The Exchanges

Q You shared a very interesting point that focus on what customer needs and not on what customer wants. In your experience, how do you figure that out in the customer conversations? Because customer may throw a hundred things at you.

A This is a great question, and I'm going to take some time explaining this, and, and this is just my personal formula. It's like, there's no way I've read this and understood this. So when you think there is a problem, right, and let's say customer says, okay, so you ask, why is that a problem? Because if I don't hire, then, uh, uh, then, you know, I'll not be able to have people who will be on the job doing the amount of work and output will suffer. All right, so, Then you kind of say, hey, but why do you have to do that? Or why do you have to do that? And keep on asking why, why, why? And eventually you get to the point where you say, if this doesn't happen, then, as a call center, let's take an example of a call center. If I do not have people on time, Doing the work they're supposed to be doing that my customers who are large, like, you know, airlines or department stores who are using this outsource call center, uh, they will penalize this company for tens of millions of dollars. Because the customer care suffers. They will have customer churn. So the problem that you understood is, the problem is of the speed of a person. The speed at which you can deliver. The predictability at which you can deliver a hire. So, so that, if you solve just that and say, I don't care what all you think you want, but I will give you this one thing. The one thing that keeps you up at night, ri…

AI assessment note: “finding that need is when you do five whys, you keep on asking why”

Q Uh, in our one-on-one interactions offline, uh, I find that you are a fantastic leader in sales and selling. Can you first share the difference between sales and selling and then the simple process to master both?

A Oh, my friend, this is a really tough question to do it that simplistically, but I'll, I'll try my best. First of all, understand, right. Um, uh, There's a subtle difference between sales and selling. Selling is an art. Sales is science. So managing a funnel, right, you have so many prospects or suspects, then you generate leads from them, and then you engage with the leads and qualify those leads, and then you kind of get them into different stages of selling cycle, sales cycle, and then you get a sale out of it. Now, I would advise that nobody should focus on how many customers did I sold. Focus on the pipeline in sales. Focus on the quality conversion. So qualifying the pipeline, quality conversions, improving the conversions, and the outcome will automatically the number of contracts you get.

AI assessment note: “Selling is an art. Sales is science. So managing a funnel”

Q Uh, would love to know your journey, right? Uh, growing up in Delhi, And your learnings coming from a traditional Marwari family that you applied in your business life throughout?

A Yeah, you know, it's a, that's a great question. Um, sometimes the stupidest decisions you make in your life turns out to be the best, right? I was in 12th Standard, uh, uh, you know, my parents thought I was complete, useless, then come poop, and just to kind of, Prove to them that I'm not as much, and I will make you proud. Uh, uh, did well, and then got into, uh, SRCC and commerce, and I quit all of that. Uh, I said, I'm not going to study after that, and I went to our, uh, traditional family business of gemstones, uh, colored gemstones, and, uh, and that's where I worked with real, true Marwadi business people. Uh, uh, I learned that, um, cash is the king. If you run out of runway, there's nothing that you left with. Uh, uh, running after, uh, scale has some value, but after a certain point of time, right, you've got to make cash. Uh, so, so that's one thing I learned. Second is, um, uh, get to know your business extremely well. When you're in gemstones, and if you make, if you, if you're 99% right and one percent wrong, it means the difference between Losing hundreds of thousands of dollars or making hundreds of thousands of dollars. You, you really, really got to know your stuff well. So, uh, uh, so those are some of the things that were ingrained. Third, which is the most important lesson in life that I got, and I think, uh, that's the best thing to have happened, uh, th…

AI assessment note: “traditional family business of gemstones, and that's where I worked with real, true Marwadi”

Q Uh, going back in your journey of your first company, uh, Mobalt, uh, it got acquired for a double-digit million dollars by Indeed within two years of starting. What was the magic recipe that you built?

