Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more

27:29That is really interesting. And you're saying that comes from just the fact that people never get paid hourly. It's always a salary and so people are like that. The concept of value in time, like many Indian languages do not have a word for efficiency. Wow. And that's true for many Asian languages. The word for the efficiency does not exist. So then how do you value it if it's not a novel category? Fascinating. There's something else along these lines of Dows and Arpus and efficiency that you talk about that I love, which is this idea that focus is is a curse in Asian markets that in the U .S.

28:08There's often this advice, focus, build one thing that's amazing that everyone loves try to make that work, scale that and then only then build a new product or build something built in a new big feature and your advice is in India and Asia markets in general. It's the opposite and I think it's because you make so little pre -user. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I think one is you make very little per user so you have to do many things but also all low trust markets and let me define low trust markets is there consumers are a lot more of trying new things because there are not institutions that protect you against a bad behavior done by a company.

28:44So for example, if I ever had a phone in a coffee shop in the US, I can think about suing them and making money off it. In India, you don't even think about suing the coffee shop or hoping that you will get any money for that. So what happens is in the low trust country, all developing nations are low trust by design because the institutions are not strong enough to really take care of many things. What happens is there is concentration of trust. So you will see that super apps, super stars, super companies all exist in low trust markets because the lack of trust creates concentration of trust.

29:21And therefore you will see one app can do 400 things. For example, we have a company like Tata that can do salt to cart, to jewelry, to anything that people will buy because it's a Tata brand because it comes from a low trust society trusting the brand and not being, oh, I'm going to go preferred to this new brand. and the joy for trying new things is not so high in low trust nations. Wow, I'm learning a lot here. I didn't know all this. So essentially brand is even more, it's exponentially more important in Indian markets. It's funny, but the oldest brand in the world is a brand called as Chavan Prash.

30:00It's a guy named Chavan who build a Prash is a sort of a that you can have for good health. And it was built in India many, many, many, many centuries ago. And when the lots of Indian business still have the name of the person behind it, even the US used to like that. Like, GP Morgan, all these guys are not some fancy name. They're name of people. And therefore, in India, trust still comes from a lot of names of people who have a lot of trust behind them in repetition behind it. I want to zoom out a little bit before we go in a different direction. What do you see as either the most pressing challenges in India right now for tech or the biggest and or the biggest opportunity for Indian startups and then just generally where do you think things will evolve in the next few years?

30:51Sometimes I wonder the challenges and the opportunities are exactly the same. For example, one of the biggest challenges we have is we have very low female participation of labor compared to many markets. But I also believe it's an opportunity because you can, let's say use AI and create many new types of business opportunities because now, like, work from home is not a concept anymore. You will actually create very interesting businesses for that. Number two is we are low on per capita income. So what AI can do instead of taking out jobs away, just make us brighter because now, like Satti talks about that now expertise is available in here.

31:34So you can actually just kind of ride on that and really make the world very equal in many, many ways. So that's massive opportunity. And also the challenge because I often make this joke that the largest employer of the world is in efficiency. And if you take that away too quickly, we'll have a very, very jobless world. So the thing is that it can be an opportunity for a country like India and also potentially a threat because we don't start becoming great at AI. I was actually just telling somebody today that maybe all of our interviews should become about giving a task that they can only perform if they were very good at AI.

32:11And no matter what the job is, you make that the minimum criteria that they cannot use that leverage that, they will become a liability in five years anyways. And last one is we have a very young demographic, very well positioned with access to technology, access to smartphones and so on and so forth, a lot of hunger. But our challenge is also that it's also the first generation that is truly learning what is entrepreneurship, what is risk and will make all sorts of mistakes get there. And I hope we don't go into shell after having these large scale failures that you have not seen before. India is not used to layoffs.

32:53Like, shut up world is used to layoffs, but in India, if you start a through layoffs, it becomes the national news and all sorts of discussions happen over here. So we are not there yet. So we are stuck between like being somewhat of a collector or some of our intervieweristic societies. So we are somewhere, India is a great remix of everything. I love this line. You just shared of inefficiencies, is the largest employer in the world. I totally get that. Okay, so let me talk, let's talk about CRED for a bit. So you had, I think three startups before CRED. Okay, and then you've been breading CRED for about six years now.

