# This company added 200Cr of Software Revenue in 8 months. Here’s why.

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Varun Mayya
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50OeCPVyy5Q
- **Дата:** 06.07.2024
- **Длительность:** 57:23
- **Просмотры:** 53,495
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12233

## Описание

Revolutionising the future of AIPCs! Learn more about Intel's latest innovations here: https://rb.gy/cshhbl 

In this episode, we sit down with Sanket, the visionary behind Invideo, a SaaS success story that's redefining the Indian startup landscape. Sanket shares his journey from near-bankruptcy to building a $30M ARR company, and reveals the fascinating 'Idli Economics' - a unique perspective on why Indian SaaS companies must look beyond local markets to thrive.

But that's not all - we explore how the creative landscape is rapidly evolving. Imagine editors with no formal music training producing stunning audio for videos using AI tools like Audacity on their Intel®️ Core™️ Ultra Processors. It's a testament to how Intel-powered AI PCs are democratising creativity, offering desktop-like performance with the bonus of portability. 

00:00 - Highlights
00:37 - Introduction
01:12 - Intel AI PCs (Today's partner)
03:17 - Discussion about Invideo's revenue and growth
04:53 - Challenges dur

## Транскрипт

### Highlights []

what we would like to do is could you edit a video like a Netflix documentary and I think Sora is definitely a threat to a lot of companies we have been looking for something like Sora what I'm worried about is AI how much revenue are you guys making 250 CR holy [ __ ] that's a big number I said that let's really like tone it down my initial number was like 35 people why don't you like hyper optimize for India yeah because it's a household income problem you would go in Bangalore have a geod idly for two finish your lunch or breakfast for 250 bucks in the US that would be $30 we charge $30

### Introduction [0:37]

ladies and gentlemen I am with sanket from Nido San's a he's become a friend in the last uh one year eight months something like that and you know it's very hard to find like a software as a service success from India s actually belongs to like a community of SAS entrepreneurs in India who have figured out one or two secrets about software as a service how to sell software across the world how to do a good job at it and shank's operating in a area that I really love which is video and he's been at this problem for many years s thank you for coming on thanks a lot for having me hey everyone before we

### Intel AI PCs (Today's partner) [1:12]

move on to the rest of the conversation I want to talk about the tech that makes our work faster and more creative behind the scenes and a huge thanks to Intel for partnering with us on this video so when it comes to editing our podcast highlights of videos one of the biggest challenges is having control over the music our edit ERS aren't really musicians nor do they have too much experience composing music but they know how important music is to set the tone of the video the problem is finding the right music online is always a pain and even if you do find something you like you just don't have control to customize it to fit your video perfectly to solve that our editors have recently started to use audacity's new set of Music generation tools on this Intel Core Ultra powered aipc let me show you how me and our editors use audacity in action okay so this is audacity and here's a stereo track you can select part of it and you can say you want to just take the drums or just the base you can do that with the open Vino plugin here you can separate these different stems all on their own it's super easy you see how quickly that happened let's listen to these drums here not bad and if you want to take it a step further let's say I want to add some funky piano to it we can do that just by typing in a prompt funky piano I'm going to take that section and give it an AI generated piano Funk that is nice and here's the amazing part I can't stress this enough the creative landscape is Shifting imagine all our editors with no formal music training are now able to produce music for videos using AI tools like audacity on their Intel Core Ultra laptop and none of the schoool AI powered creative work would be possible without the Intel Core Ultra processor unique three- tier Performance Hybrid architecture this architecture enables AI to seamlessly boost tools like audacity go click the link in the description to explore their architecture and technical details now

### Discussion about Invideo's revenue and growth [3:17]

back to the podcast I'm just going to start with like the bouncer right what's the headline number now how much revenue are you guys making it's uh north of uh 250 crores um annual revenue that's about 30 mil north of that yes interesting and that's ARR right annual recurring Revenue correct holy [ __ ] that's a big number how much of that is from India uh 5% that's 5% of the revenue 23 24% of the users so it's about uh 10cr and revenue is coming from India roughly interesting where's the bulk of the revenue coming from uh it's five countries um us takes 50% of the total revenue and the other four countries are uh Australia New Zealand Canada UK The Usual Suspects interesting what is the one thing that has changed in your life after the company started making so much money like what what's changed I think I've I'm doing a little bit of more PR but nothing really changes except uh you got to start thinking much bigger than what we were thinking at uh 510 range you're thinking about 50 I can no longer think about 50 I'm now thinking about 200 uh I'm thinking about actually I'm getting more audacious and thinking about uh how could my son's wedding be or daughter's wedding be in Jam nagar uh and started thinking about like how are they thinking and why are they thinking the way we are thinking and uh I just feel that we are so tiny even with the revenue scale that you are saying that there's room for like so much growth

