From Getting Six-Pack abs to buying out companies ft. Ankur @warikoo

uh hey guys how's it going weber cinti here and i am with mr ankur what's happening all good ever good to be here man i'm very excited to have you and i must say that uh you know like the very few people who i connect with when it comes to the level of energies and you're probably sit in the top tier of that so every time i see a video of yours it's super duper inspiring uh and i'm very excited for this one to be very frank like super excited but uh just to introduce the show this show doesn't have a name yet uh it just goes on my youtube it's a podcast where i said i ask all the questions that i would like to ask to the person uh here in this case it's you and i document that and i put that out on youtube and that's what the show is about so it's let's call it a podcast okay let's just that's good enough awesome so i'm good how is kobe treating you like how has things been

are you not not too bad yeah whatever we i think we're very privileged and very fortunate to not have had any uh negative repercussions of covid health wise or any which other way so very grateful very blessed thanks for asking awesome uh you look great too so thank you starting with the first question that i had so you were a rocket scientist

if i could call that one you started a rocket scientist and you turned out to be a motivational speaker towards the end if i can call that one because that's what google calls you has right and there has been so much before between and after right so if you had to quickly run me run me and all the audience to an introduction of who you are what has been in the past and what you do right now and everything middle and before and after it how would that how would you end it that that's the only question we'll be able to cover in this podcast but i'll here's the good part wherever i don't know who i am and i love that about myself because i don't like to box myself there was a time early on in my life when i loved boxing myself that the way you described me i'm a rocket scientist because i'm a space scientist i'm a doctorate i'm an astrophysicist and these were the words that i associated myself with and these were the only words that i wanted to associate myself with and uh and life had its funny way of making me realize uh how it's way more powerful than i am or my ambitions are or my dreams are or my predictions or imagination is so i was actually in the u. s doing my phd planning to become an astrophysicist joined nasa as a space scientist and devote my life to academics and whatnot and through that journey i just realized that physics in general was something that i was good at it came naturally to me but if i held a hand on my heart and asked myself am i happy with it then the answer was evidently no not any longer and that's when i decided to to quit and drop out of my phd come back to india and started my life all over again at the age of 24 and joined isb for my mba program at 25 i graduated at 26 joined management consulting thoroughly enjoyed my time for three years there and then in 2009 i became an entrepreneur and that's what i've been doing ever since and last year i stepped down as the ceo of my startup nearby. com and ever since i've been devoting a fair bit of my time towards content creation and i have to admit yesterday i was watching a video of tony robbins and he was speaking and then the title came below and it said tony robbins business and life strategist and i was like that's it that's who i am that is who i am i needed someone to tell me who i am so for now i'm a business and life strategist whatever that means very interesting so i mean what is most fascinating about you is i have seen people like i mean we all of us have seen people where you know like they're trying to build their brands or in terms of personal brand which is on the rise right now right i'm also trying to like the same ship right now right to be very frank uh two uh people who are trying to build startups so when we think about journeys right usually people start with a personal try to build a personal brand to a startup and then they're like okay like i want like all this is great now i want to get deep into something and then they do things like physics and then they join nasa but for you it's been like completely opposite right the journey has been a flip side of it which is most fascinating about me because even though you say that i'm a content creator now and you said this over and over again it's hard for me to believe saying that how is that even possible like ankur is up to something else for sure there is something else coming is he working on the gig economy i don't know like a creator space he is doing something for sure he or he is basically testing waters of the you know the creator economy it cannot be him making content that's and you are on live three times a day i'm not if i'm not wrong you have youtube videos coming up because i subscribe to everywhere and i see your content flowing in from every place and like how is this guy managed is managing to do this so insane man like i have so many questions uh picking everything that you said in those last uh two minutes of content that you just put out again just saying too much of content now but you get the video but before i didn't go deep into your groupon story your you know your nasa story to your current content creation story something that again shook me which kind of there's so many instances which have made me like i would follow yours one thing that absolutely shook me is uh when i heard about the fact that for five months you said it i'm gonna get a six-pack i'm like man what what the hell i mean i i hope you don't uh mind range i know not at all but then i use the f-word more than i should you wanna tell about the six-pack thing first it was uh yeah it was uh and that's why i don't