33:34I'm curious just all this journey of CRED, what you've learned or changed your mind about during this phase of your career versus previous phases. I think CRED's inside was actually quite simple realize that unfortunately the value of time and per capita income is concentrated in 20 family and families and therefore focusing on them is important and they are lot more global in their approach versus rest of India. So you have to build them very differently and I realize that ability to focus on a customer set which is not historically possible to do because everybody every investor expected us to be the next China and the only similarity of India and China was the population and nothing else was similar.

34:20So I think having that conviction that I'm going to build only for this folks and this large enough market, thankfully I had one success for somebody to bet. So our like our series A was pretty family and dollars. I would have not had that luxury if I had no success in the past because I had no product with any monetization to prove that I'm doing the right thing. It turned out okay, but I think I could get a lot of people to take risk behind my insight or my thesis is because I focused on right customer category and built on it. But I think the few things I've learned differently is that companies that are very, very good at 0 to 1 will not naturally become greater 10 to 100.

34:59There are lots of different lessons to learn. The founder has to evolve the biggest thing that has to happen. Most people who have creed are people who have not seen a bigger business than grid, which comes at its benefits and costs. So you have to gentrify the org every now and then to make people understand the value of many of these reliable things. And I often tell people that entrepreneurs are uncertainty absorbers for everybody, for for employees, for investors, for customers, they are and therefore they they they they get rewarded for being those people to remove uncertainty from people's life.

35:37But the kind of expectations keeps changing at the company of scale. For example, if you have a, let's say a seed sale investor, they are very used to very high uncertainty and they're happy with some absorption. But as you get to growth investor and you get sovereign on your capital, the amount of stability you need to provide is significantly more. And therefore, you need to evolve very, very differently. So I think those are the few lessons I have learned. You start realizing that not everybody can scale into everything and you cannot expect that you can give up to 0 to 1p and just because you're building 10 to 100.

36:12So how do you kind of coexist with those things? How do you react to big changes in the market and not become this slow company and every company goes to that? I mean, if you look at what Zach went through in the last three or years was that he had to I offered there He had to play the shiver Come and do a lot of destruction to become big again, right? So I think that's what founders can do And and it's not easy to do one of the things I've learned is that profit pools of a country Tell you a lot about what the country values and trying to copy somebody else's profit pool to your country will not be a wise idea because the countries the all user demonstrated in what profit pools exist.

36:57Let's take an example. In the thousand most profitable companies in India, the number of retailers would be probably two or three. But if you look at the western market, you will see a bunch of them because it's a consumption market plus very high divorce rate, means you are always be cocking again in the market again. You're trying to you threaten, be cool and all of that. India has very low divorce rate less than 1%. Arrange managers and fashion spend. And because we have a lower female participation of labor, India is probably the only market where female fashion spends is less than men's fashion spends.

37:33Everywhere else, it's probably 5, 6, 6 more for them. So what happens is you start appreciating what the country values. For example, I have noticed that many patriarchal societies is have very significant market gap in financial services versus consumption. And these broad patterns, you start thinking about very, very differently. So many lessons there. I love this idea of a founder being an uncertainty absorber. This other point you made about Zuck becoming the Shiva in destruction, such as on something Brian Cheskin, I chatted a bit about is how founders often start in control, giving very micro -managing, just driving the ship.

38:13And then as the company grows they delegate and power. And then things start to slow down. And then they come back and play the Shiva and take control. Again, is there anything there that you've seen? Yeah, but that's a universe. It's a universe goes through the exact same phases. So if you study in my thought, you will see that there's a broma, Vishnu, Mahesh, Thikas, and every Yogan is this gold ghost with these three phases all the time. Beautiful. I see. So this is just inevitable. This is the circle of life. Absolutely amazing. I love this. I'll just ties back to your philosophy background.

38:47I love it. It's beautiful. This episode is brought to you by Dovetail, the customer insights hub for product teams. Are you working in a feature factory building filler that nobody wants? Probably because the sad truth is that most SaaS features are rarely or never used, costing the industry billions every year. Let's change that. Product managers, Dovetail is holding their first industry conference. It's called Insight Out, and they want you to come. Over one day in San Francisco, the product community is coming together to learn how to better leverage customer insights and build products that people actually love to use.

