How to Build a Global Brand from India (Lessons from a Unicorn Founder)

Like I've heard that you were MKkesh A Shambani's noteaker. Is that also a myth or is that real? — In a glorified way, you could say I was a noteaker. By definition, VCs are mostly wrong. Think about it. Their success rate is 5%. The beauty of their business model is they still make money when they're 5% right. That basically means they're wrong 95% of the time. One of the OGs and sharpest minds in Indian tech, the founder of Inobi and Glance, Naven Tari has built not one but two unicorns out of India. Today, as the leader behind Inmobi's global ad platform and Glance's AI powered consumer platform, he's shaping how literally billions of us engage with content and commerce. — For many years, we could not hire engineers because they were worried about getting married. — There's this historical legendary story that every founder in India has heard some version of this. Mas asks you how much you want, you say 200 million and he gives it to you. This is what I've heard. Not at all.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am with Naven Tari who is the founder of Inmoi who's the founder of Glance and Naveen when I was 20 years old and I was like starting a company for the first time like a proper time. I had heard of the Inmobi story and and I've seen and heard the entire story over the decade of you going out talking to MASA convincing you know SoftBank to put $200 million in the company. You've now raised $800 million across these two companies. You've sort of built one unicorn now on track sort of building the second. It's been an inspiring story for kids like me back then to see what you've done from wherever you've started to wherever you are now. And I just feel like there is nobody better in India to talk to about this startup journey especially tech advertising startups because it's like we've never done it at that global scale apart from what you've done. So I just want this to be an absolute masterclass for everybody watching on everything from how do you think about tech startups in India? How do you build from scratch? in a time where nobody really believed in startups? This is a very different time. Today it's like doing a startup is the cool thing. Back then I remember when I was 20 and I started up people thought I was unemployed right like or on the path to unemployment and you did it even before that. So God knows what you faced then we'll find out today. But also masterass in how do you raise money? How do you do the enterprise sale because you convince Samsung to put you on their home screen? Like I need to learn all the sales wizardry, right? And the best part of my job, at least the content creator side of what I do is being able to talk to people like you and just learn as much as possible. So yeah, welcome to the show. Thank you, Arun. And I'm very excited to be here. I've been watching your show uh for the past year or two. Uh but I'm so happy to be here and just chitchat about stuff that I think I know a little bit about. So Naveen, I want to start with your story. Uh I know you've repeated it a million times, but I want a very a bridged version. short version so that we can get past the story and get straight into the masterass. — Mhm. — So where did you start? Where do you begin? How did you know how did you start in MOI? Were there failures before it? Because we always hear of the successful startup, right? Like Naven's always been identified with in moi. But

I'm sure there was a past behind there. There was a history. You know the the reality with any entrepreneur is there are bunch of failures. The beauty of the storytelling is that those failures get hidden. Uh but let me bring you onto this. So I actually started out post my business school in 2005 and I tried to do like multiple companies from that time onwards. I had four failures before in movie and they were devastating because the reality is as you just mentioned right when you are starting out in those 2005 era everybody thinks that you're doing this is completely unemployable. In fact there was a story that my mama and you know I had pretty decent brands behind me. So my mama got really worried. I was like, you know, and then he kind of went out and made a phone call and got me a floor manager job at a factory for like 25,000 rupees. I found that very cute and that was the era at which this started. So having four failures by the way at that point of time was I won't say it was like it was a hard failure because every failure is hard but it was socially being very differently watched and I think the world has really changed today. Uh I love the fact that it is the in thing today if you go talk to like anybody coming up from small towns and you ask hey what do you want to do? was like I want to do a startup and I remember like these stories in the 80s and the '9s when you would ask somebody hey what do you plan to do and they would say you know I want to go to Bombay to become an actor because that was seen as like you know the Amitab Bachan stories of the 70s and the 60s and 70s to say hey you could kind of make it big if you go to Bombay I think that's been taken over by the entrepreneurship in India and you know I feel very happy that you know I was one of the early ones to do it — okay So let's go straight to the story

which is you were running something in SMS called M coach and then you pivoted to doing Inmobi. First question before all of this before what Inmobi does etc. Please tell me what the time back then was like how much did people believe in the internet? How where was India with respect to internet? What year was this? give me all the details like paint a picture of India for me back then and especially the startup ecosystem in when I was doing M coach the idea of M coach by def like it basically was SMS search so you could clearly see where India was in the land of SMSs everybody was sending SMSs around that was the only way of communication so we were trying to essentially build a monetization stack on top of the SMS stack very soon to realize that is not a future of communication because it's too asynchronous. It's not efficient enough and therefore we moved away from that medium pretty rapidly to actually have a belief that internet on mobile would actually come about. And now we had entered 2008. iPhone had been launched but nobody really knew it'll be successful or not. Right? It just like been one year. Android wasn't there by that time. It came in 2009. So in that era we said hey in the developing world where computation is too expensive for us to or for this part of the world to essentially own computers. Mobile computation would actually take off. Therefore, one should actually build a mobile ad stack for the developing world because that's the computation that they would go after. And I was very excited because, you know, I was not truly excited about MC codes and I could see it not ne necessarily succeeding. And there were companies by the way that were getting funded uh in 2007 on this SMS search. Who were the investors back then? All the guys that you see here today which is you know Matrix and uh you know Nexus — they were still there back in 2007. — Yeah. They had all started their shops somewhere around 2005 67. So they had just like they were just like fresh off the board like just starting to think SEOA had just formed in I think 2006. And so all of these like all the ones that you see here today massively successful venture capitalists were just starting off at that point of time. And so everybody was starting off like so they you know they were trying to figure out where India would go. Entrepreneurs like myself and bunch of others were like okay we should do something. So it was just like very early. But going back to the story so in 2008 when I kind of we got convinced about this thesis that mobile internet would be large. I went out talked to investors. All of these guys I knew very well by the way. Everybody was a friend of mine. how a lot of these venture folks um were coming out of McKenzie and you know all of these you know consulting companies so there was some connection there a lot of these folks um were coming out of you know US business schools at that point of time so I'd gone to HBS myself so I'd known them and I'd spent a little bit of time at a venture firm called Charles River uh through which I was thinking and looking at Indian India venture investing opportunity frankly it was at that point of time and I saw that I was like wait a second why should I be an investor in this world when I actually can be an entrepreneur um in the world that you know venture capitalists are betting on to so you know you could kind of see at that point of time VCs are betting on India and I'm like why should I be the one betting for somebody else in India I can just bet for myself in India and therefore I came