like to categorize myself it was a fascinating journey so what had happened was in 2012 i got diagnosed uh with a condition called a vascular necrosis and what it does basically is the blood to the hip bone stops so the hip bone starts decaying and becomes really hard to walk and it typically happens because of three reasons it happens because of excessive smoking excessive alcohols or excessive drugs none of which applies to me so i i'll i lie in that 10 don't know why it happened category okay but because of that i had to undergo a surgery and i was on bed rest for three months crutches for five months and i distinctly remember being a very active person that when the disorder was diagnosed the doctor on the prescription very clearly said you don't want to go through any further damage to the hip bone so stop walking and there wasn't stopped walking like hannah you just hit me hard because like man like how can you stop walking yeah so i of course the doctor said that i have to stop walking and that was really hard for me so i asked myself when all of this was over that what is it that i can do to tell life that this chapter of my life this phase of my life is over and in the moment of craziness as i'm usually subjected to i said i will run and i decided to run or sign up for the half marathon that was happening that year so many both right murray i trained and did everything and i had before the day of the marathon never run 21 kilometers as a stretch the maximum that i had run was 14 kilometers but that day i ran 21 and when i ran it i instead of feeling good about it i felt i cheated because i was like yeah and today i just show up and run 21 that's like a fraud so what can i do where i cannot cheat where i can't just one day wish that i can do this yeah and that was when i decided i will get six-pack abs because that is possibly the most intense commitment physically one can make lifestyle diet everything and you can't just one day get up and wish that you had six packs you literally have to work towards that so that's the long story genesis of how i got six-pack abs at the age of 33 when i didn't need to my all my friends are like boss there's only one reason guys get six-pack abs it is to get married it is to date people what is up with you and i was like nothing it is genuinely because i just wanted to throw myself a challenge of doing something that required daily commitment crazy i mean i also a lot of times wake up and say you know what uh what will make me confident and a lot of times feel that you know like getting myself a six-pack would actually make me confident but then i'm like ah that's too much of effort uh let's eat let's just eat healthy and stay fit and i'm happy with that and i'm like you know understand when are they focus on something else this is not right because i've tried this trust me i've tried this you know yeah quite consistent with food i've tried consistent with gym for a month or two and the moment you hit that shape that you're okay with right you're like t-shirt that's what hits my mind i'm like screw it uh but yeah this is crazy man so do you still have a six-pack so here here's the mantra of uh fitness the month of fitness is you should be so fit that a six-pack app is always a month away and no more so i am at that stage like if i want to get six packs you give me a month i'll be at six banks nice amazing awesome so like i want to jump onto the space of uh you know like the time where you came back from uh from us joined uh isb uh and right now the board of directors right at isb you're on the board i was no longer it was a two-year stand nice um and uh yeah from there you uh and from the consulting habit and they joined the startup called is grab on groupon sorry viewpoint groupon my bank groupon which is supposedly an international brand right tell me what happened there to the story where again this is super fascinating i've never heard of stuff like this that a person bought the business of groupon how the hell

does that happen like this when i heard about this uncle this is when i decided that no matter what i need to get on a call with you how does that happen for audience who have no idea what i'm talking about ankur managed to buy of business of an international business imagine like uh like a uber's business not uber is probably a too big a business but imagine someone's buying out a indian entity offer international business and that's what uncle managed to do with groupon right how you know does that work out and tell me everything about it that your reaction reminds me of the reaction we had when we proposed this for the first time to the headquarters their reaction is like what the hell exactly they're like thank it was actually a fascinating journey so what happened was i started the groupon india business in 2011 i ran that for four years and in 2011 groupon also became public it listed itself and it was a grand success but then very quickly it didn't become so great and we had our own struggles and our own wars to fight so by the time it was 2015 it was very evident that i had spent four years in building the group on india business it was heading in the right direction but there was a lot more that could be done but the attention of groupon global was clearly on the us and europe which were the two largest markets for it so i had two options option one or rather three let me just say two option one was stick around i was in the top 50 of group on global i was flying to chicago every quarter i was in the no it was great money everything was just awesome you're living life option yeah exactly like a retirement life if you will option two was quit all of that and no one cares and then go and look for another opportunity maybe start up on your own again but what i said yeah and the third one was what would come to the crazy maverick which was hey why don't we buy this business from groupon and then run it on your own and it was honestly just an idea it was an idea that i floated in my head discussed it then with the senior guys i grew up on india all of them of course loved it because it's just so enamoring and so exciting to even imagine and then we began the hard journey of convincing groupon that this is the right thing to do and that took a really long time it took nine months of effort from the time we conceptualized to the times the deal got done and then we were fortunate to partner with sequoia which were very generous to fund this acquisition and that's what we did in august of 2015 we bought the groupon india business from groupon and that became nearby which is what i continued to run for four years until last year crazy i mean uh like when i think about this right what stopped you now that you've built the business ground up right what stopped you like why would you want to buy a business or something like a groupon business instead

