India

“I think the challenge that India has is that India doesn't have the ecosystem that the Bay Area has, right? In the Bay Area, you had Adobe that passed to Google, who passed to Facebook, who passed to, you know, like, there's just this, like, legacy of learning…”

“So in bookings, the Indians booking on our platform, 95%. So the main market is India only.”

“Actually, should we be doing it? My answer would be no. It's not very socially responsible. We have a young demographic population, ah, to our advantage. So either we get the robots to help people find jobs, or we should not replace human beings with robots. W…”

“Internet penetration is nine hundred million plus, you know, maybe a billion already, and the online buying is about 253 hundred million, depending upon which, all, all told also by and large.”

“I would tell the 25 year old there's enough platforms, there are enough people working on AI, there's a lot of competitor overcrowding, don't go there, start a boutique hotel business, or start very nice, clean, budget hotel business, and you will have a lot o…”

“Like we have, whichever report that you see it, anywhere between 1.5 to 1.67 million rooms.”

“Dubai and Singapore together have the same branded number of rooms as all of India.”

“So, specific to Thailand, they are far lower in, you know, in the GST equivalent of their country.”

“My product is, is below average right now, you know, world benchmark, like some of the places would be world class. But if I look at it, pan India, I, it is average.”

“So in India, the entire tourism activity is concentrated in those 12 to 15 destinations. Absolutely. And I think we need to build the next 1520, 30, because the current destinations will collapse as the demand will far exceed the infrastructure as well as the …”

“I think one more interesting aspect could be, in order to fast forward some of the tourism activity and getting inbound is really the premiumization of our luxury trains.”

“Is the biggest bottleneck is that travel happens to be state subject. And there is a gap between the central vision And the execution when it comes to at the state level.”

“And India spent .5% of GDP on tourism.”

“The, all the studies show that for every one rupee spent in this sector, the gross economic value that gets added is 3.25.”

“Because of the lack of digitization on the supply side, including all the experiences and the activities that you could potentially do, you just cannot discover anything, and you cannot just seamlessly book anything.”

“Lufthansa's second highest intercontinental market is India.”

“I think the progress India has made on infra front in the last 10 years is equal to the preceding 50 years put together. I don't know whether it's 30 is the right number or 50.”

“So in India, I would say the opportunity going forward is, ah, strong in experiential boutique, small size properties.”

“I think there's an opportunity in India, like, ah, think like, get your guide or a clue kind of a model. It's a tours and attractions.”

“Because the asset classes are not tokenized at all. I mean, forget about tokenized. It's hardly any digitization.”

“Not really. Not in India. So we are talking about India, right? India is still a very promoter driven country and In order to qualify for prime piece of, ah, any kind of real estate and to be able to participate in those RFPs, need to find the model, and even …”

“And if you start to think long term, like, 1020 years down, it's a huge opportunity.”

“It's crisis resistant. It's doing very well.”

“Earlier pilgrimage used to be a very, Religious purpose trip that, you know, one has to go to the mindset is that I am just going to do Darshan, right? That's the only. That has changed, and the demographic has changed. That has changed to saying it's not nece…”

“In the last few years, we ran into huge trouble just getting trekking shoes for our country because Decathlon ran into a problem. There is no other place that we go to get trekking shoes.”

“I think the time is going to come where we are going to teach how it is to be done. Like in the IT happened. So we need a complete Revitalization of our hospitality, travel, tourism, education.”

“I think huge opportunity, but then you have to dirty your hands. Because that is brick and mortar stuff, right? That is, I mean, you of course can use technology or whatever, but it is, lot of it is brick and mortar stuff that you have to do it.”

“Whatever industry India goes for, my recommendation would be, please don't compete with China.”

“Besides Taj, there is no, or hospitality brands maybe, there is no brand from India and consumer which is known outside of India.”

“India has been pretty successful at developing a tech industry. It's not in the frontier of AI. I think it may get there faster than people think.”

“The information revolution, I think, enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so on as platforms, and Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more, I think Japan is becoming more Japanese…”

“In 1980, India's GDP was something like 60%, 65% of China's. Today it's about 17% of China's.”

