How a Solo Founder is Reshaping Global Finance (Parth Garg, CEO of Aspora)

25:44Correct. We told YC that we were still tinkering around with this idea. We don't know if it's true. We don't know if it's going to scale. They're like, that's fine, come interview with us. We interviewed with them. They accepted us. And we decided we're going to go do this. And we were still debating where to build this, what to build. And we ended up settling on India. And he was very fascinated with India. I had just come back from India. And I was like, yeah, it's a great place to build. So we decided that we'll tinker our model a little bit. We realized that 10 % plus of India's economy is software exports.

26:15And a lot of these companies don't get venture equity, right? It's at 0.1 % of companies that get venture equity. And almost all of these companies don't have no access to debt because in India, if you don't have tangible assets, you're not going to get bank debt. So a lot of these companies that have contracted revenue are not able to access capital up front. So what if we were able to underwrite their ARRs, give them capital and then take ownership of their receivables, package that and then sell it upstream to institutional investors? It's really interesting because you're you're in many ways in the same problem space and solving sort of the same problem.

26:49But you went from how do I help people get a free extra boba and give this boba shop in San Diego extra working capital to Indian SaaS. So to sort of dig into that, like what was the decision around, hey, actually, India is the right place to build. Was that sort of more intuitive or did you guys sort of think about running down all of these? No, I think at that point it was intuitive. I think John and I got better at making decision framing processes. I think it was just like, hey, where are we going to do this thing? Why not go to India? It's one of the most booming economies. And there was a promise of SaaS was very big, and India had a booming SaaS economy.

27:25We'll go do that. The process of shifting from SMEs to this was essentially, did we want to run an ops company or no? Because this would be very, very ops-happy. And we both said, we're not the people that will do fantastic ops business. We're going to go hand-to-hand to every salon. Correct. Yeah. It's just an SMR. You have to get thousands of SMEs over here. You have to get a few hundred companies on board to build a really large lending board. And the second thing was, if you do the first model, you're not actually lending. You just get a SaaS free. Whereas if you do, you're lending here. You create an AUM.

27:56You can earn way more transaction fees. So that was the second idea. I think it's roughly around this point that you meet our mutual friends, the Hummingbird folks, who, as we both know at this point, have a very distinctive and unique way of looking at venture. and, you know, as I've heard the story from parts from you, parts from them, they were sort of pretty upfront with you. They were like, hey, we're not so crazy about this idea. Is that right? Well, they didn't say it back then. Okay. They did say it after we told them that we don't think it's going to work out. So I'll tell you the timeline, right?

28:27So we finished off this term at Stanford in December of 2021. We moved to Bombay in Jan of 2022 and we start working on this idea. The YCBAT starts then. And we ended up meeting them in February. What we managed to do within those 45 days is actually get operations off the ground and give five loans out as well. So we got lending books ready. We got partnerships done. We got a legal structure set up. We did some BD. And we actually found five companies that were worth giving capital to. And that's when we got connected to Akshay. At that point, we went through the process. We met Bahrain, Firaat, the partners at Armingbird.

29:02Fantastic folks. And they decided to invest in us. A small check on the entire C-drown. And a month later, still in the YC batch, we told them that, hey, we've realized some ground truths that we didn't know before, which is there's a certain amount of businesses that have contracted revenue, but a vast majority of businesses are actually dev shops. So there's no contractual revenue here. You can still do lending, but it's not going to be back off some receivables. And hence, you're not going to be able to package it. You're not going to be able to sell it off upstream. So you're just a lending company.

29:31And both of us are not super excited. And they're like, okay, we know that. And they asked us, what are you going to do next? We're like, we don't know. And they still gave us a second part of the seed round. That was the story. Well, as they are indexing so much on the person, it's always hard to sort of introspect about yourself. But as they would tell you, they're looking for truly the top basis point in terms of a builder. What do you think they saw in you very early in your career? And you were probably a bit more raw in the way that you were thinking about a business. What were the traits that maybe stuck out?

30:03I think at that point, the only things that internalized about building a company was you needed to move quick and you need to find again the top basis point of talent you had already figured that part out that you needed to be really strong on the talent lens correct and a part of that was yc yc really really uh like i guess a couple of conversations by c really nailed down the fact that you should be anal about who you have in the team and who you don't have in the team uh the worst person your team dictates your working southern culture right and i think that's what hummingbird and we saw eye to eye on and they were like okay that's fantastic we were also able to build a very strong team by the way this uh other person who was my co-founder at gross to me yeah was our second hire oh wow no kidding i had that thought in my head i'm like i hope that guy came came back the first person we hired was a lawyer he was a second person um and he scaled very well he's building the entire engineering team at Asperger.

