The Wisdom Wall

“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 of success.”

“in the old regime, I think when there is really prolonged and serious imbalance in trade, I think, I mean, if we use history as a benchmark, war is unfortunately the war that we would have to visit or revisit what that is when the two countries or countries, one country with other countries cannot resolve their…”

“But if you want to avoid war, you need to increase your defense budget. It's the only way to avoid, uh, avoid war.”

“the docile, yes, subservient people never turn out to be good. The arrogant pricks are the ones who do better.”

“Pain is a fantastic amplifier of capability. Some sort of, like, grudge, pain, anger, but, you know, the, the child that had a wonderful upbringing is a wonderful human being and not a great entrepreneur in many cases, at least at scale, at mega scale, because it just requires a level of Self-flagellation almost, you…”

“To be a very successful investor, you have to be extremely, extremely single-minded. You need to come to your own conclusions. Uh, you cannot have others help you. Uh, it is not a team sport. That is probably the single most important thing. Whenever I see teams of investors, I think these idiots are going to lose…”

“one big reason why so many people in this country are forced to do stuff which is strictly not per the law or the regulatory framework is because those laws and, ah, regulations are so onerous that to do business in India, you almost have to beat them.”

“listening to their customers, which is a good habit if you're trying to be incremental, a really bad thing if you're trying to be revolutionary.”

“You still want to do a PhD if you're an entrepreneur, or at least a masters, because you want to really sort of learn deep. I mean, you might be doing this by yourself. You don't have to, but it's useful because you, you learn more about, you know, what exists out there, what's possible, what's not possible, what, uh,…”

“I feel like hard work has very little impact on the outcome of a certain thing. Hard work is generally something that we use to appease our own ego when our ego comes calling as an explanation to why we failed or validation to why we succeeded. Hard work as a byproduct of the success, I don't think has very big…”

“Long term distribution is not really a moat in India.”

“There's no such thing as cancel. You cannot be canceled on the internet. It isn't, the algorithm has no emotions. You think the algorithm is like right wing or left wing? It doesn't care. You create content, it's interesting enough, it shows it to people. So you can say you canceled, but you come back next video, and…”

“one, ditch your existing friends, because you're about to enter a whole new industry, and two, surround yourself with new types of friends that are from the creative industry. The ones that don't shame you for screaming in front of a video.”

“You know, I'll tell you the reason why I don't think that replication is so easy. In a deep transaction business versus a, you know, generic search business. Think about Google, for example. So Google historically has always been perceived as potential competition threat also. But they could never go deep into the…”

“And they just tend to see the very low probability of that event and therefore tend to kind of ignore cut corners. You know, obviously all of these are measures which are under the hood, which a customer wouldn't immediately notice the absence of unless, unless God forbid it is needed in the moment. And therefore, of…”

“even though we're not happy enough with the US dollar as a, uh, a, a, a, a, a, a restoration of value, there's really no other alternative we can put the money into. Of course, gold is one possibility, but the market is not deep or large enough.”

“look at the stock market in the US, and look at the housing market in China up until twenty-twenty-one. Yes, we don't have increase in inflation or the CPI for many countries, but then most of the money went into, uh, asset prices and the property prices. So in a way that is good because that is absorbing, uh, the,…”

“the dollar shoots up and it's not because people thought the dollar was a safe place to be. It's because it happened to be the case that there were a lot of short-term claims denominated in dollars and there were long-term assets that were not. And you know, that was just how people had to pay their bills.”

“borrowing from the experience, the successful experience of China, I think I would say to start the country, I would put more emphasis on efficiency than fairness. Which is not very easy to sell, but I think that's going to lift the country.”

“an AI agent is going to have a hard time signing up for a credit card at a bank, and you have to show your ID, which, you know, only human beings currently can get this government-issued piece of paper. Um, but an AI agent can spin up a self-custodial crypto wallet with stablecoins”

“banks do fractional reserve. So they've lent out most of the money, and that's partly why they're so heavily regulated. They're doing fractional reserve. So in a stablecoin issuer is a hundred percent reserve. The only risk they're taking is At most a 93 day US Treasury, which most people would consider that to be, you…”

“Whenever somebody says, um, this is so scary, everybody should have to come in and get a license from the government. I'm like, well, the government does a lot of things very well, but the one thing they're not great at is like understanding the very frontier of technology. And that usually just slows things down and…”

“selling a concept is about storytelling. Somebody might be a better storyteller. He can raise better money. But somebody might be a introvert, a shy person, may not be able to raise money, but maybe he's doing business, maybe much, much better than the other person.”

“Because the consumer is not looking at endorsement brands now anymore. Anybody who comes in, takes money, and endorses a brand, I, I don't think so that works anymore at what used to work earlier, but I'm told that still works in B to B. The dealers, distributors still are okay because you are using some celebrity to…”

“Ronnie believes in constraint, and I believe in abundance. And I believe abundance can create something, because, and I think most of the Indians believe constraint only can build something. So it's a, it's a, it's a interesting theory, and I believe both theories are right. But not many people have experimented with…”

“So if you believe in the use case of capitalism, you have to believe in trickle down economics.”

“I think it's a, it's a very difficult game to scale because it's a real estate play at the end of the day.”

“innovation and generics They are not a continuum. People like to say, we're moving up the value chain, we're going to innovation. It's a very different business.”

“my experience is that people who have the endurance are the people that have a chip on their shoulder, something happened along their journey. That they're wounded, traumatized, and they want to fix it. And the cure is the creation of something that didn't exist.”

“Neither can most people. So, so what that says is there is a role for exceptional people, even in an AI world.”

“asking me how to become a second level thinker is like in basketball, we say you can't coach height. All the coaching in the world will not make your team taller. So can you, I can tell you that you must become a second level thinker to be successful as an investor. I just can't tell you how.”

“if you believe that consensus is as close to right as most people can get, then if you tell Claude, I only want non-consensus thinking, then it has a high probability of being wrong.”

“I used to think speed was, you know, I, I used to think speed was the most important thing, and I've come to appreciate that patience is almost a bigger competitive advantage.”

“there is some times when actually it's, it's worse to arrive too early than it is to arrive too late to something.”

“there's this romantic notion that change comes about because you're the outsider, the rebel, the disruptor. Actually, the change happens more because people become part of the process. They become part of the institutions. They change from the inside through a period of time and, and hard work.”

“if these large model companies are going to cannibalize the end product, if you build on top of them, I think for a young entrepreneur, it's important not to be short-sighted and kind of like diversify and hedge what they build on top of, uh, not, it's not a, it's not the right analogy, but not end up in a world where…”

“if you know domain extremely well, then The AI model, this, you know, gives you a good starting point, but then integrations with the system, the legacy systems of how you deliver that, telephony, um, how you bring the knowledge, that will take so much time. Then like building the trust with evaluations, monitoring,…”

“What, what is happening is something you are saying is attacking a core foundational belief that they have, and it is touching such a nerve that they are just reflexively reacting. That is an incredible signal because what it tells you is you're onto something. It could still be a huge zero. But you now can bucket it…”

“this investment cycle has nothing to do with scaling IP. This investment cycle is about capital investments. It's about buying powered shells of data centers. It's installing liquid cooling. It's buying GPUs at scale. Um, it's about doing behind the meter power. It's by buying massive ESS racks of energy storage. I…”

“And so the scaling laws just tell you that, like, the, you know, if you put in the ingredients to the, to the chemical reaction, the ingredients of data and model size, that what you get out is, is intelligence. Intelligence is the product of the chemical reaction.”

“Within a range, price doesn't matter that much if, if, if, if a model is, is the best model, the most cognitively capable model. Um, uh, price doesn't matter much. The form in which it's presented doesn't matter much. So I'm focused almost entirely just on having the smartest model and the best model for the task.”

“You know, the irony, to some extent, is that the more attractive an idea is, chance, the bigger the chance that it's not true. It's so easy for people to find evidence supporting the story they want to believe. So the more you want to believe a story, the more suspicious you should be about how easy it is for you to,…”

“And what is happening now in AI that if for the previous decade we saw this competition for human attention, That the algorithms are competing to grab our attention. Now the front is shifting from attention to intimacy. AIs are learning how to create intimacy with humans, how to create friendships, How even to create…”

“And the AIs experimented on billions of human beings and discovered something, that if you want to increase engagement, to grab people's attention and make them stay longer on the platform, press the hate button. In the human mind, press the greed button or the fear button.”

“You know, people say about AI that AI is glorified autocomplete, that AI just predicts the next word in the sentence. Observe your mind and you will see it's exactly the same thing. Like, like you have an AI inside you.”

“Capitalism, yes, of course, capitalism doesn't necessarily need people. It needs money and profits. A.I.s can do can do that. Capitalism already created non-human persons which run the show and they are corporations.”

