Sajith Pai — Exploring Indus Valley (Ep.241)
01:28:22 Share

Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that

to avoid going in infinite loops of thought. We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science,

linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.

Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. My guest today, Sajit Pai, is one of the most respected people in the Indian tech industry. He's a GP at Bloom VC. He's a

And he's also a very prolific writer. I've read much of what he's written. He's a wonderful writer. And what I love about it is the transition from two decades in media entertainment and then staking your claim, I think it was in 2018, by joining Bloom VC. First off, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure and it's an honor. And if you wouldn't mind, one of the things that I have been learning a lot about that I'm sure that many of our listeners and viewers don't know too much about

is India is sort of seen by many American VCs as this great untapped country with 1.5 billion people, but we see it a bit as a monolith. And at least you've disabused me of those notions. And it would be great if you could help our listeners and viewers understand that.

It's not that at all. You've said it's three, maybe four different countries and that you really need to understand. So if you wouldn't mind walking us through kind of a 101 on the Indian opportunity and many of the misconceptions Westerners have about it.

I'd be happy to. A lot of folks outside see India as this large, like you rightly said, 1.4, 1.5 billion population country with a rising middle class. And because a lot of, I would say, folks in the West...

interact with very smart Indians, especially if you're in Silicon Valley, you know, Indians are a substantial portion. And even in US corporates and as well as British corporates are full of very successful Indians. So typically the notion is that there are a lot of people like them in India, right?

But when you actually unpack the data, you find that that kind of population, highly educated, affluent, well-learning, is actually a very small portion of the Indian population.

So I look at India as what four countries, but really three of them are the ones I think it's best understood as. It's sort of a pyramid, India 1, India 2, and India 3. India 1 is like the smallest market. And the fourth country is really a subset of India 1, which is an extremely kind of rarefied set, which I'll not talk about. So let's go back to the three countries, India 1, India 2, and India 3.

India is about 30 million households or 120 million people, but 9 to 10% of the overall Indian population. And it accounts for about $15,000 per capita income. And the other ones, for example, buying Apple phones, having Starbucks coffee, or if there's a franchise in India, or Dunkin' Donuts, buying something like...

suitcases and what have you. A lot of people think this is a majority of the Indian population, but it's actually just about 9-10%. But the fact is, because they're 120 million people, it's still significant. That's bigger than Germany, for instance, right? That's bigger than the UK. So that's an interesting paradox of India, that India one is just about 9% of India, but it's still larger than many countries.

India, too, is a second nation, and that is really aspiring India. There are about 70 million households, 300 million people. They can use the internet, but they can't consume. They're users, not consumers. And they account for about $3,000 per capita income, sort of like the Philippines. But Philippines' population is about 100 million, just like in Indonesia with the per capita income of the Philippines. India, one, is like Mexico. You think of it as a Mexico-sized country.

And India 3 is really beyond pale. They're completely locked out of the markets, economic markets. They're not making too much money, $1,000 per capita income, really struggling to buy no disposable income and so on. Really, these are the three nations. And I think what...

Western companies or any company outside India needs to keep in mind is there are not too many products that appeal to the entire Indian populace. Yes, there are companies like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, more Unilever. And there are a few companies which have products that cater to the entire 1.4 billion people.

But really, most products really appeal to 30 million households, 120 million people. And if it can appeal to India too, then it's really a big, big, big, big product. So that is sort of the three nations and sort of the teasing a part of this. I want to take a pause here and let you come back into the conversation.

Thank you. And how do you navigate between these three countries? Do you aim at that tier one or are you looking for founders who you think might be able to go into country two and ultimately country three? I think all of us in venture are really launching, I would say, most consumer products.

have really kept India 3 out of our calculations. It's a very large country, 1.2 billion people or 1 billion people, but it's really outside of our consideration set.

Now, one thing to keep in mind is it is not like India 1 is concentrated in a few cities and India 1 is in certain regions. It's spread across India. So sort of a good way to understand this, if India is water or milk and India 1 is like the cream that cannot spread across.

It's concentrated in a few regions, but there's no one part where people talk about Italy and say southern Italy versus northern Italy. Northern Italy is far more prosperous. Nothing like that in India. There are some trends where the southern part is a little, southern and western parts are a little richer. But

Nothing does it. But it's all spread across. And all of us really keep India 1 and 2 in mind. And we're lucky if the product also appeals to India 2. Very few products appeal to India 1 and India 2. That's because...

The hooks that are needed to grab onto the landmass of India 1 are not sufficient or are not relevant to grab onto the landmass of India 2. What I mean is India 1 speaks a lot of English. They're very comfortable with what's happening in the US, consumption patterns,

You see them as really, and I like to think of this metaphor that India won as the 51st state of the U.S., really. So that's that. And because they're watching suits or friends and what have you, they're really consuming U.S. culture.

But India too is not a native English speakers. They can see English. Some of them can understand English, but they're largely vernacular language speakers. While they can use the English internet, they're not native and they don't leverage it well.

Some of them have started using it for learning. Some of them use it for shopping, etc. But they're not native users. So India is very used to clicking on colored rectangles on flat glass screens and buying. But India likes to use voice.

And increasingly, a lot of apps have started giving back, you know, using the voice interface. And it'll be interesting if AI in the next few years can use this voice interface to help make the internet palatable for India too. So this is sort of the lay of the land when it comes to venture-funded startups. We're largely focused on India only.

And we have direct experience with that in one of our verticals, infinite books. On the audio book, we are looking to be able to translate it into the very many languages spoken in India.

And the AI is getting better and better and better at that. So we think it'll be an interesting experiment, at least. And by the way, we're doing it entirely experimentally. We don't have any preconceived notions about how that might or might not work. But you've also written elsewhere that India is a low trust society. And are there specific things that you look for

First off, I guess this is a two-part question. In the country one that is very comfortable with U.S. culture, et cetera, is that still a low-trust cohort, or are they more like the United States in their trust? And then the second question would be, how do you build apps that work and appeal in a low-trust society?

Yeah, I think that India is a low trust country. There are parts of India, I guess the startup ecosystem, which is really the venture ecosystem, is a high trust market.

So there are parts of it that are very similar to how it would work in the US. I think the venture ecosystem here is very highly involved, and that's a high trust. Parts of the market where there are a lot of American banks that are operating, or even Indian companies, right? So concentrated in Bombay, some parts of other cities like Bangalore, okay, and some parts of Delhi would be high trust. But...

On an average, even India 1 would be, I don't say low trust, but lower in the trust levels than I would say Western countries. And a lot of it has to do with culture and the fact that, you know, at the end of the day, we are a $2,600 per capita income country, right? We're 140th on per capita income. And it's only some parts of India which really have like anything about $10,000, $15,000 per

So a lot of that permeates itself through the purchasing. With regards to your second question, how do you build products which are high trust? Very interesting. And I'll give you an example of a particular feature which is somewhat unique to India and challenges it creates. So in US, if you want to buy a product from Amazon, Amazon has one-click shopping, right? Right.