31:01Wow, so you had great taste even back then. The heuristic of asking your cousin who's the smartest person you know is not a bad way to find out. Well, he was an engineer himself. He was at a top university. Yeah, yeah, totally. That was a little bit of self-selection, but yeah. Yeah, it depends on the cousin. And so you realize that the current version of Vance at that point was not going to be the right thing. And you'll help me figure out exactly what the sort of order of operations was. But there's a certain point at which I remember you telling me that you almost ran like a series of sprints with your team to try and find like, hey, we don't have the right idea anymore, we think, but we're not going to just give up.

31:39So we need to find some sort of structure to ideate, which I think is really so many founders hit that point where they realize the thing they wanted to do is not working. And I think it's really hard to build a structure for yourself to get to that point of discovery. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you got through that. I have to give credit where it's due. We came across this conversation of the Zip founder, the procurer to pay. Oh, yeah. And he talked about how he came up with the Zip idea and he had this 10-point checklist on what you should consider in building a business.

32:09Obviously, it was not entirely that. There was a starting point of how we realized that we should have a structured process as we're going through this because we have money in the bank. We have some fantastic engineers that we've hired and we can definitely think about what to do. What we would do is come up with problem spaces or revenue pools that we wanted to eye, think about those industries, speak to people in those industries and understand what problem statements look like. So we were speaking to hedge fund managers, engineers that worked at hedge funds, crypto traders, finance teams. We were checking out the CFO stack.

32:39We were looking at personal finance across Nigeria, US, Eastern Europe, all across, right? So we were exploring ideas throughout. And whatever we used to narrow down, we would try to build an MVP very, very quickly and then put it in hands of people, either through an Excel sheet or a WhatsApp chat or a janky app on Android. And that was a process. And doing that, our team was very engaged because they were like, okay, we're part of this process. We're not sitting down. Because you've hired some great people, seven or eight of them, and suddenly telling them that the company that they took their risk on is now not doing anything is very daunting, right?

33:11And so if they don't get work or they don't get intellectual stimulation, it's easy for them to decide to leave. So that was very important. And that's the process we ended up going through. How long was sort of each of those sprints? Did you think about them within a certain duration? I think we ran some of them parallelly as well. Two to four weeks. For example, one of them was almost all of general trade in India happens to physical checks. And penetration of digital payments in P2P payments is very high. And P2M is very high. PO2 merchant. But merchant to merchant is almost always checks. And we were thinking, what is the way for us to digitize checks?

33:47And we went ahead and built a product and we actually took it out to thousands of merchants and we tried we shipped our team to different remote parts of india and try to see if it works everyone enjoyed the process but we realized that there's this one key thing missing which is recourse everyone loves checks because they can give credit with great recourse they can post their checks so i as a business can write a check for you that is dated 15 days from now and i get credit with that by not paying it right now but then you also have surety that i can always cash this that was the fundamental feature that it's very hard to replicate with additional products.

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35:09It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com slash generalist and check it out. Okay, so let's go back to where we started, actually, this conversation, which is you wake up, you're in Bangalore, your co-founder's gone, and you have an investor saying, hey, what the hell's going on? Like, apparently you're returning the money. Like, take us from there to maybe not where we are now, but to, you know, landing on this business. So I called one of my friends, Meho. He's a fantastic guy.

35:45I mean, one of the reasons that we ended up doing well is because he was my coach and therapist. Oh, that's awesome. He was a YC founder as well. So he's like, well, just get a lawyer. I mean, that's the first thing you should do. And I was glad that that was the first thing that I did. He told me, okay, in front of you, what are options? Can investors actually ask you for the money back legally? and he's like they don't but if you want you can return it and that gave me at least a sense of footing that okay it's my battle to play here and i decide how to play my cards the second thing i did is i was very candid with my team i spoke with them individually told them what had happened and told them hey man it's completely okay if you want to leave i'll make sure that you get a decent severance and you are able to find a new job thankfully all of them stayed back and not a single person left us from that moment till another three months before we decided what we were actually going to do.

