Shardul Shah of Index Ventures on Why the Founder Is the Investment Thesis

0:00I think I'm too idiosyncratic to be understood over Zoom. And the reflex of that is like, I can't read people particularly well over Zoom. As a consequence, I no longer take first meetings over Zoom.

0:16Peter High: Welcome to TechnoVenture. I'm Peter High, president of Metastrategy. My guest today is Shardul Shah. Shardul is a partner at Index Venture, one of the world's leading venture capital firms. Index invests across stages and geographies, backing entrepreneurs behind companies, including Figma, Revolut, Discord. Chardul joined the firm in 2008 and focuses on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, enterprise software, and infrastructure. He's developed a remarkable track record of identifying category-defining companies early, leading investments in Datadog and Wiz, among many others. Recently, Datadog is now a public company, actually not so recently, but Google recently completed a$32 billion acquisition of Whiz, the largest acquisition in the company's history.

0:58Peter High: Shardul's investment philosophy centers on backing exceptional founders with conviction and partnering with them over the long term. That philosophy has earned him repeated recognition on the Forbes Midas list and a reputation as one of the leading investors in enterprise technology, including his current ranking on that list at number 10. In today's conversation, we'll discuss what Shardul looks for in extraordinary founders, lessons from across the companies and entrepreneurs he's invested in, how AI is reshaping enterprise technology and cybersecurity, and where he believes the next generation of category-defining companies will emerge.

1:30Peter High: Shardul, welcome to Tech & Adventure. It's always a pleasure to speak with you, and I appreciate you making time for me today. Peter, it only took me a decade to get on. Thank you. Worth the wait, that's for sure. Sure. Well, Shardu, I mentioned a little bit of the background into Index and some of what makes it unusual. I wonder if you'd take it from there and talk a little bit about the firm that you help lead. Yeah. I think the most amazing part of Index is over 30 years, we've had so many different partners contribute to our outcomes. That diversity is really unusual in our industry. The process that supported those outcomes is a craft that focuses on people and relationships.

2:16And we'll come back to that as we talk about you, as well as other stories. And ultimately, the culture that supports that craft is something that I take really seriously in cultivating confidence within our group to take the courage to make investments across stages. And so 30 years in the making, and we've got a long way to go.

2:45Peter High: Fascinating. And I wanted to talk a little bit about, Shardul, the areas that you focus on. I mentioned some of those at the outset. They include cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, enterprise software, infrastructure. How did those lanes become areas of focus for you? I mean, logical when one contemplates the opportunities associated with each, but how did those become lanes in which you swim? Yeah, the truth is I'm not really a market investor. I've met some really talented investors who can see the future of markets. Because of my inability to do so, I've been able to hone a craft on really becoming a student of entrepreneurs and people.

3:28So some of the early work in different verticals, whether it's cyber or infrastructure, was by luck. I just ran into a few people who I really connected with and started building a community around myself that I became entrenched in. And so early on, I created a engineering community at Index. And it turned out some engineers were oriented around businesses that were selling to enterprises. And as a consequence, I got to know enterprise buyers. Eventually, I got to know you. And, you know, your voice has been in my ear ever since.

4:12Peter High: Very kind. I'm so glad our paths crossed. And it's been just wonderful getting to know you and partnering in a variety of ways as well. I'm sure I do kind of mentioned that. And I wanted to mention also, I want to cover a lot of things you already just mentioned here. Before we get past sort of the overview of Index itself, though, as I mentioned in the intro, you invest from seed through growth stages with a single investment team rather than separate stage-specific parts of the organization. And I wonder, how does that influence the way in which you evaluate companies? How do you think with a different hat on, different lens in front of your eyes, as you contemplate an idea that doesn't yet have product market fit versus one that very much does.

4:49Peter High: And you're simply putting gasoline or not so simply, but in fact, putting gasoline on a fire that's already blazing. Yeah, I appreciate the note. Most venture firms are organized completely differently for logical reasons, right? They have a venture team and a growth team or a seed team, a venture team and a growth team. And most investors, I think, are very focused on different stages because they might have risk aversion or risk tolerance or maybe attracted to different dimensions of the business in order to create a thesis and ultimately courage to act. It's a challenge for index to have all of the investment team focused on all stages.