build something again from ground up and i'm sure this time it would have been much faster was it the legal binding that stopped you from doing it or was it something else it was partly the fact that there was of course rules that didn't allow me to participate in the same industry but i think more importantly than that while i wasn't married to that industry as such i just felt that there was a lot of underpenetrated work that we had done which we could capitalize upon and the fact was groupon india was a running machinery we had merchants we had customers we had a marketplace it made money it made profits um but i was also very clear of what are the things that groupon should not have done which we will not do when we become nearby and when we became nearby those were the calls that we took so i think back then i was convinced that taking the groupon india business forward was the right thing to do if you ask me today i'd say that it's not so obvious uh a solution or proposal so i will pay a lot more attention to what you're proposing which is hey could you have started another groupon equivalent from scratch or maybe done something else i don't know because that's always a what if and the answer will never be clear but i do recognize that picking up something and changing the brand name changing the identity was a lot harder than we imagined particularly in a country like india it takes a lot for people to mentally like group one group on both them when the fact is is not there in india and that's because groupon was a very established brand name we spent a lot of energy and effort in establishing it and then changing groupon to nearby was not easy it still is decently sized business group on globally yes globally it's a great business uh it's it's large of course covered has had its impact but before that it's large it's profitable um so yeah it's a great business to be in i mean uh so i remember those days because when that transition happened i was working with uber right uh and uh when the transition happened all of a sudden we could see uh you know three later rides about nearby and you're trying to uh you know show off that cool new brand right now which used to be the boring green color brand before and you positioned it like a you know young brand to save money and which was amazing to see right i think that is what was missing and there's always this fight because though i have i've had a very little experience and not at the level that you did but i've worked with global companies in the past for last six years both of them are still silicon valley based and you know like one was uber and then fluke and we always had this fight of getting more attention for india and they are always focused towards the international uh you know the us business or the uk business so when you talk about this right like it's crazy it gives me chills saying that man oh this was an option this is an option to fight out this is so amazing man this is amazing right now that now that you're put nearby on board uh and you've said that i'm gonna build a business nearby and uh nearby basically was still is converting offline business and bringing them some sense of online to it right that's what nearby does yeah right so and i don't see this as an easy game to play at all right because back in the college days i try to do something with sparse specifically what you guys do that right now which path as well which is supposedly the biggest part one of the biggest yeah right when i was in fourth year i tried to do something with sparse and it was painful i struggled for six months to convince the owner saying that boss give a small bit of discount and i'll get you business here like i don't need it i don't have to go online i have enough business and everything around it but like i still i still ima can only imagine how do you make sure how do you execute something such ob savvy and be profitable like what how do you find that mix i don't know if it is too deep into business for this podcast but this is a genuine question i've had

like how do you find that i think that no it's a great question i'll try to answer this as easily decipherable as possible and think in india it's very obvious of that a combination of operations and technology is the true way of building a technology company yeah which needn't be true in india like you've been part of uber and for all technical purposes uber not just in india and globally is an obsolete operations company yeah it's just crazy right the driver's side of it is just so intense onboarding recruiting training constant monitoring it's insane yeah and it looks like a really cool tech company but there is so many people behind the scenes that are doing that and i i'm fortunate that we realized this early on that this is how it's going to be maybe it was the hangover of looking at the likes of nokri. com make my trip which were the true flagship bearers of the indian internet system or for that matter even flipkart where they built the entire logistics system ground up which is just easy to say you know online store hair corridor physical remissioning and nothing like that but yeah it just takes so much to get that package delivered uh every day and the cash handling and so on so i think the realization was very clear that we don't want to be the school tech company that hires the coolest engineer and works from uh air conditioned office never gets to step out and we build a big business that wasn't the intention it was very much like he fight market two what would really help was our uh our very strong belief that the market is changing and we just need to be patient um we were saying there are two ways of convincing the merchant to come online one is to keep telling them that they should come online or two is for them to see it themselves that their consumers have already gone online and we just waited for the second to happen we honestly like i remember in 2012 2013 literally every big company and their cousin brother and cousin chacha and cousin mama had a deal site like literally there were hundreds of deal sites pick any big company and they had it inside and but it was just early and so they lost patience they lost money they lost everything and while we persisted and we weren't so um and jio really helped the at least for the food categories tomato really helped we always saw zamarta as an enabler as a competition for sure because they just allowed people to browse and discover and that made it very visible to the restaurant that boss before the customer is stepping in they are checking you out and it is not the fact that you are in this mall in this high street that gives you the footfall it is because people know of you yeah online before they even know of you offline and once that tipping point happened then it became easier and easier for us to pull that game off but we thankfully built the machinery in such a way that we were always prepared with a feet on street dedicated account management team that was just fetching and closing these merchants day in and day out i mean i've been part of a part of couple of partnerships with nearby when i was at uber as well so we had done fair bit of work with uber as well but how is it doing now how's it doing it's of course kovit was

