complement to that is going to be crypto, because you can charge cryptocurrency for emails. Right. And we could do that.
- [93:29]
B
And I wanted to say more about a company.
- [93:31]
A
How would that feel? Well, so I want to do the V2 of that.
- [93:33]
B
Right.
- [93:34]
A
Basically, because I think tasking is going to become a big thing. But the, the reason for that is I think AI makes everything fake. Crypto makes it real again. Crypto sets up hard digital borders that AI can't cross. Like AI cannot fake the private keys for cryptocurrency. AI cannot pose as something with a crypto identity. AI cannot manipulate on chain data for all of that. This is like, it's like a hard deal border that these AI agents can't bust. Right. So that's what you can count on on the Internet are blockchains that are unhackable. And then that, because that's like a hard surface that actually becomes the verifiable Internet, which is Web three or the verifiable Web. And then Web one and Web two. Web one is like the World Wide Web. Web two is like, let's say the social web. Right. Web two is becoming closed because X and other things need to stop AI scraping. And then Web one is becoming spam. Right. And so you get spam or paywalled, closed, and then you have web3 be the open web, the cryptographic signed web. Right. And I think that's where we're going to go.
- [94:43]
B
What's the intersection of AI in Web three that you're seeing like a use case section? Like it's kind of.
- [94:47]
A
Yeah, so there's a few. Well, there's something that we're working on. Right. But so the one that's out there in public that everybody knows is AI agents using crypto to pay for things. Because crypto is currency of the Internet. Right. Since it works across borders and an AI agent can boot up an address, pay another AI agent who can receive it.
- [95:05]
B
Right.
- [95:06]
A
So just that alone is like clearly a big thing. Any agents can sign smart contracts with other AI agents. So any kind of automated trading, you know, or transactions, cryptocurrency will be the way that AI is going by things. So an intelligent Agent, which people talked about in the late 90s, you needed both AI and crypto to be at scale. You needed crypto so that everybody could accept the transactions across borders on the Internet. You need AI agents to be able to go and swim the web and find those things. So that's one piece. A second piece is, and I think this is most interesting for me is on chain data as the thing that AI can't falsify. So like the verification step and so on and so forth.
- [95:47]
B
So.
- [95:49]
A
That to me is what I call like the legend of record. Like rather than the paper of record or just argument from assertion. You have cryptographic verification. And right now that only works for financial facts because financial facts are going on chain. But the blockchain is actually the crypto more generally is the number four market in the world. You know that like number one. Nice. And number two, Nasdaq number three, Shenzhen, number four crypto. Right? And it's quickly gained, it's going to become number one. Like Internet capital markets will also be Indian capital markets, right? Like the way I look at this, and this is a five or ten year thing, but it's not more than that, right? We now finally have the on chain dollar, right? On chain fiat. That's going to mean you also have on chain, not just currency, but on chain equity and on chain fund interests. So very soon every Internet company will have an Internet equity for almost 10 years. This was pathologized because of the SEC and their jihad against crypto and so and so forth.
- [96:42]
B
Gensler and all this guys.
