Guide To Work In A Company 2024 | Must Watch | Salaries, Equity, Raises, Negotiations

something happened after the pandemic something happened after Gio in India uh the modern employees brain is gone case you actually don't get equity for doing work you get equity for taking risk companies don't want Theory anymore they want execution can you build a product that solves a problem for most of you any ESOP you get in any company whether here or outside just assume it's worth zero today you would rather intern at Apple for zero than get paid 30k a month at some Lalu Prasad company it will take you 20 years to make serious money

if you work here or anywhere else so I'll repeat why I'm doing this I think we have rapidly scaled uh last year this time we were like six people or something like that uh and now we're a lot of people and a lot of you are fairly young this is your first job this is your second job and I think this is not just true for you but it's also true for the people that follow me on Instagram or YouTube and generally youngsters today right which is nobody has ever told you how to work in

a Workforce cuz most of you graduated during the pandemic most of you have never worked professionally in your job and when you get fired nobody actually tells you why you're getting fired they say misper performance or this or that right so what is happening and this is something I've noticed from a very zoomed out perspective that you're getting information from the wrong sources and you are taking what other people are creating as content and thinking your life is supposed to be like that which is not not really how it's supposed to be so hopefully this

session teaches you two things one what we expect as employers and not just us but I think General companies in India right most startups most companies in India what we expect and number two how you can actually progress in your career cuz careers today are very different from careers a decade ago a decade ago or 20 years when my my mom let's say was working in banking it took her many years like 30 years of grinding same company maybe one company shift after 15 years it's very different now you have plenty of options you have

like the world has changed so hopefully this is useful for you because I think in general I've thought about how can this be how can this lead to success for you so it's called Rules of Engagement which is what do companies expect from you and what you expect from what you should expect from companies and yeah it's a guide to the to working in the modern Indian Workforce can we go to the next slide please okay now serious companies and that two kinds of companies okay you you'll see see this now there are two kinds

of companies where there's some companies who are serious who are scaling who pay employees real cash where they have real clients and you have you provide a service or you build a product or something and there's a bunch of unserious companies as well and more and more unserious companies are popping up we'll talk about this um serious companies only want to work with people who understand the roles of Engagement it's like I don't know if you know this but today let's say if you leave here and go work at another company do you know what

the first thing the other company will do after you interview anyone has any guesses yeah so mum want to answer that so what mdom said is they do a process called due diligence how many of you have not heard of due diligence okay just so you know suppose you leave here and you join another company or forget about us right like suppose you worked at Flipkart and you left Flipkart and went to another company the HR at the new company will call your old company and they will ask them how is this person did this

person behave well like was he useful right and we get lots of such calls right people who join us and then move on Etc and it's not just here but in every other company so stuff like that serious companies only want to work with serious people so when they call they mostly asking about seriousness right does is this person worth hiring so we're going to cover four things today the first one is the invasion of the modern employees brain I think something happened after the pandemic something happened after in India uh the modern employees brain

is is gone case hopefully we can correct some of that today and what is a founder and what is the difference between a founder and employee because today being a Founder is cool but it wasn't always so third one is organization structure and expenses like if we are charging a client let's say five lakhs or 10 lakhs how much money do we make out of it how much money do you make out of it how do we calculate the expenses all of that we're going to reveal all of that cool stuff today and how you

you can really make money okay so we're going to cover all four of this how you can accelerate your career how you can grow whether you want to become a Founder tomorrow whether you want to become a senior executive here or at any other company we're going to cover all four of it next slide this is a healthy brain and see nice pink pink smooth brain okay let's see an unhealthy brain now this is a damaged brain uh okay this might sound like a joke especially this last one here 10 jobs in two years plus

six agencies but it's not actually a joke like me Rohit ronit Lavina we sit in that room sometimes hiring people I'm sure you know AOS slabs is also hiring a bunch of people uh and when we see the number one thing that most people say is yeah you know I did this then 3 months later I did this then 3 months later I did this and then you know I've started a company and then I'm I also run this company and we've had so many of these people now that it's like now become like a

chronic pattern and it reminds me of when I was like 20 years old and confused and I wish somebody just like picked me up by the year whacked me one time and said no this is not how you do things here is the better way to read your career so I think everyone has a damaged brain but it's not your fault you know whose fault it is it's our fault the people who make content right because and not us specifically but content creators right in general today Instagram is flooded with content saying you know buy

25 you'll be millionaire mindset driving a Rolex or sorry a Lamborghini and like wear a Rolex and you know you'll be working four hours a week or whatever nobody here who's made it I I I get to work with some really Fascinating People has have you seen any of them work 4 hours a week no they're here like a long like a lot of the time and they're here Saturdays and Sundays as well so it's really different from what people think it is next slide so I'll tell you why no one tells you the truth

on social media you would expect by now people to tell the truth on social media to come out and be like what what it's actually like to work at a company but there's a pro I'll tell you the challenge challenge is today social media is mostly young people mostly people that 20s 21 22 23 some something in that age range right young people are mostly playing status games as an extension of college most of you went to college yeah and in college you had status games popular Branch you know you're just extending that most of

these people are just extending that in the social world I see one tweet every day of somebody else you know saying oh you know this person got placed for this but why am I not getting a job for this whatever right it's an extension of college and the this is the most important thing right the third thing and it's something I suffered from when I was very very young everyone here if especially if we have hired you you are super high potential and everyone sitting watching this kind of content especially online you're super high potential

but there's a gap between potential and tested potential and I wish I understood this when I was younger I'll tell you what this means in your head you might think okay I can do this and this I'm the best video editor I'm the best software engineer but being tested is hard like most people when they get faced with this test and we'll talk about the test later right in every person's career you have to go through this one test with tests not just can you do the skill but can you provide outcomes there's a very

big gap between the two and every year that passes I see this gap for most people like widening and lastly older people the reason no one tells you the truth is that older people people in their 30s they have no incentive to go on social media and tell the truth a because they don't want competitors to come like do the same thing that they're doing and B there are people like Naran morti who have tried to tell the truth that you have to work X number of hours or whatever it is and really got cancelled

for it nobody wants to take the risk and I know lots of founder friends right they're all like damn scared they're all like you know if I say this world people say of me will they go cancel my app that stuff happens that's a real fear in many Founders heads so they just don't say anything online so what happens this first crowd the first two crowds right people playing the status game the young people playing the status games are flooding social media with all sorts of things that are not really true because you only find

out what works or not in your career by the time you're 30 I'm 31 today and I had to go through I had to do a lot of wrong things to then eventually do the right thing all right next slide this is a picture of Socrates you know Socrates this a this of probably an artist rendition okay I'll tell you a very interesting story about Socrates I'm butchering the details but Socrates was exiled and then eventually he was asked to take like a cup of poison this is Poison by the state do you know why

cuz Socrates told the truth Socrates told his students I'm just I'm making a very simplistic story out of this he told his students go question everything if there's somebody being religious go question them why why and you know how young people are right they started questioning everything they went to all the priests they started questioning them this that so the state found him guilty and said boss you're making everything unruly and uh you know just throw away everything you've said just say you know I was wrong about everything and we'll let you go but if

you don't if you stick to your ideals we're going to make you drink some poison so stood for the truth he stuck to his ideals he ended up having to drink poison the lesson from this is not stick for stick for the truth and drink poison or whatever the lesson to learn from this is a lot of people are put in this especially people who are successful are put in this position where they can't go out publicly tell what made them successful or what the rules of success are because firstly the rules are not as

like do 1 2 3 4 five it's a little bit complicated and it's a lot of hard work stick around for 20 years and it's not good content if I made a video saying here's how you get successful and I said it takes 20 years or 10 years all of you would click away be like n a trick faceless Channel what is the trick today to be successful so nobody nobody says it because there's no incentive you'll just shout at them in the comments anyway next slide so social media therefore is Lies by Omission which

means and this is Plato's it's a it's a it's this allegory of the cave where there are some prisoners and you can see some uh they can see some Shadows but what they're seeing is somebody holding up like a cat or whatever and they're seeing a cat here so they think there's actually a cat there so you're not actually seeing reality for what it is you're seeing social media which is a mirror of reality so reality is here it's a mirror and it's coming back to you but reality is different it's messy and hopefully through

this deck we are able to you know tease out reality a bit so for example the one person or the few people that go out and actually say it takes hard work and energy and really lots of failure and lots of you know careers ups and downs when they go say these things nobody likes it and it becomes national news next slide okay now again I'm repeating this for the nth time but most this is what most youngsters think how many of you think you'll be a millionaire by 25 millionaire 8.4 crores okay we have

one person there yeah this might sound like a joke but especially if you go to tier 2 tier 3 India a lot of people really believe that cuz you can see from their feed no ultimately whatever is on your feed you end up thinking that that is true some of you especially Engineers right believe that you build some magical X technology it's going to make you super rich and that can be reached through pure skill maximization as of the MD of Google in of YouTube uh a week ago or something like that we were at