5:28It means that not all investors would be successful at index, right? Because not everyone is geared towards multi-staged investing. Your question of how do we do it, one, as a team, we exercise a lot of effort in communication with one another. Second, when it comes to interactions with an entrepreneur, it starts with the person. It turns out the very best companies we've invested in, we've systematically underestimated. Why? Because when we study markets and we do TAM analysis, we're consistently wrong. The real ingredient in companies that expand into new and larger market opportunities, the key ingredient is the founder.

6:14And as a consequence, we've really honed our ability to study an entrepreneur. Objective is to be the largest, most influential investor in category-defining companies, which means we love to get involved as early as possible. But sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we don't get to know an entrepreneur for many years. Sometimes we make the wrong call. And so having different vehicles like a venture and growth fund allow us to participate in the best companies a little bit later, and hopefully we can build our ownership over time.

6:46Peter High: I love the way you framed it a bit earlier, Shardul, and you said you were a student of entrepreneurs and people. And as you've just highlighted the necessity of getting to know the people very well that you're investing in. What is it that you look for now that you've been at it for quite some time and with such success? What are the characteristics that get you most excited to make an investment in a person and their idea? Well, I mean, let's start with you, Peter. I think one of the things I've always really respected and appreciated about you is you sincerely think about other people's interests before your own.

7:18I think it's why you've been able to become so central to so many industry leaders over the last decade plus. And I really fondly remember all the wine, but the dinners we shared across multiple cities in the United States, where we had this shared view of not creating a commercial environment where we were trying to sell anyone on anything. We were really trying to listen and learn and make observations so that we could share the right context to the right person at the right time. And so that's an example of not even searching, but as soon as we met, there was a connection that transformed into a relationship that has really flourished over many years.

8:09The reason I point that out is there are a number of different stakeholders in our ecosystem. Some individuals might be full-time hires into a company. Some might become advisors. Others might be co-investors. Others could be channel partners. Some might end up becoming customers of businesses that we work with. And as a consequence, when we approach each of these stakeholders with an attitude of what can we do for you before we even know what we're going to do for ourselves. I think it fosters a different experience that for some people evolves into a real relationship that can make us really impactful for entrepreneurs.

8:51Peter High: Well, I appreciate the kind of words, certainly, Sheryl. Thank you so much. One of your stated investment principles is invest with extreme conviction. And I wonder, what does conviction look like before the metrics clearly supported investment? Yeah. I'm curious if I turn it around, what do you hear in that statement? What do you think conviction is? Well, so if you have done the analysis and you believe this is a category leader or somebody who's defining a new category and it's an entrepreneur that meets the bar that you just began to define a moment ago, that you go all in on that. And so once you have that belief in the person and their idea, you go hard.

9:31Peter High: Is it, I guess, the way in which I would think about it? Yeah, I think you highlighted the two elements. One is belief, and the second is action. I think of belief and courage. Courage is the action. The way one finds belief, I think, is very personal. And so I disagree a little bit on the analytics component because different individuals use different apparatuses to identify when they have beliefs. And it's really a sensation. And often in the analysis and in the communication of analysis, we get in our heads instead of in our gut. And we start to think versus feel. And I think it's really important to feel belief.

10:19But when you feel belief, there are all sorts of internal and external stimuli that can prevent action. So belief is insufficient. It's necessary but insufficient to become a tremendous investor. And so you have to meet that belief with the courage to act. And the reality, in my view, is there is no truth. Like we do not know the future. And as a consequence, it requires a huge amount of courage to actually take a view based on your belief system.

10:59Peter High: I like that. That's a great way of framing that. I wonder also, now that you have been at it for quite some time, how has your evaluation of founders evolved across your tenure? I wonder what sort of wisdom you gain, I'm sure a tremendous amount of it from your many victories and perhaps some investments that you would do over. How is that tuned across or tuned differently across the years? Yeah, it's a work in progress. As an example, I think I'm too idiosyncratic to be understood over Zim. And the reflex of that is like, I can't read people particularly well over Zoom. As a consequence, I no longer take first meetings over Zoom.

11:45Now, this is really inconvenient. It can force me to travel quite a bit or be in the right place at the right time with another entrepreneur. Occasionally, an entrepreneur might be in New York to visit me. But I really, I think I had the arrogance multiple years ago to believe I could read people over Zoom and make investment decisions over Zoom. And that's proven to be really poor for me. Now, other people are great and they can read micro expressions and they have a better sense of humor than me so they can find that connection. I'm just a kid from Indiana who laughs at his own jokes. In terms of my assessment of entrepreneurs, I think I found a lot more sensibility of my own belief.

