The Ledger, every show

“I don't think that's wise for any economy, and activism doesn't create new capital, right, and you don't have disposable income, people's lives don't get better, so they've forgotten what made them successful, so I would not go to the US for these reasons. I'm…”

“I think the truly evil people are the people who have a hundred million and don't spend it. Like, I'm glad that Ambani spent thousand crores on the wedding. So much money back in circulation, so many jobs created.”

“With AI, that's only going to reduce. And especially if you're willing to live on land that's slightly far away, that's probably going to go to 30 lakhs, 40 lakhs. So the true, and coming back to AI, right? The true value of AI is it reduces your cost of livin…”

“Most of your good technical talent is going abroad. That's number one. Number two, in India, there's no market to buy. You build robotics, let's say, you know, the early market for this, you've seen that crossing the chasm, the curve, right? The early market f…”

“I think capitalism itself will break. Like, what do you think is the underlying, what do you think is the underlying Asset of capitalism. Like, what do you think runs capitalism? It's not money. It's information.”

“You can, you don't need, like, there's no moat. There's no moat. Like, and I'm telling you all these open source models are just there. You can go download them anytime you want.”

“There's going to be a one percent, two percent that's going to be completely fine, but everyone else is going to take a hit.”

“No, but I'll tell you one industry that's definitely going to go down, which matters a lot for Silicon Valley is, that's SaaS.”

“I think this might happen. There's probably a 10 or five percent chance it might happen. Like, I also know that the odds are not 100%. It's a five percent chance that it happened.”

“In SAS also, there is some little bit of racism. If you're an Indian presenting on screen, nobody cares. Nobody wants to like, then your trust goes minus minus. It doesn't matter if you're an Indian CEO talking about stuff that people will trust. But if your c…”

“Plus there's a proper attack on capitalism in the US. People are not happy with Elon Musk. Like somebody like an Elon Musk should be celebrated. Somebody like a you know, like a Jeff Bezos should be celebrated, but instead they're being constantly attacked.”

“I thought it was a great film, but I think it's net bad for India.”

“So I feel the people, the problem with AI is it makes the people with the resources even more powerful, right? Because it automates the process that you used to do on an everyday basis. So if you have some leverage that is not directly related to your time”

“And who I think will win is, I think there's a bunch of video editing tools that will win all this, like Premiere Pro, for example or for, or After Effects, where it'll just be like, okay, you know, prompt the B-roll clip and put it there. Just like Photoshop …”

“In five years, we'll have physical robots. Like I'm fairly certain we'll have robots helping us with tasks, helping us, you know, even if, like I used to say, well, there's no job for me on online. I'll probably go end up doing farming, right? I think AI will …”

“They own YouTube. They own Android. They own the browser. They own distribution. So, no matter who builds the LLM, like I said, LLMs are going to be commoditized. They are going to win the game.”

“I think the fundamental innovation with EdTech is not technology. It is CAC. It is destruction of CAC.”

“The problem I have is that if a human gets inspired by something, that's okay, because we're rate limited at a particular speed, but an AI can go crawl through the entire internet and be trained on the entire internet and beat everyone.”

“And I feel like chat GPT will eventually get good enough. And we're still in GPT-IV, right? I'm sure there are many along the way. It'll get good enough to, Push through your brain's system, right?”

“Nvidia will own everything. That's the only monopoly in any market that I've ever seen.”

“So my personal belief is in the longterm, just like geo cities and domains domains ended up, GoDaddy ended up winning. I feel like we will end up winning because we are the white labeled version or the SAS version of, let's say platforms that exist today, a Ma…”

“Lots of companies hired. So many react engineers are hired, for example, and then suddenly many of them are losing their job. That I think is like an identity fixation because these, many of these people have gotten fixated with the identity of I'm a software …”

“I'm very confident that the next generation of fairly wealthy Indians, or even tier two Indians will not send their kids to UPSC, because they're like, if they went through, they'll be like, this is too hard, and it's unnecessary to go through this.”

“In fact, in India, I would say five crores is enough. Four, five crores, you're, you don't have to worry about cash. Beyond whatever that, the amount of money you're making, there's a little bit more of a safety net, you have a little more cushion.”

“And the avatar that we've done, right? Ah, certainly it is going to replace the activities of a creator.”

“Like my last 10 reels have been completely AI-generated. Audio is AI-generated. Video is AI-generated. Script is AI-generated. News is publicly available. The editing is manual, right?”

“Sora will replace B-roll.”

“I think corporate tax is a good thing. You know why? Because it forces the company to spend. It forces the company to spend on recurring costs. R&D, whatever, right? Like, you are basically saying, don't hoard that money. Put it back into the economy and make …”

“Everything in AI is going to require NVIDIA, and AMD is not, AMD is good, but it's not like, it can't compete with CUDA. It's good for consumer devices, right? But somebody building the next LLM, you're locked into Nvidia for the time being, right?”

“But I don't think this will affect them. They have so much money, and the thing is, when you have that kind of extreme of money, You can buy out enough influence in a way to not really be affected by it.”

“But what I've seen is when you run ads at that scale, it only destroys your brand.”

“There's a difference when a VC tells me, Varun, this is how it is, and today, every day, like, 10,000 comments telling me what it is. Who do you believe? Because I'm building not for the VC. I'm building for this user... So the 10,000 people telling me what to…”

“I just want to warn everyone, including the people watching that I quickly switch on Doomer mode. So I'm really pessimistic about What's going to happen to the world in the next 10 years?”

“It's all of the web, but it's mostly Reddit, right? And the best way to understand mostly Reddit. It's Reddit anywhere. Like the internet, it was mostly forums.”

“And the reproduction rate for something like stable diffusion is one percent.”

“Our legal system is not ready for this, and we don't want to launch lawsuits against anyone who got inspired by another person.”

“I don't think we'll be able to tell.”

“For that, you need accountability. And that's one thing ChatGPT lacks. So I'm not fully bought in on the, it'll replace customer support people anytime soon.”

“So I think eventually the future of all these is going to be voice.”

“So people are, someone will find a way to market a robot with legs and hands. And then it doesn't even matter if the robot's light, where you could probably knock it down if it tries to do something new, because it would be just so fast.”

“Alignment is about figuring out all these edge cases and saying, don't do this, basically putting it in a sheet. And the problem is we just don't know what it'll end up doing even this world. So nobody can write all the edge cases.”

“On Twitter is like the same problems that like English school, educated engineering boy, that's Twitter, right? Maybe slightly more work, right? But YouTube is very different. YouTube is India, right? It has The entire spectrum of India from people who don't m…”

“It's easier to build a Google than it is to build an agency, because if you say that, okay, your longterm goal is to build, let's say artificial general intelligence. You are more likely to pick up smart talent that wants to work with you. And who will stick w…”

“Because I don't think in India, there's a big market. We actually had an experiment in India. It didn't work so well.”

“Classplus is not suited for the international world, right? For example, a lot of the international teachers will want their audience to be on HubSpot. They'll want, you know, some CRM integration, right? They'll want it to be on Zapier. Which Classplus doesn'…”

“I feel like long term, everyone will have an app. You'll, instead of you spending three lakhs, five lakhs a month on a developer, buy scenes, right?”

“Discord is huge engagement, but most of their engagement is communities or groups with under 10 people. 10 to 20 people, right? It's like, I want a game with my five friends. I want to play FIFA with my five friends, or I want to play some, I don't know, Valor…”

“Once you have that, and once you have it on autopilot, I feel your job as a CEO is three things, right? Raise capital. Communicate the internal story externally and get the external story, like tell the external story internally very well. And I feel like the …”