### Challenges during the restructuring of the company [4:53]

yeah but what's changed in the business because I remember there was a period where from what I'd heard in the market Nvidia was stuck at like 5 $6 million in revenue and that was a painful painfully excruciating while what changed I'm sure there was some Catalyst that suddenly you know boosted the company to the next level yeah no look I mean we had raised a ton of money and uh I think how much money is that uh we have raised $55 million uh last series B was $35 million we never announced it really but uh we raised $35 million it was 2021 we hired like all these great people from McKenzie bbcg like the top CTO Engineers Etc and then like all of a sudden I think like the team got very bloated and uh we started doing optimizations uh we started also running democracy looking at like how um us runs teams and so culture problem um and that's actually my judgment problem right like uh what I built like all of this happened I was the final say so my neck is really on the line and it's all of that is my fault and then we got stuck uh we got stuck at to be honest between 5. 5 to six for 15 16 months we burning north of $700,000 a month because we had money and I think 2021 was a time when we were looking at uh what's the uh how long the money is going to last and we're like hey it would last three years let's spend it and stuff like that and then things were not of course not working I started actually taking uh us trips uh two us stps that year to think what should happen and then I was and there's a lot of pressure from everyone I mean there was a new investor put in like um the number at 45 times Revenue uh and stuff like that so you were in trouble I was in [ __ ] trouble right like I was in trouble uh Beyond a point uh I think we had almost hired a banker okay like I think we had shook hands what does that signal for the audience hiring a banker means like uh you're ready to uh go off sell the company etc like whatever that means to be honest like one day I was having like wow in Bombay I live in chur which is like a very middle class suburb of Bombay uh I was like [ __ ] it I'm not selling it I love doing what I'm doing I want to continue building this uh so I just actually like called everyone up and I said that hey look I know I screw up it's not your fault but uh we have like 80% of the series be money in the bank or 90% of the series B money in the bank I'll return like large portions of that money to you and I want to continue running it like give it a shot post that I and that conversation then started and then we have a board few investors so there was a discussion going on uh post that and I said that like [ __ ] it I'm going to take a break so I scuba dive I went on a six day super solo very remote scuba diving place and I think that is when like the company started talking to me uh by the time I reached the airport I was like have to downsize first thing we got to do is downsize the team how big was the team back then 220 people so quite large yeah so I said that we got to downsize the team by the time I landed I had the team members I wanted to keep by the time I was reaching the destination I was calling people up and trying to align them and see what they think and it primarily came from a place where couldn't take sharp turns and I think we had forgotten how to think like a startup it's like the T-Rex problem right Tyrannosaurus Rex is really large but the easy way to outrun a T-Rex is to run zigzag because it can't turn left and right very easily so you found that as a large Aug it was very hard to like steer or make any change no it was impossible no because I call one person I would get alignment with them the third person would not say yes to that they would have their own opinions now you are starting to respect opinions um in fact when you hire these people you start respecting them more than I was respecting myself because they went to like IIT and I IM and whatnot so that happened I took a break I said that let's really like tone it down uh I my initial number was like 35 people and then I think negotiations happened to keep it at 65 got the burn down from like 7:50 was that hard like that layoff you cry you you cry and you sleep like uh there's no choice but right you have to you got to do what it takes there's just no choice uh so uh you cry you feel okay you get up and I think it's okay to for such things to happen uh I actually felt extremely bad for the people we had hired where are they going to go etc to be honest I think like me proposing people to return the money was ahead of its time you proposing to the investors to return the money yeah I've heard of that where you know I think some of your investors also wanted their money back right because you PL it for a bit I mean yeah sure like on the death bed I think people would want to cut their losses off for sure um 100% how did that go no so like that was an ongoing story right like in that period I was like I'm going to really give my best shot and I'm That Kind of a person who gives his best shot uh I understood that jobs to be done might be the problem so I went ahead and hired the founder of jobs to be done to do jobs to be done for us so his name is Bob moesta uh he founded jobs to be done as a term with Clayton Christensen luckily he's old but doing like great work and like we got him to do work for us and then I said that there's a definitely a product strategy problem so we got sh DOI and I think sh DOI is also a phenomenal person to help with product strategy at ours our scale so did both of that and laid people off so there were like very few decision makers in the room uh really and that is how it had to be done on the other end like I was talking to investors I think there were camps of investors few of them happy few of them wanted to continue backing um few of there are very few investors in the world who have seen these things happen there various companies where they had to keep wiring bridge bridge and then they became a Deca con so there are such stories and uh when you see such stories those investors are like two of the investors have told me this is the second time they have seen it after they saw it the first time they wanted to see it again and they have seen it within video now and there are few others who are like I think some investors said I think it was karik r or somebody right who's like even though you know we back a lot of winners the stories are made when you know there's a loser and you give them something just over the edge and they win that's the story to like we tell the near that stories yes and that's what actually makes life also very wholesome so you know we talking about high pain during those 16 months and Beyond to be honest like that is where I learned the most like that is when the character got built like I had some character it got refined much further then why because I was reading books I was fighting very hard I was working as hard as possible smart trying to really push myself to like get up because there's no choice so really the full learning in life happened there in fact like all the numbers that I'm seeing today are actually from the work that happened in 2022 M my numbers today would show like much later and you would know like how I'm doing today really much later in life so we did that and uh and we almost decided that we'll return the money um and I don't think like you know I think more Founders should do this I don't think I did anything wrong and I don't think that investors did anything wrong by agreeing the company was over capitalized we had raised more money than what we should have and we wouldn't have in 2021 and I believe that company would last like 15 20 25 years and you will see all the Cycles so basically if you're public company you are going to get traded at like 7x multiple for sure or 8X Revenue multiple for sure and there'll also be times where you get traded at 40x yes and you don't let it get on to you so that happened and then we gave some cooling period come and did just company strategy but from January onwards like a couple of our releases worked I was again doing GTM what is GTM for the audience it's go to market so basically how do you get users how do you acquire users uh at that time we doing like some 8,000 new signups a day uh okay so when all of that like do settled we got to operations by the way like companies when you do a layoff uh companies actually get back to normal between like 15 to 45 days you're back up and running people in the team are motivated if you do it the right way I think a lot of people are scared about it and I think the right way to do it is like just get up and do it when you know that you have over hired you're not able to be very Swift uh and people have said that at our offsides that basically we were a government office and no longer like we operate extremely swiftly now um come January to March we uh doubled the revenue uh because of our releases because of the GTM several things we did several things because like a lot of things were coming on to me um a lot of people who were um executing started taking decisions and uh they have all been at invid for years now so that became like easy uh we doubled the revenue as I think uh we decided not to return I mean we collectively decided that uh it might be a great time to not return the money and continue building and I think since then we have tripled the revenue so we basically had an April deadline to launch the product so we did like full fledged strategy for 3 4 months and