to India but in 2008 when I kind of took this idea and went to the uh VCs is people said two things okay everybody and I knew everybody right Naven you're amazing we really know you we think you're very capable I don't know why but no matter doesn't matter but there is no way there would ever be an economy internet economy created on mobile — in India — ever nowhere in the world nothing to do with India it's not the future — so you're saying VCs were wrong I generally say that look by the way by definition VCs are mostly wrong. Think about it their success rate is 5%. The beauty of their business model is they still make money when they're 5% right. That basically means they're wrong 95% of the time. So you should be very careful if you take a advice from a venture capitalist because they're mostly going to be wrong and they're wrong when they put money behind companies most of the time. So but that's a topic which we can touch upon later. So they basically said this and then I was like okay this is very disheartening and look at that point of time it's very hard to have you know like your conviction starts to falter a little bit right you kind of show conviction but it still starts to kind of go away and so then I went to the US I was like okay maybe I should just go try to the US and go there. So I started to go to the US and you know go VC after VC and the narrative was different and now the narrative was Naven absolutely there would be an economy on the on mobile internet that's a given what are you talking about and there would be a need for a mobile ad stack amazing idea we just don't think you're the guy for it because you're doing this out of India so I was caught in this crosshair which is a very interesting crosshair. The crosshair was wait a second just the fact that I have a great idea is not being recognized by the by people in my region if I come to a different place they're seeing the idea to be amazing and global in but they think that doing this out of India is absolute you know it's absurd now the Other part of entrepreneurship, a venture, the relationship between an entrepreneur and VC is you don't need a 100 people to say yes to you. You only need one person And

need one person to say yes to you. And that's what happened with us. We got who I would say the Michael Jordan of investing like Cler Perkins and Ram Shiram to say, "Hey, we really think the idea is amazing. We are one of those who is going to back India. So this is amazing that you're doing it out of India. We think it's a great opportunity. We're going to give you a lot of money. — How much was a lot of money for that? — $7. 1 million. This is 2008. April of 2008 got $7 million. Just prior to that, my bank account had $20,000 rupees. So I for me to fathom what $7 million looks like, I couldn't fathom. And I'll tell you a side story on that. Like at in the meeting when I was told, "Hey, we are investing $7 million into you. " I didn't know how to react because, you know, by that time, I had spent 5 months hearing nos. I would have recycled or surfaced through like 40 plus investors. I'd gone everybody. I would go into a meeting knowing I'm going to hear a no because I was it was I was habitual to hearing no. So I heard a no. I was expecting a no. Sorry. And I somebody said a yes. And I had to gather myself to finish that meeting. I came out of that meeting. I go into, you know, it was in the it was in San Francisco. I go into my rented car and I pass out for 3 hours because I was you know you have this burden for not the last 5 months. The burden was for the last two and a half years almost three years probably three years two and a half three years because it took three years frankly for me to actually see first backing big backing that could get you to a place of what you would call hey I have a you know you have a pass to go do something otherwise you know you just didn't have the money to do it. So 3 years, four failures, almost the fifth one being a failure. Uh yeah, the you know it you start to run out of the energy to actually do it. So you know I can never forget that moment that kind of gives you a not just a lifeline. I would not call it a lifeline only. It was a ticket to go make it happen. uh make it happen big and um but I think every entrepreneur has these stories. This is just mine. I want to go to the next piece of this, right? Which is the MVP. Let's say now you raised this money. I'm sure you hired some engineers, you hired a bunch of people. What did you build next? Like what was the first version of the product and how do you get your first sale? Who ended up paying for it? What was the customer meeting like? What did you say in the meeting? Like I want everyone to know everything. So we had some version of the MVP product being built ahead of this you know ahead of this uh investment. So our first product was almost handstitched by Mohit my co-founder and you know he's currently the CTO of the company. He had these few engineers that we had somehow gotten on. By the way, the engineering story is very interesting. For many years, almost for a year, year and a half, we couldn't could not hire engineers. The reason engineers would not join us because they were worried about getting married. And to join a startup meant that they were not worthy enough for a good proposal. — You know, it's the opposite today. — I know. But I'll tell you what we had to do. We had to go out call for a press conference. I begged Times of India to say hey cover me like just like do a coverage on me. We are a startup and do something for us and they did and they put us up on like one of their pages. Hey a startup is trying to do something. I did not need the publicity. The only reason to do that was God please let my engineers show this at their homes so that they can actually come in and like work for me and hopefully get married and like that worked that worked. So you had the MVP. Uh can you tell us what the MVP was and who your first customer was and how did you exactly sell the first deal? What is the price? Give me micro details. So my first customer was Diagio. The first check they gave me and Dajio in India and was uh 5,000 rupees. Okay. 5,000 rupee check. And they asked us to run a campaign for them in what we would call the mobile internet, but it was the WAP world. Uh basically very low-end internet. — Yeah, I remember the web. — The web, right? — Yeah. You kind of just revealing your age when you when anybody connects with this web world like you're like, okay, you belong to a pre smartphone era. But you know the that's what we did. We ran that campaign. Ab went and sold that campaign and I still remember he had tears in his eyes. We I'm pretty sure we have that picture of that uh check uh somewhere because it meant a lot to us. We by then had realized how valuable is the first customer, engineer, how valuable is the first uh investor, how valuable is like the first of anything that you do. So what did the first customer do for you? Like did it give you motivation that yes, this works? Like what did it do for you? It made us cry because it was not easy to get the first customer. Just like I told you the story of the first investor, major investor to come and back us. The first customer also wasn't easy. It took us months to land the first customer. You have to realize nobody understood that like nobody even wanted to talk to a startup because there was no concept of talking to a startup. We would make phone calls to people. They would not respond. I remember going to a customer. They called me on like 9:00 a. m. in Delhi in their office. I reached 9:00 a. m. in the office. I sat there, sat there, sat there. At 6:30 p. m. I sat at the uh reception. At 6:30 p. m., you know, we get a message through the reception to say, "Hey, it's too busy today. Like, can you come tomorrow? " And I was like, "Okay. " They come the next day. You sit again from 9:00 a. m. The next day at 6:30 p. m., they gave me 7 minutes literally to tell me, "Look, we don't think we want to work with you. " Now, it is very devastating to hear it because you know, you don't even have the money to fly to Delhi. So, now you're flying to Delhi. So, I think the getting the first customer is very painful. It doesn't give you the you know you lack confidence after every meeting you're lacking confidence. The first customer gave you just enough confidence to say I can go for the second one. That is all it did for us. It did not tell us that we'll be successful. that. It just told us I can go for the second one because till you have the first one you don't have a customer. when you did the VA campaign, what exactly was the dynamic of the campaign like how what did it do for the for your customer? I think for the customer in my view they were an evolved they were they're a global franchise right so they wanted to test you know test digital what they knew is that digital in India was not really