Can Ola Maps Dethrone Google Maps in India? | Roundup #159 | The Startup Operator

[00:00:00] Good job! You know what's the most expensive ship in the world? What? Friendship. Think about it! This spent a lot of time and I've heard on money on the thing. We also miss Roundups once in a while,

[00:00:14] but anyway good to be back. Hello and welcome to The Startup Operator Roundup, I'm Russian Carrier, and I'm Gwingen Saha and together we break down the biggest update from India's growing startup ecosystem.

[00:00:26] If this is the first time you're tuning into the channel then please consider subscribing to it for everything good related to startups and bad jokes also. And some bad jokes also as you just noticed. And if we're first time in this now we don't just do bad jokes,

[00:00:40] I mean once in a while but stay with us right till the end of this episode and if you like it then please like this video and subscribe to it. We miss the Roundup last week, but we are some really interesting updates for you.

[00:00:52] Starting off with Karnataka's new job reservation bill and then the end-in government also pass a union budget this week. So we're talking about the key highlights of that. Last week we also saw one of the biggest trends on Twitter about the Microsoft Blue screen of death.

[00:01:11] And a very own owner is taking the fight to the big dogs like Google. Yeah. WasriRex also got hacked last week and the lost over $235 million. And India has gifted the world its first CNG Motobike, all thanks to Bajaj Auto.

[00:01:29] These things aside, Kred has launched a new product in the suite called Kred Money and Sviggy has successfully executed another eSoph by-back program before going public. So a lot of exciting topics to discuss this week. Let's get started.

[00:01:52] It's a bit of sweet thing. I've lost about 60 grand, I think in one day. Yeah. But it is still on my trip to. And it would add a pull it out but then it had to, you know, that's what she was at. It was terrible jokes.

[00:02:07] But yeah, I mean I had to do a P2P transaction and so on and so forth. I mean it was just two tedious. I've left it there. I'm hoping that at least a part of that is still there after the $235 million swing bill.

[00:02:21] But yeah, a bit of sweet because we know of you Sviggy folks. Hopefully you know. Hopefully. Yet they'll never call us. Yeah. Except for the delivery guys. What? Like seriously. So many eSoph by-backs and not even one party guys, something this sucks.

[00:02:36] So please change that. If you're listening to this podcast and you are a Sviggy person, and not a delivery guy but hey who knows something? Yeah, a delivery guy also. Yeah. Give us a brian at least. Come on. Right?

[00:02:47] So, all right. Let's get started. I think it's pretty eventful this week. Yeah. Oh yeah. Apart from all the shenanigans we're seeing in the US, we have some our own drama happening in India. Let's start off with Karnataka's new job reservation bill.

[00:03:03] Now according to this bill which has now been kept on hold, it was said that around 75% of all jobs should be reserved for Karnataka's and 100% of all grades and grade D staff should be Karnataka's. Right? This received a lot of backlash across all social media platforms.

[00:03:23] What is your take on it? I mean you have been born and brought up in Bangladesh. Yeah, of course I'm a proud Karnataka. Look I mean I get it. I know that there are displaced people in any growing metropolitain city

[00:03:40] as Bangur has been. I mean Bangur has been on this hypergrowth path for the last 20-25 years and there are people who feel that they need to be a stake in the growth and they're not quite having it at this point.

[00:03:55] Right? Things have gotten expensive, jobs are scarce for those folks. They have to compete with people from everywhere, right? Not just from the north. I mean from other parts in the south as well. But this is what it is like for any city that is prominent.

[00:04:13] I mean you look at SF or London or Singapore or Singapore is a speed state, but still right? I mean you have people coming in and competing for resources well than whatnot.

[00:04:22] But I think the way to solve this is to look at the other end of the spectrum, right? I mean instead of looking at jobs, I would really look at education and skilling and so on. And to that end, the budget has been fantastic.

[00:04:35] We'll talk about that when we discuss that segment. But otherwise on the reservation side, I mean it's observed. So first thing is this is not new. Every few years some government or the other decides that they need a reservation in the private sector.