a dampener a big dampener and uh we had to readjust in multiple ways unfortunately right before kobed we had that really big log out campaign by the restaurant industry around food delivery players and we were just caught in that crossfire oh yeah exactly right so uh so it's just been a very hard one here um while we were like wonderfully on track i remember when i stepped down as a ceo uh it was profitable it was growing after four years we were finally making money month on month um and it would have been lovely to just see that through but unfortunately there were other plans uh we're getting there right i think we are we're with far more perseverance than than most others so i'm fairly convinced we will we'll make that happen i'm sure now the big question right what made you realize that you want to step

down and pursue content creators face which is again mind effing blowing to me like how why like who would do that man like what happened what was the mindset why would you do it i had uh i had a very honest conversation with myself about when it had been nine years running groupon and nearby and that's a fair bit of commitment made from my side i felt personally that i had done my bit to get to the company to a certain size scale stability that was expected from me i had a fantastic team of co-founders who i could trust blindly to take their company forward and perhaps do even a better job than i could and all my economic financial interests and incentives were taken care of in terms of my stocks vested my ownership being concluded so i just felt that i could do something else i didn't know what it would be and honestly i took my time and it's not that content creation is now what i want to do full time but i do know that this is what gives me joy it comes naturally to me and there are different facets of this that i can explore very much on the lines of what you were doing which is not just building your identity but helping people build their persona online be helpful in whatever manner you can that you know better than most so i i've just been spending my time doing that interacting with first-time entrepreneurs helping them hopefully not make the same mistakes that i made and through that piecemeal investing acting as a mentor as a coach to these startups so it's a lot that keeps me meaningfully engaged while leaving a lot of time on my hands i have this philosophy key so i i think a lot in two by two matrices okay and my heart two by two matrix so one of the two by two matrices that i have is x axis pay the actual effort okay low and high and why access pay perceived for me content creation is in the quadrant of low actual effort and high perceived effort but the reality is i spend three hours a week making content and that's it everything else then is a machine i'm a very process driven guy so i have a team which just takes care of everything and it's clockwork it's a process it's a system um and i love it i just love it because it gives me so much free time to think about things to actually engage with people in the right manner to do things that i want to do while this continues to add meaning to my time whatever little i spend on it makes a lot of sense i mean to add a point here right you you're saying that for people perceive value is high the reason is not everybody can create content like you can it's natural to you so i mean for all the listeners out there don't expect to spend three hours and get the kind of output that he does not everybody the the way i would do that and peter thiel says this peter thiel says that you you gain disproportionate advantage when you do things that are not so obviously easy for others to do sure and my takeaway for that is if you can devote your life towards finding that one thing that you can easily do that most people can't that is the best joy that you can give yourself that's the best gift and it's unfortunate that it so happens when we pick up our first big job and whatnot we first asked ourselves this question am i good at this but very quickly the question changes to how can i get good at this and while that may seem like a very fair question to ask the problem with this question is it stops all opportunities to actually find what you're good at because now you're just forcing yourself to become good at something that is defined by society by your boss by your salary by your relatives by whosoever and that's just a little unfortunate if every time we pick something new in life we asked am i good at this am i happy doing this and if the answer is no we were to change instead of trying to make that work we would perhaps have a very different life very true so like based on what i understood again right like uh the two takeaways from here one is that you're not only doing content creation during way more than that i'm probably assuming you're super active on the startup space investing space uh we could talk a little bit about that plus what you gave away right now is that boss this is not permanent i'm doing this for now i might do something else so is there something running on your cards