36:34Three months between that moment and figuring it out? Oh, yeah. Wow, wow. That's a long time. Well, two and a half. Yeah, I think this happened in July, end of July, early August. And we decided what we're going to do in October. And then we ended up launching Aspera's first product in December. Yeah, not a long time in terms of, you know, no judgment. More just like to keep people, to manage to retain people during that time. Yeah. So this is happening. January moved to Bangalore till December, the first version of Aspera that came out. And then I spoke to investors. and I told them, hey guys, this is what's happened.

37:03This was a background. This is what we're trying to do. The truth is, I don't want to return the money. I will still want to continue building. I spoke to them a day after all of this happened because I wanted to settle down. The fundamental question I asked myself is, if Aspora, or at that point, Vance shuts down, what will I do? And the answer was, I'll start another company. And then probably in financial services, because I really, really liked it. I was like, okay, fine, let's just do this. I spoke to them. They were like, but how are we going to run this company alone? had to convince them that, hey, we can still figure this out.

37:32I'm going to be a solo founder. These are the XYZ things I will have to do as a solo founder to still be successful. So then the team is still behind me. They spoke to the team. They're like, yeah, the team is still behind you. And yeah, from there, three things we did. We were trying to figure out what product to build. We were still continuing iterating. We had this small legal battle with the co-founder, Oliver John, trying to figure out how do we do severance correctly? And can we actually, because we were both co-CEOs, we both had a say on what to do with the capital. That was a weird position.

38:02And investors were on a safe note, so they had absolutely no say. And the third one was just keeping myself sane and saying that you can still do this. How did you do that? Just like speaking to my parents and I guess my friend Mayhill, that was the only way. And they were like, yeah, I probably will figure it out. You said you had made this list of sort of, here's X, Y, Z of things I need to do as a solo founder that I maybe didn't need to do before. What was sort of mentally on that list? And as you think of it now, I'm curious how you think about, are you built to be a solo founder? Was that like actually the right path for you?

38:34I don't think anyone should be a solo founder. I definitely think that you should. It's just easier. Like when you have people around you that are in the same boat as you. Because as the company scales, your employees start taking up functions, you hire over them, and then the company grows. And there's no one next to you, right? It becomes quite lonely. Having a co-founder is always best. But what I realized back then, the biggest failure point for me would be thinking I was right and having no one that had the authority to challenge me. So the biggest thing that I had to do was create a culture where everyone can speak their minds, everyone can be challenged, especially me, because I'm going to say 40 to 50 % things that are just not going to be the right ideas or right decisions.

39:16And someone had to be there to check me as well. Because with a co-founder, there's always honesty with employees less so, and especially if you scale. So that's something that I was very candid with the team and sort of inculcated that up to today. How did you get folks to feel comfortable doing that? Because there's one, you know, it's sort of the classic thing of your boss says, hey, I love feedback, but there's, you know, an internal block maybe of giving that to someone. I think not having a knee-jerk reaction to feedback. I mean, like just taking it well, right? Showing them that you care about it.

39:46Also, my ex-co-founder had a lot to do with it because he was comfortable and we were friends and he would call me out in like meetings and be like, wow, that is a stupid idea. So when you see people doing it and you're okay with it. And that's when it happens. You sort of, people get comfortable with that behavior. It's hard to keep doing that. As I'm skating, I'm realizing I'm losing a little bit of it. But that's really, really important. Maybe some of the folks that have been there long enough now feel more comfortable. But the new folks are sort of, as you sort of scale and scale, it maybe becomes harder, right?

40:16So after that moment, there's this three-month period. When is the moment that you sort of land on the idea for Aspora that you were like, hey, this could really work? I think it was not one conversation. It was a series of conversations. We were still trying to do this thing, right? We were speaking to people in different industries, trying to understand their business context or professional context as well as their personal lives. And we realized that a good chunk of people that we were speaking to turned out to be immigrants that moved from one country to another three to 10 years ago. And one common thing they mentioned was it was hard for them to manage finances across borders.

40:50And there are three things to it, right? It was very hard to manage multiple accounts. Like everywhere I'm going, I'm opening new accounts. I don't know my password. And it's just, I don't know where my money is. Second was taxation is bloody complicated. I don't know where am I supposed to pay which tax. Any tax consultant that I hire does not know anything about the other country. That's very hard. Third is, I don't know how to deploy capital wealth. How do I manage it? And the fourth was the payment is still very hard. And that became a repeated pattern. And we kept seeing it again and again.

