Outliers

Oultiers S05 E14 Lucky Ali by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E13: Nand Kishore Chaudhary by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E12: Ajit Isaac by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E11: Aditi Mittal by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E10: Dhimant and Anuradha Parekh by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E09: Mitch Grasso by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E08 David Tibbitts: How Notion Works by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E07 Camille Ricketts: How Notion Works by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E06 Akshay Kothari: How Notion Works by FactorDaily

Outliers S05 E05 Ivan Zhao: How Notion Works by FactorDaily

Gaurav Taneja, aka Flying Beast, is an outlier in the social media world for many reasons. First, he’s a professional airline pilot who worked with Air Asia until last week, before he turned a whistleblower revealing the airline’s security malpractices. Tune in to this podcast to learn life lessons from flying and being a social media influencer.

In this episode of Outliers podcast, I discussed a range of topics with Dhruv, from growing up to the thinking behind his selection of topics and his science fiction view of the world going forward.

In this episode, I talk to Jav Vijayan talks about some amazing, deep insights from Jay about life and work, and what makes Tesla and Elon Musk great.

Tune in to this episode of Outliers to learn more about Superhuman’s product journey, and how Rahul is navigating the ongoing pandemic as an entrepreneur.

Anand Deshpande has navigated Persistent over the past three decades through different cycles of disruptions and existential crises. He’s an outlier for many reasons. And creating a software product focused company when everyone around was busy building immensely lucrative software outsourcing business in the 90s, isn’t the only reason. Over the years, Anand has built Persistent into a well-oiled machine that continues to survive and keep its focus intact, sometimes doggedly.

Outliers Special Ep 13: Tanmay Bakshi by FactorDaily

Outliers Special Ep 12: Mehak Garg by FactorDaily

Outliers Special Ep11: Adya Satapathy by FactorDaily

In this conversation with Amit Somani, you will learn about how to be watchful about different biases while making decisions or navigating a crisis. He talks about one of such techniques called “Invert, always Invert” from Charlie Munger, co-founder of Berkshire Hathaway.

In this episode of the Outliers podcast, I asked Rajan to share some of his learnings from watching the founders fight the battles they do, and how they can navigate the pandemic.

Deep Nishar is among the most admired product builders, having created impactful products at Linkedin, Google among many companies. He’s now Softbank’s senior managing partner based in Mountain View, California. Listen in to know how’s he reading the ongoing pandemic?

In this episode of Outliers: Season of Resilience, I bring you an hour long conversation about how Girish is navigating the ongoing pandemic for his startup, and himself as a founder.

I speak with William for this week’s podcast, he reiterated FabIndia’s focus on standing by its community of craftsmen and women, and the employees, even during the ongoing pandemic. “For the first time, truly the first time, in human history, it’s an event that affects every single person on the planet,” he tells me.

For Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and the CEO of AI startup Mad Street Den, fears of her startup’s “death is a distraction.” “Hope is not a strategy. I truly believe that death is a distraction, sooner or later everybody dies, sooner or later all companies die and it’s a question of when, it’s never a question of if and it’s a distraction and it’s the same for companies,” Ashwini tells me in this episode of the Outliers.

In this week’s Outliers podcast, I bring you another candid conversation with Nithin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha who has disrupted some of India’s biggest banks and financial services companies with his innovative and bold approach. Add to that his bootstrapped startup journey, which illustrates how to build a company that matters without raising monies from a VC.

Manish is a battle-hardened entrepreneur who has steered his startup Printo through many crises, including the last existential crisis triggered by the Lehman collapse post-2008. In the entrepreneurial ecosystem, he is looked upon as a bold voice of realism and honesty. Not false hope.

Over the next few weeks, I intend going back to some of these Outliers (and some new voices), sit down with them for deeper conversations about how they managed different cycles of disruptions and crossed the valleys of death in their lives and careers -- basically, look how their experiences in the past can help us navigate the coming few months or quarters. The first in this series is a conversation with Ravi Venkatesan, the former chairman of Microsoft India, who has worked across the sectors of manufacturing, technology and now social over the past few decades.