is a new startup coming into the picture i really don't know and i'm not being uh i'm not being very secretive here i am generally do not know what it is i see glimpses of it shaping up um but too early to tell too a little bit what so i've had this question back of my mind that i wanted to ask you any which was little later but i think now is the time to ask that is if there was one space that would ex that excites you right now right for me it's a tech that excites me the most right now right a person like you what is that space that excites you the most that is let's say today everything is off and you get a choice that this is a space that you can work on what would that be and why i it would

conclusively be helping people become entrepreneurs okay um it's not a space it's not an industry it's not a profession but i think it's definitely a purpose and i would would love love to think of incubation i would accelerators fellowships i would love to think of just going through a journey of understanding what it is to become an entrepreneur whether it is for you or not whether it is at that scale that you imagine or maybe a lot lesser whether it is bootstrapped or funded or whatever the case may be just go through the early legwork and heavy lifting of understanding what it is to run a startup that gives me that gives me a lot of joy because i do feel a lot of people become entrepreneurs because they think it's sexy and a lot of people do not become entrepreneurs because they think it's hard and neither of these two is true i think it's it's somewhere in the middle where a very very high percentage of capable people are not becoming entrepreneurs and they should and a very high percentage of people who should have never become an entrepreneur are also becoming one do you want to take a couple of examples still some beans on controversies now uh ankur you said a very important thing that is uh you want to you know help people start their kick in their entrepreneurship journey now i've had this question which i don't have an answer to do you think entrepreneurship can be taught because i personally feel you need to be a different kind of a person to be a good entrepreneur like the risk-taking ability the persistence the consistency being okay not getting paid for these are not common traits of common people right and even though i've done fair i mean very small bit of entrepreneurship since in the past i still call myself i still you know i'm very vocal about the fact when somebody says entrepreneur usually i'm not because every time i started up something i always had a cushion in the back i started when i was in college right i had engineering though it was very successful for that age i still had cushion and then everything that i've done i had uber i had plug now for the first time i'm like screw everything i want to do something by myself by giving myself one year time i'm doing this after a lot of time also there is a question because i've had fair bit of success in the last four months which made me realize that okay i can build something by myself now you know but without that cushion there are people a lot of people who take this tab and those are the real entrepreneurs by

blood is what i feel right so coming back to the question of do you think entrepreneurship can be taught like is that something that we can teach people i i think the uh yes the answer is yes to me the entrepreneurship can be taught i do still maintain that it is not for everyone um it i feel that the motivation to become an entrepreneur is misguided a lot of people think that entrepreneurship is a great way to make money i feel that a lot of people think of entrepreneurship to escape their current life because they hate their job their manager and their boss their company um i feel a lot of people want to become an entrepreneur because it's a cool thing to do and none of these reasons are the right reasons to become an entrepreneur so if you have the right reason and if you actually have the right dna which can be taught it doesn't need to be something that you were born with there is no harm in becoming an entrepreneur and equally so there is no shame in saying i don't want to ever become an entrepreneur and i'm perfectly okay going through the professional journey because it is fulfilling it is absolutely fulfilling and if you were to do it the right way there will be very little defining and differentiating you from an entrepreneur and otherwise like is satya nadella an entrepreneur who knows man he's as close as it gets to being an entrepreneur and just because he doesn't own microsoft doesn't make him not an entrepreneur is is sheryl sandbag an entrepreneur she is as good an entrepreneur as anyone else and just because she doesn't own facebook or didn't start it doesn't make her one or not the other and there's so many examples like that where people have gone on to do meaningful things um that then maybe anyone else could have also done or never done um so i to answer your question i think entrepreneurship can definitely be taught um but it is not for everyone what are those traits that you look at