In India, it doesn't work. I literally have to do like six, seven clicks because the Reserve Bank of India, RBI, which is very powerful, which is one of the few institutions like the Fed, but much more trusted.

They said, a lot of customers are accidentally paying because Amazon made it one click and pay. No, we want more friction in buying. So literally have to do multiple clicks. Then there is an OTP that I get. It's called a one-time password, which comes on my phone. And not only do I have to put my CV lead, sometimes I have to put it each time.

or I have to give special permission, then the OTP comes. So there's a lot of friction in buying and it takes me five, six clicks. Whereas when I'm in the US, everything is designed maybe to just separate money from me like in an institute, right? But in India, there's so much friction. So that is one example for India 1 even. For India 2 or even parts of India 1, e-commerce is a good example. We have something called cash on delivery.

So now this is interesting. In the US, you have to prepay for anything you want at your house or whatever. In India, you can opt for cash on delivery. Now, what it means is I do not believe that what you're sending me is the right thing. I want to see it. I want to see it. I want to make sure it is and then I'll pay you.

So cash on delivery still is a majority of Indian e-commerce. And fact is, people do pay digitally, but they want to see the product in their hands. Now, this is an indicator of what a low-trust economy has engendered. The fact also is that our addresses are very hard to make out. They're hard to pass. They're as simple as US addresses, 1320 Maple Drive, Zip Code.

They are like half a mile long and they give you interesting things. They come behind the temple, give me a shout and someone will come. It's a fourth door with this. So one of the Indian apps, Swiggy, even has an option for photographing your door and adding it so that people who are delivering can see the door. So this is interesting. This is not related to trust as much. So what it means is aligned with cash on delivery,

aligned with the fact that addresses are hard to parse and etc they have return rates which are very high some of our apparel companies which do fashion e-commerce have return rates as high as 40 it's a nightmare to deal with like you know because it vitiates a unit so i've given you another variety but i thought two examples of what low trust mean like india one and india two so it

As I listened to your response, I can't help but think that both of those were problems in the United States way earlier, right? So cash on delivery, COD, was very popular in the United States as we were emerging as a more unified country because the states were very, as you probably know, the states have their own constitutions and they have their own rules and regulations and all of that.

And so most things were set COD because in that regard, we were low trust. And then the friction on the one-click payment, same thing happened here when the internet started to dominate, right? And I think it's probably an apocryphal story, but it illustrates the point. It was really the Beanie Baby phenomenon in the United States that got people willing to put their credit card on eBay.

Most people, when Amazon was brand, I was a real super earlier adopter of the internet. And I'm a journal keeper too. And I just found something from like the mid-90s where it says, I don't know if I'm ever going to put my credit card on the internet. And then, of course, we became accustomed to it. Do you see similar things progressing that way in India as well?

I do. I think over the last, I would say like 20 years, internet has 20 plus years, like 30 years, if you take 94 as sort of the early kind of wave of internet in India. I would say, yes, I've started seeing this trend towards more trust, less of fiction, more people willing to use credit cards or at least digital payments. So certainly in the right direction. But I would say a lot of this is much faster in India, what?

a little less faster in India too and non-existent in India too. And so I have been very bullish on India, Indian people. I mean, the profile is, and now I'm learning, I'm probably profiling that India one, but highly educated, incredible work. We have a joke at OSB that if an Indian CEO gets installed, then yes. Yeah.

So we view it very positively. But as I listen, it seems to me that penetration into country two and country three is going to be a very long adoption curve.

And what are your thoughts on how that might happen? I could probably understand how you penetrate the aspiring country number two that's just below that 30 million figure you gave for the top one. Do you ever see it like getting and permeating the third level?

Yeah. So India 1 is about 30 million households and 120 million people. 120 million. Thank you. India 2 is about 70 million households and about 300 million people. I would say that I'm very hopeful of India 2 much more. For one, the per capita income is around $3,000. And typically, they have low but rising percentage of their income.

earnings as disposable income. And typically on four to $6,000, the disposable income becomes material enough to start influencing the Indian consumer market. And at that point, we'll start seeing them becoming a force. What's interesting is that there are people, there are companies which have been able to

successfully sell into India too. Some of them are startups. Some of them are not necessarily startups in the true sense, but they are really larger companies launching brands. And one successful company is called Zodio. Z-O-D-I-O.

It is from India's, one of India's largest conglomerates, the Tata Group, the highly respected Tata Group. Everything from salt to software, you know, they run aeroplanes as well. So they launched, one of their companies launched this product called Zodio. Effectively, it is like Indian...

Zara, H&M, but much lower priced, less than $10 typically. And basically what they did was they worked backwards. They said, this is the price I want to kind of offer. And this is the margin that I'm comfortable with. Hence, this is what I need to manufacture it at. They gave a large amount of volume to their suppliers and they were able to

get goods at much lower prices the markups are lower and this sold the product at lower prices and extremely they've been extremely successful so it's kind of said that Indian consumers are not low low price but they're high value northern low price right and that has turned out to be true so second when it comes to for example India's a big market for toolies

So there have been, for example, companies which have, there's a company called Hero Honda, sorry, Hero Group. They earlier had a joint venture with Hero Honda, but now they kind of separate. So Hero Group. So they have a very successful two-wheeler brand, which is very popular in India too. And a lot of it has to do with fuel efficiency. So they basically said, we will do what it takes. And they created this, you know, four-stroke engine. So there's less power, but

But it gives you tremendous mileage and that really matters in India. So these are two examples. And there are many more of companies really working backwards from the price that they have to sell at, making sure that the product has features which are relevant for India too, and being able to kind of provide that value. And they've done very well.

Tell us this gentleman, C.K. Prahlad, not so well-known now, but he's passed away. He was an American academic. He was at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He wrote this book called The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, where he talked about how Indian companies can actually sell into India 3.0.

So, you know, with deep respect to Mr. Prahlad, I think India 3 is a little tough. I guess you could, if you're selling products which are like conjugal staples, maybe salt or green or something like that. And another mode that's worked well is to do what's called sanitization.

which is really the challenge. It's from making big packs. Like you go to Costco and you see these jumbo packs, they won't work in India. You need like much smaller, so sachets. Because Indians don't have very high income at one go. And very few Indians are part of the formal economy.

out of the 1.4 billion people, there are about 600 million people in the labor force, out of which about barely 10% are in the formal economy, which means they get regular income every month and stuff like that. The blue collar population is about one third of this and the white collar is about two thirds of this. So if you ask me, a lot of these factors also play itself and

Like this trend towards subsidization, because when you don't have regular income, you're not able to save towards a lot of things. And you're very careful about what you're going to spend it on. And that brings to mind the stat that kind of blew my mind, which is only 1.5% of the total population in India pays an income tax. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So what's worth noting is, and this is how our two countries have evolved. The US is a very local, the local municipality, the states have a lot of power. So the center has, the union has power that is not bequeathed to the states, right? So India is the other way around. The states have power that's not bequeathed to the union.

