#19 - Lightspeed India

All right, Hemeth, welcome to the Number State podcast. So you introduce yourself, you're at lightspeed. We worked here at a six and eight. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you for having me. Been looking forward to this for a long time. Malazi. Yeah. So for the folks that don't know me, I'm Amith. I'm Malpatra and all the Parkers at Lightspeed. ISP is a global venture capital firm that invests across different regions. Basically, we are aware of our pressure base. And India is like 1.8 bill,

something like that. India, yeah, you manage about 1.5 to 1.8 bill in the capital, very early stage focus. You also have a growth front there, presence in China, presence in Europe, presence in the US and the way that we don't have an office or team, we certainly have investments like in America and African Vicures. Yeah. And then before Lightspeed, I would like to you and then I was like, yeah, known you for maybe 7-8 years before that even.

Oh, it's a fun story that I don't think you would remember. Yeah, go. I don't know. So before it's the scene, yeah, I would like Google, Yes. And I was part of this small team of people led by a guy named David Glaser, the genius Lily guy who was trying to kind of saw the wave of or his thesis was that in 10 years from then the next noble laureate in Biome, PA by a statistician, but not yeah, Marix not a not a bet lab.

Which just happened. With domestic, Yeah, yeah, just happened recently, two years back. So. And what was Google's all going to be there? You're going to be the computer. The computer for that. So he pulled together a small group of people and they call you Google Genomics. And one of the people you wanted to work with was a company called Console. That's right, my first one.

Yeah. So if you were there, so I remember getting on a bunch of phone calls, trying very hard to get in touch with you and then getting on a full convalia kind of convince you that we was build cloud to do all of the analysis. I may remember this. That's right. And I think we were, I think we were using AWS at the time or something like that probably. And I was just like, I mean, Google was great, but I was, I remember actually, was that the time of App Engine?

App Engine was popular there, yeah. And the problem is App Engine before Google Clive was something that if you're just doing exactly what Google wanted you to do, it works. And but then if it was almost like A blog where like if you if you want to do just a blog, it was fine. If you want to do something outside of it, it wasn't right. It was just like Java, and I think about Java is it'll let you not do anything stupid, but won't anything smart either. Yeah, yeah.

That's right. That's right. And I think, I mean, cloud has obviously evolved a lot since then. And it it, you know, with the whole genomics thing, by the way, what's funny about sorry, were you going to say something more? Yeah, So with the whole genomics thing, that is the space which should be much bigger. And it's kind of being quietly growing. Like, I mean, 23andMe recently

went bankrupt, unfortunately. But with 23andMe answersyou.com, like sequencing has really radically increased, right? But it hasn't increased as much as it should. Like everybody should have a personal genome on their computer. And so it should be an important file. It should be an app that's top of mind. And part of the reason it hasn't is that FDA attacked a bowl space and basically said that you can't offer interpretations of genetic tests and results and

so on and so forth. And we're now very fortunate that it's gotten beaten back because with AI, you can now interpret genetic test diagnostic, Softer can do that. It can do that better than a doctor can, right? The entire concept of, oh, you can't use AI to interpret your own test results was the kind of thing that that FDA would have blocked AI from doing and said it's an unregulated medical device. All those things have to be sensed or has to be bottlenecked through a doctor, right?

So we may be able to take another crack at that now that the regulatory state can't block that anymore, right? Or at least much less powerful than it was. And so AI enabled medicine is going to be a big thing, but it required so much infrastructure to sort of break past the regulatory state, the American regulatory state in order to do that on. And I don't know if you did you guys, was that on your radar at that time? No, not the, not the regulatory part, probably.

The regular part we did not care about. Yeah, they try a lot to get to what you would call the baseline study of human populations. So yeah, at least have a baseline genome kind of right already. And then, you know, because Google being Google, they tried it in a way that people did not like. Yeah, they're very sussed. Right, right. Couldn't trust a big conglomerate like Google so nobody would upload their genomic data. This is a Google Health and they tried to, yeah.

Exactly right. So my team LED a lot of bad and it didn't work out. And we want to build a Federated data set that those could use at some time where a Pfizer could use or a clinic could use for germline studies or specific, you know, like rare diseases. And they're really matters a lot. And we just couldn't get there. That's the context of that. We met very briefly. And I remember I've tracked your journey for many, many years and, you know, glad you've paid in touch and yeah, finally.

Yeah, that's good. And I think in E6 and Z1 of the reasons I got into BTC was because and crypto and so is that only when I started a company did I understand how big a deal the regulatory state was. And it was only it was DNA that in in a sense made me get into BTC, right? Because as as an academic, the government is basically friendly to someofthe.edaddressonceyouvegota.com they think of you as like an evil for profit company, especially in a regulated industry, the regulators are

like the police, right? And if you understand how there can be sometimes bad police, you understand how there can be bad regulators, right? And so this was something where I realized actually, you know, do you go and try and reform this? Do you make this or that and around the process? And certainly people have tried that, but ultimately I, I realized it's actually easier, just like it's easier to start Bitcoin than reform the Fed. It's actually like actually easier to do that, right?

It's easier to get a new jurisdiction than to reform the FDA, right? It's easier to start a new city than reform San Francisco. That's fundamentally the press, right? And there's a lot of people who are working on a reform and, you know, reform, there's power of it's 99 to 1, something like that, more than that 99.999 point 99. But we do need to be able to opt out of the existing system and build something else rail.

And it's funny, there's all kinds of verbal tricks that people will use, like to keep you within the existing system and say, Oh my God, you're a traitor. Why are you leaving? You're, you know, right Or you know, you're a coward. Why don't you stay and fight or something like that, right? Or, you know, you need to be part of the process. You can't just, you know, leave, you know, this kind of thing. And I understand where that

comes from. And sometimes obviously you don't leave in a precipitate way, You know, you try to fix it and some suffer. But at a certain point, and everybody's points is different, you realize that system cannot be fixed, right? And further capital, further time for their energy going after it doesn't work. That's what Elon just realized. Yeah. He literally tweeted out. Did my best. Yeah, right. So you know what comes to X-ray

anyway, Go ahead. Yeah. This is interesting because it reminded me of and we should talk about your Bitcoin journey which are curious about that too. So it's what you were saying about it is sometimes easier to create a new system versus change an existing only system. It seems to be true as long as mythology as almost as far back as Indian mythology has been around. And even then it was easier to build a new heaven versus to elevate yourselves into the old

heaven. So it makes sense that you're planning to do what you're planning to do. I admire you for. That yeah, I, I, well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I think, well, you know, one thing I want to do is actually, so Speaking of India, let's maybe why don't we talk about India for people who don't know anything about India and then India for people who know something about India,

especially Indian tech, right? So you know, the thing about India is for people who are Anglophones, right? Like basically English speakers they could essentially, especially Americans, not the British of course. So they had a long history with India, but most Americans, many Anglophones, could ignore India until pretty recently, right until last, the Indians were more and more prominent in text, starting being with vanilla, Khosla and so on and so forth

and more and more in the 2000s. But really India is kind of only popped on the radar in the last few years. For example, Ukraine is the first international issue where I can recall Americans, Europeans and so on being concerned as to where India's position was. Nobody cared where India's position was in Iraq that I can remember. And we care what's position was on the financial crisis that I can remember, nor on Syria that at least that I can remember, right?

Like, but it is now become enough of a global player that people did care about it's position on Ukraine. And so so because that people need to know something about India, right? So obviously the basics will import for a billion people. It's, you know, this multi 1000 year old civilization, one thing most people don't know is India is actually a union like the European Union, like the United States, right? Why don't you talk about that? All these different cultures and so on there.

Yeah. So I'll go very far back when very quickly come to the present day and tell you what's been going on. Very old piece of land, lots of complicated history. It used, it used to be a union more around different religious practices that end up becoming tribes and tribes end up becoming States and states end up coming together to build a nation. But from the very beginning, it was always 5 or 10 tribes that were kind of dominating in India.

There were southern tribes, there were northeastern tribes, there were, you know, northern tribes and so on eastern tribes. And we expanded, you know, all the way out to Iran, Afghanistan for the longest time. So the first and only 4000 years ago, 2000 BC, 2000 BC, This is, you know, what Indian Qataris parole looked like in ammunication of a variety of cultures and and so on spreading, you know, all the way to Afghanistan, Iran on the left and then, you know, to the

right. And at that point, and for the longest time of II's history, we were almost 1/4 to 1/3 of the global economy. That's that chart. That chart, yeah. If it goes from 30% and then it kind of very quickly shrinks in the last 500 years of 2% with the with the rulers that have come from pretty much everywhere around to occupy India. But the longest time China and India were the dominant, you know, players in the global

economy. And the global economy was part manufacturing, where the manufacturing meant back then part trade and so on. And the country obviously was a big part. And then that probably stayed till that, you know, for about 2 to 3000 years that kind of stayed very stable. It doesn't really change that much. There's a bit of up and down here, but it doesn't change much. And that's been the history of India and also to a certain extent Shia 4-5 hundred years ago, of course, and we'll talk

more about that. The bigger you get, the more attention you grab. And India build roads to the world, the roads also come to you and it becomes easier for people to come to you. And that's what started to happen. Peaceful and peaceful people, not so peaceful people coming right? Especially in the Northwest. Yeah, probably more ambition. It's fine and fair to say they may have had more ambition to occupy and they may have had more ambition to.

Terminology or going even further back, Yeah. Correct. So cultural differences and then. Northeast that much because it's impassable to the Himalayas, yes, Yeah. Yeah. So majority of it came from the left and off and then the once a state like that, which is anyway loosely put together a group of people that were somewhat cooperating versus collaborating, when it starts to crack, the cracks don't you know, disappear very quickly.

So we had, you know, 1 crack appear with the Islamic State coming in and occupying and then that crack continue to reserve, you know, extend from there. And then of course, the Britishers came and at one time I remember the math, but then they took out about $40 trillion of, you know, some very harsh number in today's dollars back to, you know, dominions.

And then India basically is trying from being a, you know, hyper capita GB country with manufacturing, trade, agriculture to basically subsistence level GDP and primarily a resource state for other countries. And then that that was, this is Fast forward to maybe, you know, maybe 100 years ago, like 5070 years ago roughly. And then we got independent from independence to now. And I had the story of how states change shape and

philosophy. I feel like, and, and maybe this has happened with other countries and we should talk more about that. You have this period of shape. A country goes through a period of shame and a country goes through a period of regret, a period of realization, a period of hard work and then a period of a sentence. Yeah. And these things can take 7080 and 80 years sometimes. It depends on a lot of factors of. Course, it's usually say a

regret, right? Because I I'm not so the realization I'd say in 1991 when India liberalized hard work made the last 30 years and now a sentence right. Why would you characterize regret as or is that not the right word? I I'd call it socialism. Socialism, yeah. I don't know if the population regrets it. It's certainly think people who could have taken decisions differently might regret it. But it was the sure, sure. Certainly the limit of shame. We were that stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, we were that, right. And look at our history and all that. And you carry the video and then you look at the president. Oh, my God. Like I'm a 2% DDP country, right? World War. And what was I in my own memory, you would say, 100 years ago? You probably were in a powerful state back then. So that regret leads to, you know, hard work and eventually, eventually.

Hard work. Once there's acceptance of we're not great anymore and we mark down and we're at 0 and kind of people quit thrashing and screaming. They're like, OK, we have to build our way back up. Nothing but for it, right. Yeah. And you know, it's funny, like Argentina seems to have maybe bottomed out and may finally be there El Salva or maybe bottomed out. And now it's like on its way up. China bottomed out. It's on its way up. You know. Well, it seems really improving.