41:16We realized there are companies like Remitly and Wise that are in this space. but they don't really solve banking for you as a global consumer, right? They only solve payments which is an important piece but I would have naturally assumed that the next step would have been well, we'll solve entire banking for you. I know why isn't 2018, 2019 rebranded from transferwise to wise to do that but the fundamental flaw for them was that they were spread to 10 maybe multiple diasporas or multiple immigrants groups or ICPs, customer personas that would be very hard for them to go deep because every person needed a different solution.

41:53And then we realized that, okay, we have something at our hand here. We ended up doing a bunch of research, realized there's a power law of number of countries where immigrants come from and the number of countries that they go to is about eight in eight. The largest developing countries, the largest developed countries. So you don't really need to do 200 to 200 mapping. It's about seven to seven, eight to eight. I think it captured a large portion of the revenue pools here. And then we started digging into, well, NRI diaspora. And the first victim was my dad and his friends and people that I knew.

42:20An NRI just for people is non-resident Indian. Correct. These are people that have left India, are living outside, and they can either have an Indian passport or foreign passport at that point. Yeah, and so UAE is filled with them, right? So UAE has 10 million population, 3 million of who are NRIs. And I realized this problem was way closer to home than I realized. And it was structural as well, right? So as you move as an immigrant from one country to another, the country that you move to is not great with banking new immigrants in general they don't know how to assimilate you with credit with banks with wealth uh and also you're lost as to what to do and the second is the country that you're moving from is not fantastic with uh banking their diaspora and that's primarily because almost everyone spent time on in the last 10 years of fintech evolution these largest uh immigrant these largest developing countries on their local populations for example india has a billion and a half people that they built payment infrastructure for they didn't think what it would be for nris so it's going slightly deeper into nris nris are required to have a special bank account it's called a non-resident account uh because they have different tax treatments for you there are some benefits uh and the government wants to be clear about what is foreign money what is not capital controls uh and this account opening process is 45 days as a result 60 to 70 nris globally don't have access to this account and without this account you can't invest in India you can't take credit but then everyone does.

43:45They use their mother's account, their brother's account. So there's a lot of workarounds to this. But the entire financial ecosystem was broken. And the second thing is, this is despite them disproportionately contributing to the financial services landscape. So the number that we ended up concluding was close to one third of all of India's consumer deposits, which is about a trillion dollars, comes from the diaspora. So one percent of the population contributes to 30 percent of the deposits. And this was consistent across the diaspora. This is the same for Filipinos. This is the same for Nigerians, Chinese, that they wanted to bank back home.

44:19There's a sense of nostalgia, growing economies, and it's just not easy. Yeah, that's so interesting. There's these sort of structural things, and just to sort of recap it to make sure I'm understanding it well enough, and listeners are understanding it well enough. It's like an Indian person moves to the UAE. The UAE doesn't really know what credit that person should have or what sort of banking, how they should fit into the existing banking system. But India has sort of not washed their hands of them, but it's sort of like, hey, you have to fit into this very specific set of capital controls, this this bank account.

44:53And as a result, folks are are finding these these back doors or side doors of saying, hey, I'm going to invest in real estate through my mom's account or I'm going to send money through this way. And so you've sort of took as a problem statement building for this diaspora, this NRI group that is asymmetric in terms of its actual size, but its sort of financial size. When did the realization that sort of stablecoin should be a really important part of that solution come into it? I think we tinker around with the idea of stablecoins very early on, right? So we launched our first product in December of 2002.

45:31We got our first users around January of 2023. And around that time, we were thinking about stablecoins. But we took a call against it because we were like, oh, regulations aren't clear. We don't know if this is actually a way that we should go about things. And we knew there were a couple of benefits of using it. We said, OK, fine, it's not clear. Back at that time, we were actually exploring gold-based settlements as well. But OK, fine, we can buy digital gold in one country, sell it in another. And that's where we can settle. Wow. So it was not a common place to think about stablecoins. So we tried a couple of things.

46:04We were like, we don't know if people are doing this. So we shoved that idea. When it really became important and pressing for us to think about this was when in March of 2023, our volumes were going up and our cash balance was going down because we're still burning money as a company. And to do settlements to a foreign country, you need some working capital in that country because you're buying effects ahead. Banks in India only work eight hours on weekdays. So if you want to do install settlements for your customers, you need to buy capital, buy INR, and then store it in that country. So you need some working capital.

