Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more

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Kunal Shah is one of the most well-known and admired product leaders in India. He is the CEO and fou...
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Microsoft Adobe alphabet IBM H Alta networks even Starbucks the CEOs of these companies were all born in India and immigrated to the us a lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the Dharma of the founders quite well these are the principles were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger I want to keep talking about India and how it's different and how to build products that are successful in India no Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life the concept of time is not
the same what do you see as the biggest opportunity for Indians startups India is changing because now for the first time we seeing Founders being respected and unicorns being celebrated we have a national startup day and probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building today my guest is Kunal sha Kunal is one of the most well-known and respected entrepreneurs and product leaders in India and around the world he shares endless wisdom on on Twitter and Linkedin where he's got
over 1 million followers he's the CEO and founder of cred a fintech startup based in India which was last valued at over $6 billion and as of a couple years ago processed over 20% of all credit card bill payments in India prior to Ked he founded three other startups including free charge which he sold for over $400 million to snap deal Kunal is a deep thinker both about product and about life his background is actually in philosophy which comes across very clearly when you hear him share his advice in our conversation we get deep into
what makes working and building in India different from the US markets and other markets including why trust is so essential and why so many people are so much more risk averse in India we talk about the biggest challenges and opportunities within the India market why there are so many successful Indian immigrants in CEO roles across Tech and what we can learn from that also why companies in India can quickly grow dows but not arpus and what that means for building products in India we also talk about how to stay curious and open-minded in the power
of second order thinking also stories of failure and lots of contrarian takes and so much more if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously a big thank you to Sayan my ET for making the connection to Kunal with that I bring you Kunal Shaw after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by work OS if you're building a SAS app at some point your customers
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is stunning at its the box and you can also fully customize it to fit your app's brand it's an effortless experience from your first user all the way to your largest Enterprise customer best of all authkit is free for any developer up to to 1 million users check it out at work.com Lenny to learn more that's work.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by orb as a business you care about Revenue but as a product team the last thing you want to do is delay a product launch or pricing change because your team has
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much for having me and a huge fan of everything that you do and and uh like I said before India is a huge beneficiary of what the stuff you do we we are all people who have learned the art of product by just figuring it out and watching some content here and there and reading some stuff so kudos to everything that you do and like I said earlier that you do the fabulous job of taking the information asymmetry of the art of product and kind of make it accessible to many of us across the world
so thank you wow I I really appreciate that this is already feeling great to me I have a huge so it turns out this podcast has a huge audience in India as do you and so I feel like this conversation is going to be really special and really meaningful to a lot of people I wanted to start with something very tactical there's a product framework that you came up with that I absolutely love and I've shared it with at least 30 Founders over the last couple years and this is actually how I discovered initially is
I heard about this thing and I'm like who's this guy Kunal sha and look at us now chatting could you explain this framework briefly and then just how you've used it or how you recommend people apply it oh and it's by the way it's called Delta 4 I don't know if I even said the name yeah it's it's called the Delta 4 framework but I think it's actually quite simple if you think about it a lot of people say that your product has to be 10x better and it's not very measurable uh you don't know
if you are 10x better or not not uh unless you're delusional and the trigger for me was actually uh I'm the unusual Tech founder in India I'm a philosophy I'm the only Humanities philosophy major founder in India who's got into tech and and uh I often wondered that most people who were my peers or people who were ahead of me were significantly smarter academically or otherwise and and why did I become successful with my first start of free charge which I exited in 2015 for nearly like $450 million and I was like what would make
this happen because I would not qualify into this Super League of really thed IIT rankers that exist in India and and that got me onto this philosophical quest to find out what makes things successful so the simple framework is like examples I give often is that imagine uh the old way of ticking a cab ride and Uber right and if I asked you give me this score of efficiency on Uber and let's say getting the old cap what would you say lny I'm curious like out of 10 yeah give a cab like a three and
then Uber like a yeah like a nine yeah so every time you see that the the product efficiency Delta is greater than equal to four three things happen uh it is irreversible second is that you have very high tolerance for it to fail like if Uber fails a little bit you will you say oh my God that I'm going to like really stop using it no and the third thing is that I call it the uh ubp unique brag worthy proposition so every time humans unlock a Delta 4 product or service they cannot stop talking
or sharing about it and therefore all Delta for products will naturally have lower CS or sometimes zero CS because people humans and and think about any how you discovered but definitely not through an ad definitely not through some Performance Marketing here and there somebody showed you the demo and you like my God this is crazy and that's what I'm seeing right now what's happening with all everything on open Ai and everything that is happening around llm feels like magic and it's kind of Delta 4 because the efficiency of doing things before and after is now
showing that but there the failure is the real problem right and and making everything Tech does not make things more efficient let's take about talk about an example uh buying a suit for you are online versus offline All Tech cool stuff all this features built in what would you say the efficiency of buying a suit online is versus let's say buying a suit offline I've actually done that and it was a terrible did not fit at all uh and so like it's efficient but the the end result was not is it's probably often not not
great so it's probably overall efficiency score what would you give uh of uh buying a suit online yeah is offline like it probably give it five and five like on offline is actually probably better experience if give it a that's crazy by because you've broken the principle this is a tech product but the efficiency is better offline uh and therefore the when the Delta is lesser than four uh what you will discover is that it is reversible you will not see people uh uh bragging about it right uh and you have zero tolerance for it
so you never going to buy Su online I can tell you that right now right so I think it's a simple framework I believe that if many companies applied so I know now many VCS uh in the US uh use this as part of the training program for the analyst I know about it that uh somebody in sequa mentioned this to me that they have this part of the thing but uh in in India we are like not still applying many of these things I think it's a simple framework to at least know and you
can apply this to Features you can apply this to products you can apply that to business uh uh and and often time this is a longer concept we can talk about it in many ways because it's it derived of some study around entropy and something about evolutionary biology which is the root of how I discovered and thought about Delta 4 that when does a species get disrupted or and what is entropy and uh and why does low entropy require growth of high entropy and like it's a it's a it's a dayong podcast on its own
so some other time okay we'll save that for a future followup just diving in on the psychology of Delta 4 just to kind of summarize this because I think it's such a powerful framework and I find it useful to convince Founders why their product isn't taking off they may feel like this is better than like the classic example is a better Excel look this so much better than Excel it can do all these things you don't have to learn all these formulas but the trick here and that I love is just what people rate the
