Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Kunal Shah is one of the most well-known and admired product leaders in India. He is the CEO and founder of CRED, an Indian-based fintech startup valued at over $6 billion. Prior to CRED, he founded three other startups, including Freecharge, which he sold for over $400 million to Snapdeal. He has also been an advisor to India’s most influential organizations. In our conversation, we discuss:• The prevalence of successful Indian immigrants in top CEO roles across the tech industry• Why companies in India can grow DAUs but not ARPU—and what that means for building products for India• What most sets India’s market apart• Challenges and opportunities in the Indian market• The Delta 4 framework for building new products• Lessons from building CRED so far• The power of curiosity and second-order thinking• Lessons from failure—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—The modern API for auth and user identity• Orb—The flexible billing engine for modern pricing• Dovetail—Bring your customer into every decision—Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/kunal-shah-on-winning-in-india-second—Where to find Kunal Shah:• X: https://twitter.com/kunalb11• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunalshah1/• Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@CRED_club—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Kunal’s background(04:22) The Delta 4 framework(11:00) The success of Indian CEOs in the U.S.(19:55) Challenges and opportunities in India(23:04) DAUs vs. ARPU in Indian markets(25:50) The perception of time in India(27:55) The curse of focus in Asian markets(30:33) Challenges and opportunities in India (continued)(33:23) Lessons learned from building CRED(36:40) Profit pools can provide valuable insights into the values of a country(37:55) Founders’ role in company growth(39:55) Profitability and Indian business culture(43:24) Advice for staying positive amid criticism(44:41) The promising market in India(47:35) The power of curiosity(52:59) Who Kunal looks up to(55:31) Kunal’s favorite sources of content(58:42) Asking great questions(01:02:54) Contrarian corner: Wealth is nothing but storage of energy(01:05:26) Failure corner(01:08:57) Closing thoughts: Share your learnings(01:09:38) Lightning round—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Microsoft, Adobe, Alphabet, IBM, Pal-Alta networks, even Starbucks. The CEOs of these companies were all born in India and emigrated to the U.S. A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the Burma of the founders quite well. These are the principles were given to me, and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger. I want to keep talking about India and how it's different and how to build products that are successful in India. No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life. The concept of time is not the same. What do you see as the biggest opportunity for Indian startups?

India's changing because now, for the first time, we're seeing founders being respected and unicorns being celebrated. We have a national startup day and probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building. Today, my guest is Kunal Shah. Kunal is one of the most well-known and respected entrepreneurs and product leaders in India and around the world.

He shares endless wisdom on Twitter. Twitter and LinkedIn, where he's got over 1 million followers. He's the CEO and founder of KRED, a fintech startup based in India, which was last valued at over $6 billion, and has of a couple years ago processed over 20% of all credit card bill payments in India. Prior to KRED, he founded three other startups, including free charge, which he sold for over $400 million to snap deal. Kunal is a deep thinker, both about product and about life.

His background is actually in philosophy, which comes across very clearly when you hear him share his advice. In our conversation, we get deep into what makes working and building in India different from the U.S. markets and other markets, including why trust is so essential and why so many people are so much more risk-averse in India. We talk about the biggest challenges and opportunities within the India market, why there are so many successful Indian immigrants in CEO roles across tech and what we can learn from that. why companies in India can quickly grow Dow's, but not Arpous, and what that means for building

products in India. We also talk about how to stay curious and open-minded in the power of second-order thinking, also stories of failure and lots of contrarian takes, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. A big thank you to Siamai'a E.T. for making the connection to Kunaniwai. With that, I bring you Kunal Shah, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like Sammel authentication and skim provisioning.

That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features, and hundreds of other companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Versel, WebFlow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently launched AuthKit, a complete authentication and user management service. It's essentially a modern alternative to Opt Zero, but with better pricing and more flexible APIs. Authkitt's design is stunning out of the box, and you can also fully customize it to fit your app's brand. It's an effortless experience from your first user all the way to your largest enterprise

customer. Best of all, OTHKit is free for any developer up to 1 million users. Check it out at WorkOS.com slash Lenny to learn more. That's workos.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to by Orb. As a business, you care about revenue, but as a product team, the last thing you want to do is delay a product launch or pricing change because your team has to rebuild billing from scratch. Orb is a flexible, usage-based billing engine that lets you evolve your pricing with ease. The fastest growing product teams at companies like Versel and Replit trust Orb to power their pricing changes and launches. Use Orb to ship product faster, stop worrying about billing, and evolve pricing with ease and control. Check it out at withorb.com slash Lenny and skip the line for a demo

or sandbox by using promo code Lenny. That's withorb.com.com slash Lenny. Kunal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Lenny, thank you so much for having me and a huge fan of everything that you do. And like I said before, India is a huge beneficiary of what stuff you do. We are all people who have learned the art of product by just figuring it out and watching some content here and there and reading some stuff. So kudos to everything that you do.

And like I said earlier, that you do the fabulous job of taking the information asymmetry of the art of product and kind of make it accessible to many of us across the world. So thank you. Wow. I really appreciate that. This is already feeling great to me. I have a huge. So it turns out this podcast has a huge audience in India. As do you.

And so I feel like this conversation is going to be really special and really meaningful to a lot of people. I wanted to start with something very tactical. there's a product framework that you came up with that I absolutely love and I've shared it with at least 30 founders over the last couple years and this is actually how I discovered you initially is I heard about this thing

and I'm like, who's this guy Koonal Shah? And look at us now, chatting. Could you explain this framework briefly and then just how you've used it or how you recommend people apply it? Oh, and by the way, it's called Delta 4. I don't know if I even said the name. Yeah, it's called the Delta 4 framework

but I think it's actually quite simple if you think about. A lot of people say that your product has to be 10x better, and it's not very measurable. You don't know if you're 10x better or not unless you're delusional. And the trigger for me was actually, I'm the unusual tech founder in India. I'm a philosophy. I'm the only humanities philosophy major founder in India

who's got into tech. And I often wondered that most people who were my peers or people who were ahead of me were significantly, smarter academically or otherwise, and why did I become successful with my first startup free charge, which I exited in 2015 for nearly like $450 million. And I was like, what would make this happen? Because I would not qualify into this super league of really top IIT rankers that exist in India. And that got me onto this philosophical quest to find out what makes things successful.

So the simple framework is like an example that I give often is that imagine the old way of taking a cab ride and an Uber, right? And if I asked you, give me this score of efficiency on Uber and let's say getting the old cap, what would you say, Lani? I'm curious, like out of 10. Yeah, give a cab like a three and an Uber like a nine. Yeah. So every time you see that the product efficiency delta is greater than equal to four, three

things happen. It is irreversible. Second is that you have very high tolerance for it to fail. If Uber fails a little bit, would you say, oh my God, that I'm going to really stop using it? No. And the third thing is that I call it the UBP, unique bragworthy proposition. So every time humans unlock a Delta 4 product or service,

they cannot stop talking or sharing about it. And therefore, all Delta 4 products will naturally have lower cacks or sometimes zero cacks. Because people, humans, and think about how you discover Google, but definitely not through an ad, definitely not through some performance marketing here and there. Somebody showed you the demo and you were like, my God, this is crazy. And that's what I'm seeing right now. What's happening with everything on OpenAI and everything that is happening around LLM feels like magic. And it's kind of Delta 4 because the efficiency of doing things before and after is now showing that.