The union is very powerful in India. And that's just the way we've evolved because we basically adopted whatever practices the British had laid down. And the British, because they governed India as a colony, they had a very strong center. So we kind of just took over from that. And what's worth noting is, unlike the US, we have very few local taxes. I do not pay local taxes, Jim. I only pay the income tax and I pay the goods and service tax, which is an indirect tax.

But the fact is there are very few Indians kind of being that. And I think over the last few years, and there's been a very different discussion and I probably shouldn't go there. There's also been a desire by the Indian state to not expand the tax base, the direct tax base.

So there's a saying, right, in the U.S., no taxation without representation. It is a very important saying in the history of the United States. So in many ways, I think the powerful Indian state goes by the philosophy of no taxation, no representation. So what it means is that

If you're not paying tax, then you do not have the right to ask for a lot of things. So the center is not held accountable for a lot of things. And what has happened over the last many decades is the Indian elite has sort of segregated themselves from participating in public goods.

So the elite of India live in large gated complexes today, which is sort of the equivalent of the white suburbs in the US. So not all the gated complexes are in the suburbs in India. Some of them are in the big middle of the cities. But in large gated complexes, they have security.

They drive large cars and there's a trend towards richer households buying more and more cars. While public transport is used, not enough public transport is used.

There is a saying in the West that rich country is one where even millionaires and billionaires travel by public transport. It's not so true in India. So kind of a roundabout way, but it's sort of this 1.5% or 22 million Indians paying all of the tax has many implications and not all are necessarily healthy implications.

Do you think that that is somehow a remnant of the case system in India? Is that still influencing the way things are going or not? Not a specific one, but I would say that if you take the Indian caste system,

So India is, unlike the British and like UK, where there's a class system. I mean, you know, India is, yeah, the caste matters far more. And it has not gone away completely, you know, so I would expect it to kind of come down every year and it is reducing. In large cities, it's not as important. But then again, as a member of

I'm a privileged member of the upper caste, so I won't see it. It's hard for me to kind of see the chart. Much like, for example, if you're a member of the minority in the US, you will encounter formal challenges, which, for example, the white American will not encounter, right? So I may not see it as much. I would say it's come down. There is a strong correlation with income and, I would say, caste. It is not decisive. There are reasonably large, but there are a reasonable number of

Lower castes who have done well, or middle castes who have done well, but increasingly, I think the majority of the people who have done well, economically well off, are, I would say, certainly the upper castes. But the tax, so naturally, that has an implication in who pays the tax. So that's the way I would put it. So my younger colleagues in Roshamasi Ventures who are working from India and are Indians, obviously,

often joke that the largest variable, whether India can be the powerhouse of the 21st century, is the government. And they say that to me often enough every time I ask a question like, well, why isn't this happening, this happening, this happening? And then the refrain from them always is,

Look, you're right. We've got all of those things that you're mentioning, you know, highly educated, highly motivated, you know, capital formation is VCs like yourself, but they're like, the government is our greatest exogenous risk here. What do you think about that idea?

To give credit to the government, they do understand that if they don't reform India, they're sitting on a time bomb. Because this is a country where there's a large number of people who are less economically well-off. Unemployment is reasonably high. So to their credit, all governments, especially this government,

has been very proactive in, I would say, investing. For example, when it comes to roads, railways, infrastructure, for instance, has improved dramatically. That's it. I would say there are two areas where I would say we should see a little more intervention. The first would be the tax one. I think the Indian tax one can be very temperamental. For example, they can come back and say,

You owe us money for the last 10 years and there's no statute of limitation there. And that does create challenges. The second is to do with interpretation of the laws. And I would say there are enough examples of sectors where the certain laws hobbled the growth of the sector.

Now things are changing, but for a long time, India's drones had to be within line of sight. So they couldn't be used in agriculture. They couldn't be used for many things. You had to get a lot of permission. So as a result, the biggest news case for drones was weddings. And because Indian weddings are...

They talk about big fan Greek weddings. Indian weddings are, boy, oh boy, they're bigger and fatter. And you had this trend where every wedding had a drone going up, shooting it from multiple angles, et cetera. So that's an example of how we're going to have a law to help the growth of the drone sector. Now things are changing. So I think these two are areas where I think we need to kind of see the Indian state, the

is up in the top. But otherwise, I think they've been fairly, fairly be open to the idea that they have to invest. They can't stand in the way of growth.

The other minor risk, and this is not so much for Indian companies, but for, I would say, global companies, is that there is a, and it's not only India, there is a sort of economic nationalism that is kind of rising. And what that means is the Indian state wants more control. We're seeing some of this in Brazil, as we saw it with X slash Twitter being shut down by the Brazilian Supreme Court.

And there is a case that is slowly proceeding through the Indian legal system on WhatsApp.

The contention is that WhatsApp should give the encryption keys to the Indian state because they're worried that WhatsApp being new and WhatsApp is what the country runs on. Sitting in the US, you probably don't understand how important WhatsApp is. It's a bit like how China, Tencent and Tencent's Messenger is so central to the country.

So we'll see how this goes. At some point, they will understand and probably lead to some sort of middle ground. So I would say these three, a little bit of temperamental tax treatments, laws being applied, a little indiscriminately. And the third thing that I was mentioning, Jim, is about economic nationalism. So if you came into mind these three, temperamental tax,

tax treatment, treatment of laws in a discreet manner, and finally, economic nationalism. These are sort of three ways in which the government sort of creates challenges, I would say. We are investors in a fund that concentrates on Bangladesh. And one of the GPs there said to me,

That Westerners get most things wrong there. And he gave us an example. He was talking to a potential LP. And the LP said, yeah, well, I was looking at adoption rates of Internet in Bangladesh and they're they're microscopic. Nobody seems to be using the Internet there. And he smiled and he goes, that's because they don't ask the right question.

If you look at a survey that says, when was the last time you were on the internet? It might seem long to a Westerner, right? But if you ask the question, when was the last time you were on WhatsApp or when was the last time you were on Facebook? It was today because they're the, and this is echoing the importance of WhatsApp in India as well. And it seems to me that, uh,

If the state really wants the country to emerge as an economic powerhouse, they would at least understand the universal importance of those apps. Or am I just a Westerner totally getting it wrong?