happening on on the uh on computers was happening on mobile phones so they were like we should test you on mobile phones and therefore when they tested us on mobile phones like you know it was amazing. I'll tell you one more story by the way on test customers testing us. So I you know I was you I was called for a meeting uh to say hey we have some mobile inventory. Can you monetize that mobile inventory and can you show up because you know what part of our business model is that you we can rent mobile inventory from somebody else and then put ads on it. So I went to the customer and customer said, "Hey, have chai. " And I had chai. And then they said, "Okay, let's go outside. I'll show you my mobile inventory. " I'm like, "What? What do you mean go outside? " And you know what? What are you talking about? So he took me outside. There was a truck. A truck had a mobile billboard. And that was the understanding of mobile inventory. He showed me a truck and he said the truck passes through. I have two such trucks. They passed through the city. Can you like serve ads on it? I can't even explain to you what happened to me because you know these are like early days and you question yourself, have I just entered into a world that is just so unknown to people that I don't know what where this is headed? But those have been our experiences and they're not like I'm pretty sure there are bunch more. But yeah, you kind of fight those uh as the new world gets created. I think we did land into a world where we were betting into a new world far ahead of many others. — But all this snowballs I'm sure after your first customer, you got your second and then it snowballed. When did you know this was snowballing? 2009. 2009 we knew it was snowballing. But the snowballing was not happening in just one country. It was happening in these little pockets across the world. And so there is a there was a big decision we made. We realized that this is a phenomena but a phenomena that's not happening in one country not by all the customers. It is happening by handful of customers across the globe. So we expanded ourselves in 2008 towards the end of 2008 one of our biggest decisions we made was to say hey we would like to build this company as a global company. — Is that because you saw evidence from abroad? Yes, we saw evidence from abroad. A very limited evidence from abroad. We saw two evidences that if we were to be successful in India in this internet space at best we'll be a very small player that was clear to us. — What does small player mean? How much how big is that? — Irrelevant.

We would be irrelevant if we were to be success successful. And I think that decision is okay because when I look in hindsight and players who were our contemporary in this part of the world in 2009 and 10, they're not there. So I think some of these decisions to say hey let's just go build a global platform. It is not based on a lot of logic by the way. Also it's not based on logic. It's like I did not I yeah you saw some signs but I was like it's not good enough for me to be able to convince anybody that that's the right strategy. It was just good enough to say our gut says that we should go global. It was very hard to convince everybody on our board and everything to say we should build a global company. Uh but you know I think that's what you know entrepreneurship is about to make these calls ahead of where everybody else sees them. We would hear from some online forum that there are players who are trying to think about this in Africa. There are players who are thinking about this in Indonesia in Thailand in whatever parts of different parts of the world. Instead of I think that the big difference for us was we had the we decided that instead of taking a flight only to a Delhi or a Bombay, we would make we would take these slightly longer flights and see if these opportunities in these small micro pockets we can connect together and instead of trying to develop these pockets in pl in our own country where we had to develop these we were tapping into these pockets that were emanating by themselves. So the difference for us was we did not try to develop India as a market. We basically went after pockets that we could see and stitch all of them together. And that worked for us because suddenly we had these you know 15 pockets in the world where we would just be we would be on a flight one of us at any point of time. We would be on these flights to you know whether east or west we would just be there picking these pockets connecting them and suddenly a year later we had a sizable business with well it was a million-dollar company. — How much how many customers did you have and now the ticket sizes have gone up? — No, we just had more customers. We were running even faster like in No, you know what the internet was evolving, right? So it was not as if the internet wasn't evolving. No more pockets, more pockets. So we were we had this strategy called show up, show up for till 2011, we just showed up rapidly and we would service most of our customers from India, not all we would just show up. You just needed to show tell us that you would have a business, we would show up. And that started to create a flywheel, a beautiful flywheel that we could see a flywheel of scale that was in the larger scheme of things still a micro flywheel. Okay. But it was started and that you know you could just we did that for 3 years. The beauty of a flywheel is it compounds pretty rapidly and we could see it compounding and you know — so the outbound was transforming into inbound now I would say — it was also transforming into an inbound by 2011 it was also and and what happens is backers who are a backer investor is a backer who is the other backer you know people who work for you are backers they want to back the number one company in that sector. So we started to get amazing talent, amazing talent. You know the world had started to turn around a little bit. People wanted to work for you know I wouldn't call it yet the startups only but things are like different — narrative started shifting. — Yeah it had started to shift. So we started to get good people. Investors are looking at different companies in that sector. We were still smaller than the companies that were in the US because we had not tapped into the US market yet. We were we our strategy was go everywhere where the biggest players are not showing up which is the players in the US. And what was happening at that point of time in the US there were about call it five to 10 players. They were fighting each other out in that market which was of course like 10 times bigger than these markets that we are going after. But we were able to do this more efficiently without competition. We had created this flywheel that was unique. A flywheel that had the that had rest of the world put together but not the US. Everybody else was undercutting themselves in a US market. Uh and we did not venture in that market. We did not go into that market. We just said, "Hey, — so you avoided the obvious. " Well, in hindsight, I I'd like to say that, but even then, we just realized that our ability to run really fast in this part of the world was giving us good rapid scale. We essentially positioned ourselves as an as a in the first phase as a platform for advertising of mobile internet for rest of the world, not US. And the world was is even today is divided as US and rest of the world. And so anybody who worked for us, any customer who wanted to work for us, if they wanted to reach rest of the population in the world, we became the default platform. Once you became the default platform for rest of the world, investors or customers or employees saw us as a legitimate player who could actually have a shot at this industry because by the 2010 2011 the world had started to realize that the internet would be a global phenomena. We could be one of the players who will play a formidable play formidable game in rest of the world. So we were able to capture rest of the world. — When did you become profitable? — Truly we became profitable in 2016 u and uh we have stayed so ever since. — So about 8 n years to get to become profitable. — That's correct. eight years to get to profitability and that too I think you know we were knocked into a place in order to get to profitability. In hindsight, it was good that we knocked into that place to get into force ourselves to get to profitability. Otherwise, you know, we could have continued to board. What does being knocked into a place mean? — You know by 2015