39:25It's on April 11th, and you can hear from product leaders from Uber, Twitch, Meta, and Netflix. as they share their strategies for driving innovation, thriving in uncertainty, and balancing customer -centered work with business needs. And here's the kicker. It's absolutely free for online tickets. Just go to dovetail .com slash Lenny to register. This is thanks to Dovetail, the best way for product teams to get the most out of customer insights. Check it out at dovetail .com slash Lenny. Okay, so uncred. So here's a funny thing that happened. when I ask people on Twitter what questions to ask you on this podcast.

40:02And one of those common questions was, when do you think you'll become profitable, which is interesting because when I have other CEOs that are founding a company that is, and most companies aren't your profitable, nobody's asking that question. So I'm just curious why, why is that such a common question that comes up? It's fascinating. It's fascinating. As a country, most business of a trading, you buy something at low cost, sell it higher price and you make profit. Most of our businesses, most of our family businesses were trading, right? But building a capex heavy distribution monetizing it later on, focusing on higher revenue growth rate versus trying to get profitability first is not known to us, right?

40:47So when this series of numbers of losses, like there's a shock that why would somebody give you this kind of money? Like, and then by the way, my own dad wouldn't respect me till I was a profitable company. So it's not surprising that people in India have this comments, but it also comes from not understanding how businesses are built in internet world where VCs are giving you the capital to kind of build distribution, unique product, edge, brand, all of that stuff, and then monetize later on and monetize big and then have very large profit boost to go after. But a lot of times this comes from not understanding this business and I feel it'll change because many internet companies are now getting very profitable public listed.

41:36So we'll have a decade. Let's understand one thing. Like in the US, maybe 27, 30 % of US market cap is now tech companies. India tech companies would probably make less than 2, 3 % of the market cap. So we are mostly and I'm not saying India has this fabulous history of building very, very profitable tech companies. We are probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies, but we are still figuring out what this means. And the fact that this question by another I can tell you one thing that I have been asked this question by people on Twitter way more than my any of my investors ever asked me this question, which also creates an orbit charge for entrepreneurs who can actually build businesses and ability to rescap and prove their business model with very revenue high -grace, high revenue growth rate and very large brands and so on and so forth.

42:29But I find it fascinating as well. Also, one thing you'll see fascinating in India is that there is immense amount of trolling and doubt that will come in your comments. No matter what you do. So if you see any founder in India, they'll post something about the thing. The comments will rarely have appreciation. So it feels sad because when you see global companies do stuff like India will lose their shit on Apple Vision Pro and all this stuff and like the Twitter will go gaga over it but I think when it comes to and I believe NV is hyper local. We do not envy Elon Musk for all the stuff he because he's so far away.

43:13But we, we, we are own, because they were just like us, not many years ago. And therefore, NV is like Wi -Fi, it's like a, it's like an hyperlocal service. How do you stay positive and focused and not let that stuff bring you down? And you have advice for founders in India that are dealing with the same sort of feedback. It's funny that a number of calls have got from founders to start getting hit and go to person to get this call because they've seen me get it for many more years. And I tell people that we couldn't have made it this far. If we cared about criticism of everybody, versus people who've done better than us.

43:58If somebody who's done anything better than me gives me any amount of criticism, I will absolutely flip and make all the changes and evolve. And I seek feedback all the time from people, but if I start taking feedback from everybody who do not understand and no one's an empathize with what I'm doing, I'm not saying that we should not take customer feedback. That's very different. But let's say somebody commenting about your business who does not understand the no one's of it. You can't be reacting to everything. And I often tell people that there's a reason elements with lower valencies are called noble gases because they're hardest to get reactions from.

44:37That's over my head, but I love it anyway. It's so interesting. I love all these elements you're pointing out of how different building in India is that I think people in the US have no idea about. And so I appreciate you getting into all these little elements. Is there anything else around the Indian market that may surprise people before we go in a different direction about building a startup there? For all the challenges, India remains the most promising market that one can be building for right now because everything is going our way. We have all sorts of digital, public infrastructure, government support, all these great people doing extraordinary things apart from the Twitter noise and Twitter is designed for outrage getting likes.

45:21So I wouldn't read too much into it. But I think all of us are doing well because we have an audience set, an award ecosystem that is fully supporting us and really taking it forward. So I think I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building because of this extremely vibrant crazy opportunity that one can learn from. However, I wish, I often wish that I wish I could learn one month internship with Brian and learn how to do things. And I have never had the luxury. I can only watch his podcast with you to learn a few things. But what if I got a chance to be there? And I missed that part where I've never been really trained by these extraordinary product brains, or even observed them make decisions.