Yeah, I think they do understand. It's just that I think there are very powerful forces and it's not unique to India alone. We're seeing that in Brazil, we're seeing it in China. The state today and sometimes end on by the dynamics of politics internally and having to pander to a certain constituency sort of takes the stance that how can we surrender to the hegemony of the West?

And we now need to kind of regulate these. Sometimes it's good. I do appreciate that the EU has helped regulate Apple to change the lightning port to the USB-C port. And that's a godsend. They can use different chargers now. We're not reliant on the Apple charger anymore.

But sometimes it can get, you know, overtly kind of awkward. And I do hope that some of this regulation doesn't lead to a situation where, which leads to someone exiting the country, like X decide, X had to, you know, exit. There's a force to. So I don't know if it will happen tomorrow in India, but yeah, I mean, these are risks that sometimes you run. But I think overall, I think India is far more progressive. I mean, I must tell you that. And I think there is a keen understanding that, hey,

India is far more connected into the global economic system, and India stands to benefit far more from it. And there are enough pulls and pressures, enough constituencies, you know, that sort of a middle ground will be reached in India.

Do you still see a diaspora of people of some of the brightest minds and who would make natural entrepreneurs? Has that been leaving for places like the United States or other much more conducive to friendly laws and terms around venture? Is that still significant or are you seeing that slow down?

I'm not seeing it slow down at all. I'm actually seeing it rise in certain parts of India. If you go to Punjab, which is in the north of India, on the border with Pakistan, historically, it used to be India's

most prosperous state. That's because it's fertile farmland and they benefited from irrigation projects laid down since the British time. And they also did very well when we had what's called the Green Revolution, you know, when we got these saints. But

Over-farming, over-fertilization, and many other challenges, including some uses of terrorism, etc., has led to declining incomes, a lot of farmland being not productive anymore. And as a result, a lot of the youth in Punjab not finding gainful employment because industry has not grown there as much.

As a result, a lot of Punjabis want to kind of migrate out. And I was recently reading this podcast where the Economist editors in India were being interviewed. And one of them spoke about how when you go to Punjab, almost every hoarding you can see is Punjabi.

relocate to the UK, apply to this university in the UK, visa for UK, etc., etc. So there are parts of India where that's particularly prominent. For example, the state I come from, Kerala, sends a lot of people to the Middle East. They were not always in white collar. A lot of it is blue collar, so similar to Punjab. So what we're seeing is the rise of blue collar migration has really gone up.

When it comes to white-collar migration, I think it is not the case that in the 60s, 70s, a lot of Indians migrated to the US because jobs were not hard to come by. So that's not true. For white-collar, jobs are easier to come by. But the absolute numbers have gone up because there are a lot more of them, etc. And there's nothing wrong in it. Many of them want to study things. Many of them get scholarships.

So it's net positive for everyone because many of them send money back. But what we're seeing in blue-collar migration is something that's very interesting. And I do think a lot of it has to do with the challenging economic circumstances that they find themselves in.

And I kind of talk about three things in one of my reports. And one of them is English. So the elite Indians have access to English and use English as kind of a proxy. English is a gatekeeping device.

The second is exams. So one way to break into India one for India two people is to do well in one of the government exams. All government jobs are two exams. And it's crazy how many years sometimes people take to kind of pass these exams. And effectively passing an exam guarantees you a regular income. And given that only about 50-55 million people in India pass.

have regular income. You can imagine how big a difference. Just 4% of the Indian population have regular income. The third E, the first was English, the second was exams, and the third is exit. When you don't have access to these two, then you look at exit as one way. And we're seeing large numbers of that. And you wrote a very interesting piece that looks at what you call the English tax. Yes.

Talk a little bit about that. And I found that piece very intriguing. So the English taxes essentially fact that much of the Indian internet, much of elite India's communication, much of public science in India tend to be in English. When I say public science, I mean, it's changing now. So for example, if you go to a hotel and like a five-star hotel, you will see most of the science in English.

If you go to a Starbucks in India, you won't see anything inside in Hindi or Bengali or whatever Tamil. You'll see it only in English. When you go to Turkey or Germany, they...

All of the signs will be in German. Some of them in tourists, like in Istanbul, you might see a little bit of English. But if you go to Ankara or something in Turkey, you'll only see it in Turkish. That's fine because much of the population speaks, like very few people speak English. In India, the fact that India one all speaks English and is fluent in it means that much of the sign boards, etc. are in English.

This concept of English text came to me because one day I was sitting in the Bangalore airport and I saw that almost every sign internally inside the Bangalore airport was English. Other than like the transit signage, only the transit signage wasn't

the local language, Hindi and English. And all the shops were in English, etc. And I said, imagine, and I saw a couple of people sitting there. There were an old man and a woman. They were wearing Indian dress. Like he was wearing a dhoti, a sarong, a equivalent. And she was wearing a sari. And they were old people. And they were sitting peacefully. And, you know, they seemed, I can't prove for sure, but they were speaking in Kannada. And I thought, like, they probably were the ass fluent in English.

And I wondered how intimidating this would be for them. Like, you know, everything in English, etc. So this is what I call the English tax. The English tax is something that we enforce on non-English speakers. A lot of apps in India are in English.

a lot of literature that comes out much of this thing is in English. So for example, if you don't have access to good English, you're shut out of a lot of writing. AI should change it because translation is very expensive. So hopefully AI will change some of these things for the better. So this is what I mean by the English tax. The English tax is the preponderance of English. I can't

across apps, signages, literature, so as to make it overwhelming for a non-English speaker or non-fluent English reader to kind of interface with.

Yeah. And I really identified with that because when I was in Japan in the late 1990s, the first call I made was back to my wife and I said, I don't understand anything here. I mean, I felt entirely like a foreign man in a foreign land.

because I couldn't even make a phone call. You would pick it up and they would give rapid fire Japanese and you'd be English and then it would just come rapid fire Japanese. And...

When I was reading the piece, I was like, wow, I understand that feeling. And I agree with you that I think that AI and AI translation is going to help tremendously with that. But do you think that that was just a remnant of the English Raj, or is that also a gatekeeping mechanism?

I think a lot of it is not gatekeeping as much as so much as just the fact that a lot of the elite Indians are very comfortable with English. But it's worth noting that most of the formal jobs, I would say English is used, I would say about 50% of the time. About 50% of the time, they would speak in a different language. But if it is at the top, if it's really like, you know, in senior management, for instance, largely English,

All written communication is largely English. All emails are English. I haven't got a single Hindi email. Not a single Hindi email. All the emails are English.

and it is shocking i mean i would have expected at least one email to come to me i've not got a single email so if you work if you want to work in corporate india you can speak a little bit of hindi or speak a little bit of tamil and that's fine right but any written communication is is almost entirely in english it is not intentional

I mean, yes, gatekeeping is an outcome of that. But what it does is, if I'm comfortable in English, and I know that people come into these jobs, they come through the right colleges, they're comfortable in English, you know, and it just turns out that people use English.