[00:04:52] Right? They moved this and it's almost never passed. Right? Also I don't think it's constitutional as well. I think most likely the court should strike it down even if it is passed in some way. Right? The second thing is it is absolutely impossible to implement as well.

[00:05:09] Right? I mean it has things like 50% of the management has to be from the state itself. Now as a proud candidate, I can say that we have produced fantastic tech folks, business folks who have competed at the highest level without requiring any such reservations.

[00:05:25] But even we will not be able to fill that quota. So it's almost impossible to implement. And look, the third thing is, you know I mean you will just scare the folks from investing in this place. Right? Let's face it.

[00:05:40] You know Bangalore has been made by all of these folks coming in and ploring in money, right and building infrastructure and so on and so forth. So the second and third order impact of this has not been entirely negative.

[00:05:52] I mean if you look at the gig economy that has opened up, right? I mean so many of these folks have come in from you know, Hassan, North Cannotka etc. and have become drivers here and delivery folks and so on and so forth earning 20-25K month

[00:06:09] which would have been like a rich person's wage in the village that they were living in. Right? I mean all of these folks have gotten employment. I think the idea should be to enlarge this by, right?

[00:06:22] Rather than like try to divide it among you know who are is here. That's not the right way to look at it. I feel some endmigam of phone pay.

[00:06:30] I mean express his views pretty strongly on Twitter and then he had some blowback and so on and so forth. Yeah? I mean look any city changes and I will be the first to confess that Bangalore

[00:06:43] who doesn't at all resemble the Bangalore that I grew up in. Right? At the time I grew up in it was her pensioners paradise. Right? There were wide roads, very scarce traffic and yeah, I mean you could speak Canada pretty much everywhere.

[00:06:57] Right? Today I mean if I go to Ganesh Juus Center, I mean he will still say Mango Chaiya. So it is different. I mean it's difficult to cope you know.

[00:07:08] While I see the economics, one-on argument of you know this is the wrong thing to do via reservations and so on and so forth. I also see the sort of emotional side to this that you know the city has changed beyond recognition right?

[00:07:23] But the way to fix it is not through that for sure. Yeah? But do you think this is like the government actually trying to manage the deterioration of infrastructure because with the growth in population infrastructure is crumbling right?

[00:07:39] And this is not the first time that the state government is taking steps to you know do something exclusive for Canada because for example there was a law which again got table I think few months back where you are too

[00:07:52] declared the number of Canada workers working in the company. Then most even more recently another law is being discussed where about 14 hour working 14 hour work days is ridiculous.

[00:08:05] None of this will ever come into effect right? I mean it's very hair brand I mean if I may say so. Right? Look coming roads benefit everyone right? Not just Canada's right?

[00:08:15] I mean we've just seen the silk board flyover and it's made my life a lot better you know in the mornings.

[00:08:21] So I will buy the population growth is untenable argument if you're saying that we are building you know one flower every four years or three years and two years And it's not even still then you know we're not able to keep pace right?

[00:08:36] But when things take you know ten years 12 years and so on right? I mean that's that's no argument at all right? And it used to be for us that the state and the central government were always different parties

[00:08:50] But I mean we did have you know BJP at the center BJP at the state and we did see some funds come into you know the state as well But the next day to open up yeah exactly.

[00:09:01] Meadows did open up and folks in whitefield can't stop raving about it Right? The fact that we can get to in the run again in 30 minutes and so on

[00:09:08] So it's a solvable problem right I mean any other city elsewhere in the world has had to see these kind of problems And they've solved it through world class infrastructure right? They're not solved it through reservations

[00:09:20] And if you really want the demographic dividend in the state to benefit from schemes then I would say launch education skilling employment schemes Right? See we have largely for the longest period. We've just outsourced all of this skilling to industry

[00:09:36] Right today I mean we assume that a person graduating from engineering college knows how to read right and perhaps think That's about it. That's the level at which we assume right? And I mean infos is famously pioneered this 20 years back

[00:09:53] I mean they put these people at their mice who are center and literally made them you know do all of the stuff you do engineering