I think. I don't know if it's bottomed out. Yeah, like, but they they definitely have crashed, right. Vietnam bottomed down as long as the way up. So yes, OK, so basics India has so one thing it's it's a union, right? So a lot of people don't know that India has like in a sense, the difference between a like a 2 million or a Telugu person and a Gujarati is like there's between a Italian and a Finn,

right? Because like, you know, the North and South like these are pretty different cultures. There is certainly now an Indian union and people travel from one part or another to India, trade across India and nobody really thinks about it. There's a currency union with a repeat. There's transit links. You know, English and Hindi have become nationalizing languages. People marry across various religions and, you know, regions. And so and so was actually

pretty pretty frequently. And so all of that it actually, the union has actually become a real thing in the sense India is more unified than any quintessary in its history, I think. Would you say? You know, I feel like it's a little bit, having lived in Europe for a while, I feel like it is like the European Union. Yeah, with. More nationalism than Europe? Yeah, more nationalism. So European Union with more fluid and weak memory of individual cultures that don't

go as far back. Interesting. Because I'm from Orissa, but I know that is a culture like from Kalinga days like thousands of years ago or Ashoka was part of that and all that. I would have such a strong memory that attaches me to Kalinga. Interesting. But a German would probably go by thousands of years and remember. What, you're in Italian as Rome and stuff like that, So that's less cultural memory. Less cultural memory.

Even though it's loosely put together Union states, it has less cultural memories specific to the state. I guess language is the main. One language is the main one, Gujarati, Mali Ali. And there is the literature that is more specific. And I would say maybe even the last 50 years that memory has faded. Fifty, 60-70 years ago, Bengal used to be the literary hub of the country. I would not. Tagore was part of that and something the rain was part of

that. And today, I don't know if I mean, there's a S that has a Bollywood type industry called Tollywood and there's whatever. But then I I still personally don't feel like there is that much dense cultural memory that used to exist, probably ended 200 years ago. Why is? It do the British and then the Mughals. Before them, yeah, English has

played a big part. It's becomes a common time thread and you know, over the last 30-40 fifty years, like you said, trade has become a little bit more easier between States and you know, travel, you know, it's you don't require a fast boat to travel anywhere in India. A currency is the same and you are you basically still Hawking back to a single citizenship. So you have that, you know, that kind of thing that ties it together.

So it feels like a a more tightly put together European Union with less cultural memory of individual states that create that union. That's why I. Compare it to it's closer in some ways. I I would never believe this in the 1980s, nineteen 90s, when, you know, we were growing up. But I assume you're like also roughly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've never have believed this, but in many ways, India is now more similar to the America, the 1950s, where it has like a

unifying national ideology. And many like, just like you have Poles and Italians and, you know, English and Germans and all these different European ethnicities in America. But there was like a common creed, economy, culture, common currency. That's kind of what India is to a, to an extent that I wouldn't have actually believed have I

not seen it with my own eyes. And one of the consequences is even though sometimes it's like 2 steps forward, one step back, like the public infrastructure has radically improved radically to an like an unbelievable level. Like, you know, Bangalore airport, the airports are basically like world class. They're world class. They're step clean. They're, they're beautiful. And then you step outside and there's paved roads and they're

new and, and they're stop. I mean, this kind of stuff sounds so basic, but the basics are actually hard because you have to coordinate a lot of people. You have to get permissions to build. And then, you know, the government can't be corrupt. And so, so sometimes it feels 2 steps forward, one step back. But for anybody who's like part of the Indian diaspora who hasn't visited India in the last five or ten years, you definitely have to visit India and just see how much it's

improved. It's radically, radically, radically radically better than the 80s in the 90s and hours of the thousands. Absolutely. And I remember growing up and I mean there are things. So coming back to your question about what is this, Where did you grow? I grew up all over India and I thought I was in the military. So we kept out in particular. You have military jaw. Jaw in the letting festive okay the. Chad the Chad. Jaw. Thank you.

I appreciate it. But yeah, I grew up in the 80s, and I frankly grew up without, you know, I grew up in a small village called the Ocean Market, which is, you know, like as a crow flies maybe 60 kilometers from the border somewhere. Where, where, Where is that? When you were race called, it used to be called Uttara Kand. That's a guy's called a Ton chow. Obviously this was part of UP earlier. OK. So a bit, yeah. And it's not northeast, it's more like closer to Jammu and Kashmir and.

There. Oh, OK. North, north, yeah, north, north. And you know, if you know buzzy enough that that religious place building up, it's it's the last stop before you got to start walking or take a meal, OK to get to that place. The roads don't really show. Take cards. I didn't used it at the time. Yeah, at the time. So group there. You know, we would have basically no hot water and gonna boil it.

We didn't have heater so we would have wood in a thing called Bukhara. But you put wood in it had a chinny, it goes out of the house. You don't die of monoxide, but twice a day just. Literally growing up, no hot water that was low. In a very cold place and and no electricity because you remember used to use this thing called Petromex to study at 9 and stuff it was a beautiful part of my life I remember I'm in a heartbeat retire in the Himalayas because.

The thing The thing is that like because of that, because so many Indians have an upbringing that's like that they are in general like I'm there's a daily set back or something like that, but in general the trajectory has. Just been up. Yeah, you're actually valued 2 steps forward, one step by sometimes 2 steps back. But there is absolutely a crediting for us that's happening in India. Like gradually you are ferociously moving up and up and up and from.

No hub order to finding hot start-ups. Yeah, yeah, finding hot start-ups. Yeah. So now let's Fast forward a little bit from the 80s, nineties, which was I would say maybe the transition treated for India when in the 90s Manmohan Singh kind of opened up the economy. And then, you know, foreign companies come in, you know, create competition in the local economy before what was called license Raj, like to get a license to do a business, you had to get a license from the government.

It was kind of ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not, I was not ABC back then. I don't think you could ever do anything like that. But risk taking was essentially not allowed, likely a lot more socialistic. And I think we opened up and then I think since then, you know, we were, I don't know, maybe 5 hundred $600 million GDP country. And now we are sitting at roughly 4 trillion. And a lot of that growth has happened in the last, you know, 10 to 15 years.

And we've gone through multiple regime changes and demographics have changed. And now I feel like now it's coming together in a way where society is hungry. There is a government that is not a group of politicians were politicking. It feels like in good pockets, good number of pockets. It's a government that is interested in administrate because for India. That's that's a big thing like the the government is actually now interested in building the platform that Indians can build

on, right? As opposed to just taking the money or we have you like they've come in a positive direction, which is it's way easier to have a government that goes corrupt than to one have one that actually ascends and

becomes, you know, better. And it's, you know, it's a, it's been a journey, I can tell you very openly as corruption is still a problem in India. And maybe the low level stock is still hard to do. But again, the whole point of being, you know, stepping forward or slowly by stepping forward but not moving back, I think that feels like it's in monotonically increasing pace that India is AT. And I, I was in the USI grew up in India. I was in the US from all three to 2018.

And I moved back in 2018. And I remember writing about it online, a piece that, you know, if you Google return for India, this still shows up in the first page. And I was quite shocked that it showed up because I was getting so many people thinking on LinkedIn, like, oh, you're fighting space. I remember moving it out. This is actually become a popular piece. And I remember talking about it that when I moved back from US to India in 2018, I had to change very little about my

life. I replaced Hulu with All Star. Netflix worked in the US the same way in India, Amazon worked the same way it worked in India. I had to replace Lyft with Ola and Uber works exactly the same. I still have my US credit card and my Uber because there's no ADP stuff going on. It just goes through and what else? Like, you know, I what'sapp as payments and all those things just worked out completely fine for.

Me. That's because I think Internet first is actually the way I think about the world versus country first in traverse, right? Yeah, that's a great point. I was living in it. I didn't realize it. I was not living as much in the physical infrastructure as I was living in the vigil infrastructure. Yes in the US And all I had to do was I literally moved back at 2 backs. It's 2 bags of 15 years of light. Two big bags would have to. Buy it or known it.

It was the offline stuff, the Fiat stuff that took longer, the cloud stuff you could just log in and get back to work. Right, I had no how then? No car, no scooter, no motorcycle, nothing. Yeah, The only thing you have to change, like maybe you have to get residency right, you have OCI or? No, you always see here. Yeah, I was an H1B for 15 years in the US. OK, got it. And I just didn't have a green card, OK. But I just ships it. So that was easy. That was easy.

Yeah. Yeah, but even if I were a green card holder, OCI now is easy to get. So you basically have a digital passport of sorts and you live in two countries. But yeah, overseas it is, yeah. It was a very smooth move. Now, again, I'll talk more about the India move if you're interested. But yeah, it felt like a pretty straightforward move to me. And then, yeah, there was a bit of this, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you would feel this culture shock.

I didn't feel any culture shock. You were 20 years ago, you would feel an infrastructure shock. I felt a lot less of the infrastructure shock. So there's pollution in India. And if Delhi is much worse than Bagalore and Goa is much better than many cities here in the US And, you know, there is traffic, of course, but I remember being stuck on 101 in SF for many

hours. So it's not that better than different, except somebody drives you but more cheaply in India versus in the US And politics is is nowhere in the world is is good or great. So India is basically no better or worse than any other country. I you know, The thing is, I I disagree. I actually think India will be India is going to be I think a dark horse in terms of it's surprisingly well run. What's one example the votes for the recent election, they were counted in a day right for a

billion person country. And so while the US, it took like weeks, months to get it done right. And that just shows that steep capacity is on some axes actually flipped, right. UPI is very, very good, other is very good. You have criticisms of these systems, but an identity system that works for a billion people on a payment system that works for a billion people, a voting system that works for a billion people, that's pretty good. Yeah, right. I mean, ISRO is landed a probe

on the dark side of the moon. We have these new, you know, trains, we have these new, you know, highways and stuff in India, all this kind of stuff that, you know, the airports, right. And and yet it's still it's still at the J curb. It's still at the bottom of the of the upward trajectory. And the way I think about that, and I'd love to know your thoughts on it is now that it's overlands Geo, we have cheapest, you know, the cheapest 5G Internet service in the world, right.

And all of these things we observe in India, and that's actually quite new. Yeah. You know, what else am I missing? Those are pretty. There's a whole tech ecosystem there, right? Yeah. Good. Help me also. Yeah, so absolutely right. You're not missing anything big. Maybe what I would add to that is India a bit the Geo thing that happened nine years ago. Now, I think India has one of the most digitally awake population in the world in terms

of volume in the time this. Past you see a few periods about Blastia. Yeah. So, so in 2015, Vocation Ambani, who was, you know, one of the main guys that, you know, the biggest controller in India called Reliance, basically took this generational bet. He said that I'm going to spend 10, fifteen, $20 billion and literally put it in blue brown. He dug up places because you know you can't when you're that big, you can take anything you want in the government relationship to it.

But he did it in a way that actually was quite strategic and really has changed the nation's trajectory. He essentially provided literally free Internet to, you know, the entire country, Indian in India. For those that, for folks that don't know, the price of 4G and L5G is let me tell you what I what I pay. I pay about ₹170 per month and that about two and a half, $2.00 on roughly. For 5G Internet. For 5G Internet and I have a three GD per day limit.