existing solution 1 to 10 what would they Rate Your solution one to 10 and that's to be four point Tire otherwise no one no one's going to pay attention and I think I think it's pretty simple people are busy they have enough things to do they have enough products and apps they're not going to take the time to really dig into something if it's not that much better absolutely okay I'm going to go in a totally different direction I want to talk about Indian CEOs in the US okay so today the CEOs of Microsoft alphabet
Adobe which is a $250 billion company turns out uh IBM which is $170 billion company palel to networks which is a hundred billion doll company even Starbucks also 100 billion dollar company I was look that up and then also Twitter before Elon took over Twitter the CEOs of these companies were all born in India and immigrated to the US and I might be wrong but I think this is the largest ethnic group of CEOs of tech companies other than just white dudes in the US okay so I'm curious why you think Indian immigrants are so
successful in business and in Tech in the US especially in these very high positions and then is most curious just what can we learn from that what can we learn from their success it's it's a great question I often often wonder about it and I have had had the Good Fortune to meet a fair bunch of these individuals and had a chance to really explore with them what really went on so there are few things that pop out and and again these are all conjectures which I can't prove in any ways but it's a it's
a thought experiment anyways to talk about these things first is uh in in general immigrants that get out of the country are usually have chip on the shoulder in a very different way and the struggle that they have to go through to just get out and be successful and that hunger uh that got them there there was no privilege like they they were they came from very very humble backgrounds and and literally no money to start with so I think the the that this force is real right but you can say that for many immigrants
in general as well but appreciation for math in general or logic which came through the society in a big way right kind of give let's say for example lots of engineering graduates come from only a few countries because the society was bent towards let's say earliness of mathematics or earliness of this and I think that kind of helps create status that what will get appreciated for example being an engineer being a doctor like philosophy major I was a write off for the society over here right so uh the reason I am the rare commodity over
here because you you are not considered to be very bright unless you break into these very hard exams and very very hard things so the filtering criteria on its own is big but there's another interesting framework Al together which I have actually learned from this gentlem deat patnayak he he he applies Indian mythology and management principles together and it's an interesting thing so there are three major uh Indian God one is the uh uh prma uh the god of creation Shiva the God of destruction I'm super generalizing but that's the classification and and the third
is like Vishnu which is the god of sustainance and there avars the word avar comes from Vishnu keep changing avar right so we have had Rama Krishna all these guys are alars of this so what you notice is that uh if you look at two take a 2 by two of people who are high on values and low on values uh high on obedience and low on obedience you make an interesting 2 by two right now Lord Krishna uh which is a one of the very popular avars uh which was non I mean FS suits
the entrepreneurial C which is high on values but very low on obedience he was known to be the naughty God and he could actually create lots of things and there is Rama which is known to be the one which follows principles and obedient right so they will follow Dharma uh and scale on that and and then there are these notorious characters there raavana which is low on values low on obedience and there's duryodhana which he says that he's low high on obedience but low on values right so these are the people that you don't want
to be and what you notice is that uh a lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the Dharma of the founders quite well they have not diluted the dhma of the founders uh who have started these companies and managed to sustain that uh and a lot of CEOs have this need to say oh I'm going to change the company forever and it will be my identity and I will change the logo and I will change the name and I will do all sorts of things right but maintaining Dharma right where I will say
that these are the principles given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger comes from humility of saying that there is something is built with some pure form factor and I think therefore that character stays on right and therefore the the characters of Brahma and Shiva are the founder istic I'll create and Destroy like that's the thing but sustainance is is the harder one and therefore aars keep happening uh uh over and over of time and and different hurdles come and different levels come but when you when you think about
uh the the archetype of at least the Indian SE have seen that they are fabulous at moving between Krishna and Rama all the time right they can play this consistently uh and therefore they keep evolving and and keep making these companies bigger and bigger and I think we we'll see a lot more of this in years to come because now they have the role models of these individuals who have kind of done well but the the key principle is that if you ask the founders they will love be CEOs if they're around because they maintain
the Dharma of the thing and and for example let say what Tim is doing he's maintaining the Dharma of Steve Jobs because if you had tried to change the tharma of Steve Jobs and what the values the companies are it's very hard to imagine it to be sustaining itself forever and ever wow what an answer this what I love about this is this combination of using a 2 by two and Indian mythology is like the microcosm of you which is philosophy and Tech uh and so I love that and makes a lot of sense that's
where your mind goes something else this makes me think about is I read this book a long time ago Jim Collins either good to great or one of his early books about leadership and he talks about level five leadership I think is him and where level five leaders are ones where it's not about them it's about the business and they can disappear in the future and things will work great yes and and I I feel it is very hard if you believe that your identity needs to have its own position and Legacy uh and and
therefore a lot of time chasing status causes disruption because you will say that oh this doesn't have my signature in it uh and therefore becoming uh uh accepting the religion and trying to be the the pope of it or the father of it is is better than trying to say oh I need to have my variant of religion uh and that's where the creative destruction starts happening interesting okay so you said that there's this good balance between Krishna and Rama that happens can you just uh again summarize the where they are in that 2 by
two so Rama is uh high on values and high on obedience and Krishna is high on values and low on obedience but they both are high on values which means they will follow Dharma uh uh and and they will change the side for example let say Satya uh during the open a crisis played Krishna uh and and guard things out but he'll switch back to being Rama and continue to keep scaling it up amazing and just to close loop on here is your sense that they're like they're actually thinking about this and they're religious or
is this just like in The Ether of growing up in India and this is just part of the culture it's a great question I don't think they consciously think about it uh but I think if they ever heard this they would agree with this because that's what they grew up with and and the value systems are much more long-term for example I believe all bad behavior in humans humans come from being shortterm right uh and and being longterm uh uh comes in a very it's a it's a big choice to make and and a lot
of times uh a lot of people argue that oh we have arranged marriages and like it's 95% arranged marriages and less than 1% divorce rate comes from this whole long-term thinking right that people are married through values versus attraction or lust and all of that stuff but more long-term oriented and about building building a family building values or or low divorce rate is about we'll fix uh along the way versus trying to say oh I I need to evolve and I need to move forward so I think being long-term uh uh about that mindset and
and that's why some cultures last for thousands of years because of this need for everybody to be more long-term versus short us ask could use a lot of that these days you mentioned this interesting uh fact about how in India there so the fact that most startups fail you said you know I think the classic stat is 90% And that the risk is a lot higher to start a company and then fail can you just talk about what that what impact that has how do people try to avoid that because that's that'd be amazing if