[00:10:00] Exactly in three to six months and get them industry ready right and and the industry at large has kind of adopted that model in varying proportions

[00:10:08] Right? Why don't we make industry ready people right? Why not that why not for the longest time I've been saying that we need to have the Well ITI kind of manufacturing specialized skill learning centers Really again, I mean with the focus on manufacturing again from the central

[00:10:27] Government we could definitely gain on that front as well But instead I mean we haven't done any of those things right and you look at how Telangana is moving You look at how Gujarat is moving Right? You look at how Marastra is also again punching

[00:10:42] About it's weight in the last like maybe like four years or so right? I mean everyone's trying to gain more industry And so on whereas we are sending the opposite signals here. So yeah, we'll be interesting to hear from you know the founders

[00:10:54] We have on the podcast as you want to what they think about this Okay, so that's what's happening in the state of Connecticut now let's shift our focus on the national level The union budget was also announced a few days back

[00:11:06] And here are the key takeaways for startup on the latest budget Starting off with the biggest highlight was the ballician of Injale Tax The government has abolished all Injale Tax on all classes of investors to boost the startup ecosystem

[00:11:20] A thousand crore venture capital fund will also be set up for investments in the space economy Public private partnerships for e-commerce export hubs will be established to facilitate access to international markets And this will vary very well benefit the MSM is and traditional artisan in India

[00:11:38] Rules for everyday have also been simplified to facilitate their inflow and promote user rupees for overseas investments The tedious rate on e-commerce operators have also been reduced from 1% to just 0.1%. The corporate taxid for foreign companies have also been cut from 40% to 35%. Capital gains tax have also been simplified

[00:12:01] Short-term gains are reduced to 20% and long-term gains on certain assets are tax at 12.5%. But in the wider public this has not been received very well across social media twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatnot

[00:12:15] It is saying that this budget is again there too, you know, if you make money your tax if you don't make money your tax If you're paying taxes you're still taxed on that See there are only two constants in life, death and taxes

[00:12:27] Right so it's better you accept it right now and worry about all of the stuff that you can do outside of it than You know, you know, kriber about this but anyway, this is like annual outrage it will die don't Right have been seeing this forever

[00:12:42] But see the last point that you mentioned right the LTCG and the short-term capital gain Now Earlier there was a difference between listed assets and unlisted assets right the stock you hold in

[00:12:55] Unlisted entities which is like startups and so on and so forth they have been you know brought on par with listed assets now Right, okay. So as a startup founder as an employee I mean it just got better for you Right

[00:13:07] So maybe you might have to pay the additional 2.5% you know on your you know They stay for you or whatever else publicly treated stop. Yeah, I keep talking about HDFC so much people must think like

[00:13:18] You know, I'm sitting in with the top part and this you and so on and discussing strategy or something But no, but major HDFC fans Did you do that? Hey So But that's the thing right So unlisted assets have been rationalized now

[00:13:37] We will publish an episode or likely it has been published by the time you're listening to it With they went there agarwal who is founder at Dexter capital You know, he had some very interesting thoughts on the budget specifically how it relates to startups

[00:13:53] Definitely check that out. We're publishing perhaps only on our YouTube channel Yeah, and while you're at it do like share and subscribe if you haven't already So in my opinion, I think look the government has done a good job in articulating what their priorities are right

[00:14:09] So far instance if you look at jobs and employment There are three schemes that they've launched right more or less to support this whole employee employer Provident fund right then they've launched this NPS as well national pension system They have given that an upgrade as well

[00:14:28] So these two or three schemes Those are some of the scheme on skill development Correct exactly so all of this is a recognition that yes, we need more jobs and perhaps there has been you know more growth over the last like two three years

[00:14:43] In comparison to the amount of jobs that we need and so on this jobs data is a little dicey We've discussed this earlier because we have such an informal economy So it's hard to see the numbers but still from whatever we can get

[00:14:56] They've realized that and they've incentivized more on the employment and skilling side of things That aside I think angel tax it was long due that it had to go on in their exemptions on top of exemptions being made