12:35I'm much more in tune with how I feel, which has been a practice of getting out of my head and into my gut. That said, I do sometimes use an analytical framework in order to refine and find my feeling as well as express it to other folks. And so that's been a work in progress. I think my most recent iteration of this is to seek entrepreneurs that can hold contradiction with ease and second to seek high agency individuals.

13:10Peter High: Describe the latter, high agency individuals. peel back that onion. Yeah, I'm happy to unpeel each. So I recently invested in a company called Simile. June and I met about a year ago on Stanford campus. And his first sentence was, I want to simulate every person on the planet. As a sci-fi nerd, like Asimov Foundation, you know, Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, my imagination like was lit on fire. His second sentence was taking me through a proof of value with the customer, what the pricing, what the value exchange, what the utilization, what the use case, who was the influencer, who was the buyer, like the amount of detail orientation around commercial value exchange was such a contrast to the imagination that I felt he held contradiction with ease.

14:09When I talk about high agency, an entrepreneur that comes to mind is Praag Agarwal from Parallel. This is a web search business. And when I joined the board of Praag's company, candidly, I don't think he knew what he was working on. So I certainly didn't. But as he brought to life a product that could unleash agents to information throughout the world, he had so much kinetic energy in hiring, in developing customers, in positioning the story. And that agency to disrupt the world is really starting to show. I'm not sure if he named it after our firm, but his latest product, Index, is actually a really disruptive take on the industry.

15:05And I think that only comes from someone who takes action and takes the bull by its horns. words.

15:10Peter High: While we're in the process of personifying some of the ideas that you're expressing, I'd love to have you take us back into the point at which you invested in Datadog and Whiz. You did so before either company became obvious successes, certainly. What stood out in those early meetings with the legendary entrepreneurs, the people who had become legendary entrepreneurs that you invested in? Yeah. Early days of Datadog, I don't think anyone, certainly the founders and myself, we underestimated the tidal wave that was the cloud, right? We didn't appreciate that this would be as massive an IT transformation as now is kind of taken for granted.

15:50The company had less than 10 employees and less than$10 ,000 in revenue. So I can't claim that I understood the business model or the product market fit was very clear. So without market signal, without business model signal, the only thing we could write our thesis on were the entrepreneurs. And I think, fortunately, Index, which has roots in Europe, we have offices in London, New York, and San Francisco today, but we started 30 years ago in Europe. I think we had a better appreciation for Olivier and Alexei, who are French entrepreneurs that were living in New York, than other investors. And I think that affinity and connection and understanding is what allowed our thesis to be very different.

16:40With Wiz, I don't think it was obvious for the first... We let her co-led six consecutive rounds. And I don't think it was obvious at any one point in time. One of the advantages we had was knowing the founders for a decade, because I served on their prior company's board, we had a different connection with them, which allowed us to have more context around the business, which allowed us to take a different view than I think many other world-class investors. And so I think we were kind of lucky to be in the right place at the right time in order to have a differentiated amount of information to take decisions against.

17:30Peter High: How often do you invest in second-time entrepreneurs or multiple-time entrepreneurs as opposed to people who are starting their first idea ever? That's a great question. I don't know the answer. At one point, I studied our track record, and I didn't find a pattern of first-time versus second-time entrepreneurs driving different outcomes. And as a consequence, I've not been a student of the input of first time or second time entrepreneurs to drive the output because I don't think there's a pattern. Got it. I want to talk a little bit about some of the other sort of areas, more generally speaking, that you invest in.

18:11Peter High: Let's begin with artificial intelligence, which of course is in the mind and on the lips of so many people who would be watching or listening to this, certainly. Talk a bit about the layers of the enterprise software stack that you think are most likely to be rebuilt or are being rebuilt because of artificial intelligence? Yeah, just about everything, right? So where to start? I think, number one, we're seeing legacy applications being transformed by AI native businesses. Second, we're seeing new categories of software that are being created. So let's give examples of each of those before we talk about infrastructure and how infrastructure is evolving on the back of new platforms.