But the failure is the real problem. and making everything tech does not make things more efficient. Let's take about a top of an example. Buying a suit for you online versus offline. All tech, cool stuff, all the features built in. What would you say the efficiency of buying a suit online is versus, let's say, buying a suit offline? I've actually done that and it was a terrible. It did not fit at all.

And so, like, it's efficient, but the end result is not. is probably often not great. Overall efficiency score, what would you give? Of buying a suit online? Yeah, ours is offline. Like, I'd probably give it five and five. Like, on the offline is actually probably better experience. Yeah, that's crazy.

Because you've broken the principle, this is a tech product, but the efficiency is better offline. And therefore, when the delta is lesser than four, what you will discover is that it is reversible. You will not see people bragging about it, right? And you have zero tolerance for it. So you will never go into BISO online. I can tell you that right now.

So I think it's a simple framework. I believe that if many companies apply, so I know now many VCs in the US use this as part of the training program for the analysts. I know about it that somebody in Sequoia mentioned this to me that they have this part of the thing. But in India, we are not still applying many of these things. I think it's a simple framework to at least know. And you can apply this to features.

You can apply this to products. You can apply that to business. And oftentimes, this is a longer concept. We can talk about it in many ways because it's derived out of some study around entropy and something about evolutionary biology, which is the root of how I discovered and thought about Delta 4, that when does the species get disrupted? and what is entropy and why does low entropy require growth of high entropy?

And like it's a day long podcast on its own. So some other time. Okay, we'll save that for a future follow up, just diving in on the psychology of Delta 4. Just to kind of summarize this, because I think it's such a powerful framework and I find it useful to convince founders why their product isn't taking off.

They may feel like this is better than, like the classic example is a better Excel. Look, there's so much better than Excel. It can do all these things. you don't have to learn all these formulas. But the trick here that I love is just, what would people rate the existing solution 1 to 10? What would they rate your solution 1 to 10?

And that's to be 4 points higher. Otherwise, no one, no one's going to pay attention. And I think it's pretty simple. People are busy. They have enough things to do. They have enough products and apps. They're not going to take the time to really dig into something if it's not that much better.

Absolutely. Okay, I'm going to go in a totally different direction. I want to talk about Indian CEOs in the U.S. Okay. So today the CEOs, of Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, which is a $250 billion company, it turns out. IBM, which is $170 billion company. Palo Alto Networks, which is $100 billion company, even Starbucks, also $100 billion

company. I was looking that up. And then also Twitter, before Elon took over, Twitter, the CEOs of these companies were all born in India and emigrated to the U.S. And I might be wrong, but I think this is the largest ethnic group of CEOs of tech companies other than just white dudes in the U.S.? Okay, so I'm curious why you think Indian immigrants are so successful in business and in tech in the U.S.,

especially in these very high positions. And then I'm most curious, just what can we learn from that? What can we learn from their success? It's a great question. I often wonder about it. And I have had good fortune to meet a fair bunch of these individuals and had a chance to really explore with them what really went on. So there are few things that pop out.

And again, these are all conjectures which I can't prove in any ways, but it's a thought experiment anyway to talk about these things. First is, in general, immigrants that get out of the country are usually have chip on the shoulder in a very different way and the struggle that they have to go through to just get out and be successful. And that hunger that got them there, there was no privilege. like they came from very, very humble backgrounds and literally no money to start with. So I think that this force is real, right?

But I can say that for many immigrants in general as well, but appreciation for math in general or logic, which came through society in a big way, right? Kind of gave, let's say, for example, lots of engineering graduates come from only a few countries because the society was bent towards, let's say, earlyness of mathematics or earliest of this. And I think that kind of helps create status that what will get appreciated. For example, being an engineer, being a doctor, like philosophy measure, I was a write-off for the society. So the reason I am the rare commodity over here, because you are not considered to be very bright unless you break into these very hard exams and very, very hard things.

So the filtering criteria on its own is big. But there's another interesting framework altogether, which I have actually learned from this gentleman who got to Devadatathe. He applies Indian mythology and management principles together. And it's an interesting thing that there are three major Indian god. One is the Brahma, the god of creation, Shiva, the god of destruction. I'm super generalizing, but that's the classification. And the third is, like, Vishnu, which is the god of sustenance. And the avatars, the word avatar comes from Vishnu keeps changing Avtar, right?

So we have had Rama, Krishna, all these guys are avatars of this. So what you notice is that if you take a 2x2 of people who are high on values and low on values, high on obedience and low on obedience, you make an interesting 2x2. Now, Lord Krishna, which is one of the very popular avatars, which was non, I mean, suits the entrepreneurial category, which is high on values but very low on obedience. He was known to be the naughty God and he could actually create lots of things. And there is Rama which is known to be the one which follows principles and obedient. So they will follow Dharma and scale on that.

And then there are these notorious characters as Ravana, which is low on values, low on obedience. And there is Duryodana which he says that is high on obedience but lower values. So these are the people that you don't want to be. And what you notice is that a lot of CEOs have done well. because they follow the Dharma of the founders quite well. They have not diluted the Dharma of the founders who have started these companies and managed to sustain that. A lot of CEOs have this need to say, oh, I'm going to change the company forever,

and it will be my identity, and I will change the logo, and I will change the name, and I will do all sorts of things. But maintaining Dharma, right, where I will say that these are the principles were given to me, and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger. comes from humility of saying that there is something built with some pure form factor and I think therefore that character stays on, right? And therefore, the characters of Brahma and Shiva

are the founder of history, I'll create and destroy, like that's the thing, but sustenance is the harder one. And therefore, avatars keep happening over and over time and different hurdles come and different levels come. But when you think about the archetype of, at least the Indian CEOs, I have seen that they are fabulous at moving between Krishna and Rama all the time. They can play this consistently

and therefore they keep evolving and keep making these companies bigger and bigger. And I think we'll see a lot more of this in years to come because now they have the role models of these individuals who have kind of done well. But the key principle is that if you ask the founders, they will love these CEOs if they're around because they maintain,

the dharma of the thing. And for example, let's say what Tim is doing, is maintaining the dharma of Steve jobs, because if he had tried to change the drama of Steve jobs and what the values the companies are, it's very hard to imagine it to be sustaining itself forever and ever. Wow. What an answer. What I love about this is this combination of using a two-by-two

and Indian mythology is like the microcosm of you, which is philosophy and tech. And so I love that and makes a lot of sense. that's where your mind goes. Something else that makes me think about is, I read this book a long time ago, Jim Collins, either Good to Great or one of his early books,

about leadership. And he talks about level five leadership, I think, is him. And where level five leaders are ones where it's not about them. It's about the business and they can disappear in the future and things will work great. Yes. And I feel it is very hard if you believe that your identity needs to have its own position and legacy.