[00:15:09] And I'm glad and I think pretty much everyone is relieved right now that there is off the table right? It's been like Like extreme what angel tax is for a listeners so angel tax basically was mooted and I think 2012 right and it was basically to extract

[00:15:27] Fair market value right now this fair market value of assets especially when you're talking about private Unlisted companies is a dicey situation right It is really valued at how much someone will pay for it

[00:15:43] And you can understand you know how much of this is ambiguous and gray area when it comes to start-ups And at very early stages and so on so the government had mooted that you know you have to end up paying taxes on

[00:15:57] Some of these unrealized assets as well But since then I mean there've been various sort of exceptions being made to that over the last I would say 10 12 years Particularly over the last three four years And now that has been taken off the table which is fantastic news anyway

[00:16:14] But overall there's a great of impetus on defense for instance Minerals And a lot of me that you mentioned creating a fund of funds that 1000 crore can go into plenty of other different you know VC funds or whatever else in cubic actual rate of that

[00:16:36] That aspect of it is needs way further defined more clarity is required how that fund is going to be used But I think another big takeaway from the budget announcement was the PLI schemes

[00:16:46] We have seen how PLI schemes have been really beneficial in giving a boost to certain industries like your EV Your energy, your steel exports These things have gained a lot A lot of people seem to think that the budget is basically about tax

[00:17:04] And sure I mean I think taxes one of those primary instruments that the government has in order to generate revenue and so on and so forth But really I mean it is about the economy

[00:17:17] It's about what we decide to focus on where we're growing and so on and so forth So you have to have a sort of a macro view of things We still have this mindset of tax cuts, soaps, reservations, so on and so forth

[00:17:33] I think we will have to think beyond that in terms of how the economy is going to grow And how much value of that we're going to capture People also have this weird sort of a makeup in their head that they're earning 30-40-50 lakhs

[00:17:49] And still consider themselves middle-class India is really poor, guys India has had $2,500 or $3,000 per capita If you do earn 30-40-50 lakhs you are likely in the top 5-10% of the country And there's a whole lot of money that has to go into services for the less privileged

[00:18:09] In that sense you also have to do that You have to spend on those people who are less privileged and fortunate And deprived of basic stuff in life And plus you should also balance your budget and not let your fiscal deficit spiral out of control

[00:18:27] So very, very hard job Okay You've seen over the last three or four years post-COVID Especially how governments everywhere have just recklessly spent money Right? Look at what happening to USR? USR is going to... So, it's a GDP Look at the interest payments, it's ridiculous

[00:18:47] Like ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous Right? So, when you look at all of that It's a hard decision I sometimes think about how If you grew up in a middle-class house And you ask Dad if you could have that cycle or go for dinner

[00:19:06] A couple of days on the chart or something You know, Dad had to decide if he's going to do that or something else And sometimes he took very unpopular decisions Right? But thank God for him that all of us are gainfully occupied Right? And helpful members of society

[00:19:26] So, it's hard Look, I mean, I hate paying taxes I hate paying 30% of whatever else And especially it irritates me when You know, it rains for example And the garage floods Or, you know, I go over these many different Part-holes of various shapes and sizes on the roads

[00:19:47] But I tend to be an optimist I worry about the things I can control And don't spend too much time on all these constraints That are unchangeable Right? Irrespective of Yemen Yeah! Irrespective of governments You will be taxed 100% you will be taxed

[00:20:08] Just think of it as your contribution to the nation's progress And forget about it Really? Forget about it What an optimistic view to look at Yeah! Look, we take shit for granted Man, I'm telling you

[00:20:22] Like if you compare with any of these other thriving cities in the world Whether it's Han Francisco or London When I say thriving, I mean, like prosperous cities I mean, in comparison, we have a great life And if you are quote and quote middle class in India

[00:20:38] Right? Or in Bangladesh Yeah! You can afford all nature of services Right? Drivers, mates, households, cooks Delivery, deliveries, order out You don't have to spend your weekend doing laundry or meal prep Right? Which even folks who are running 100k, 150k in the US 10 to do that Right?