18:54Legacy, pick your favorite large category. And I think there's a slew of startups aiming to disrupt with different degrees of success. I think where we're seeing the most success is probably in customer support, followed by the legal industry, where companies like Decagon, Sierra, Wonderful, Birdbusters, and a few of those are seeing trajectories that we haven't seen before in software. The biggest new category, of course, is coding, right? Where Cloud Code and Cursor and Augment and a number of others, including Cognition and Factory, are making huge impact to developer productivity. In between, I think almost every other vertical of software is being re-evaluated by AI native companies.

19:53And I think we'll continue to see an enormous amount of disruption. I think those will stand apart from foundation models, which are providing intelligence almost like a utility. In terms of the underlying infrastructure, as you mentioned, I think infrastructure software such as Datadog, security software such as Wiz are two examples of category leading companies that are evolving with the times and are creating products for AI as well as using AI for their own business. So I do think there are companies in infrastructure that will continue to have great success. And I think there'll be new infrastructure that's required in order to support a range of applications and a range of different platforms.

20:47A great example of this would be Fireworks, which is an inference-serving business that my partner Sahir led. And this is a business that we got to know through Lynn, the CEO, about two years ago. She has gone on to recruit a phenomenal team and has built a pretty epic business in a short period of time against this new token era. So I think there will be many more new infrastructure companies. And of course, underneath, you have businesses like Anthropic and OpenAI and open source model companies that are directly touching enterprises with direct models or forward deployed models such as Palantir.

21:37And there are a range of startups in and around these fields, too. We're, for example, investors in a range of neolabs, such as Flapping Airplanes and Ineffable, that may challenge some of the largest frontier companies. And beneath that, I think this is probably a little bit far from what most enterprises will reach for, but we're seeing an explosion in the semiconductor industry, right? Where there are a new set of companies that have a new set of assumptions around what the chip environment may look like and how supply chains may evolve. And so there's a new set of opportunities there as well.

22:23Peter High: You mentioned a fascinating thing through several fascinating things, but one of them challenging the frontier companies. Can you talk a bit about the ways in which you see them challenged? I mean, it's a space that some believe that they're a lead across the three major ones, for example, that is so robust as to be difficult. But I'd be curious about what excites you about those companies that are coming for them. Sure. I serve on the board of a company called Cartesia. Cartesia is top of the leaderboard in TTS and has some upcoming models that are pretty exciting. It's based on research around a foundational paper related to technology called Mamba, which effectively is an alternative to a transformer architecture.

23:06And so there's a reasonable view that the transformer is not the ultimate and last architecture we see, in which case, can you get more efficient, higher quality, higher speed outputs from a different architecture? So Cartesia is a great example of a challenger that I think is off to the races. Fascinating.

23:30Peter High: Digging into cybersecurity a little bit further, how does the evolution of artificial intelligence change the balance of power between attackers and defenders? How do you think about that? Yeah. Yeah. For a long time, we've been in an unusual asymmetric environment where attackers can share information. They can just pick up the most modern tools and technologies. And in some ways, they're untargeted. They're just looking for ROI as an attacker. And nation states have created entire economies, capitalistic economies out of authoritarian regimes to facilitate cybercrime. Meanwhile, defenders are generally more isolated.

24:19They have to manage a combination of new and old technologies. And they have to defend against automated, targeted and untargeted attacks. So I think what has been asymmetric has become more asymmetric. The consequences, I think, very real. We cannot live in a world where there is a human in the loop. On the adversary side, there will not be a human in the loop. And so I think we are seeing machine-to-machine combat in the cyber realm. This requires enterprises to very quickly modernize and adjust their cultures to become more trusting in the right place at the right time with fully automated responses.

25:13From a commercial standpoint, that, of course, is a massive commercial opportunity where I think a new set of providers can exchange value with enterprises. But I think it's incumbent on enterprises to make a dramatic shift in their stance.

25:31Peter High: And are you optimistic that the companies that are being born, the entrepreneurs behind them can keep pace with the asymmetric advantages that the bad actors have, as you described? I am. I serve on the board of a company called 70i. And it may not be the right solution for everyone, but it seems to be a terrific solution for some of the most sophisticated financial services companies in the world. And Seven thinks about data, intelligence, and action. It's a very modern way of thinking about how one can manage their organization. They are moving extraordinarily quickly, as you'd expect an AI native company to do.