46:08So I recently posted one thing that, you know, the word Operation Theater comes because operating used to be a public process. And people used to pay money to watch surgeries and see all the bloody gory stuff. and even before anesthesia is born. And there's so much joy in seeing somebody do their action. And I wish there was theater for Brian, take a product decision, take a hard call on killing a product or seeing Tim rejecting all the ideas that they have before the GTM of a product. I think we could benefit so much from that. And unfortunately, it's remained in very small circles. Because like I said, I did these and I said, you do a fabulous job of removing some of the information asymmetry and kind of making it more democratic.

46:54But there is so much more that we all could learn. And I feel extremely, and we as too many people who have the opportunity to work with the best of the best because many of us from India never had the luxury we had to figure out everything on our own. Wow. How cool would that be just to have a camera in some of those meetings just as a learning experience because like very few people are in those rooms and there's so much to learn. I think though people will find, holy shit, this one, this is how decisions are made, what is going on. And two is like, I don't want to work for this person. This sounds very difficult and stressful.

47:32This would probably some takeaways that will emerge. Kind of along these lines, something that show called credit curiosity. You often talk about the power of curiosity. I'm just curious why is curiosity so important to you and why is it important for other people to always stay curious and what values there. I think a curious person is somebody who's constantly demonstrating that they are not proud of their expertise and they will demonstrate extraordinary the amount of excitement when they face a problem which they have no clue how to solve. And therefore a lot of people stop growing because they want to constantly demonstrate their expertise versus demonstrate their curiosity, right?

48:27Because curiosity should come from security because imagine I was in a and the founder CEO of this company and this group of 60 people on WhatsApp somebody says something I'm asking a dumb question, what does this word mean? You need to have the security to feel okay with it. But a lot of people are in security, try to demonstrate expertise and do it or Google not ask this people. And I think that slows down the compounding growth. And I think it keeps you very good at adapting, right? So it's funny I was recently, GPD is my favorite thing to keep asking random questions because now I don't need to really worry about Google having those questions answered around because I can ask the GPT.

49:12So I recently asked the question that which animals have managed to survive, which species are animals that survive for more than 100 million years without changing too much. And what is common in all of them? So GPT came up with interesting answers which says that it shocks, like horseshoe crab, crocodiles and all of these people have survived to do this thing. So three distinct traits were one ability to reduce metabolism at will. Okay, it's fascinating. I can bring down my metabolism by 20 percent, like one, one is to 20 or like crazy, crazy scale, they can bring the metabolism down. The second one is, by the way, a lot of in in ancient yogis have demonstrated this as well.

49:59It comes from the same yogic practice. The second thing is about, and if you think on company's context is the same, if COVID came, could you could do so on your motorism and survive? Or you burnt your way out of the and disappeared? The second thing that was interesting was very high conversion rate on every attempt to secure food. They don't go around chasing randomly and doing things. They have a very high conversion rate which means high judgment and the deadliest bite. So they will not chase many options but if they chase something they will have the biggest bite on it and they will convert it.

50:41And the third thing that was more interesting one was they have survived all sorts of crazy environmental changes just adapting and adaptation comes from curiosity. right? And you could see those people in COVID, there were two sets of people who were completely gone into shell and they were like, who are like this curious, like, okay, so what do I do with this? Like, what happens now? Like, do I need to change something? Do I need to treat something? So, ability to change very quickly. So, I often feel that curiosity is that demonstration to adapt and learn and and and you only create more information asymmetry to me well it's nothing but information asymmetry all the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry and and that comes from curiosity because you're constantly collecting dots connecting dots collecting dots connecting dots and end up creating this unique edge for yourself and information asymmetry for yourself.

51:48And if you assume that I have collected enough, I mean, there are no human life is gonna be enough to connect and connect all the dots. We never be able to get, and sometimes I envy the stuff that you do because you are efficiently connecting and collecting dots by having luxury of all these people to talk to and you are making more dots getting connected. So your information asymmetry is growing. Wait until you IPO and then someday maybe leave Cret and then you could start this podcast over here on like this and connect all the dots and I think that's a reference to Danny Meyer who's the founder of all these fancy restaurants and big on hospitality and as his phrase always be collecting dots I think ABCD.