Google marketing live and interesting interesting thing he said is Google is a product company but in India we have so many people it's like a services company but everyone still especially Engineers have that myth that you build a technology and you do something and then like that Social Network movie that you get rich some of you on the other side creators think you create content every day it's going to make you rich um I think ronet told me this very funny thing he told me which is the minute I see one of our employees creating

content I'm like has he left so everyone thinks that creating I mean everyone does like so many people have done this right we are a very very young company we just started but like people will leave us sometimes and then very next week there's like they start doing content right and they do it exactly for 2 weeks and then they give up because obviously as you know in two weeks nothing happens so people think creating content is going to make you rich and famous some of you who want to be entrepreneurs think funding is easily

available you know this is very specific to the online audience More Than This audience but this idea that you can just go to an investor and it'll give you like 1 CR 5 crores 10 crores it just doesn't work that way especially now it just doesn't work that way it's actually really hard to raise funding and uh it's very rare for you to be able to raise funding in this climate without having like history of building something reasonably successful next thing is you can have the ideal life without trade-offs or sacrifices actually the people who

work 4 hours a week and are rich the people I know let's say have actually spent a decade working 10 hours a day it's like it's almost like you first have to do the hard work the extreme hard work and then you can spend the time chilling I've actually I mean there are examples of people working 8 hours a day and doing reasonably well but it's very hard to start your career saying I'll work 4 hours a day for the next 30 Years but get rich it's very very difficult to do that the last problem

which is the system is broken I was like this when I was young it's like government sucks these guys suck politicians don't know anything nobody knows anything my teachers are idiots system is completely broken I can fix it I think my ideas are better but what I didn't realize when I was 20 and between 20 and 30 is the gap between ideas and execution is huge it's massive and we'll go through why it's hard and lastly there's Elon Musk itis the most popular influencer in the world is not Mr Beast in my opinion it's Elon

Musk he has the he has like hundreds of millions of followers and Elon Musk has convinced everybody that you can start five companies at one time and do really really well and make a ton of money and be really popular on social media and he's done like deep tech companies right so it's not easy and if you look at Elon musk's like career graph he started very very early and his first success was actually X right the PayPal what they did with PayPal so he's had time to become Elon Musk it's very hard to be

an Elon Musk at 20 or 22 okay next slide so I want to tell you what reality is really like some stories of successful companies how long it actually takes this 2008 this is I'm sure this picture is not from 2008 but I couldn't find an old picture of zato this is a old uh article about flip cart uh Flipkart opens his first office in bangaluru pin code 56034 they delivered 3,400 shipments successfully okay and there's some factors that led to success today Flipkart is massive sorry uh zomato is massive so is Flipkart flipcart IPO

billions of dollars zomato billions of dollars and it's look at the gap 2008 and 2024 you're hearing about zomato Flipkart now it's been popular in the last like 3 4 years it's really been in your business case studies are made of out of it but look at the Gap what's the what is 2024 minus 2008 16 years the guys who made money the guys and girls who made money at zomato and Flipkart in the early days have probably worked there for a very long time and they've been there early right they have thousands of employees

now but I'm sure the first 100 are treated like royalty but more importantly the factors that led to success of zato Flipkart it's very hard for you to replicate them today in the same way the software methods and Frameworks if a zomato guy 10 years ago like I I remember there is one very uh interesting article by Shopify about how they shifted from a monolithic service to microservices have you guys heard of this thesis you heard of this right that Shopify that famous article where they shifted from monolithics this thing to microservices and everyone said

Ah that's the way to do things right and there's so many debates I'm sure sure there are debates even today of zomato uses this or Z or or Flipkart uses this but remember that's probably not why they got successful they use it because it's a relic of the fact that it's so complicated as a system now it's hard for them to change next is the type of marketing you know there are many businesses that grew purely on ads actually that was a primary way to grow in India or any other country you would run ads

you know how You' run ads you put them in the newspaper social media I mean Instagram faceb Facebook Google ads how old are these companies what happened before that what happened 100 years before that so advertising as a medium has changed in my opinion now ads are also dead like today if you see ranir Singh in another ad you're like whatever you scroll like right so advertising has also changed and in fact you guys know the d2c companies that we're now seeing that are becoming very very successful are becoming successful on the back of influence

of marketing right so they're the way they are growing the way they are scaling has become completely different now and I think in the last one year we have been seeing this rise at least in India of like YouTube driven businesses we've seen this in the US 3 four years India is always lagging behind us for a bit but we've seen this in the US right Mr Beast you go to any store in New York you go to any store in La there is a damn Feast tables right on the table Prime in every fridge

so building distribution first first free advertising you spend zero your cost of acquisition is zero and then you build a business on top seems to be the way that people are doing it now but if you go back a lot of people like sometimes you know Saga and shans have to deal with this all the time right where we work with some Brands and they're like What's the treatment of this video right where they're still thinking like 20 years ago where they're still thinking like 30 years ago uh Market opportunities changes and challenges Market has

also evolved a lot like today you would find it very difficult to make a d2c brand that does what let's say um I don't know like a nikar does cuz it's already clogged it's already saturated like the reason we I think got some traction is because AI became a new inflection point and we said okay we can create content around this it might be useful but Mo many people with ideas often say okay we'll do the same as somebody else but like 500 people doing the same thing okay and lastly even the founding DNA right

the founding DNA that you needed back then was like a proper dhundha pnl guy like in India this is a known fact right if there's some laa type guy sitting there thinking through that's like the way to succeed I still believe you need some of that but I think the DNA of the founders now has started to change more in terms of this is my opinion whoever is able to advertise and Market best get their product in front of as many eyes as possible wins this is why our clients really come to us right at