And it's how it is. There's a lot of path dependence that's really emerged because when the British were there, the elite. So there's a gentleman called Macaulay. OK, so he was a kind of a British administrator and he spoke about creating a middle race of Indians who would be able to mediate between.

the native Indian students speak English and the British. And so sort of English speakers in India are what I call Macaulay's children. Okay. So a lot of the people who did well, the people who knew English and who got into the bureaucracy, who got access to the top jobs, et cetera. And so that sort of continued. And I don't think it's,

very intentional gatekeeping, but certainly it helps that only a certain percentage speak English and these speakers get access to the best jobs. It's sort of a happy outcome for the English speakers. Yeah. And of course, it's not unique to India. Part of the emergence after World War II was English essentially becoming the world's language against many people's desires, of course, especially the French. But like, for example, France,

The most prestigious scientific journal in Germany is published in English, not in German, because of that universality. And I also think that English is a fairly easy language to learn how to speak orally. It has a ton of idiom, especially American English, is filled with idioms. I once had a guy who was a native Spanish speaker work for me.

And he was telling me a story about how proud he was of he's from Columbia, where he studied English and everything. And he had an MBA from a great institution here in the United States. And he had his first job. And he said he went and he was quite pleased and everything. And he said by the end of the day, he went back and his wife said, how'd it go? And he was just crestfallen because he looked at his wife and say,

I don't speak English at all. And he was specifically referring to American English is richly idiomatic, right? Like water off a duck's back and things like that. And he was like, water off a duck's back? What does that mean? And so I think that that is part of the challenge with the emergence of English kind of as the de facto language.

world language, but you've also written about what you called one of India's newest castes, which is highly educated, affluent, but inter-caste marriage, inter-religion marriage. And then you say the paradox there is they're at once the most visible, but also an invisible class. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, that was my first big hit when it came to writing. I'd been writing for a long while and then I wrote this article and it just went viral across India. I got a lot of fan mail and I got a lot of hate mail. And the fan mail came from people who said, oh my God, you have described me. This is my identity. I'm an Indo-Andean.

Every year I get one such meal now. It used to be a lot more earlier. The hate mail came from people who said,

You don't use caste so loosely, young man. You don't know anything about sociology. You don't know anything about politics. You don't know anything about whatever. And you're just using caste. Of course, I shouldn't have used caste so loosely. But what I was trying to say was, typically, that Indian caste system has Brahmins at the top.

And I said, there is a caste which is more elite than this. Or sort of the other way to look at it is to say that they're broken free of the caste system. And sort of they are a parallel to that because anyone can be part of this system. And all it requires is for you to speak English fluently.

But the objection was that to speak English rightly, you need to be a member of the privileged caste. And well, I mean, it's hard for me to win every argument. But essentially, for example, in my house, my family speaks in English. And one day we were in Hong Kong, and I remember we were speaking English, and a gentleman asked us,

Where are you from? And I said, India. They're like, okay, you're an Indian, but where are you from? I said, India. Oh, but you speak so good English. Like, you know, I said, yeah, but I'm not the only person. I don't know the exact numbers, but I would say there is a segment which I call India 1A or India Alpha.

which is sort of a subset of India, about 8 to 10 million households, about one-third, really, of the households, 25, 30 million people, who speak English very fluently at home and are more comfortable in English than in other languages.

And one way to kind of become a member of this is typically be from when you and your wife are from different communities, two languages. But often the kid speaks in English because it's confusing for the kid. And the husband and wife also don't know each other's languages. So they use English as an intermediating language, like a lingua franca, as you see. And the kid starts speaking that language.

So I would say, but me and my wife, we don't speak a language called Konkani, but we don't speak Konkani as much. And my hypothesis is, I haven't been able to prove this, but I'm trying to prove this, is that Indian languages have fewer words which describe emotional situations or contexts. Right.

I was reading this podcast where Charles Duhigg is an author who has written this book called Super Communicators, where he talks about language having three components. There is the practical one. Please get me this book. Then there is social. How are you feeling, Jim? And the third one is...

Jim, what you told me did not make me feel good. I think there was a melancholy in what you said or something like that, right? So the third one is a challenging area. For example, in the language that we speak, I know enough words relating to the first practical context.

I know enough words relating to the second, social context. But when it comes to very emotional conversations with my wife, etc., when we want to talk about issues, etc., we tend to use English a lot because English has far more emotional range. I mean, I'm willing to even pay a student to do a PhD or I'm willing to kind of pay someone to do research. I want to find out how Indian languages rank my vocabulary

Do Indian languages have fewer words? B, do Indian languages have fewer words in the emotional bucket?

Three, does the average Indian speaker have much more limited vocabulary, especially in the emotional bucket? If what I'm saying is true, then that explains a lot of why the elite use English a lot more. Because the native Indian languages don't have enough range, especially on the emotional side, to express themselves.

Wow, that is such a fascinating thesis. Now you've given me something that I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the day. Because I had a colleague who was Japanese, and I got to know him really well. And we were talking about language. And I asked him, do you think differently when you're thinking in English versus Japanese? And he looked at me and he goes, Jim, I don't just think differently. I act differently.

And I went, well, what do you mean? And he said, when I'm thinking in English, I'm much more like proactive. We can do this. Let's go take that hill. And he goes, when I'm thinking and talking with colleagues in Japanese, I go to a much more consensus oriented. Do you think that maybe taking that hill over there would be a good idea or no? And so that's,

I hadn't thought about it from the point of view of a lack of the ability to express emotions in that native language, because ultimately I think that's one of the things people get really wrong about capitalism. If you're going to be an incredibly successful founder,

You better understand emotions because emotions are ultimately what drive a tremendous amount of decisions, even for so-called rationalists, right? What they'll do is they'll make an emotional choice to buy a product, to subscribe to a service, et cetera. And then they'll paper it over after the fact with all the rational reasons for why they picked that particular product and or product.

And so that is really fascinating, and I will be thinking a lot about that. You also mentioned something that I found really interesting, especially given the fact that in your three E's, exams being so important and credentials being so important, you once said that you would rather...

Get rid of the degree on your CV, then stop writing. So this is kind of a two-pronged question. You've also mentioned that there aren't very many Indian venture capitalists who do write a lot like you do. So my first question is, why is that? And then secondly, I am fascinated that given how important externally

exam results and credentials are, you understand that the writing is even more important. And I'd like to hear your version of why. We'll take the first one, why reasons don't write.