“In India, for example, Upgrad, Was a predominantly direct-to-consumer company. We eventually did build a strong enterprise business, but it remains a fairly strong direct-to-consumer company, right? Here, we obviously also do direct-to-consumer, but we also re…”

“For an up-grad student in India, they would appreciate if we called them and said, hey, look, you've not logged in for five days. Are you missing something? Can we help you with something? And they appreciated the follow-up. Here, if we called somebody, they w…”

“The quality of talent in India is top notch. And, you know, not just like EPD building talent, but even on the GTM side, India has actually made one of the strongest muscles for both marketing inbound, outbound, even AEs who are closing deals sitting from Indi…”

“Sure, Silicon Valley is still ahead, you could argue, but if in the world of SaaS, Silicon Valley was five years, 10 years ahead, I mean, it's probably three to six months ahead.”

“Let's say as you compare to a vertical thesis, the challenge in verticals is unless you are here close to the customer, how can you build for verticals? But the person sitting in India actually has a very clear visibility of the latest and greatest problem tha…”

“Most action platform engineering teams, even for us companies are probably sitting in India. So they are the ones who are dealing with a lot of this infrastructure.”

“Speaking as an arrogant American, most, most financial innovation comes to the United States. Maybe you could argue about infrastructure, which may come from over in Europe or India, but if you look at financial innovation, it's come here, right?”

“Two of our large, three largest countries by volume are India and Brazil. You know, the average fare in Brazil is like, Three 54 bucks USD and India it's two 53 bucks or something like that. It's going to be decades until the cost of autonomy compresses to the…”

“And a lot of times what founders end up doing is they say, okay, it's so easy. I just hired two sales rep in the US. And I'm like, never, it's never, ever going to work because it's not just about your sales. Your entire company is meant and built For Indian n…”

“We've ever, we only ever, ever sold to one Indian customer, and that's because it came from an investor, a mutual investor, a great brand in India public, they recently went public, so all, all amazing things. They were a customer very large customer, got it l…”

“So we have about 80 people worldwide, and about 42, 43 of them are in the US, and the rest of them are in India, and engineering-wise, we have about 1817, 18 developers, and at least three or four of them are thinking about agentic workflows.”

“We estimate that in the next four or five years, by 2030, AI will need the incremental power of the whole of India and the incremental drinking water of the whole of the United States.”

“I personally believe that long term, if we didn't have capital controls, more money would actually flow in and less would flow out.”

“In fact, when we started in 2002, we pioneered the concept by launching ourselves as India's first multifamily office.”

“Those were really early days because Mr. Premji and I remember this very distinctly was the first Indian to set up his own family office in 2006, which was four years after we started and introduced the concept in India.”

“Whatever number ballpark which comes around is about a million odd households. You know, there are about a million odd millionaires, dollar millionaires in India.”

“They just constitute about .3% of India's, you know, overall number of households. So the clients that we work for would be clearly are less than half a percent of India.”

“In fact, today, when you see there's one report of PwC, which came out in 20, 24, which said that in India, there are about 300 family offices.”

“Now if you pick up, you know, bulk of the list of family offices, largely they are being steered by the younger generation.”

“When you invest outside India in a global portfolio, which is poorly correlated with the Indian markets. So then you are basically bringing in the benefits of diversification into your portfolio. It is not maximizing your wealth, right? But it is making your p…”

“And they believe they are the only ones who are advising and they are just about less than 500 odd which are active.”

“So naturally, because so many people entering, they have kind of, the talent is limited, and the cost of talent has gone up. So today, actually, the, for somebody who's starting this business, the economics are not very favorable.”

“So we're already at 3000 over about 20 years. I think there's a good chance that we should get to about 15,000 or so, and that is where we will get categorized as a mid market, you know, affluent nation from a poor nation currently.”

“So I think within this century which belongs to India, I think next 10 years could be India's best years because After that, also, India will keep compounding and keep growing, but I think your base effect will start catching up with you as it is catching up w…”

“The currently, the thing is, oh, you know, we can give 500 crores for a big actors film, and then we'll make thousand crores. More likely to lose that 506 hundred crores, because it doesn't end there. India has a very high exhibitor tax. You're better off inve…”

“The reason the farmers keep protesting is because, I mean, does India have a food scarcity problem? I don't think so. You constantly see visuals of, ah, you know, farmers, ah, destroying their own crop. Matlab, biste ton piyaaz kisi na highway pe pheg diya, gu…”

“Mark my words, in the next two years, India is going to be the cancer capital of the world as well.”

“95 out of hundred highest temperature cities in the world are in India in this summer right now.”