you can reduce the risk of starting a company or is it just it happens and people get super in debt I I think uh long-term societies are naturally more risk overs right uh and not all great CEOs can become great Founders for the same reason in fact I would say that it actually makes it very hard to be a Founder if you've been a great CEO because you've turned into this sustainer uh uh uh versus Destroyer or Creator right uh so the Nuance I'm talking about is when you are thinking about like Risk capita India
is changing because now for the first time we seeing Founders being respected and talked about and the unicorns being celebrated and our prime minister talks about startups quite openly we have a national startup day and so on and so forth so I think there is a thing that has changed this thing but the core princip let's understand the core human behavior Basics India still has large arrange marriage and if you are a founder and a failed founder your Chan of getting a person to marry is still a hard thing to achieve so if this is
all true then the appetite to take risk will be conted right and somebody gave an interesting example to me that there's a very large let's say uh uh FM uh cpg company in India uh and let's say you do a z to1 over there and and the CEO changes in four five years and your you're 0 to1 failed but you are the best person that's why you given the 0 to one the next CE is like so what have you un done in the last five years he like nothing I just Tred to launch it
failed and and you neither given a promotion in the company neither a new company will say oh my God I'm going to hire this Talent so the guy who stayed on this stable brand within the cpg company kept growing because that has natural Tailwinds all he has to do is nothing in that brand and then suddenly what you see is that he or she's like managed to do well and this guy is done 0o to one has not done well so we we do not celebrate uh Risk Takers as a country yet and I think
we'll we we'll change that I think it's changing already but we have a long way to go uh one of the beautiful things I I often talk about is that I was in Portugal uh once and I saw I don't know if you have ever been and seen this but in the church uh normally let's say only the royalties allowed to be buried or or crated or whatever like they they are there only one more category the loud is the the Explorers vasod Gama all of these guys who explored the world and took risk and
took the country forward they were given the same position as the royalty right so when we give the highest status to risk taker the country appreciates it because ultimately we're all looking for markers of social validation super interesting I want to keep talking about India and how it's different and especially what may surprise people about the market both building there and then how to build products that are successful in India I saw in a different interview you talk about how there's this big difference between Dows and arpus that in India it's really easy to get
Dows basically get lots of users really hard to make Revenue per user and that changes the way you build product broadly could you just talk about why this is the case why is why is it so e get Dows versus arpus so that means I think arpu is a function of per capita income of a country right you cannot make $100 per user from a country for a product when their income is let's say $2,500 per year as an average for the whole country right so what happens is uh many global companies love to come
to India because we have the cheapest data very high smartphone penetration so if you look at lot of global Giants they'll have 500 million users from India or sometimes a billion numbers coming from Asia uh and and they don't have huge arpus but they they help you show the user growth which helps you in your public market and there therefore improve your valuations right for example my my guess is that I don't know if this data is public or not or talk about but my guess is that meta would not have more than three or4
dollar per user per year monetization in India but if you look at the user growth in India it'll be huge right so a lot of times uh for global companies India becomes a great Ma Farm uh but very low on arpu and therefore a lot of Indian Founders who try to copy the Western Market saying I'm going to have a few hundred million users make a terrible mistake because they will need to then go abroad to find their arpus to balance the ACT you talk about how Netflix is a good example that where they launched
India they got lots of users but just couldn't make a lot of money yeah because uh uh for that users to find relevant content and pay for Content when we have tons of free data tons of free content like all over the place like short videos which are competing with time like so much going on over here uh uh people actually paying for that by Design is going to be less and and I'm not saying that it'll not change in 10 20 years but uh the expectation that many global companies come over here saying that
oh I'm gonna have like these tens of millions of users who start paying me as soon as I come uh for Spotify for Netflix for almost anybody with uh or or Amazon Prime for that matter has not pan out so one of my takeaways here is just when you look at a startup as an investor especially and you see like we've got a 100 million users don't treat that the same as say 100 million users in the US or other markets absolutely one more thing is uh value of time is a concept right so one
of the things you'll notice then is that no Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life life right but let me ask you a question what was your first ever job and how are you paid my first ever job I was tutoring tutoring women on back computers and passing Microsoft certification test and I was paid I'm pretty sure was hourly now most likely you'll remember what the houry income was and and even though you've started making a lot more you somehow have the concept of what the value of your one hour
is yeah but if you ask most Indians uh and if you ever come to India and do this exercise when you meet them ask them what's your income per day or income per hour nobody will be able to answer no matter what their job is they could be staff at the restaurant to somebody who's doing really basic work to anybody in any fancy job because we've never ever be paid an hourly salary so when you are not paid an hourly salary the concept of time is not the same and then the concept of time is
not same paying for time is hard to do right and and therefore you'll see a lot of Indians who make let's say I don't know maybe $100 an hour uh uh still spend an hour to S $10 on a flight ticket because that's what it is and and if you by the way discuss that with many of the Indians in the west also you'll realize that this is a common joke that they will still fight for the $10 because the value of time is something that is harder to get used to unless from your childhood
that the unit of time was moved smaller and small that is really interesting and you're saying that comes from just the fact that people never get paid hourly it's always a salary and so people concept of valueing time uh uh uh uh like many Indian languages do not have a word for efficiency wow and that's true for many Asian languages the word for efficiency does not exist so then how do you value it if it's not in a vocabulary fascinating there's something else along these lines of Dows and arpo and efficiency that you talked about
that I love which is this idea that focus is is a curse in Asian markets that in the US there's often this advice Focus build one thing that's amazing that everyone loves try to make that work scale that and then only then build a new product or build something uh build a new big feature and your advice is in India and Asian markets in general it's the opposite and I think it's because you make so little per user could you talk about that yeah I think one is you make very little per user so you
have to do many things but also all low trust markets when and let me Define low trust markets as their uh consumers are a lot more wary of trying new things uh because there are not institutions that protect you against a bad behavior done by a company right so for example if I ever had a fall uh in a coffee shop in the US I can think about suing them and making money off it in India you only worried about I'm going to pay my thing and you don't even think about suing the coffee shop
or you were hoping that you will get any money for that so what happens is in a low trust country uh uh and it's all developing nations are low trust by Design uh because the institutions are not strong enough to kind of really really take care of many things what happens is there is concentration of trust so you will see that super apps super star super companies all exist in low trust markets because the lack of trust creates concentration of trust right uh and therefore you will see one app can do 400 things for example