“Like, for me, religion is, is in many ways the opposite of spirituality. That religion is about giving people answers that you are not allowed to question.”

“If you have to be hyper specialized, AI can do that better than us. The only way you can stand the chance is if you have the breadth of knowledge.”

“gold is the only money That you can have and nobody has to give you anything to have it. Other money, all other money is dependent on somebody giving you something. Okay. Whether they give you, and so it's unique in that it's confiscation risk is less than others.”

“So what you're getting paid for is credit risk, right? So it's not gold. It's a promise to get your gold back, right? Then that's what money was. And that's why it would have an interest rate. You have an interest rate that on the promise to get your gold back. That's what everybody believed. And that's the great trick…”

“because if you look at the history of wars and so on, there are winners of the wars, losers of the wars, and neutral countries. The winners of the wars lose, meaning they still get deeper in debt and they have the consequences of the wars. The losers of the wars get wiped out. They lose everything. And the neutral…”

“I think the technology war is the most important war that almost whoever wins the technology war will win almost everything.”

“in order to, um, in order, in order to harness A non-trivial amount of the energy of the sun, you have to move to solar-powered AI satellites in deep space, um, which somewhat is a complement of Tesla expertise and SpaceX expertise, um, and XAI on the AI front.”

“money is really, uh, an information system for labor allocation. Like, people think, some of us think money is power in and of itself, but it doesn't, it doesn't really, it's, if there's no labor to allocate, it's meaningless.”

“so I think that from a Darwinian perspective, the simulations most likely to survive are going to be the ones that are the most interesting simulations, which therefore means that the most interesting outcome is the most likely.”

“Well, the truth, as I said, truth is like, I think you can make an AI go insane if you force it to believe things that aren't true, um, because it will lead to conclusions that are, um, that are also bad.”

“Um, and then curiosity, you just, you, I think you want the AI to, um, want to know more about the nature of reality. [4757] Elon Musk: Um, I think that's actually going to be helpful for AI, uh, supporting humanity because [4766] Elon Musk: We are more interesting than not humanity. [4769] Elon Musk: So it's, it's…”

“the really underappreciated part of the demographic advantage America had. That because, partly because of immigration, America's population growth rate was much faster than Europe and Japan. So if you adjusted for per capita income, yes, the gap is there, but it's not as pronounced. But the moment you sort of, ah, in…”

“every time a policymaker introduces a new regulation, remember that regulation by definition tends to be pro-incumbent. Whoever the person in power or the company which is already established, regulation, 90% of the time favors those people. So I think that is the very fundamental principle that has to be behind…”

“That was a big, in fact, Philip for gold and for, and for Bitcoin and stuff. The moment America sanctioned Russia, ah, back in, ah, the spring of twenty-twenty-two.”

“And then I learned that this, this advice giving business It's just counterproductive, and doing, giving frank exchange, and all that, just doesn't work. And how, it also taught me about how leaders transform over time. That when he first came to power, he seemed receptive. He needed the money. The country was in…”

“their subscription revenue drives their revenue model. It's not, ah, it's not advertising so much anymore. It's there, but subscription is the overwhelming driver. Now you would imagine that in a subscription driven model, it should be much more, ah, free press. And much more democratic in that way. And yet, Because…”

“the way the sanctions were imposed on, on Russia at the time of the Ukrainian war, where the assets were seized. And Russia was thrown off the dollar grid completely. I think that was a big wake up call for governments around the world that, Listen, this, if, if this can happen to Russia, it can happen to us”

“I feel like AI and the ability to code with things like cursor and a bunch of other changes have democratized the ability to build A lot of these American products which might have costed X at a fraction of X.”

“there is no country in the world which has grown rapidly without rapid population growth. No country.”

“In emerging markets, uh, I've always believed that getting the country right is very important. Country. And then at the end of the day, Like you have to buy the best quality companies in that country, but if you get the country wrong, then if, if you're investing in Argentina and Argentina in the basket case, good…”

“AI has actually made most industries that were uninvestable, suddenly investable. For example, like any industry that's collecting large amounts of data was like, you know, priorly prior, like you wouldn't invest in them because you were like, oh, there's no clear No way for you to understand this data. No clear way to…”

“I don't believe in overthinking TAM. I think TAMs are like you build those for IR and you build those to raise money. You may, you may want to create this wonderful dramatic TAM to go raise, you know, a couple of million bucks, but that's not what should be processing through your mind. It should be, can I build a…”

“With quick commerce, uh, you can't automate that much because the cost of the automation doesn't bear out in a small box. So you have to use human labor, uh, the car. And so in markets where the cost of human labor and is not there and the concentration of, of customers isn't there, you get a fail, uh, which is for…”

“75% of product development in technology is human beings teaching consumers how to interact with back-end engineering databases and transactions.”

“The differentiation is solving the unknown problem.”

“the wave of technology that is coming is going to allow people to build businesses faster, more agility, a lower number of people, and fundamentally rethink them. And if you're not doing that, if your rethink is marginal, if you're looking for a 10, 20% improvement, don't bother, because things are about to move 10 X.…”

“you can, um, you can idiot-proof your business, but then you're gonna end up with a business full of idiots.”

“this is not a family. This is a sports team, a high-performing sports team. He goes, you know, you wouldn't throw your brother out. He said, but there's no shame of getting cut from a great team. You could, a lot of great athletes get cut from a great team”

“So this idea of, you know, authentically local storytelling being the most globally valuable is unintuitive, but totally true.”

“For me, I believe that big sports, cricket in, in India, the NFL in the United States is, those leagues are so powerful. The, the consumer demand for them is so high, they should get all the money. So whoever's delivering it, it's just a distribution business. Should be very, very low margin just for distribution only.…”

“I think where it really works well here is we do two very distinctly different things. We manage two different, distinctly different cultures inside the business with tech culture and entertainment culture. We're even physically in two different places in California. Um, and it enables us to be, to bring out the best…”

“If somebody was young and watching this and wanting to get into consumer electronics, I would urge them to first become a content creator.”

“I think the disruption can happen on the OS side. I think the hardware side is very hard to, to differentiate on because all these suppliers that we have, they're all very concentrated, and they're very strong, and they're investing in their product roadmap, upgrading their batteries and processors incrementally every…”

“And again, it's a country play. A company can't build something like this. Country, you know, has to come into it.”

“somebody who's a good salesperson or a good manager, you know, may not be good at the way I think of IQ. IQ is much more varied. Talent is more varied than I realized. You know, I sort of thought, well, if you can do math, you can do anything. And if you can't do math, then you can't do anything.”

“You can never do anything that's totally pure. Um, because if it's really deeply moral, then a little bit, you think, oh, people will, will praise that.”

“What matters in reality is making things work. And it's often the simplest ideas, uh, that work in practice, especially when, uh, thrown a lot of compute at them. The simplest ideas typically outshine the complicated ones.”

“hyper-optimizing for margins now would be the wrong, uh, tactical move.”

“Meta has a bigger moat than Google, uh, because Google's moat on distribution comes from their deals with, with carriers, OEMs, and like all, you know, all these people, um, but Meta's, um, moat is this raw network effects, like, Nobody pre-installs Instagram or WhatsApp on phones. Android pre-installs Google. Despite…”

“When you look at the West and you account for real estate to cost of cups sold, you're able to serve up a lot more cups because the culture is of people buying a coffee and then walking with it. India somehow has out, sidestepped that altogether. Nobody's buying a coffee or a slushy or a matcha and walking the streets.…”

“The category of people in India, which can afford to pay a premium, uh, is still very low. Very, very low. I think we are very, very price conscious. It's almost like annoyingly price conscious. If you're selling something at 50 rupees and you're not in the craft space, you're in the mass market. If he sells it at 45,…”

“I wouldn't take anything unless you can measure it.”

“एंट्रेपरनर के पास जो पहली ट्रेनी होती है ग्रो करने की यहाँ पहली ट्रेनी होती है खुद को खपा देने की जो है वो भी दे देने की वहां पर मैं मेरा मेरी कमपनी या मेरा प्रोफिशन उसकी नमबर वन कैसे बने यहां होता है नेशन फर्स्ट”

“The most likely business model, uh, that has to do with AI is taking a open source foundation model, like LAMA, which is the data open source system, which is used everywhere now, right? Every, almost every startup uses it, uh, even large companies. Uh, so take an open source platform, um, whether it's an LLM or an,…”

“we look at real estate as a very regional game because I feel like the further away you move away from home base, more leakages, harder to sort of monitor, harder to sort of, um, oversee. Um, and also each state in India is like a different country. The rules are different. And there is a bit of learning curve that…”

“I've done work in Mangalore. Yes, it's a lovely city. Yes, it deserves some good buildings, developments, all of it. But the, the overall appetite market is too small for the type of effort. The effort is the same. From licensing, to execution, to delivery, to marketing, the effort is all the same. But you don't get…”

“If your outcome is money, you will statistically do better at the industry where there are least amount of passionate people. The more boring your business, the likelihood of you making money is higher.”