46:38And we were deploying our equity money over there. And as our volumes are growing and our cash balance is coming down, it was like a fatal pinch. And we're like, we have to do something. You can have constant purchase of INR throughout the day and throughout the weekends. So your working capital requirements went from X to 0.2X. Wow, that's really interesting. to give folks sort of a sense of the scale here and maybe the idea of like what, you know, how to wrap their heads around the product. How do you sort of pitch Aspora today? And what are the sort of scale we're talking about? Today, Aspora in its current form lets you send money from, well, I guess five developed countries back to India and also pay your bills back home.

47:21They have electricity, utility, my credit card bid payments or mobile rechargers. We are processing close to half a billion dollars of volume every month. That's about close to 4.5 % of the inward remittances that India receives every year. And that's primarily from two countries. We've recently gone live with Europe and the US as well. And those are scaling markets. And we have a few other countries that we're taking live. But what is exciting is our roadmap. So how I pitched to new NRIs is like, we will be your primary bank across the two countries that you live in. You don't need any other financial institution after us.

47:54And that's because we give you an NRI bank account back in India. We give you a GDP bank account here. They work seamlessly with each other. You have one card that you can use across the world, zero forex fees. And we allow you to invest in both of these countries. Obviously, that is a roadmap. And we're going to be launching these over the next six to nine months. But that's what we're super excited about. And in terms of remittances, you know, you say maybe 5 % of inflows. India is, as I understand, the biggest remittance economy in the world, right? Right. And also, I'm sure you know this, but there was a report this week talking about crypto adoption globally.

48:29You know, there's different ways they sort of measure that. But across a number of different metrics, India is number one. And so it really is obviously so inherent to who you are in your story. You were an NRI, right? You are an NRI. But also there are such sort of analytical reasons why this really makes sense, it feels like. Absolutely. I agree with you. One thing that I'm interested in is, in a way, I can't think of another neobank or financial story that has framed themselves the way that you guys do. There are obviously lots of global fintechs, but not one that says, hey, we're actually for diasporas.

49:11That's sort of in our DNA in some way. And it raises the question for me of, why is that the right framing for this? And is there sort of enough similarity across Indian diaspora, Pakistani diaspora, you know, Turkish, whatever you want to pick for that to be like a meaningful, unifying characteristic? I'll tell you the truth behind it. Right. Some of it is obviously current and present branding. When we started this off, our goal was today finances across borders are broken. And it's not just for consumers. It's not just for diasporas or anyone that has any use cases around sending money between countries or managing multiple currencies.

49:52And that's SMEs, freelancers, corporates. And the plumbing itself is broken between these countries. And our idea with Aspora was, well, it's a design problem, right? You're able to now, with Aspora, get licenses and regulatory infrastructure in eight of the largest economies in the world. but then as you expand diaspora is also eight of the largest developing countries in the world and once you build this plumbing you have a platform that you can do infrastructure plays on you can do b2b banking plays on consumer banking plays on and that's really the goal right so while diaspora banking is our short term and what we're building and the consumer aspect of it we've already started building our infrastructure we already allow other businesses to use our rails to send money to india we've launched a couple of other countries there but the goal is evolving Aspora into a global bank that anyone can use because we're building all of this infrastructure and finding the best way to move money and information.

50:48And how do you think about taking the right steps towards that? Because, you know, if you're saying global infrastructure and the application layer, you could go in any number of directions, right? Correct. So this is the point where it's really important to understand where to allocate capital. And the approach we've taken so far is be commercial first. Figure out what allows you to get the most revenue, the most relevant users? What can allow you to cross-sell from there on? How can you build synergies? The reason we chose Philippines as the next diaspora is because we ended up getting licenses in the US and there's a very high concentration of Philippines in the US.

51:22And we decided to wait until we went to the US to launch Philippines. But the idea is try to chase revenue pools, try to chase adjacencies to your current business models, and at the same time, keep building infrastructure. And in terms of the product part, you started with with the wedge being transferring, right? The remittances, which on the one hand is amazing when you think about how you want to build one of these companies, because it's so high volume, high frequency. It feels like you can capture a lot of people quickly. And if you compete on price and ease of use, like people are very happy to switch, right?

51:56There's like very low switching costs, but the downside feels like there's low switching costs. So, you know, if someone else comes in. Oh, absolutely. So how do you think about like deepening? Urgency that our team obsesses on, right? We realized that what we've done is not unique. Anyone can come and out-price you, have a better experience. Hopefully not a better experience, but at least out-price you. And for that, you need to get deep into the consumer wallet very, very quickly. So we are building three to four products that we think all of our users desperately need. They will pay money for.