### SEO and growth strategies [15:02]

I think like people say things a lot of things get said in the world because they sound smart but they're not true one of them is uh execution eat strategy for breakfast I agree I think that's not true strategy is basically you're simulating a dozen of things finding the right spot that's potentially doesn't have competitors potentially you looking for direction speed you need velocity right velocity has both speed and direction to describe it yeah so we pick the in those four months like we could pick the right segment where the competition would be less where our superpowers get used and where technology would support that segment can you describe what that segment was people doing like super early on the YouTube Journey so anyone who is can't have the cameras the lights the edits just those kind of people did not see competition and what does nid do for them we they find the most value of video creation uh they basically find the extreme value on our platform uh they were already doing there was an old way to do it is like basically it would take you an hour and a half uh to create a particular video our core thesis when we launched the product was quite simple 80% of these users should get a better quality video at the end of 2 minutes on invido AI versus what they were already getting okay so till the time we would cross the 80% Mark we would not release the product there was just one notstar that and there are like two ways to really understand the quality one is after 7even years I should tell if the quality of video is okay or not and the second is you could just do some data mapping and see that uh is the quality higher or not but for those set of users at least 80% of them in video AI would create a better video what than what they were already creating okay and I think that fly has worked like in 6 months uh we have done over $21 million in revenue on just the Nido AI product which also Pro potentially makes us the fastest SAS company out of India for that time I understand that there's a back history and that all was completely simulated strategy you were Bois to take advant anage of AI because you already had the infra around it tools you already had a little bit of brand you already had the team who had experience with AI with video so would you say a lot of it was right place right time but also strategy to know that it's right place right time we got to take advantage of this so uh there are two three answers to this the first answer really is a bad ball is supposed to be still like you have to hit that for a six yeah uh the second is really there are pros and cons like because of we having so much baggage it gets extremely difficult on dayto day because you have scars from the past uh and they are influencing your decisions you had like a ton of users to take care of while you were building it so there was a lot of navigation as well so it was not like super straightforward the third was the strategy still had to be done right because the most we actually did not pick the most obvious answer which was integrate AI inside the product we actually ended up flipping and building all together a new product which had its own risk okay so uh but that also has a very differentiated product offering than what a weed does or a cap cut does or anyone else anyone smart any four people in a room who are super smart would take a particular decision we have not taken that decision we opinionated about it and that happened because of the strategy work interesting hey but you know I have a thesis around this is like we've met a few times right so I learned this the last time we met which is and it's something I've learned about a lot of Founders since then which is actually really successful Founders reasonably successful Founders are actually much better at finding one distribution hack they find one distribution hack and then they spam it you know for years and I think with that Circle that I was talking about right the circle of Founders that you are part of you all have really cracked SEO yeah and you've cracked SEO to the level that nobody else has and we learned in fact in my previous SAS company we learned a lot of things out of that Circle right because I think summit's brother is part of that Circle uh and he helped us with some of our SEO with the last company and you have done it extremely well can you tell us the hack can you reveal all your secrets yeah sure so the first thing is that you cannot hire a good SEO so if you have hired someone at 20 25 30 35 lakhs that person most likely is not a good SEO because is if they were a good SEO then they would be making two three crores a year running affiliate sites and the best seos are probably like entrepreneurs themselves yeah for sure so I've learned SEO it we started building our first like link and whatever uh in 2019 how does it work can you describe it for like a slightly more Layman audience yeah sure it's all competition right like first you have to look at user intent is really keywords actually before that you want to know is your business a push business or a pull business Uber cannot do SEO it's a push product no one searched for it so you could only do it for pull products so do you already have an existing search volume when you so people looking for how do I edit a video online or video editor or online video editor or ad maker Intro Maker um thousands of such keywords really then you identify how large is that and then start estimating that if I rank number one number two number three how much traffic do I get really truly okay once I get that I go back and start building pages on that structure uh and that structure is basically uh you start making a tree uh that's super relevant so you would make a bunch of user intent pages when you make user intent pages I think the only thing to look at is competition Google itself is like the best answer to what you should do so you should really go say that I want to rank for this keyword I can see 10 Google search results I go through those results I see what are the kind of pages they have built what is the kind of content they have put what is their authority of their domain how many uh referring domains do they have referring domains is a Google's way to say that how many people