we have a company like Tata that can do salt to car to jewelry to anything that people will buy because it's a Tata brand because it comes from a low trust Society trusting the brand and and not being oh I'm I'm going to go preferred just new brand and and try the the the joy for trying new new things is not so high in low trust Nations wow I'm learning a lot here I didn't know all this so essentially brand is even more exponentially more important in Indian markets it's funny but the oldest brand in
the world is a brand called as chavan prash uh it's it's a by a g name guy named chaan who built a prash which is a a sort of a place that you can have for good health and and uh it's it was built in India uh uh many many many many centuries ago uh uh and and and by lots of Indian businesses still have the name of the person behind it even the US used to like that like GP Morgan all these guys are not some fancy name they're name of people uh and therefore
in India trust still comes from a lot of names of people who had a lot of trust behind them and reputation behind them I want to zoom out a little bit before we go in a different direction what do you see as either the most pressing challenges in India right now for Tech or the biggest Andor the biggest opportunity for Indian startups and then just generally where do you think things will evolve in the next few years sometimes I wonder the challenges and the opportunities are exactly the same uh for example one of the biggest
challenges we have is uh we have very low female participation of Labor compared to many markets but I also believe it's an opportunity because you can let's say use Ai and create many new types of business and opportunities because now like work from home is not a alien concept anymore you can actually create very interesting businesses for that number two is uh uh uh we are low on per capita income so what AI can do instead of taking our jobs away just make us brighter because now uh like Satya talks about that now expertise is
available in air so you can actually just kind of ride on that and really make the world very equal in many many ways right so that's massive opportunity and also the challenge because I often make this joke that the largest employer of the world is inefficiency and if you take that away too quickly we'll have a very very jobless world right so the thing is that uh it can be an opportunity for a country like India and also potentially a because if you don't start becoming great at AI I I was actually just telling somebody
today that maybe all of our interviews should become about giving a task that they can only perform if they were very good at Ai and no matter what the job is you make that the minimum criteria that uh if they cannot use that leverage that they'll become a liability in five years anyways and the last one is uh we have a very young demographic very well positioned with access to technology access to smartphones and so on and so forth a lot of hunger uh but our challenge is also that it's also the first generation that
is truly learning what is entrepreneurship what is risk and and we'll make all sorts of mistakes get there and I hope we don't go into shell after having these large scale failures which You' have not seen before India is not used to layoffs like startup world is used to layoffs but in India if you startup to layoffs it becomes the national news and all sorts of discussions happen over here so we not there yet so we are stuck between like being a somewhat of a collectivist or some of individualistic Society we are somewhere we India
is a great remix of everything I love this line you just shared of inefficiency is the largest employer in the world I totally get that okay so let me talk let's talk about cred for a bit so you had I think three startups before cred okay and then you've been building cred for about six years now I'm curious just on this journey of cred what you've learned or or changed your mind about during this phase of your career versus previous phases I think ced's Insight was actually quite simple we realized that uh unfortunately the value
of time and per capita income is concentrated in 25 million families and therefore focusing on them is important and they are lot more Global in their approach versus rest of India so so you have to build them very differently uh and and I realize that ability to focus on a customer set which is not historically possible to do because everybody every investor expected us to be the next China uh and the only similarity of India and China was the population and nothing else was similar so I think uh having that conviction that I'm going to
build only for this folks and this large enough market uh it thankfully I had a one success for somebody to bet so our like our series a was $25 million I would have not had that luxury if I had no success in the past because I had no product with any monetization to prove that I'm doing the right thing it turned out okay but I think I I could get a lot of people to take risk behind my insight or my thesis is because I focused on the right customer category and and built on it
but I think the few things I've learned differently is that uh uh companies that are very very good at 0 to1 will not naturally become greater 10 to 100 uh there are lots of different lessons to learn the founder has to evolve the biggest thing that has to happen most people what Ked are people who have not seen a bigger business than cred which comes at its benefits and cost so you have to gentrify the org every now and then to to make people understand the value of many of these reliable things and and I
often tell people that entrepreneurs are uncertainty absorbers uh for everybody for for employees for investors for customers they they are and therefore they they they they get rewarded for being those people to remove uncertainty from people's life uh but the kind of expectations keeps changing at the company of scale for example if you have a a let's say a a seat stage investor they are very used to very high uncertainty and they're happy with some absorption but as you get to growth investor and say you had Sovereign on your cap table the the amount of
stability you need to provide is significantly more and therefore you need to evolve very very differently so I think those are the few lessons I have learned Talent you start realizing that not everybody can scale into everything and and you cannot expect that you can give up the zero to1 DNA just because you're building 10 to 100 so how do you kind of coexist with those things how do you react to big changes in the market and not become this slow company uh uh and every company goes through that I mean if you look look
at what Zak went through in the last three four years was that he had to I often tell that he had to play the Shiva come and do a lot of Destruction to become big again right so I think that's what Founders can do uh and and and it's not easy to do one of the things I've learned is that profit pools of a country tell you a lot about what the country values and trying to uh copy somebody else's profit pool to your country will not be a wise idea because the country's values are
demonstrated in what profit pools exist let's take an example in the Thousand most profitable companies in India the number of retailers would be probably two or three but if you look at the Western Market you'll see a bunch of them because uh it's a consumption Market plus very high divorce rate means you always peacocking again in the market again you're trying to be fit and be cool and all of that India has very low divorce rate less than 1% uh arranged marriages uh and fashion spend and because we have a lower female part paration of
Labor India is probably the only Market where female fashion Spence is less than men's fashion Spence everywhere else it's probably 5 6X more for them so what happens is you start appreciating what the country values for example I have noticed that many patriarchal societies have very significant market cap in financial services versus consumption and these broad patterns you start thinking about very very differently so many lessons there I love this idea of a founder being an uncertainty absorber this other point you made about Zuck becoming the Shiva in destruction touches on something Brian chesky and
I chatted a bit about is how Founders often start in control giving very micromanaging just driving the ship and then as the company grows they delegate and Empower and then things start to slow down and then they come back play the Shiva and and take control again is there anything there that you've seen yeah but that's a universe it's a universe through the exact same phases so if you study Indian mythology you'll see that there's a Brahma Vishnu Mahesh cycles and every yug is it gold goes through these three phases all the time beautiful I
see so this is just inevitable this is the circle of life absolutely amazing I love this all just ties back to your philosophy background I love it it's beautiful this episode is brought to you by duv tail the customer insights hub for product teams are you working in a feature Factory building filler that nobody wants probably because the sad truth is that most SAS features are rarely or never used costing the industry billions every year let's change that product managers dovetail is holding their first industry conference it's called Insight out and they want you to