52:26They will use week on week. And a large part of that is what is our right to win on the first couple of products? and then which products will allow us to then do the most cross-sell. A secondary dimension here is that we are in a regulated space. So a lot of our roadmap is also driven by the regulator. Yeah. You know, let's talk about that piece, actually, because we've obviously seen a lot of momentum around the regulatory stuff within the U.S. You know, how much does that impact you given the markets that you already serve? And then, you know, then we can talk about, you know, India's regulatory environment.

53:00I think the Genius Act is great. that it happened now uh i was thinking about right like is it better off that it happened now or should it have happened slightly earlier slightly later i think we we are the the highest benefactors of it because what it allowed is a lot of focus of talent and capital in this market uh so people are like oh this is an interesting space so the best talent wants to work in this space and the uh the best capital pools find themselves attracted to the space and we've been able to ride some early tailwinds, get some traction that allows us to attract both of the talent and capital pools.

53:37So I think it's right, rightly time for us. Interesting. To push back on it, isn't there a part of you that wishes you'd had an extra two years before this had happened, you got a little bigger, and then suddenly this happens. And, you know, you're almost too big to compete with for a lot of people. Maybe a year. But think about it, right? Like we were able to raise our series and series primarily because Bridge got acquired by Stripe, and then everyone started talking about stablecoins. So I think we had the right tailwind. Maybe the Genius Act itself could have come a year out again, but I think with our business, product velocity matters way more, and anyone can kill us regardless a year or two years out as well.

54:19How do you view stablecoins' perception in the market today? Because on the one hand, there are real volumes that are happening that are, you know, just continue to sort of reach new highs. And the adoption is growing really substantially. So there's these fundamentals that are are just true about the way that they're being utilized. But on the other hand, there is almost so much excitement that I wonder, has it still gone maybe a little bit over the top? Like, are we do a micro correction, a macro correction on how people view stable coins? Or actually, is it, you know, is that totally the wrong way to view it?

54:51then we're just in the early innings here. Stablecoins will not create fundamentally new revenue pools. They will to an extent, but not to the extent that AI will. They're not going to double or triple the revenue pools that exist in finance. What they'll do is they will enable cost reductions massively across the board. The SWIFT network is clunky, terrible, prohibits trade, prohibits value exchange, and it's peace for everyone. that will get replaced hopefully exchanges don't run 24 7 it's t plus two day settlements all of that will get streamlined so there will be a lot of efficiency over the next 10 15 years with stablecoin adoption across the board across industry like finance will feel real time and that will create a lot of great businesses it might not create trillion dollar industries and that's where i think some of the misplaced belief from capital makers might come in but But there are still great infra and application consumer level businesses to be built out.

55:52In terms of India's regulatory environment, we talked about this is obviously such a big remittance economy. This is a big crypto economy. And in many ways, India has been incredibly forward looking in terms of building, maybe we call it civilian tech or tech, sort of this infrastructure for the country with UPI and so on and so forth. How has the sort of government or regulators, how have they looked at crypto from the stablecoin perspective and the stuff that is relevant to you? So take a step back, right? Like most developing nations, what do regulators care about? They care about consumer protection and the national interest.

56:29I think crypto had a bad name in India, like other countries, where people are getting scammed. Rugpulling was happening. So they were generally conservative. But India also never had outright ban on crypto like China or other countries. They had like a regime where crypto exchanges could thrive. Recently, Coinbase invested in an Indian exchange at a$3 billion valuation. And so in terms of, you know, the way that you need to work in the country, how much do you have to do through sort of like joint ventures or through other partners? Like, is that an important piece of doing what you actually, you know, want to do from a product perspective?

57:03Or, you know, is there enough freedom that you can sort of move? So in India, it's a lot harder because almost all licenses are strictly guarded by the regulator. So for example, the first product that we're launching, which is the non-resident accounts, we're working with an Indian bank. They essentially were kind enough. They're like, okay, fine, you can come in, rework all our code base. You can build the product from scratch. It would be powered by us, but you would have a white label experience. And the regulator is okay with those arrangements. What they're not okay is giving you a license on day one.