And therefore, a lot of time chasing status causes disruption because you will say that, oh, this doesn't have my signature in it and therefore becoming, accepting the religion and trying to be the pope of it or the father of it is better than trying to say, oh, I need to have my variant of religion. And that's where the creative destruction starts happening. Interesting. Okay, so you said that there's this good balance between Krishna and Rama that happens. Can you just, again, summarize where they are in that two by two? So, Rama is high on values and high on obedience, and Krishna is high on values and low on obedience, but they both are high on values, which means

they will follow Dharma. And they will change the side. For example, let's say Satya during the opening a crisis played Krishna and got things out. But he'll, he'll, switch back to being Rama and continue to keep scaling it up. Amazing. And just to close loop on here, is your sense that they're like, they're actually thinking about this and they're religious? Or is this just like in the ether of growing up in India and this is just part of the culture? It's a great question. I don't think they consciously think about it. But I think if they ever heard this, they would agree with this. That's what they grew up with. And the value

systems are much more long term. For example, I believe all bad behavior in humans, humans come from being short term, right? And being long term comes in a very, it's a big choice to make. And a lot of times a lot of people argue that, oh, we have arranged marriages and like, it's 95% arranged marriages and less than 1% divorce rate comes from this whole long term thinking, right? That people are married through values versus attraction or, lust and all of that stuff, but more long-term-oriented and about building a family, building

values, or low-divorce rate, it will fix along the way versus trying to say, oh, I need to evolve and I need to move forward. So I think being long-term about that mindset, and that's why some cultures last for thousands of years because of this need for everybody to be more long term versus short. The U.S. could use a lot of that these days. You mentioned this interesting fact about how in India, so the fact that most startups fail, you said, you know, I think the classic status 90%,

and that the risk is a lot higher to start a company and then fail. Can you just talk about what that, what impact that has? How do people try to avoid that? Because that'd be amazing if you can reduce the risk of starting company, or is it just it happens and people get super in debt? I think long-term societies are naturally more risk-averse. And not all great CEOs can become great founders for the same reason.

In fact, I would say that actually makes it very hard to be a founder if you've been a great CEO. Because you've turned into this sustainer versus destroyer or creator. So the nuance I'm talking about is when you are thinking about, like, India has changed. Because now, for the first time, we're seeing founders being respected and talked about and these unicorns being celebrated. And our prime minister talks about startups quite openly. We have a national startup day and so on and so forth.

So I think there is a thing that has changed this thing. But the core principle, let's understand the core human behavior basics. India still has large arranged marriage. And if you are a founder and a failed founder, your chances of getting. a person to marry is still a hard thing to achieve. So if this is all true, then the

appetite to take risk will be controlled, right? Somebody gave an interesting example to me that there's a very large, let's say, FM, CPG company in India. And let's say you do a 0-1 over there and the CEO changes in

four, five years and your 0-1 failed. But you were the best person. That's why you're given the 0-21. The next year was like, so whatever you want done in the last five years? It's like, nothing. I just tried to launch as it failed. And you neither given a promotion in the company, neither a new company will say,

oh my God, I'm going to hire this talent. So the guy who stayed on this stable brand within the CPG company kept growing because that has natural tailwinds. All he has to do is nothing in that brand. And then suddenly what you see is that he or she managed to do well. And this guy has done zero to one has not done well. So we do not celebrate. risk takers

as a country yet and I think we'll change that I think it's changing already but we have a long way to go one of the beautiful things I often talk about is that I was in Portugal once and I saw

I don't know if you've ever been and seen this but in the church normally let's say only the royalty is allowed to be buried or cremated or whatever like they are there only one more category that allowed is the explorers Vasco Di Gama all of these guys

who explored the world and took risk and took the country forward, they were given the same position as the royalty. Right? So when we give the highest status to risk takers, the country appreciates it. Because ultimately, we are all looking for markers of social validation. Super interesting. I want to keep talking about India and how it's different,

and especially what may surprise people about the market, both building there and then how to build products that are successful in India. I saw in a different interview. You talk about how there's this big difference between, Dow's and Arpoo's. That in India, it's really easy to get Dow's, basically get lots of users, really hard to make revenue per user.

And that changes the way you build product. Broadly, could you just talk about why this is the case? Why is it so much easier you get Daos versus Arpooz? So I think Arpoo is a function of per capita income of a country. Right? You cannot make $100 per user from a country for a product when their income is, let's say, $2,500 per country. year as an average for the whole country.

So what happens is many global companies love to come to India because we have the cheapest data, very high smartphone penetration. So if you look at a lot of global giants, they'll have 500 million users from India or sometimes a billion numbers coming from Asia. And they don't have huge arpoos, but they help you show the user growth, which helps you in your public market and therefore improve your valuations. For example, my guess is that I don't know. data is public or not or talked about,

my guess is that meta would not have more than $3 or $4 per user per year monetization in India. But if you look at the user growth in India, it'll be huge, right? So a lot of times for global companies, India becomes a great

MAU farm, but very low on ARPU. And therefore, a lot of Indian founders who try to copy the Western markets in the I'm going to have a few hundred million users, make a terrible mistake because they will need to then go abroad to find their arpoos to balance the act. You talk about how Netflix is a good example that were they launched India.

They got lots of users but just couldn't make a lot of money. Yeah, because for that users to find relevant content and pay for content when we have tons of free data, tons of free content, like all over the place, like short videos that are competing with time, like so much going on over here. People actually paying for that by design is going to be less. And I'm not saying that it'll not change in 10, 20 years, but the expectation that many global companies come over here saying that, oh, I'm going to have like these tens of millions of users who start paying me as soon as they come.

For Spotify, for Netflix, for almost anybody with or Amazon Prime for that matter has not panned out. So one of my takeaways here is just when you look at a startup as an investor especially, and you see like we've got 100 million users don't treat that the same as, say, 100. million users in the U.S. or other markets. Absolutely. One more thing is a value of time as a concept, right? So one of the things you'll notice then is that no Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life, right? But let me ask you a question.