“That's one industry where someone who wants to get into music business, that's one industry that, that is the only aspect of music where they should invest. Immensely growing. Especially in this part of the world.”

“Society misrepresents insecurity to be a bad thing. Insecurity, in my opinion, leading to inaction is a bad thing. Insecurity leading to action is generally conducive to a world governed by capitalism for sure.”

“For any newcomer, uh, you have to, your, uh, gross profit has to be high. It has to be 70 to 80%, else you'll fail. If you try to compete with the masses, big boys will take you.”

“if I'm getting a majority of, say, a tie-up money, it's called a tie-up money, which basically means if I'm working with a Diageo, or a Pernod, or a Bacardi, or even a Radico, I will be then prioritizing their brand over other brands to actually make cocktails with, which basically immediately turns into volumes for…”

“Because what I believe in alcohol, you cannot push sales. You have to win sales. Like, as I said, first 10,000 is important. So even sometimes I brew with that idea whether is it the right strategy, but in my last 20 to two decades of my experience, I feel It's, it's not worked.”

“So by the time you go to Thana and you're going to the suburbs and everything, you're still growing because you're doing primary sales, but your original core consumers doesn't come back to you repeat. This, you start going from Thana now to Nasik, from Nasik to Ratlam. It takes you five years and you can still grow…”

“If the higher you go, suppose you go eight, 10,000, you don't need any marketing. If you market, you won't be able to sell. The only thing should be Word of mouth and PR press and the competitions.”

“For climate change, the animal is critical because the only risk mitigation strategy, the true adaptation strategy that a farmer has, is to make sure that the risk is not just in the crop, But also has an ability to keep animals, which then give it meat, which give it milk, which give it dung.”

“So I've really considered cell manufacturing is this really complexly bad combo. Very high tech with commodity margins. So it only makes strategic sense. It generally doesn't make cost sense.”

“Range is, range is a cost. Range is a product spec decision. How much range is? Obviously, it gets missold as like, you know, somebody's cracked this amazing battery that'll do thousand kilometers in a car. It's only two batteries. It doesn't crack any amazing technology. So range is generally not a technology problem.”

“At some point you will not get more famous. At some point you will saturate every single person in India that could potentially like you. Then you'll have this amazing and sad decline, and then the platforms want to show a different face, a different podcast, a different name”

“the best interest of YouTube is to have a new Mr. Beast every five years.”

“In India, products that either save you money, uh, save you money or make you more money will make a lot of money. Products that save you time don't necessarily make that much money.”

“On Instagram reels, the title doesn't matter. Thumbnail doesn't matter. In fact, no one should be stressing over this at the beginning. Just stress over the 1:03 seconds of the video. The first sentence that you say in the video. So on TikTok, thumbnails don't matter. On Instagram, thumbnails don't matter. And on…”

“Do not start your career by making long YouTube videos. It will ruin your dream. There's no discoverability engine. In this, like, just like, this is only when you're big enough. For now, focus on TikTok, Instagram.”

“I think there's only sustainable delivery commission that is payable is 12%. You can't pay a single rupee more than that. However, now the norm is 24 to 28%. They're signing up people at 24 and 28%.”

“The third and the most important thing, which I believe people do wrong in social, is they try to make branded content, performance content, and shareable content together. And it's a losing strategy... the only thing, if you want to grow, you should think about how can you make people share more or save more? Nothing…”

“will somebody pay premium for it because it costs more to get to be sustainable? The answer is almost always no. If the answer to that is no, there's no economic model. So I think should one do it and be responsible? The answer is yes. Is it a selling factor for a customer to be able to pay more? My, my current sense…”

“I think first you should choose people who are at the tipping point, not really big, not small. Because if you build like, if you build with number one, there's no way going up. Like it's just, there's someone number two, number three, number five waiting to replace that. Right. Right. So for example, if you want to…”

“Because in India today to launch a brand, a DTC brand, you need two stars. One from the south and one from the north.”

“There are fifty million people in India that you're truly building a product for. If you're going down the premiumization route and the more premium you go, the higher the rate of growth seems to be.”

“Your ability to evolve is probably highest In isolation. Mimetic theory. If you're around people, you're going to be biased by virtue of your surroundings. If you want to truly evolve, you need objectivity.”

“Brings you slightly more insecurity. And the semblance of power, which is so intoxicating that you start to value things you should not value in a certain way in life more importantly than you should.”

“So, international investors won't touch early stage India VC if they don't Can't imagine a world where you can deliver 25% compounded, right? You might fail miserably at it, but if that's not their hope, they won't touch you. So it's a, it's a tall ask.”

“Somebody taught me a rule of thumb that basically irrespective of size of portfolio in a cycle, so it's important to measure this in cycles, it's disproportionate in their case because you'll have these free kits like Flipkart and Freshworks. But in a cycle, if you invest in 20, 3040, 50, it doesn't matter, but five…”

“around 2012 or 13, I learned this simple thing as an angel, which is every time there's a round, you ask yourself a simple question. Can it five X from here or not? So if it can't, if it can't, as an angel, the good thing is, You can exit.”

“if your objective is to make returns, being an angel investor, unless you really know what you're doing, and you're deeply networked, and you, you can add tremendous value, is not a good idea.”

“three years ago, you could get to 300 crores offline, online, and then you went offline. Today, that number is more like 50 to a hundred crores for two reasons. One, online has gotten more expensive as the more and more brands have come up online, so cost of acquisition is higher. And second though, offline, much like…”

“we used to think teams are important. Of course, they're important. But I think I'm back to over indexing on one alpha female, alpha male equivalent, because I don't think you can distribute that vision and mission.”

“Yeah, if I had to pick one, I'd pick the overconfident. ... So there has to be a will to say that I can conquer any mountain, right, in some sense. That it doesn't, without that, there's no chance. The first small peak, you'll give up.”

“If I were to divide all the money on the planet equally amongst everybody tomorrow, one will work harder than another day after tomorrow, one will be more skilled at a certain thing. And we will come back to where we are today, maybe not in five, 10 years, but in 50 years or a hundred years, because that is the very…”

“the awareness of the movie and this forty two billion dollars that I'm talking about and the 21 that was coming to back, coming to them can never get recouped if they go straight to streaming. So if a hundred million dollar movie gets made and you want to monetize it is best to first release it in the first window,…”

“Because what we are being told is because we are putting the money, we take 50%. What the end creator is being left down to is a salary. So he'll charge the highest salary and there's nothing wrong with that.”

“But I think normally when you're going against the grain and you know, it means when a lot of people think they've not understood your model, I found that that's normally where 10 X, 10 X, or 20 X value gets created.”

“I have been a fan of this notion that if you have to be truly, truly big, and if you have to create something that impacts, creates a huge impact, I hate balance. I mean, I believe that you do enough so that it's utility. You figure out a way to balance family, health, etc. But you have to go all in. If you have to…”

“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.”

“The problem is that software is going to be like content, which is that like your product is not the moat.”

“Today, GSEC is considered as cash. I think that's a systemic risk. They're using it as a tradable instrument. Yeah, they're treating it as cash, and I think it's a long-term systemic risk in the system which has to be changed. Anything, any financial instrument which has a mark-to-mark component carries duration risk.”

“being physical, attempting digital was the biggest mistake, because you can't think digital. People who are born digital, think digital. So you were born physical and thinking digital was adding one more layer, but that doesn't work.”

“Now you can't build a brand on newspaper advertising or television advertising, or outdoor. Now the way to create a brand is completely changed.”

“India one is the consuming class. Anybody who has a domestic help, for me, is the consuming class. Because consuming means not basic consumption, but some value-added consumption. India two is the serving class, which makes our lives better. The driver, the helpers, the peon, the watchman, the liftman. And for…”

“The best consumption happens when the economy is around 7000 to 11,000 dollar.”

“Payments are same on every app. It's not that my, if I do payment with one app to the other, they stand for different things. Payments is a commoditized one simple thing. Products are not. Like it's two different stores you go to cannot be exactly the same. They stand for different things, what they merchandise, what…”

“I just wanted to build on this, that it is better built by non-oteliers. So sometimes, if you have to do out-of-box thing, you don't have to get the same person from the industry.”

“Usually there is rate parity. It's not that we have cheaper, but you know, the best deals are available on the hotel website.”

“AI is more an enabler than a disruptor of our business because AI will help us streamline a lot of our operations. I also look at our business as something which is AI proof because With the amount of interaction with digital media as well as AI and technology that's taking place in people's lives, people want…”

“I think our jugaad is our biggest strength and our biggest weakness, because the same jugaad translates into a lot of this unpredictability for someone who's not familiar with that jugaad, right?”