are referring to you saying that you are legit once you understand that you want to replicate it once you start beating it you don't have to beat the absolute numbers but if you start uh beating the Velocity in a three six month time frame you start ranking up H and this is all on the back of writing great articles I think like uh you cannot really win without writing great content uh you need to be a Skys scri and who writes content for you uh multiple people's right so basically uh I'm quite we have a Playbook now but like if I would write an article it would rank within a week or two weeks for sure what you're doing is basically understanding the user intent very deeply trying to also structure it like that and making sure that you are adding value to the user uh it's actually super basic what are people asking for you could find what people are asking for and giving them your Clarity of thought of what they what the answer should be yeah in the right way not in the number of words way in the right way and then there are a dozen of techniques that you could use uh after that to do but what's super important is of course the page speed and all of that good stuff after that quality of pages quality of content and third how many people are really referring to you I think that is what uh gets decided and uh in your opinion or actually according to the data how much traffic does it bring you it brings us uh just organic traffic would be 70,000 users a day 880,000 users a day just pure organic and is all on the back of quality writing quality Pages uh yeah we get like pitched random [ __ ] we're like can you do a camera blog on your side will pay you like $500,000 a year because it would now rank because CU other people want your SEO now it's a it's a long-term Channel and people should build long-term channels because they keep giving uh there were months when like I would also say like how much money we would have spent we were spending 40 50 lakhs a month for the first six months and then really like at this point of time we might be spending like 10 12 lakh rupees this on ads uh no on seo um ads is another uh channel that we use I don't like that channel I that's my least favorite Channel um how much spend there would be spending 250k 100K on the Branded keyword so basically 150k really like we don't spend too much on ads but we have to life sucks when you have to spend for your own keyword yeah that's Google I think yeah that's not 100 that's like between 70 to 90 so basically for the audience what's happening is when you search for Nido there are other brands now like in video cap cut weed Etc that are now bidding for those keywords trying to appear on top and on Google to save yourself from other people bidding on your keyword you have to basically and we spending 60 70 lakh rupees a month on that just to defend your own VI is actually a number one culprit yeah just such a predatory practice but uh I guess it's all fair game you play by the rules yeah but yeah it's it's strange to see that SAS is like sort of a distribution problem right like I wouldn't have thought of this 10 years ago when I wanted to build software in India I was like you know it's about quality of product and it's true quality of product actually matters but it doesn't matter as much as you know figuring out how to get 70,000 users a day coming to your app because there's like a graveyard of things I've built where nobody's actually used it and one last thing is if you're ever doing like an SEO course or a small group or whatever right I would love to be a part and I think the audience watching should also be a part I know you don't need to do it but uh I think that's a very important skill and I think distribution products are getting easier and easier to build known this for a while right like and we've been speaking about it this for a while but distribution is like is the next big Frontier and writing just the fact that you've written so well and you know what to write and it's getting you 70,000 signups a day that's powerful yeah uh I think like GTM go to market is a bunch of creativity so basically um I was working at this company in the US okay they were building a topical search engine think about like perex of 20 of 2012 or something like that right so basically when you search machine learning on Google you get like a Wikipedia machine learning article but there are people who want to know about the top articles of machine learning so they were building this topical search engine uh and I used to work at that company called WR relevance and they had no users like six people five people no users had built a product okay so now what happened what I learned and I was super young and I've always been like on the Crea ative side and so I hate ads like you would not hear me talk about ads I don't understand the channel really because I hate it but what happened at that company was the whole article of data science machine learning or content marketing whatever is right the top articles of them were from the Twitter graph so on Twitter they would know who is great at content marketing or machine learning or data science or like any Topic in the world okay and then throw the best articles that was on Twitter what I actually did was I first used just unfollow for experiments but then we build a bot that would follow so basically I built a Twitter handle saying top articles of machine learning that would spit out top articles of machine learning as the feed gets updated and then since it was built on Twitter we would follow and unfollow everyone on Twitter who liked machine learning and the handle spits out articles of machine learning at one point we had thousands of handles you search for a topic our handle will show up because we're like throwing relevant articles and got to like some 3 4 million people visiting the site every day just by this hack but it's super contextual because the company was using Twitter they had like the Twitter data so we could follow and follow them then there was a Twitter handle but like these are the kind of things that I just love doing and we do like some crazy things with influencer marketing and stuff like that as well but it's all about finding a distribution hack and I think uh I wish I knew that sooner yeah and that brings