[00:20:58] And you don't do your laundry I mean, I do But then I mean, it's not such a big deal It's not a big deal You can go out Pretty much every day of the night If you want, I mean, every day of the week

[00:21:14] Not every day of the night But there are all these things And somehow, yet somehow, in a country of 1.4 billion people With like wofully short capacity Right? You have They less police people Here than you need You have way less of everything, government, judges, etc.

[00:21:34] Some how this society functions Right? And if you compare statistically also Like the crime is on a relative scale Is on the lower side compared to You know, one of these, I know for a fact that SF and London are like absolute shitholes

[00:21:50] When it comes to crime and so on Right? So these are things that we take for granted But I mean, this is obviously like, you know, Adding to the quality of life Right? I know this is a touchy subject and People's opinions may differ

[00:22:04] But as I said, I am an optimist I tend to look at the glass Half full and also drink it once a while So that's me You know what happened when I was filing my income tax this time Crash to him

[00:22:16] No, I got a notice from the income tax department Saying you are making false claims On your incomes And I'm like, how can that be? Hey, what not that? What shady business is not that? I will be like, crores a rupees They're probably okay find some minor calculation

[00:22:33] But on going through that in detail And talking to people I realized I did not declare crypto Having triptumant you have to file a different form It's ITR See anything the government does not like It'll tax like crazy Right? From crypto to options trading

[00:22:51] To, you know, gaming and so on and so forth Tax is an instrument Basically that is an instrument for a dundab Okay Very few people are enjoying these The way taxes are growing But then you go towards them Let's talk about the blue screen of death

[00:23:10] So it is I thought we should talk about something optimistic But yeah So because of CrowdStrike A lot of windows machines around the world Crashed And to show in the blue screen of death This affected windows users globally Due to a faulty software upgrade from CrowdStrike

[00:23:28] Approximately 8.5 million windows devices were affected But that number represents less than 1% of machines worldwide But the repercussions were pretty huge We saw airlines stop functioning banks stop functioning Then there were interruptions in services like health care as well Right?

[00:23:47] And all of these due to one error on the software side Yeah Sometimes you realize how fragile all our systems are Right? As we get more and more and more digitised Right? You realize that you are becoming as fragile as possible Like if think about COVID

[00:24:09] I don't think it would have affected as many people 20 years back You know, we were less connected then And look I still belong to the generation that had this pretty periodically Right? These kind of hacking and outages and so on And so forth

[00:24:26] We saw that BSOD screen way more than you guys Right? But it's pretty unfortunate I mean CrowdStrike has done Formally well over the last 10 years So they are generating a more 3 billion something in revenue And the CEO is somewhat of a maverick

[00:24:41] I mean he worked in McAfee also And incidentally Around 2007 to the next 10 The previous largest outage It was under his leadership Right? Can I reason some questions? No, it's an unfortunate thing You work in security long enough I mean this is going to happen

[00:24:59] And it's also a sort of thankless job When nothing happens Nobody cares And when something like this happens Obviously all guns are ablaze But strategy had a good piece on this In terms of just how we ship software I mean for me it's

[00:25:16] It's weird that this update was shipped to all computers All at once You know what I mean? Yeah I mean I don't know I mean even for less important things We always backs these Right? So you can But these are like entire airlines, banks, hospitals Yeah because see

[00:25:35] Endpoint security and so on Right? I mean it's at the kernel level So this is very deep I mean it's not like an application or something like that Right? And apparently it was like an alpoint Which is like a 1-1 of like coding

[00:25:47] You know you're throwing like really big words kernel Alpoint this Something I learned in college Did you know my class and I slept up No but suffice to say that it's a very like fundamental Very simple thing that ruined this Right?