57:32What that allows us is to build presence. the regulator gets to know you and then three to five years out you can try to get your own license fast forwarding you know let's say three years what do you hope a spora looks like where is it operational what is it able to do for people absolutely and maybe let's say 10 years well you know what's the version then so okay three years uh we definitely want to be live across four or five uh key diasporas and we think uh philippines uh china uh egypt nigeria china Wow. That's a level of complexity that I imagine is like, you know, real hard mode, right?

58:07Correct. But why not? I know it's not easy, but it's got one of the largest diasporas, one of the largest remittance corridor. It's the second largest remittance corridor, right? So why not try it? So be live across diasporas and within these diasporas, be able to have these people manage money across borders, have multiple accounts, access to investing in the home country, host country, as well as USD, a lot of these immigrant populations have aspirational dollar dreams. So investing in the US stock market, take access to credit, credit cards, personal loans, insurances that cover you when you're traveling.

58:42One key thing that we also want to build for the Indian diaspora is a way for them to connect with their family back home. A lot of these people leave their family back home and there's a lot of guilt with leaving their parents. So if Aspera is able to take care of their family back home, there's a level of trust. What does that mean? Sending money to their family? or something else? No, so I can manage my parents' healthcare insurance. I'm going to be able to get them a caretaker who can help them go to medical appointments. So build a healthcare infrastructure, manage their money. So having a way to control how they're spending, making sure they're not getting defrauded, all of that.

59:14Yeah, okay, fascinating. So these are the sort of things that because of the market you're going after, they're sort of unique product opportunities, right? It's not something a traditional neobank is thinking about. Correct. Okay, and so that's the three years, let's say, and 10 years, what does that look like? We want to be HSBC's worst nightmare, but essentially at that point, we want to have a foothold into any consumer that is thinking of dealing in more than one currency, uses us as a bank account. They can roam around the world, use us as a native bank account, wherever they go. If they live in Singapore today and move to Australia, they don't have to do that, right?

59:50They ask for our users here, they're going to be as for our users there. They can just click simply add an Australian account and get on with their lives. And businesses can manage teams, vendors, buyers from around the world. They can manage money movement. They can manage their account in these countries. In preparing for this episode, I spoke with Akshay, who you mentioned. And I was like, hey, what do you think are some questions that I should ask Parth? And he sent me a few suggestions. And one of them that I wanted to ask you about is you have what's called a new bets team on the company.

1:00:18Tell me about that and why have you sort of built that unit quite early in a company's life? It's a little bit of the Amazon philosophy, right? Where just do things because they help in your business and then you can spend them off. The reason we set up new bets early on is because we're in this tectonic shift of stablecoins and we do not think of Aspora as a stablecoin backward business. But I definitely feel like as a company that has a decent amount of cash on our hands, It is worth allocating some of that to fundamentally stable and backward businesses and seeing if we can create a tremendous value out of that.

1:00:56And so what does success from that division look like to you? Doubling company valuation or delivering a similar shareholder value from a small investment. But it's finding a unique promise statement that we think it's going to be a massive opportunity to stand us out. And then having like an ambitious Super Ninja team working on it for two to three years. And what have some of those new bets looked like? I would not. Okay, fair enough. Amazing. Well, I've learned so much. And, you know, to sort of wrap us up, maybe we move to a few more philosophical questions. If you had the resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run?

1:01:36I was thinking about this while I was coming here. and one thing that I've been thinking about since we've been building it for the last two years is today foreign currency exchange still happens over bank counters, ODC traders, smaller exchanges. It's defragmented. It's fragmented quite a bit and it's opaque, clunky. What if there was one API or one protocol that could send money to whoever and you don't have to worry about currencies, exchange rates, just transfer of value. You can operate in your native currency. They can operate in whatever currency they think is fair. And there's a global protocol that takes care of money movement.

1:02:17It happens instantly. It happens on the chain. It is dystopian. It is going to require more than technology, I guess, coordination. What's a tradition or practice from another culture that you wish we would adopt more in our modern life? This is going to be slightly contradictory. But I'm a big believer that if you want to truly leapfrog an economy, the economy constituents, which are the individuals, need to work extremely hard. I'm a big fan of what China, Singapore, I guess South Korea were able to do with a tremendous amount of concentrated and coordinated effort from the individuals. I feel modern economy is sort of shunned, or I guess modern politics sort of shunned.