- [96:43]
A
And they'd all be like you said, a security and so on. They'd like, you know, and. But the obvious point is you wanted a legal pathway to put a security on chain. Duh, right? And that's not dishonest or anything like that. It's like saying don't record your securities in an Excel spreadsheet. You need to do on a piece of paper. So you went from, you know, a piece of paper to a cap table, right? Why can't you go to a coin table? Obviously you should, because that is kind of like, you know, the intermediate step is like Carta or Angellist, which are great, great things, right? So you go. It's almost like the, the ascent of man. You know, the caveman is like actually the caveman doesn't have a company at all, right? Then you've got piece of paper or you know, then you've got a cap table and spreadsheet. Then you've got Carta, right? Or angel of Sugary companies. And then you've got the on chain coin table. The advantage of this is, you know, something I didn't actually realize arguably until crypto, international law, international trade did not exist. You know why I say that? So let's say you've got, you're an Indian company and there's like a Brazilian company that you want to acquire. Right. How many people speak both Portuguese and Hindi? Not that many. Right. Okay. Many speak English on both sides. But how many people have done Indian Brazilian acquisitions or Indian Paraguay or something like that? Not too many. Right. So what people end up doing is they use a U.S. company as the adapter between the two. Because the U.S. did enough business with both of them, they use U.S. law. And so this way they, they, they make it work. So the US actually turned out to be the central hub. They reduced it to a hub and spoke problem rather than a peer to peer problem. The other country that increasingly you could not one could, the Chinese people could use is China, where they can use that. Because that also does enough business with both countries that there's some bilateral thing, a Chinese company can buy this one and sell this one or something along those lines. Right. But now with crypto you have global rule of code. So eventually that just like when you came to India, you had global mail, right? Because your mail just worked. Right. And you had global movies and you had global media, your Twitter just worked. Everything else just worked. You will have global money and global entity. And global entities. Exactly. Because if you think about what is an entity, first you have Bitcoin, then you have stablecoins and so you have all the transactions on chain and then you have all the transactions on chain of a company. Once you have all the transactions, you can generate financial statements. Once you can generate all the transactions, you can also have the cap table there. So the collect, you know, the cap table plus all the transaction, plus all the smart contracts. That is what a company is. So you have an on chain entity and it actually lives on chain and that floats above and you can port it between jurisdictions just like you can port everything else. The reason that's harder to do than all the other things we've done before is it is like a group of people, it's like law, it's money, it's like high stakes stuff. But we're getting there, right? I think that's going to be one of the most important areas for Indians. But actually anybody who's not in the US or China to really invest in, actually frankly lots of Americans and Chinese will benefit from as well. But especially if you're not in a quote, in a country that is contending for being the global number one, you want crypto because it protects your rights online. You know what I mean? Right. And it protects your rights abroad. It gives you like currency that can't be seized. It gives you contracts that can't be unilaterally abrogated. You're like a first class citizen on the Internet. Even if you're a second class citizen in America. That's like a really deep point. Like, you know, people can Mess with your H1B visa. They can make it hard for you to start a company or something like that in the us they cannot make it hard for you to move your bitcoin.
- [100:21]
B
Yeah, you were saying, I think at some point in time your wallet is your passport. That's right, yeah. Look, I mean, I think it's starting to really play out. What's exciting you in crypto today? I mean, we keep hearing about stables a lot.
- [100:34]
A
So you know what? You know, I launched UFCC at Coinbase.
- [100:37]
B
I pulled up.
- [100:37]
A
Yeah, you want to see something we put up? We'll put that on screen or whatever. We're launching support for a new stablecoin called USD coin. We call it a stablecoin because one USD coin can reliably and stably be exchanged for exactly one US dollar. So October 23, 2018, like we put in the 25 mil, we collateralize the consortium, we launch the like. That whole thing doesn't exist without old Balaji.
- [101:05]
B
Wasn't that like a massive bull period in 2018?
- [101:10]
A
That was a bear period. That was a bear period. 2017 was a bullshit. This was extreme bear period.
- [101:14]
B
Yes, yes.
- [101:15]
A
This is what this is in crypto had fallen. Bitcoin had fallen down to like 5,000.
- [101:18]
B
Or something from 20.
- [101:18]
A
It was down 75%. But you know, I'm an all weather, you know, I believed in this, you know, through multiple bubbles and cycles and so and so forth. And so, yeah, and basically the graph on that, that was October 23, 2018. And I'll show you the graph actually.
- [101:36]
B
And it hit caught 17,000 or something like that in 2017. I remember I was lost.
- [101:41]
A
Yeah, you heard 20,000. I've got the price graph is carved in. It's like a tat. I don't get any tats, but I do have that as a tat in my brain. So here is like so uscc. Let me see if I can show the exact area. October 23, 2018.
- [102:00]
B
Zero. Wow, is that cool, that's amazing.
- [102:05]
A
And now it's at $60 billion, $10 billion.
- [102:08]
B
Crazy.