A.R. Rahman is one of those Outliers who, having charted a unique path of their own and spread their magic along the way, hardly need an introduction. His genius lies not just in his creative melodies but in seeking out all that is ‘good’. In music, in life, in other human beings. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Raju Reddy of Sierra Atlantic talks about his entrepreneurial journey, and how the underground nerve center of BITS Pilani network – he's an alumnus and currently the chairman of BITSA – works. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

C K Ranganathan of Cavinkare talks about starting up and his journey building one of India’s best homegrown retail brands. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Ritesh Arora talks about how he learned from failures to bootstrap, and then turn BrowserStack into a $60m rocket ship. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

“Giving just returns to your investors and shareholders is a restrictive model for business. Business is such a powerful force, it needs to stand for a higher purpose,” Bissell tells me in this episode of Outliers. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Listen to Amuleek Singh of Chai Point talk about some never-told, amazing back stories about Chai Point’s innovative packaging, business strategy, and organization culture. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Vinoth Chandar, founder and CEO of ChuChu TV, talks about his journey and building a successful global YouTube company with over 24.5 Billion views and more than 38 Million subscribers across its channels. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Sebastian Thrun, the Google X founder and among the world’s top AI and robotics scientists, flying cars are no more science fiction. In this episode of the Outliers podcast, he talks about flying cars and solving today’s problems Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Kishore Biyani talks about his rollercoaster ride of an entrepreneurial journey and his latest ammunition to fight his business battles - a combination of his customer base and technology-powered data insights for making decisions. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Nandan Nilekani - cofounder of Infosys, the brain behind Aadhaar and India’s recent financial platforms, including “the IndiaStack.” - talks about his playbook for building things and how he builds them to create impact at scale. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Guneet Monga of Sikhya Entertainment talks about her journey producing next gen movies in a world ruled by the incumbents. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: www.accelerated-ideas.com/

The first Indian in space, Rakesh Sharma, talks about his journey becoming an airforce test pilot, going to space, and life after space. Produced by Anand Murali Music Credit: http://www.accelerated-ideas.com/

Journalism’s biggest existential battle isn’t about fighting the business model disruption or the way new consumers of news are behaving. It’s the war against intense polarisation and biases plaguing the newsrooms. There’s extreme negativity on one hand and excessive cheerleading on the other. For those in journalism staying true to the craft and following the principles of objectivity and the good old world balance, it’s a tough battle. Amid all this chaos, Ravish Kumar is a rarity who practices fundamentals of journalism by pursuing. How does he stay this way? And why? And what’s the cost of speaking truth to power? Our Season 2 Finale of Outliers is with a journalist who evokes emotion in what he chooses to cover as much as admiration in the way he keeps to the fundamentals of on-the-ground reportage.

Over past few years, and especially as a rookie entrepreneur myself, a lot of what Phani said and did have started making sense. After the exit, he took his mother to London, her maiden foreign trip. Phani tells me now in this podcast that she’s not in a shape now to travel overseas. And his thoughts about how entrepreneurship is a self purification journey cannot be more relevant at a time when debates about a crisis of culture and integrity are at centre of India’s start ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is hard. No matter what you’re building. It becomes even harder when you’re building something that’s not understood by many, and even worse if the product is clearly ahead of its time. But founders are crazy. They see opportunities when no one sees them. They also get blinded sometimes by it and fail. When Tarun Mehta started building Ather Energy, India’s first electric two wheelers, his startup was being written off even before the pre-orders started. After getting his pitch rejected by 80 investors ( is that a magic number? Even Kabeer of Dunzo had similar number of rejections before getting funded), Tarun finally met Sachin Bansal. “What should I change in this pitch deck?” “Don’t change anything. This is how you’ll build this.” Perhaps only a fellow entrepreneur can empathize with another founder’s dogged optimism. So here’s to the entrepreneurial mafia being led by Sachin Bansal and several others.