Yas where they want us to do you for them it's for the same reason because they're starting to realize actually Building Products is getting easier over time building distribution is getting harder it's it's something that people have started realizing over time hardik Panda from not from the Indian cricket team but from um uh unacademy has a great thread on this I'll read it out for you because I think the screen size is small I've interacted a bit with the genzi workforce in the last few months you would see a consistent pattern around their casual disregard

for hard work longevity of a career and the trade-offs involved the their argument and I I know many of you are argument and many people online as well is that work has evolved it has but here's what hasn't jenzi speaks fondly about setting their own terms for time commitment not making as many sacrifices defining their own benchmarks of success I'll create my own agency how many of you think you'll create your own agency or business at some point honest truth from everyone everyone else come on I know I've spoken to some of you who wanted

to start your own agency or company at some point there's a lot of hands right so I'll create my own agency I'll freelance from Goa how many people ever thought at least once I'll freelance from Goa just look at the number of hands in the room how many of you have thought I'll build my own YouTube channel okay that's literally every hand in the room I want to build a community and Mentor people right lot of hands problem is when proded enough you learn that their willingness usually stems from the pride of having figured out

a market Arbitrage okay you know what a market Arbitrage is it means you've learned something that nobody else knows that's what an Arbitrage is basically you're you're saying I have some information that nobody else does I'm going to take advantage of this information and as if they landed on this asymmetric advantage that wasn't afforded to the folks before them the problem about market arbitrages and he's very right about this because just so you know I wrote a book in 2018 called pajama profit where we literally covered lots of this it's called pajama profit it's about

literally sitting and freelancing obviously we didn't talk about companies as much but we spoke a lot about freelancing we also spoke about building a personal brand there's a chapter in the book 2018 6 seven years ago right the problem with Market Arbitrage is they spread like wildfire and in no time everyone knows about them now you all know the techniques of how to build a Channel or how to go freelance or whatever right to exploit an Arbitrage you still need to be in the top 1% of what you do so not only do you need

to find an advantage you also need to be in the top 1% of that Advantage it's really hard and the last thing is no Arbitrage is enough to sustain a 25y old career let's say you build an agency on something new how you going to sustain it 25 years right so these things are not unique to you like sometimes some people wake up and they're like oh you know I have this unique idea I'll build this agency or I'll do this YouTube or I'll freelance from go out this is now the most common thought on

social media especially in India you need to find find something new next slide so the problem is you are not only getting wrong information you're also getting delayed information like I said from the zato story your takeaways from what framework they use what stack they use how they did things are so old that you're making life decisions on what worked one or two decades ago there are some people who making life decisions based on what worked even before that like all the guys going to entrance exams right now nothing against them if you're in the

top 1% you'll win but if you're not in the top 1% your life is going to be hell there's a reason today's Founders for example are building on top of YouTube and WhatsApp we're not stupid we know how to build products we built scenes a couple of years ago right where we built out the entire expans by ourselves but we learned a very important lesson which is that building on top of YouTube and WhatsApp are much more valuable because you're taking advantage of their inherent distribution and your costs are lower right like you want to

do video streaming by yourself tesis will tell you all the bills if you want to build video streaming by yourself this is for more for the engineers but the last gen did things differently but you have to keep evolving with the times right and the algorithm only surfaces successes and flashy Lifestyles your algorithm will not show you some struggler it will show you beer biceps and then Dru rati and then the next success and the next success and then ktic Arian McLaren car whatever the algorithm is built for that and it's giving your brain like

like cancer or something so and there's also massive amounts of surviv ship bias right right the people that did the exact same things but failed you can take what I've done in the last like 6 months 8 months or you can take let's say what roit has done and you can find five other guys who've done exactly the same thing with the exact same steps but because they missed one or two things they weren't able to make it you know how many clones there are of some of the businesses we have here the minute we

make something work we'll see one clone and you know it's it's so strange right like there's nothing against the Clone it's just they're doing exactly the same thing but there are some factors or timing that made our thing work at the time that it worked so I feel like and I we're still not a big company we're still a very tiny company right but I don't think copying another business would work so easily and a change in what is school so what is what was school 10 years ago entrepreneurship was not cool 10 years ago

Suddenly It's become cool so you're also tracking what is on TV and what is on social media today next slide this is a picture of me from 2015 it's almost 9 10 years ago that is me in Delhi with three other co-founders running a company called job Spire this is a makeshift microwave I mean this is a microwave but it's a makeshift standing table I had a back cake back then and enjoyed my back or something it's my MacBook and this is like a really old building in Delhi I started there I'll tell you one

thing in 2015 it was uncool to to run your own company in India you looked at as unemployed my parents didn't know how to explain what I did to their friends and everybody else and startups there was some hype around startups but it was still seen as a an uncool thing to do okay and then we had social network pictures Silicon Valley media started talking about it funding suddenly it became cool right next slide and that's why in my head and I know this is true for some of our leadership as well there are two

kinds of Founders okay like I told you there's one kind of like this is that's Shar Bambu I have crazy amount of respect for him he has hundreds and zo is a client as you all know hundreds of thousands of employees he's working full-time he has a real board real consequences I don't know if he has a board but there are real consequences he's actually made money he looks at everything in tradeoffs right money time Peace of Mind much less concerned about status because he already has the serious people already know who he is and

very respected in the community right now I'm making some assumptions but I'm saying that in general this kind of founder these Founders I look up to as well right now there's another kind of founder which I've been seeing a lot of lately and there's nothing wrong with this but this is this is generally what social media encourages where you're founder for the status you just want to you know be cool and you're doing a lot of things at once and there's nothing wrong with doing a lot lot of things is runs but one thing has

to work one thing has to generate cash for you to be able to take multiple bets you can't do too many things and that's the Nuance right you can't do four things together unless one thing is absolutely crushing it and we are a good example of this by the way yet to breach any reasonable Revenue has no employees therefore no real cost okay very young therefore lower risk do you know the risk of a Founder who is 30 years old who has two kids or let's say 35 years old two kids parents to take care

of three employees versus a 20-year-old who's like I started a agency today do you know what the risk profile difference between these two is massive Gap you can't even call them the same type of the the odds for the the stakes for both these kinds of Founders are so different that's why when somebody's 35 and they start a company I take them seriously I'm like oh big deal for you and I think Main thing is and this is the thing that really confuses us many of these guys are looking for jobs it's like wait aren't

you like a Founder like run your company why why you looking for a job unless you've shut down your company then then it's fine then it makes sense but yeah it's just confusing and they yet to earn the respect of existing Founders but that's okay that's a technicality all respect can be earned like it might take you half a decade 5 years 10 years 15 years but you can earn other people's respect so this is just a temporary pit Stu stop next slide please the reality is that entrepreneurship is really hard uh it takes 10

plus years to make real money 2015 is when I started I think I still haven't made like crazy money it takes a long time to make real money most people will fail 90% of people will fail the ones who succeed make very little money worse than a job there not a false stat just because you hear of the same 50 companies in the news half of which are going to dive they're unicorns but they don't have real profit so they might die there's so many Founders who it looks like a success but they've not made

real money it's worse than a job honestly and they' just wasted their time it's not real risk if you're hedging with a job good Founders will not take you seriously and like I said family and age shoot up the risk and the thing about being a Founder is you have some good months and you make zero on the other months everyone there at least knows this right some good months but you make zero on other months and you'll often have radical pivots you look foolish for decades earlier I used to look at somebody like let's

say a G mjal right and I look at them pivoting I like ah why they pivoting but now I get it I'm like yo what you're trying to seek is not the validation of other people you're trying to seek something that you can build that works that people pay for and sometimes you will get it wrong so sometimes I will come to you and be like sorry this was not the way to do it let's do it this way it's not because I'm dumb or scatterbrained or whatever it's because I'm looking for something that the

market will pay for cuz I've learned the hard way that if you build something just based on your conviction and you don't make money out of it everyone Burns Out you will all run out of motivation you'll leave two years later or 6 months later whatever it is so you have to look for pmf and sometimes you look foolish for a long time doing that your friends would make more money than you this is kind of obvious anyone with a job stable job especially your company doing well will make more money than you and this

is more for the engineers but courage and staying power are far more important than intelligence Twitter now is like filled with like oh if you're not like 190 IQ and this and that you're not going to make it that's not true like go talk to any real estate guy or anyone any broker or something they're making far more money than many of these engineers and they're not really over reliant on intelligence they're actually reliant on Courage relationships and staying power and like I said the arena will knock humility into you if you're a Founder for