52:32Nice. Nice to that. Yeah. Okay, wait, this is really interesting. This list of what are the common traits of the most long lasting animals. They can lower their metabolism at will. They have a hike and versionarate to get food and they've survived many types of environments and I think there's a lot you can Transform as you've done to start up some leaders. This could be its own if you haven't written about this This would be a cold blog post I'm curious who you look up to in business either in India and outside India who comes to mind we're like I really inspired by these folks. I often tell people that I hate the word favorite because it tells me to become limited in my mind.

53:16So I stay away from being favorite but I learn all the time from everybody and there are so many people to learn across the world and in history, in recent past, in every time you will discover fascinating, extraordinary things about them. So I don't think I I have a person, I am this person about how did they solve this hard problem. So many other things that we started doing recently and not very ritualistic about it so far is I ask myself and my key reporties every month, we go around the table and ask ourselves what are the hardest problems we solved last month and it's very hard to come up the answer.

54:04And if you do this to the product leaders, just go around and ask what was the heart problem you solved last month, you will realize that we all stay very busy and displacement is hard. But if you notice extraordinary successful people, they will have a lot more content to talk about every month, every quarter. Because they are obsessed about making that big displacement and does not come by being busy and that's another thing that you cannot chase the big thing you don't see a crocodile being busy you see a crocodile just waiting patiently at the watering hole for that best meal and have the deadliest bite for that so the beautiful destination of predator as predators I read was the one one the least amount of calories to on the most amount of calories.

54:59So how do you become that? And I think when I meet people who are extraordinary at that and it comes in all shapes and forms, I learn something from them. So in these meetings you have, are you judging people's success based on how many hard problems they solve? Now that they've heard this, they're gonna be like, I need more. Because if you're a senior, what is the role of a senior person? You have to be the chief problem solver. I love that. I often think of leaders as a professional fire fighters who are just endless fire to put out. Kind of along the lines of people and where you learn from.

55:34Is there any sources of content? This is actually an audience question on Twitter. Onerog Verma asks this, what are your favorite sources of content to learn from in terms of what's happening in the world and what to pay attention to? I wish I could think of an answer. My method of collecting information is mostly about I come up with conjectures in my head and then I go all over the place to find out if there are proofs of what I'm saying is true or not. For example, I recently came up with a conjecture that everybody who's been successful in the history of business or vices have historically done a lot of philanthropy to create a good image for themselves and therefore being treated as a respected citizen versus being treated as a person who did vices to make wealth.

56:24And then I asked this to GPT and I GPT came up with like 50 people who did what and what were their vices, how did they change the reputation by doing lots of philanthropy and all of that stuff. And then a thing happens and then I research in all sorts of directions and and I have no boundaries to if I go to chemistry or physics or a human behavior to some universal principles. So my method of learning is constantly come up with conjectures from the dots that you've connected and then like absolutely work hard to find proof of it and then use that to connect to the next dot, right? So I often tell people that everything that you, every book you read makes your brain pour us to read the next book.

57:09That's the purpose of books, but that's true for every single thing we learn. It makes our brain more porous for the next thing that we're supposed to learn. Is there a recent example that where you got super succinctness at some topic? It's my daily life. I get sucked into topics every now and then. For example, I've been thinking about second -order effects of AI and what happens to countries and jobs and how to expect some of these things to change, not change, rate of change, rate of skill change. I got recently obsessed with what happens to lap grown diamonds. If they become big, does it kill diamond?

57:45Does it make diamonds bigger? And then I looked at parallels. So pearl industry was very big before cultured pearls came and the high status of pearls disappeared because everybody could have pearls. But not too long ago pearls were to be a very royal thing to be every prince and princesses used to have pearls around them. But as soon as it was easy to manufacture in a lab, it lost its value. So I think, so then it should I be shorting or going long on diamonds, thinking about what happens. So but there'll be a temporary period of making a lot of money on lab -grown diamonds, which will kill it will become parasitic on the status of diamonds and in destroy all its profit pools.

58:31You heard it here first time to buy some diamonds futures. I feel like there's no one in the world chat GPT impacted more than you considering how much you want to spend digging into random topics. I often wonder, Lene, if you took the most serious people and made their GPT searches public, a lot of people will learn because the problem of GPT is now it will make the people the great questions do well versus people who are looking for basic answers. So I think the words gonna be unfair to people who will ask great questions. Interesting. Okay, well I gotta ask you, is there any advice you have for asking great questions that has helped you in your work and career in life?