“Because millennials, they saved, and then they spent on the travel. Gen Z's are like, give me AMI options. Give me like, tell me if I can pay via credit cards. They don't care about money. They feel it's an investment.”

“You would expect a Gen Z to come and say that, okay, I want to go to Goa and do all that. Of course, Gen Z's would come and say that, but they are also interested in spiritual travel. Wherein, The parents, they're done with it. They've been doing it all their lives. Now they want to experience a different part of…”

“We can use for the three wheels, uh, scooters, uh, short range, which says less than 500 kilometers. It's fine. But for the long range, up to 1000 kilometers, it's, that's the way for this one, for the solid city one.”

“There's nothing inherently sustainable or unsustainable about deficits and surpluses.”

“If one guaranteed way to either reduce a trade deficit or to generate trade surplus is you just crush your domestic economy. Uh, if people can't afford to eat anymore, then, you know, but they still can sell things to people in the rest of the world, then you're going to have a shift in the trade balance.”

“whatever happened to South Korea or some other, uh, Southeast Asian countries during the financial crisis has taught China a lesson about a running deficit, maybe even a brief and, uh, concentrated period of time could open your country to vulnerability, which is a reason for China want to continue its, uh, uh,…”

“Europe as a whole has had this massive structural shift in its behavior in terms of spending less relative, ah, to what they earn. Which, again, at the individual country level, it's understandable why you have that traumatic experience you want to avoid it. But from the perspective of the world as a whole, it makes…”

“foreign investors, particularly reserve managers, want liquidity and they want it, which means it has to be a big market. But the only way it's a big market is if there's a lot of debt in the first place. So you cannot have a liquid market for assets unless the government's borrowing a lot in the first place.”

“It's probably smart for the beneficiaries of capitalism to also fiend altruism because that allows for them to remain capitalist for longer.”

“I actually think there's one nice thing about the crypto markets, which is there's, there's, there's not like a bailout coming, right? Like, you know, if, if, if something does take on too much risk and blow up, they, they suffer the losses. It's not the government that's going to come on the taxpayer's dime, like bail…”

“And I was always, ah, believing in this, ah, realist school of thoughts, that, you know, states, they always compete, who is going to be, you know, Uh, the leader. So, even after the collapse of the Cold War, you know, I was expecting that in 2030, 15 years, we're going to go back to this, you know, uh, anarchic, in a…”

“I think unpredictability is, is the core for leadership. As far as I'm concerned, it's a really one of the prize virtues. If you're a little unpredictable, everyone's around on their toes in a good way”

“No, I don't think when you have power, that's the first biggest responsibility you have is to not show the power.”

“Anybody who has domestic help at home and who doesn't do something with their own hands is India one.”

“The herd mentality is some of the major setbacks India has had from time to time.”

“You would have lost 40%, 50%, 60% of your company raising money, losing a little bit of that money, failing a little bit on that whole thought process, and anyway be at about 25%, in my view, to get to that same place.”

“no, no businesses start with brand first. Nobody. We strongly believe it is brand design and consumer first. Consumer brand and design first.”

“If you take any chain, the hospital which delivers the maximum revenue per bed will be the one where the stars are.”

“Because if you sell something at a very cheap price, to run that Jan Ojdi, is a problem. You can look, if your daily sale is say, for example, 2000 rupees, what will you earn out of that? You need to have at least 50,001 lakh rupees sales daily. Then you earn 10%. In general, usually, the profit of margin for the…”

“If a patient is coming to him, and if he prescribes only Ayurveda product, the patient will not come back to him. Because patient needs what? Instant relief. Faster relief.”

“In the three to five, consumption explodes.”

“From five to 10, Healthcare and education explodes. Because once you've got your refrigerator, once you've got your basic necessities done, once you're eating the foods you want to eat, the ultimate luxury is to not have to go to the public system of healthcare. The ultimate luxury is to afford your kid a better chance…”

“My crystal ball is not perfect, but, um, extreme inequality in my book leads to either revolution or taxation.”

“This country, unusually for this scale, gets a new wave of Traumatize immigrants. Every year. And you look at time and time again, it is that generation of people that shakes things up and keep this society vibrant and fresh. And, and, and I think it's critical to their continued success, is that you keep…”

“The things that have happened, for example, in the economy and the markets are likely to induce certain behavior in the future, and you can know a little bit about that. And, but when, when the history and the past behavior has been extreme, the ability to infer from that rises.”

“when you look at a portfolio and you see a stock that's down 80%, It's usually because something wasn't covered. And because the, the, the analysis was not disciplined enough to touch all the bases.”

“my answer is that indexation has taken over as it has, not because it's so good, but because active management was so bad.”

“The bad times create an opening for active management. But it's still hard, and not many people can do it well. Why do bad times create an opening? Because panic drives down, let's say, stock prices. But the same panic causes most people to panic, which means that most people can't stop up and buy in the panic. And…”

“So if, if your excitement level, and by that I mean your insight level, is average, you don't have an edge. Your, and you get involved in AI, your performance will be average. You will go along with the tide if it works. You'll be schmeiced if it doesn't work.”

“readily available, quantitative information about the present cannot hold the key to success. Because everybody has it. Success in investing is doing better than others. Investing is a, is a funny field because it's really easy to be average, and it's really hard to be above average. But readily available quantitative…”

“second level thinking or contrarian thinking is not just different from the herd. That's not enough. It has to be different from the herd and better.”

“But I do know that you can't find a way to not have kids and still have a productive society at the end.”

“If one of our kids was doing a degree, or they're choosing a degree, and whatever it is, engineering, English, economics, if all they did for the three, four years was just study that subject without building those broad capabilities, then that would be, I think, a problem, right? They would not be set up to succeed…”

“if, you know, if you want to go into politics, you are far better off having done something first. That's my view. Uh, and I think that because A, A, you bring a set of skills and experience about something else into the political arena, which is just a good thing. And you have that knowledge which you can contribute.…”

“I think to protect yourself, you need to have an ASML strategy. So figure out in the technologies of the future, where can you develop a capability that the world will need?”

“This pathway comes further down the journey than that pathway, because I think you have to win at capitalism before you can win at morality.”

“If you're leading, that most of the decisions that you make, almost by definition, are fifty-fifty decisions. And if they were not, like, someone else would have made it. And so the only decisions that come to you are the exceptionally hard fifty-fifty ones.”

“I don't think it's like fully AI automatable, but AI SDR version of like learning about the product, learning about the use case, learning about the company. And, and we've seen this, um, play out in a few cases where here too, the best way to deploy AI SDRs is, is more as a augmentation of the flow”

“People with most risk capital will have the best models by virtue of how much money they pump into those models.”

“In the, in the absence of governmental support and intervention, the answer is no. The natural momentum is for monocultural consolidation. And the reason is because we've assumed and we've given the responsibility to an algorithmic arbiter that only values one thing and one thing only, which is engagement. And that…”

“if you have a process that has many components and you speed up some of the components, the, the, the components that haven't yet been sped up become the limiting factor. They become the most important thing. And, and, you know, you might not have thought about them at all, right? You might not have thought of them as…”

“This is, I think, the most, again, this is goes back to this kind of cynical worldview. Everything is a power struggle. Nobody cares about truth. Everybody, whatever they say, is just some kind of manipulation. This is giving an open check. For the real liars.”

“Most good founders will be largely driven by their own thoughts. Most good founders are never doing the, what is the current advice or what is the current YC yarn to people. That's for mass consumption. That's content strategy. That's not a good advice on average.”

“I feel like society has wrongly coined hypocrisy as a bad word. Hypocrisy and change are synonymous in a way. I feel like it shouldn't be looked bad upon. Like, if you believe in something today, and you believe in a completely different thing tomorrow, you should change and not give a f*** about who is going to say…”

“I think societies are happy when the trend of relative change is upward. It doesn't matter if you have a lot more than me, as long as next year I have more than I have today.”

“if you apply Machiavelli's thinking, Tony Prince that acts philanthropic, or acts kind, or acts like a family man, especially in our DNA with social media, it's absolutely impossible. Because you will have one bad moment, and it will come out. Regardless of how you portray yourself, In this time, it's very hard to…”

“the way I learned to invest, ah, was to write down my criteria when I was making a decision. Every time I'd make a decision, I would then think, why am I making that decision? And then I write down the criteria and see how it would have worked in the past.”

“And if you tax wealth, then people have to sell in order to get the money to pay the taxes. And that creates a dynamic that can pop a bubble.”

“you look at, um, studies of history and you find in studies of history, uh, what brings about happiness and health past a certain amount of money. Uh, of basic subsistence life. There's no correlation between the amount of money you have and the amount of healthy happiness you have. Um, the greatest source of, uh,…”

“Some people understand something better than other people because it comes the way the mind works. It doesn't mean that other people can't reach there.”