1:03:01But I still think there's a population that should focus on that 996 mentality of let's make something fantastic, let's make something that's going to leave bound and make the next generation's life a lot easier. I would love to see that. How do countries do that? How do you do that? I definitely do think that it's very hard for democracy to do that. It is almost always impossible, right? You need a little bit of autocratic elements in a government, in a country to be able to make that happen. We saw that with Li Kuan Yew, we saw that with China's economy. and so the conclusion that I came to is any developing country which is still a democracy it's very hard for them to leapfrog yeah and have to be some autocratic elements obviously benevolent autocratic yeah uh that can make it happen but like Ali Kuan Yew who who you know was a sort of a benevolent autocrat in many ways yeah for a leapfrogging mentality that that makes sense I suppose we are now entering a period where a lot of those democracies that have been at the the vanguard have faded enough over the last 30, 40 years, we might say, that maybe there will be a point in the future where there's a degree of leapfrogging required.

1:04:15I guess so. I mean, we do these conversations that Europe is in decline or what's going to happen in the next 10, 15 years. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 15 to 20 years, one of these countries in Europe actually takes that stance and does go for that leapfrog mentality. And people are like, okay now we need to really work hard to push ourselves otherwise we will be left behind in a way. Yeah yeah in terms of global competitiveness there is yeah for Europe for example I think it's hard to argue against Europe becoming more competitive over the past 30 years and so there needs to be some sort of reversal there.

1:04:46Final question if you could recommend or rather assign a book to everyone on earth in your in your benevolent autocracy to everyone to read and understand what would you want to assign to people? If you're talking about this framework, right, which is if people need to be highly motivated, I think you need to point out what sheer will can do as an individual. And there's a lot of examples, but I guess the most culturally relevant one and the people that people can see is, I guess, Elon Musk, the Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk autobiography, not because it's a great literature, but in this context, just showing people what one humans tenacity and perseverance can make happen is like bizarre right just tells you that just work hard and things will happen yes if you if you are willing to devote your like every you know drop of blood and give up potentially all of your relationships and experience like insane amounts of pain it is like yeah i mean it is remarkable what one person can achieve right i don't think that life is for everyone, but just knowing that you can achieve whatever you want to by dedicating yourself to it is enough power for you to not cry out.

1:05:57Yeah, that people almost don't realize that it is possible. And I think there's a version of history that plenty of people subscribe to and that I've really, the more I've watched exciting companies get built and studied history, you've come to really feel doesn't make sense to which is this, you know, more bottoms up view of history where things are going to happen because they were going to happen already. And the society was ready for it when it really feels like extraordinary people who sacrifice an insane amount and usually have some sort of aspect to them that is hard for us to really feel full sympathy for.

1:06:34Right. Like Elon Musk is a great example where I appreciate so much of what he's done and I have great admiration for him in other ways. But there's also part of me that, you know, I see what he is in many other places and think, god you know but i think that's just natural that yeah these people are it's impossible to wrap your heads around them but like they are the engines of progress in so many places and and that is how stuff changes do you know d hawk by the way the visa founder no so actually that is another wait what company visa visa uh no no i've never studied that that's actually a fantastic story i think it's even more impressive than what Elon Musk has done.

1:07:10Elon Musk went just like, sheer will, scream at everyone that comes in front of you, just outwork everyone. D-Hawk, to the problem to me we were discussing earlier, if you wanted to create this ecosystem of everyone collaborating to create a common payment engine in the world, D-Hawk did achieve that with Visa. So early on, every bank had their own card system. He was able to convince everyone to unify it, give up their own revenue, and this was across hundreds of banks across the world. And it was one of the biggest coordination problems. Yeah. How did he do that? Well, I guess perseverance, but then being able to, there's a lot of interesting stories of him using tactics to sway people, impress people, convince them one-on-one, convince them in large settings.

1:07:58Just a preacher. And he said, we're going to make a non-profit organization and it's going to be this fantastic place which allowed the world to leap. He showed the grand vision know what it could look like 50 years out and people fell one by one. Wow so he said it was going to be a non-profit. Yeah yeah I mean Visa was structured as a non-profit when it initially began. Wow what it wow there's so many echoes of today I can't help but think of OpenAI for that of like this grand vision the non-profit and then you figure out a way to turn this into correct yeah a massive for-profit company fascinating man I've got to research him clearly because that's a kind of story I don't know if I've ever properly understood before.

1:08:35I mean, that could be very interesting for your newsletter as well. It's actually very fascinating. Man, well, that's a great place to end because you're sending me down a new rabbit hole. So thank you so much, Parth. It was so lovely to chat. Thank you for having me, Mario. Amazing. Take care. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one.

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