- [102:09]
A
Crazy. Right?
- [102:10]
B
So mind gu.
- [102:11]
A
Mindguard. Right. That's only seven years ago and it's now like a few percent of transactions for the dollar globally. Right. It'll become everything in a few years. Right. So why don't we just wrap up lightning round and so on, so forth. I'll just go through a bunch of different areas, get your thoughts on. Just give you one word and you can be in a few. Yeah, so let's see, we did a bit of AI. So biotech. Have you thought about that at all since your Google cloud days?
- [102:39]
B
A little bit of it. A little bit. What is interesting to me in biotech now is. Is it a long answer? You want a short answer?
- [102:46]
A
Give me the medium.
- [102:46]
B
Life I heard.
- [102:47]
A
Yeah.
- [102:47]
B
Okay. So in the context of India, what I didn't know is that if you think about imagining new molecules, that we cure diseases, to building chemistries for it, to testing it, and then deploying and launching and scaling it. If you think about the thinking of new molecules as a head, India has the body, it doesn't have the legs yet. The body is turning those ideas into chemistries, trying it out and then doing animal tests and then first layer of human tests and then pushing it back and they push it back to a Pfizer or a Modena or whatever the US and that they, they cover legs, they have the brains, they tell an Indian company what to build and the other five or ten tricky chemistries you should build and then go test out and then it's a near, you know, second stage, even trial or the approval stage. Then it gets pushed back to the US they finish the process and for cancer it'll take five years. For something simple, it'll take a few months. And then they go prioritize, package, sell, manufacturing, cell with LLMs. Now if you're starting to see is there's a recent paper that came out of Stanford two months back is that they tried out 75, 76 different modalities and figured out, you know, I don't know, binding efficiencies for each of those with certain diseases and all that. And then they came up with two chemistries in six weeks. What used to take two to three years and then they actually had successful lab rat tests. So what's interesting to me right now in biotech is that India did not have a head, it had the body, it didn't have the legs, now we have a head. So you could then build a fully Integrated biotech company out of India that does not yet know how to productionize and sell and package it. But what they would do is, you know what used to be called mostly like contract.
- [104:37]
A
Yeah, CIOs.
- [104:38]
B
Yeah. No, you don't have, you don't. You can take the CR of that, you can design your own drugs, manufacture as you put it, push it back.
- [104:45]
A
To the U.S. this is, this is similar to how China started as like just main, you know, just like a low end thing and then eventually it went up the value chain and actually the CEO around China, so.
- [104:54]
B
Correct.
- [104:55]
A
That's right. That's interesting. Okay, that's good. So media. So one of my theses is India becomes a media superpower, but in the following sense. Not in the sense that Bollywood takes over the world, but rather that Indians are very good at content creation and become a larger and larger and larger percentage of content created online. Let me know your thoughts on that.
- [105:15]
B
Yeah, we're starting to see it. We actually embarked a few companies that are essentially content creators, young kids creating content and then publicizing it. So India sold digital native that many people are choosing to as their primary job. YouTuber is becoming a cultural phenomena. I do think like you said earlier, Indians are the best exports. So I'm trying to see Indians show up in movies and TV series and never have I ever and blah blah blah. And that was not normal 5, 10 years back. Now we're popping up in big movies. So this familiarity with the culture and sustain in face I think is quite interesting. And now the content that is getting created in India, it can potentially get viral in the us he's seeing it in gaming as well. They are culturally relevant games about Mahabharata and Ramayana. They are getting popular in India. The question is can like the way Thangka is popular everywhere in the world and we play games with the North Scot themes and so on. Can that ever go expand beyond India and become a popular theme in the US or in Japan or Korea? I mean that could be interesting to see. Same with comic books. India has a really nice, nice comic culture. It's kind of died out over the last 10, 15 years, but it's picking up again the kept tool like companies coming up and AI is helping that wave. And then they're all very culturally Indian and then can you find, can you export that to the world? Right. Indian stories, you have a company called Pocket FM and the guy essentially was traveling in Indian Railways and then Indian Railways have, you know, these are all seven, eight, ten hour journeys. You would have these TAs, you know, guys that sell Pocketbooks, Pocket Pavelas there are spicy stories, romance, horror, love adult fiction fiction. So he was reading, you know, realized that Sheila could convert this stuff to audiobooks and he converted these to short, short form, but long episodic audiobooks. And it just took off. It's a company called Pocket FM and they make 7,250 million revenue now. 70% of it is in the US Indian company building, designing new short form novellas, you know, spicy stories.