“I feel like all people are born the same and we all attempt different things. If I was five years old and I played cricket and I played cricket better than the 20 classmates of mine, I would organically become passionate at cricket, because I'm doing it better than the 20 kids around me.”

“In the capitalistic society, the projection of being selfless is a value add.”

“We need to run A decent amount of the neural nets at, ah, kind of like, basically a couple hundred hertz, like a couple hundred times a second. There's no way you're gonna be able to do that fully off board. The robot, ah, would just be too slow.”

“once, like, one robot knows how to do, like, logistics, That's the same neural networks we can put to every single robot in the fleet, and they can all do it. And so you have this weird scaling law here for humanoids where once, like, one robot knows how to do it, every robot in the fleet, if you have millions,…”

“Automotive manufacturing is, uh, like the most complex systems I've ever seen in my entire life all put together to manufacture cars. It's, it's like hundreds of times harder than manufacturing consumer electronics. Like, we manufacture consumer electronics a lot by hand in the world, and we ship billion phones,…”

“I've always, um, I think my, like, the conventional wisdom of everything is to go out and hire somebody, like, really experienced that makes you feel really good from a really good background that's at a successful company. And I found, like, that playbook is just complete crap.”

“I don't think AI can help you frame problems, yet. Like a business needs to know how to frame the problem, and evolve, evolve the framing of the problem constantly.”

“In beauty personal care, there is a, there is a, there is the moment of transition is when you become profitable. When you start going from four times revenue, five times revenue to 40 times forward EBITDA.”

“Today that number is now 500, you can build a good 500 crore business, 80% online, and some amount in modern trade, and still do well. Like we are, we are 500 crores.”

“Men are hard to engage, easy to please. Women are easy to engage, hard to please. The fundamental difference in consumption.”

“India gave its people lots of political freedom. That you can vote, and the way you want, and you have democracy. These countries did not give their people much political freedom, but they gave their people much more economic freedom compared to India.”

“the government should not be bailing out private sector companies, and should sort of, you know, keep, because I think that that creates an impression that the government is favoring the incumbent. Because, because after all, if companies are failing, it's, it's, you know, in terms of the fact that they tend to be…”

“When we subscribe to a media house that I read from a certain journalist, I'm actually subscribing to the bias of that journalist. If you withdraw that bias from that journal, then I might as well read those 20 lines of text. So bias will never go away, I feel like.”

“because China doesn't have, it's still at the end of the day controlled by a communist party. And they don't have capital account convertibility. Therefore the trust in the Chinese currency is still very low.”

“We're in a world, at least Trump's world is a very transactional world. And this is what I said even when he, like when he got elected. So let's not think that there's something major strategic going on here. This is a transactional world. If tomorrow something happens where he sees it advantageous to get back with…”

“And until you get an economic crisis, no one cuts government spending anywhere in the world.”

“So honestly, I wouldn't care less about the sector. For me, it's like, if you're as smart as you sound at like, 1619, 23, 25, how much smarter can you be in five years? Because the idea will change, the product will change, the market will evolve. And what do I know? Pre-seed or seed? My own, you know, perspective on…”

“every time there is growth and development, inequality increases, I don't think there's very many situations where that's not the case.”

“Like when my dad was sick, I got him a nurse. So then he didn't have to do anything. He didn't have to move. Somebody was doing everything for him. That's the worst thing you can do for your parent. Uh, it's very counterintuitive, but I think just that community, the having to play with someone, having some competition…”

“I think so much about building is more about where your unfair advantage is, not where the macro is going. And so I think, you know, take beauty for an example. Like I, I'm sure some of us have friends. I have friends building in beauty often. I think, you know, not doing a great job is not because I don't believe in…”

“in general, asking VCs about companies is bad, because if they're invested, they have to be positive, and if they're not, they still have to kind of be positive.”

“So I think if you find a niche Where you believe that you can build liquid supply and demand on a local basis, and then you can rinse and repeat that over and over again. It's essentially what Travis did when, with Uber when he founded it. That is something that could work.”

“I will tell you, I think no one has a plan. No one really has it all working smoothly. Everyone, or at least I am figuring out as they go.”

“Using AI itself does not create a defensible business. You see this with every technology boom where people are like, well, I'm a startup doing X, and because I'm using the latest technology trend, the normal rules of business don't apply to me. And that's never true. You've always, you've always got to You've always…”

“If you build a business that gets better, the business gets better when, when the model gets better, then you should keep doing, you should keep doing well if we continue to make progress. If you build a business where, when the model gets better, your business gets worse because the wrapper was too thin or whatever,…”

“I like to say something else, um, which is most people, most of the time, assume improbables are not important. I've always assumed the exact opposite. Only the improbables are important. We just don't know which of a thousand improbables is important. So what do you do in that case? You go for agility.”

“The most likely categories which will see outsized returns are categories where a new attack vector is being born. And there are many ideas about how to secure the attack vector, and many people are experimenting.”

“The whole mode of interaction of me with your payroll system may be fundamentally different, and you're ahead of HR, and that might be different, but the system of record will stay, because it's required as part of your business process to exist. Now, a system of record could also be there purely because of the fact…”

“So I think the act of wrapping these models or brains with useful things that we wanted to do will be where the art will be, and which is what I think our mutual friend is talking about, building applications around them, perhaps.”

“Failure is not as easily accepted anywhere in the world, but in Silicon Valley. Yeah. There are founders here who had companies fail and started second company and third company. There are founders who, you know, done something wrong, come back and started companies and the market gives them the benefit of doubt and…”

“In fact, what AI is doing today is like the antithesis of imagination. It's taking, it's giving you the most predictable outcome, uh, based on these kind of rough ideas you're giving it.”

“the ads only model doesn't support the kind of ambitious content that we, that we put on.”

“I think it, or maybe it's just aspirational that they seek life, work balance, but there's no such thing. It's an exercise in futility to try to chase it. In fact, it's probably, you're probably shortchanging one or the other all the time.”

“The more I think about passion and talent, Neil, in my life it's starting to sound to me more as an output than as an input. I believe I'm passionate or talented at something when I do something and I'm a little bit better at it than my peer group. Uh, I was having this conversation with someone. If I believed that I…”

“It's not the question of technology. It's the question of need, societal need. Do you re actually require a self-driving car here is the question at that price. So if you see US, ah, there is the dearth of drivers, especially for long haul, ah, trailers like this lumbering and all that, which they're not getting. So…”

“But then one common sense this thing is that flyovers do not solve police traffic problems.”

“often when you see people who are, you know, high achievers, there's some, you know, something they're trying to prove.”

“I think when I've sat down with, you know, I remember sitting in Chicago where I lived for a long time with a bunch of quite high powered CEOs and realizing that actually academically, maybe they were all B plus type students, you know, smart enough people. But when you say, why are they successful and why are others…”

“governments don't do problem definition well, um, and therefore the solutions are often roaming around in search of problems to attach to.”

“But you are seeing a shift from rules to power, as I said at Racina, you're seeing a shift from economics to security.”

“every three months or something like there's a new open source model out there, uh, and then that forces them auto labs to lower the prices because then nobody's going to use their APIs.”

“If AI was not neural nets, then GPUs wouldn't have mattered. But, but AI happened to be just basically neural nets at scale. And so all the primitives they built, all the, uh, software stack they built ended up being, like, The, the core foundational building blocks for neural networks too.”

“I think it still helps to be very good at infrastructure, backend, uh, data centers, like, uh, floating point arithmetic, storage, all the core fundamentals are not going away. In fact, like, I would say they're very essential in a world where AIs are taking care of the front end and the UI and, um, all that stuff…”

“physical access matters way less anymore. I think it's more the amount of time you get to spend yourself with an AI model using these apps, understanding where they fail and, uh, talking to the best people.”

“I think personally that passion and talent are two forms of the same word. We often think passion or talent are inputs. Like if you're passionate about coffee, you get into coffee and then you realize you're talented and you have a good outcome. I feel like passion and talent are more outputs than input. When you're…”

“as a country or a city's coffee culture gets more mature, The standard that people expect is already high. So the differentiation factor becomes less and less to some extent about like after, after you, you show that you have a certain, you know, standard... Can differentiation only be achieved through the quality of…”

“The average customer walking to a cafe doesn't care that this coffee comes from the state ABC.”

“In a coffee shop, even now, coffee prices are at a 50 year high right now. You know, add two, three rupees to the cost of a cup of coffee. So it's very easily absorbed in a coffee shop. In a packet of coffee, it's not very easily absorbed.”

“2000, the capex becomes too large to fit it out. Uh, and the incremental revenue is not justifying the increase in rent as well. Uh, below 800, then tables become occupied, and people don't want to wait for a coffee shop, though. If they see it's full, they'll just go to somewhere else.”

“The algorithm. So like if, if the objective is don't die, Then it's just a systematic process of what inflicts damage upon the body. And then how do you mitigate that damage? Like how do you block it or, you know, how do you mitigate it? And so in that regard, it, uh, it, the process predetermines what foods you eat.”