59:14Whenever somebody has many choices and they make the right choice in whatever's domain they have. For example, let's say you could hire anybody but you hired great people or let's say you could marry anybody but you married a great person and so on and so forth. I want you to have many choices to make. How do they make choices for that domain of expertise? And I think that is the most, and many times, they cannot be, they'll not be able to explain how they make great choices. They will really go in into that, because they don't really have their mental model figured out. They cannot articulate, they cannot coach, they cannot explain, but if you can figure out how they make great decisions in general, in whatever domain of work that they are doing, you will find many interesting insights coming over there.

1:00:01The other good questions to ask is about second order thinking, what do they think will happen to the world and why did they come to that conclusion and you see that full chain of thoughts is very powerful. For example, second order thinking is known to be the most powerful trait to predict success of somebody. But I often wonder what happened in childhood of people who became great at second -order thinking. And that question is not fully discovered or discussed yet. And I have found some loose examples of did you play strategy games or only physical games? I have a strong correlation to building, so rigor came from physical games, but second -order thinking came from playing shardsy games as a kid.

1:00:48And if you had both, you could do really well in general because you have a discipline and second order thinking together. Then did you ever have an exercise on looking at history? For example, one of the things I recommend to parents to do with their kids, I call it the Wi -Fi school is ask them a one -wide question every meal and and let them come back with the answers next day. For example, why do humans well, jewelry, and why is something in a certain way, and let them go into the full depth of history and find out why it's so expensive to advertise on Super Bowl. And then so and so forth, you just take one question.

1:01:34And if you train them on why, they evolved at a very different rate, because how water the questions which do not evolve at you were too much higher rate because why is the deep question and it breaks a lot of things in your head or another question about origin stories that how did how did elevators come into being and what made your phones happen what made microphones why is it called microphone and why is it called a phone and if you just moment moment go into this depth you see people kind of build second order thinking automatically because either you go in history and see second order thinking coming evolve with that or you play games that train your brain for second order things with the spectrum.

1:02:13But that's broad range of things that I think people should be asking. I'm looking forward to a canal. Children's raising book, like a book to help you raise kids. It's gonna be your future. I don't have kids, so I can run experiments on everybody else's kids, so it's a great thing to do. I feel like with these questions, I think the rule has to be, you can't just ask Chad G .P .T. for the answer. You have to talk about it. Actually, it's not bad. I think you should encourage it because we have to assume that we are gonna be all co -pilots of AI now. What you have to do is, did I have the second order inside that, okay, this is true, where is the similarity of this in some areas?

1:02:48Like give me an example of this found somewhere else. And so on and so forth. Amazing. Okay, I have just a couple more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round. First, let's visit Contrarian Corner. I'm curious what's something that you believe that very few other people would agree with you on, and why do you hold that belief? Our understanding of wealth is flawed, and what wealth is. To me, wealth is nothing but storage of energy, and therefore the reason wealth is not zero sum because energy is, and we are just finding all the ways to convert energy in our advantage. We are the only species that have managed to convert all forms of energy to our advantage.

1:03:32Cannot take energy and fuel sound and solar. No other species have done this. And therefore since industrial revolution our wealth has gone like this and continue to be like that. AI and nuclear fusion and all the stuff will kind of take right there. So I have a strong view that we will never, never have equality of wealth. In fact chasing that is actually a bad idea. But if you let people do well and chase wealth they have enough wealth for everybody else and we could take a lot of people out. And another thing is complicated because we can have all this democratic arguments that oh, the wealth is concentrated and all that's about, that's the physics of wealth.

1:04:16It will always be concentrated. It changes mediums, companies, countries. They're all, to me, wealth is nothing but an anthropic complexity. They'll keep changing it form and shape. you can be fighting it or accept physics and take the benefit of the physics. I think of Elon had this interesting point that wealth is just a database where everyone's wealth, I guess, is just an arrow in the database and here's how much everyone has and you just transferring numbers around and that's the whole economy. No, but the more that is important is that you can actually increase the database size infinitely and therefore his vision of sun's energy.

1:04:58Like if we really convert all the energy to our advantage, the amount of wealth we'll create for humans is disproportionate. And all the species that have managed to collaborate and cooperate to create wealth. For example, let's define wealth as biomass. So let's say ants and bacteria and humans are the only few things that have the largest biomass on this planet because we forgot how to make energy work for an advantage. Wow. I love all the directions we've gone. Probably the last question. Is there a story of failure in your career that would be interesting to share something that taught you an important lesson?

