Introduction:

The Podcast Episode:

Great podcasts have 3 key ingredients:

1. A great host (this is the most important factor)
2. An above-average guest
3. A good topic

Once you have these in place, the listeners get the ROI they come for. Sometimes it happens that, the host, the guest, and the topic they choose to discuss are all great and then just magic happens.

This happened on Oct 2023, when Mukesh Bansal interviewed Kunal Shah on Risks, Growth and Ethics of Entrepreneurship. A better title would have been – “The only podcast episode you need to listen to before or while building a startup in India” because they cover so much ground that it’s MECE

Why I chose to review this podcast episode:

The acclaimed filmmaker Anand Gandhi puts it better so I quote:

“A recurrent aspiration, and one of the many common aspirations at that, of all intellectual endeavor – of arts and sciences – is the maximization of content density per unit.

A piece of literature is great when there is a high density of experiences contained in a few passages, a photograph great, when it transcends the mere documentation of the moment it’s capturing, a scientific equation great, when many other inferences are contained within it… (The information of the entire organism itself comes from a single genome).” 

Stretching this a bit further, one can say that a podcast episode is great, when there is a high density of experiences in just a few sentences, and taken together the sum is more than the parts. 

Key Takeaways, Analysis and Personal Reflection:

 Caveat: I wrote down 11 pages of notes in a long-size notebook, but I will try to maximize the content density of this article (which is unsurprisingly, one of the core objectives of this blog). 

While the episode covers a lot of ground, I would like to break this down (in typical consultant speak {thank you to all my B-School cases and consulting prep days}), into 3 different levels. The ideas shared in the episode make a lot of sense when viewed from these 3 levels/perspectives: 

Self:

• Before one can start up or do anything for that matter, one has to understand himself/herself better
• A good place to start to evaluate your fitness for startups is to ask yourself, what your core values are. If the following values feature more prominently in your list, then entrepreneurship might be a good route for you
  • Intense Curiosity
  • Ambitious / Extreme Goals
  • Continuous Learner
  • Risk Taking, trying new stuff
• Additionally, he talks about a lot of other qualities, that are not just prerequisites for startup success but also to live a good life. These include
  • Truth Seeking Mindset (being a philosophy buff, this was so reassuring)
  • Think In Analogies
  • Feedback Attraction
  • 1st Principles Understanding
  • 2nd Order Thinking
• The most interesting self-focused takeaways for me personally have been Kunal’s insight into folks who have gotten into IITs and IIMs and I couldn’t have agreed more. It was great feedback and this article is in many ways to put myself out there.
  • Risk Taking
    • Folks who are risk takers have played some form of strategy games during their childhood – I used to play Chess in State and district level tournaments till Grade 5 and while I’m not sure if it has made me a risk taker, I can attest that it has made me think about the consequences of my actions and those of my opponents, 2-3 moves down the lane. [a good second-order thinker, basically]
    • Someone’s ability to take risks is shaped by
      • Upbringing (strict parenting kills risk-taking instincts),
      • Culture (In the Baniya community, businesses and selling are integral and praiseworthy, whereas in most Tamil households, only a good education is the marker of a life well lived)
      • Creativity / Right Brain Driven Thinking Traits (Folks who are neurodivergent (eg: ADHD, autism, etc.,) are gifted at this, but the irony is that most folks are not aware of their neurodivergence and their instincts are killed by their failures, and their environments by the time they reach adulthood)
    • Big life events are great catalysts to propel you onto the right path (a breakup, the death of a loved one, job loss, a new diagnosis, etc.,)
  • Knowing When to Break Rules
    • People who grow up in a strict household have difficulties in knowing when to break vs follow rules; In startup environments, this is a huge skillset/advantage. If you are unsure and underconfident about breaking rules, scaling the startup ladder is going to be tough
  • Selling
    • Most people (esp. those with great backgrounds and batchmates) won’t share their thoughts because of public ridicule. This is a sign of a very compliant childhood and it can take ages for us to grow out of it
    • Being shameless comes easily to people who have faced early setbacks in life; Most of the so-called cultural elites are so status driven, it is hard for us to fail or come across as shameless; People who are ready to be shameless achieve a lot more in India
    • People with great academics (read IIM/IIT etc) are extremely terrible at selling – Kunal suggests this is because life just comes to them, due to their degrees and their salaries. On the contrary, for someone like him who had to  survive, selling was one of the first things he learned in his entrepreneurial journey because it’s so fundamental
    • Interesting Hypothesis (Needs testing) -> The tradition of arranged marriages is one reason why most of us are not good at sales and also a reason for a poor consumption culture
  • Ambition & Curiosity
    • Some folks are inherently ambitious and intensely curious – they don’t know how to be otherwise – this is the reason why both these traits are the hardest to teach -> the code for these traits is written by nature and nurture much before one matures; The good news is the brain is neuroplastic and we can all rewrite the code
  • Thinking in Analogies
    • The brightest minds in the world are those who are extraordinary at thinking in analogies. I remember my favorite IIM Professor (YLR Moorthi), saying that Bill Gates had the unique ability to use both his left brain and right brain and people who can make connections between seemingly unconnected things will lead us into the future
    • Master learners like Kunal learn a lot from hardships. His analogy of taking the concept of virus growth (from COVID) to viral marketing is something we all can learn from
  • End State vs Process Orientation
    • Most of us are focused more on the end state (eg: ChatGPT’s phenomenal capabilities today), but fail to overlook the process it took to get there (vs the facts that the math that made it all possible was discovered in the 90s, the advancements in GPU came about in the early 2000s, the ImageNet Challenge pushed this further in the 2010s)
  • Love & skill for finding and solving hard problems
    • Most of us, in life and startups, are bogged down by solving the not so hard problems; Real growth comes from solving hard problems day in and day out; The most fundamental skill in entrepreneurship is to learn to work on hard problems and hence if you love solving hard problems, entrepreneurship might be your cup of tea.  