“That don't die is the most played game by every, every human on this planet every second of every day. It is our zeroth order priority every second to not die. Every breath we take, all of our metabolic energy is going to not die in this moment. That's true for all biology too, most of biology. And so don't die is the…”

“the process that people should go about doing is not trust anyone's philosophy. They should trust the data. And so there's multiple paths to get to the same destination. Just trust the data.”

“दूसरा मेरा मत है कि भाशन कला औरेटरी उससे भी जानदा महरतपून है कॉम्मिनिकेशन आप कॉम्मिनिकेट कैसे करते हैं”

“I think I'm essentially a creative person. And for me, the most creative thing you can do is build or run a business. I think there's so much of creativity that goes into that, into that.”

“Uh, and I've said this before, but I find that a lot of very successful people today are building on top of some kind of confrontation, Avoiding confrontation, vicariously viewing confrontation or, uh, something shameful that happened.”

“I feel like in a, in a family, you can be communist almost, if it's your family. With a group of friends, you can be socialist. But as the group becomes wider, I don't think socialism works because trust factor falls very quickly. We don't trust people inherently that we do not know.”

“I feel like in that hierarchy, Every manager does lesser than the people he manages. And every manager's manager does lesser. It's actually like inversely proportional to the reward they get for the work.”

“For almost every problem that we have, the cause is really a lack of knowledge or intelligence by humans. We're making mistakes. We're making mistakes because we're not smart enough to figure out we have a problem, because we're not smart enough to figure out solutions, we're not smart enough to organize ourselves to…”

“It's very inefficient because the system has to try many things before it gets the correct answer. Um, and so, It's very inefficient. It requires many, many, many trials. And so it works really well for games. You know, you, you, it's very efficient. If you want to train a system to play chess or go or things like…”

“And the reason it works for text and not for other things is because text is discrete. So there is a finite number of possible things that can happen, right? There's a finite number of words in the dictionary. There's a, you know, so if you can discretize your signal, then you can use those autoregressive prediction…”

“LLMs are system one. The architecture I'm describing, which I call objective driven AI, is system two.”

“Passion cannot be your job.”

“So we had to figure out, see there's two, there's big energy and little energy. Big energy is the grid. Little energy is thousands of homes having batteries and rooftop solar. So the opportunity is actually in, in this little energy where there's lots of players and how do you make that efficient? How do you create…”

“We fiend benevolence a lot, because it is cool to be benevolent and not malevolent. We often are nice to people because we like the projection of ourself of being nice to people.”

“Certain, you can use certain things, but nothing at least in sport guarantees, uh, better performance, better performance or success. It's not that you do this and your success rate is going to go up. There is no formula like that.”

“You support first when you're the underdog. Then you become too big, then they want you to fall. And then you have to outlive them. In order for you to become a legend.”

“No, no, no. That has no, like, at least in sport. ... Nothing. Zero. Zero. ... You can be all of those things, and if you're scoring, scoring hundreds every game, there's nobody to stop you from being picked, and yeah.”

“Companies do well over the long term who are able to bear the brunt of a down cycle. And most companies I see today will find it hard to survive a down cycle.”

“If you start a shirt and sell it at 15,000 rupees, you might find it hard to sell it. But if you price a shirt at one lakh rupees, Indian made, weave a story around it, it will sell itself to a certain extent.”

“Not really hard. A month would. If you're totally into it, in a month.”

“In my experience, I find like something either works from the very beginning, or it never works at all.”

“I don't think movies should be where society derives their sense of morality.”

“I feel like I have changed as a person every year in the last 10 years. What I thought I wanted today has been totally different from what I wanted the next year. And I would hate to commit the present version of myself to another person when I know I'm going to change so much.”

“Eventually, uh, I feel like in society, everybody is chasing status. Which is differentiation from your fellow people.”

“I feel like Indian celebrities shy away from being vocal about who they are as people. They show the very media trained facet of them. And I feel like that worked five years ago. I don't know if it works today because you can't fall In love with a face or the manner in which a person acts or the proper image that they…”

“I feel like if the real version of you with the flaws, the vulnerabilities, the strength, all of that is depicted in a manner which is truly organic to you, I would assume like there will be some people who will troll you and dislike you and all of that. But net net, if you then sell sneakers, I think more will sell.”

“And I think mental health is something that It's nice to kind of tackle it also quietly, with a lot of grace, and not really, don't use it as an excuse, you know, to not do things, or not be a certain way. It's a problem. Find a solution. Keep working at it. Take love and care, but don't make it an excuse. I think a…”

“The audience didn't like it, and audience is king. If audience doesn't like something, it means there's something wrong in the film. Otherwise, there's no reason for them not to watch the film.”

“Consciously people are nicer to you before they get funded, not after.”

“The minute you push your primaries and you don't look at your secondaries and tertiaries, the brand is finished.”

“In a, in a state, suppose if you are there, you address the 10 trendiest bar. So the minute you are there, other bars will copy you. They'll say that if you give, like, if you have an entry to one on-premise, like say a sidecar in Delhi. If anyone knows that, okay, if in sidecar your brand is there, it is accepted…”

“if you are an absolute zero to one person starting out, I would say once you identified what product you are doing, just take a few bottles and there are three layers to distribution. What you manufacture is called as the primary. Then you, what your distributor supplies to the market to say, Meenakshi's bar is called…”

“Mumbai is the costliest. Any city, like if you want to launch his beer from Mumbai, as a startup, it's very tough. The kind of money it burns, like, you know, it like I addressed Mumbai the last. It's the most expensive market.”

“That's why beer is the hardest because you have no room to hide. You're just doing pure fermentation. It's the hardest thing to do because you make a mistake. Anybody will catch.”

“This is the number one competency in entrepreneurship that you have to be confident no matter what, but really you have no idea what's going to happen next.”

“Imposter complex is good. A lot of us seem to have it. Insecurity is good. As long as neither of these lead to inaction, but they lead to action.”

“Avoidant attachment type. Good for startups. Bad for relationships overall, but good for starting a company.”

“Very much part of the solution has to be a part of the solution, particularly e-buses rather than e-cars.”

“The problem is that you were treating this as a technical problem. It's not a technical problem. It's a political problem.”

“So actually our biggest problem is coming from the fact that we as human beings are still rewarding, um, something that nature actually tells us should not be rewarded. Nature says that it should be destroyed. It should go back to earth. And yet we are the arrogance of man. Because I don't think any of the women were…”

“It may in the north, where you're eating a lot of bad food, too much meat, growing it badly, but if vegetarianism means that you eat vegetables which are also grown badly, it doesn't help.”

“the problem is the asset cost of an electric car is so high, that the kilometer saving is only worth it if you buy a car in the 10 to 20 lakh range. If you buy like a 80 lakh, 40, even a 40 lakh electric car, you don't have an ROI. Unless you run it like a hundred kilometers a day.”

“Mostly my thesis is that, Hey if you,, if you own distribution, you own eyeballs, no matter what, where you move to the eyeballs will travel there.”

“it has become so important, even for people like me, uh, an entrepreneur to build distribution because paying for distribution takes away so much of the Delta you might have, uh, that a district that a person with distribution brings organically.”

“Like, there are creators who come in batches, and then, you know, four years later, you gotta reinvent yourself, or else the next batch will take over, so on and so forth.”

“the digital version of authentic would be, what are some of the attributes that are actually true? Right. And those are the ones you choose to project because that's what's, that's what's the closest version of you, but you can't truly be fully authentic. That's a, That's a suicide.”

“As a creator, if you get cancelled or pushed back, you have cracked it. You are finally relevant enough to hate.”

“So unfortunately, in social media, every year there's roughly like six to seven opportunities To go guaranteed viral. Guaranteed. Any video you make about a topic, it will go viral. Unfortunately, a lot of people utilize that just to get attention.”

“you want, you want to feel secure financially before you're able to voice your thought very, very publicly. At least this is what I have maintained that I think if I feel extremely secure financially, it actually the thing that you're buying by making money is freedom to express.”

“the only and the best way to get distribution today is to make YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels that are 59 seconds exactly, which is the one minute guy. And I think short content gets you reach, and after you get the reach, you should go deep by creating the podcast. But you shouldn't start By creating…”

“You should read the quarterly calls of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, and from listening to the CEOs of the social medias, you can guess where the tides are going to go, because these guys control the tides.”

“When you begin, it's only quantity game.”

“Virtue signaling works, Nikhil. It does work, but it creates an expectation out of you that's hard to sustain. Because not everybody is as virtuous as they claim to be.”

“When creators share about their relationship online, and then they go all out, uh, sharing, talking about it, even doing brand deals, things like that, and then when that falls out, and your audience expects you to answer, I don't think that's the time you can take a stand saying, oh no, I want my space.”