What was your first ever job and how are you paid? My first ever job, I was tutoring women on bad computers and passing Microsoft certification test, and I was paid, I'm pretty sure it was hourly. Now, most likely you will remember what the hourly income was. even though you've started making a lot more, you somehow have the concept of what the value of your one hour is. But if you ask most Indians, and if you ever come to India and do this exercise when you meet them,

ask them what's your income per day or income per hour? Nobody will be able to answer, no matter what their job is. They could be staff at the restaurant, to somebody who's doing really basic work, to anybody in any fancy job, because we've never ever. ever be paid an hourly salary. So when you are not paid an hourly salary, the concept of

time is not the same. And then the concept of time is not same. Paying for time is hard to do. Right. And therefore, you'll see a lot of Indians who make, say, I don't know, maybe a hundred dollars an hour, still spend an hour to send $10 on a flight ticket because that's what it is. And if you, by the way, discuss that with many of the Indians in the West also, you'll realize that this is a common joke that they will still fight for the $10 because the value of time is something that is harder to get used to unless from your childhood that the unit of time was moved smaller and smaller. That is really interesting. And you're saying that comes from just the fact that people never get paid hourly. It's always a salary. And so people don't break down.

The concept of valuing time, like many Indian languages do not have a word for efficiency. Wow. And that's true for many Asian languages. The word for efficiency does not exist. So then how do you value it if it's not in a vocabulary? Fascinating. There's something else along these lines of Daos and Arpoo's inefficiency that you talk about that I love, which is this idea that focus is a curse in Asian markets,

that in the U.S., there's often this advice. Focus, build one thing that's amazing that everyone loves, try to make that work, scale that, and then only then build a new product or build something, build a new big feature. And your advice is in India and Asia markets in general. It's the opposite. And I think it's because you make so little per user.

Could you talk about that? Yeah. I think one is you make very little per user, so you have to do many things, but also all low trust markets. And let me define low trust markets is where consumers are a lot more wary of trying new things

because there are not institutions that protect you against a bad behavior done by a company, right? So, for example, if I ever had a fall in a coffee shop in the U.S., I can think about suing them and making money of it. In India, you're only worried about I'm going to pay my opinion. You don't even think about suing the coffee shop or even hoping that you will get any money for that. So what happens is in a low-trust country, and all developing nations are low trust by design because the institutions are not strong enough to kind of really, really take care of many things.

what happens is there is concentration of trust. So you will see that super apps, superstars, super companies all exist in low trust markets because the lack of trust creates concentration of trust. And therefore you will say one app can do 400 things. For example, we have a company like Tata that can do salt to car, to jewelry, to anything, and people will buy because it's a Tata brand. Because it comes from a low trust society trusting the brand and not being, oh, I'm going to go's preferred this new brand.

And the joy for trying new things is not so high in low trust nations. Wow, I'm learning a lot here. I didn't know all this. So essentially, brand is even more, exponentially more important in Indian markets. It's funny, but the oldest brand in the world is a brand called as Chavan Prash. It's a guy named Chavan who built a praj, which is a sort of a paste that you can have for good health. and it was built in India many, many, many, many centuries ago. And by there, lots of Indian businesses still have the name of the person behind it.

Even in the U.S. used to like that. Like, G.P. Morgan, all these guys are not some fancy name. They're a name of people. And therefore, in India, trust still comes from a lot of names of people who have a lot of trust behind them and reputation behind. I want to zoom out a little bit before we go in a different direction. What do you see as either the most pressing challenges in India right now for tech or the biggest and or the biggest opportunity for Indian startups? And then just generally, where do you think things will evolve in the next few years?

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

so you can actually just kind of write on that and really make the world very equal in many, many ways, right? So that's massive opportunity and also the challenge because I often make this joke that the largest employer of the world is inefficiency

and if you take that away too quickly, we'll have a very, very jobless world, right? So the thing is that it can be an opportunity for a country like India and also potentially a threat because if we don't start becoming great at AI. I was actually just telling somebody today that maybe all of our interviews should become about giving a task that they can only perform if they were very good at AI.

And no matter what the job is, you make that the minimum criteria that if they cannot use that, leverage that, they will become a liability in five years anyways. And the last one is we have a very young demographic, very well positioned with access to technology, access to smartphones and so on and so forth, and a lot of hunger. But our challenge is also that it's also the first generation that is truly learning,

what is entrepreneurship, what is risk, and we'll make all sorts of mistakes get there. And I hope we don't go into Shell after having these large scale failures that you have not seen before. India is not used to layoffs. Like, shut up world is used to layoffs,

but in India, if you start out through layoffs, it becomes national news and all sorts of discussions happen over here. So we are not there yet. So we are stuck between like being a somewhat of a collectivist or some of our individualistic societies. We are somewhere, India is a great remix of everything. I love this line you just shared of inefficiency is the largest employer in the world. I totally get that. Okay. So let me talk. Let's talk about credit for a bit. So you had, I think, three startups before CRED.

Okay, and then you've been building CRED for about six years now. I'm curious just on this journey of CRED, what you've learned or changed your mind about during this phase of your career versus previous phases. I think CRED's inside was actually quite simple, realize that unfortunately the value of time and per capita income is concentrated in 25 million families, and therefore focusing on them is important and they are a lot more global in their approach versus rest of India. So you have to build them very differently. And I realize that ability to focus on a customer set, which is not historically possible to do

because everybody, every investor expected us to be the next China. And the only similarity of India and China was the population and nothing else was similar. So I think having that conviction that I'm going to build only for this folks and this large enough market. Thankfully, I had one success for somebody to bet. So our series A was $25 million. I would have not had that luxury if I had no success in the past because I had no product with any monetization to prove that I'm doing the right thing.

It turned out okay, but I think I could get a lot of people to take risk behind my insight or my thesis is because I focused on the right customer category and built on it. But I think the few things I've learned differently is that a company, companies that are very, very good at zero to one will not naturally become graded 10 to 100. There are lots of different lessons to learn. The founder has to evolve. The biggest thing that has to happen. Most people that credit are people who have not seen a bigger business than credit,

which comes at its benefits and costs. So you have to gentrify the org every now and then to make people understand the value of many of these reliable things. And I often tell people that entrepreneurs are uncertainty absorbers for every, everybody for employees, for investors, for customers. And therefore, they get rewarded for being those people to remove uncertainty from people's lives. But the kind of expectations keeps changing at the company of scale. For example, if you have a, let's say a seat stage investor, they are very used to very high uncertainty and they're happy with some absorption. But as you get to growth investor and as you get sovereigns on a cap table,

the amount of stability you need to provide is significantly more and therefore you need to evolve very, very differently. So I think those are the few lessons I have learned. Talent, you start realizing that not everybody can scale into everything. And you cannot expect that you can give up the zero to one DNA just because you're building 10 to 100. So how do you kind of coexist with those things? How do you react to big changes in the market

and not become this slow company? And every company goes to that. I mean, if you look at what Zach went through, in the last three years was that. I offered to he had to play the shiva come and do a lot of destruction to become big again. So I think that's what founders can do.

And it's not easy to do. One of the things I've learned is that profit pools of a country tell you a lot about what the country values and trying to copy somebody else's profit pool to your country will not be a wise idea because the country's values are demonstrated in what profit pools exist.