Ashish Gupta is an outlier for many reasons. A gold medalist in computer science from IIT Kanpur, Gupta built a startup (Junglee) and sold it to Amazon, has been through several near death experiences at his second startup (Tavant), and is now in the process of sunsetting his third entrepreneurial venture, Helion. None of the above make him an outlier though. Over years, Ashish has found a way into some of India’s biggest and most valued startups as an angel investor. From MakeMyTrip, to Flipkart and MuSigma, Gupta has been an early seed stage backer. It’s almost like getting a front tow seat in a blockbuster movie, and also being able to help produce it. There are very few investors who are as humble, intellectually honest and loved by the entrepreneurs. How and why does he stay that way? Please tune in to listen and read the full transcript below to find out more. Hat-tip to Kanika Berry for help with transcription of the conversation, which is produced lightly edited below:

India’s booming startup ecosystem has been mostly about the founders and the investors writing cheques to fund their ideas. But building a startup takes a lot more than just founders and investors. It takes exceptionally talented individuals who take the leap of faith to become part of these startup journeys as employers. And while these professionals may not be the founders, they are highly entrepreneurial. In this week’s Outliers Podcast I sat down with former McKinsey consultant Ananth Narayanan who’s been the CEO of Myntra since October 2015. What sets him apart as an outlier is his deep passion and sense of ownership for Myntra. So much that it’s difficult to tell that he’s not a founder.

So who is the quintessential Indian entrepreneur? This is the question we keep asking while analyzing success and failure of Indian startups. On one hand, large scale platforms such as Flipkart and Ola have high profile founders at the helm, always grabbing the headlines. On the other hand, a bunch of low key, reticent and enterprise focused startups such as Mettl continue to create impact in the niches they serve. When Mercer acquired Mettl few weeks ago for $40 million, it didn’t make splashy headlines. And while you would have read the stories by YourStory and The Ken, there’s always more to learn about these entrepreneurial journeys. And with Outliers, we bring you the stories told as it is from the horse mouth. So here’s the podcast, our 76th, with Ketan Kapoor, Mettl’s founder.

Why are there hardly any women in top roles in Indian newspapers and magazines? The answer is the same for most business sectors and organizations. These companies have sexual predators lurking around at the workplaces who make sure the bright women don’t rise up the ranks, especially if they don’t succumb to their demands. Yes. It’s that bad. And if you feel this is an exaggeration, please read the stories shared by top women journalists on social media over the past few weeks. This week’s Outliers Podcast is with Sandhya Menon who triggered a revolution on Twitter and elsewhere by sharing her own story of harassment. And while it reinvigorated the #MeToo movement, she stays away from using that hashtag. This will be among a series of such conversations we will do over the next few weeks to ensure that we all wake up and become sensitive enough to realize the value of shaping a healthy workplace for everyone.

I first learned about IIT Madras professor Balaraman Ravindran when my colleague wrote this profile story titled “Wizard of AI: Meet India’s foremost reinforcement learning expert.” Since then, I’ve met him a few times. It’s fascinating how conversations with AI researchers go beyond technologies and tools shaping AI. It quickly becomes philosophical and even ideological while discussing the ills of machine learning systems making decisions impacting humans and society. And this is where professor Balaraman starts making sense in the over-hyped and often “skin deep AI” ecosystem in India. AI is the new buzzword for policymakers, startups, VCs and individual job seekers. So what questions to ask while trying to make sense of AI in our lives and work? Here are some pointers from my recent chat with him. “The right answer to any question is, it depends. What you’re learning throughout your life is what it depends on,” he says. I know it’s a very philosophical answer. But knowledge is evolving.” “India is the destination where most of the repetitive jobs are outsourced. And AI is mostly applied wherever there’s repetition.” “It’s not like we aren’t going to need programmers. But we might need more app developers, those writing codes for the cloud and so on. “ There are problems to be solved within AI too. “By and large, the biggest problem in AI is performance tuning. Many of my students are calling it “the performance tuning hell.” Listen in to this podcast to make sense of AI in India.