I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that in India, while the venture industry is reasonably sizable and there are a rising number of VCs now, I think the power imbalance is still much more in the VC's favor. Unlike the US, where the power imbalance is in the elite founder's favor. In India too, it is changing, but slowly. So what happens is, when there's a power asymmetry in the VC's favor,

VC can sit back and wait for the founder to approach him or her. In the US, it's such a large market, there's so many founders, and the market is relatively uncapped. That means if you miss out on something that's big,

That could be $100 billion on world, whereas India is relatively capped. The largest Indian venture is $36 billion, which is Slipkart, majority owned by Walmart. The next one is one-fourth the size. Sorry, next one is half the size, Zomato. And the third one is one-fourth the size. So relatively, mistakes haven't been as expensive as in the U.S.,

When the power essentially changes, like for example, there are a lot more Eric Saunders.

And those elite founders then have to pick you, which is how great venture happens. You have to be picked by the founders. It's unusual that someone once described venture as not an asset class, but an access class, where the trick is really getting access to the best founders and the only asset class where the asset picks the investor, which is sort of the founder.

So now, in the US, I'm not surprised that many Mises are writing because they're signaling to the founder, hey, I'm relevancy, I know this space, et cetera. They're trying to make themselves useful.

In India, I think there's some ways off from that because relatively the VCs have more power and the founders have to go to them. And there are much fewer quality VCs and every founder knows that unlike in the US where there are many quality VCs and in India there are much fewer quality VCs. They have to kind of, they have no choice but to go and

They can't be pickers. There are few founders who can be pickers because they're like second-time founders, etc. It's changing, but it's slow. So this is one reason why VCs don't have to market themselves. I, however, choose to market myself through writing. And for me, writing was the one way I could make an impression.

I remember reading this Scott Adams article about how to be the only where he said that look there are many Japanese speakers there are many marketers but if you are a Japanese speaking marketer in the US then you're unique right like you know so you be the only so I said there are I will never be the best VC I don't know maybe I will but as of now I don't know if it's a realistic ambition to have but

I will never be the world's best writer, but can I be the world's best writing VC? Okay, that's tough too. But can I be India's best VC who writes? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, and I think that's the slot I've kind of carved out. And it's worked for me because I came into venture at the age of 43. I'd not been a founder. I'd not worked in a startup. I'd not been an investor. Okay.

And I sometimes don't know what Karthik Reddy saw in me. Of course, he's told me what he saw in me. It was a person who reached out to me. He found it blue. But he did reach out and I kind of heard him out. And I said, yeah, sure. I'd like to kind of give Venture a shot. And it's worked well for me. But because I was like an outsider coming into Venture, I...

wanted to market myself to founders and I wanted founders to find me. And hence, writing became very critical. And the reason why exams don't matter enough is they feel like that doesn't help me stand out as much because even if I pass the toughest exam in India, it's typically the IIT entrance exam. It is not going to make me stand out because there are many VCs who are from IIT. But there are very few VCs who write.

And that's what helps me stand out. Very smart. And that also leads me to what skill sets did you bring from your longer history in entertainment and media that were sort of immediately applicable on the venture capital side?

So I worked for a long time in a company called the Times of India Group. It is India's largest newspaper company, sort of like Gannett in the US. Very well run, privately held, very profitable. And there was a, well, there's no word for it, but there was a

way of and the company's Indian name was Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd. The official name because it was a British company which was acquired by Indians. They kept the name Bennett Coleman and Co. And they were kind of

The term was, there was a Bennett approach or the Times approach to kind of look at the business and through a lens. And we worked with this gentleman called Samir Jain, who's sort of the owner of the group. And he's sort of a brilliant mind. And he looks at the world in a very unusual way.

And there were a lot of principles that he looked to work through, which I learned. I used to work with him closely. I was his chief of staff for a while. And it's sort of this Bennett approach or the Bennett way or the Times way was something that I kind of brought in. In addition, I've been working for about two decades. You've worked with a lot of people. So, and for example, I had worked with a lot of salespeople and I understood that incentives matter a lot.

And one of the unusual things I found was startup founders did not pay attention to incentives. So I would ask them, okay, this is the goal, which is to enter this market. And who's driving this? And so they'll say X, Y, Z. So now tell them, okay, if...

this succeeds how much will xyz make let's say why would he make more he has a sops me now i'd say okay but he'll make that even if this doesn't succeed in the company does well right so uh and i would find that there's like a blind spot and i would say like oh okay on for example uh like like i would say like you need to send the incentive such that this person makes money only if

The next person's incentives work. Like if I'm the salesperson and if you pay me well, if you pay me my incentive. But once I kind of convince the customer to give the money, I just take it. But the onboarding is a failure and the client then walks away. I still get my money. And I would say, how can you kind of design your incentives like that? You need to design incentives that...

You only get money after six months, nine months, et cetera. Like, you know, when the customer is like onboarded and like, you know, it's a working partnership. So I think incentives was another kind of area where I was able to kind of really help my founders.

The third one is really strategy. And I find that sometimes bringing the lens of strategy was very helpful. A lot of founders sometimes intuitively get it, but they're not business students. They're not studied business. And I find that...

This is sort of, I would say, like a gray area for them. And these were the areas, strategy, incentives, and sort of this unique times approach to looking at data, for instance. They would say, like, don't look at the average. Break up the average of everything and really look at what is really working and what is not. Not that founders wouldn't do it, but I was able to kind of stress that to a greater degree.

And that's part of what you also call narrative capital, right? Where they have a strategy, they have the incentives, right? And what you're helping them do is tell the story better. And listening to you, it sounds like helping them understand, gee, these things over here really, really matter.

And you need to think about them more. Are you finding that there's pushback on that from your founders or are they just, thank you, thank you? No, no, they push back. Yeah, founders, you know, they have the mind of their own. And in India, it's extraordinarily hard to start up. It's a very difficult place to do business.

Which is why when Indians come to the US, they just find that, look, it's such an easy country to do business in. Like, you know, like if you take care of the basics, you will do. Like, you know, they just can't believe it. The tax money is degrading them, you know, etc, etc. But India is hard to do business in. So it takes a special kind of person to be a founder in India.

And I would say that I don't have it easy with any founder. And I'm grateful for that. I don't want any founder to just accept what I say at face value. I love it when they push back. And then I can push back. And finally, end of the day, it's their business. They need to run it. They are the, like as Roosevelt says, men in their arena or women in their arena. And I respect that. And I'm the person on the stands. But yeah, I got to be a mirror for the founder. I got to kind of...

show his or her face, warts and all, so that they're able to kind of take the correct admissions. And you've also said that really India is kind of a digital warfare state. Well, what exactly do you mean by that? Yeah. Digital welfare is a term that's kind of coined. I don't know who coined it, but I like it.