So you don't hit. That basically I never hit that. And if I don't hit it, it's sometimes there are some plans that Eddie rolls over to the next one. Signal and watch TV on Netflix on. It's like basically 100 X that amount in the US, yeah. Yeah, so it was crazy for me and I don't. Want the XI? Don't know something like that. Yeah, and Netflix in India is 699 versus whatever it is in the USI mean, so on and so forth. Sure. So digital infrastructure has become so cheap, and cell phones

cost maybe less than $100 in the. 699 in the sense of zero ₹90.00. Rupees. Yes, Rupees. That's about less than $10. Yeah. So when? When? When Jio essentially digitized the entire country, they became the rails on which everything else kind of got built out. Quasi public, quasi private infrastructure. Quasi public, quasi private, they had the spectrum and kind of and all that good stuff. And now, now we've got world's cheapest phones and then most

people have several phones. Like, you know, I know people that are in the up and coming part of society that actually have two phones. You drive in a, in a Orangash in India, it'll have two phones, one for roll out, one for Uber, and it can take the rides on both. And these are both phones that probably cost us in ₹10,000. So that's been very interesting to see.

And on top of that, you could then, you know, then you get distribution, mass distribution, you can build interesting companies and extend them more quickly and learn what, you know, what works for a consumer versus not. So we started to see this venture ecosystem come up and take more bets and funders coming up and, you know, going on building riskier, riskier things.

And then, you know, then we saw, you know, essentially this massive amount of entrepreneurial energy sort of just really coming out and just like bursting at the seams. So the last 10 years, India, I've just been there six years now. I think it's been a remarkable shift in terms of the risk appetite the nation is going to take in terms of the infrastructure build out the country is doing. We spent more in infrastructure bent out in the last five to six years than we spend in the last

70 years since independence. And we are spending more than what we spend in the last seven years in the next five years. Well, the nuclear reactors are coming online. That's a really big one. Brats will be a thing of the past. Hopefully, if that, if those come, India is actually either number 2 after China or it's either there's a graph of nuclear reactors we can put on screen, but plain nuclear reactors.

I think India's number 2 actually on lots of graphs, for example, steel production, China's far number one. But then when you delete China from the graph, India is the real distant but real number 2. So that's on steel, that's on nuclear, solar, solar, some the number of unicorns, for example, it's US, China, then India's like distant China. But it is #3 solid, right? So it is actually really rising and really I think underpriced in a sense and on on the world

stage, right? And of course it's possible to over hype it. It's possible, but it's also to under hype it, right. And you know, in a sense I'm, I think I said to you, I'm moderately bullish in India, but extremely bullish in Indians, right. So India as a system is getting good enough to be a launchpad for the world. And you know, one of the things I think a lot about is this is a very and maybe you have some astronauts. So there's about 7 million or so

Indian Americans, right? I think that's a rough, rough number. And they're doing pretty well, right? Like they are, you know, producing now, now that the second Gen. has kind of, you know, started to grow up a bit. You've got, you know, people in politics like, you know, Vick or or Chervence or or Cash Patel. You have people in in media, like lots of, you know, like, and I shot in love was on the 1st, but lots of other folks, obviously tech, very, very gas based, finance and so on and so

forth. But but there's like weight and of course medicine and lots of other professions, engineering, blah, blah. But there's an interesting and the diaspora has done pretty well in other countries and it's certainly in Dubai and and the UAE, like that's like about 80% Indian. And that's a country that's doing extremely, extremely well, right at the UAE. And but the question is how much potential is still in India, right? Because there's a degree of

selective migration, right? There's, you know, not many people are coming to the US or places they have an engineering degree or there's some qualification somebody back in India are at that talent level. And even if it's 5%, I don't know the exact number, right? If it's 5%, that's like 70 million people out of 1.4 billion, right? That's like 10X what the Indian American population is. So that's a massive new economic disruptive force on the global stage. So that's like a new Germany

coming on Geo, right? A New Japan kind of thing, you know, like at that scale coming online and, you know, maybe you have some thoughts on that. Yeah, I think look, I mean we obviously are very bullish idea. I mean we have continued to double down the last 10 to two years in India. We we feel like this is where you know the maximum alpha is right now. And you're right, I think India feels underpriced even at this point in time for. Indians. Indians are under underpriced,

yes. Where are the finished you saying I'll say something? What do I think about the potential of India? What of it is it's time to get realized. What it is, is still latent and will be realized. Oddly enough, I have been a lifetime skeptic of governments and in the context of India, I came in skeptical. And one interesting thing thing that I realized is that two things, One is if you are a government who is not proud of your country, you're not going

to improve the country, right? If you are a human who is not part of your body, you're not going to improve the body. If you're somebody in a relationship, you're not part of your relationship for partner, you're not going to improve your relationship. For the longest time, I think India suffered. They were, they were. They didn't have a sense of national self and. Pride and never had a sense of national self. And there are Shades of Grey in there.

There's a lot of, you know, places you can slip and fall in. But I think it is an important thing that ties India and Indians together wherever they are. And I think that sense of national self was not there for the longest time when I was growing up. People just woke up and complained about India all the time, Right? Buried. In 80s and 90s, yeah. 80s and 90s that was working. It took two years to get a telephone in your house and for ATV or a sand line somewhere, blah blah blah.

Now I think there is a sense of rising optimism. There are pockets of pessimism for sure, but a sense of rising optimism as a whole. And so for So where am I going with this? I think for a country as large as in the eye, 1.4 billion population, you have a challenge that requires a platform level change to happen. Duo may have been a platform level change. Policies of the platform level change the kind of governance and administration. 1981 liberalization.

So I see that was a moment for people to don't know from independence till roughly 91 India was they actually wrote socialism into the constitution any like the socialist state of India or something like that. And so of course, Fabian socialism arguably was the second colonialism, right, because Fabian socialism came from Riven. And so it was something that kept India poor. And it was, you know, all these NGOs were handing out arms like the whole Mother Teresa thing is meant for country.

That's prostate, right? And like basically, you know, it's not actually meant. It's investment is more investment is real charity in a sense, because charity keeps somebody dependent and investment makes them independent, right? So charity, you know, like I said, if you give a man a fish, you keep them independent. But if you invest in their fish company, they might actually do

something, right? So until basically the late 80s, early 90s, Europe or India was essentially socialist and you have the license Raj, and it was impossible to do anything. And talented Indians were just either like cat poor where they left, right. And then 1991, because of the crisis, you know, the Soviet Union fell and so on. And socialism was clearly not the way to go. India made the right turn. Now, by the way, that wasn't guaranteed, like Cuba remain communist, North Korea being

communist, right? So is the right leadership who saw the right opportunity at the right time and took the right door. And India, it went at least somewhat capitalist. Yeah. And there's still a million criticism you can have like air conditioning is taxed and it's by the way, if there's one thing we should get all Indian VCR founders and so on, basically repeal the tags, the luxury like the Indian air conditioning tax

of all the things. That's a very simple line item thing to repeal will completely transform idea, right? Yeah, the dog, you have a new thing where you could not, where you cannot put your air conditioning to 19°C. There's some something. Something stupid like this, right? But, but at least that one is a little harder to enforce or whatever, right? The the AC tax though, is just, you know, Lee Kuan Yew knew air conditioning was necessary, right?

It wasn't like an option in that like a sub, you know, like a like a tropical kind of environment, right. But why, why did I get on that right? So Oh yeah, so after 91 capitalism hit India and started to grow, right? For China, it was 1978. So that's why China is in some metrics roughly about 10 years, 13 years ahead of India, roughly other metrics. That's why we had other metrics. You'd argue it's even behind in

some metrics. But like, China's diaspora doesn't do as well as India's diaspora. China plays a better home game and India plays a better away game and vice versa, I'd say, right? But so that was the moment that India turned capitalist. That's why India's actually rising now and I think over the years to come. You know, China was always the number 2 communism after the Soviet Union for, you know what,

decades. But then the Soviet Union made a bunch of bad decisions and basically tried to ideologically reform for economic reform. And then it just blew apart in the late 80s, early 90s. And then China in a sense became quote, the leading brand of communism, right? Even if it doesn't export communism, even if it doesn't think it's system is the ideal system, it became the leading brand of communism and Vietnam and and others, you know, like basically all look to China. Are we happy?

And now I think we're on the verge of something similar happening in the Western world where the US and the Western countries on like what they call democracy is going to financially, socially, politically, physically meltdown, right? The sovereign debt crisis is going to hit. And I think that if India can weather that, that it actually will keep in a sense the flame of monarchy of life. It'll be like like China was the number two that then became effectively the most

pragmatically run country. Whether it's actually quote, communist or not, it preserves the name of communist, right? So. India becomes, I think, the world's leading democracy by the late twenty 30s, early twenty 40s or the thereabouts. I think really the Internet is also a big part of that because the Internet allows us to do cryptographic verifiable voting. It allows us to do, you know, like votes where you cannot just, you know, your vote counts, but you can count all the votes.

So the Internet also is a big part in kind of guarding, quote, democracy because communism will be very strong. Chinese communism think will be a lot of people will think that's the way to do things after this sovereign debt crisis. And I think it's going to overcorrect in that direction and we'll have to have a counterbalance to it. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Just the fact that India can count all the votes in a day, for example, not a small thing.

It's like in detail though, that shows that operationally it's actually able to do that and it's somehow on net, it's working within India. Yeah, I was there. Yeah, I think so. I mean back to your point, I'm going to more to do about the potential that India has been realized in the potential that was latent.

I I do think some of these big ships happen when big bets are taken and some of these some of these big bets can be taken by large alumni rates and lot governments and policies and all that. And I think that's what's begin to show some promise and results in India.

And the kind of stuff you see in India different from 20 years ago is this is over by and because the government and, you know, the globalists have done well, it is creating a sense of optimism and is becoming a Petri dish where ambition and risk taking can survive and thrust. 20 years ago when I was in college, if we were to start a company and on a parole, on a parole, you would not get married. Now, if you're on Tinder, I think if you're a founder, you

get all updates is what I hear. So that control shift, I think allows ambition and it doesn't tap it down that he says, yeah, you could do this and, you know, go on that journey and there are people who back you and if you come back failed, you're not gonna be a joke and all right, simply get packed on the back in a bar so that the. Failure tolerance. A cultural shift is apparent. Yeah. As opposed to only taking the safe job of engineer doctor.

I mean, of course, being an entrepreneur is a kind of engineer, but yes. Correct. So now I think that that that Petri dish is somewhat ready. It's still take a decade plus, multiple decades perhaps to get it ready to. That will be what we need. But now I think we are starting to see ambition and risk taking happen, get back and then get results. And we're probably in the first cycle of that. And I could argue the first cycle was 20134014.

And now it's like showing up in public markets in India. Where good companies you just hung out with Beanie Bonsil Flipkart, right. And so we put up a clip use from, you know, a friend of both of ours, he's on the pod before and basically the, you know, he, he was the first large exit in India, right, $18 billion for for Flipkart and kind of showed it was possible, right. And you know, now, you know, one thought you have a thesis and why don't we get to Indian tech

for a second? You have a thesis on Indian tech. I have a thesis. I'd like to hear yours and I'll give you mine. Yeah, yeah. Thesis on India tech. That was a broad question. Yes, thesis on India tech. Should I give? You mine in the group first? Yeah, Yeah. So. My view is that India itself is a market, yes, but it's I'm actually morched in India for the producer side than the consumer side that say I'm morched in India as a source of talent for engineering, for finance, for media, for

basically Internet first. Basically all of the you know, AI is amazing, but AI needs prompting and it means verifying that's actually the new bottleneck, right? Because the prompting is actually writing programs in a higher language. You have to be verbal enough, you know, to to be able to do that. So I'll say Indians winning, selling beasts as a so you heard

it right. So you have to you have to be able to know all kinds of crazy vocabulary terms actually, like for example, art history is now an applied subject. You know why? Because if you can say Cezanne or Picasso or something like that, then you can invoke that as a library call when you're using using AI up, right. And so every subject, the more vocabulary and not just vocabulary, the more terms concepts, because using them correctly, you can prompt it better, you get a better result.