uh if you can answer this where you say that okay this person probably is a guy who could test it out obviously you cannot say you are going to be successful and you are not it's impossible i'm assuming at least right i um i feel that there are two or three things which stand out one is a obsessive level of curiosity where you don't fall in love with the solution as much as you love fall in love with the problem you are constantly asking questions around the problem why do things happen this way what can be done differently how is it possible so on and so forth so this childlike curiosity of how what why when the second one is i don't want to say it so that it comes across wrong but i would almost say stability emotionally stability financially stability physically stability mentally spiritually the reason why is because it is an intensely hard journey it is a hard journey where you're signing up with stuff that you don't even know of and things will go your way one way and the other day it will not and if you're not stable or if you don't have an environment that gets you that stability then it can be really really stressful and harmful and it doesn't matter then what comes out of it because you don't want to be the entrepreneur who's running a billion dollar company but is uh popping pills every night to sleep you don't want to sign up for that like that to me that would not be a happy outcome of being an entrepreneur uh and the third one is this knack of finding talent and being comfortable with that talent better than you oh my god amazing gives me chills again when you say this point and um i feel these three are almost the if and only if conditions for genuinely enjoying the journey of being an entrepreneur brilliant awesome so this is me trying to validate myself by asking you these questions again now uh going back to a specific thing that i wanted to pick your brain on is what is your take on online education because with covet kicking in you see so many things going off and you have an online course as well so i could i would say that you're a part of the ecosystem as well right and what is your take on your online education uh is online education udemies of the

world or is it something else where there's a hybrid model what do you think is the right balance especially for india right online education is very different for india what is your take on that i mean if you have dig that space a little so my belief weber is platforms are going to become commoditized and standardized and online education in india will replicate what offline education in india looks like and that is it will be brand slash instructor driven what i mean by this is the following today if you want to send your kids to school there are a few names that pop up the reason why those names pop up is because the results of the school are better the teachers maybe of the school is better they do a better job of telling and tom tomming about whatever it is so it's led by the brand and if you want to prepare for iit-jee for chartered accountancy for law and so on there are these very well respected names those names could be individual a group of individuals but every student has gravitates toward them and i feel that online education in india will have more or less the same construct as the offline education where the best instructors will now not be geographically limited and will have a reckoning and a following which is far more agnostic of where the student is and by virtue of that they will also start attracting or associating with the right brands so if a weber becomes exclusive to a edtech platform then that edtech platform attracts the brand value because of web hub and if webhub chooses to remain independent and do the things that he is capable of without relying on anyone's that people will naturally gravitate towards weber and it wouldn't matter where vapor is it could be on his website linkedin it could be on any other platform and he could literally be everywhere and people will buy it because it's web of not because it's the platform so i feel that platforms are just going to become marketplaces and true blue sell through and it's the quality of the instructor that is going to define the following and that's the market that's exactly i mean if you think about it that's exactly what upgrade is doing right now not updated unacademy and then you get all these really good guys in specific niches and very clearly they're saying the creator will drive the audience because they are so good so that i feel is one space while on the other side right on the people are consuming information the students part of it the experience that they go through there's been a huge debate internationally nobody cares if it's live or recorded or anything around that but in india what i've seen is the perceived value of a live class is much higher than that of a recorded class where if you think about the quality of content that could be conveyed a recorded class could have much higher quality of content because you know it can be tuned but a live class cannot be tuned but the perceived value of a live class is much higher and that's exactly why an academy has grown so big right while there's so many other players of states smaller in that space which is absolutely the opposite if you think about it in the international frame what do you think is happening in that space like do you have you thought about this like what do you think like someone has to

crack this because the moment you say live class it's not scalable anymore it is not the here is the way that i think it will happen or at least i hope it happens go back to our time and i'm sure you will relate to this and the audience will as well if you saw when we were kids any hoarding or board of a beauty parlor it invariably always mentioned trained by shannazzo yeah standard this was the quality check mark yeah now i am lifting this up and hoping that that's what happens in education as well and here's what will happen webhub is a quality instructor and he knows his stuff and he is of course not going to spend his time doing live classes because that's not the best use of his time here's what he will do though he will pre-record and produce great quality content which is what you are already doing and he will then also run training workshops for people who will be certified by web to act as instructors so what will happen is students will consume webhub's content at their disposal on their time on their schedule and then they will have office hours with instructors who will be almost emulating what webhub would say do think if he were to take that live class and of course occasionally weber will come in and put up a grand show and do whatever it is but the model will be exactly like how the us does it in the universities which is there is a professor and then there is a teaching assistant sure and the professor comes gives the lecture and gets out of there and the teaching assistant then hand holds the students and conveys whatever it is imagine this to be now a online offline combination where in my society and i stay in a society which has 10 buildings and close to about 600 700 families why do we have to send our kids to a school why can't the society school be in the basement where my kid wants to learn biology and he will not learn it from some random anchor varico who claims to be a biology phd and then this he will learn it from the best professor that there is in the world it could be a stanford head of biological sciences and that individual will come and on a curriculum convey a recorded course and then there are people who are trained in the society or live nearby who've taken that training go have that certification and will then sit with that child to make them go through whatever is it that they would have i hope edtech goes there i hope that is what edtech becomes not just in india but globally i love how you draw palettes to share as you're saying here but makes a lot of sense it again thank you these are my questions personal questions that i'm throwing at you to pick also now going back to that point of uh you making that switch from you know like uh stepping down uh as a ceo right you probably i mean i mean i don't know what was your stance there the moment when i see something like this then i would assume that okay and you also kind of spoke about it a little is you hit that financial independency stage for which you said okay now i can take this stance because probably i don't need uh you know running money into the account or whatever it is right so what is your take on financial