Start-ups / Entrepreneurship – the Profession:

Entrepreneurship is tough and has a lot of variability (industry, market, problem etc.,), but listening to Kunal, I could summarize the key prerequisites for successful entrepreneurship as follows:

1. High degree of self-awareness (+ contextual and system awareness):
   1. Entrepreneurship often starts with an individual (or a group) who has a very good understanding of the problem they want to solve. They understand their strengths, values, and ability to stick with it in the long run
   2. They understand the context of this problem (the reason why things are the way they are, their unique capabilities to solve for this problem etc.,)
   3. They also have an understanding of how the problem they are choosing to solve can be impacted by any changes to the broader system they are a part of or how they can influence these systems for the better (eg: regulations, economic cycle, interdependencies etc.,)
2. Bold idea:
   1. The fundamental reason for starting up is to prove that one’s conviction is right. It is this dedication of one human being to his bold idea that is the foundation for not just any startup, but for almost all the great successes that the world has seen; it can range from the Indian freedom struggle to Beethoven’s maniacal focus on making great music to a startup’s quest for immortality
   2. It can start as a personal quest or it can be an outcome of an accidental event, but the birth of this idea and the conviction of the entrepreneur to his idea, is the mother of all great startups or timeless works of art and science
3. Bias to Action + Ritualized Ingenuity:
   1. Bias to Action: This sounds easy, but is hard (at least based on my personal experience). If at all there was one question i had to devote myself to (now), it would be this: Why do some people have an inherent bias to action while most others do not? Is this a nature or a nurture problem? How can one become biased towards action?
   2. Ritualized Ingenuity: This concept is borrowed from Diane Coutu’s wonderful 2002 HBR article “How Resilience Works”. In simple terms, this refers to the ability to make do with whatever is at hand. As Kunal says, a good entrepreneur understands the level of the game they can play at and starts there, without waiting for external events to change.
4. Ability to sell:
   1. This sounds cliched but is so easy to miss. One of the most intrinsic traits of humans is to sell, however, so many of us lose this muscle, because life just comes to us.
   2. In case you struggle hard in your 20s and 30s, and have difficult to please parents you might have picked up good selling skills, but IITs and IIMs almost kill your selling instincts in many ways by giving you life on a platter.
   3. I remember Meesho’s founder and a good friend Vidit Aatrey telling me about how his main reason to switch companies was to learn sales while switching from ITC to InMobi in the early years of his career. I also appreciate his self-awareness to understand and go after the skillsets he had to master at a relatively young age! This is one area we can all keep getting better at forever!
5. Ability to identify high-slope people:
   1. I just love this way of defining great people. High-slope can mean many things but to me, these are people who can learn and love abundantly. They are humble enough to learn new things and cordial enough to work with. Interesting people, to put it simply. And yep, to identify high-slope people, one should himself be high-slope.
   2. Some high-slope people I constantly learn from nowadays → entrepreneurs such as Kunal Shah, Mukesh Bansal, Derek Sivers, American Professors Scott Galloway, Adam Grant, and Cal Newport, the phenomenal tech journalist Kara Swisher, writer Anne Lamott, productivity experts Chris Bailey and Marc Zao Sanders.
6. Ability to absorb uncertainty and failures:
   1. In my lexicon → I consider this as being stoic. Any good entrepreneur has to be able to constantly fail, learn from his failures, be able to pick up himself and his teams from the zenith, generate new ideas and continue to act while the contexts (internal and external) he operates in continue to change at a fast pace
   2. There is also a lot of uncertainty about how things will turn out, and so one should be able to handle anxiety better and be able to focus on the present (when a million things are not going as per plan). As the stoics recommend, having a good grasp of what one can control vs not is a good skill to develop not just for living a good life, but also for building a startup
7. Good judgment/decision-making skills:
   1. This sounds like a no-brainer, but people are not born with good judgment. It comes with experience, time and making decisions, acting on those decisions, evaluating their decisions, and constantly course correcting.
   2. An understanding of our biases (Gurwinder Bohel), behavioral economics (Daniel Kahneman), the resulting fallacy (Annie Duke), and mental models (Shane Parris) also come in handy. However, none of this precedes making decisions and analyzing their impact every time.