And then verifying it is if you have expertise in there. So yeah, it doesn't take things away, but take jobs away. But what it does do is it shifts them to people who will have time to do prompting and verifying. And sorry to reject you back. I don't know if you saw that recent video by Karpati where he kind of does this analysis of get up code. Yeah, and more and more now they get up. Repositories have English embedded in the code, because now the code itself is becoming

natural. Language for more, yes. Similar board dense. So back to your point about yeah. That's right. And exactly like prompting programming, assembly, like, you know, right, and, and India is good in English, or at least a lot of Indians come to English. And it's in some ways, depending on the numbers, you can argue India has already actually become the number one source of English speakers on the Internet, right over the US, which used to be at the default,

right. And I think as more and more Indians acculturate to English, that will become completely true by 2035 or 2040 or thereabouts, right? Because they can learn languages quickly around. So my view is like, if we're sitting on this chair, this chair doesn't feel like a Chinese chair, right? It may be made in China, but it doesn't feel like a Chinese chair in the same way, I think like what is a thesis for Indian

Internet entrepreneurs? They'll build software that's just globally competitive software that happens to be made by an Indian or even in India. But it is Internet first. It's not India first per SE, It's Internet first. It's almost a little bit like Europeans who if they're in a small country in Europe, they have to actually think Internet first if they're an entrepreneur because the whole market is just

not not big enough. And so like the translation has to be there from the beginning and you know, they have to be intranet first. That's got its problems because that's a tax if compliance and stuff you have to do, but it's got its benefits because you have a holistic view on the world, right? And so like, you know, build in India or build by India and sell to the Internet.

That's the kind of business I'm interested in investing in, which is an Internet first business that happens to be founded by Indians. Now, of course, sometimes it may turn out that something like Olaf, for example, is necessarily got a very local and geographical component, right? Some businesses will be built which are, you know, necessarily going to be domain or Geo lock and you have to start there. And I'm not saying India is a pretty big market.

You can definitely get to a pretty large market over there, but I do think Internet first is the way to go. And I think crypto is going to help with that a lot because it means global rule of code, right?

So an Indian may be a second class citizen in America where you know, H1 BS and so on, sort of becoming much more attacked and so on in the US. And they're, they're basically, they haven't eliminated them, but they made them so much more of a pain in terms of forcing people to go back every year rather than every few years and making the renewals more longer and uncertain. That's not a small issue.

That's a big issue because it means you can't, first of all, just the fact people may not know this, but as an H1B, you have to periodically go back to India, wait for a council appointment, then come back. Now, if you're just working at a job, this is like, OK, I need to pause. I need to take an international flight. I need to wait for an uncertain duration and then come back. And that that is a pain, even if it's like a day on both sides.

If it is an uncertain multiple month thing over here, you can easily just lose your job in the US. It makes hiring an H1B something where the bureaucratic overhead means you wouldn't do it. Right. So their point is to make it their goal is to make it disadvantaged enough for the program still exists in neem, but not in substance, right. So as that door closes, and I don't think that Indians should go to American. I think if you're it's just like a big not welcome sign is being

put there. If you're ACEO, the much of the American left hates you. And if you're an Indian immigrant, A Guchenko American right hates you. So just listen, you know, to the the signals there, right? And just don't go to America anymore. And it's true for many other countries as well. Like even German tourists are getting strip searched and what happy, right? America does not want immigrant entrepreneurs to come there anymore. It just doesn't right. So where do they go instead?

Somewhere else, right? And so we have network school, you know, we've opened that. There's Dubai, there's tons of other countries that have digital nomad programs. And of course, there's India itself. And finally there's the Internet, right? Which you can be on from anywhere, you can be a digital nomad, right? And I think that shift, I'm

starting to see that shift. Somebody posted the other day that like there was two really great entrepreneurs that just chose to, you know, not take their US offers, just, you know, stay in India instead. And I'd love to hear your, or go to Dubai or go to Singapore, go to something like NS and so on and so forth. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, that's what I grew. Agree. How hard you get back. I came back. Yeah, over to you.

And you're an early adopter or? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I came back before it was. I mean, yeah, but there were a couple of waves in India that people have returned to. I1 was in 2010 I think 29/20/10 1910 and the next one probably began around the time I moved back for Bell but mine was not really in late there just moved back to I want to move back but I do remember how hard it was to get my H1V standby.

Got stuck in Mexico in a place called Matamoros for six days to get my visa appointment and it just kept getting delayed and that place was literally bombed out. It'd be before because people had stayed and hidden there, drug dealer than hidden there. So the Mexican police had literally had to bomb them out. So the far of the hotel was actually a big circle or hole in there as we were living there. Anyway, that was an interesting time.

But yeah, it is getting harder and harder to stay in the US or enter the US. And we're all about thinking about the five and 10 year and 15 year horizon, right? So you make investments, see, you think about where the world is going to be in 10 years, correct? Is America going to be more or less welcoming to immigrant entrepreneurs in 10 years? I think it's going to be much less welcoming. Much less what? That's what about here. I have friends. What? You mean worse than today?

Yeah, worse, right? Yeah. So if it just is getting worse, you never want to bet on a curve that's going like this. You want to bet on a curve that's going like this? Yeah, it is. It is much harder now. My friends that are living in the US 10-15 years are afraid to come back to near to see family because they feel like when they go back to the US or legitimately stand back for B, they will be stopped at the border. And so I think it is getting.

I was surprisingly back. I was quite shocked to hear that just a couple of months back, and that was. In the US it's also The thing is just the randomness of it deters a trip. Yeah, right, right. Because if you have a 10%, like you're spending money on this plane flight, on this hotel, all this kind of stuff, and then you can be just randomly stopped at the border. Why? It's almost like an investment. Why'd you make an investment or can randomly go to 0, right?

Why'd you have a conference in America, like a tech conference if you can't have international guests, right? Tech is an international thing. You wouldn't base it there, right? Yeah. So it has lots of knock on effects. Yeah, I mean, the the debasing of the institutionalization of our institutional, our houses of the US is quite and it's quite sad to see because I kind of really benefited from it and it was probably one of the things that made it a superpower to

begin with. So, yeah, I think it's sad to see. And I don't know the trend line is ever going to reverse, but it seems to be accelerating and going downwards. Yes, yeah. Now coming back to your question on India and tech thesis on India, I mean, it's a hard question for me to answer because like at the end of the day, we are in the people business and a lot in the business of predicting what

future needs to exist. That was the business of this understanding the motivations and intentions of a founder that's trying to create a future of certain kind. And you know as any, you know as well as anybody else, they are primarily the people business. So my intention is to keep the best people in India, stay in India and build in India or even the best people from around the world to move them back to India somehow. That's why primary interest. Interesting. OK.

So now what's interesting about India? Do you only fund Arthur's in India? Itself, there has to be some connection to it from the India fund. We we have the back entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia and India. OK, got it from a viewable fund. You know, different, different regions are different funds for us.

So what is interesting what India, I think you was you mentioned this earlier biology that India actually lives in the cloud a lot more because it's much cheaper for us to go live in the cloud than any other country. Everybody literally lives in the cloud and India has all free time and they watch the same movies as the Americans do and they play the same games as, you know, all around the world. And you know, they are all sitting on Reddit and shit

posting everywhere. They're on Twitter and all that stuff is happening. So the more unplugged you become from the physical infrastructure, the more plugged in you are. The digital infrastructure, that is a very fundable thing that you can move people around with. So they are much more at home because they speak English. They are culturally, you know, easy to assimilate in any other culture and they can move around. So what you might be seeing, and I would love to hear how you're

seeing in that school. I think you began with the idea that you can literally put together a set of people that believe in a similar vision, that have similar culture. And the culture is not regional related. It's more about a digital culture that exists in the

clouds and sorts. You can institutionalized that and create a movement around it. And I think Indians are actually a really strong and a great perfect fit for this new world that is emerging, which is going to be this network state of sorts where the other the other native citizens already. Yes. And they will have the least friction to get a passport and get citizenship in this new

world that you are creating. And comparing me with that, by the way, is it's a little bit like people understand Fiat currency and cryptocurrency now that there's like an Internet native version, there's a land native version. And I think the next step, which we've kind of altered in the middle of is Fiat identity and crypto identity, because for example, your Google login, right, is in a sense a digital identity, right? A very important one, in fact, right. Your, your crypto wallet is

another one. Your pass card to your, you know, hotel room, your Tesla, you know, digital lock that opens it with the use of phone app and your two FA right. All of these kinds of things are pieces of digital identity that eventually I think will get consolidated into like effectively A crypto passport, digital passport that gets you into online and offline property seamlessly, right. And India's part of the way there with author and other

things, right? Like that actually can log into online services, but it also gets you offline, right? Yeah. And they have what's the thing at airports where it's just like face recognition, you get a lot of. Digi Outro. Yeah, Digi Outro, does that work? Yeah, that works beautifully. Yeah, I don't have to carry my.

It's. Not talking about it so digital entity that you know it's essentially scans your face at the airports and then now you are you know you are in the system and then you don't have to carry your passport for international travel. You still have to but domestic travel you are to carry any NDD for proof. So what do you do is you just stand in front of the screen and then it takes your it scans your face and you are the door open.

Then you you get into the airport and used to be you know a few years back and still is there for majority of the airports in India. You're for sure and you take your wallet out and you carry if you forget your I need a card, then you got to go back home and pick it up. And today I don't really carry anything to be card with me. I think don't really carry my what I do really remember carrying my wallet when I'm in Singapore right now or the US

and I tend to forget. You don't need a credit card, debit card. We saw digital UPI and QR code base. You don't need to carry a ready card. I have this thing called digit locker which keeps my duty and it's a legal as a legal way to show your needy to people. You cannot be denied entry if you show that and so on and so forth.

So now when you combine this digitally native cloud native, a population of, you know, very, very young people, really hungry, really ambitious and you combine that with the infrastructure the government is providing recommend them with the venture money that is didn't take risks with really young and unproven founder. And also pretty capital efficient there. Very capital efficient.

Then you get this. That's where the future of India is. And on top of that you have this fast growing mini floss with higher and higher disposable income. And frankly India has obviously multiple parts. That is a really, really rich part of India has very high per capital GDP. There is this middle part that behaves differently and there is a bottom. That bottom is really quickly coming out of poverty and below poverty line.

It's coming out of poverty, some disposable income and then they are already you know we are spying to be somewhere the one or the middle. What does that mean? What it means is they want to go take, you know, take their girlfriends and boyfriends to a movie once in a month. Once in six months, great. Take them out to a lunch or dinner in a small restaurant. Consumption is starting to

increase, yeah. Yeah, if you look at the number of iPhones India buys a real, it's quite massive, surprisingly, a state that's another. Important stat that I was surprised at seeing recently. India's risen from 1% to 20% of iPhone manufacturing. Yeah, which is, again, it's like it's rare that something keeps surprising me to the upside. Yeah. You know, like I said, like governments, things tend to, you know, somebody said something like India.