independence because this is something that is again going bonkers everywhere everybody wants to retire by 35 40. i have my goal at 35. uh when i say retirement i'm not saying that i'm negan netflix but uh when i talk about that i would like to do something that you are doing right now right do uh what i personally like doing and that's exactly that's according to me is financial independency so what is your take on that uh what is your take on the overall topic yeah i look money is important and i think it's foolish to deny yourself that awareness but i also feel that there comes a tipping point where you should stop working for money and work and make the money work for you so here's my approach my approach is have financial stability that covers the pace it doesn't pay for your ambitions it pays for your existence right and then whatever time is saved through that minimal investment you deploy that to create wealth for you so there is money that pays the bills and there's wealth that you create by virtue of what you know and the skills that you have look at how you've done it like and i i'm a third-party observer so i'll be making a lot of assumptions but you're essentially creating content that will survive even beyond you and it is something that makes you money even when you sleep and that is the best use of your time because you called out time from whatever is it that you were doing and of course you were professionally engaged and busy and whatnot but you called down the time and devoted it towards creating wealth for you that hopefully will compound and get you to that financial freedom where you wouldn't have to think about money at all but it's foolish for you to quit your job and become very romantic about the idea of uh practicality is very important realism is underrated and it is just very important that you have that financial backing at all points of time people misunderstand it because then they get addicted so they're like salaries and that is when you get caught up because that's not wealth that is just money borrowed at your expense of your time that's the worst use of your life so i mean if i may ask this point-blank question saying uh how do you do that math if you i mean i'm assuming you've probably have gone through that how do you do that matt of saying okay now that x is in the account uh now i mean i don't want to talk about the x as a figure but how do you come to that x that x is very simply a calculation of all your expenditure and if you have that luxury multiplied by 12 times so you have a runway of 12 months and either or you have guaranteed incoming salary whichever of the two so the way that i would do it is if my expense is monthly everything included but not being fashionable just basics absolutely basically it maintains your lifestyle doesn't make you live like a urban poor but gives you the respect that you have um let's say it's 50 000 one lakh rupees a month so you have a job that pays you that and you have now two choices choice one is and you're not happy with the job so you want to do something else so you have two choices one is you continue doing the job become better at it way cloud data you almost become like and i use this in a bad way you almost become an employee in your mindset and employee in the mindset is and i will just focus on my own self rather than what my boss wants me to do and that means i will not grow have the opportunities that most other people do but i am okay with that why because whatever time i save by being an employee i devote that towards building wealth for me and that could be creating content a personal brand that could be learning a new skill that could be doing internships and side projects with really smart people that you can learn from that could be doing fellowships or apprenticeships with people that can change the course that could be joining and devoting time towards the network whatever the case may be but you're essentially saying whatever is it that i'm doing right now is not going to make or break my future but what i spend time on besides this is possibly a shot in that direction and that to me is if it's a steady stream then don't think about it if it's not a steady stream then i would encourage you to have at least 12 months of runway so that it should happens you can still hold on build one at least start building one at least okay amazing great uh i'm good my probably one of the final few questions because we are running out of time as well uh is i know that i know for a fact that you invest right invest in startups and i don't know if you would want to name a few here but then uh what is that you look at on an early stage startup when you're starting to