come over one day in San Francisco the product Community is coming together to learn how to better leverage customer insights and build products that people actually love to use it's on April 11th and you can here from product leaders from Uber twitch meta and Netflix as they share their strategies for driving Innovation thriving in uncertainty and balancing Customer Center work with business needs and here's the kicker it's absolutely free for online tickets just go to dovet tale.com Lenny to register this is thanks to dovetail the best way for product teams to get the most out
of customer insights check it out at dovet tale.com Lenny okay so on cred so there's a funny thing that happened I asked people on Twitter what questions to ask you on this podcast and one of the most common questions was when do you think you'll become profitable which is interesting because when I have other CEOs that are founding a company that is and most companies aren't yet profitable nobody's asking that question so I'm just curious why why is that such a common question that comes up it's it's fascinating it's fascinating uh as a country most
businesses were of trading you buy something at low cost sell at a higher price and you make profit right most of our businesses most of our family businesses were trading right but building a capex heavy distribution monetizing it later on focusing on high Revenue growth rate versus trying to get profitability first is not known to us right so when they see these large numbers of losses like there's a shock that why would somebody give you this kind of money like and and by the way my my own dad wouldn't respect me till I was a
profitable company so it's not surprising that people in India have this comments but it also comes from not understanding how businesses are built in Internet world where VCS are giving you the capital to kind of build distribution unique product Edge brand all of that stuff and then monetize later on and and monetize big and then have very large profit pools to go after but a lot of times uh uh this comes from not understanding this business uh and and I feel it'll change because many internet companies are now getting very profitable public listed so we'll
have a decade uh uh let's understand one thing like in the US uh maybe 27 30% of US market cap is now tech companies India tech companies would probably make less than 2 3% of the market cap so uh we are mostly and and I'm not saying India has this fabulous history of building very very profitable tech companies we are probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies but we are still figuring out what this means and and the fact that this question by by the way I
can tell you one thing that I have been asked this question by people on Twitter way more than my any of my investors ever asked me this question which also creates an Arbitrage for entrepreneurs who can actually build businesses and ability to raise Capital uh and and prove their business model with very Revenue high high Revenue growth rate and and build large Brands and so on and so forth but I find it fascinating as well uh also what one thing we see fascinating in India is that there is like immense amount of trolling and doubt
that will come in your comments no matter what you do uh uh so if you see any founder in India they'll post something about their thing the comments will rarely have appreciation so uh uh it's it feels sad because uh when you see global companies do stuff like India will lose their on Apple Vision Pro and all the stuff and like the Twitter will go Gaga over it but I think when it comes to and I believe uh Envy is hyperlocal we do not envy Elon Musk for all the stuff he does because he's so
far away but we we Envy our own uh uh because they were just like us not many years ago uh and therefore uh Envy is like Wi-Fi it's like a it's like an hyper local service how do you stay positive and focused and not let that stuff bring you down and you have advice for Founders in India that are dealing with the same sort of feedack it's funny the number of calls I've got from Founders Who start getting hate I'm the go-to person to get this call because uh uh they've seen me get it for
many more years and I tell people that we couldn't have made it this far if we cared about criticism of everybody uh versus people who've done better than us if somebody who's done anything better than me gives me any amount of criticism I will absolutely flip and make all the changes and evolve and I I seek feedback all the time from people but if I start taking feedback from everybody who who do not understand and noan and empathize with what I'm doing I'm not saying that we should not take customers feedback that's very different but
let's say somebody commenting about your business who does not understand the Nuance of it uh you can't be reacting to everything and I I often tell people that know there's a reason uh elements with lower valencies are called noble gases because they're hardest to get reaction from that's over my head but I I I love it anyway it's so interesting like I love all these different these elements you're pointing out of how different building in India is that I think people in the US have no idea about and so I appreciate you getting into all
these little elements is there anything else around the Indian market that may surprise people before we go into a different direction about building a startup there for all the challenges uh India Remains the most promising Market that one can be building for right now because everything is going our way we have all sorts of digital public infrastructure government support uh uh all these great people doing extraordinary things uh apart from the Twitter noise and Twitter is designed for uh uh outrage getting likes so I I wouldn't read too much into it but I think all
of us are doing well because we have an audience Set uh an a ecosystem that is fully supporting us and and really taking it forward so I think I I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building because of this extremely vibrant uh crazy opportunity that one can learn from however I wish I often wish that I wish I could get one month internship with Brian and learn how to do things and I've never had the luxury I can only watch his podcast with you to learn a few things but what if I got a
chance to be there and and I and I missed that part where I've never been really trained by the extraordinary product brains or even observe them make decisions so I recently posted one thing that you know the the word operation theater comes because operating used to be a public process and people used to pay money to watch surgeries and see all the bloody gory stuff uh even before anesia was born and and and and there's so much joy in seeing somebody do their action and and I wish there was theater for Brian take a product
decision Zach take a hard call on killing a product or or or or seeing Tim uh uh rejecting uh uh all the ideas that they have to before the GTM of a product I think we could benefit so much from that and and unfortunately it remains in very small circles and like I said I the reason I said you do a fabulous job of removing some of the information asymmetry and kind of making it more democratic but there is so much more that we all could Lear learn uh and I I I feel extremely uh
envious to many people who have the opportunity to kind of work with the best of the best because many of us from India never had the luxury we had to figure out everything on our own wow how cool would that be just to have a camera in some of those meetings just as a learning experience because like very few people are in those rooms and there's so much to learn I think though people will find holy this one this is how decisions are made what is going on and two is like uh I don't want
to work for this person this sounds very difficult and stressful those are probably some takeaways that will emerge kind of along these lines something that comes up a lot in your talks and work is is curiosity yeah you have a show called cred curiosity you often talk about the power of curiosity I'm just curious why is curiosity so important to you and why is it important for other people to always stay curious and what Valu is there I think a curious person is somebody who's constantly demonstrated demonstrating that they are not proud of their expertise
and they will demonstrate extraordinary amount of excitement when they face a problem which they have no clue how to solve uh and and therefore a lot of people stop growing because they want to constantly demonstrate their expertise versus demonstrate their curiosity right because curiosity should come from security because imagine I was in a I'm the founder CEO of this company and this group of 60 people on WhatsApp somebody post something I'm and ask a dumb question what does this word mean you you need to have the security to feel okay with it but a lot