we were like we were so post 2011 2012 when we got big capital the expectation overtook us. Our first mistake was we stopped being authentically thoughtful about how to scale the business. We started to get we started to take in too many external inputs. — Were those investor inputs? — Not just that, but just broader inputs like we we just got enamored by things, right? We were like thrown into the limelight. We were thrown into like a lot of things and we did things that just made like headlines, you know, launch new countries one after next, you know, go do big deals. It's like we did all of those things that we hired like over a we were a 200 member team in 2011. By 2012 end we were 800 people like we hired reck like we were reckless. So and we didn't stop. We knew we had made a mistake but you know by the time you realize that you made a mistake you kind of like okay maybe the solution for me to for the mistake I've made is to get more capital I have two ways to solve my problem right I can get more capital so I hide my issues under capital that's a good answer nobody else knows you know that you have made a problem but if there is no external extra capital coming your way then the only answer you have is to go solve the problem so by 2015 we were, you know, we were on a high, okay, the business was scaling, but so was our losses, but the business was scaling really fast. Okay. And like we were like north of like 200 odd million dollars like topline. Yeah. ETA, et like it was pretty solid and you know Yeah. It was good, but the losses were also fairly steep. Did you have to have those losses in hindsight? to grow that? — I'll tell you that. I'll tell you the answer in 5 minutes. The answer is obviously no. Like But I like why would I be very thoughtful if I can be like maverick and reckless at the same time and like do the big things, you know, why do the hard thing of like grinding it out there like, you know, like why would I not want to be on the headlines? I may just be there. So therefore I was you know we were trying to do this and uh and we had uh we had two of our customers who were contributing like 40% of our business in a matter of like few months just go away they went doesn't matter what the reason was they just went away two of our customers and our business tagged 40%. How were you feeling like what what did they say? Did they send you an email? Like how did you know feel the minute you knew these were churning? It happens over like two months because you know these are media they do media spends on you and then suddenly they stop they start to reduce the media spends and then you kind of see you know they go down like significantly and significantly to they don't go to zero but they trickle and it's their strategy. they don't need to spend anymore. — So you saw the numbers plummet. — I saw the numbers plummet and suddenly two of our customers go down. Our business drops 40%. On a quarterly basis Q1 of 2016 we were losing $20 million a quarter, $20 million a quarter. So these customers were contributing close to $80 million in total. These two customers — they were contributing uh 80 actually more than that because our business was actually higher scale — maybe $100 million then. — Yeah. Close to $100 million. So $100 million goes away. — So you're saying there are clients out there in advertising who will spend $50 million a year. — Yes. Yes. And they are large customers who for a short period of time really want uh these are annualized numbers, right? So they really want like large scale space. — Where were these customers from? — US, Europe and US, right? And so suddenly we saw the business drop. Um and um our problem that I think that there was a problem just became a glaring problem for us. We had a problem that we were burning money. Not just money, we were losing money. So, end of Q1, we had $35 million coming into um 2016. In Q1, we lost $20 million. We left with $15 million. — And at that time, you were the first unicorn. You were the poster boy. — Yeah. Right. And so, all of those things were just like people were calling you to say, "Hey, do you need help? We can like do this. We can do that. " Like they were all like distressed. people certainly realized that we were in distress and all of those and they were correct by the way to a certain extent and it was the most excruciatingly painful humiliating uh and shameful time for me as an entrepreneur as somebody who was at the helm of the company because it's under my watch that we are in this situation you can your first tendency is to essentially externalize the problem. It's your problem. Market did this. Doesn't matter. You got to solve it. It's your problem. And that got knocked into like we like it just became clear we have to solve it. Nobody is coming to help you. And when the times are tough, nobody comes and helps you. Nobody. The biggest lesson you learn as an entrepreneur is that you A, you have nobody else to blame. You have to take responsibility. B, nobody's coming to help you. You're on your own out there in that world. You're on your own. You just got to do this yourself. But here's the thing that really happened. When you get down to it to say, I am going to solve it. We have no clue how to solve it. Then you get into the grind, the real way of building a business. You get you do the hard thing. You make hard decisions. You make hard calls and suddenly you realize we realized in a matter of 45 days, 45 days we got rid of bad business because we're doing bad business. It means like we were doing we doing business with customers, we were losing money. get rid of that business — just to show that the top line was — Yes. We had wrongly negotiated deals with customers like we had we just like in discipline. Now am I going to blame somebody else for that indisipline? I got to take the responsibility for it. So we fix those things. — We have a digression here which is who was selling those bad deals. Was it like people with the wrong incentives? Like was it an incentive problem? It was maybe an incentive problem, but there is a bigger problem here. My eye was not on the ball. Look, let's not try and inpreneurship, right? externalize these things. I was not running the company as I should be. That's the reality of it at that moment, right? And so I had to learn a hard lesson. It is sad that I had to learn it in a somewhat public manner but I had to learn that lesson 9 years later. I am so glad I learned that lesson because in about a 45day period we broke even. Q2 of that quarter of that year 2016 our losses were zero from 20 million a quarter before. Q3 of that quarter we made $3 million. Never since we have not made money. It is how you should run a business. Could I not have done that like earlier? I should have. Why did I not do it? — Did you feel good when you became profitable? — Very. There was a sense of control, true control. I knew end of that 90 days we would now make it because 90 days prior to that I had no clue how we're going to make it. It gave me confidence not at just at a personal level it actually gave me confidence that as a company we will always survive. There is a difference as an entrepreneur. There is a game about you know being able to take excruciating amount of pain in order to survive and in the same moment have the ability to think big and thrive. These are two extremely juxtaposed situation that you have you that you have to bring together at the same time. You had to have the mind frame of both. — You're thinking heaven while you're still in hell. — Yes. And that is the only way to win the game because the one thing that I refuse to do at any point of time in my life is to survive. Only survive. You got to essentially be able to place your bets that if they play out, you come out as winner. And we did that. U we made big bets. Our biggest bets were made in, you know, as soon as we became profitable. We made big humongous bets. You know, we made the we made our bet to essentially go to the, you know, a new transformed advertising stack. Our ad stack was a lot more human human-driven ad stack, human intervention led ad stack there. You know, human could play the game in between and kind of we moved the world to a complete machine-driven ad business completely made the big bet on it. In 2018, we acquired a company for little less than $100 million of our own money because we were making that big bet. That was one. We swed the seed for glance in 2016. So the seed for it a small team of five people would put aside to say hey go figure this out. There is something here we don't know exactly what it is. Took them three years to figure it out. So that in 2019 we actually launched Lance big mega bets we were able to make because now we were confident on our own ability to always survive. That is not equal to thriving. So we now had to place the bets to thrive. We did 2017 massive bets. 2018 massive bets. They started to pay off in 2019. By 2020 we were we had these big things coming out and we see the results of those today. There's this historical