Let's take an example. In the 1,000 most profitable companies in India, the number of retailers would be probably two or three. But if you look at the Western market, you'll see a bunch of them because it's a consumption market, plus very high divorce rate, means you're always peacocking again in the market again. You're trying to be fit and be cool and all of that.

India has very low divorce rate, less than 1%. arranged marriages and fashion spent and because we have a lower female participation of labor, India is probably the only market where female fashion spends is less than men's fashion spends everywhere else. It's probably 5, 6x more

for them. So what happens is you start appreciating what the country values. For example, I have noticed that many patriarchal societies have very significant market cap in financial services versus consumption. And these broad patterns, you start thinking,

about very, very differently. So many lessons there. I love this idea of a founder being an uncertainty absorber. This other point you made about Zuck becoming the Shiva and destruction touches on something Brian Chesky and I chatted a bit about is how founders often start in control, giving very micromanagey, just driving the ship. And then as the company grows, they delegate and power. And then things start to slow down. And then they come back, play the Shiva and take control again. Is there anything there that you've seen? Yeah, but that's a universe. The universe goes through the exact same phases. So if you study Indian mythology, you'll see that there's

a Brahma, Vishnu Mahesh cycles and every yuk is this gold goes through these three phases all the time. Beautiful. I see. So this is just inevitable. This is the circle of life. Absolutely. Amazing. I love this all just ties back to your philosophy background. I love it. It's beautiful. This episode is brought to you by Dovetail. The customer Insights Hub for product teams. Are you working in a feature factory building filler that nobody wants? Probably, because the sad truth is that most SaaS features are rarely or never used, costing the industry billions every year. Let's change that. Product managers, Dovetail is holding their first industry conference. It's called Insight Out, and they want you to come. Over one day in San Francisco,

the product community is coming together to learn how to better leverage customer insights and build products that people actually love to use. It's on April 11th, and you can hear from product leaders from Uber, Twitch, Meta, and Netflix, as they share their strategies for driving innovation, thriving in uncertainty, and balancing customer-centered work with business needs. And here's the kicker. It's absolutely free for online tickets. Just go to dovetail.com slash Lenny to register. This is thanks to Dovetail, the best way for product teams to get the most out of customer insights. Check it out at dovetail.com slash Lenny. Okay, so on cred.

So here's a funny thing that happened. I ask people on Twitter what questions to ask you on this podcast. And one of the most common questions was, when do you think you'll become profitable? Which is interesting because when I have other CEOs that are founding a company that is, and most companies aren't yet profitable, nobody's asking that question. So I'm just curious why is that such a common question that comes up? It's fascinating.

It's fascinating. as a country, most businesses were of trading. You buy something at low cost, sell at a higher price, and you make profit. Most of our businesses, most of our family businesses were trading, right? But building a KAPX heavy distribution, monetizing it later on, focusing on high revenue growth rate versus trying to get profitability first, is not known to us, right? So when they see these large numbers of losses,

there's a shock that why would somebody give you this kind of money? And then by the way, my own dad wouldn't respect me till I was a profitable company. So it's not surprising that people in India have these comments. But it also comes from not understanding how businesses are built in Internet world where VCs are giving you the capital to kind of build distribution, unique product, edge, brand, all of that stuff. and then monetize later on and monetize big

and then have very large profit pools to go after. But a lot of times this comes from not understanding this business. And I feel it'll change because many internet companies are now getting very profitable, public listed. So we'll have a decade. Let's understand one thing. In the US, maybe 27, 30% of US market cap is now tech companies. India tech companies would probably make less than 2, 3% of the market cap.

So we are mostly, and I'm not saying India has this fabulous history of building very, very profitable tech companies. We are probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies. But we are still figuring out what this means. And the fact that this question, by the other, I can tell you one thing, that I have been asked this question by people on Twitter, way more than any of my investors ever asked me this question, which also creates an arbitrage for entrepreneurs who can actually build businesses and ability to raise capital and improve their business model with very revenue,

high revenue growth rate and build large brands and so on and so forth. But I find it fascinating as well. Also, one thing you'll see fascinating in India is that there is like immense amount of trolling and doubt that will come in your comments, no matter what you do. So if you see any founders, in India, they'll post something about the thing. The comments will rarely

have appreciation. So, it feels sad because when you see global companies do stuff, like India will lose their shit on Apple Vision Pro and all the stuff and like the Twitter will go Gaga over it, but I think when it comes to, and I believe

envy is hyper-local. We do not envy Elon Musk for all the stuff he does because he's so far away. But we envy our own because they were just like us not many years ago. And therefore, envy is like Wi-Fi. It's like a hyperlocal service.

How do you stay positive and focused and not let that stuff bring you down? And do you have advice for founders in India that are dealing with the same sort of feedback? It's funny. The number of calls I've got from founders to start getting hit and the go-to-person to get this call because they've seen. we get it for many more years. And I tell people that we couldn't have made it this far if we cared about criticism of everybody versus people who've done better than us. If somebody who's done anything better than me gives me any amount of criticism, I will absolutely flip and make all the changes and evolve. And I seek feedback all the time from people. But if I start

taking feedback from everybody who do not understand and nuance and empathize with what I'm doing. I'm not saying that we should not take customers feedback. That's very different. But let's say somebody commenting about your business who does not understand the nuance of it, you can't be reacting to everything. And I often tell people that,

no, there's a reason elements with lower valencies are called noble gases because they're the hardest to get reactions from. That's over my head, but I love it anyway. it's so interesting. I love all these elements you're pointing out of how different building in India is that I think people in the U.S. have no idea about. And so I appreciate you getting into all these little elements.

Is there anything else around the Indian market that may surprise people before we go in a different direction about building a startup there? For all the challenges, India remains the most promising market that one can be building for right now because everything is going our way. We have all sorts of digital public infrastructure, government support. all these great people doing extraordinary things, apart from the Twitter noise. And Twitter is designed for outrage getting likes.

So I wouldn't read too much into it. But I think all of us are doing well because we have an audience set, an evolved ecosystem that is fully supporting us and really taking it forward. So I think I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building because of this extremely vibrant, a crazy opportunity that one can learn from.

However, I wish, I often wish that, I wish I could get a one month internship with Brian and learn how to do things. And I've never had the luxury. I can only watch his podcast with you to learn a few things. But what if I got a chance to be there? And I missed that part that I've never been really trained by these extraordinary product brains or even observe them, make decisions.