### Indian SaaS market and optimizing for India [28:39]

me to my next question right SAS in India has typically been a struggle not because we can't build stuff we've always had the Arbitrage of being able to build things at much cheaper because our Engineers here are lower price than people in outside right the hard problem has been bringing users and that's why we don't see too many SAS successes selling from India to India I think India to India SAS is like more of a it reflects in your revenues right only 5% of your revenues comes from India uh it reflects in the in your revenues because it's a market size problem and I'd love to hear your thoughts why don't you like hyper optimize for India yeah because it's a uh pure U I think household income problem till like you would go to go in Bangalore have a geod itly for two finisher lunch or breakfast for 250 bucks in the US that would be $30 we $30 so it's really like the problem of household income it's going to improve but not at the pace at where the US is to be honest like if in the US you look at uh you know different type of people uh basically someone at the someone cleaning the railway station right then say the New York subway station they would be cleaning while wearing the airports uh Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max and stuff like that doesn't happen in India and that's really the difference why U us spay I think there's no other difference there very few companies uh that do that the second thing is actually if you look at SAS right like us talks about Focus India you have to do multiple things because uh the market size is pretty small so you have to build like sort of an ecosystem you do like 10 Things I have I also feel like India doesn't value their time as much of course right because of the fact that everything is cheaper right like I don't know which CEO said this I think it was Kish bani who was like it's much cheaper to hire a person than to like buy software or use AI or whatever right it's like you can get a person like 15 20,000 rupees and he'll do the job and I think we have really built our software exports might on this philosophy that it's cheaper to hire somebody than to build out something complicated uh like what is the formula that you've picked up for India to us s is it just pure SEO no it's multiple things uh but uh to take a step back right my articulation to this is we need to use the craft advantage of India versus the cost Advantage I think that needs to be thrown out of our heads that there's a cost advantage to be honest I think the cost Advantage doesn't exist because when you hire that many people the productivity goes down uh if you have heard of mythical man month I think companies are mythical manm months and can you explain that for the audience mythical manmon is basically the way you do math essentially is that hey we want to do XYZ requires this many man hours and for if we hire 10 people will get done in 3 days instead of 30 days that's not true because productivity goes down because uh there's a cost of alignment communication there's a cost of hiring prices law is this is weird prices law thing right where the square root of the number of employees you have does 50% of the work so you have nine employees three people do 50% of the work if you have four employees two people do most of the work but if you have 100 employees only 10 people do most of the work so as scale I like to call like people start hiding in your company 100% And the second is like what it does to people right like you just lose creativity uh when you are throwing people at problems uh you lose creativity uh you become like fatter and uh constraints Drive creativity 100% 100% uh constraints uh are super important I mean no the only thing the only place where this doesn't apply is if you're building an infosis because each project can have like three four people and then you can just have it in its own Silo but it doesn't work for a product company like ours I so I don't I personally don't like to talk about companies like infosis primarily because I think they are the smartness quotient is probably a multiplication of all the founders in Tech today they're thinking something super large super sharp that makes sense for them and we don't know like the underlying reasons why they are doing it but I'm 100% sure that uh they're thinking 100 years long like the principles are super deep it's all making sense for them and they have thought through this like extremely deep but we love complaining about them on Twitter because it's the easier thing to do right like of course I think people you only develop respect for an infosis or actually any company at scale if you've run a company for like four five years seen the down seen the UPS lost people's money and how could you not like if you look at our Revenue versus what they do I'm at best a director at infosis at best and I think they might be doing like groundbreaking work for sure interesting hey but um that's a question

### Discussion about Sora and AI video generation [33:42]

for you right like I'm sure everyone's asked is the elephant in the room Sora is out and I think Sora is definitely a threat to a lot of companies uh I'm a big believer Sora doesn't compete with you directly because I think you use pixels right now on nid AI to kind of replace out the stock footage or to kind of generate the stock footage that's just going to be replaced with Sora but people still need the last M delivery right FS filters text uh and I think that as a tool you synthesize it you're like Photoshop in a way right the one of the largest generative AI tools right now in the world is Photoshop right they use generative AI but they're not a generative AI tool in its entirety but so many users of Photoshop it's just one feature in a bunch of features so I think Sora is going to be that feature inside your platform where you will build on top of it and three years later when it inevitably becomes open source uh not Sora but something similar to Sora you will sit on top of it and build more correct right or you will own the technology you now dump Sora and you'll you'll get on with this but I want to hear your thoughts on this you have a full document about it yeah I get asked this a lot and then at one point I was like I know you want to distributed in internally at your VC firm of what would happen to us so here's a document you can forward it in your WhatsApp groups um basically like if you look at a video that has to get created uh you're looking at a story you're looking at audio music uh and then edits what Sora gives you is Clips our attack right now is in stock we use iock everything actually but IO is one of our largest Partners we use IO because we believe that companies like Runway Pika has not crossed the uncanny valley and that's actually one of our core beliefs that we'll do only things what is The Uncanny value basically you can't like publish something with six fingers or like a broken nose or one eye it's great progress but you know there are problems yeah you will not publish it it's not it's great progress It's away from being utility in some forms okay so uh that's why we use talk now if sora's promise remains then it gives us an unbounded library of stocks a user still doesn't want to prompt Sora six times for six different clips bring it back put music audio edit and do it requires very um fine level of work and people to focus on that uh where could you edit something could you solve for that longtail things where you want to edit you want to put subtitles you want to have colors on the subtitles now I think open ai's focus is Agi someone has to pick a problem like this open AI is not going to pick something like this post that to improve on that problem and to like get the Finer Things done you need a data flywheel for data flywheel you need people's intent and then you need to look at all these models fine-tune them change them to match the user intent so that is what we would do for example what we would like to do is basically could you edit a video like a Netflix documentry can the pause the audio the pauses the transitions all of that combined which is then layered so changeable across and uh what I'm not scared of is Sora I want Sora to win big time we have been looking for something like Sora what I'm worried about is Agi I don't know what AI does yeah and we