legendary story that we all heard one some version of. Every founder in India has heard some version of this which is your fund raise with Masa, right? Like you raised $200 million. I'll tell you what I've heard and I'm sure this is the Chinese whispers version of it. You walk in the room. — I'm sure this is not true. You walk in the room, mas asks you how much you want. You say 200 million and he gives it to you. This is what I've heard. — Not at all. — So I want to hear the real version of the story and I wish it were like that. — Why not? I want to hear the real version of the story and then I also want to hear from you if somebody else was raising capital whether it be early stage capital or whether it be late stage you know 200 million and whatnot. what can founders do better in the fundraising journey and also what were your metrics when you raised this money like rough numbers. I think at that point of time uh our business was450$50 million business somewhere in that range and um so you know I was introduced to SoftBank in uh you know by someone in Delhi and said hey you know you should go meet SoftBank. I actually didn't know what SoftBank was at that time. Um and they said hey you should kind of come and see Masa. I was like okay who's Masa? Of course you know the world knows him now a lot more than globally the world actually knew him at that point of time. So I kind of looked him up and I was okay this is interesting and you know I should go see him. But the in those days the visa used to take one month. The Japanese almost a month. So I was like, "Okay, I can go see him. " And I'm in the middle of a capital raise. And so the representative basically said, "Hey, we are very keen on like ad businesses in general because MASA owns Yahoo in Japan. He is a big believer in advertising. Are you okay in us doing due diligence ahead of time? " And so I was like, "Okay. " Yeah. So they kind of landed like gazillion number of lawyers into our office even before I even knew what SoftBank was and they did a lot of due diligence. So by the time I reached a month later they had their due diligence done. So I of course by that time I had learned about Masa and um you know and so I go see him and very charismatic person who kind of like sits down and you know and let me just explain the setting right the setting is like a room which is like the biggest conference room that I've ever seen okay huge and they were like some 30 chairs on each side of the conference room. On one side there are there was his team sitting on the other side is me and my co-founder Moit. The two of us are sitting and Masa is sitting at the head of the table and he's like he asked me to present. So and he turns around towards the screen. So it's me now speaking with him and so many people watching there are only two people speaking and you know while I was sharing with him the there was only two or three things that I think I told him I said I want to build a global ad stack. I think the world requires an ad platform and I can build it one where we can actually enter the US and I need you as a partner to go build this ad stack in the US and in Japan in the biggest ad markets in the world. What was the difference? I was making pitches just prior to that where I was only containing my pitches to building a business just in Asia because there is a difference in different kind of investors. Masa is a big thinker. On my way to his office I was reading up about him. What I realized that he's always bet big. He had bought Soft Bank which or he had bought Vodafone for like I think 1618 billion by taking a debt of $16 billion and you could literally sit there and say a person whose business started off as a reseller for software actually sitting on such a massive business he's a risk taker. Everyone else where I was going and pitching prior to that in my fund raise was a risk mitigator. So my pitch to him changed on the fly. And I said, if I have an opportunity to actually build a global business, it is only him who will back me for this because everybody else is thinking rationally and they're trying to give me small check sizes which will just kind of be okay, be good enough. So I poured my heart out in that pitch and my heart out to say I want to build a global business and I need you to essentially back me on building this global platform. At the end of it he asked me how much money do you need I was already in negotiation advanced negotiation for raising $50 million with somebody else. My natural answer with anybody else would have been to hedge my bet on the $50 million that I'm raising for somebody else. With having one more partner, I would have asked another $50 million. I don't know what happened in that moment, and I said $250 million. There was this pause for 15 seconds by him. You know, you kind of like almost logged in and I wasn't sure what was going to come out at the end of 15 seconds because he could throw me out of the room or not. At the end of that 15 seconds, she said, "Why 250? " And I knew at that moment that I have him hooked on the vision that I'm sitting with building a global business. And of course, I narrated it out to him. This is why I need the money. This is what I'm going to do with it. All of that was being made up on the fly. I may have had those fleeting thoughts in my life, but never were they never had I had the opportunity to present it to anybody. Never had anybody even had the audacity to even ask me those questions because most people that you end up dealing with in life are all about risk mitigation, not opportunity creation. I somehow felt that energy in that room in that moment. So I spoke. His next sentence was, "Can you do with 200? " And I was like, "Really? " Like, did he just say this? And now I'm like, you know, no, I cannot do with 200. I like that. That was my reaction. I cannot do with 200. That's like that's you know 250 is the exact amount that I need. I say okay. What is the valuation that you're willing to give me? I'm like 1. 5 billion. Just to be clear my previous valuation was 100 to 120 million. Okay. So I said 1. 5 billion. And he's like, "Preost? " And I'm like, "Okay, I'm not being thrown away. " Okay, there is no there is no I'm not being thrown away in this moment. Like, okay, pre and post. All right, let me not be like let me not push my luck too much. I'll say post. But, you know, and he you know, he said, "Look, I'm not going to do 250. Going to do 200. " We didn't agree on the valuation. I didn't budge. He said I will not pay 1. 5. call you in 48 hours and I'll give you my offer for giving you $200 million. Now in all of this I you know there was a lot of you know Japanese uh you know softbank Japanese people who were sitting there they were smiling they're very you know they they don't they're very they started to smile they were getting excited why because they had spent the last one month doing diligence on us they were getting excited but my co-founder who was sitting there he was losing his [ __ ] He thought that I like he literally looked at me. I cannot say this on live TV but he was literally mumbling like explicitive towards me to say what is wrong like we have traveled all the way for you to like do this like what is it that you like shut up like stop it and I was the only person I was ignoring was him because I was like okay if I see him for too much too wrong. I think I'm just I will go back to being normal. Rest is history like we do get 200 million. We do get you know we get it. You've also raised money from Jio. Was it the same reason? And there is some history between you and Mkesh Amani. So a I'd like to know like I've heard that you were MKkesh Amani's notetaker. Is that also a myth or is that real? — Yeah. No, you know, I used to work for McKenzie uh in those early days of this