Starting up in India:

Kunal’s insight into the Indian psyche is probably the most fascinating part of the podcast for me. He covers so much ground that I would like to categorize his insights into 4 major buckets:

1. Core Indian Motivations: Indians are highly value-conscious. The stuff they attribute the highest value to include
   1. health,
   2. giving their kids the best education and opportunities, and
   3. being recognized (in ascending order of importance) within family, work, and the communities they are a part of. The example that Kunal suggests drives this point. Say, if you are in the fashion/apparel business making a bridal collection (you are just a tributary/distributary of the Ganges), customers will come to you only when they want to look good for an event, whereas if you target a problem that is very core to their motivations (you are the Ganges), then you tend to have a broader market size and greater demand for your products/services
2. Profit Pools: An understanding of profit pools is essential before one can start. I just did a Perplexity search and the first sector it suggests is financial services. No wonder both of Kunal’s startups are focused on this, it just makes logical sense. Finance is the only sector that has the largest profit pool from a startup’s standpoint. There are others like infrastructure, used car sales etc., but these have high barriers to entry. The most helpful insight here is → Profit pools don’t change (like the laws of physics), the way you attack them changes. What was only possible for stock traders in the 1990s, is feasible for finfluencers today.
3. The real India: The podcast suggests that most people in Bangalore or the metro cities are heavily biased to what they see day in and day out. Unfortunately, the real India is much different than what we see here. Two insightful recommendations here:
   1. Rama Bijapurkar’s latest book Lilliput land is based on the premise that in India, the millions of customers in the bottom and the middle of the pyramid make even small profit margins look amazing, and hence building products for these non-metro consumers is the most sustainable business strategy. Picture this stat from the 1st part of her book – the top 9 metros account with a population of at least 5M only account for 18% of total household income, while 50% of household income comes from rural India with 600,000 villages. The challenge is to build for this broad customer pool and this is why India will be more important for Samsung and Oppo than it will ever be for Apple.
   2. This LinkedIn post by the Ken’s COO that defines the California users and how they both lead to and hinder the growth of current-day unicorns is very helpful. When your customer base is only 10M, you can’t really grow forever and you will have to rethink how you can take it to other markets. I love this definition so much, I want to quote it here.
      1. “If you are reading this, you are likely in this category. You are a digital native. You buy nearly everything online—from products, to groceries, to food. You may even have a Netflix subscription. You are the elite user—the one with a lot of spending power, and who is comfortable buying that lipstick from Nykaa or that cold brew from that fancy direct-to-consumer startup in Indiranagar, Bangalore. You probably use Dunzo, and maybe even pay your bills on CRED.
4. Culture & Aspirations: There were some interesting hypothesis that Kunal proposed that piqued my interest.
   1. Collectivist Culture – Being bucketed to be a collectivist culture in general, I have never thought about how that could influence the entrepreneurial history and relevance for India. I am connecting the dots between this hypothesis and two recent examples I came across; All of these hint that there could be a strong causation effect here.
      1. Jonathan Bi’s wonderful video essay summarizing Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On The Genealogy of Morality” starts with the below quote: “The reason that startups succeed is because they are structured as dictatorships“ → Most people from collectivist cultures put the group’s opinion before the individual’s opinion
      2. Kara Swisher’s interview with Brene Brown → She points out how Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have this huge band of yes men around them who praise and agree to whatever they say day in and day out → It seems like being individualistic to your detriment in someway helps one to be a maniac entrepreneur.
   2. Consumption and Dating, Arranged Marriages, Divorce: Kunal links our dating culture, the high rate of arranged marriages and relatively low rates of divorce lead to low consumption. He posits that in Western countries youngsters and people in their 30s and 40s and even beyond are constantly in the market to find the right one and this drives consumption (apparel to retail to everything that can drive consumption growth). While I want to believe this is true, I am not sure about what sectors drive real consumption in the country. Reading Rama Bijapurkar’s Lilliput Land might shed some light, but for now I am not completely sold about this correlation
   3. Female workforce participation rate: This is another concerning truth that Kunal points out and Mukesh concurs to be a big issue. India’s female labor force participation rate was 9.4% in Dec 2021. World Bank data pegs this at 25%. Even the most optimistic numbers are dwarfed by China’s 61% female LFPR. I guess this is a more causative factor for reduced consumption in the broader economy than any other reason. This is one topic I am interested in learning more about so I would welcome any recommendations on this topic.
      1. Urban female LFPR is even lower than rural (~20-25%) and hovers at <15%. This is an even bigger concern that leads a majority of demand and supply of goods and services to focus heavily on men, who are the ultimate spenders/decision makers.
   4. Time value: Kunal hypothesizes that convenience businesses cannot be large in India given that we do not value time yet as a society. On the one hand, this makes sense because we are conditioned to wait in queues forever for almost every bureaucratic approval. Our population makes us assume there isn’t any other way. On the other, Amazon, BookMyShow, and MakeMyTrip are all doing well, so it might just be a matter of time before the tables turn.
      1. The most valuable insight for me is recognizing that delays are deeply ingrained in our society. Instead of blaming myself for these setbacks, I practice self-compassion, which allows me to wait patiently and proactively plan for inevitable long traffic jams (I live in Bangalore), perpetually delayed PF/passport office processes, and other similar inconveniences. This is even more pronounced in non metros (cities like my hometown), because life just slows down – which i am starting to realize has both pros and cons.