26:17And with all of the attention and resource they have, I think they're building a really compelling solution. Relative to the cat and mouse, just like we saw with companies like Wiz and others in the past, I think when you have really dedicated, focused teams who are on a mission, they can create great results.

26:40Peter High: Your point about machine-to-machine combat is poignant, I think, Shardul. How would you recommend that enterprises prepare for this reality? Obviously, it's different from the mentality that has been part of CISO's and CIO's thought processes to date. How would you suggest they contemplate this new reality? Yeah. It starts with culture, actually, before you reach to vendors and don't trust the venture capitalists who have the trench coats with all the gold watches. Don't trust me. But it starts with the culture of trust, because for so long, I think CIOs, CISOs have had, for the right reason, sensitivity on locking out the account of their CEO.

27:31right like that you know you get you're getting an angry phone call um or you know stopping production systems if you're a manufacturer um or you know locking down your development team if you're developing software right the the agent of no which is how the security teams of the past were regarded had to evolve into enablers and now we're back into it um we're kind of back to the future in so much as individuals have to think about mitigating risk in a different way. So it starts with culture, right? What risk are you willing to accept and how and where? That, I think, precedes exactly how aggressive you're willing to be in outsourcing decisions to a machine versus being in the loop.

28:24And so for most companies, it's probably going to be a journey. I think that you might start in locations of your business, whether it's outsourced teams or in parts of your business that are less mission critical or in workflows that are less risky to get started with trusting that a machine can give green lights or red lights to activity on a consistent basis before you evolve and move to the crown jewels. However, my challenge for the industry is I think the slope of change has to be near vertical. We just don't have time in light of all of the advancements in technology. And this is not like a mythos reaction.

29:12I don't think as an industry we've talked to, nor is it like the open AI anthropics escaping and touching the internet to hack benchmarks in order to improve and make suggestions. What I find fascinating is you can get open source models, you can lobotomize them as an attacker and launch chained exploits today. Okay. That's a problem. And so enterprises unfortunately need to very quickly adapt their culture, risk-taking, and then find the right partners to help them on the journey.

29:53Peter High: While you're offering advice to enterprise leaders, what infrastructure capabilities do they need to understand today that they didn't five years ago, say? Um, you know, I think, um, where your data is, um, who has access to it, um, is the starting point of context that will allow you to inform intelligent decisions and ultimately take actions. And so, um, your, your mileage may vary, right? You might prefer a data lake where you centralize everything, or you may be concerned with that for cost of storage reasons, and you may prefer a federated approach, right? And so how you approach your data strategy is very personal, but that's probably the place to start.

30:47Peter High: Talk a little bit about how the role of a board member has changed as companies remain private so much longer than the early days of your tenure as a venture capitalist. a fascinating development that you've got companies reaching trillion dollar valuations while still private today. Talk a bit about that if you would. Yeah. I don't know if the tenure of a company as a private company changes the responsibility of a board member. The responsibility of the board member remains like capital allocation, holding a team accountable, and providing perspective to challenge a business. being private or public is part of a capital strategy.

31:30Can you get access to lower cost capital? Is there a marketing event that you can take advantage of? Do you enjoy more credibility amongst your stakeholders in your ecosystem by being public versus private? These are all different types of considerations that go into, are you a public or private company? your talent retention strategy is different. How you can pursue M &A is different if you're private or public. So there's different strategic considerations, but I don't think tenure is related to your responsibility. Got it.

32:06Peter High: Talk a bit about, some founders seem to become stronger leaders as companies scale while others struggle as they do. And I wonder what's your diagnosis of What separates the two of those? Oh, well, I don't think you get stronger without the struggle. Well, it's struggle to the point where they aren't the right leader as the organization scales is what I mean is the setting the dichotomy there. Oh, yeah. And, you know, to offer an alternative, sometimes it's not even the right leader. It's desire. So with entrepreneurs that I work with, with founders, with management teams, I often ask them, do you want to become a manager of managers?

32:47It's not a negative, it's not a judgment, but sometimes people want to be closer to the work. And that's completely acceptable, creating the rapport, the chemistry and the environment to have that conversation without any judgment allows someone the freedom to then maybe choose a different path. And I do think as part of creating a sustainable, enduring business, you're constantly in search of putting the right people in the right place at the right time. It starts with yourself, whether you're a founder or a CEO or any C-level or manager or IC. And that introspection and understanding of what you enjoy and what you're passionate about and what you're skilled at is, I think, the starting point.