10 years I've never met a Founder who's been around for 10 years and cocky never seen never seen that especially if they bootstrap right like but the ego and arrogance of a Founder who just raised 5 million oh my God it's next level but the minute you've been in this game for 10 years whether you've raised money or not you're like anything can take me out anytime right so it will knock humility into you and and that's why I love spending time with Founders who've been around for like a decade longer than that because they

just know so much and they're also so humble it's the opposite of you know what you get to see at least on social media next slide please okay so now let's get into your parts of the equation has anyone wondered why you don't have Equity Equity no nobody else knows what Equity is I see bat I see Vishal okay I see mdom I see a bunch of other people okay so I'll tell you the difference between why Founders get equity and how Equity works as Founders cuz I've had weird conversations with this over the year

because this is just not taught in college this is not taught this topic is not taught in college so you have no idea especially because like startups happen slightly later than when College curriculums sort of froze in India people think you get equity for doing work you actually don't get equity for doing work you get equity for taking risk this is a very important concept to drive home okay this has nothing to do with foundershield profit and we are only like whatever 6 8 months old right most companies are bootstrapped and funding is an anomaly

I did some research on the math I don't know how accurate this is this is from whatever I found on Google there are 1.66 million active companies in India barely any are F funded so this entire like Equity you have a percentage of the company and then you know when the company IPOs you make crazy money that barely happens in India actually investors get Equity this is investors not Founders who just put in cash get equity for taking Capital risk not for doing work okay and a lot of people get pissed off sometimes like especially

when I was younger and I didn't know what Equity really stood for and I was negotiating equ with other people the thing that whenever the conversation broke up let's say I want to start a company let's say selling candles and I was talking to another guy and he wanted 50% I said no I don't think you're worth 50% I'm worth 70% whatever it is whatever the number is and the guy says no I will go start my own thing if an equity conversation breaks down between Founders they move on one of the founders moves on

and either he starts the same business or different business or go gets gets a job or whatever but the math is simple 100% of zero is zero so a lot of people really optimize for ownership without realizing actually and I'm a good example of this especially now right where I'm not optimizing for ownership in any company I just want to own enough but I want other people to be heavily incentivized as well because I realize that 100% of 0 Z what's the point of owning everything but not you know making profit not having other people

contribute now here's the part that is a little bit hard to digest for most employees but y combinator will Echo this most other companies most thiss will Echo this right if you are paid a market rate salary the amount of equity you take home is zero it's a controversial point but it's a true Point Equity is a measure of risk okay let's say you could either get a job at TCS or some other com company whatever some let's say the some of you might be working at some other agency or whatever right and let's say

you know you were paid 3 lakhs anim plus one lakh stock I'm just giving some random numbers so let's say four lakhs anim you were getting okay now the question to ask is is that market rate for you would the market pay you more okay I'll give you an example of somebody taking risk there's a guy that I really want to hire he's superb guy but very expensive right it might run into 40 50 lakhs which I can't afford at this point in our career considering a bootstrap right so I'm like yo take a 90%

salary cut and come work with us but I'll give you Equity how much Equity well we'll value the thing and we'll figure it out now whether he'll say yes or no I don't know but that's a big deal he's 35 years old he has two kids and y y he's he already has a job an active job with very he spent n number of years with them so generally we don't give Equity to people who are paid market rate or very close to market rate okay but we are trying to change that right in the

sense that we still like let's still incentivize you to play the long game with us right in some cases not in all cases in some of our companies so employees with market rate salaries are still given some amount of equity to align motivation right just so you're still motivated to do the thing now in the way we are structured some of our companies Equity is actually valuable some of our companies Equity is completely useless especially in ag gencies my opinion is equity is not very useful unless you know you decide to IPO tomorrow like a

TCS or a vipro or something like that we have no plans of IPO in N9 out of 10 times though Equity is worth zero so the guy who's coming in from Google or whatever company right let's say whoever I convinced to come at one/ Tenth of the salary and come do a very big role here nine out of 10 times he'll probably make zero out of that it'll just be pure risk for him it would basically be like he's thrown his money into the and whatever he currently has into the fireplace that's his risk to

take that's why I no longer Hard Sell on this I'm like yo it's your choice here's the risk you want to come come here's what you're giving up and nine out of 10 times they say no to me which is fine but they need to be very clear about what the risks are before coming in aligning motivations of several people even with money is damn hard in fact if I would argue what the Crux of Entrepreneurship is this it's two things right one is finding a market Gap and number two is getting the first 10

people to come work with you for lower price and incentivizing them in whatever way possible is the hardest part because I'll tell you one thing when you start you have nothing you start from A500 squ foot house we had nothing anyone taking a risk on us back then was foolish but again it's very hard with money but there it's easier to do with something like an equity or a profit share be like I don't know where it's going to work out but at least you have a chunk of it at least you try it hard

at least we tried hard we gave it a shot next slide okay the next question that most of you have is why does the company get paid so much more than me have you ever thought of this how many of you thought of this hands up come on want to see more hands a lot of people online have thought about this this is a subar called developers India where the this thing says just got to see today how much my boss charges the client I'm working at a services company and I'm the old developer in

one of the projects I'm working on I'm paid well so can't really complain my boss doesn't do anything besides just talking to the client and understanding requirements but yesterday I got to see how much he charges the clients and blew my mind it's more than five times I'm getting so I wrote to the client if he wants to hire me directly but he forwarded the email to my boss and I got questions why I did that don't clients know how much it cost to hire their own developers if I were to do freelance work how

can I get clients like this this has 620 likes by the way which is pretty good engagement for developers India are for a Reddit Community is pretty good engagement first comment honestly I'm still surprised your boss hasn't fired you the premium they pay is for the trust associated with the company past experience and so on I'll tell you what I think I think this Gap comes from not knowing how much it costs to run a company that's the thing right like when you've been a Founder for a while then you kind of get this thing

of the cost every week when we discuss pnl with the team it's almost like we paid for that also when did this expense come up now we have to pay deposit oh the last house that we vacated deposit only half came back cuz the owner scammed us all of that like it's just every week it's like it's like I sit with the teams and I'm like uh I'm like where did the money go but it's important to understand this because we'll break down the math next slide okay so I just want to briefly explain why

do I get paid X when company makes y first thing is business relationship shs are built on Discovery okay first you the client has to discover you let's say you running an agency let's say you were running an agency all of you started an agency tomorrow called YouTube ABCD agency okay there are four things you have to do first you have to get Discovery you need to get a client to know who you are to be attracted to you okay then you need to convert them just being attracted is not good enough just bringing someone

into that room is not good enough they have to convert you do a sale okay then you have to do first time proof of delivery you to do one video like as a video agency we do one video as the um as AOS slabs we have to do one you know AI campaign for them and then there's continued trust if you've done one good one with them then they're like okay let's do it again let's do it again let's do it again I'm going to break this down because this is we are talking about businesses

here Discovery is marketing how do you get a client to be attracted to you is marketing now there are many ways to do marketing but whatever it's marketing conversion is sales it's what gurmit does right it's like somebody's already coming there's a lead but GM's got to go close that lead then there is first time proof of delivery which is almost always discounting we probably lose money on the first thing we do for any client there are some rare exceptions but usually we lose money on the first delivery for any client okay continued trust which

is relationship maintenance quality of service meeting them once in a while making sure that you know if somebody leaves we replace that person is a continued headache okay now remember four rules Discovery is competitive versus other service providers we are not the only company in India that does AI campaigns we are not the only company in India that does AI Business Solutions we're not the only company in India that does uh video editing or uh YouTube as a service so discover is competitive versus other service providers sales and conversion of are unreliable just because gurmit

has 5,000 leads it doesn't mean he will get 5,000 conversions right it's unreliable sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't and even gurmit can't walk into a sales meeting knowing will this guy convert or not it's very challenging discounting loses the company money the first time I do anything for a client we probably lose money it's we know we're losing money but it's okay we're like we're hoping that we do such a good job that the client does a second thing with us a third thing with us whatever it is Trust erods on the tiniest

of things okay I'll give you an example the example was of kosek okay Kosik is young but Kosik is not a very good communicator he's very very good at what he does but not a very good communicator and when Kosik spends less time communicating with the client even if we doing work it erods the client's trust and you might think but that's so silly I I'm doing a good job yeah but the client's not seeing it from the client's perspective it's like these guys they told me 2 weeks ago this is going to be done