of people out of insecurities try to demonstrate expertise and and do it or Google not ask this people and I think that slows down the compounding growth and I think uh yeah it keeps you very good at adapting right uh so it's funny I was recently GPT is my favorite thing to keep asking random questions because now I don't need to really worry about Google having those questions answered or not because I can ask the GPT so I recently asked the question that which animals have managed to survive which species or animals have survived for
more than 100 million years without changing too much and what is common in all of them so GPD came about the interesting answers which says that it shocks uh uh uh uh like horseshoe crab uh uh uh like uh uh crocodiles and all of these people have survived to do this thing so three distinct traits were one ability to reduce metabolism at will okay it's fascinating I can bring down my metabolism by 20 like one one is to 20 or like crazy crazy scale they can bring the metabolism down the second one is by the
way a lot of in ancient uh yogis have demonstrated this as well uh it comes from the same yogic practice the second thing is about and and if you think on company's context is the same if covid came did you could you could do s down your metabolism and survive right or you burnt your way out of the and disappeared the second thing that was interesting was very high conversion rate on every attempt to secure food right uh uh they don't go around chasing random and doing things they have a very high conversion rate which
means High judgment and the deadliest bite so they will not Chase many options but if they chase something they will have the biggest bite on it and they'll convert it and the third thing that was more interesting one was they have survived all sorts of crazy environmental changes just adapting and adaptation comes from Curiosity right uh uh uh and and and you you could see those people in Co there were two sets of people who were completely gone into shell and there were like who are like this curious like okay so what do I do
with this like what happens now like do I need to change something do I need to tweak something so ability to change very quickly so I I often feel that curiosity is that demonstration to adapt and learn and and you only create more information as symmetry to me wealth is nothing but information symmetry all the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry and and that comes from Curiosity because you're constantly collecting dots connecting dots collecting dots connecting dots and end up creating this Unique Edge for yourself and information symmetry for yourself and if
you assume that I have collected enough I mean there no human life is going to be enough to connect and connect all the dots right we never be able to get and sometimes I envy the stuff that you do because you like you are efficiently connecting and collecting dots uh by having luxury of all these people to talk to and and you are making more dots getting connected so your information symmetry is growing wait till you uh IPO and then someday maybe leave credit and then you could start this podcast a podcast of your own
like this and connect all the dots and I think that's a reference to Danny Meyer who's uh the founder of all these fancy restaurants and big on hospitality and has this phrase always be collecting dots I think ABCD link to that yeah um okay wait this is really interesting this list of what are the common traits of the most longlasting animals they can lower their metabolism at will they have a high conversion rate to get food and they've survived many types of environments and I think there's a lot you can transform as you've done to
startups and leaders this could be its own if you haven't written about this this would a cool blog post I'm curious who you look up to in business either in India and outside India who comes to mind we like I really inspired I'm inspired by these folks I I often tell people that I hate the word favorite because it tells me to become Limited in my mind so I stay away from being favorite but I I learn all the time from everybody and there are so many people to learn across the world and in history
in recent past and and and every time you will discover fascinating extraordinary things about them so I I don't think I have a person I am this person about how did they solve this heart problem so many one of the things that we started doing recently and not very ritualistic about it so far is I ask uh myself and my key reportes every month we go around the table and ask ourselves what are the hardest problem we solved last month and it's very hard to come up with an answer and if you do this to
the product leaders like just go around and ask what was the heart problem you solved last month you will realize that we all stay very busy and displacement is hard but if you notice extraordinary successful people they'll have a lot more content to talk about every month every quarter because they are obsess obsessed about making that big displacement uh and does not come by being busy and that's another thing that you cannot chase the big thing you don't see a crocodile being busy you see a crocodile just waiting patiently at the watering hole for that
best meal and have the deadliest bite for that so the beautiful definition of predator Predators I read was the one who burns the least amount of calories to earn the most am of galleries so how do you become that and I think when I meet people who are extraordinary at that and it comes in all shapes and forms I learned something from them so in these meetings you have are you judging people's success based on how many hard problems they solve now that they've heard this they're going to be like yeah I need more because
if you're senior what is what is the role of a senior person you have to be the chief Problem Solver I love that I I often think of leaders as a professional firefighters are just endless fire to put out kind of along the lines of people and where you learn from is there any sources of content this is actually an audience question on Twitter uh anog Verma asked this what are your favorite sources of content to learn from in terms of what's happening in the world and what to pay attention to I wish I could
think of an answer my method of collecting information is mostly about I come up with conjectures in my head and then I go all over the place to find out if there are proofs of what I'm saying is true or not for example I recently came with a conjecture that everybody who's been successful in the history of business of VIIs have historically done a lot of philanthropy to create a good image for themselves and therefore being treated as a respected citizen versus being treated as a person who did VI to make wealth and then I
asked this to GPD and I GPD came with like 50 people who did what uh and what were their viic how did they change the reputation by doing lots of philanthrophy and all of that stuff and and then a thing happens and then I research in all sorts of directions and and I have no boundaries to if I go to chemistry or physics or a human behavior to some Universal principles so my method of learning is constantly come up with conjectures from the dots that you've connected and then like Absol absolutely work hard to find
proof of it and then use that to connect to the next do right so I often tell people that everything that you every book you read makes your brain porous to read the next book that's the purpose of books but that's true for every single thing we learn it makes our brain more porous for the next thing that we are supposed to learn is there a recent example that where you got super sucked into some topic uh it's my daily life I get sucked into topics every now and then uh uh for example I've been
like uh thinking about second order effects of AI and what happens to countries and and jobs and and and how to expect some of these things to change not change rate of change rate of skill change uh I got recently obsessed with what happens to lab grown diamonds if they become big does it kill diamonds does it make diamonds bigger and then I looked at parallels so Pearl industry was very big before uh cultured uh uh pearls came and the high status of pearls disappeared because everybody could have pearls uh uh but not too long
ago pearls wased to be a very Royal thing to be every prince and princesses uh used to have pearls around them but as soon as it was easy to uh uh uh manufacture in a lab it lost its value so I think so then should I be shorting uh or or going long on diamonds thinking about what happens so but there'll be a temporary period of making a lot of money on lab grown diamonds uh which will kill it it will become parasitic on the status of diamonds and uh in Destroy all its profit pools
you heard it your first time to buy some Diamond Futures uh I feel like I feel like there's no one in the world chat GPT impacted more than you considering how much you want to spend just digging into random topics I I often wonder that if you took the most serious people and made their GPD searches public lot of people will learn because the problem of GPD is now it will give it will it'll make the people with great question do well versus people who are are looking for uh basic answers so I think the