1:05:36It's just series of failures. I think there is no escape for anybody who's There are nothing in life, not failed a lot like every day, every thing. But I would say that many initiatives, many products, companies that I've built have absolutely failed, hiring that I've failed, trust -broken, betrayals. So I think there is no end to it, but I think entrepreneurs have the weird ability to forget. about failures. And almost turn that into a lesson that you hold and you forget the story. And then like for example, COVID is literally no memory for me. I just don't remember what was COVID. It's just a blank in my head right now.

1:06:30And I think there are humans that are great at forgetting the memory of failure but remember the lesson from failure. But I think I'm constantly learning and I often believe that life is too short to make all our mistakes ourselves. So we should be learning from other people's failures as well. And a lot of times we don't do that because we believe that we are special. Nothing will like that will happen to us. But as humans, we should be learning. I would say that my life started from a failure. My family went through severe financial crisis. I just started working from age 15 and I feel till date I'm just trying to escape that failure.

1:07:09It happened in the family. So I think many of us are just fighting that initial large failure that we've had and don't want to be anywhere near that. And although we are significantly far away from that, but the feeling is exactly that. that circles back to whenever, first few questions about the chips on shoulders driving a lot of motivation. There's this phrase, chips on shoulders drive chips in pockets. That's interesting. Yeah. Is there anything more you want to share about that early challenge you went into or is that something you've shared off the net? No, I mean, I've shared that enough, but I just, I should not talk about it before because I was thinking that I would get some sympathy for that and I only till like recent past I speak about it because I want people to realize that I was not some gifted kid who had some rich parents who made me extraordinarily bright and put me in great school and colleges and I made my way through that.

1:08:11I should start talking about it early because I this is a lot of tendency to give sympathy to those people that oh, this is a gash puddle and I don't want to be given any credit it for playing that poverty card or this card or struggling for food card. Like that's not an excuse. There are so many people in the world who've done extraordinarily well because they had the gift of struggle. And I often tell people that this is the biggest curse of successful parents, that that's the only gift they'll not be able to give to the kids, the gift of struggle that they had. Wow. I think about that a lot.

1:08:47We have a kid. He's eight months now. So I'm trying to figure out the balance of struggle versus making life easy and great A new challenge for me to figure out Before we get to a very exciting lightning round. Is there anything else? You know what you wanted to share or leave listeners with anything any last nuggets of thought Well, I would love for the listeners and from different fields of product is that Please share what you're learning without being fearing judgment of your peers because that are many many people who are learning only because you share your evolution and your thoughts and I believe that a lot more could be contributing and a lot of your listeners are really bright people.

1:09:28If they all shared many people from many places in the world would learn and achieve some amount of success thanks to your sharing. Amazing. With that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? All set. Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? It keeps changing a lot, but my books are usually around understanding human behavior, and I keep changing based on the person, but I think it's the biggest subject, all our customers, all our investors, all our employees, all our relationships, all humans, and the subject that we have weakest on is human behavior.

1:10:11How do we live this live? We're playing life on extremely hard mode if you don't learn human behaviors. I would say that's one thing. The second thing is evolutionary biology. It teaches a lot about how species evolve and how do they make decisions. And what are the core motivations that drive everybody? So that's another one I would recommend. And I don't want to make a recommendation because I can barely finish a book to be honest. So I believe in drifting and going deeper into topics. So understand the topics versus trying to say, give me these three books and I'm going to be good. And the The last one I would say is that anything that can make you learn something about their journey versus their success.

1:10:53So sometimes auto -bagraphies are too celebratory in some ways, but if you can just kind of understand how they, if any book can teach you how people recovered from a setback in great detail, is a great book to learn from. And audience member on Twitter actually asked a similar question on these lines is there's one book that you could read over and over and over. What would that be? Is there one? I absolutely don't believe in the word because I believe that we are evolving things. You might discover the same stuff coming from different books and you would say, oh, I can categorize this in my brain.

1:11:34I get it again. but I think we should we tend to become believers in it becomes too religious. Hmm, Philippine. Yeah. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? I love Open Heiber because of these struggles, but an Nolan's craft of making the movies, but nothing in the recent past that I feel is right up there. They were a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing. I like to ask a hypothetical second -order thinking question. For example, if everybody who has taken a COVID vaccine dies tonight, what happens in 12 months from now?