but 2 weeks later I haven't even heard from them right and then the next day if you send them the final footage they're actually surprised they're like wait you actually worked on this right so trust erods on the tiniest of things so there's this overhead communication overhead of how can we keep you know telling the client every day every week what we're up to and keeping them a breast right and if things are not working out telling them things are not working or you shouldn't be doing this or you should cut your losses next slide

so I'll tell you how the internet and most of you do the math for for a 10 lakh deal let's say we're getting a 10 lakh deal okay one let's say per quarter we're getting a 10 lakh deal first GST will go Modi sir will come remove 18% you know 8.2 lakhs fine okay now the way we let's say we do the math and these are not our numbers but I'm just saying let's say a sales gets paid 30 30k a month okay let's say a project manager gets paid 60k a month okay let's say

an engineer gets paid 50k a month let's say it's an engineering project let's say we're doing something let's say one of our clients let's say dwat okay let's say roughly this is the math I'm I'm taking average math now you do quarterly so quarterly that sales rep is being paid 1.2 lakhs project managers being paid 2.5 lakhs Engineers being paid 2 lakhs so total is 5.6 lakhs correct what's the profit 8.2 minus 5.6 what's the profit okay whatever the profit is next slide okay the real math which most smart people will think for a 10

lakh deal it's still fake math but I'll tell you why so you have sales rep project manager engineer then you have an internet fee we spend like Martin what's our internet fee what is it yeah we spend 7 and a half lakhs a year on internet just internet for the office okay so let's say whatever I'm breaking it down I'm just saying 10K a month or a quarter it's 40K electricity bill our electricity bill is huge but whatever there's an electricity bill then there's office rent we forgot in the last mon month that there's office

rent so there's office rent on this then there's a marketing cost remember we said Discovery is a cost how do you get visible in front of another client in our case let's say if it's hosting a dinner hosting a conference whatever it is whatever the way you acquire ads so you can do this math whatever this math comes up to okay and still looks like it's profitable but I'll tell you this is still fake math I'll tell you what the real math is like the math that I see and China sees and Hara sees and

whatnot next slide I've added some I've added some descriptions through chat GPD because I didn't want to write it down but I'll tell you what all it is there's legal fees you incorporate a company there's some cost that's a onetime cost but fine it's there's still ongoing cost in some some cases right contracts with clients every contract we do the client is reviewed by a legal team it's not here the team is not here but we have a client we we have a legal team then there's licenses and permits in some cases our business maybe

not but we you need specific licenses to sell stuff then there's office rent there's security deposit there's utilities okay then there's furniture and Equipment you think the are free they're not free these are expensive so there's desks chairs computers printers software licenses there's every day I I wake up see the pnl it be an adobe bill on the pnl I'm like right telecommunication systems Etc then there's recruitment cost do you know there's a cost to hiring a person especially people who are wasting who come in and don't end up getting hired sometimes we work with

agencies to help us hire people right so there's entire recruitment cost here then there's advertising online ads print media promotional materials and we do spend such a news spend on ads right where suchin yeah you spend on ads so there's advertising cost then there's website cost obviously we don't we we're a video company we don't give two shits about websites anymore then there's networking which is if you want to get to an industry Association you want to go to a conference you need membership to go into some of those and some of those conferen are

very useful Hara will tell you the cost of flying to that conference and probably getting deal and coming back is worth it right so there's some networking costs then utilities we've already spoken about then insurance right all our companies have some form of insurance or the other right then there is maintenance which is somebody cleaning this on an everyday basis somebody walks in cleans this walks out right and I'm just going to keep going through this right because these are all real expenses there's accounting and bookkeeping sushmita where susm yeah susmita is there she she

book she does bookkeeping for us then there's office supplies postage travel expenses whatever then there's bloody AWS in Cloud flare that that walk in the room right AWS should be like I want this much gpus and every every week we have that discussion should we buy the gpus or should we you know use an AWS but eventually it always comes down to AWS because of ease of convenience it's just easy to use an AWS spin up something or use a replicate or something like that right then there's software I'm sure you guys use some software

or the other I was seeing tesis look at the linear website I was like please not one more subscription by the way you you guys spend like 50k a month on Zoom do you know that spent 50k a month on Zoom then there's we don't have data security right now uh because we don't you know have any client data uh then there's an emergency fund and I think that's the most important thing right remember we did quartly math and the reason we did quartly math is you need to make sure you have enough money in

the bank because if you have a bad quarter you need to be able to use that previous month to be able to pay for this month because for you and this is slightly different in the US with many jobs but for you it's like this this thing of I get a salary every month for me and the core team here it's always like okay we need to make sure across the year we are able to pay this person this much right it's almost like ours is more one shoted and we absorb the risk to to

give you a chronic consistent salary it's much easier for funded companies to do much harder for bootstrap companies like ours to do then there's expansion cost sometimes you're planning for growth you want to hire more people and every day someone or the other comes here and says oh I want to hire this one more person because my back is aching I can't do this whatever it is right so that's a cost right then there's tax corporate tax comes in uh then there's whatever Professional Services if we need advisors if we're not sure about something and

we need somebody else's ad advice okay there's also an employee that doesn't work out cost one of the biggest costs if I hire somebody let's say 5 laks anim and you don't work out for the company and you've been there for 6 months because now we're starting to scale and we don't have time to sit on top of everybody's head it's just a waste of money it's almost like somebody else is doing one deal just to keep your salary alive then there's income tax rate 30% in India there's also a search charge of 7% %

of your income ranges from 1 CR to 10 crores so yeah basically my point is you should run a company once it's not that's why I said right serious founder that that's where I started from because the minute you're a serious founder it's like you're going through this one every week and then you know every day somebody will come to you and be like compan is doing well whatever it is right next slide okay after all this the founders get paid being a bootstrap founder is the most inconvenient way to make money and I don't

know why you guys want to start agencies the minute it works it will burn you out that being said I'm a Founder so I love people who want to be entrepreneurs and do it themselves but also prepare for 10 years of pain if you're not prepared for 10 years of pain don't do it you can still have like you can still work from 20 to 25 make good money have fun make the network Etc and then start a company you know my biggest regret at 20 when I started job Spire I was like the problem

is I don't know anybody in the ecosystem today a lot of our success whatever said and done is because I know people in the ecosystem I'm able to just call up people and be like hey can we do XYZ for you can we do YouTube for you or can we do AI business solutions for you but I didn't have that at 20 and I I feel like if I done a job till like 24 25 it would have been much more beneficial for me but then I would have probably been successful at 35 5 years

later and I I still don't feel I'm successful I still feel there's another five years left so maybe I'd make money at 40 right so just saying every this it's this is the worst way to make money next slide so again the problem is many youngsters have not tried this seriously full-time for sustained periods of time okay fundraising has convinced a cohort of Founders that these miscellaneous expenses should not be kept in mind while determine unit economics they're like bottle manufacturing I'm selling it for 70 okay and all of us do this like especially the

people who do business case studies I get damn angry with them cuz they're like they only take the cost of the item the manufacturing the item and how much the margin is I'm like bro you're running a business no in the middle of this you're running acquisition all of that in the middle of this no how why are you why are you just taking the cost of how much it cost to manufacture like people keep making this claim with apple oh Apple manufactures their phone at whatever price margin but they run a business huge business

it's the best advertising business in the world you don't think that cost money Engineers today can build ml models this is especially true for Twitter where many Engineers will be like yeah you know I can build this model I can do this but cannot understand Excel okay and this is especially true for our experiments team right Shashank and Vishal continually dumping no offense to you guys I'm just saying in general any experiments team we have we we would ever have right continually dumping non-profitable risk on the company for personal exploration which is status need this

is not a trivial problem I'll tell you why uh there was a Labs there was a kid I'm not going to take his name but he really wanted to do research at the company and while I really respect that okay here's my thesis around it why do you want to do the research okay and if you really PR deep enough they want to do the research because they want to post post a tweet about it they're like see I I built this I made this whatever it is have status among their peers but really research