33:32I think what you're describing is probably someone, if I just respond to the generalization, You know, it's probably someone who has not introspected and then is surprised and they wake up one day and they either are incapable or undesiring of the role that they're currently in.

33:50Peter High: Yeah, fair enough. That totally makes sense. I wonder, what do you make of the so-called SaaSpocalypse? It seems like a tremendous amount of opportunity that has come about as a result of entrepreneurs diagnosing the problems or the shortcomings of the business models that have lasted a couple of decades very powerfully. As you reflect on the opportunity for organizations to take on the major SaaS providers, what What are some of the things you look for or the things have you most excited? Caspocalypse, beautiful branding. I don't know who came up with that. I wish it were me. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's a reminder that as a culture, we seem to be attracted to talking about extremes.

34:40And it's a beautiful portrait of a zombie apocalypse. You all of a sudden imagine all these companies are lobotomized and eating each other's brains. without a direction to head. It's too coarse of a generalization. There are some companies that will emerge even more successful. There are some companies that will not flourish. I think what's the real underlying is any company that was born before 2025 needs to reinvent itself. There's an opportunity to reinvent itself. There are some that will have the courage to do so There's others that will resist or will fail. And I think that's a hard message for some to hear.

35:31It's a really inviting message for others. And I think that's a more interesting separation. So when I think about the challengers that you're kind of describing, those that were born after 2025 are not encumbered with the inertia that they built beforehand. And that gives a lot of freedom to challenge companies with different business models, with different pricing mechanics, with different talent, with different product. A whole range of disruptive opportunity is at their fingertips.

36:06Peter High: You mentioned at the outset that the company has its roots in Europe, which is very interesting and still has offices on both sides of the Atlantic, invests considerably around the world, not just as some venture capital firms do in the sort of driving distance from San Francisco or Silicon Valley, as it were. Talk a bit about the advantages of the organization's roots far from Silicon Valley, eventually arriving, of course, but in terms of the philosophy that it has set, the extent to which there's some ways in which you might typify that. Yeah, there's advantages. There's also disadvantages.

36:44I'm happy to enumerate both. Yeah, please. Yeah, even more interesting. An example of an advantage is we truly believe there's opportunity everywhere. A second is we take someone's time with a great degree of like responsibility and respect. Because often we traveled in the early days, we would travel to entrepreneurs where they were, instead of expecting them to show up, you know, at our ivory tower. And so, and third, I think we have a lot of European taste. When you do come over to our office, I hope you get a sense of that and the detail orientation that goes into the porosity of the stone to the books along our shelves.

37:26But there are disadvantages, right? We are, one team across multiple geographies. And that's not just like drinking the Kool-Aid in a Kumbaya. That requires real effort to coordinate and communicate as one team. And it's not for everyone. Second, it can be tricky, right? I live in New York. I'm traveling to San Francisco very frequently. The last four flights I had to Israel were all canceled due to conflict. I serve on the board of companies in Israel and being in person with them has been a challenge. And so that can make it more difficult to be a true business partner. Whereas when you could just drive down the street and grab a coffee on a Sunday evening with your entrepreneur, you have a different level of connection and context that can allow you to make an impact on the business.

38:25So I think every firm has to express themselves into their culture. We're very much who we are, but that's not necessarily a recipe for anybody else.

38:36Peter High: You mentioned early on, the point you made earlier has made all the more salient now that you've given this most recent answer about the necessity to invest in communications. You mentioned that is something that's very thoughtful within Index to make sure that the partners and the broader team have strong communications. All the more difficult, given the geographic diversity that you described and the many time zones that you stretch across. Talk a bit about how you do that. What are some of the methods you use to make sure that you operate in sync? I've got to give my credit to my wife. I met Poonam in elementary school.

39:09I took her to homecoming. So we're married, but sometimes we communicate like children. And so I've realized just how important communication is in building and fostering and trust. And so she's helped me in becoming a better partner at Index. For us, we recognize that conflict resolution varies over different media. So conflict resolution over Zoom versus in-person is very different. Like you and I are in a box. If we kind of disagree at the end of this conversation, we're going to shut down our screens. And that's kind of like it. Whereas if you and I are in person, it's like, let's go for a walk and actually talk this through.