world is going to be unfair to people who can ask great questions interesting okay well I got to ask you is there any advice you have for asking great questions that has helped you in your work and career and life whenever somebody has many choices and they make the right choice in whatever domain they have for example let's say you could hire anybody but you hired great people or or let's say you could marry anybody but you married a great person and so on and so for somebody who has many choices to make how do
they make choices for that domain of expertise and I think that is the most and and many times they cannot be they don't be to explain how they make great choices so you to really go in into that because they don't really have their mental models figured out uh they cannot articulate they cannot coach they cannot explain but if you can figure out a way how they make great decisions in general in in whatever domain of uh work that they are doing you'll find many interesting insights coming over there the the the other good questions
to ask is about uh second out of thinking what do they think will happen uh to the world and why did they come to that conclusion and you see their full chain of thoughts is very powerful for example uh second order thinking is known to be the most powerful trait to predict success of somebody but I often wonder what happened in childhood of people who became great at te thinking and that question is not fully discovered or discussed yet uh and I've found some loose examples of did you play strategy games or only physical games
has a strong correlation to building so rigor came from physical games but uh second a thinking came from playing strategy games as a kid and if you had both you could do really well in general because you have the discipline and second thinking together uh then uh did you ever have an exercise uh on looking at history for example one of the things I recommend to uh parents to do with their kids I call it the Wi-Fi school is uh ask them a one why question every time every meal and let them come back with
the answers next day for example why do humans wear jewelry and why is uh uh something in a certain way and let them go into the full depth of History and find out uh or why why is it so expensive to advertise on Super Bowl and and so on and so forth you just take one question and if you train them on why they evolve at a very different rate because how what are the questions which do not evolve at you at a much higher rate because why is the Deep question and and it breaks
a lot of things in your head or another question is about origin stories that how did how did elevators come into being and and what made earphones happen What made microphones why is it called microphone and why is it called a phone and if you just Mo want to go into this depth you'll see people kind of build second AO thinking automatically because either you go in history and see second order sing coming invol with that or you play games that train your brain for second order of sing it's a spectrum uh but that's broad
range of things that I think people should be asking I'm looking forward to a canal uh children's raising book like a book to help you raise kids this could be your future I don't have kids so I can run EXP on everybody else's kid so it's it's a great thing to do I feel like with these questions uh I think the rule has to be you can't just ask Chad GPT for the answer if actually it's not bad uh I think you should encourage it because we have to assume that we are going to be
all co-pilots of AI now uh what you have to do is derive the second order Insight that okay if this is true where is the similarity of this in somewhere else like give me an example of this found somewhere else and so on and so forth amazing okay okay I have just a couple more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round first let's visit contrarian corner I'm curious what's something that you believe that very few other people would agree with you on and why do you hold that belief our understanding of wealth
is flawed uh and what wealth is uh to me wealth is nothing but storage of energy uh and therefore the reason wealth is not Zero Sum because energy is and we are just finding all ways to convert energy in our advantage we the only species that have managed to convert all forms of energy to our advantage kinetic energy and fuel and sound and solar like no no other species has done this and therefore since Industrial Revolution our wealth has gone like this and continue to be like that Ai and nuclear fusion and all this stuff
will kind of take us right there so I I I have a strong view that we will never never have uh equality of wealth uh in fact Chase that is actually a bad idea but if you let people uh do well and Chase weal they have enough wealth for everybody else uh and we could take a lot of people out and I think it's comp complicated because we can have all this Democratic arguments that oh the wealth is concentrated and all that but that's the physics of wealth it'll always be concentrated it changes mediums companies
countries they're all to me wealth is nothing about an entropic complexity uh that'll keep changing its form and shape uh uh uh you can keep fighting it or accept physics and and take the benefit of that physics I think of Elon had this interesting point that wealth is just a database where everyone's wealth I guess is just an a row in the database and here's how much everyone has and you're just transferring numbers around and that's that's the whole e the is important that you can actually increase the database size infinitely that's true uh and
and and therefore his vision of uh sun's energy like if we really convert all the energy to our advantage the amount of wealth we'll create for humans is disproportionate uh and and all the species that have managed to collaborate and cooporate to create wealth for example let's define wealth as biomass so let's say ants and bacteria and humans are the only few things that have the largest biomass on this planet because we figured out how to make energy work to our advantage wow uh I love all the directions we've gone probably the last question is
there a story of failure in your career that would be interesting to share something that taught you an important lesson it's a series of failures uh uh I think there is no Escape for anybody who's done anything in life not failed a lot like every day every uh thing but I I would say that uh many initiatives many products companies that I've built uh have absolutely failed uh uh hiring that have failed uh trust broken betrayals uh so I think there is no end to it but I think entrepreneurs have this weird ability to forget
about failures and almost turn that into a lesson that you hold and you forget the story uh and and like for example Co is literally no memory for me I I just don't remember what was C right it's just a blank in my head right now and I think we humans are great at forgetting the the memory of failure but remember the lesson from failure but I think I'm constantly learning uh and and uh I often believe that life is too short to make all our mistakes ourselves so we should be learning from other people's
failures as well uh and a lot of times we don't do that because we believe that we are special nothing like that will happen to us uh but but as as humans we should be learning I would say that my life started from a failure my my family went through severe financial crisis I to start working from age 15 and uh I feel till date I'm just trying to escape that failure that happened in the family so I think many of us are just uh uh fighting that initial large failure that we've had and don't
want to be anywhere near that and although we are significantly far away from that but the feeling is is exactly that circles back to one of our first few questions about the chips on shoulders uh driving a lot of motivation there's this phrase chips on shoulders uh Drive chips in pockets that's interesting yeah uh is there anything more you want to share about that early uh challenge you went into or is that something you've shared often I mean I've shared that enough but I just I I should not talk about it before because I think
that I would get some sympathy for that and and I till like recent past I speak about it because I I want people to realize that I was not some gifted kid who had some rich parents who made me extraordinarly bright and put me in great school and colleges and I made my way through that uh uh uh I I I should start talk about ear because I I there's lot of tendency to give sympathy to people that oh this guy had struggled and I I I don't want to be given any credit uh uh
for playing that poverty card card or this card or uh uh struggling for food card like that's not an excuse uh uh there are so many people in the world who've done extraordinar well because they had the gift of struggle and I often tell people that this is the biggest curse of successful parents that that's the only gift they'll not be able to give to their kids the gift of struggle that they had wow I think about that a lot we have a kid he's eight months now and so I'm trying to figure out the