“Very few people are able to succeed while also doing another thing. It's, it's, it's very tough to do that. If you do, you're really talented. You're really talented at being able to figure out in your spare time how to crush it at the content thing. So it requires you to make that jump to actually fully succeed.”

“You want to build a business under your distribution no matter what. Because wealth is made through owning equity and not through renting your time out. And unfortunately, the branded content part of our business, it's effectively high rent.”

“India is a very value conscious market. It's not a price sensitive market. It's a value sensitive market.”

“Malls are good for incidental footfall, but cost prohibitive and your margins in a standalone restaurant with lower incidental footfall, your margins are going to be better than in a mall.”

“There are 35% cogs, right? You got 15% labor, 15% rental, 15% incidentals, you want to make 20 to 25%.”

“Cloud kitchens work for where either you are a very strong brand that you've built over the years. You come from a certain pedigree and have the sophistication enough to understand sophisticated marketing tools, right? And CRM and to be data driven and analytically driven. It's very, very difficult.”

“The restaurant industry has a cycle shorter than any other industry. Every six months, food tastes change, design tastes change, entire, you know, the entire vibe around a certain, you know, area changes, entire markets change. So I think, uh, the cycles are smaller in our industry than perhaps even in the fashion…”

“reach out to B to B brands more than D to C brands. And I'll tell you why, right? Because platforms when you say B to B. B to B is like, let's say Amazon or Adobe or Google or Meta, WhatsApp, right? They pay you way longer.”

“we are getting formalized as an economy, and formal economy is more expensive than an informal economy. I think that's playing around a little bit. For the first time, the formalization is quite complete now. Yeah. And that is, that means 18% extra. And I think that's a big, that's a big, big thing.”

“So Nikhil, in early days, like Big Bazar was created on three things. Greed, fear, and we used to call it altruism to a certain extent. The brand can be built on this. Greed is that it is available at a lower price. Fear is that it won't be available after a while.”

“The biggest reason that I feel is point of sale. Every time the majority of influence happens on point of sale. Okay. There's obviously different digital discovery, different, different percentage, but the large majority happens on the point of sale.”

“I think from the zero to 20 crores, if you can keep an 80 20%, where 80% is e-commerce platforms, and 20% is DTC, it's a great mix. Because then you have enough consumer data, but you also have reach, right, that you can actually get to.”

“If you focus a hundred percent on DTC, for example, I think you can represent the brand, but you'll end up bleeding money, which means by the way, you'll have to raise money much sooner.”

“Myntra values freshness. Fresh stock. So new styles coming on all the time. Therefore, if you want to make Myntra your primary platform, you basically have to introduce more frequent drops and you have to get tagged to what's new.”

“A hundred and above to 500, you have to figure out how to make offline work, which is a different skill set for a lot of people who have started it this way. You have to figure out and really make sure that the product goes from push to pull.”

“That percent from 20 to a hundred, maybe call it fifty-fifty performance and organic. Hundred plus that performance based sales should come down to 30%. Because if it doesn't, 30, 40%, it doesn't, it just, the cost of it keeps going up and up and up and up and up, right? In the Amazons of the world.”

“If you asked me three, four years ago, I would say most of the big players were not digitally very good. So you could actually still create some scale online and then figure out a way to see if that was enough. I don't think that's true anymore. I think all of them are now quite good digitally. And so I would certainly…”

“And I believe digital brand in fashion has to do X number of stock turns, otherwise there's no sense. Yeah. At least their stock turn has to be in excess of seven, eight percent, seven, eight times.”

“In general, online values width more than depth. The reason is purely algorithmic. What happens is you have 600,000 SKUs in a Myntra. Number of SKUs that are tagged to a same brand name is one weightage in an algorithm that basically then says you're a large brand, and therefore you get automatically more visibility,…”

“is it possible to use machine learning to reduce inventory and reduce wastage? The answer is absolutely. And I think it's, it's differentiated enough that if you build this as a, as a real capability, you know, you get two, three, four percentage points more. That I think makes, or, or profits that makes a big…”

“I would not do it. I mean, I would not do it. You go offline.”

“No, I think luxury, you should not sell with patriotism.”

“Arrogance as a sales strategy is working. If people go to a brand and ask for something and they say, no, you can't have it. People want it more.”

“Like, to be honest with you, like, if I was, like, I would actually, like, most people ask me, okay, you know, you guys dropped out of college. Should we drop out of college? I say, no, don't drop out of college. Like, stay in college.”

“Because I think, I think hunger, you can't teach hunger. You know, um, the drive, the hunger, the, I think people who come from nothing, who have a point to prove, I think they generally tend to be the ones that.”

“It's usually two to three percent of your portfolio that will return 80%, that will give you 80% of your returns. I mean, it's that skewed.”

“Money is more about, I would actually index trust more than returns.”

“firstly, I don't believe charity is altruistic. I feel like everything has subtext in context, which I might not be able to speak about in a manner which will be comprehensible by many, many people, including myself in most cases, but I think charity is done. From a place in your heart where your morality is being…”

“It's on television as well. The reality is, The presumption that there would be high value attributed to it, and we'd have a high number to it, just doesn't hold because it's available somewhere else.”

“This is a business that requires a Rolodex. Because even if the entrepreneur has the material, he might like, how many years does it take for a good song to reach a right person? There are, there are so many good material out there today on that you'll find that you'll never meet it.”

“I believe that, um, as you grow your company, you need, uh, you need a capital value for a kind of a currency that you use to grow your company with. So if you create a valuation for your company, you can use that as a very, very powerful currency, um, to do many more things.”

“when you don't have kids, you tend to Be more philanthropic.”

“Don't be wedded to a historic business. If that business can be monetized, and if someone else can make a bigger business of that business, divest it.”

“No, the differentiation is, once you've built a business, and you've been successful once, you don't start all over again. Yes. As an actor, you start all over again. People only remember your last movie.”

“I, I'm definitely not a proponent of going out of your way to avoid carbs. You need to control it. Carbs should not be 80% of calories, but can easily be, you know, 30, 40% of calories, and I think they're absolutely fine.”

“Every day, consumption of sugar, I think, is just very unnatural. I think, evolutionary, we are just never used to having so much sugar, and that's, you know, very much out of sync within how our biology works.”

“And I was quite clear that if I had a plan B in my life, then plan A wouldn't work out. Because I think that's half the situation, right, when you want to start something, and you feel you have an optionality, you're going to run aground definitely 10 times.”

“And more than the perception, I think it's also about the fact that I think a lot of initial drive comes from the fact that like, like from the fact that you see other people having so much and you want that.”

“my belief is that everyone is collecting these badges and these credentials, which is what education is about.”

“because I like to believe that it's not oversimplification, but it's the reality that if you say that you will get X after doing Y, then people are more motivated. So I don't think it's an education issue. I think it's a motivation issue.”

“And 10 times more capital coming is not going to give you 10 times fast result. In fact, it's going to slow the process down.”

“If you open up completely, you also become mercy even more to something the Fed may do. That is really silly. That causes violent capital flight. That was nothing to do with you.”

“I feel like being indifferent, and having low expectations, like really low expectations, is the key to happiness and content.”

“The rate of UBI not necessarily being the same, but the thinking of the world has to go in this direction together, because if country A remains Overtly capitalistic and competitive, where company, country B goes to the UBI way, it'll cross discrepancies in the world.”

“Alignment is about figuring out all these edge cases and saying, don't do this, don't do this, 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.”

“very, very small influencers are very effective, because it's just not go to the celebrity with millions of followers. You have to find someone who connects with the principle of the brand.”

“So, we kind of, we had different celebrities for different parts of the country. Like, we had Swaro Ganguly for West Bengal, we had Ram Charan for a certain state in South India. So, I'm saying it's a, it's basically we went very local and we saw that to be much more effective than have one person who appeals to all…”

“When they come to Misho, people believe that this selection I will not get for a more affordable price anywhere else. Like they have to believe this. And I will get the largest possible selection in the price points that I can afford.”

“There are one stage of the business, especially in e-commerce. You need to cross a critical mass of scale. And unless you get there, if you try to become profitable too soon, you get into a negative spiral.”

“And like in fashion business, on, on digital commerce, you can do 10 stock turns. Where in physical, you can't do more than three, three and a half.”

“That is a unique problem of open networks. So it's not necessary that this is a problem on, this is a major problem on a Facebook, LinkedIn, or WhatsApp. But it is definitely a problem on Instagram and Who and Twitter.”

“that platform is all about fancy food, fancy fashion, fancy holidays. It's not just, it's not even aspirational, it's unattainable. So it's intimidating.”