Because it describes two parts. One is digital and the other is benefits. And digital means digital public infrastructure is one of the big innovations that India has done in the last, I would say, decade and more.

Digital public infrastructure stands for broadly digital Lego blocks of basically product sets around identity, payments, and data exchange. So identity, all Indians have something called an Aadhaar number. So like a social security number, but an Aadhaar number. Data exchange.

Payments. We have one of the most frictionless payment system called UPI, where I can send money like a message. There were about 15 billion transactions that happened last month on UPI. Like it's crazy, right? Yeah. 15 billion transactions. The third is data exchange. Like for example, I don't need to carry physical copies of many documents like my driving license, my identity card. I have something called DigiLocker where I can store it and

Now, beauty is people can access their digital document remotely if I give them the right. And this can be used for other services like what's called the Know Your Customer, KYC, which is needed for financial transactions, etc. So the most important thing in this is digital payments.

the digital payments and the welfare state. That is, a lot of Indians are poor and what the government has done is used

the digital payment infrastructure and the fact that people, you know, a lot of people are economically less prepared to give subsidies to them rooted through this. So digital welfare state is really what this particular government, Dr. Mr. Modi, has done well. They have kind of reinvented India as a digital welfare state where, well, there is a certain...

DNA of socialism, making sure, and they need to, it can't be hard capitalist because India is not a country which is, like large masses in poverty, they've had to kind of, they have to take care of them. And what they've done is cleverly used the digital public infrastructure and digital payment infrastructure to drive them insane.

And that is why I call India digital ventures. And you also refer to, it sounds like you've mentioned a lot of things in what you've called Tony Wang Tribeca. And essentially that's cheap bandwidth, smartphones and frictionless payments, smartphones in every pocket.

And that was a huge inflection here in the United States as well. When the iPhone, for example, in 2011 started putting GPS in the phone itself, that opened up a huge number of markets that would have been impossible prior to that, right? Like Uber, Lyft.

all of the delivery services, et cetera. And are you seeing things right now, if we have some listeners who are thinking, hmm, India looks like a very attractive market, you have said not for beginners, but what are you seeing emerging from that trifecta and that welfare, digital welfare that you see as...

Could be a very, very big thing over the next 10 years.

Yeah. So a lot of these examples, like the digital welfare state, et cetera, has come from this particular publication that we do, which is what kind of very well-known, it's called the Indus Valley Report. And it's online. You can access it. So the Indus Valley Report, the latest one, which we published on late February, March of the year, what we did is we actually cataloged

interesting examples of digital public infrastructure. So there's something called

So UBI has an auto-pay system where if you're a subscription product, for instance, a customer can set it and then they don't have to think about it. And what that has done is it's led to growth.

for a lot of companies which earlier struggled with getting customers to pay. And there were a lot of Indian interesting, let's give you two examples. There was a company called ShareChat in India. And ShareChat, think of it as Twitter or Instagram, but in non-English languages. So they have different channels. Each language is a channel. And so you go into your channel and kind of get a lot of content there.

And Shet had struggled with monetization because they tried to monetize it because a lot of the people who were on it are not necessarily affluent Indians. So they couldn't monetize those iVoox. So, however, off late, a lot of Indian media apps have started monetizing. So we have a company called Stage which does vernacular content. They've been able to monetize furiously.

What made the difference was UPI. So customers could not only pay UPI and search industry, they could pay very small sums. This again goes back to saciatization. So it's just $5 per year

And content is produced very cheaply because they work backwards from what customers can afford to pay. And UPI AutoPay means customers subscribe, then they just renege. So I kind of spoken about how stage leveraged UPI AutoPay here. I won't go into detail, but for example, we have invested recently in a company called Namayatri. And Namayatri means our travel.

And sort of think of it as Indian kumbh, but the difference is as follows. Namayatri is built on an open source protocol called the Beckham Protocol. And the Beckham Protocol is created so that companies like Namayatri and others could leverage this protocol for logistics, transport of goods, or transport of people.

And they have pioneered a very interesting model where they actually charge 25 rupees, which is sort of 30 cents every day to an auto-rickshaw driver, which is like a tuk-tuk. And eventually they'll get into cars as well. But they don't charge anything to the customer. So this is different to Uber. With Uber, if I pay...

You know, Uber takes 20% of the cut. So this is actually a kind of a different model. And it was made possible only thanks to the digital public infrastructure that kind of came about. So I would say if you're in the US and you, anyone can operate on this. Uber, in fact, is thinking about how to kind of leverage the backend protocol.

What I would say is digital public infrastructure and a lot of the digital public goods that are emerging, whether it's Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments, data exchange through DigiLocker, et cetera, and a lot of the other goods. Now, for example, health, there's something called ABA, which I won't get into the full form of that. But essentially, it's like all your health records are available.

owner then you have account aggregator network whereby if i'm a business and if i need to and get access to debt like booking capital loans i can show that you know i can give access to my bank account it's it's tokenized it you know it's and people the bank can see that hey he gets regular payments

And this is enough of a credit history for us. We don't need to ask him to mortgage his house or anything like that. And historically, the challenge has been that India is under-penetrated on credit because a lot of credit in India is given only on the back of assets. Now, because land records are so poor in India,

Wholes can be more key, unless you typically have your member of the elite, like middle class or upper middle class. That is why gold is very popular in India. Why do Indians hoard so much gold? Why is India so important for all the gold in the world? Because gold allows me to get access to gold. So there are all of these interesting... Also the fact that we spoke about trust.

Low trust also manifests itself in a poor credit market because I will not believe you and I will not believe your credit history, but I want hard assets. But now things are changing because your credit history is now visible, like it can be accessed more easily. And sort of what the government is trying to do is bring more people into the formal economy through this route.

That's fascinating because another one of the theses that I have is that in the United States, we are in many respects hampered by our very efficient paths. And I use our installed landline system right as digital was coming online. And Americans, the adoption curve in America for digital was actually quite a bit slower.

than the rest of the world. And one of the reasons for that was the rest of the world did not have the kind of really efficient infrastructure that the United States had developed. So in a way, it hampered our ability to

to embrace the new digital networks and digital payments and all of those types of things. What are another few examples that you would think that would fall into this line that it doesn't get developed in the U.S. because we already have that infrastructure that you can take advantage of in India that wouldn't be obvious to an American investor?

One interesting example I would say is broadband internet or wired internet. There are just about 30 million wired internet connections in India. We have about 20 million wired phone lines in India, fixed phone lines. It's just plummeted. People are giving it up. My parents had a wired phone.