So I recently posted one thing that, you know, the word operation theater comes because operating used to be a public process and people used to pay money to watch surgeries and see all the bloody, gory stuff, and even before anesthesia's was born. And there's so much joy in

seeing somebody do their action. And I wish there was theater for Brian take a product decision, take a hard call on killing a product or seeing Tim rejecting all the ideas that they have to

before the GTM of a product. I think we could benefit so much from that. And unfortunately, it remains in very small circles. And like I said, the reason I said, you do a fabulous job of removing some of the information asymmetry and kind of making it more democratic. But there is so much more that we all could learn. And I feel extremely envious to many people who have the opportunity

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

Those are probably some takeaways that will emerge. Kind of along these lines, something that comes up. a lot in your talks and work is curiosity. Yeah. You have a show called credit curiosity. You often talk about the power of curiosity. I'm just curious why is curiosity so important to you and why is it important for other people to always stay curious and what value is there? I think a curious person is somebody who is constantly demonstrating that they are not proud of their expertise.

and they will demonstrate extraordinary amount of excitement when they face a problem which they have no clue how to solve. And therefore, a lot of people stop growing because they want to constantly demonstrate their expertise

versus demonstrate their curiosity. Right? Because curiosity should come from security because imagine I was in a, I'm the founder, CEO of this company and this group of 60 people on WhatsApp, somebody posts something. and ask a dumb question, what does this word mean?

You need to have the security to feel okay with it, but a lot of people out of insecurities try to demonstrate expertise and do it or Google not ask these people. I think that slows down the compounding growth. And I think it keeps you very good at adapting. Right. So it's funny, I was recently, GPT is my favorite thing to keep asking random questions

because now I don't need to really worry about Google having those questions answered or not because I can ask this to GPD. So I recently asked the question that which animals have managed to survive, which species or animals have survived for more than 100 million years without changing too much? And what is common in all of them? So GPD came out of the interesting answers which says that it sharks, like horseshoe crab, like crocodiles and all of these people have survived to do this thing. So three distinct traits were one, a bird. ability to reduce metabolism at will. It's fascinating. I can bring down my metabolism by 20%,

like one to 20 or like crazy, crazy scale they can bring the metabolism down. The second one is, by the way, a lot of, in ancient yogis have demonstrated this as well. It comes from the same yogic practice. The second thing is about, and if you think in company's context is the same, if COVID came, did you could you slow down your metabolism and survive? Right? Or you burnt your way out of the and disappeared.

The second thing that was interesting was very high conversion rate on every attempt to secure food. Right? They don't go around chasing randomly and doing things. They have a very high conversion rate which means high judgment and the deadliest bite. So they will not chase many options, but if they chase something, they will have the biggest bite on it and they'll convert it. And the third thing that was more interesting one was

they have survived all sorts of crazy environmental changes. Just adapting. And adaptation comes from curiosity. Right? And you could see those people. In COVID, there were two sets of people who were completely gone into shell and they were like who were like this curious, like, okay, so what do I do with this?

Like, what happens now? Like, do I need to train something? we need to treat something. So ability to change very quickly. So I often feel that curiosity is that demonstration to adapt and learn. And you only create more information asymmetry. To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry. All the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry.

And that comes from curiosity because you're constantly collecting dots. connecting dots, collecting dots, connecting dots, and end up creating this unique edge for yourself and information asymmetry for yourself. And if you assume that I have collected enough, I mean, no human life is going to be enough to connect and connect all the dots. We'll never be able to get. And sometimes I envy the stuff that you do because you are efficiently connecting

and collecting dots by having luxury of all these people. people to talk to and you are making more dots getting connected. So your information in symmetry is growing. Wait until you IPO and then someday maybe leave credit and then you could start this podcast of your own like this and connect all the dots. And I think that's a reference to Danny Meyer, who's the founder of all these fancy restaurants and big on hospitality. And as his phrase, always be collecting dots, I think ABCD.

Nice. I would like to that. Yeah. Okay, wait, this is really interesting, this list of what are the comprehensive. of the most long-lasting animals. They can lower their metabolism at will. They have a high conversion rate to get food, and they've survived many types of environments,

and I think there's a lot you can transform as you've done to startups and leaders. This could be its own. If you haven't written about this, this would be a cool blog post. I'm curious who you look up to in business, either in India and outside India. Who comes to mind? You were like, I really inspired and inspired by these folks.

I often tell people that I hate the word favorite because it tells me to become limited in my mind. So I stay away from being favorite. But I learn all the time from everybody and there are so many people to learn across the world. And in history, in recent past, and every time you will discover fascinating, extraordinary things about them. So I don't think I have a person. I am this person about how did they solve this hard problem. So one of the things that we started doing recently and not very ritualistic about it so far is I ask myself and my key reporters every month. We go around the table and ask ourselves, what are the hardest problem we solved last month?

And it's very hard to come up with an answer. and if you do this to the product leaders, just go around and ask what was the hard problem you solved last month, you will realize that we all stay very busy and displacement is hard. But if you notice extraordinarily successful people, they'll have a lot more content to talk about

every month, every quarter, because they are obsessed about making that big displacement. And does not come by being busy and that's another thing where you cannot chase the big thing you don't see a crocodile being busy you see a crocodile just waiting patiently at the watering hole for that best meal and have the deadliest bite for that so the beautiful destination of predators I read was

the one who burns the least amount of calories to earn the most amount of calories so how do you become that and I think when I meet people who are extraordinary at that and it comes in all shapes and forms. I learned something from them. So in these meetings you have, are you judging people's success based on how many hard problems they solve? Now that they've heard this,

they're going to be like, I need more. Because if you're senior, what is the role of a senior person? You have to be the chief problem solver. I love that. I often think of leaders as professional firefighters are just endless fire to put out.

Kind of along the lines of people and where you learn from, is there any sources of content? This is actually an audience question on Twitter. Anurag Verma asked this. What are your favorite sources of content to learn from in terms of what's happening in the world and what to pay attention to? I wish I could think of an answer.

My method of collecting information is mostly about I come up with conjectures in my head and then I go all over the place to find out if there are proofs of what I'm saying is true. or not. For example, I recently came up the conjecture that everybody who's been successful in the history of business of vices have historically done a lot of philanthropy to create a good image for themselves and therefore being treated as a respected citizen versus being treated as a person who did vices

to make wealth. And then I asked this to GPD and GPD came up with like 50 people who did what and what were the devices, how did they change the reputation by doing lots of philanthropy and all of that stuff. And then a thing happens. And then I research in all sorts of directions. And I have no boundaries to, if I go to chemistry or physics or a human behavior to some universal principles. So my method of learning is constantly come up with conjectures from the dots that you have connected. And then absolutely work hard to find proof of it. and then use that to connect to the next thought.

So I often tell people that everything that you, every book you read makes your brain porous to read the next book. That's the purpose of books. But that's true for every single thing we learn. It makes our brain more porous for the next thing that we are supposed to go on. Is there a recent example of that where you got super sucked into some topic? Well, it's my daily life. I get sucked into topics every now and then.