- [107:25]
A
And it's basically though at global quality. It's not like Indian accent, it's not Indian only. That's the key thing.
- [107:32]
B
It's Netflix for audio. And now they're laying on AI because you know, initially you would have to have humans sitting in a podcasting room like that to, you know, capture their voice and tone. And there's 40, 50% gross margin. Takes a long while. There are contracts that you have to do over time. You just get to 90% gross margin by just using AI to create different synthetic voices in any language. And then the interesting part of that is you can experiment in India because the population is large and interestingly, if something spikes in India as a story actually spikes in Germany. Except then you convert to Germany, you get to German. But there's the same seven or eight stories in the world that keep playing out. Love, loss, grief, ambition.
- [108:14]
A
Yes, it's culturally similar enough. See what's interesting about that is I do feel China is a Galapagos Islands where the, you know, like the animals are different there. You know, the ecosystem is different. Right. Like for example, Meituan is like a huge, the equivalent of Groupon in the US Became a much bigger company in China, so they had a, almost like a different evolutionary tree. Have you ever been to like Socotra? No, no, Socotra is like this island in the Middle East.
- [108:39]
B
Yemen. Right?
- [108:40]
A
Yeah, near Yemen. That has a totally different like set.
- [108:43]
B
Of trees and the baobab trees and all that. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [108:45]
A
To anywhere else in the world. Right. And so it's like a different ecosystem. So China's like that, where stories that take off from China or vice versa don't necessarily happen the rest of the world and et cetera, it's relatively rare there's a story. But India is connected enough because it's English that it is correlated with, let's say Germany. Yeah, I mean it's a 95.
- [109:02]
B
Yeah. That's another thing that's happening in India. It's quite interesting.
- [109:05]
A
Okay, all right, let me do two or Three more space. ISRO has actually done surprisingly well. Low cost launches are a thing and so forth. Tell me, have you thought about space or actually Adnikol, me and Sriram and several other people invest in that. If you know that one like a spatial.
- [109:20]
B
We know very well. Yeah, fantastic company Adnikol Sky Road. We invested in a company called Pixel Space to raise about 90, 95 million hyperspectral satellites. They can.
- [109:30]
A
Sorry, I didn't know if they're a competitor with algae color.
- [109:32]
B
Oh no they're not. Yeah, they might use ethnicools to go launch because they don't do the launch stuff, they do the satellite and payload stuff. But yeah, very cutting edge. And we were the first institutional investors in any space company four or five years ago in 2019. And now we, I think we have hundreds of companies building space and again if you think about hundreds of companies, but hundreds of companies building in space across launch vehicles, reusable launch vehicles. There's a company called Ethereal X that does utmo incredible stuff. There is propulsion systems, there's ground station, there's telematics, there's satellite building.
- [110:04]
A
So this is a place that you, this is a sector you invest a.
- [110:06]
B
Fair bit or there's road warehouse. Yeah, we, we are very much. We are really.
- [110:10]
A
I don't think I could rattle off all of those different subsections like you just said. Yes.
- [110:13]
B
Yeah. So we ye pretty deep and sophisticated thesis around space tech because the ISRO talent base is so strong and then the young entrepreneurs coming out of the world can join hands and then you know, you know how much Indian government based ISRO is peanuts. So you know, once they, once they've done their duty, they've learned their lessons, they learn their skills. They are very happy to go work for a private company now.
- [110:34]
A
Interesting.