Disappoints about the pessimists and optimists yes, that could be right. That's that's true true. It's true for, it's been true for India for the longest time and probably don't be true forever. But that, that's what's interesting about India. Now, why is that happening? Look, 1020 years ago, my parents really saved up their entire savings to buy a house or for somebody's marriage, or they would buy gold or they would buy a vehicle. India, the new India, doesn't

care about that. Nobody wants to buy a house. The kids don't want to buy a house. Interesting. Physically don't. They don't care. They don't want to have possessions. They want to rent. Yeah, now to where gold in public is tacky for the young people. So they don't want want to buy gold and keep it in their locker. So where the money go? They don't want to buy a vehicle because they want to just take Ubers everywhere. Like oh so they are Internet first, they leave projects.

Yeah, they really, Yeah, they want to have, they want to plug in, plug out of infrastructures, banking infrastructure, you know, vehicle infrastructure. So it's a. Lifestyle of sort of the San Francisco tech guy is actually the default lifestyle. I'll get a much lower price

point. But actually comparable quality, honestly, it's like maybe 10 or 100 X in some cases cheaper than California, but it's comparable or better quality in many cases like food delivery, like Uber, all that all that stuff exists, right. You know you can you can be completely productive with great coffee, MacBook Air conditioning, everything there. And, and it's not like like super expensive or anything. It's like accessible to a very large number of people. Yeah.

And you can. Get all of this stuff in 10 minutes in the big cities, yeah. And pretty soon in the K2K2 cities in 10 minutes. Yeah, because economics doesn't work out. Now, the one thing I will say is when people go to India, they they'll find places and there are plenty of places that are still, you know, filthy or, you know, those like terrible streets and something like that. And that's absolutely true. And we have actually started to express it is. India's like California in

reverse. And what I mean by that is California is fractally getting worse, right? So everything that's old is like beautiful and it's got like amazing, you know, Spanish roof architecture or its speeches. But everything new is like in California, it's like a homeless encampment. It's like a burn downtown. It's like a way most set on fire or something like that. It's like the new stuff is bad. Most of the buildings that are new are bad because they're not buildings.

They're destroying us really, right? And in India, it's opposite, the older it is, with some exceptions like the Taj Mahal, which are really, really old, right? But in general, the older stuff is like, it's like a slum or it's like a, you know, bad St. Though poverty is radically reduced in India. Like the rate of extreme poverty is dropped off a lot, right?

So it's like, you know, it's like a messy street or something, but the new stuff, it's like a shiny new Apple store or it's a, it's a new restaurant or something like that. And, and, and importantly, a lot of the people are very especially English speakers and of course not already speaks English. And so it's sort of, but a lot of people do are very okra with Internet memes. You know, they're like, they're extremely conversant with everything that's happened in

the English Internet, right? And so that's surprising to people if if they haven't had, you know, time to, they may, you know, because people type without an accent. Yeah, right. You type with an accent and it's their complete conversant in written English. And it is like a slight accent in within India. But even then, like, you know, because Indians learn languages recently fast. So it's fractally getting better. That's kind of how I think about it. Let me know.

Yeah, and there's that because. You've also lived in California and India for. Absolutely. I think in India you can. You can visit three to four countries in a day if you wanted to go to Mumbai. You can Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3. Yeah, talk about that. Pretty much, right? So you go to. As I can all shaws, I think. Formulation, yeah.

I think he mentioned that perhaps and then our friends at Bloom Ventures and I mentioned that in his recent, I think it was last year, a couple of years back in his publication. He does a really good job on that. That's called Indus Valley Files and I think he's, he's got this really, really interesting observation that, you know, in a single day, I don't know whether he said this or not, but it's a minor reputation of it. You can a single day.

You can if you go to Mumbai or Bangalore, or you can land in a in a airport that looks like a seven star hotel drive on a highway that looks like absolutely brand new and flowers and trees on both sides and feels like you've come to Singapore. So you've landed in Singapore. You can then reach a city that feels like Mexico in the middle of a sweaty afternoon. And then you could you could pass by something that looks like a Brazilian Fugela.

I probably I'll find it a bunch of big countries in a single statement because that's interesting. In India, this is what you know, there is a pocket of massive improvement and there is middle, the messy middle, and there is a

yeah. But if we look at the graph over time and like, so there was a tweet on Indian infrastructure that I put up that actually Prime Minister Modi retweeted that show the like, you know, for example, illumination, like lights or highways or, you know, plumbing, all this stuff just radically improving. Absolutely. And your cycle, it's completely different, yes. So can your cycle, the connectivity, the electricity,

you know, consumption. If you look in those graph, you look at the road network that you put this up, I remember seeing that a train network, the flight networks, the airport infrastructure, we're looking at 10 to 15 year graph. It looks like it's erratic in different country. Yes. And you can still go, you can find whatever you want to find. In India, the optimist will go find the Singapore. In India, the pessimists are

going to go find something. Else, yes, well, but the pessimists have, if you look at the graph over time, it is, it is very hard to be pessimistic on it, right. And that, that I think is unless you're calibrated on the trend line, right. It's kind of like people can take a beautiful photo. There's still beautiful areas in California. But the trend line from, you know, because I was there almost 25 years, right? From 1997 to 20/20/2019, so 22 years, something like that,

right? The trend line was just definitely like it hadn't yet hit zero. But Ann, how old are you there? You were there from 15 years, 15 years, so 2320, eighteen, right? So you definitely saw it towards the end. It was like much, much, much filthier. It's different work, right? So it's funny because we're in a time where I think previously these sort of civilizational level changes happened over decades, but other happening over years.

Yeah. Or they're they happened over centuries and other happening over decades. You know, the rate of change is so ridiculously fast. And we can quantify that actually. Like have we seen the graph of, for example, I think it was whether it was Internet adoption or actually, no, it was e-commerce. E-commerce spend had been growing as a percentage of total spend X percent a year until COVID and then it actually literally increased 10X in a

year, right? So that's like the the Lenin thing, like there's years where decades happen. That actually was a year where a decade happened where the rate of change just went like that, right? Things that people have known were happening just went vertical like this. Now COVID in India actually, I mean, interesting macro thing, COVID in America after that, like the site is just felt worse off.

Like people say, people often post about this, like maintenance quality has dropped off, you know, polarization is increasing even further service quality. Like you know, it's, it's like everything in terms of maintenance, all that stuff is kind of broken down. And whereas in China, for example, somebody went there and they said post COVID and you know, China was really ruthless

during COVID. They locked up on rooms and so on. But they also a lot of the things that people used to do in China, like, you know, spitting on the street and stuff like that, like a lot of that is actually dramatically being curtailed. And China feels more Japanese, like there's a greater degree of public, you know, cleanliness and some sort of perhaps as that the system got pushed into a new state as a function of COVID.

And I actually think India on balance, because of the internetification on balance, it actually feels stronger after COVID, like the sites come together more and so it's over. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, as a funny tweet somebody put out a few days back that the world has not been the same since somebody ate a bat. Yeah, so. It actually appears to have come out of the wet lab as more than one.

Well, OK, yeah. Yeah, because there's enough data on the NIH funding of on the COVID, you know, like the COVID-19 labs that it's more than incidental. There's too many different connections for it to be I think. Too instructive? Yeah, I could. Go through all the genetics of it, but it looks it looks positive. So yeah, I think look, India and COVID was brutal time and it's very hard to compare which country had the worst of it. India suddenly didn't do well and the first wave was fine.

The second wave was brutal. People did come together quite nicely the society, which was really great to see. Many of us. And I remember like being part of a lot of this COVID drives in the line. We would call off hospital and figured out the bends and I think, yeah, it was a tough time.

It does feel like it did not change society in a way that you could pinpoint pre and post and say we are a different world now, like what you're saying with China or perhaps, you know, the US. It doesn't feel like it's very different. So I think we did come away not getting too deeply impacted culturally or economically or recovery. It could be because India by itself is a little bit conservative across, you know, pistol policy and monetary policies.

So we kind. Of soon do the big big print in the same. Way we didn't do the same thing that we did and and the healthcare infrastructure, you know, it's not as massive as it is in China, but it, you know, it gets the job done. You know, and you did have its own vaccine. You did have your own vaccine, and I took the Iranian vaccine, not the Pfizer one. And and, you know, felt like, you know, I think we came out of it OK. Yeah, I'm glad.

I'm glad to see that it didn't lead to a lot of like the demonetization wave made sure that people don't really care about carrying money anymore. I think it did lead to a lot of the digitization of services, you know, that one company, you know, like you could get people to cover your house and clean up and you know, you could get, you know, quick commerce picked up during that time and of all kinds of things. And I caught COVID in the US and it was so hard to get medicines

delivered to you. You just couldn't get medicines delivered to you. COVID and any IE just comes to your doorstep, even doing COVID, you will come to your toaster. So I think those things start to get adopted. And one of the funny things that happens during COVID is, you know, even grandparents were were had to learn all the stuff because many times they were living by themselves or if their kids were, you know, then they had to take care of them.

They learned how to how to use digital services at 7080 years of age. So it led to this mass coaching of the entire country to learn to take classes online, to transact online, to get services online and so on and so forth. So I think that led to a behavior that has stuck around a lot, lot, lot more. So on the whole things like it did accelerate our digitization journey, which is already kind of really getting there, but it's really accelerated.

I think the digital part is what really accelerated after that. I think if if you looked at a few graphs so society is at least the same if not there, but really doesn't seem to be badly correct. No the digital part radically. Improved and we have a much younger population so. It was like a big deal. That's right. So going to hit this hard. That's. And it did. Frankly, that's a. Good point. Actually the demographic aspect of it is under appreciated. Yeah, yeah.

And and frankly, here doesn't listen like it is don't listen right. It wasn't like people are still walking around and getting beaten up by the police like a bunch of funny tweets coming out and but people just began to mingle like in other countries, people protesting against during So part of it was India are both docile and don't listen and severe operation and tell people to wear a mask and many people lose as well. So that was good.

And then sometimes people just don't care just mingle around anyway. And both of it kind of worked out in a way that the country came out of it OK. It was quite weird to see. Interesting. So OK, let's see other things. I mean you basically you left in 2018 for India and so and when did you, when did you come, when did you come back to India? When I come back to India. You came back in like January. 20 No, I came back in August the 2018. OK. So it's only a year and a half before.

COVID yeah, yeah, yeah. So then, yeah. And So what was the like the venture environment at the time was, I mean, 2021 just talking about that for a second, right? A lot of deals that got done in 2021 in the US had this giant, I mean, like markets are just going like bananas at that time. Valuations are out of control, all kinds of stuff. And then, you know, inflation obviously went vertical towards

the end. And finally they acknowledged it was doing so. And then they had to hike rates and not had to. I actually think both the printing and the hiking were both disastrous policies, but they felt they had to do fine. How did that like? To what extent was India's economy also connected to like the Western gyrations of of markets versus how much was it kind of its own thing? Not very, not very much.

Yeah. So if you look at the, if you kind of go back and maybe you can show that in 2020 and the, and the COVID shock happened, the market's going to drop in the US by what 2030% or less few months. And India was probably more like 78%. So the shock because the first rate wasn't? As bad in India? Yeah. Also Vietnam is as connected to the US stock market, you know, as perhaps other countries might be.