### Reflections on potential AI-driven societal changes [37:29]

were talking about this before the part started right uh which is open I might not really compete with you they were not going to go into the last mile delivery of these tools because their goal is Agi but if AGI comes out we're all like it's sort of like what's the point of building any s anything if AI comes out right uh and I have some unformed or slightly found thoughts around AGI because I've been thinking about the problem for a year like for me it's felt a lot more serious that's why my Twitter username is waiting for AGI I've been thinking about this for a lot more time than most other people and we built a bunch of tools right we built auto code which was text to uh code we built Alpha C which was text to images but for YouTube thumbnails we built Gardner box which is just that's a CH GPT rapper and then I tried to build a video model but then quickly realized this is a very difficult problem right and now Sora is using a very different technique to do it so I'll probably have to give it another attempt but the price to play is like $100 million if I have to really build it as a product right so we said we'll build it as experiments we'll learn but we'll build a Services a we'll use the best state ofthe Earth tools uh to kind of you know uh do it as a service for other people but I think if AGI does come and Elon must tweeted today that AGI is going to come at some point at by 2029 and none of what we do is going to be meaningful then have you do you have any thoughts around AI I think like basically all technology revolutions were super scary at the beginning of them but they have not turned out to be that I think like basically with AGI right now if like all of the we are moving definitely moving from a place of information to expertise so we'll have expertise at of fingertips I don't think with AGI craft goes away I also feel that like what we are talking about with AI today is let's say it's doing 8 9% of our work I think like a with AGI it would start doing like 15% of work and I also believe in like human beings are we are so resilient and we also want more like we want more than gbd4 clearly and I think also I don't think like AGI would be the last thing uh humans will invent so like on a very macro level my Outlook is quite positive and I'm like AI is like electricity uh it's much it goes much deeper than what we think uh and a new kind of electricity is being invented as we are alive and electricity did wonders for us and it would do wonders for us of course there will be some disruption but it's still a intelligence multiplier to the world and that is what actually we have been chasing all our lives and AGI is just like a step to that so we'll have to like change lives but like on a broader level does it uh improve life I think so you know what I think it's very strange I think AI will bring about Utopia because if you are able to manufacture everything for zero create everything for zero and people think in the physical world AGI will not have you know influence but I think it will right you'll have embodied robots pretty soon and if energy is kind of free and unlimited then take the example of farming right a robot pick out seeds every year from whatever plants you've grown fruits you've grown plant it back I think can do that fairly well computer vision is already good enough to make decisions on condition of soil condition of weather etc right in fact it'll be much smarter than us because it'll know the weather prediction for the next X number of years and it will know when to plant when not to plant so production will increase yeah right and it will get to a point where it's zero it's automated right there's no manual labor involved so you're not paying for somebody else's manual labor to sort of you know get goods and services the only thing which are truly scarce like things like gold or houses or like land I was going to talk about say that we should in that case I think it's a good idea to buy land yeah I've invested in a lot of land recently because of this right and my mom is keeps asking me like why are you buying all these random small plots and I'm like AGI and she's like huh so it's strange but I truly believe that land might be a lot more valuable finance influencers will disagree uh and I but I never tell other people that or even if I I caveat it with I'm an idiot I don't know what I'm doing more because I actually don't know if it's going to play out to be true or not no I think like cost of generating things at near zero is 100% true yeah then we have Utopia then I think people will create stuff for the fun of creating stuff they're still Pottery People today right and I think a lot of people play games because games have bounded rules right in a in any FPS game today like a first- person shooter you can click and headshot somebody else with an Aimbot like there are aimbots that automatically move the uh the pointer to a person's head and click they're really good at it but they banned in the games it's like just because something's more efficient here and AI could be more efficient here we won't let you use it it's against the spirit of the game so I think we'll play a lot more bounded rules we be like we can compete but only human level competition right like the Olympics so I think we will have bounded rules where humans play a lot in and I think entertainment I think we'll have infinite amount of entertainment for sure and you fit in the entertainment category as nid right like you're some way contributing to entertainment so am I with content and everything that we're doing it's it is entertainment and I think people will consume a lot more of entertainment because they have nothing else to do now whether that entertainment is going to be synthetic or real I don't think it'll matter so much but I think the minute you want offline physical entertainment at least in the short next 5 10 years you'll still go watch a play or a you know something in real life meet people so I think we are going back to sort of our tribalistic nature and I think it'll be Utopia but till that Utopia comes lot of jobs and identities are going to get squashed in between also I think like a lot of things would I by the way I completely I have been thinking of buying land for the exact same reason and I think it makes logical sense to buy land uh if this is going to happen the second is I think uh for AGI to become like full scale uh I think there's an energy problem and I think like Fusion or something should be on its way to get solved and if and it will have to come together for uh it to get super connected yeah because in the beginning AI will be super expensive if the energy costs are high oh I think like short term I'm like yeah sure you spoke about Sora I think it's going to be like a dollar a minute or something like that but yes I think it's going to be super expensive to start with and I actually feel that world doesn't have enough energy and I think code because I don't think we have enough people to write code and I think like yeah I AI would solve at least one of them and hopefully we get fusion and then get solved yeah there are like six seven Great teams uh attempting to solve uh for energy yeah I think it'll be solved at some point and I think then you look at things that are truly scar right like everything else is artificial scarcity like company stock prices like an artificial scarcity right um and it's based on something that's happening in the real world if that goes to zero their if the company's Revenue goes to zero then the stock price is worth nothing but things that are truly scarse like and real estate is not scarce you have a lot of real estate but nobody wants to live in some Village somewhere right or some really Village is the wrong word maybe some corner of where there's no civilization so real estate in indan nagar is much more valuable than real estate somewhere else but by the way that's only true for India I mean not let's not say it's only true for India it's not true for the US suban US is great like you couldn't live and uh I mean you couldn't live in panil when it comes to Bombay but like the panil of us is New Jersey and it's great like people live there no I'm talking about much more remote land I'm talking about land where it's like 10,000 acres of Farmland there's not a single grocery store that land will always be valued less today wherever there or here for sure so I feel like that land if you're really going to the middle of nowhere in India you can get land for nothing almost nothing but the challenge is how do you find land with civilization in it right so land with civilization where there's a toiletry system like the entire Plumbing for toilets the entire you know uh grocery infrastructure power all that will become valuable it's the ecosystem around the that's why people pay a lot more for gated communities like okay there's a gym there's a clubhouse similarly you also want facilities like you know lawmaking Etc in some form that's what I meant because in India you go outside the city and all of these things don't exist in the US like you go outside the city and like miles away from the city like you have a Costco and you have a Trader Joe's Starbucks and you have Subway all of that exist and I think that connects back to really the average income what happens to the business then like have you thought to the point where what if AGI comes and inv video becomes worth nothing because let's say everything gets automated and everything happens within open air Char everyone's screwed yeah but have you thought about that case I mean you'll have to think about like you'll have to re we'll have to reinvent ourselves essentially for sure uh but that is how world has been right like initially the films were cut on roles like basically really the film strips were cut and then there was nonlinear editing uh that would require large Compu like everyone has to reinvent themselves and most companies would not reinvent themselves would die it's also almost thinking about Reliance Reinventing themselves on uh taking over the Internet of the country from petroleum uh so I don't think like every few years like such things would keep happening and I think the companies would have to evolve unless uh you want to become like the bomb dying family like in some form interesting do you have any last