- [110:35]
B
And yes, you know the ISRO as an institution is also very supportive. They are offering labs for free to test out, do turbo testing, vibration testing, space readiness testing for satellites. Rocket is quite amazing to see.
- [110:47]
A
So okay, that's interesting. I learned something and I knew ISRO was doing well and when I know that hundreds of companies. That's really, really cool. Drones.
- [110:58]
B
Drones.
- [110:59]
A
Yeah.
- [110:59]
B
It's a very interesting space. The company I should check out is called airbound.com they're building VTOL blended wings body. So it's a single, single blended body. There's no moving parts and it takes vital. It takes off vertically and then gyroscopically navigates itself to a horizontal glide path with wings and it can cover about 6-70km. This is a company they invested in the preceded this raised from from a bunch of TM investors in the US Large seed round they're doing. I think drone is an interesting space in India because you know, when traffic is just such a pain in the ass in India, if you really want to offer things of different varieties and quick commerce space, you have to take the aerial route. The road routes are just too slow and too expensive. And regulation has been generally quite positive in India. What doesn't exist yet is a technology that can scalably, reliably go deliver things that are not 500 grams. You know you got to get to 3 to 5 kgs 40 to cover 40, 50, 60% of the overall volume of deliveries you want to do consumers. So 40, 50% of consumer deliveries are some 3 kgs. So this company right now is building a drone, one of the most advanced drones in the world that has an LD ratio almost matching the best aircrafts in the world. And what he wants to do is to just build the best aircraft in the world and just use it for drone deliveries. So the goal is to build the best aircraft, the best lift and drag.
- [112:41]
A
Ratio or the best mean like aircraft aircraft or drone or delivery drone delivery aircraft.
- [112:47]
B
He's building the best aircraft that is shaped like a drone, the size of a drone. For delivery.
- [112:52]
A
For delivery it's got to custom build.
- [112:53]
B
For a custom airport Aeros. But the goal is to build the.
- [112:55]
A
Absolute best aircraft and is drone delivery. I know drone delivery is actually live in China now. Yeah, right. Is it there in India?
- [113:02]
B
Yeah, he's doing pilots in India right now with a large healthcare system.
- [113:07]
A
What is happening in India that people don't know about?
- [113:09]
B
Tech wise, India is now coming to a point where people are building real world class first in the world of technologies. The drone was an example of that. The satellite companies, rocket companies are examples of that. And there are many more that are coming. Semiconductor stuff that we are looking that seems like it's very cutting edge. So there is absolutely intent and there's capital available and there's talent that we believe is going to land India in a place where we are de novo. We're doing the novo innovation that if it works, it can actually really reshape industries. That wasn't true five, ten years ago. And I would argue we still are a minuscule, minuscule percentage of what I think the contribution to global idea is that needs to change and I would love for that to accelerate. And I'm trying to do some things to make that much faster. But There are small pockets, a few pockets but they are very deep pockets of innovation that are absolutely mandatory. But this company that we just talked about you're coming with people that are leaders in senior developers at Tesla, at SpaceX, Google's wing which is tried to build exactly this 10 years ago and couldn't annual Andrew's drone team lead is with us in this one. And so this stuff is really cutting edge. So I think there are more and more pockets of that with young first time founders. This kid is in 19 now when we invested he was 17. There are more people like that coming out of the woodwork. I think there's quite people don't know this and I would love for that volume of people to be much more and back them more. And I would love for more people to know that there is stuff like this coming out of India. You're not a software animation. We have a back office anymore. We're not just a consumer mass consumer Internet and e commerce country. We all of that and that's also deepening and broadening but we also this.
- [115:20]
A
Now that's really awesome. I think I don't think people again I think it's still underpriced. I think we that that story like this kind of stuff is awesome. This is that's like world class, right. And I think the world class stuff people kind of knew Indians individually were doing that kind of stuff, you know But I don't think they realize how much of a for lack of a term not even bench isn't even the right term how much in reserve there was for the NDA. Yeah. Okay, awesome. Maybe with that.
- [115:49]
B
Great, cool. Thank you.