So, so the shock was there, but it was it was less and and then it just continued on. So yeah, on the venture side, there was a massive gold rush even in India like seat drowns were getting done, you know, 20-30 post money and the six months ago they were happening at 10 and 15 post money. So really double all night. See these days were happening 102 hundred post money, half $1,000,000 of revenue,

especially in SAS. So SAS category kind of really blew up massively India and majority of these that happened there were probably SAS and software can deals. And so the snap, the snap up into COVID frenzy, lots and lots of capital went into different companies. I think at that, maybe don't quote me on this, but about 30 to $40 billion of capital went into India across early maiden grow. What's funny is that's a large amount for BC, but it's a small amount in the grand scheme of

things. You know, like because so many hundreds of billions a dollar. But yes, this is a big jump for BC. Cool chunk of money and for why you were the world's second largest full of venture capital going into the market and China was sort of 4th at the time. So I think now we've kind of stabilized in the snapback out

of COVID is also very brutal. Many companies, you know, going into COVID, especially if they're offline, really struggle and then they use the time, the good ones, the good management teams use the time to really, you know, get leaner and get more hungry and powerful on the way out of COVID.

All the companies they were building into the COVID way, what people used to call pandemic market fit, they also lost that and lost a lot of capital and you know, kind of lost the thesis and they eventually died. So that all, all that happened in India in two years and I had a few of my companies blow up to a billion dollar and then blow down to 0 gain in like 2 years time.

It was crazy at the same time crypto it was happening and you probably know this and then tons of tons of companies and then NFTV was picking up. It was it was a frenzy, feeding frenzy and the, you know, D5 was picking up and the selling lot for you in India. So we saw a lot of that lots and lots of gold rushes all happening simultaneously and it was really hard to keep this straight ahead and figured out what kind of entrepreneur you want to back and what kind of

companies and wage you want to back and what we'll sustainable and lock. So we'll be looking at the best we could have the most investors around the world struggle with that period. We'll see what that vintage looks like in the next 10 years, but it'll be challenging if you've been a bit, you know, more indiscriminating deploying capital within that time and didn't care about valuation and resume the but there were days of stay and I think they, you

know, lose a lot of money. Yeah, interesting. I think, I think in general the the one thing that is good about those boot times is, you know the Carlo Perez thing that we talked about a lot of these. Is he going to talk about that? Go. Ahead, right? He's good, yeah. It's like in a sensethe.com bubble was a global search to find Google and Amazon, right? So all the capital that went into it, if it, it did more than that, but if it just did those two, you can also add Netscape

and a few other things, right? Which obviously Netscape's very important. It adjusted that it's worth it, right? Like all the cap, right? And so if that 3040 bill, if it generates $1 trillion company, even $100 billion company, you can argue it's worth it, right? And and it probably will probably will do do quite a few like, you know, you didn't, I think I don't know, of course you responded in that, but that'll probably be there,

right? So and you know, it's because The thing is that entrepreneurship is hard and rare. And so you kind of need to take the whole thing and, you know, toss it on the table. Another example is you remember the chat bots boom of the mid twenty 10s, Is it rather the time of Tay and Microsoft and so and so there's like. 2015 ish 26 and like floor type stuff like a like a programmatic do this step one step if else check yes, yes,

that's right and. And there was Microsoft Tay, which was like an R like AB0 AI chat bot.

And I remember seeing all that and I remember, I'm not sure if I wrote it as an AC and Z memo or something, but I remember writing something like for people to make this work, what they're actually what they really want, as people are talking about with chatbots, I'm like, what they're asking for is iterated Google. Like what they want, and it's full generality is to say something in natural language, get back a response that uses the entire Internet to make the

response, and then do another query, right? That is iterated Google. So if you can do that, of course, it's amazing. It's more valuable than Google, but that's the scale. The problem we're talking about is like beef Google, right? And I remember writing that and that's actually what happened. Like ChatGPT has actually iterated Google and it's actually better than Google has actually taken share away from Google. That was the scale of the challenge.

And actually, Greg Brockman actually got interested in AI because in part of the chatbot boom, he's written about that, right? So in a sense, all the capital that went into that, if all it did was get Brock and then interested in chat bots, it paid for itself. Yeah, Right. So that is like a really right tail way of thinking about some of these bubbles or what have you know. Crazy how powerful the power law is. Yeah, exactly. Or actually DACA bubble when also it is did PayPal, right.

So it did Netscape, it did PayPal, it did Epinions, which novel, you know, Ebid's a real company, but you know, it, it it did Google, it did Amazon, right? So PayPal gave Teal and then LinkedIn and everything else from that, right. And YouTube and blah, blah. Then there's Google. So. So just that search for those entrepreneurs was kind of worth it. Yeah, that's right. And that's so funny because that's not the way that people normally think about it. They want to score every

investment independently. And of course that's worth worth doing, but it's sort of like no bubble actually goes to waste in the long run. I shouldn't say no bubble, but you know what I mean. Many of these ostensible bubbles actually are search function which actually paid dividends in five or ten years. So man, we. Had a look at it. Yeah, I, I agree.

I think if, frankly, if I were to redesign the venture world, I would sort of say it's going to become if she were a lot more bimodal, where the extreme right of these absolute dual shots, you know, no shot in hand working. But if it does work, it's like, you know, you cure cancer. Yeah, do a lot of stuff on the extreme left is, I don't know, roll up companies, guaranteed performance, but you know, 15% coupon year over year and everything in the middle may not

be as interesting. That's one way to think about that. That's interesting. I mean, The thing is I think it's hard to do the left hand side company nowadays. It is very hard. And the reason I think it is hard to do that is like the argument, you know for example the the so-called lifestyle business argument that 37 signals made for a long time. The problem I always have with that is if you don't intend to scale a business, then you intend to run the business for

the rest of your life. So the lifestyle business is actually the rest of your life. Whereas it's actually easier to build a business that is a gigantic thing because then you can sell a piece of it at some point. Unless, and yeah, sometimes it's a project you do want to run for the rest of your life, right? But unless you want to run it for the rest of your life, you want to actually build it as a company that you might be able to sell and then do something

else in life. If you want to do something else in life. Number 2 is a lifestyle business is not necessarily more competitive in the market than a scaled business. Because it is attracting almost definitionally less ambitious people, right? That's the bigger problem. I say that's right. And so the ambitious people who want to conquer the world will optimize the heck out of every screen and every flow and so and

so forth. And Even so we think of as you know, simple like a like AI don't know nowadays people because something is easy to them. They sometimes, unless they're experienced, they think it's easy to build like WhatsApp or Discord. You don't necessarily feel like you're doing something very sophisticated when you're using it. You're just typing in some chat stuff to somebody on the other side. It seems basic.

When you want to implement it and actually make it work at the scale that it works, it's actually quite challenging. I thought quite hard, but just video uploading from, I don't know, Brazil and having it viewed in India and America and Japan all at the same time seamlessly with replies coming back and you know, deliver at least one semantics and 500 other kinds of things. It's hard, right. So the the lifestyle business kind of thing isn't thinking about Polish. I think I was right.

So that's my my counter argument is I'm not sure the low risk business exists as much. You know, you're right. Low local capital, though, to edit what you're saying to, to let me, let me let me take part of what you're saying, which I do agree with. I think the small business exists. The small business with a few people that with AI and with crypto and with interest rate distribution can do really well. Like telegrams, only 30 people, right? And WhatsApp is only 55.

Instagram. This thing was only about sub 20 people. That business definitely exists and that business will continue to exist. So it's just an edit on what you're saying. Perhaps not low risk, but low. Capital, yeah. And then I guess the thesis that some people have and I don't know how it's going to play out, but you're absolutely right.

I think what you're saying is court and code, you put 10B plus people and put them together, they could be 10 companies, less ambition, less finesse or whatever. The combination becomes AC minus automatically. It doesn't become 10B plus. There's not even stay B plus anymore. It's become less exactly.

But I, I totally get that. I think what I think you're also right that if the job of a business is to suck in $1.00 and and you know, spit out $3 through productivity gains and high margin work or high value add. But they are maybe you suck in half a dollar and come out with five and maybe possible because all this sprinkle magic of productivity and quality and scalability now finally gets sold with AI. So instead of 1 coming out with four, you have half coming out with five.

And we'll see. I think it's, it's, it's, it's showing promise at small scale. The challenge is that when you add 1020 of these .5, you know, capital suckers and will 50 come out of the other end? We'll see.

That's good. Yeah. I mean, the big thing about AI is, I mean, there's a lot of big things, but the fact that it has scalability and consistency and low price, even if it does make errors, is still so insanely valuable because you are just hyper deflating the cost of the legal console from a lot of, you know, from a lot of people.

So yeah, I think I don't. Know and you have a lot more resilient you know what happens today if you're building these some of these old school businesses you are more people heavy. So then if you don't control demand with small businesses don't have a lot of control on? Actually just go ahead and say I'll say sorry. So you have a fixed cost, you have people sitting on the bench and there's nothing to do, you know, figuratively speaking.

But with AI and if you have agents doing the job and what one point they'll be able to do pretty much end to end of a variety of things. OK. I'll come back to OK here. And then what happens is you can then you can just purely focus on scaling demand because supply can scale infinitely with demand. So you shift your fixed cost into an operating cost, you lose operating leverage, but you are essentially scaling a business with exact same, a reputable, scalable, predictable cash flow

profile. You know, the moment you get 10X demand, you can copy paste 10X agents with the same quality of service and the cost will become variable because now you're paying more for infrastructure for 10 times more agents. But you are essentially in lock step with demand. The demand goes out, the customer says you're not good, I'm gone. You can kill the agents and you're, you're back to lock step with the demand. So your revenue and margin profile stays pretty much in

lock step. You're but but you are a lot more resilient through the cycles and which is important for a small business. Large businesses always need control over the stuff. That's what we're starting to see now happen because of Yeah, please. Yeah. So I think the only part I may discreetly on that is the end to end part. I think it depends on the task. So if it's a robot placing things, that is something where the verifying of whether it's

placed is easy. But many other tasks it's actually it's actually middle to middle so you will have to prompt it and you have to verify it. I see. But AI is mil to mil and then you take care of the. Ants you do then you can't scale that what you say. Yes, it's a the not so basically all the depending on how much the middle part takes in any process, the part after prompting and before verifying that now compresses to prompting and verifying.

But it means, for example, as a coder you have to specify and then you have to review the code at the other end and then integrate it, right. And that's like the job of an engineering manager is actually higher skill than job than somebody who's an engineer. And so I'm not saying it's not a productivity winner, It is, but it is amplified intelligence in many ways rather than artificially eugenic artificial

intelligence, right. So the smarter you are, the smarter it is. But I will give one analogy you're going. To say something, I was saying that that verify prompt to verify loop. I think it's a shifting window where things you have verified prompt to verify enough times we get auto verify and auto confidence. So the question, I mean in the last 2 1/2 years of AI since chat, the chat shift team moment, I don't feel that's true yet.