For example, I've been thinking about second-order effects of AI and what happens to countries and jobs and how to expect some of these things change, not change, rate of change, rate of skill change. I got recently obsessed with what happens to lap-grown diamonds. If they become big, does it kill diamond? Does it make diamonds bigger? And then I looked at parallels. So pearl industry was very big before cultured pearls came and the high status of pearls disappeared because everybody could have pearls. But not too long ago, pearls was to be a very royal thing.

Every prince and princesses used to have pearls around them. But as soon as it was easy to manufacture in a lab, it lost its value. So then should I be shorting or going long on diamonds, about what happens. But there'll be a temporary period of making a lot of money on lab-grown diamonds, which will kill, it will become parasitic on the status of diamonds and destroy all its profit pools. You heard of your first time to buy some diamond futures. I feel like there's no one in the world chat GPT impacted more than you considering how much you want to spend digging into random topics. I often wonder, Lenny, that if you took the most serious people and made their GPD search,

is public. A lot of people will learn because the problem of GPT is now, it will make the people with great questions do well versus people who are looking for basic answers. So I think the world is going to be unfair to people who are going to ask great questions. Interesting. Okay, well, I got to ask you, is there any advice you have for asking great questions that has helped you in your work and career and life? Whenever somebody has many choices and they make the right choice in whatever domain they have. For example, let's say you could hire anybody, but you hired great people. Or let's say you could marry anybody, but you married a great person,

and so on and so. Everybody was many choices to make. How do they make choices for that domain of expertise? And I think that is the most, and many times, they cannot be, they'll not be able to explain how they make great choices. So you really go in into that, because they don't really have their mental models. figured out. They cannot articulate, they cannot coach, they cannot explain. But

if you can figure out a way how they make great decisions in general, in whatever domain of work that they are doing, you'll find many interesting insights coming over there. The other good questions to ask is about second order of thinking. What do they think will happen

to the world? And why did they come to that conclusion? And you see their full chain of thoughts is very powerful. For example, second order thinking is known to be the most powerful trait to predict success of somebody. But I often

wonder what happened in childhood of people who became great at second order of thinking. And that question is not fully discovered or discussed yet. And I have found some loose examples of, did you play strategy games or only physical games?

As a strong correlation to building. So rigor came from physical games, but second order of thinking came from playing strategy games as a kid. And if you had both, you could do really well in general because you have a discipline and second round of thinking together. Then did you ever have an exercise on looking at history? For example, one of the things I recommend to parents to do with their kids, I call it the Wi-Fi school, is ask them one why question every meal and let them come back with the answers next day.

For example, why do humans well jewelry and why is something in a certain way and let them go into the full depth of history and find out. Why is it so expensive to advertise on Super Bowl? And so on and so forth. You just take one question. And if you train them on why, they evolve at a very different rate because how, what are the questions which do not evolve at you at a much higher rate? because why is the deep question? And it breaks a lot of things in your head. Or another question about origin stories.

How did elevators come into being and what made your phones happen? What made microphones happen? Why is it called microphone? And why is it called a phone? And if you just want to go into this depth, you see people kind of build second order thinking automatically because either you go in history and see second order thinking

coming along with that, or you play games that train your brain for second order thinking with the spectrum. But that's broad range of things that I think people should be asking. I'm looking forward to a Kuhnal, children's raising book, like a book to help you raise kids. This could be your future. I don't have kids, so I can run experiments on everybody else's kids. So it's a great thing to do.

I feel like with these questions, I think the rule has to be you can't just ask Chat GPT for the answer. Actually, it's not bad. I think you should encourage it because we have to assume that we are going to be all co-pilots of AI now. What you have to do is derive the second order inside that, okay, if this is true, where is the similarity of this in somewhere else? Like, give me an example of this found somewhere else, and so on and so forth. Amazing. Okay, I have just a couple more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

First, let's visit Contrarian Corner. I'm curious what's something that you believe that very few other people would agree with you on, and why do you hold that belief? Our understanding of wealth is flawed and what wealth is. To me, wealth is nothing but storage of energy. And therefore, the reason wealth is not zero sum because energy is, and we are just finding all ways to convert energy in our advantage. Yet the only species that have managed to convert all forms of energy to our advantage,

kinetic energy and fuel, sound and solar, no other species has done this. And therefore, since industrial revolution, our wealth has gone like this and continue to be like that AI and nuclear fission and all the stuff will kind of take us right there. So I have a strong view that we will never, never have equality of wealth. In fact, chasing that is actually a bad idea. But if you let people do well and chase wealth, they'll have enough wealth for everybody else. And we could take a lot of people out. And I think it's complicated because we can have all this democratic government.

arguments that, oh, the wealth is concentrated and all that. But that's the physics of wealth. It'll always be concentrated. It changes mediums, companies, countries. They're all, to me, wealth is not about an entropical complexity. That will keep changing its form and shape. You can keep fighting it or accept physics and take the benefit of that physics. I think of Elon had this interesting point that wealth is just a database where everyone's wealth, I guess, is just a row in the database, and here's how much everyone has. And you're just transferring numbers around, and that's the whole economy. No, but the more that is important is that you can actually increase the database size infinitely.

That's true. And therefore, his vision of Sun's energy, like if you really convert all the energy to our advantage, the amount of wealth will create for humans is disproportionate. And all the species that have managed to collaborate and cooperate to create wealth, For example, let's define wealth as biomass. So let's say ants and bacteria and humans are the only few things that have the largest biomass on this planet because we forgot out how to make energy work to our advantage. Wow.

I love all the directions we've gone. Probably the last question. Is there a story of failure in your career that would be interesting to share, something that taught you an important lesson? It's just a series of failures. I think there's no escape for anybody who's been anything in life, not failed a lot, like every day, every thing. But I would say that many initiatives, many products, companies that have built, have absolutely failed, hiring that have failed,

trust-broken, betrayals. So I think there is no end to it. But I think entrepreneurs have this weird, ability to forget about failures and almost turn that into a lesson

that you hold and you forget the story and like for example COVID is literally no memory for me. I just don't remember what was cruel. It's just a blank in my head right now and I think humans are great at forgetting

the memory of failure but remember the lesson from failure but I think I'm constantly learning and I often believe that life is too short to make all our mistakes ourselves so we should be learning from other people's failures as well and a lot of times we don't do that because we believe that we are special

nothing like that will happen to us but as humans we should be learning I would say that my life started from a failure my family went through severe financial crisis I would start working from age 15 and I feel till date, I'm just trying to escape that failure that happened in the family.

So I think many of us are just fighting that initial large failure that we've had and don't want to be anywhere near that. Although we are significantly far away from that, but the feeling is exactly that. Circles back to whenever first few questions about the chips on shoulders driving a lot of motivation. There's this phrase, chips on shoulders drive chips in pockets. That's interesting. Yeah. Is there anything more you want to share about that early challenge you went into?