is 2001 2002 uh they uh Reliance was launching Reliance Infocom the first version of their telecom business and given and they had hired Mckenzie to essentially do something. I was the flunky in the team like I was 22 23 year old or something and so I was part of the team and you know I clearly did not know anything about the telco business. So there was no way I was going to try even fain like doing anything. Yeah I was you could like describe my you could in a glorified way you could say I was a notetaker. I was literally sitting in meetings like either making spreadsheets or taking some notes and making those things happen. But the part of that was and I've told this to him many a times. I would sit in meetings with him for like 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, five to six days a week for 18 months and I saw him. He is a I saw him and I saw Manoj Modi. These are people who are masters of their craft. They were like you know you're learning from the best in the world. Ability to think beyond what human mind can even fathom. Audacity to go after it. the tenacity to actually be in the details, clarity of thought, courage like it was on display for 18 months. Yes, I get it that their last name carried Amani, but they were not going for the little game. They were going for a game that the world had never seen. That's not like you sit there and you know at that point of time he was like 40ome mid-40s probably early 40s probably and you could see that happen and those things are not taught in school dies — can you give me an anecdote a micro example of something like this it's you know there was a big analysis that the McKenzie team had done to essentially come back and say, "Hey, how much would it cost to make a phone call? " And I remember that number in like in a very aggressive scenario that number was like I think a one rupee to 1 rupe 50 pisa um per minute and you go we present that to him and you know there's like a 50 member like you know again a massive conference room 50 me like 50 people are kind of presenting that to him and he looks at it and he's like I need this to be 10 pisa And everybody in the room is like stunned. I would pretty much argue that everybody thought that like he's just being ridiculous. You can never get 10 peso. We got to 20 peso eventually when we launched 20 peso. It is the ability to have the conviction and see a world differently that then changes the natural flow of things for you. What changed? The reason why it was 1 rupe 50 pisa was everybody was assuming a certain scale of usage, certain number of subscribers. He in his head was saying if I make it 10 pi 10 pisa then my us number of users is actually 20 times of the users that you're really telling me and so I am going to assume that the scale will appear you have to now come and tell me how to get to 10 pesa and I will know and so suddenly he had opened the doors for everybody in the room to think about the opportunity at a different scale and therefore think of the business differently. Did he have any past experience of doing that? I don't know. Did he have any past data to suggest that you know this could be that big and you know that it could get to 10 pyon? Nobody in the world had. So what was the data suggesting? None of it. But the beauty was that he could see a world that nobody else saw. Like for a 23 year old or 24 year old me, it was the most enamoring. The best experience of my life. I gave him so much credit to where I am today. Like for those 18 months of paid training of sorts.

— But they invested in you, right? — They recently invested into us. Yes. — What was the reasoning? Is it was it similar to the MASA meeting or was this a different pitch? — Uh somewhat similar. The idea was twofold. This time when they got to know we were raising money for Glance, they knew me a little bit or they knew me. And so when we spoke and they heard that we truly want to build a global consumer platform, they saw it in two ways, I think. One, they truly saw it as a as a way to support and be part of and audacious vision of building a glo global consumer platform from India. Nobody has done that in the past. So I think he connected to the audacity of the vision. Did I match his audacity? I don't know. I would have to ask him that question specifically. Maybe next time I'll do that. The second was it was something where they realized that on a geo network in itself in India it would play a big role and at that point of time they did want to launch their own handset. So therefore you know this our glance platform could deeply connect into their own handsets. And uh after the first meeting they said this is we're going to invest all of the $200 million that you're raising. We are they wanted to do the deal. I couldn't have asked for a better partner. I learned so much from them now also from Akash who I work with. I learned you learned so much from just being with how they think about the world. like world so differently. So differently like it's every moment of like it's amazing. Uh and there now it's in white display on what — it's truly abundant thinking in some ways. — Yeah. And then going after it truly going after it like huge massive abundant thinking with exceptional execution. Ruthless execution. It's amazing. So much to learn from. — What is the current state of InMobi? Like I'm not talking about glance. I'm talking about InMobi. How big is it? You

know, are you happy with where you're at? Like where is Inmoi today? The way I describe Inmobi is slightly different from the way it evolved or it was in its early days. Inobi is a end-to-end consumer internet company. Inobi has a massively strong advertising business and a very big consumer platform with glance. Both of those are part of Inobi. Of course, there is a capital structure of independent capital structure that I have for Glance. But that's how I think of the company. So we are a classical internet company. We are a global internet company. We have a global consumer platform. ad platform. On the ad platform, I'm very happy where we are one of the most advanced ad platforms in the world. The ad business in the on in on the planet is you know distributed across some 15 big players maybe at best 20 big players. We are one of those 15 to 20 players in the world. It is impossible very hard for a new player to come in that industry. It's so complex. A lot of consolidation has already happened. And a lot of players have gone away. It's in a state of equilibrium the ad industry and we are we are part of it. The ad industry is going to grow massively with AI applications coming into the world. We are not you and I are not going to pay for AI applications anymore. They are going to behave like internet applications where they will get subsidized through ads. What is the objective of ad platforms? platforms in the world is to keep the internet free. It's subsidized. Right from subsidizing content to subsidizing news to subsid subsidizing games, making them free to subsidizing e-commerce today and in the future subsidizing all AI applications. How do you think every AI application this agentic economy is going to behave at scale with when it reaches every consumer? Yes, today in the early days we you and I pay for it a little bit but in the long term they are all going to get subsidized through ad. So we are very we are in a amazing place with a large scale global very efficient ad platform and we are very happy about where we are. It's a business that we run massively at massive scale very profitably. Very happy about where we are. What we've added to this ad platform is added a very big consumer capability with glance to create a global consumer internet company. If you take Google as a company, Google has google. com and YouTube and has a Google ad platform. Facebook has the same thing. Uh Tencent has same thing like Tensent has Vchhat and has Tencent ad platform. So a lot of these companies globally have consumer and ad platforms. We also now have the same stack. Of course ours is not as big today but it is getting there. So when it comes to glance what we have created is we have tried to create a global platform. Glance AI which we recently launched is our it's our AI commerce platform. I think the way the world would shop in the world of AI would be different. Glance AI is disrupting shopping in the world. The way the world would shop before glancai and the way the world would shop after glancei would be different. It is very similar to how you how your search changed post GPT you know it the world changed similar to UPI how UPI changed the way we make payments or Uber how we changed the way we you know hail cabs has changed post Uber that's what we would do we are doing with glanci the way the world shops before glanci and the way world shops after glanca is different the interesting part is in that is We are going after the global world for this. We're launching this globally. We expect we'll have about 100 million users just in the US. In 12 months from now, we would have about 400 to 500 million users using Glance AI in across the globe. in 12 months from now. It's the most advanced generative AI technology that's ever built. We created we've we built a foundation model for shopping where the last 20 years of intelligence on shopping has been trained and it is under training continuously. We built a generative AI model on top of it which basically changes the way you look at a product because now is with you in the — way it's like chat GPD has made search hyperpersonalized. — Yes, — you're making fashion hyperpersonalized. — I'm making shopping hyper personalized. The first model that we have launched is fashion. But you're right, we're making shopping hyperpersonalized. — So you remove the browse behavior that you had from search on Google search. If I searched, I would find 20 things. You removed the browse behavior and you've now introduced a chat GPD like behavior, which is here's your answer. Here's the clothes you need. — That's part of it. The bigger part of that also is that what you see, you see it on yourself now. — So, it's personalized and it's here's your recommendation. — Well, it's personal. Personalized is when I would show you only the product that's