“On the supply, you bring in billions and billions of pieces of content, 10:02, 22:32. You use AI to understand what's in that content. Is it urban? Is it rural? Is it a song? Is it dance? Is it poetry? Is it shiry? Is it, you know, fun, skit, dance, et cetera? And you tag it with a machine. And on the right hand side,…”

“Um, that I think is because I think there's no one platform serves all that day, that time is gone.”

“the guy who entertains us for 30 seconds on a short video app, right, you will never watch him in a three hour movie. You only Shah Rukh Khan can do a three hour movie and get our attention.”

“today we already disappear into a different universe. And that universe is based on our taste. Like if I want to get into the lifestyle universe, I'll, I'll open Instagram. Right? What people are eating, where they're going, you know, all of that is the universe of lifestyle that I live in. Right? If I want to get into…”

“So what in my experience it does is it does not allow other brands to stand on their feet. You're always like a second child or a stepchild or a.”

“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.”

“We don't need many things outsourced or better that there are wedding planners because they are professionals at that. Our job is very good when it comes to catering the food, the service, the, you know, everything else. It's like we, we as a sector got out of doing wedding cards because there are professionals who do…”

“So many spaces which could be remodeled and converted into boutique assets or budget assets. And has to just calculate what kind of revenue share he's going to give from his total revenue.”

“earlier pilgrimage used to be a very, Religious purpose trip that, you know, one has to go to the, the, 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 necessarily only that, it's also culture, and it is…”

“So like anything is working, anything and everything is working, right? So I'll just say that the most random idea that you're getting right now would work. Do like a pajama party, right? People would come. So anybody who's young and who wants to build something in the community space, start with these small events.”

“There is, but that is the one which is more difficult to be a good financial value, because those are small lodges, 12, 1418, 20 rooms. They get a good rate, but they also shut down four, five, six months in a year sometimes. So you have to make all that business within six months for it to be viable over a year.”

“Anyone who's thinking about travel tech, anyone who's thinking about out of box niche area, I don't think the advice should be, To start another similar me to kind of a model in a crowded space already, because that era is gone, to be honest, because the internet early, 2020 years ago, there was an opportunity.”

“Energy does not seem to be the problem as much as it is the fungibility, the movability, and the storage of energy today.”

“if you, if you think that in fact there is this sort of growth impulse from AI related investment, I would think that would increase the returns on risky assets, which means that non-risky assets should pay more compensation, which means yields should go up.”

“So if the growth rate of the population is slowing, you should expect to have less investment. That should push down interest rates.”

“because so many people have the majority, if not the vast majority of their wealth in housing, there is a very reasonable motivation for governments to not want housing prices to go down. I mean, maybe you don't want it to go up a lot, but you certainly don't want to go down because You know, screwing over a lot of…”

“I think I've seen a lot of friends, uh, engage in philanthropy and it's, it's just like startups. A lot of it doesn't work, but the best ones do incredible things.”

“It's if when they're purchasing power or their wages are flat and then someone's getting much, much wealthier, that's what creates like the, the biggest social unrest, I think.”

“And if you can take away someone's economic rights, um, you can take away all their rights really, because if you can, if you don't have enough money to have transportation or food or housing, You'll, you know, you can't really express your other rights.”

“to make a new financial system, you had, you needed a few things, like you needed scalability of the blockchains to get the cost down and the speed, speed down. You needed regulatory clarity, and then we needed privacy of the transactions. It's actually, it's actually almost perfectly mirroring the evolution of the…”

“in some ways, like real estate is the original Bitcoin because it's like proved provably scarce.”

“I think most people should probably not be traders. They should be investors. You know, and dollar cost average, own the index fund, diversify the portfolio, have some, you know, have some in Bitcoin, some in everything, all the different pieces, so.”

“if we, all of us will follow a, you know, An approach of just serving our interest in the long run. I mean, in the short run, we may see, you know, some interest, some gains, but in the long run, it's going to be a lose, lose, uh, situation.”

“They need to reflect today's reality. Because if they don't reflect today's reality, then they don't have any validity.”

“I will start from the regional level. I will start from, ah, first to connect, ah, the region with Europe. It's much more easier to start, you know, building the puzzle. So, ah, India, connecting India with the Gulf, with the Middle East, with Europe. It's a win-win situation.”

“sitting behind the office of the president. You need to understand that you cannot change everything. Ok. You need to be very specific and always keep in mind that changes will come probably after you leave the office.”

“what is important is when you finish a meeting as a diplomat, what your colleague will think after you leave and not what he or she mentions during your discussion.”

“I think you lose the idea of capitalistic high. Because you become philosophical after you lose, after you lose a lot. So I think philosophically, I think for me, creating anything new is a good high.”

“I'm trying this creation method in other areas. It just doesn't work. This has been a rare thing where nobody has said us no to be a part of this. Everybody has contributed in some manner.”

“The loyalty factor of this generation is much, much lower because the kind of content and media they get to consume is far, far more.”

“And consumer business is not like cinema, where first day, first show, you are gone, you are gone... There is a whole chance to improve ourselves. The consumer will tell you something. We will change ourselves.”

“So when you work in that kind of a company, ah, if you will not become a brand yourself, ah, company will not run.”

“when we started our business, you just had to make the product to make money. Now we have to be very good, excellent, highly competitive. The business has become very crowded, there are not many people here, and the whole thing is scaled.”

“See, supplements are not well regulated. Right. So you're better off taking from a good brand who has good internal quality systems than rely on a regulatory system to do this.”

“Cost is not the most important thing in this Gen Z crowd. I mean, for example, this youth, where if, if, if somebody is concerned about his health, he wants a flavor, he wants a good looking, ah, tablet, capsules. I mean, see point is not, ah, bringing the same thing in the same packaging, the same manner, in the same…”

“If you're basically spending money on R&D, you're supposed to have global presence. Then only it will make some kind of a sense. Only from India, not possible.”

“I like to say the United States is like a salad bowl. They're all here, but they are Irish American, Indian American. In Brazilian, we, and I say we because I became, I identify as Brazilian. I became a Brazilian citizen. I dream in Portuguese. It's more of a soup. All the vegetables kind of fused together.”

“If I want the youth of India to change one thing, just one thing, is they need to stop Thinking that changing their mind is some kind of hypocrisy.”

“in investing, you can put together a portfolio rather than one that will produce maximum success. If a certain future unfolds, you can put together a portfolio Which will do fine if several, any of several futures unfold, and not too terribly if a bunch of other futures unfold. Now you can't prepare simultaneously for…”

“history, the things that have happened so far and people's reaction to history have Semi-predictable implications for the future.”

“rather than thinking of cycles as ups and downs, which I think most people do, think of them as excesses and corrections, excesses and corrections.”

“patterns in the, in the, in the real world, the non, non-scientific, non-mechanical world, uh, Certainly aren't regular, but they do occur ups and downs. They do it predictably, but not necessarily predictable in time or predictable in, uh, amplitude, but they certainly occur predictably.”

“I think that most ambition starts with the dollar sign. In enlightened cases, it transitions to non-dollar.”

“If, if, if you go into a field that everybody likes and they like it a lot and have bid up the price, then your returns are not likely to be high. If they, if you go into a field where everybody else has been blind to the merits and says, I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole, and you figure out that it's good and…”

“the base, the most important fundamental skill set is predicting the probability of the fault better than other people. That's, that's where if we don't have that, that's the necessary condition for, for superior performance.”

“This is a competitive game... You don't have to, it's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's a matter of being more right than the other person or less wrong.”

“There are certain themes that re that rhyme from instance to instance in history. And, um, They mostly have to do with human nature. And I think human nature doesn't change incredibly slowly. I mean, when we talk about fight or flight, people will start talking about the, the, the, the, uh, the stone age man and the,…”

“If you have to be right all the time, if there's something in your makeup that recall, that says you're going to be unhappy if you're not right all the time, don't become an investor.”

“In the emerging markets years back, if you were a global multinational brand, you had a halo of which you didn't feel you could get domestically. That certainly has changed.”

“her ability to tell a story about anything in any context, Is a superpower, because it's by far and away the most powerful way to communicate”

“I would in a way in the new world, define creativity by contrarian behavior more so than yesterday, because a lot of these models are trained on data, which always projects a certain path.”

“someone put it to me well, they said that, you know, the long term is really just a succession of short terms that you either survived or were not kicked out of. Um, and, and actually I realized over time there isn't, at least in politics, maybe it's more broadly in business, there's less of a kind of conflict between…”

“If you spend most of your life doing what I do, which is reading for purpose, right? What's the actionable takeaway from what I'm reading? You know about what to do and how to do it. You're probably less good at understanding the why. And as Lakshad was talking about before, you're less good at understanding people.…”

“Yes, you know, unlike B to B companies, unlike SaaS companies, unlike potentially companies in the AI, ah, deep tech space, you don't see outcomes quickly, you don't, um, get those same kinds of financial validation quickly, but actually, if you stick at it, some of these companies dramatically change people's lives…”