Or is that something you've shared often? No, I mean, I've shared not enough, but I just feel I should not talk about it before because I think that I would get some sympathy for that. And I only till like recent past I speak about it because I want people to realize that I was not some gifted kid who had some rich parents who made me extraordinarily bright and put me in great school and colleges and I made my way through that. I should start talking about earlier because

there's a lot of tendency to give sympathy to those people that, oh, this guy has struggled. And I don't want to be given any credit for playing that poverty card or this card or struggling for food card.

That's not an excuse. There are so many people in the who've done extraordinarily well because they had the gift of struggle. And I often tell people that this is the biggest curse of successful parents, that that's the only gift they'll not be able to give to their kids, the gift of struggle that they had. Wow. I think about that a lot.

We have a kid. He's eight months now, and so I'm trying to figure out the balance of struggle versus making life easy and great. A new challenge for me to figure out. Before we get to a very exciting lightning around, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with anything, any last nuggets of thoughts? Well, I would love for the listeners from different fields of product is that

please share what you're learning without being fearing judgment of your peers because there are many, many people who are learning only because you share your evolution and your thoughts. And I believe that a lot more could be contributing and a lot of your listeners are really bright people. if they all shared many people from many places in the world would learn and achieve some amount of success, thanks to your sharing. Amazing. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Are you ready? All set. Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? It keeps changing a lot, but my books are usually around understanding human behavior. and I keep changing based on the person, but I think it's the biggest subject, all our customers, all our investors,

all our employees, all our relationships are all humans, and the subject that we are weakest on is human behavior. How do we live this life? We are playing life on extremely hard mode if you don't learn human behavior. So I would say that's one thing. The second thing, evolutionary biology, we teach a lot about how species evolve

and how do they make decisions and what are the core motivations that drive everybody So that's another one I would recommend. And I don't want to make recommendations because I can barely finish a book to be honest. So I believe in drifting and going deeper into topics. So I understand the topics versus trying to say, give me these three books and I'm going to be good. And the last one I would say is that anything that can make you learn something about their journey versus their success. Right.

So sometimes autobiographies are too celebratory in some ways. But if you can just kind of understand how they, how did they, if any book can teach you how people recovered from a setback in great detail is a great book to learn from. An audience member on Twitter actually asked a similar question along these lines. If there's one book that you could read over and over and over, what would that be? Is there one? I absolutely don't believe in reading over and over because I believe that we are evolving things. You might discover the same stuff coming from different books, and you will say, oh, I can categorize this in my brain again and again.

But I think we should, we tend to become believers in, it becomes too religious if you repeat. Yeah. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? I love Oppenheimer because of these struggles and Nolan's craft of making the movies, but nothing in the recent past that I feel is right up there. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing? I like to ask a hypothetical second order of thinking question. For example, if everybody, who has taken a COVID vaccine dies tonight,

what happens in 12 months from now? Can you explain the world from what happens to money, what happens to law, what happens to countries, what happens to military, what happens to stock market, what happens to order of things? And I would say less than 10% of really smart people

can really have good answers. So it tells you how good they are in second order thinking. But the questions can keep changing. For example, if we said that what if arranged marriages were banned in India, got capital punishment for doing arranged marriages? What happens to the country? How do we change from there? Like some absurd scenarios, but then what happens after that?

Not to give away your secret sauce, but what do you look for in an answer that gives you a sense there? A range of things that they could go into and think about if this happens, B happens, and then C happens. like the leaves they could make. And just so people understand when you're talking about second order thinking, what's the simplest way to describe that concept? I think the simplest way to think about this is that being able to correctly judge

the butterfly effect of an event in as close as possible. For example, okay, like a lot of people in stock market use that to say, which stocks will go up and down? Like, there's something that has happened in the market. oh, there is a war now with Russia, then what happens to the market? Like, can you be good at predicting that? But in everything in life, like, if this happens. And a lot of people hate this because it's very taxing to the brain.

Brain absolutely hates second order to thinking, unless you've trained your brain with second order of thinking all the time that it looks forward to it. So you have to convert this into a hate versus a reward cycle, and that comes with probably doing it probably early on in your life. Later on, people hate doing second order to thinking. It is, yes, that sounds like a lot of work for the brain. Okay, just a few more questions. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love?

I'm looking forward for my vision pro that is coming soon. It's a future, future favorite product. We have actually Baws for META coming on as the next guest in my recording. I'm not sure when they come out in sequence, but we're going to talk about his thoughts. Yeah. The most fascinating thing that I saw was Zach talking about the utility of meta

being better than Vision Pro and their product. And that's exactly going to work well for Apple because when you try to make the product more utilitarian, it loses status. And if you study animals, you realize that the one which gets the highest making success is the one which can demonstrate ability to waste resources and not be very efficient with resources. And therefore, people who are known to buy a product that is wasteful

will actually earn higher status. And I think Zuck made it actually quite easy for Apple to demonstrate their superior positioning by saying that, oh, we are not as efficient. We are not as cheap. We are not for everybody. Wow. Just continue to blow minds even on our lightning round. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends and family, find useful in work or in life? It's not a favorite motto, but I think we truly are transient and we are very lucky to have this life that we have and we have to make the most out of it. And all these struggles will mean nothing. I often tell people that wish for your life to be so great that you have collected the highest amount of content when you are old, you have no end to the stories that you can talk about.

That reminds me of a book I once read that really had an impact on me where somebody was trying to make a movie of their life and the producer was like, there's nothing, there's no good movie here. You have not done enough interesting things. I love it. And so he actually became, he turned his lens into what to do in life by thinking what would make a great, story. And so you just started to do, and a great story is something where you overcome challenges and achieve something you wanted. And so that became his life mottoes. I'm going to try hard things and overcome them. And that's going to be my life. I love it. I love it. I love it. I'll link to that book in the show notes. Final question. You have this series on Twitter that you call Monday Motivations.

I'm curious what's motivating you these days. I find interest filled with all these people trying to give this fake motivation and make money of that stuff and it's almost like a drug for people to feel oh my God, there's motivation I'm going to do well. I just want to remind people that all success come from extraordinary amount of pain and struggle and hard work and there is no shortcut to anything material coming in life.

And so the Mandavish Motivation Post comes as the anti-motivation post because the world is filled with I believe that the biggest profit-making scheme that I've seen in recent times is to tell people to love themselves and they'll pay you money for saying that. And I think the best way to love yourself is to keep evolving. So my motivation comes from evolution, connecting dots, solving harder problems and I've solved in the past. And I think life is ultimately a game that you want to feel that your levels have changed and your skills have changed constantly. Kunal, you are wonderful. Thank you so much for being here.

Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and follow up on some of this stuff? And how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me on social media. I look for Konal Shah. You'll find me everywhere. I usually have different percentage on each social media. And in terms of being helpful, keep tagging me on interesting things that you discover

that gave you that moment of, oh my God, I did not know this. I would love that. Amazing. Kurnal, again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.