Follow-up recommendations for the guest, the host, and the audience:

This podcast has given me so much, I feel a bit bad to not give back. (The book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini, highlights why this is a very basic human trait). Here are some interesting recommendations that align closely with the topic of this discussion:

1. Self:
   1. The best route i have found till date to understand myself more is by finding patterns in things i love.
      1. The greatest Eureka moment for me while listening to Mukesh Bansal’s Sparx 2nd episode where he says he found it most inspiring when he was reading autobiographies of Sam Walton’s Made in America (The Walmart Story) and Akio Morita’s Made in Japan (The Sony Story), that led him to build
      2. I consume a lot of information by reading and listening (2 magazines, 2 newspapers, 10+ weekly and daily newsletters, 2 self help apps, Pocket/Refind recos, books, podcasts, and the list still goes on)
      3. After all of this, when I pause to think about what i love the most time and again, it is stuff from 2 kinds of people:
         1. Topics → Attention, Curiosity, and Stoicism
         2. Authors → Writers, Journalists, B-School Professors, Professional Coaches, Psychologists and Philosophers
      4. This gives me a lot of clues about where my interests lie and where i should focus to nurture my passions. In fact, i started listening to this podcast because Kunal is a philosopher and Mukesh Bansal is more a life coach (their startups for me are secondary pursuits / outcomes of the processes they have built to live a good life)
      5. And finally always remember this quote from Peter Dinklage: “Don’t search for defining moments because they will never come. The moments that define you have already happened and they will happen again”
   2. Books:
      1. Design Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans – this is the mother of all self-help books that has delivered the greatest ROI for me so far; I have read a ton of books in this genre, so you can take my word for it (I also attended the terrific DYL workshop in Bangalore in Aug 2023, by Navyug Mohnot, which I also highly recommend)
      2. The School of Life App (Theme – Self-Knowledge, Topics – How to Know Yourself)
2. Startups:
   1. A More Beautiful Question, Warren Berger → To learn to ask better questions
   2. Shortcuts, John Pollack → To Think in Analogies
   3. How to Do Great Work, Paul Graham (actually anything by Paul Graham) – Article, Visual Summary by Jason Shen
      1. In case this ever gets to Kunal/Mukesh → Paul Graham is another philosopher entrepreneur, along with Reid Hoffman (along with Peter Thiel and Kunal, that makes a strong case for budding entrepreneurs to study philosophy) – Hoffman’s Impromptu is another great read
3. Starting up in India:
   1. The shallowness of India’s consumer market (We have way too much riding on our California users)
   2. Lilliput Land, by Rama Bijapurkar. (Excerpt here)
   3. There’s a perception that rural means poor. But if you look at what the top 20% to 30% is spending there, it’s quite significant. We estimate it’s north of $250 billion,” Accel partner Anand Daniel told TechCrunch in an interview. (TechCrunch Article, Jun, 2024)

Conclusion:

This episode has given me so much and I learnt so much more while writing this article. I am quite amazed by the truth in Kunal’s statement that there is no shortage of teachers, but shortage of students who have the curiosity and desire to learn and a bias to action. If you find this article helpful, please leave your comments / feedback and feel free to DM me!

Tags: Present Day Heroes