The Exchanges

Q Sohail, ah, this is the DNA of innovation, right? Every six months you are launching one product. After all, how many failed products are, I don't know. So how do you, as a CEO, come into this picture of innovation and just helping the teams innovate faster and faster and taking go to market faster?

A I think, It is two, three things, right? And, and it's not only true for me. It's equally true for Shashwar and some of our sort of, uh, leadership team. Innovation can't be driven by one person, right? Innovation is a natural process, which comes through you spending time in the market, figuring out what is happening. You, uh, sort of Reading probably tons and saying what are other markets going through which are in sort of similar trajectory, and innovation sometimes comes from stupid conversations on a coffee table on what is working or not working in a product. I think sort of my job is to basically back some of those, right? My job is to basically say this innovation I support, this innovation I don't, because it's a, let's say a distraction on the bandwidth we have on tech. It may be a distraction on the capital we have, or I fundamentally don't believe it will scale, right? But again, that's a conversation process, right? And I think the general mindset is let innovation happen and not say no to sort of new ideas until they are a significant drain on either capital or people, right? Because, uh, we've always taken a lot of pride in, we still operate as a very lean company. Most people at our size will have a team of 600 to thousand people. Our whole company is 600 people, right? And this includes a heavy feud on street nature of our business, right? So therefore, If it i…

AI assessment note: “My job is to basically say this innovation I support, this innovation I don't”

Q So one is, uh, philosophically and other is numerically. How you think the next chapter of Bharat pe, like, ten million valuation point here, right? Das million merchants are away. And clear. Achse kha the products we launch kar gie. They're using on a daily basis.

A First of all is sort of what can we do for merchants? That's sort of core. Today also we have, as you said, a crore merchant, uh, but we've enabled loans for only five lakhs. I'm sure there's a lot more of them who need it, right? And we need to constantly become better at how to decide who can be like two and who cannot be right. So there's a core business which needs to keep on learning and keep on becoming better and better. The second part, I remember having these conversations with the early day, uh, in my part of Brittany, or on key, what will merchant pay you for? A thought at that time used to be merchant will pay you if you give him credit, of course, because he makes money off it. And the second thought used to be that merchant will pay you if you send him customers, because these shopkeepers really struggle from a point of view of acquiring new customers, especially against the e-commerce and the modern trends. I think the first one, We've done a good job of it and it should keep evolving. The second one, we've not really done anything full on. And now with our consumer leg of the business with payback and post pay, I think we are at a place where we can solve that bridge, right? And I think that's sort of at least one big leap of faith we want to take in group, decide what is the right time for it. Uh, it's lots of things always in the pipeline. But that's sort of o…

AI assessment note: “First of all is sort of what can we do for merchants? That's sort of core.”

Q So when you joined, you were 36 and you were 21, right? So very, like, I would say, dynamics would have been, like, founder trying to say, you know, take this much control, but a little bit, keep it with me.

A Not, to be honest, no. I think, ah, one thing which we've done, always well, ah, is we've never got into, you have to control, right? So, whoever, Is potentially better suited to handle that, handles it. Whoever has bandwidth at that point of time, handles it. And whoever raises their hand, I can handle it. Right. So, and that's how I think, ah, you two, as founders, and like, I'm counting myself as sort of the, whatever, ah, the core team. I think if a business is growing this fast, you to be fungible in the roles you play. You can't operate as, ah, I only see marketing because it comes. Right. And that's the job for the next level of team to be really good at what they are doing. But, uh, the top two, three folks who are sort of whose job is to steer the company in the right direction. Can't take a very narrow view of their role because the market evolves so fast and the business grows so fast, right? What is relevant today will probably not be relevant six months down the line. And that's, and hopefully now we're at a scale where things will have longer runways, but at least the time I joined, we were just about like, I think we used to do like two, three million dollars a year type revenue, right? Very, very early days. At that stage, every three months we had to relook on what we were doing and which is right or wrong, right? And therefore any single person taking It's det…

AI assessment note: “Not, to be honest, no. I think, ah, one thing which we've done”

Q So when you joined, right, what was your first priority?