A There's always one magic recipe. There's only one. Um, build a good product, uh, do only one thing. See, imagine, right, you will be highly valued if you just do one small thing, but do it better than anybody else in the world. If you just make chapels, like literally bathroom slippers, but you make the best bathroom slippers in the world, everybody in the world would wear it, and you'll be highly valued. So we just focus on doing one thing, And we got that right, and we delivered every time, every single time. It worked. Our competitors, on the contrary, raised tons of money, and we were bootstrapped, by the way, and that is the most important part of it, right? A bunch of engineers fresh out of college, uh, uh, my co-founder and CTO was just literally three months out of IIT Kanpur, and, and all he did is, just did one thing, and, uh, And the Ragtag group of engineers, right, out of college, from IIT Kanpur, they created a technology that actually was not existing in the world. Second, that is an important thing to get any startup successful is know what your customer needs, not what the customer wants. The customer want is a pit for which there is no end. Customer, like for example, I need food to survive, right? I need air to breathe, but I want a masala tosa, I want Italy, I want Ustapama, I want all, all the best cuisines out there. So, so focus on the need, find that nee…

AI assessment note: “We focused on Optimizing the applied process such that we can reduce”

Q And, uh, what, what keep you kept you motivated that you spend two decades and are still so much excited about this industry? Is it the unsolved problems?

A Uh, uh, you could say that, but I'll tell you what, uh, my real motivation, uh, people make decisions in life and there's some decisions that have a, um, that leave a very indelible mark, right? A deep, uh, and some of those decisions are who you marry. Uh, uh, uh, what kind of a house you buy? Uh, and what kind of a job you take? So imagine the right job for you actually increases the happiness index of the world. Because if you ask people, right, nine out of 10 people would say they're not happy in their jobs. Uh, it's not because of them, it's because they just haven't found the right fit, the right company, the right culture, the right place for them. Nobody comes to the company, uh, just to do a job. They come to a company, they show up in the office every day to be valued, to be appreciated for what they do, to be able to give their best to the company they work for. But this is where the problem is. The problem is that, uh, We have, as a, as a technology, uh, in HR, not tried to solve that problem of, can I help that guy be in the right job? Then the second is, imagine, right, in India, there's a demand and supply issue, right? There's way more demand than, you know, uh, than suppliers, and, uh, and if you do not have a job today, you know, within two days, you'll get a job. It doesn't happen. The same way in the Western world. Of course, some jobs are always in demand, …

AI assessment note: “you could say that, but I'll tell you what, uh, my real motivation”

Q Are you an affirmation person that you write down your affirmations and then they come true?

A I don't write it down, but I obsess about it. Uh, and, uh, there's a, there's a subtle difference. Um, I'm married to only the goal. And, uh, if I don't get to the goal, it's okay. That's, that's fine. It happens, right? Shit happens, right? You didn't get to the goal, you learn something from it, and you move on. So having an ability to move on is also important, as much as you're obsessing about a goal. And, uh, and, and for me, the goal is making a difference there. And if your goal is pure, see, you know, it's, uh, and I know this is a podcast and all, but I have a philosophy that, you know, uh, don't, um, Lakshmi ke piche mat bhaago. Lakshmi kisi ke haat nai haat na. So go after learning and, and, and stay married to that, and eventually all the goodness will come out of that.

AI assessment note: “I don't write it down, but I obsess about it.”

Q Uh, you shared in your journey that many people took a chance on you while in your job at Monster, then after it. Uh, what is that quality that makes people take more chances on someone than, let's say, X over Y? And how do you become that kind of a person?

A It's a leap of faith, my friend. There's no Way to determine that. Or you have an instinct that, you know, um, in monster, I was in sales, um, and I had, uh, uh, my manager who used to head monster in APAC. His name is Arun Taranki. And I said, I want to move to product. And he was not happy about it. Or he took a leap of faith and said, all right, champ, come over and see what you can do. Never touched product before that in my life, and many a times, a lot of people just took a giant leap of faith on me and, and let me do, uh, so, and I asked them what made to do that, and they said, hey, you know, they will give me all the reasons, but eventually said, hey, we did not know it will work or not, we just, Thought you could, and we did it. And I think it's basically perhaps driven by the goodness they had received that they were passing on. That's kind of my analysis. So, you know, you create this virtual cycle, you know, you take leap of faith, and in our company, we took a leap of faith on a girl who joined us when she was 23 years old. Uh, she was, uh, for lack of a better word, um, like just the junior most HR, come receptionist, come cultural hacker, right? I mean, we were a very small company. And, uh, she just proved right, and we took a leap of faith, and gave her another task, and she proved us wrong by how good she was, and then we kept on taking a leap of faith, and, …

AI assessment note: “It's a leap of faith, my friend. There's no Way to determine that.”