“The biggest investment you make in a startup is your time; it’s not capital or anything else.” The first big lesson for Kabeer Biswas, from his first startup Hoppr is that entrepreneurship is more about the time than anything else. Biswas, who co-founded Dunzo, is potentially building the next unicorn, or the startup with over billion dollar valuation. But that’s not what makes him and Dunzo outliers. “Our mission is to go ahead and say we’re going to make cities more convenient and we’re going to make sure that every store in the city can be transacted with,” he says. “That’s a massive business. It’s not the business of hyper-convenience, time—this is the business of buying and shopping. This is the business of local commerce.” “And nobody wants to give you money because logistics as business lost a lot of money in 2015-2016.” So why go on building it when none of the investors were ready to write the big cheques? “Because the users wanted it,” he says. And it continues to be frustrating for Kabeer and his co-founders to explain why Dunzo deserves bigger rounds of funding to fulfil its mission. By September of 2017, Dunzo actually became profitable. But it was also the year when Kabeer and his team faced a near death experience. “We ran out of money in June. And by that time we had got 85 people (potential investors) to say “no” to us.” Dunzo has been an outlier from the time it was born on a WhatsApp group in 2014 and kept battling it’s near death experiences despite a growing community of users who loved the app. Much before Google invested in Dunzo earlier this year and it became a popular startup, FactorDaily wrote this story in August 2016. “Dunzo! How a hyperlocal concierge app is killing it in Bengaluru”

“What can I do that I haven’t done in the past, or trained for?” At 44, Indushekhar Khaitan has been an entrepreneur, a VC and a corporate executive. Khaitan’s journey across these assignments was triggered by the restlessness to do something he had not done before. And that meant long, painful journeys apart from discovering what he’s good at, and what he’s not. “We had no idea what venture investing was when we started Morpheus. We didn’t even know we had to set aside 2 per cent as the management fee for our salaries etc.,” he says. “Now that I piece it all back, I was only finding what I’m capable of doing and what I’m not.” “When I decided Morpheus wasn’t for me, it was because I couldn’t see myself giving gyan to founders without actually doing it,” he says. After Morpheus, things changed a lot. “I was now feeling, where’s my power, my army?” So what really changes when you’re not an entrepreneur? “In a job, boundaries are laid out for you. As an entrepreneur, you lay out the boundaries. You’re still the same person,” he says. Why is Indus not an entrepreneur again? “You do a startup, make half a million, the bar is $50 million for the next one. Now the next one has to be $500 million worth of your time. That bar is actually the bar that doesn’t let you enter entrepreneurship until you have the next 500 million idea,” he says. For now, Khaitan is training to be a pilot apart from helping the SaaS startup Chargebee hack its next phase of growth. “In five years, if I’m a pilot, that will be a completely different career.”

“If I wasn’t running a startup, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.” If there’s one thing most of the entrepreneurs will agree as the biggest influence while building their startups, it’s the personal transformation they go through. For Arpita, who comes from a small village called Pihani near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, growing up was all about watching how generations of Indians were relying on mobile screens for everything from entertainment to business. At 27, she now runs Mech Mocha, backed by both Accel Partners and Blume Ventures. (Both are among FactorDaily’s backers, too.) Mech Mocha builds mobile games for Indian users. She met her cofounder Mohit Rangaraju while still in college. Together, they attempted an online food startup in the campus (IIT Guwahati), which didn’t work out. Now, Mohit helps her balance “excessive entrepreneurial optimism” with the realities of running a startup. “We balance each other out.”

Amid India’s smartphone boom and the rise of large consumer internet companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and several others, profitability and funding rounds have dominated the narratives. Designing these consumer products, creating engaging user interfaces hasn’t really made any big headlines, though. Cleartrip, with its simple, uncluttered mobile web interface, has been an outlier on the design front. When most rival travel websites were busy packing their sites with innumerable features and deals, Cleartrip chose to doggedly keep its focus on a simple user interface when it launched in 2006. “We said, 'Who is on mobile, and who are we designing for?’,” recalls Sunit Singh, design head of Cleartrip until August 2015. “That helped us with a razor-focused design approach. In terms of the complexity of the interface, we cut it down to quite a extent.” Singh adds: “That’s where I first learned the value of being razor-focused.” So, how does a product balance ease of use and user convenience with this quenchless urge to pack more features than your rivals? “You have to pick your battles. You can’t fight all of them. Designers have to pick their battles.” Is Cleartrip indeed a greatly designed product or is it just that most of its rivals have shabbily designed products? How and why does Cleartrip continue to live on? “I think about this question a lot myself. I would always tell my team that get to a level where there’s no other way to do it. There’s no better way to do it. I think that’s the secret,” says Singh.