like especially if you start with research it doesn't make any profit for us your salary is basically just a cost and you're getting brownie points off of it you're putting up an open source GitHub repository that you know I I saw one guy do it for another company where he didn't even mention the company's name and he didn't on the company's salary like what is wrong with you guys right so it's for your own status need and the way we do research is very nice at Labs where we like first we'll we'll use third party

models if it really works you know then we'll see can we can we make a better model out of this can we fine tune it for our needs cuz we are a bootstrap company we are still in the philosophy that first let's make cash after we make cash you'll have excess then you can now we have a experiments team but I'm very this thing that experiments team has to be two people and not 50 people right but there are some startups that do this completely inverted by the way where they're like okay first we'll do

research and experiment so many people who have been funded so many people who are building uh local language llms I'm like where is the business it's better to do a business use case for it sell chat GPT Plus+ do F tune one of those existing models prove that there's money in the market for this then build the model but no everyone's like doing it the other way around next slide and this is true for the people who want to work on the hardest problems this is true for filmmakers who how many of you are filmmakers

in the companies in the company who want to like make films theyan like he put his hand up and then he put his hand on he's like I know I'm going to get okay I'll tell you the problem this true for filmmakers and like really really deep tech people right you have to choose between not getting paid for decades starting your own company or you know taking a huge risk and you know doing it at a company where you're not really getting paid cash up front or you're getting Equity instead or go work at Google

in the filmmaker case go work at Hollywood or Bollywood or something okay if you can get in early stage startups who haven't raised too much money and this is more for the startup and angle should be careful of absorbing expensive Talent without cash inflow from customers or exceptional fundraising ability some people are able to fundraise like I look at them and I'm like wow the company doesn't even do anything and you've raised like 50 million wow I don't know how they do it and that's my lack right like I just maybe I don't know the

internal workings of this system but still unless you have exceptional fundraising ability you should avoid absorbing expensive talent that wants to do things for personal exploration like film Mak we are in the game of efficiency can we do it in a studio in as short a period of time as possible can we use existing models and build use cases that customers pay for much simpler problem statement right it's wise to solve problems first that don't require too much upfront investment and there are enough and more problems in this country to be solved without you having

to go invest 20 crores into the business till now we've never done that invest crazy amount of money or anything we're not a real estate company NeXT slide so this is not just true for you in this room but it's also true for everybody watching this online which is now everything will be performance-driven 2001 we had this time where everyone could come people have worked in unprofitable companies for five six years of their lives they've never seen they've never worked at a company making profit your marketing has to now Drive conversions if you're a marketing

person now it has to drive conversions your content now has to get views and engagement time pass you can't do content saying I want to do this everyone comes to us and says now I want to start this kind of Channel like you get us views in engagement then we'll talk about it right after that we'll we'll take the risk but till then you're on your own your code has to make money can't be code for the sake of code right so I there's this temptation with most Engineers to build the next build a framework

or and this happened in Google where they incentivized people to go do experimental projects and people just did that for promotions just build experimental projects that made no money your salary has to make sense in the p&l so some of you I won't say you guys because we have been pretty careful about this but when people come in they're like some crazy salary expectation that they've heard on Instagram that and that's the problem with marketing one guy will make a post saying oh you know today this role let's say um let's say typist is now

making three lakhs a month or whatever or 30 lakhs an here's how you can make that's everyone's hook right that's hook here's how this guy is making 75 lakhs and doing this this Baki it's not his fault it's the game that's the problem with social media so 20 21 free hits are over okay uh Theory and a lot of you are very Theory this thing right like I know many people both on the content side as well as on this side I know how to do this crazy effect video or someone on the engineering side

who will be like yeah you know we should do this theory is no longer sought after companies don't want Theory anymore they want execution can you build a product that solves a problem or can you give a service that solves a problem it's so simple it's so easy but yet we go back and we like maybe you know what we're lacking is Theory it's the entire Indian education system problem it's like a vaa system you know what the W system like it's the W fication of work I have to go I read cracking the uh

coding interview I go into the engineering you know interview and I have to answer these question 10 questions right answer that once specific pair programming Challenge and then I'm in but that's not what people want anymore people are like I don't care you work here you give me output client is happy with your work or you're building a product and you're doing it fast enough great that's all I want so world is changing and the gap between potential what you think in your head that you are and success is proven performance now you need to

prove sain now needs to prove that he's good at ads he can't just say now he has to prove that he's good at it right so I call this the test because to be honest for many years I I had this idea in my head that I have crazy potential when I was young but I got belted by the test and at some point it's inevitable everyone has to go through the test in your career and I can tell you in this company everyone who's done well has been through the test something where they were

really put on the spot and they had to pull a miracle off for the client or whatever they're building right and most youngsters have been far disconnected Ed from commercial outcome of the business an editor is completely disconnected from the outcome of a Creator's earnings do you know this do you know what that means you don't know and same for engineers right an engineer at zomato doesn't know well this line of code that I shipped how much is it making or saving for zomato same with an editor do you know Video Edit how much does

that increase the top line of the Creator's earning you have no idea but sales guys on the other hand they damn well know right a sales guy knows I have contributed this much to the company I have cost the company this much I've contributed this much right and sales is ultimately what makes the company money so I wish everyone was able to work in sales for a few week of of their lives so they just got this this thing of actually few months of their life so they at least knew know how much it costs

to do what they do on a daily basis and just be given the freedom to do creative stuff next slide so this is the test okay this is a I'm I'm I'm this is hyper buly but nine out of 10 youngsters I meet think they'll be the next Elon Musk roit was telling me this we're sitting in the room and we had some guy come in and he was like uh he said something and he left and Ro was like Elon Musk like me and Ro just have this thing we we pointed guy and we're

like this guy is like Elon Musk right in their mind that potential is unlimited like me when I was young I was I'm also guilty of this this is not unique I started consuming content far before anyone else did because I got an internet connection early in my life and it was us Reddit in my head when I was younger right so that potential has to meet ground reality okay this is measured in commercial performance how much money do you guys make the company or how much money you make yourself most collisions of your potential

in your head and ground reality leads to ground reality winning it's actually damn hard to build a successful business right and a lot of people who have left us to go start the exact same thing are realizing this now it's actually damn hard to make everything play together and make money seasoned tested Talent is humble because they know the test is hard and has lower expectations when you're seasoned now you come in and you're like okay now I know this is hard I know this is not worth taking on like that's why I love working

with people like haran and Tas right they're like yeah we can build a product but that's crazy amount of risk for the company to absorb right now and the ROI is unclear most people go decades without the test you could live your entire life not being tested on whether you have driven leads conversion anything for the company but the minute you align you're like my job whatever I'm doing has to align to give leads to the company when you're editing let's say for the waron Maya Channel and you're like okay we're doing a brand deal

for this company can we drive can we do something that doesn't piss off our audience but drives more conversions for the company what's a better narrative instead of somebody else telling you that if you can think through that you have passed the test or you're getting close to testing yourself sagur is a great example of this Saga literally scaled a channel by himself and he was like like he's very confident he can do it again that's the thing about the test once people have pass the test they're confident now I can do it one more

time I can do it two more times next slide okay I'm going to change the table till now I've been speaking as an employer now I want to tell you how you can take advantage of me and all of them this is how employees can now leverage and take advantage of their employers right this also for people online it all flips around once you passed the test once something you have done has led to commercial meaningful commercial outcomes whether directly or as directly as possible some of you are slightly indirect like an engineer would be

slightly indirect but still you'll know whether you've contributed to some outcome you have a new asset the asset is leverage you have proven leverage if you can perform again and again you gain even more leverage you know why people really come to us today at least on the content side we do the AI side and the content side people really come to us on the content side because we get people performance eight out of 10 times sure we still fail 20% of the time because this content so hard but eight or 10 times when a