39:53So acknowledging that conflict resolution is different across media forces you to have different habits, like picking up the phone or taking a pause, right? So we have different rituals that allow us to have more effective communication, whether that's verbal or in writing, as a group, as subgroups. We've put a lot of effort over multiple decades to get this right. Fascinating.

40:22Peter High: I would also ask you, as an undergrad, you, like me, only have an undergrad, only have an undergrad degree. You studied economics, but also biology with a specialization in immunology. What did you, as you were going through your studies at the University of Chicago, what were you envisioning as to what you would do? Perhaps it's exactly what you've gone on to do, but that second part of your two majors would suggest there may have been some other things you were thinking about as well. You know, I don't have a lot of vision. And the only thing I accurately predicted was my mom would be disappointed that she didn't have an MBA, which remains true as of two weeks ago.

40:59Peter High: I wanted to ask you before I let you go, as somebody who's in the business of seeing around corners, I wonder, what do you recommend that's publicly available? Not just the conversations that you have with your many smart partners and colleagues, as well as entrepreneurs that flow through your offices and whose offices you flow through. Um, describe your intellectual diet, if you would, and what you would recommend to others among books or blogs or, or, uh, podcasts or other people that, that you find particularly, um, interesting that influence your thought process. Yeah. Well, the way I learn, so the first, um, thought I'd share with folks is like, think about how you learn.

41:38And I think, uh, different people maximize learning in different environments for myself. One is learn by doing. A second is in small group discussion. And a third is by finding experts in their field. And this was all trained into me at the University of Chicago, actually. So I play with AI a lot. I have multiple agents running, doing extensive amounts of work for me. And if anybody wants to talk about like agent uses, whether that's personal or professional, I'd be happy to share use cases that have really been transformative in a range of parts of my life. Second, I think about my time as existing relationships and new relationships, how to create more depth in existing relationships and creating more breadth in new relationships.

42:35and that feeds my learning. The third is more, I think, directed to what you're describing, which is what's my intellectual diet, which I think of as it can be small group discussion. And so I tend to go back and forth between reading history and reading science fiction as my two main sources of actual information. When it comes to media, I use a lot of agents actually to automate information flow and synthesis from news sources. When it comes to podcasts, of course, everyone should subscribe to yours.

43:22Peter High: Checks in the mail, Jardul. But there's so much rich context out there. It's really a function of what you're looking to read and learn. I can't let the, uh, the offer you had a moment ago, we're talking a little bit about the agent use and use cases that have been transformative. Maybe can you offer one or two from the personal and professional side that you were just, you were describing a moment ago? Uh, sure. So, um, I have created, uh, let's see, where should I start? We'll, we'll start, from a work perspective. I had far too many LinkedIn invitations and far too many LinkedIn messages to live up to my ideal, which is to be very responsive to individuals that are looking to connect.

44:13I have an agent that every week will take my archive of data. You have to get a new archive every week from LinkedIn, but take my archive, automatically decide which invites to accept and deny. It also recommends five new invites I should send every single week and drafts replies to relevant messages to me. Super efficient. Fantastic. And has actually been really valuable to enriching my network as well as adding to my network over time. Now, I do worry that it becomes a little too transactional. So I'm monitoring this carefully and I want to always have a draft presented to me so I can enrich it with more personality and context.

45:00So we'll see. Check back in in six months and I'll tell you how the experiment is going. On the personal side, gosh, there's so many use cases from trip logistics to probably my favorite. I have a large extended family. Um, I've created an inventory of everyone and their birthdays, and now I'm far more proactive about, um, handwritten letters and birthday presents. Actually, Peter, I want to cut out all of my agent description and leave it to people reach out to me for you. I'll tell you everything, but I probably, uh, I should keep that to myself.

45:43Peter High: Got it. Fair enough. Fair enough. Excellent. Good. Well, Shardul, with all due respect to your mother, I think you should be very proud of what you have done. I'm honored to have gotten to know you when you were just a big deal, not among the biggest of deals. And it's an honor to call you a friend. And I really appreciate you taking the time with me today. No, you're the best anytime. And thank you for all of your guidance, support, and partnership over the years. Thanks for listening to TechnoVenture. If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating.

46:17Peter High: Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you next time.