right for you. personal is when I would put that product on you. So I would show it's like a trial, right? When you go and get a trial done, you kind of see it on yourself. Well, using generative AI, I could do that right then and here. So you show the trial, you kind of try the product out. It suggests the best looks for you. You try them on you in the in using generative AI and then it basically tells you the two choices and two places where you should go buy it from. All of these three are are you know models that are getting trained and are trained. So the model actually gets trained on you now as a consumer. It's very similar to the GPT experience that you would have for you know getting answers and responses. Okay. So I had a bunch of more questions for you but I think I want to do something slightly different which is you have told me the story of the past till where Inmobi is today. You've started from your startup journey. What startups were like, what India was like, what internet was like, how many people believed in it, how many people didn't believe in it. And you drew a story from 2007, 2008 to 2025. Now, I need you to tell me the same story from 2025 to 2030 or 2040 because you've played this story once before. You're seeing where startups are now, what are cool things, but you also know that you took contrarian bets back then, but now there's a very different set of things that's cool. There are very different things that will get you married. There's might work and I'm sure you're angel investing as well. So you're seeing which startups are working, which are not. You're seeing how these AI models are playing out. Paint the future for me. Yeah. Look, I think the for us I we're building in moi as founders, to a generational company. We want to be we want to see this company over a long period of time. So therefore that question is something that we do think about. Do we have all the answers? Maybe not. But at some level, we clearly see ourselves as a global uh consumer internet company that would build something which should be used by everybody on the planet. Everybody. We want to build that. We see the opportunity of making that happen with Glance AI. The artificial intelligence as a technology is so advanced and we have made such massive bets on it that we feel we are very like you know you got to be an early adopter of these technologies we don't you know we don't really know what is going to happen I give this analogy many a times it's like a fog the you know the world of AI right now is you know is nobody there's no clarity But we have so much belief in it that in that fog we are driving at 100 miles an hour. We have that much belief in that opportunity. We are seeing that opportunity translate into real application with Glance AI. inobi ads as we launch generative advertising making the internet more beautiful. We are betting big on that. So we believe in the next 5 years our technology our products glance and in moi both everything that we do should be touched by every consumer on the planet. That's what we are really going for. We think that is a possibility. Is it audacious? Yes. Is it hard? Yes. Might we fail going for it? Yeah. We still want to go for it and we think we have all the things in our arsenal to go for this. The most important part of that is our belief on our own technologists in this country. Our belief in our own engineering cap capacity and capability our belief in the resolve that we sit with to say India should write software that the world should run on. I truly believe that especially with AI — and you've already done it. — Yes. We want to do it even bigger, 10 times bigger, 100 times bigger than what where we are right now. And we're going to go for that. That's the resolve that we have in the company today. The best reason and the the biggest thing that gives me that confidence. It's not just something that I carry. You go around the office, you go around talk to my leadership team, you talk to different people, they will have some version of this confidence, this belief, some version of this desire to actually go after it. So this is the Inobian glance story. Let's go slightly more macro, right? To startups in general in India right now like startups now are raising a ridiculous amount of money. 2021 22 we've seen the pedals of excess investors now have a lot of dry powder that they're sitting on that they're not actually investing in they're not where they're not actually deploying they're all waiting for an AI opportunity but the AI opportunities are better outside so what do you think now that the 2008 version of you would see as contrarian in this ecosystem what do you think the ecosystem is doing wrong I don't know whether I would say wrong but I'll say what they should do look I think we have

In India, we can build two kinds of companies. One, a set of companies that solve for what I would call local inefficiencies. Our country by definition, given we are an emerging economy, has a lot of inefficiencies. Companies in the last 10 to 15 years have truly built amazing consumer experience, consumer products that solve for these inefficiencies in the local markets. whether you and most of them have to deal with most of them are end up dealing with solving for uh logistical inefficiencies sending something from one place to the next making that more accessible easy uh more timely like all of those things right and they have changed our lives you know the way we shop today has changed the way we travel access services have changed — we got logistical excellence now — we have unbelievable able level of logistical excellence backed by the uh internet capability and payment infrastructure. I don't think anybody in the world comes even close to that. That's the beauty of our entrepreneurship. In the last 15 years, our country has catapulted itself into the most efficient logistical country in the world despite having horrible roads, horrible road infrastructure. it has yet mastered that. Imagine what would happen if a road infrastructure were to improve where we would get. So that's one. Would there be more such opportunities? Yes. And companies should keep going and building those. The second opportunity which is in my view is a lesser seen opportunity is building global software from India especially the AI software opportunities. The opportunity scale and size in that game is phenomenally large. And that does not mean you must go to the US by the way. It could also mean that you go into Asian markets into European markets into Middle Eastern market — but not selling software to India from India to India you haven't seen those work — they don't work unit economics for our country is not as strong so if you have a software only business the unit economics will not justify great outcome we may have to wait about 5 6 years 7 years for that to start happening typically the unit economics of software businesses start to happen in a country when the GDP per capita of that country crosses like $5,000 or so. We are several years away from that. So therefore, if you build these businesses in India today, we got to take them global. Go after the global opportunity. By the way, even if India could pay for it, go after the global opportunity because that is available to you. We are sitting at a at an intersection of the world where the world is getting a little divided. China is facing a different kind of a challenge where their acceptability of their products and especially software products globally is going down. That gives us as a country which is very hardworking country a huge opportunity to go after build these things at global scale. I don't see people thinking about global opportunity as much. Is that a function of the ambition or capital availability? — It's a function of distribution because historically whenever like for example we have tried to build software getting like a global audience to care about it to even use it the first time. It's a like distribution is a big challenge because you don't know anybody there. This is landmass gap. — Well, it is lesser. It's not as big as you make her out to be. That's the mindset change that I think our entrepreneurs need to go through in the mindset of everybody. It's a very hard problem. — The distribution piece. — Yeah. That's you outlined. That means nobody's going to go after it. So therefore, you should. An entrepreneur is somebody who sees things that others don't see. You're not an entrepreneur if the only thing you see is what everybody else sees. If it is written in newspapers, that's not an opportunity. So you yes, you have to see different parts of the world the you know whether it's Middle East, whether it's you know Europe, whether it's rest of Asian markets there is the world is pretty large. Is US the largest market? Yes. Would if you being very successful would you want to be there? Yes. So you would replicate the Inobi