client comes to us we get them the views on the AI business Business Solution side when a client comes to us like Amazon Prime for example we do such a good job on the first one and we' lost money on the first one where the second time they come back and they love us they built a relationship and that relationship continues to compound so if you can perform again and again you get even more leverage and people with leverage can demand any price they want and are widely sof sought after the table is not like

once you gain leverage it's not that you make 10% increment 20% increment you can ask for whatever you want once you have real leverage and this cannot be faked with credit taking we have too many people who go out there and say I built AOS I built Labs we really have these kind of people by the way it's so stupid because everyone like I said they do D they call us so you cannot fake this with credit taking because eventually okay even if you get a deal saying I'm really great at content Ed for this

other company and I did everything end to end the other company can you perform for them because if you don't perform for them then next slide there are nine types of Leverage okay skill management ability experience in a specific domain relationships and distribution cash data assets technology brand next slide okay skill and Technology are getting commoditized and maybe also because of how we've built the company right uh video editors is not a like finding a skilled video editor is not like a like an insane challenge for us it's getting commoditized finding a very skilled developer

today especially after lots of people are being laid off is not too much of a challenge and even the technology it's not like today Hollywood has some you know there was a time by the way when I was younger I went to this some animation Academy when I was like very very young right to learn animation and that time they had exclusive licenses of Maya I don't know whether they had pirated it or what but that was like 3D software 3ds Max and Maya I was like crazy these guys have this software how do I

don't I don't know how to get it at home and they are on discs and all today everyone has blender in 3D so the tech there was a time where live streaming only few companies can do now everyone can do so technology is getting commoditized over time so you have to rely on one of these few things next slide okay let me tell you something about skill okay Supply demand economics exists in all kinds of Leverage to okay for example we posted a post recently about we have a job board do you know this on

super DM we got 1,600 rums for full stack developers but just four rums for VFX artists if you are and this is more for people online right because everyone here already has a job if you're looking for a job why would you do add one more number here why not add one number here sure the number of companies here hiring is lesser but the competition here is so much more I think it's better to do this and do Discovery a little better no you can't go where the traffic is if you're looking for a job

especially and this is even for people here who might be looking for a job outside for Whatever Whenever 3 years later 5 years later whenever it is tomorrow whenever it is you can't go by the traffic is you have to do something sufficiently different from the rest of the world that the world really needs being early to a new industry or solving a problem for Less sexy industry is better and again more for the people online where there's a line of people outside of cred saying I want to be a designer for cred but that

same line isn't standing for a real estate company and if you're a good designer and you're able to build a relationship like I said relationship is a leverage you can get paid just as much in a good real estate company helping them sell their products they make more money they make real hard cash for VCS in 2021 and this is the other side of the table right cash was not the leverage as Supply demand got temporarily skewed in 2021 if you went and said you know one VC is ging me 3 crores 10 other VCS

are standing in line saying 3.1 CR 3.5 CR that time is over but that time cash stop being The Leverage for a short period of time so you need to find what has leverage now okay so and this is also all these lever also the intangibles you get from working in the company when people look at package okay you see okay I'm getting whatever X number of laks per 10 lakhs inm 20 lakhs inm 5 lakhs inm but you're not seeing that every company gives you intangibles not only is a company helping you gain skill

okay because you're working on the job that's the only that's the best way to learn you're also Learning Management ability because you're managed by people above you you learn okay like a Barat will say okay this is how Harsha is doing this okay maybe I should learn from that because Hasa has had a few years doing management right but you also get the opportunity to manage down right so for example in Ian would be like okay how do I handle how do I manage dops or theyan should be like how do I manage the dops

you learn that experience the hard way right okus has learned the hard way how to manage people downwards how do I deal with this so you gain that experience right some this not this cannot be taught it's very hard to teach this experience in a specific domain so if you're working let's say with us you gain experience with content we are mainly focused on content and you learn a lot right if you're a developer and you're here you still learn so much more about content if you're a filmmaker you're like oh this is how VFX

is done you see all the experiments happening life so you learn stuff then there's relationships and distribution tomorrow if you want to start a company the best people to start a company with even though I'm shooting myself in the foot for saying this is people around you I didn't have this network when I was young Engineers you know software Engineers designers uh VFX artists video editors some robotics guys sitting there right so you have like this relationship set that you build and even if if it's not like you going and starting a company with them

that's too risk that that's high risk it could also be like maybe you move on and you need some help from somebody somebody who in the industry who know something you have people around you very hard to do especially lots of kids who want to do this work from home you have zero like you're basically losing this entire leverage even the experience you're losing leverage because some you can just walk to our studio and be like okay what are you guys up to right which you don't gain work from home this is for the people

online especially then there's cash there's a difference between doing something by yourself and doing something with company resources all the filmmakers here the equipment we have today which we built over the last let's say 4 months how how would you get this otherwise be expensive right so you're basically using the assets and the cash of the company to do things that you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise right and even I see it the same way by the way my company's assets are not mine my company it's not like I own the company's assets

and you know it's like I get to take it home every day it's like okay this is an asset I use it and it's also for use for everybody else let's see if we can use these to generate more cash if we have better green screens or whatever it is right then there's of course data and I think we have now some data here and there to know not just in terms of insights data as in which clients but also in terms of we have our backend YouTube dashboards we know roughly what works what doesn't

you know for many years I used to go to many creators I've done this with sharan I've done this with tan I've done this with probably every Creator I've met show me YouTube dashboard I want to see your stats I'm notorious for doing this so I'll go I'll see the stats I like I'll be like okay why is this low why is that high why did this video do well so data is very valuable and data only comes from proximity right like sitting next to somebody then of course technology which again in our case is

assets and then there's a brand today you would rather intern at Apple for zero for zero pay then get paid 30k a month at some Lalu Prasad company why cuz your next employer will look at Apple on your CV and say oh my God he worked at Apple I'll tell you one thing we have also been guilty of this if there's a big name on a CV we will take an interview like theying like let's see if he's good or not like the one way to be uncluttered in interview is go to a company that

people recognize serious companies like I spoke about so if you worked at any serious company from the zero of the world to the blinket of the world whatever if we recognize the name and to be honest with AOS we are now even though we're very young we starting to become more recognizable so AOS on your CV means something it's not baked into your CDC but it's meaning something to your life but the minute you stay there for three months and then say I built AOS that doesn't work you got to be there for a while

and people look at how long you've been at a certain place somebody's gone to like you know like a Facebook but work there for 2 months even we don't take it seriously employers are not dumb next slide yeah this is a truth you can't say on social media by the way I'm taking a risk by saying it one of you is going to feed me poison which is that actually interning for zero at an apple will do more for your career we don't have an internship I don't think we do internships at the company we

just do full-time salaries for everyone we just like let's not get into this junj but interning at Apple for zero will do more for your career than a 50k per month job at some no-name company because it's apple and apple rarely hdes that's such a that's such a filter right so that's brand leverage in action and this is a truth you can't say on social media right that's why I said you can't say enough truths on social media next slide now I'm going to tell you important part how to negotiate for a race okay I'm

telling you a little bit of founder psychology so I'll tell you a little bit of my my psychology and the founders we have here and also the founders outside most Founders are lonely they've been through a 5 10 year Journey before they are in a position where they can give you good cash or they're VC funed and you know I don't know what works for them because they're not really thinking it through they're not stable companies either bootstrap Founders will never part with cash up front unless there's appropriate value provision okay so if you come

to me and you say vun there's this project and it's making X and I'm I'm why in this and then after all your whatever costs you're still making good this thing or you're expanding revenue for us if you come in and you expand revenue for me that's a very big deal for me like with the Hardware team now with the experiments team now we're trying some VFX because if that works that expands revenue for us right so that I don't mind taking up The Upfront risk for it because I'm like okay if it works I