Of recording it's bidding to be true well I. I don't think, I think the verifying part is still hard because actually I learn to be more precise on the front end for images and for video and for for front end code that you can verify with a different thing, which is you verify with the GP us from your eye for your brain. You can instantly see something is wrong because it's like 2 hands or it's got a messed up button or something like that. So that's where verifying is

cheap. Put on the back end for logic, for database code, for crypto code, security code. That is actually where verifying is expensive. Maybe we can turn it into something which is visual. And so you can visualize almost like, for example, an audio file, you can turn into a spectrogram and you can see if there's some giant spikes of amplitude and that looks broken. You can quickly see it with your eye, but you can't quickly

listen with your ear, right? So it's possible we might be able to, for example, generate some visualization of the code so you can quickly visually verify it. So that generation itself has to be deterministic code rather than probabilistic. But that's why I divide. I'd say the front end stuff, the images, videos, that's what AI is amazing for because the verifying is cheap and but but the back end code verifying is expensive, which is a non

obvious division. I think that, I don't think I tweeted about that, but I don't think people have made exactly that division. And give another analogy, which is many businesses for a long time until, you know, basically the the 80s, they were doing their accounting with piece of paper, not spreadsheets. So the instruction of spreadsheet compressed that whole middle step of adding up all the numbers. They used to have a mailroom at

companies rather than e-mail. And then the instruction of e-mail just basically tipped that completely away and it pushed it to other things. And it's our example when running a clinical lab because we started it in such a way that it actually had a database at the core.

I could run a query and it could just give out all kinds of analytics and stuff like, you know, which variants were present with which other variants and which insurance companies and all this kind of stuff that it cost millions of dollars for a traditional clinical lab to try to find

those analytics on some process. I could, for example, bottleneck identification worked as follows because every station in the click lab, when you when you create a record in Postgres, you get a create an AT timestamp for free. That meant that later when we had, you know, we wanted to prove turn around time, we could take every station, station one through station, let's say 20. And these were in a complicated order because sometimes you have to revert back to a station.

You can take a sample and you take it's created at timestamp at all these stations and you can make a graph of the sample moving through stations. Then every edge between them, you have the time that it took. And you can start making the histogram of like, oh, did this have a long delay at times, right? Or does this have a high variance? So you can make the edges wiggly if they're high variance, you can make them red if they've got a long delay and so on and so forth.

And this fashion on a big monitor, you can instantly visualize all the blaze and you're like, oh, right, there is the highest variance and slowest step and we need to add 3 more pico greens or something to paralyze, right? So that kind of analytics you couldn't get. And so that's how I think of Ki becoming the brain of many companies, right? Lots of processes that were previously as manual as a mail room or previously as manual as

count to get numbers though. Yeah, it just takes care of that middle part. Then you still have to kind of do the end caps. Yeah, interesting. Yes, I'm just going to look at it. You've been thinking about this quite a lot, but I think of again, as that I'm not diving into AI. The course is fantastic. You're familiar with formal theory, right? It's almost like like formal verification, formal verification, right? So you almost can verify the output within the system itself.

So you know, it's actually accurate. And I think it's an NB hard problem because you don't know what other accuracies are there that you're not covering because you're not programmed to to to measure it. But, but I think I think of AI systems because they're probabilistic, it is much harder to measure accuracy. And how do you measure accuracy for a poem that you write as six PL. and you don't know it is accurate or not?

It's a feel, it's a why. But I think the IT will be, I think the next revolution of AI will happen when you are able to formally verify output and quality of output in a way that is, that is that closes the loop on the prompt that begins the production of the tokens that you see as photos, videos or whatever. What does that mean mostly as systems today are actually open loop systems. They are not closed loop systems. Take for example, Clay dot Ayani, fantastic company.

We, many of our companies use Clay dot AAI. It takes inputs from, you know, CRM, May 6th sense sort of Zoom info. It'll do some research. It can figure it out, you know, this person, even there's AVC here, age, whatever gender, whatever, living here or there and write me a beautiful customized e-mail to me. It'll write a million copies for a million people and then pushes into a offspot, and Offspot does the programming and has the

campaign. Management, but the problem is now I don't want to read those emails. That's another problem to solve. That's the AI to sort of fix that. But where does the loop get open? Is that now there's these, Even the God lost spot, hot spot puts a tracker in there. It puts a headline in. There No, I know, I know. But what I'm saying though, is when it increases the generation of stuff to such an extent, it'll break that Channel that was working and I don't even read e-mail anymore.

And then and then I kind of don't already basically seems like, Oh, I sent you, you know, I'll go and look a grabber. And so instead you go to other channels that are high trust channels. If people don't have the number two or something like that, right? And that's where actually where your true messaging is now AI can't get in there. The whole point is not AI,

right? So, so I think that there's there's a, there's a window right now, yes, where generated stuff from AI will overwhelm all kinds of missing channels and there'll be a reaction against some Shamali scene where people are like. But the reaction is where the loop is closed. OK, go ahead. Because when you send this out to a spawn and you say I don't care, I'll never open an e-mail that looks by the other e-mail. That information is not coming back to Clay today.

It's staying in WhatsApp. It's staying sure, sure. Yes. So they have put the trackers in. They don't know what kind of subject lines people open and what times when you send it people open or do you have it in STML or with NVIDIA made it in it and hotspot knows. So Click does not know how to improve its AI, how to make it better. So you open it tomorrow day after one year later. So that loop never gets close and these are softer loops that. Either layers there, that's true.

So so one part of that I do agree with, which is the closing of the loop in terms of open rates and so on. But the other part is just that systemically rates will trend down when as people are increasing the number of their AI, you know, like emails getting sent out and I think you're going to start. So the the complement to that is going to be crypto because you can charge cryptocurrency for emails. Yeah, right.

And we could do that. And I had a company and I and I wanted to use a more wanted company. How is that? Well, so I want to do the V2 of that right, basically because I think tasking is going to become a big thing. But the the reason for that is I think and makes everything fake. Crypto makes it real again. Crypto sets up hard digital borders that AI can't cross. Like AI cannot fake the private keys for a cryptocurrency. AI cannot pose as something with a crypto identity.

AI cannot manipulate on chain data for all of that. This is like it's like a hard deal border that these AI agents can't bust, right? So that's where you can count on on the Internet are block chains that are unhackable. And then that because it's like a hard surface that actually becomes the verifiable Internet, which is Web 3 and or the verifiable web and then Web one and Web 2. Web 1 is like, you know, the World Wide Web. Web 2 is like, let's say it's social web, right?

Web 2 is becoming closed because X and other things need to stop AI scraping. And then web one is becoming spam, right? And so you get spam or paywalled closed. And then you have Web 3 be the open web, the cryptographic signed web, right? And I think that's where we're going to go. What's the intersection of AI in book three that you'll see like a use case section? Like it's kind of yeah. So there's a few, well, some that we're working on it, right?

But so the, the one that's out there in public that everybody knows is AI agents using crypto to pay for things because the crypto is currency of the Internet, right? Since it works across borders. And an EI agent can boot up an address, pay another AI agent who can receive it, right? So just that alone is like clearly a big thing. And EI agents can sign smart contracts with other AI agents.

So any kind of automate trading, you know, or, or transactions, cryptocurrency will be the way that AI is, you know, going by things. So an intelligent agent, you know, which people talk about in the late 90s, you need to book the AI and crypto to be at scale. You need crypto so that everybody could accept the transactions across borders on Internet AI agents to be able to go and swim the web and, and find, find those things.

So that's one piece. A second piece is, and I think this is most interesting for me is on chain data as the thing that AI can't falsify. So like the verification step and so on and so forth. So that to me is what I call like the Ledger of record, like rather than the paper of record where just argument from assertion, you have cryptographic verification. And right now that only works for financial facts because financial facts are going on

chain. But the block chain is actually the crypto more generally is the #4 market in the world. Do you know that like #1 I see #2 NASDAQ #3 Shenzhen #4 crypto, right? And it's quickly gaining. It's going to become the number one, like Internet capital markets will also be Indian capital markets, right? Like the way I'd look at this, and this is a 5 or 10 year thing, but it's not more than that, right? We now finally have the on chain dollar, right, On chain Fiat.

That's going to mean you also have on chain, not just currency, but on chain equity and on chain fund interests. So very soon every Internet company will have an Internet equity. For almost 10 years. This was pathologized because of the SEC and their jihad against crypto and so on and so forth against and all discuss and they'd all be like you said, a security and so on. They'd like, you know, and but the obvious point is you wanted a legal pathway to put a security on chain.

Duh, right, And that's not dishonest or anything like that. It's like saying don't record your securities in an Excel spreadsheet. You need to do on a piece of paper. So you went from, you know, a piece of paper to a cap table, right? Why can't you go to a coin table? Obviously you should because that is kind of like, you know, the intermediate step is like Carter or Angel list, which are great, great things, right? So you go, it's almost like the

the sense of man. You know, the caveman is like actually the caveman doesn't have the company at all, right. Then you've got piece of paper or you know, then you've got the cap table and spreadsheet. Then you've got Carta writer Angel of sugary companies and then you've got Bianchi and coin table. The advantage of this is, you know, something I didn't actually realize arguably until crypto international law, international trade did not exist. You know why I say that?

So let's say you've got you're an Indian company and there's a there's like a Brazilian company that you want to acquire, right? How many people speak both Portuguese and Hindi? Not that many, right? OK, maybe speak English on both sides, but how many people have done Indian Brazilian acquisitions or Indian Paraguay or something like that? Not too many, right? So what people end up doing is they use AUS company as the adapter between the two because US did enough business with both them.

They use U.S. law and so this way they they they make it work. So the US actually turned out to be the central hub. They reduced it to a hub and spoke problem rather than a

peer-to-peer problem. The other country that increasingly you could not one could the Chinese people could use is China where they can use that because that also does enough business with both countries that there's some bilateral thing a Chinese company can buy this one and sell this one or some something along those lines, right? But now with crypto, you have global rule of code. So eventually that just like when you came to India, you had

global mail, right? Because your mail just worked, right? And you had global movies and you had global media, your your Twitter just work. Everything else just worked. You will have global money. And global entity and global. Instance exactly because if you think about what is an entity, first you have Bitcoin, then you have stablecoins and you say you have all the transactions on share and then you have all the transactions on share of a

company. Once you have all the transactions, you can generate financial statements. Once you can generate all the transactions, you can also have the cap table there. So the collect, you know, the cap table plus all the transactions, plus all the smart contracts, that is what a company is, right? So you have an on chain entity and it actually lives on chain and that floats above and you can port it between jurisdictions, right? Just like you can port

everything else. The reason that's harder to do than all the other things we've done before is it is like a group of people. It's like law, it's money, it's like high stakes stuff. But we're getting there, right? And I think that's going to be one of the most important areas for Indians, but actually anybody who's not in the US or China to really invest in actually, frankly, lots of Americans and Chinese will benefit from as well.

But especially if you're not in a quote in a, in a country that is contending for being the global number one, you want crypto because it protects your rights online. You know what I mean, right? And it protects your rights abroad. It gives you like currency that can't be seized, gives you contracts that can't be unilaterally abrogated. You're like a first class citizen on the Internet. Even if you're a second class citizen in America, that's like a really deep point.

Like, you know, people can mess with your H1B visa, they can make it hard for you to start a company or something like that in the US. They cannot make it hard for you to move your Bitcoin. Yeah, you're saying, I think at some point in time if what it is your possible. That's right. And yeah, I wouldn't look at it. I think it's starting to really play out. What's exciting you in crypto today. I mean, we keep you think about stables a lot. We'll see it to be so. You know what?

You know I launched your CC at Coinbase, right? Well done. Well, yeah. You want to see something we we can put up, we'll put that on screen or whatever. We're launching support for a new stable coin called USD coin. We call it a stable coin because one USD coin can reliably and stably be exchanged for exactly one U.S. dollar. So October 23rd, 2018, like we put in the 25 mil, we collateralized the consortium, we launched the like that whole thing doesn't exist without.