A I think, and I think there were three priorities at that time. I think one was, leave aside my own journey because, ah, it was also transitioning from founder and to sort of professional CEO. You build your own trust with the team, right? So I think that's sort of a, Personal journey, but I think from a business point of view, it was just about launching and just about had launched lending, but it was not no scale. We were launching Swipe at that point of time, and then we were hiring at that point of time because I think CSO, CXO level was just starting to get built. Thankfully, sort of, Shashwar took Swipe completely off my plate, and then I could spend a lot more time on the other things, right? But, but I think the foremost was sort of to get the team Comfortable with the fact that someone external, someone who's run largest companies can come in and sort of ensure that the pace of how we operate doesn't suffer because of that. Right. And, uh, and that conviction in the team is And full energy on. Okay, CEO, I always took a plan for a hundred days. Because if you don't do that, you don't get second opportunities, third opportunities, right? And that was by large the, by large the focus. Get team comfortable. Get one great product out there. Thankfully, we got to, because Ashwin took over the other one, and then, since then, it's sort of been much, much simpler.

AI assessment note: “I think there were three priorities at that time.”

Q And, ah, when you joined, right, how has Bharat changed? What has changed, right? Team-wise, culture-wise, and as a positioning-wise also?

A This business is massively scaled, and in that I have a little constitution. The rest is all probably contextual, right? Covid, horrible for the world, but great for digital payments, right? And when I joined, we used to do 50 crore of transactions a day. I mean, it was meaningful scale. I didn't know anything, it was done, it was done. Right? So, sometimes you have to also be in the right place, right time. When business starts scaling that fast, that naturally means something's changed in the company, right? Lot more people start believing in the business. Lot more of your Products start making sense, right? If you are helping, uh, RNBFC partners underwrite merchants on the back of payments, suddenly the payment volume became two X, right? So a lot more merchants became lendable and that sort of builds natural connection. In the company, whether it's from an investor point of view, whether it is from the team point of view, or whether it's from the industry participants point of view. I think a lot of the change is actually driven to that, right? So I think the second thing, which I would probably give bit more credit to me than this market dynamic is when the team started this, the only piece of the puzzle, which was missing was the mindset of the retailer, right? And anyone who comes from FMCG again, this is Contextual. I think that sort of closed the loop, uh, in terms of …

AI assessment note: “When business starts scaling that fast, that naturally means something's changed in the company”

Q payroll in the show notes. Now let's further continue with the podcast. Because zero to one when run or zero to 10 in this case is mostly when founders run it is done pure hustle, right? Pure energy. And then when a professional CEO comes in, they try to bring in more processes. So did you Choose the processes part, or you will also be a part of the hustle.

A I was like, I was hustling. I was talking about this very interesting conversation. Zero to one people are different. One to 10, 10 to a hundred different. I realized that maybe zero to one, one to 10, I can't do 10 to a hundred. We couldn't do it. But at one level, we've learned multiple things. I think every skill is learnable as long as sort of you figure out. So, I'm not, by definition, very high on processes. There are processes need to help business move faster towards the end goal, right? At some stage, they will slow you down, but as long as you're not doing this zig-zag path, but are still going straight, it still can mean faster outcome. I think at least I'm very thoughtful about the, if it is process, it should simplify someone's life, not complicate it, right? So, I think Few of the processes we've implemented over the last couple of years are only around, for example, budgeting, reviews, how decisions are made, like how procurement is done, for example, right? Because there is lots of value there. Process has to either systematically add value or has to make you faster. If it is neither of the two, at least I have no respect for that process, right? And therefore, I think we've moved a fair bit in the last two years, but I think By and large, every process we've implemented may have slowed down slightly, but I would not say we are, we operate still probably at 80 t…

AI assessment note: “I'm not, by definition, very high on processes. There are processes need to help”