1:12:23Can you explain the world from what happens to money, what happens to law, what happens to countries, what happens to military, what happens to stock market, what happens to order of things. I would say less than 10 % of really smart people can really have good answers. So it tells you how good they are in second -order thinking. But the question is going to keep changing. For example, we said that what if arranged marriages were banned in India, it got capital punishment for doing all these marriages, what happens to the country. How do we change from there? Like some absurd scenarios, but then what happens after that?

1:13:05Not to give away your secret sauce, but what do you look for in an answer that gives you a sense there? A range of things that they could go into and think about if this happens, be happens, and then see happens, like the leaves they could make. And just so people understand when you're talking about second order thinking, what's the simplest way to describe that concept? I think the simplest way to think about this is that being able to correctly judge the butterfly effect of an event in as close as possible. For example, okay, like a lot of people in stock market use that to say how which stocks will go up and down like that's something that has happened in the market.

1:13:46Oh, there is a war now in Russia, then what happens to the market? Can you be good at predicting that? But in everything in life like this happens and a lot of people hate this because it's very taxing to the brain brain brain absolutely hate second order thinking unless you have trained your brain with second order thinking all the time that it looks forward to it so you know convert this into a hate versus a reward cycle and that comes with probably doing it probably early on in your life later on people hate doing second order thinking. And it is, yes, that sounds like a lot of work for the brain.

1:14:26Okay, just a few more questions. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered and that you really love? I'm looking forward for my vision product coming soon. It's a future, future favorite product. We have actually Boz from Medic coming on as the next guest in my recording. I'm not sure when they come out in sequence, but we're going to talk about his thoughts. Yeah. The most fascinating thing that I saw was a zuck talking about the utility of meta being better than vision pro and their product and that's exactly going to work well for Apple because when you try to make the product more utilitarian it loses status and if you study animals you realize that the one which gets the highest mating success is the one which can demonstrate ability to waste resources and not be very efficient with resources.

1:15:20And therefore, people who are known to buy a product that is wasteful, will actually own higher status. And I think Zuck made it actually quite easy for Apple to demonstrate their superior positioning by saying that, oh, we are not as efficient, we are not as cheap, we are not for everybody. Wow, just continue to blow minds even on our lightning round. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends and family find useful in worker and life? It's not a favorite motto, but I think we truly are transient and we are very lucky to have this life that we have and we have to make the most out of it and all these struggles will mean nothing.

1:16:05I often tell people that this for your life to be so great that you have collected the highest amount of content when you are old, you have no end to the stories that you can talk about. It reminds me of a book I once read that really had an impact on me where somebody was trying to make a movie of their life and the producer was like, there's nothing, there's no good movie here. You have not done enough interesting things. I love it. And so he actually he turned his lens into what to do in life by thinking what would make a great story. And so he just started to do and a great story, something where you overcome challenges and achieve something you wanted.

1:16:41And so that became his life motto. I'm gonna try hard things and overcome them and that's gonna be my life. I love it. I love it. I'll link to that book in the show notes. Final question. You have this series on Twitter that you call Monday Motivations. I'm curious what's motivating you these days. I find interest filled with all these people trying to give this fake motivation and make money off that stuff and like it's almost like a Drug for people to feel oh my god. There's motivation. I'm gonna do well I just want to remind people that all success come from extraordinary amount of pain and Travel and hard work and there is no shortcut to anything material coming in life And so the Manavish motivation post comes as the anti -motivation and post because the world has filled with, I believe that the biggest profit -making scheme that I've seen in recent times is to tell people to love themselves and they'll pay you money for saying that.

1:17:39And I think the best way to love yourself is to keep evolving. So my motivation comes from evolution, connecting, dodging, solving, harder problems, and I've solved in the past. And I think life is ultimately a game that you want to feel that your levels have changed and your skills have changed constantly. Kunal, you are wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions, working folks finding online if they want to reach out and follow up on some of this stuff. And how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me on social media. Look for Konal Shah. I'll find me everywhere.

1:18:13I usually have different personality on each social media. And in terms of being helpful, keep tagging me on interesting things that you discover, that gave you that moment of oh my god I did not know this I would love that. Amazing. Can all again thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com.

1:18:54See you in the next episode!