### Advice on getting angel investors [47:34]

thoughts to leave us with I mean there is one question I wanted to ask you which is you have a thesis on how you should get Angel Investors on and some Angel Investors that have been very valuable to your life I want to hear about that but I also want to hear any other thoughts you have on running a company running a team running an a that might be very useful for the audience let's talk about the angel investors first I mean look we have raised a lot of money from a lot of people but um two of my favorite stories are basically there are two investors I really wanted one was Gokul rajaram was very known exec in the US basically Gokul knows if Gokul emails anyone in the US they will reply within 15 minutes and I experienced it firsthand and you're talking about the a-listers in the US um and uh hares chaa he used to be the founding CEO of network aan enir committee they both like said no to me and what I did was essentially um asked them that hey I can just wire you $20,000 and you could put in that money uh and they of course felt that I was very persistent and they both like of course did not take my money but ended up investing like 250k each uh I do get this question enough in life that what how do I get Angel investment and sometimes my answers are two right like um one is like did you go so extreme to tell an angel investor you really truly wanted that I would give you money to put it and did you really want that person that much that you would do it if that person said yes uh and the second is if you haven't like pitched 60 70 people then I have no sympathies for you so I think like you have to a lot of people get disappointed like talking to four funds and I'm like no are you hitting 60 are you hitting 50 uh um and if you can't do that then I don't have uh too much sympathy in to be honest like we got rejected like so many times from so many firms it's suppos to be funny I think by the way if Serge did not exist then we would not get investment uh really from any other VC in India interesting and I'm saying surge very specifically interesting because of their accelerator and because they took it because it was an accelerator it's a model where you would fund 20 companies it doesn't matter like you would take shots more shots than what you would ideally I don't think we would qualify we would have qualified back in the day for a venture shot interesting at any form yeah that's uh and do you ever think about