invest because uh that is something that me and my brother started to do as well we made our cup first couple of investments as well and for us for me i only have a skewed perspective to what i think will work fall in love with the idea person and boom you put your hard-earned money into someone else's dream right what is your take on investing because obviously you are way way way more uh no hardly i don't like i i've gone on record saying that i am a really bad investor and i would make a really bad one as well but here's the thing that i look for and maybe that means you shouldn't look for it because i think i am a bad investor one is for me investing is not a way of making money but actually supporting the cause that i spoke of earlier which is that of entrepreneurship uh i love to be part of someone's journey especially if they're smart they're committed they're driven and the opportunity is exciting so i have so far only invested in businesses where i know the founder very well i like the vibe that comes from them i love spending time with them i feel that they are coachable so i can actually guide them and mentor them and add value yes and uh and it's a space where i connect and i can see that i can help them see through it in some way or not if it the this is almost the wrong way of angel investing because angel investing is so risky that you almost always are likely to lose money correct with every deal right so the only way to make money is to be part of almost every good deal but that also means that it becomes very expensive for the angel investor because they need to have that net worth if you are only picking and choosing deals then you most likely will never make money in angel investing so i do recognize that this doesn't work it's a gamble at least not it is a it's a gamble so you have to be very clear on why you're playing that gamble and for me the big reason is that i get to spend time with very smart people and and just get to know them uh for now in the future uh it's funny like the first angel investment that i made was in i think 2013 or 14 and the founder of that startup it didn't work out so it shut down um but i am now working with that founder uh on a business idea um so it's lovely it's awesome to have him as a co-founder i it's awesome to jam with him and there's so much that i learned from him um and who would have thought so it didn't pay me my money but it did give me yeah it gave me a relationship and eventually a co-founder in a business which is awesome okay what is that business anchor under under the wraps we i it's one of those businesses that i hope no one ever knows that i had any role to play in and it becomes big amazing okay that kicks the excitement more uh more than so i'm hoping that we'll see some kind of varico fellowship like field fellowship coming forward based on what i understood uh right since i'm a marketer right what is the first brand that comes into your

mind when you think about good marketing uh nike and indian brand if you may sweetie swiggy very interesting okay so if you had like let's say uh this is before even nearby happened or anything like that let's say you have to choose uh you know

motivational speaking like being a speaker versus being an entrepreneur without actually going through the journey of entrepreneurship which one would you pick entrepreneurship for sure i mean i kind of guessed it but yeah so what is your advice to these young guys like me who want to ditch their jobs right and try to try starting up because they're really

uh really are passionate about the idea they're working towards what is that one word advice that you have always think of what success and failure is uh for you personally i think we all fall in the trap of defining success and failure as defined by the world but it's very important that whoever is starting up or for that matter anyone in their life they always spend time in defining success and failure for themselves what does it mean personally for them brilliant wow brilliant okay finally uh something you always wanted to do but didn't get time

or you couldn't do it which i think is going to be a little tough for you because you kind of do everything that you want to that is the answer there is i don't live my life on uh if there's anything at all that i want to do i would just do it one final question from my front is uh

based on whatever you have noticed about what i've been doing any advice that you have like blunt advice something that you like something that you don't like whatever it is any advice that you have on a personal front for me i like what you're doing here i genuinely i like the energy i like the commitment i like the drive um it's uh it's a great way to test the waters and figure out whether there is something meaningfully large that can be built from this so i would be it will be foolish for me to advise you seem to be figuring things out much quicker than most other people i just wish you the best and it's just you're riding a wave right now and it will look awesome and it'll look it'll feel great and it'll feel like you're on the top of the world and but do recognize at some point of time it will it'll not work as well sure and you need to be just emotionally prepared for that because that is when your true test will happen um but i don't have any advice for you seem to be doing very well awesome i mean because i've got this quite a lot of times from multiple people though i don't ask them i don't ask everybody for advice is that you know what you are doing things too fast is what they say but i believe in this fact that try fast fail fast you know better done than perfect are the two things that i follow on because i feel when we are too obsessive of some about something then it will emotionally and physically drain you both when it fails i'm like let's fail faster so that's yeah so yeah that's that's absolutely early on the more you put yourself out the more feedback you'll get and if you're true to that feedback you will improvise better and you'd have a rock solid product very fast awesome thank you thank you so much ankur it was amazing having you here and i hope i mean i hope you had good time as well i did thank you thank you so very thoughtful but thank you so much for having me bob it's a pleasure thank you so much ankur great thank you so much for having me for those who enjoyed this please do not forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon so that the next video is up in your inbox there you go coming from the man himself awesome ankur thank you so much and i hope we stay in touch as well