story in the way that you'd first go after those little pockets. You dominate them and then eventually you build enough brand sort of equity to go into the US because — we've done that twice now. We did that with Inobi ads business. We started off in India, tested it out very rapidly went into Southeast Asia, went into Middle East, Africa, Europe, China. — So the in 2014 went into the US. — So it's the round the world in 80 days model — probably. The other one we did same thing with Glance. We launched the launch in India, launched it in Southeast Asia, uh and now uh launched it in Latin America and now launched it in the US. — How do you do these launches? Like if I were to do a launch, let's say if let's say somebody was building software tomorrow and they wanted to launch in Latin America, like how did you do your glance launch there? — We have always believed in if you want to do something global, we have always believed in a partnershipled model. As a company, we are very good at partnering. So you go to an agency and — whatever we figure out a partner we figure out partners in every country we want to be in. We think building you know there is a saying right if you want to go fast go alone big you know go together I think that's the model we go after we are applying this through our global distribution so for example when you take glance global uh in the US we have partnered with the likes of Samsung uh Verizon uh with Motorola with Google. We partner with these companies to say, "Hey, I have something amazing. You have distribution. Can I actually combine forces with you? " Because combining these forces is great for the consumer and of course great for each of our businesses. Now, these deals take 12 to 24 months to do. — Run me through the process. Like, Is it like you get an intro to somebody from Motorola and then you make a pitch to them the same way you'd raise money? — Absolutely. And look, all of these companies are so partner. They're very open to partnership. They are looking for great software. They're looking for great services for their customers. They're very open. We just think it's too hard. We don't go to them. Finding that decision maker is like and having enough trust with that person is a challenge. — It's not a challenge. It's a process. You they they will help you once you make one inroad in a matter of like you got to be patient. Look, you're going after these companies who are phenomenally successful. They are not just going to open their doors just for anyone and everyone to let in. Yes. So they have guardrails. So you should be patient enough and have the you know the resilience to keep at it. So we've kept at it across you know 25 such partners of which 15 of them would have converted for us and suddenly we have a global scale business with glance. We have partnerships with I just said you know Samsung, Verizon, Motorola, Google you know likes of you know uh you know bunch of other companies across the they just if you build something amazing go partner with somebody who will help you do this. Don't worry about holding all the economics to yourself. Share the economics. If it's great for the consumer and you're willing to share the economics they'll give you global distribution. But it's just like it is so surprising to me and maybe sales wizardry and maybe exceptional storytelling to get like a Samsung to give away a piece of their lock screen to you. It's an amazing ability to build a great product. We have built a worldass unique product from India. We take pride in that. that in advertising also. You got to believe that you can create the best product on the planet. You're not going to get these things if you're not best in something that you do. We are today best in building a lock screen product. We are best in the world today on AI commerce. We are one of the best in the world on our advertising products. You got to be the best. — I have one last question — and this is about Naven the man. this wealth that you've generated, I'm sure you've generated wealth for yourself as well, right? As a founder, has that changed you? What do you do differently now? Do you optimize your time better? Like what is the support structure you have around your personal life now and also your professional life that allows you to do what you do? And how do you think about wealth, personal wealth in general? You know the

wealth has given me the freedom to really go after even bigger things to achieve. I feel that I'm very lucky, supremely lucky. Did I have everything to deserve this? I don't know. I don't think so. So, I'm very lucky. Right. Once I've gotten this opportunity, this is rare. I am not going to let go of this. I am this freedom that I've gotten has allowed me to dream bigger than the biggest I have ever imagined. And I thrive in that. I live in that world. I enjoy that world. I surround myself with people who have similar ambition, who are crazy, who are passionate enough to see a different world because there is an opportunity to go achieve it and if not you then who else? So that's what I do most of the time. Now what is that number for most people at what number like in terms of wealth that they should generate where they can start thinking much bigger when your passive income is more than the highest amount you can spend — per year. So for most people that's about 10 20 lakhs let's say or slightly higher if they're married. No, that's you know passive income is more than what maximum you can spend. — No, I'm saying that passively they should be getting 20 30 lakhs a year. Let's say to let's say about at 5% uh you know let's say 10% growth but 5% for you're keeping aside for inflation about five six crores you think that people can play a much more free game. — Yeah, let's say at about 10 crores or so 10 to 20 crores your passive income is far higher. that you don't have to worry about anything in life. Um — then you can play the big game. — What do you have to lose? You have a unique opportunity to go build something. Go do it. Like we are not going to be in a in a situation like we are in today as Indians. We are the luckiest luckiest. Our country has things that we can resolve and solve and therefore do things opportunities. Our capital markets is out there just every retail investor is telling you hey build something come to the capital markets I'm going to fund you to go big we are equally hungry for making you bigger — so everything broken is an opportunity in India well that's the opportunity to build the rising middle class who is not necessarily participating in the building of these companies is saying I am actually going to own your company and I'm going push you to go make it big. You have a thriving capital market today. Amazing capital market today. You have talent at large scale. You have a talent that is actually willing to work really hard, much harder than in the western countries. It requires you to work hard. essentially get rid of uh a lot of the you know basics of life to achieve something. So you got to go for it and therefore you find those people and there are in plenty who want to make something out of their life. Nobody comes not many come out there and say I just don't want to do anything. Most good people want to have a purpose to their life. Whatever their purpose be, you know, doesn't matter. But if your purpose can align with their purpose, you'll find a lot of them in India today who are hungry for doing these kind of things. And you just got to get them together. You would have a great time. So you're saying that all the market forces are there like the funding is there from the public markets now. Talent is there because the startup boom has happened and we have all that talent, excess talent there. The problems and the opportunities are there. You just need to lead and sort of tie it up. — Ambition sits there. We're a country that wants to be Vixit Bharat in another like by 2047. That's an ambition of a country. It's not ambition of an individual. It's a society that is sitting ambitious. You do these podcasts. You have a large number of people who hear these podcasts. You typically end up doing them, I'm assuming, with a lot of entrepreneurs and people who are building companies and startups. Why do you have such a large followership? The part big reason for you to have such a large followership is because that kid who's growing up in middle class town is saying huh I think I'm going to go build a startup and change the country or change the world. That's is that ambition of middle class hope and a possibility is possible in our country today. — It's a phenomenal conversation. I think you've told us two stories. One of the past and one of what the next 1015 years could be. Starting with the technology, ending with hey, we still need ambition, hope to get there. Thank you so much for doing this. This is a good conversation. — I enjoyed this. Thank you.