### Thoughts on selling the company and future goals [50:17]

selling the company these days I I used to think about selling the company uh now that I have little bit of money uh I think I everything I need I actually keep thinking about like if I had more money I would pay to do this job uh so I don't uh think about selling the company uh I want to build a large company once in life for sure like an institution uh institution becomes subjective let's put a number to it let's say I want to build a $150 million in Revenue business uh and then I can revaluate life when we get 200 we plateau again or what whatever so we could reevaluate life but um I think like that's what that's where the goal is um everything has a priz in life uh I really don't know my price at this point but I'm sure there's a price but I'm not thinking about it I'm really loving it also I don't think like something like an AI I don't think this level of serendipity is going to hit again it might hit again once more so you won't get the opportunity I don't think so and I think like this is the time to like really play your best game interesting and also super fun to play the game interesting and I mean the real AGI is the friends we made along the way all the people we learned from hung out with and I think I'm sure you know this right all the smartest people in the world only hang out with you once you have proven that you are worth hanging out with and I think by building an Aug and getting it to the scale that you've gotten it to you've made your mark on the world in a way already and I think now it's just about let's make a mark with a big set of an audience with a bigger with the next level of folks right but I don't think I'm like just generally U the Jensen of nvidia's uh video Hit me hard I don't think I'm very smart actually but I'm super persistent like I'm the kind of a person who the quote of Will Smith right like you put me on a treadmill either I win or like I die something like that right like so I'm super persistent and I think that's my superow I don't want to be known for my persistence uh I don't think intelligence will matter anymore like I think there was a time where people could stand up and be like look I'm so smart I don't think it matters anymore like AI is going to beat out intelligence in fact I would argue that AI is not as persistent because it can't do real World back room deals in a way I'm not even like I agree to what you're saying but I'm not even only saying from that perspective uh all smart people I've hired founders of different companies I've known I've invested in the thing with smart people is I think they want fast gratification I've hired like very Senior Team from Uber I've hired Senior Team from like topnotch companies they just want much faster gratification and maybe life work like that at uh a Google or an Uber I have not seen it but uh we have been quite slow like in seven years we do north of 30 million rev so it's not very fast really like if you place things in context but uh yeah I think they need faster gratification and the moment gratification keeps going away I think the problem is they think that basically people are judging them and it doesn't work and I think persistent people like what are you going to judge me all like I don't care and then I to get up back and fight in fact like I almost believe that right now we are doing great I am not going to do well in life again there's going to be a down period again 100% I have zero doubts about it I'm like let me collect the energy to spend it there but H there no question about it and then again it's going to be like great and again it's not going to be great like for sure and I'm just mentally okay with it yeah I think Jeff bizo said this right like intelligence is not in short supply courage is well I think so it's tough to be courageous when things look bad and all your life you've been told that you can't have a failure like in school college failing is a crime your parents will throw you out of the house or whatever right like I guess it would be very hard in Indian households but real world is different like you have to fail and you will see failures and aborting right before a failure is probably not I'm telling you my I a different person post the plateau like just a very likewise my last year wasn't that great and I think it's taught me so much I am who I am because of the ups and the Downs yes and what it does is basically like gets you know you are somewhere in life and things come to you but you want more things like better things bigger things and the thing is you need to grow up and the plateau in your head is actually then you're pushing yourself to grow up and as you grow up you start getting that and that's the new normal and you'll have to keep pushing back again I that's what my thinking is I'm not sure if it's true or not yeah thank you so

### Closing thoughts [55:32]

much sankit I really enjoy this conversation because I feel like um you're one of those few people who it's very raw when I talk to you like in the sense it's like it's as is it's not like corporate speak and I don't think you're going to change when you hit like 100 million Revenue 200 million Revenue whatever right I think you're going to be the same person and as somebody who has you know been in this ecosystem for a very long time it's always very nice to hear of especially a SAS success because it's like finding a needle in a ha stack it's very tough and I'm also really glad that you took the AI Opportunity by the reain and sort of you know pivoted the company around it because few people have the courage for it yeah intelligence a lot of people had I think I thrive in I thrive jumping off the cliff for some reason like Comfort I hate the Comfort the moment I don't have comfort I don't know I think it's how I've studied for engineering and like the conditioning happened like on in life but for some reason uh I actually feel like I would be a I'm a Fab wartime person and a pretty mediocre peacetime person that's it thank you for coming and I hope you guys enjoyed something definitely go check out nid I know a lot of you are you know really keen on the latest video tools so check out nid they've got something really nice called nid Ai and yeah definitely follow s on Twitter he keeps putting out nice wisdom on running a company and it's as a founder who now our team starting to get large it's very interesting to always listen to other Founders who run large companies cuz these issues that you had of bloated Talent you got somebody from some bigname college and then you know or bigname company and then they just don't know how to they work in a small company so I'm learning a lot of the same things I mean i' I'm handling a lot of those same things so it's very enjoyable awesome why