Jim, there was a time when we had to wait 10 years to get a phone line. I kid you not. In the 70s and the 80s, when India was socialist, it was so difficult to get a phone. I remember that we would get a phone call. We would give the number of the neighbor and...

phone calls would come saying that somebody's passed me or something like that and those are only emergency calls would come or somebody's passed an exam or somebody's getting married and then my father would go then when he hit like a certain level in his government job he got access to a house with a phone then he got access to a car so i've seen how hard it's to get the phone like and then one day it all changed anyone get a mobile if you put in the money you could get a mobile and uh

So we just have about 18 or 20 million phone lines in India, whereas the US has far moved. And because India is a leapfrog nation, right? It's just leapfrog to the mobile headset. And Wi-Fi, like what my conversation is on Wi-Fi, but a lot of Indians don't use Wi-Fi.

They use mobile internet because Wi-Fi means your house has to have good power, regular power. And if you don't have regular power, then you can't take really advantage of Wi-Fi because it comes and goes. So only what 30 million Indian houses have? Wired broadband. Credit cards. Only 40 million Indians have credit cards.

40 million Indians, they have two, three cards, so about 100 million credit cards in India, very small. What we really leapfrog to is the mobile internet, mobile payments, which is like UPI. So India is a leapfrog nation. And I think that's another metaphor for India, which I like teams.

Yeah, I think that that's the way I think about it as well. So what are you most excited about in terms of both the ability to leapfrog and sort of the novel way? What companies are really you're looking at? You're just like, here's a classic example where we get the leapfrog. And also, this is an amazing idea.

Yeah. So, I would say one way, that's one trend line that is happening in India is a move from unorganized to organized. So, there are ways of doing business, which is on paper, which is on trust within a small community, on high interest rates, because our

long payment cycles, which is now changing because you can use a mobile phone to kind of transact between each other. You can use the mobile phone to discover each other. So one way that I'm seeing is really more and more Indian commodity markets coming online. Okay. So we're beginning to kind of see that.

This is really one clear tendency. The second is that you can... B2B marketplaces is the most obvious manifestation of that trend, which is unorganized to organized. Because earlier, you would do a transaction in a particular region between trusted groups, etc. Now you can do...

Transactions All India, etc. Someone can vouch for that. So that is something we are quite excited about. Apart from that, there are also, I would say, very interesting, unique Indian models emerging.

and which are, you will not find it anywhere else in the world. It's a combination of access to the mobile and the unique kind of UI and UX that it enables, as well as the nature of India as a low-trust country, the type of technologies that are available, et cetera. So, one is

There's an interesting company called Friend, if I remember. And they're a dating app. But dating here doesn't work the way dating works in the US. Here, the challenge is that the two genders don't mix as much. So Friend says, don't worry about dating. Let's get you talking. And what it does is it creates a chaperone who will help the two play games and get comfortable with each other when the chaperone is there.

And then if you want to pay them directly, then you've got to pay up something, right? And sort of stuff like that.

There's an interesting app called Sringwandir. It means temple, like, you know, honorary temple, whatever. And it's fascinating because, you know, Indians like to do what's called pooja, which is like, you know, and they can attend virtual temples and do pooja. And that's a very unique Indian kind of. Then there's an app called Jaar.

which is where people can save small savings, and you can transfer it and then buy gold with it. And if you transfer like 40 rupees, they will buy 40 rupees with digital gold. So the very interesting, uniquely Indian apps born out of Indian consumer psychology,

unique interfaces that Indian internet offers, as well as the low-trust nature, etc. So I'm quite fascinated by all of these trends and really looking at these spaces. So one company we bet on and which succeeded well was Stage, which I just mentioned, which is really about vernacular content. So sort of like Netflix for India, but they have very distinct Indian content produced extremely cheaply.

And they kind of cater to people who don't get the kind of content that they would like to kind of enjoy. And now they get access to that. So these are all opportunities that I'm excited about.

I think it's a tremendously exciting time for India. And I think I'm fascinated by the differences, but also by just the huge, just like the opportunities you just mentioned. Those are very exciting to me because they're very unique to the country itself. And yet...

There might be people who pay attention to what's hot elsewhere might be able to adopt it to their own country, at least in the strategy of being able to think about things like that.

Well, this has been remarkably fun for me to listen to you. I love what you write. And we have a final question here that's kind of fun. We make you emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anybody in a free education camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population of the earth

Whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to have those two things that you say. They're going to think of as their own wonderful new ideas and they're going to turn to themselves or whoever their significant other is and say, you know what?

Unlike all those other ideas that I had in the morning and were inspiring, but I never acted on, I'm going to act on both of these ideas that I got today. What are you going to incept into the world? Oh, my God. How interesting. Yeah. This is a surprise. Yeah. Well, I think, and these ideas could be anything. Anything. Anything.

Certainly, I think the world is a very unfair, unkind place. And I certainly want one of those ideas to be one where we're able to kind of be a lot more kinder. So perhaps it could be in the form of

I'm probably kind of rambling now, but being really able to kind of understand the other person. So whenever you talk to a person, you're able to kind of immediately understand the challenges that they have, right? And you're immediately able to act based on that. So it's sort of like a magical power whereby I'm talking to you and I'm not shouting at you because you're not done. I'm trying to understand what is it that...

led to this one and sort of I understand intent really well and people kind of understand the intent so and I understand what is driving you to make that action and I kind of see you not take the action but the intent and the circumstances that led to it

would be one where I would say people should kind of have more and more understanding of that dent. And the second would be to just reduce the religiousness of the world. And if I could summarize

say everybody could become religious. Like, you know, I'm not saying people should become less mindful. There are certainly aspects of every religion that I find fascinating, whether it's the Jewish Shabbat to Buddhist meditation, etc. But I would certainly want religion as we know it to just disappear from the world. So I would say intent,

Not actions. It's the way to understand people or understanding circumstances, not actions or behavior. Okay. And second would be to kind of remove religion from the map. Probably make the world a kinder, safer place.

Those are both absolutely fascinating, and I think I agree that both would make the world a safer place. The ability to, as we would say in America, walk a mile in that person's shoes and understand what was driving them is something that is sorely lacking. And then the idea that traditional institutionalized religion, you could have a very healthy debate on whether that has been a net positive or a net negative.

for the world at large. And I do love your distinction. You're not talking about meaning. You're not talking about all of that. I think what you're getting after there is the tribalism of certain religions and the animosity and hurt and pain

that they cause probably a net negative. So I think both of those are excellent things to accept in the world. Thank you so much for joining me and for your time. You have a wonderful perspective.

And we will make certain that all of your links, everyone will be able to find you. When we release the podcast, we release both in video and audio. But all of the links to finding you will be there. And I'm certainly glad we found you. And thank you so much for giving me so much of your time. Thank you, Jim. Been a pleasure. Thank you so much. All right. Cheers. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.