can see how it expands Revenue Founders really value loyalty there used to be a time where how many of you believe so there's two things right loyalty and meritocracy you know what meritocracy is what's a meritocracy basis Merit basis skill there if I were to promote choose between two people and promote them or or give them benefits who would I choose Merit and loyalty what should I choose rationally okay everyone said Merit some people are saying loyalty okay somebody who said Merit tell me why Merit mhm because like one paper is better than skill wise

okay why would the other people choose loyalty actually one of the one of those guys there tell me Hara why would you choose actually will any of you choose loyalty yeah okay why would you choose loyalty I choose loyalty longy ISM loyalty longm yeah so because I have a mic on I'll just repeat what he said he said in the short-term meritocracy works in the long-term loyalty is better I'll tell you what the one of the challenges of being extremely meritocracy with being a pure Merit Aug right so people come in they're extremely you know

good at what they do but the problem is like I said skill is commoditizing right and actually it's finding I'm finding it harder to keep people for like 2 years 3 years whatever we're young and we mostly we've managed to keep everybody but most Founders have a hard time keeping really good talent because really good talent right now is is very distracted so it doesn't matter how good you are if you aren't willing to commit for a year or two years right for a while what's the purpose of being good if you can't commit it's

like saying I'm getting married but for one month but she's the best girl ever it's useless it's like it's not a it's not something that's valuable especially through the hard years just like we're having good times today we will have bad times at some point I'm damn sure of it because I've eaten dirt for 10 years so Founders really value loyalty especially during the hard times right and extraction of value from a relationship again I'm batting for your side is best done after few years cuz it's very hard to say they go one month you

know I've done this I'm very loyal to you now give this thing there have been people around for a year two years actually people who are making the most amount of money in this company are people who' have been with me for many many years and I'm sure they will treat their employees in the same way you've stuck around with them for 3 four years you get everything especially as the company does better you get more and more and more if you've been around for a while cuz we know we can trust you we know

we can count on you that's the hardest thing today actually and knowledge of a company situation is valuable if a particular company company and especially because we are a bunch of companies if you know that the company is doing well it's easier for you to ask for a raise if you know a company's margins are lower it is harder for you to ask for a race right and it's best done after a few years so our race cycle is once a year so let's say you join on Feb first you you can only talk about

a raise Feb first the next year so whenever you join one year from there you can ask for a raise we don't do Midway Rays we're not too big for that to you know continuously revise numbers or whatever and we're also not there was a time when we started where we didn't have crazy budgets but now we don't have we still don't have crazy budgets but we pay everyone Market salary or close to Market salary what you're looking for for success in general this is not just related to you is you're looking for a fast

growing company fast growing in terms of profit not in head count profit with close proximity to decision makers there are companies you would work at maybe real estate and all that where you wouldn't even be able to talk to the founders you won't even know what's going on in their head you won't even know what's important to them right so fast growing company close proximity to decision makers in profit successful Founders are tested and hence value humility dude I had a guy come the other day to the office I'm not going to take names but

the most 20 years old obvious normal I was like that probably where he came and he's like you know we're doing this we know this zero humility right of understanding that this is damn hard and doing this 10 20 years it'll burn you out anyway whatever so good Founders values humility if you come to me and say this is 100% going to work I'll be like really you'll prove it to me 100% will work but I prefer people who come and say there's a 50% chance this will work and these three parts I don't know

but we'll figure it out right I love people who can figure it out I love working with people who can figure it out not just me every founder if you say vun I will take time but I'll figure it out and if it's not possible I'll tell you it's not possible and you want an accurate assessment sometimes Vishal comes to me and like it's not working it's a problem with this system I'll be like no I've tried it before it works and then he'll tweak it and it'll work and he'll be like yeah it's working

now so as much as I respect Vishal for like always eventually figuring it out it also worries me when he gives me an inaccurate assessment right sometimes okas does this inaccurate assessment of where it'll go so I I I'm I like optimism most Founders like optimism but you have to we don't mind people saying we don't know or we'll figure it out uh but you can't use that for everything Steve Jobs has this quote between the janitor and the CEO excuses stop mattering so the janitor you know what that means like if maid comes in

and Maid says door B fair I understand our argument but if you the CEO and you say I wasn't able to add whatever my Target in Revenue nobody's going to save you you can't give an excuse if you're an executive and you're being paid an executive you have to get results by hook or crook last thing staying in the company for long periods of time is a hidden level leverage and we have proof of that in the company Tas Hara they've been with me in previous companies also sidhant uh you know staying staying around really

matters and actually having lower expectations also really matters because Ron is an example of this where he came in he had low expectations and then he did just did such a good job that we like you you have won my trust right let's do something cool together okay this is the last slide I think of but one slide so you now can go break out for lunch dinner whatever it is uh there are three ways to make big money the first one is you stay in a fast Growth Company for years and hope for your

esops to materialize most of the time it doesn't work out so you could join like a the next startup that raises $30 million straight out the bat join them hope the esops materialize you're not betting on anything apart you're not betting on the founders ability to build technology you're not betting on the Founder's ability to do marketing you're betting on the founders ability to make profit okay and not just profit but also IPO because most people who I'll tell you the problem the problem is most people who can make profit won't IPO especially if you

know how to make good profit do you know why why would you want to be controlled by the market every day anything you do anything you say the market saying good things bad things about you you can't live your life it's like being in shackles private company bootstrap is the best the minute you've raised funding also you have to listen to investors so most people who can turn a profit they to them esops is not as meaningful but still if you look at zero that they do BuyBacks they buy back some of the esops over

time so there are ways it can work out but you're really betting on somebody's ability to do profit for most of you any ESOP you get in any company whether here or outside just assume it's worth zero toilet paper basically the next thing is start a company at an inflection point something has just changed and you think there's a company required here it's very risky takes 10 years to work out timing has to be perfect actually I don't know if you know this but I've been doing 3D avatar stuff now for like four 5 years

much longer than that I started with game engines when I was with reality Factory like I was 13 or something 13 14 or something and there are videos of me old videos where even before metahuman we were doing like a 3D avatar right so we've been doing this Avatar replacement for a long time it's just now it's become good on on reals on and shs um so you need to also time it such that what will be popular in 10 years take the risk now and then play out those 10 years in life very very

hard to do it's really hard to do and last the easiest way in my opinion gain leverage and get to a senior position at a well-known company and work for 20 to 25 years this is something never told on social media it will take you 20 years to make serious money if you work here or anywhere else and I can guarantee you you for most of you it will take this much time to make good money retirement level money 20 25 years just like it was for your parents nobody wants to hear this you're like

5 years how do I get a lambogini and get out of this but it takes time even if you're damn smart even if you're damn connected it takes time last thing is gamble invest in some crazy risky thing some new coin this that whatever some or the other keeps coming out but there the risk is almost certain and you but you'll still find one guy you know who has invested in like some something and they've made 100x their money or whatever and then you'll be like but that's the problem by the time the guys invested

it's already too late now you can't invest and make that money but you'll have such people you should never look at them and say oh he's doing better in life than me he gambled and won it's like looking at a guy who won a lottery ticket and being like and envying his life it's so strange I I've seen it with some of you right especially with the crypto boom and you looked at your friends making some crazy money in crypto like oh you made so much money but it's like looking at some guy who won

a lottery ticket and saying why does he have oh he made so much money you don't envy a lottery ticket guys lifestyle so why are you envying the crypto guys lifestyle it's fine it's one wins 100 day anyway do you have any other slides that was long and I'm sorry for taking so much time but I think it was important that I told you how youngsters were thinking because 90% % of you were kind of thinking something along these lines I thought might as well tell you what it took for us and how long it'll

generally take nobody wants to plan out 20 years of their life but you need to right and we don't know what's going to happen in 20 years AI might come anything can happen but long-term loyalty really matters in any company especially as AI comes around the corner and skill becomes less and less important loyalty and just being around being able to absorb responsibility and risk matters yeah that's it for everyone online bye