balance of struggle versus making life easy and great uh a new challenge for me to figure out before we get to a very exciting lightning round is there anything else can you wanted to share or leave listeners with anything any last nuggets of thought well I I I would love for the listeners and from different fields of product is that uh please uh share what you're learning without being fearing Judgment of your peers because there are many many people who are learning only because you share your Evolution and your thoughts and I I believe that
a lot more could be contributing and and a lot of your listeners are really bright people if they all shared uh uh many people from many places in the world would learn uh uh and and achieve some amount of success thanks to your sharing amazing with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready all set let's do it first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people it keeps changing a lot but uh my books are usually around understanding human behavior uh and I keep changing based
on the person but I think it's the biggest subject all our customers all our investors all our employees all our relationships are all humans and the subject that we are weakest on is human behavior and how do we live this life we playing life on extremely hard mode if you don't learn human behavior so I would say that's one thing the second thing at evolutionary biology it teaches a lot about how species evolve and how do they make decisions and what are the core motivations that drive everybody uh so that's another one I would recommend
and I I don't to make recommendations because I I can barely finish a book to to be honest so I I believe in drifting and going deeper into topics so understand the topics versus trying to say uh give me this three books and I'm going to be good uh and the last one I would say is that uh uh any thing that can make you learn something about their Journey versus their success right so uh uh sometimes autobiographies are too celebratory in some ways but if you can just kind of understand how they how did
they if if any book can teach you how people recovered from a setback in great detail is a great book to learn from an audience member on Twitter actually asked a similar question along these lines if there's one book that you could read over and over and over what would that be is there one I I absolutely don't believe in Reading over and over uh uh because I I I believe that we are evolving things you might discover the same stuff coming from different books and you'll say oh I can categorize this in my brain
again and again but I I think we should uh we we tend to become Believers in it becomes too religious if you repeat yeah next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed I I love love open Heimer because of the struggles but uh and Nolan's craft of making the movies but uh nothing in the recent past that I feel is right up there do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing uh I like to ask a hypothetical second order thinking
question for example if everybody who has taken a covid vaccine dies tonight what happens in 12 months from now can you explain the world from what happens to money what happens to law what happens to countries what happens to military what happens to stock market what happens to order of things and and I would say less than 10% of really smart people can really have good answers so it tells you how good they are in second order thinking uh but the questions can keep changing for example you said that what if arranged marriages were banned
in India made made got capital punishment for doing arranged marriages what happens to the country how do we change from there uh uh like some absurd scenarios but then what happens after that not to give away your secret sauce but what do you look for in an answer that gives you a sense there the range of things that they could go into and think about if this happens B happens and then C happens like the the leavs they could make and just so people understand when you're talking about second order thinking what's the simplest way
to describe that concept I think the simplest way to think about this is that uh being able to correctly judge the butterfly effect of an event in as close as possible for example okay like a lot of people in stock market use that to say how which stocks will go up and down like that's there's something that has happened in the market oh there is a war now in uh with Russia then what happens to the market like can you be good at predicting that but in every thing in life like uh if this happens
and uh a lot of people hate this uh because it's very taxing to the Brain Brain Brain absolutely hates second thinking unless you have trained your brain with second thinking all the time that it looks forward to it so you convert this into a hate versus a reward cycle and that comes with probably doing it probably early on in your life that later on people hate doing second a thinking it is yes that sounds like a lot of work for the brain okay just a few more questions do you have a favorite product that you've
recently discovered that you really love I'm looking forward for My Vision Pro that is coming soon it's a future future Favorite product uh we have actually boss for meta coming on as the next guest in my recording I'm not sure when they come out in sequence but we're going to talk about his thoughts yeah the most fasinating thing that I saw was uh Zak talking about the utility of uh meta being better than Vision Pro and their product and and that's exactly going to work well for Apple because when you try to make the product
more utilitarian it loses status and and uh if you study animals you realize that the one which gets the highest mating success is the one which can demonstrate ability to waste resources and not be very efficient with resources uh and therefore people who are known to buy a product that is wasteful will actually earn higher status and I think Zak made it actually quite easy for Apple to demonstrate their Superior positioning by saying that oh we are not as efficient we are not as cheap we are not for everybody wow just continue to blow Minds
even on our lightning round do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends and family find useful in work or in life uh I it's not a favorite model but I think we we truly are transient uh and we are very lucky to have this life that we have and we have to make the most out of it uh uh and and all these struggles will mean nothing uh I often tell people that wish for your life to be so great that you have collected the highest amount of
content when you are old you have no end to the stories that you can talk about that reminds me of a book I once read that really had an impact on me where somebody was trying to make a movie of their life and the producer was like there's nothing there's no good movie here you have not done enough interesting things I love it and so he actually became he turned his lens into what to do in life by thinking what would make a great story and so he just started do and a great story is
something where you overcome challenges and Achieve something you wanted and so that became his life motto I'm gonna try hard things and overcome them and that's G to be I love it my life I love it I love it I'll link to that uh book in the show notes final question you have this series on Twitter that you call Monday motivations I'm curious what's motivating you these days I find internet is filled with all these people trying to give this fake motivation and make money off that stuff and and like it's almost like a Dr
for people to feel oh my God there's motivation I'm going to do well uh uh I I just want to remind people that all success comes from extraordinary amount of pain and struggle and hard work and there is no shortcut to anything material coming in life and so the M motivation post comes as the anti- motivation uh uh uh post because uh the world is filled with uh I believe that the biggest profit making scheme that I've seen in recent times is to tell people to love themselves and they'll pay you money for saying that
and and uh uh and I think the best way to love yourself is to keep evolving so my motivation comes from Evolution connecting dot solving harder problems than I have solved in the past and I think life is ultimately a game that you want to feel that your levels have changed and your skills have changed constantly Canal you are wonderful thank you so much for being here two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and follow up on some of the stuff and how can listeners be useful to
you you can find me on social media look for konal sha I'll you'll find me everywhere I usually have different personality on each social media and and uh uh in terms of being helpful uh keep tagging me on interesting things that you discover that gave you that moment of oh my God I did not know this uh I would love that amazing kol again thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show
on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode
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