Old blotch. Wasn't that the like a massive bull period in 2018? Oh. That was a bear period that was a bear period 2017 was a bull to this was extreme bear period yes yes, this is what these are in crypto had fallen Bitcoin had fallen down to like 5000 or something from 20 is down 75%. But you know I'm an old weather. You know I believed in this. You know, there are multiple bubbles and cycles and so on and so forth.

And so, yeah. And basically the the graph on that, that that was October 23rd, 2018. And I'll show you the graph actually. And was it called 17,000 or something like an increase 17? I remember I was lost. In yeah, they heard 20,020. I've got the the price graph is harmed in it's like a tat. I don't get any tats, but I do have that as a tat in my brain. So here is like so UCC. Let's see if I can show the exact area. October 23rd, 2018, Zero. Wow. Right.

Is that cool? That's amazing and. Now it's at 60 billion dollars, $10 billion. Right. Crazy, Crazy. Right. So mine good, mine good, right? That's only seven years ago and it's now like a few percent of transactions for the dollar globally, right? It'll become everything in a few years, right? So why don't we just wrap up Lightning round and so and so

forth. I'll just go through a bunch of different areas, get your thoughts on just give you a one word and you can be in a few, you know, so on. Let's see, we did a bit of AI, so biotech. Have you talked about that at all since your group cloud is? A little bit of it, a little bit. What is interesting to being biotech now is, is it a long answer you want or a short answer? Give me the Medium library, yeah?

OK. So in the context of India, what I didn't know is that if you think about imagining new molecules that we cure diseases to building chemistries for it, to testing it and then deploying and launching and scaling it. If you think about the thinking of new molecules as a head, India has the body, you don't have the legs yet.

The body is turning those ideas into chemistries, trying it out and then doing animal tests and then first layer of human tests and then Cushing it back and they cushion back to a Pfizer or whatever in the US and they they cover legs. They have the brains that tell an Indian company what to build and the other 5 or 1015 chemistries they should build

and then go test out. And then it's a near, you know, second stage human trial or the approval stays and it respect the US. They finished the process and for cancer is like 5 years for something simpler like a few months and then they go prioritize package cells

manufacturer and sell. The LLM is now if you're starting to see is there's a recent paper that came out of Stanford two months back is that they tried out 7576 different modalities and figured out, you know, I don't know, binding efficiencies for each of those of certain diseases and all of that. And then they came up with two chemistries in six weeks, what it used to take two to three years and then they actually had successful lab rat tests.

So what's interesting to me right on biotech is that India did not have a head, but it had the body, it didn't have the legs. Now we have a head. So you could then build a fully integrated biotech company out of India that does not yet know how to product, personalize and sell and package it. But what they would do is, you know, what used to be called what I think mostly like contract. Yeah, CCRO.

Clos, no you don't have. You can take the CR of that, you can design your own drugs, manufacture as you put it, push it back to the US. This is this is similar to how China started as like just main, you know, just like a low end thing and then eventually it went up the value chain and actually the CEO around China. And so correct. That's right. That's interesting. OK, that's good. So media. So one of my theses is India becomes a media superpower but

in the following sense. Not in the sense that Bollywood takes over the world, but rather that Indians are very good at content creation and become a larger and larger and larger percentage of content created online. Let me hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, they're starting to see it.

We actually have backed a few companies that are essentially current creators, young kids creating content and then publicizing it. So and they're so big native that many people are choosing to go to as their primary job. YouTube is becoming, you know, a country phenomena. I do think like I said earlier, Indians are the best exports. So we I'm trying to see Indians show up in movies and TV series and never have I ever and blah blah, blah. And that was not normal 5-10 years back.

Nobody popping up in big movies. So this familiarity with the culture and staying in the face I think is quite interesting. And all the content that is getting created in India, it can potentially get wider in the US. You're seeing it in gaming as well. You know, they are culturally relevant games about Mahabharata and Ramayana. They are getting popular in India.

And the question is can like the way Tankai's popular everywhere in the world and we play games with the North Star teams and so on, can that ever go expand beyond India and become a popular theme in the US or in Japan or Korea? I mean, that could be interesting to see. Same with comic books. And he has a really nice, nice

comic culture. It's kind of died out over the last 10-15 years, but it's picking up a game that have two like companies coming up and AI is the thing that wave and then they're all very culturally Indian. And then can you find, can you export that to the world, right. Indian stories. You have a company called Pocket FM and the guy essentially was travelling in Indian Railways and then Indian Railways have, you know, these are all 7-8 hour

journeys. You will have these tale Lawas, you know, the guys that sell pocketbooks, pocket bavillas. There are spicy stories, romance, horror, love, adult fiction and endemic fiction. So he was reading, you know, realized that should I could convert this stuff to audiobooks and he converted these to short, short form but long episodic audiobooks and it just took off Company called Pocket FM and

they make 7250 million revenue an hour. 70% of it is in the US Indian company building designing new short form novellas. You know, spicy stories. And it's basically though at global quality. It's not like Indian accents. It's not Indian only. That's the key thing. It's yes for audio. And now they're waiting on AI because initially you would have to have humans sitting in a podcasting room like that to capture their voice and tone. And there's 4050% gross margin

takes a long while. There are contracts that you have to do over time. You just get to 90% gross margin by just using AI to create different synthetic voices in any language. And then the interesting part of that is you can experiment in India because the population is, is large. And interestingly, if something spikes in India as a story actually spikes in Germany, except when you convert Germany, you get to Germany.

But it's the same same several stories in the world that keep playing out Love, loss, grief, it all. Ambitious, it's culturally similar enough. See, what's interesting about that is I do feel China's a Galapagos Islands where the you know, like the animals are different there, you know, the, the ecosystem is different, right? Like, for example, Meichuan is like a huge, the equivalent of the Groupon in the US became a much bigger company in China. So they had a almost like a

different evolutionary tree. Have you ever been to, like Socotra? No. Scotra is like this island in the Middle East. Yemen, right? Yeah, near Yemen. Yeah, that has a totally different like set of trees. And the ball walk trees and all that, Yeah. Exactly to anywhere else in the world, right. And so it's like a different use of. So China is like that where stories that take off from China or vice versa don't necessarily happen the rest of the world and etcetera. It's relatively rare.

There's a story, but but India's connect enough because it's English that it does. It is correlated with, let's say, Germany. Yeah. And that's a 95. Yeah, that's another thing that's happening in India. It's pretty interesting. OK. All right, let me do two or three more space. ISRO has actually done surprisingly well, low cost launches or a thing and so on.

Sort of tell me, you know, have you thought about space or actually Adnicol me and Sriram and several other people invest in that, you know that one that could we? Know very well, yeah, fantastic company Adnicol, Skyroute, we invested in a company called Pixel Space. We could raise about 1995 million. They're building hypospectral satellites. They can, sorry. And if they're a competitor with algae colors? Oh no, they're not.

Yeah, they might use Adnicols, OK to go launch because they don't do the launch stuff, they do the satellite and payload stuff. But yeah, very cutting edge. And we were the first institutional investors in any space company 4-5 years ago in 2019 and now we, I think we have hundreds of companies building space. And again, if you think about. Hundreds of companies building. Hundreds of companies building in space across launch vehicles,

reusable launch vehicles. There's a company called Ethereal X that tells the Ukraine Mall incredible stuff. That is propulsion systems. There's Drown Station, that is telematics. There's satellite building. So this is a place that you this is sector U investor fair been there or this road whereas. Yeah, we are very much we are really. I don't think I can rattle off all of those different subsections.

Like you just said, yes, yeah. So we yeah, be able to pretty deep and sophisticated thesis around space tag because these Rd. talent base is so strong. And then the young entrepreneurs coming out of the world can join hands. And then you know, you know how much any government base this road is peanuts. So you know, once they once they've done their duty, they've learned their lessons, they learn their skills. They they are very happy to go work for a private company now. Interesting.

And yes, you know, they throw as institution is also very supportive. They are offering labs for free to test out, do turbo testing, vibration testing, space weakness testing for satellites and rocket is quite amazing to see. So, OK, that's interesting. I learned something and and I knew ISRO was doing well and and and when I know that hundreds of companies that's really, really cool drones. Drones. Yeah. It's a very interesting space

the company should check out. It's called airbound.com. They're building V tall blended Bing body. So it's a single, single blended body. There's no moving parts and it takes V tall, It takes off vertically and then gyroscopically navigate itself to a horizontal light path with bings and it can cover about 6 to 70 kilometers. This is a company, the investor and the preceded this raise from from a bunch of investors in the

US large seed round. They're doing the I think door is an interesting space in India because you know when traffic is just such a pain in the ass in India, you if you really want to offer things of different varieties and quick commerce space, you have to take the aerial route, the the the road

routes. That is too slow and too expensive and regulation has been, you know, generally quite positive in India. What doesn't exist yet is a technology that can scalably, reliably go get anywhere things that are not 500 grams. You know, you got to get to 3 to 5 KGS for you to cover forty 5060% of the overall volume of deliveries you want to do presumes. So 4050% of consumer deliveries are some three KGS.

So this company right now is building a drone, one of the most advanced roles in the world that can that has an LED ratio almost matching the best aircrafts in the world. And what he wants to do is to just build the best aircraft in the world and just use it for grown deliveries. So the goal is to build the best aircraft, the best lift and rag ratio, the best. I mean like aircraft, aircraft or drone or delivery drone, delivery aircraft.

He's building the best aircraft that is shaped like a drone, the size of a drone for delivery, for delivery. It's got a custom bill for a custom. Airport air rules, but the goal is to build the absolute best. And is drone delivery, I know drone delivery is actually live in China now, yeah. Is it there in India? Yeah, he's doing pilots in India right now, but they with a large healthcare system. What what is happening in India that people don't know about tech wise?

India is not coming to a point where people are building real world class 1st in the world technologies. The drone was an example of that. The satellite company and rocket companies are examples of that. And there are many more coming semiconductor stuff that we're looking that seems like it's very cutting edge.

So there is, there is absolutely intent and there's capital available and there's talent that we believe is going to land India in a place where we are didn't know what we're doing, didn't know what innovation that if it works, it can actually really reshape industries. That wasn't true 5-10 years ago. And I would argue we still are a minuscule, minuscule percentage of what I think the contribution to global ID is.

That needs to change. And I would love for that to accelerate and I'm trying to do some things to make that much faster. But there are small pockets or fewer pockets. So they are very deep pockets of innovation that are absolutely mandatory. But this company that we just talked about, you're coming with people that are that are leaders and you know, senior developers at Tesla, at SpaceX, Google's wing, which is let's try to build exactly this 10 years ago and equipment annual.

And it was drone team leaders with us in this one at, you know, a bunch of so this this, this stuff is really cutting edge. So I think there are more and more pockets of that with the young first time founders. This kid is in 19 now. When we invested, he was 17. There are more people like that coming out of the woodwork.

I think there's quite people don't know this and I would love for that volume of people to be much more and back them more and I would love for more people to know that there is stuff like this coming out of India. You're not a software automation. We have a back office anymore. We're not just take consumer masks, consumer Internet and e-commerce country get all of that and that's also deepening and broadening, but we're also this now. That's really awesome. I think.

I don't think people again, I think it's still underpriced. I think we that that story like this kind of stuff is awesome. This is that's like world class, right? And I think the world class stuff, people kind of knew Indians individually were doing that kind of stuff, you know, but I don't think they realize how much of A for lack of a term, not even bench isn't even the right term, how much in reserve there was for an idea. Yeah, OK, awesome. Maybe with that by me? Absolutely.

Great. Cool. Thank you, Bob. Yeah.