[00:26:01] And I don't know how many billions of dollars Birth of you know value was destroyed But yeah I mean it sucks But glad to see that everyone's back And you know enterprises will use this to sort of migrate To the second or third but perhaps in the industry

[00:26:19] Right? And let's see I mean this is pretty regular Keeps happening and I expect that more things will happen Actually I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often To be honest I thought you were an optimist No, which is why I'm optimistic about it

[00:26:31] I mean it happens once a while Yeah, sure You know unless you got on a flight Stranded and so on in which case I mean my sympathies to you Yeah Don't you have enough light being the airport Yeah Yeah All right, let's talk about cruise film

[00:26:47] That is really shaking of Google's monopoly in India So Google has recently announced an India specific pricing for its maps API With up to 70% lower prices on most of their APIs

[00:27:02] Ola, what they are doing is they're introducing a free tier for all of its mapping and location-based APIs To developers allowing up to 5 million API calls per month at no cost Ola is also partnering with WendyC 2 of 3 years of free access to Ola maps

[00:27:18] APS for all startups and small businesses operating on WendyC Here is a chart to show how the pricing for Ola maps come up to And if you compare this with Google You'll see the difference But it was quite ironic that Google pushed this update just 2-3 days after

[00:27:35] Bavish took two LinkedIn and announced this See maps is essentially a monopoly business But let me also see this Ola map services Absolutely is not a choice Yeah I mean I'm trying to book as trying to order food using Ola and that

[00:27:53] That has already integrated with Ola maps It was for me I'm somewhere in North Kannada Hardman Again look we take these things for granted, but it's hard No, absolutely It is hard It was back was I'm telling you people won't rely on it so effectively

[00:28:10] Right even now, sometimes we will discuss in that flyover I'm always confused Whether to go towards the left or take the flyover and so on And it's a simple UX change It's hard, it's really hard But the first version of anything will be like dog shit

[00:28:29] Right and then it gets a little less dog shit And 4-4 and so forth And after 10 years you have a great product right Hopefully you have customers along the way who will tolerate your dog shit releases But map my India is a fantastic example

[00:28:43] They've been acted for 30 years now I feel they had a pretty successful IPO So they are again an indigenous company doing this We definitely need indigenous solutions Because Google Maps pretty much has been like a monopoly business for a long time Right and they definitely need competition

[00:29:01] And guess what? I mean when you don't have competition you control price Right and Google Maps API is expensive It's really expensive I mean we've seen this in the company that we've worked as well Right

[00:29:15] If you're not prudent about you know optimizing your code and so on and so forth Yeah, you can pay up to 180% more than what you should pay Yeah, I mean infinite percent more than what you should be paying for sure Right, I mean there's no death of that

[00:29:30] But it's good to see that there is an alternate in the market for sure And props to Babish as well Yeah, I think do you think it's right to compare Babish to Elon

[00:29:40] Like the Indian Elon further way you know is going his approach to building companies always aggressive Always out there taking the fight and being unfazed by all the critic Yeah, I'm sure he's staying a leaf out of Elon's book for sure

[00:29:54] Right and it's good to have these kind of people man I mean Maverick some in the kinds who you may not truly appreciate Right who will be a little rougher on the edges who will take those wild swings

[00:30:06] Once in a while they do things that completely transform humanity I'm so sure you don't have to want five man Yeah, it is the tea But but it's good Elon again is such an outlier Right, I mean I was watching this podcast with the pedothial and

[00:30:32] Pedothial says that at the time Elon pitched SpaceX he thought it was completely nuts Right and imagine Peter and Elon have worked together for a while right at pay I mean not the best relationships

[00:30:48] But you know someone who is works so closely with you can think that about that kind of idea I mean and Pedothial is like a super smart chap Right, I mean perhaps the one of the smartest investors in the world today

[00:31:03] It was such a preposterous idea, it's SpaceX and think of new relink Think of any of these things Tesla or solar city And there was some other yeah, etc Talk about boring and there was a wild idea to construct tunnels It's insane

[00:31:20] It's insane. I mean imagine going and telling people you want to populate Mars It sounds like a observed idea even now But it's getting less observed every year So you need people doing this and while it is not at the level of okay

[00:31:35] We'll populate Mars but saying that he definitely need an alternate for Google Maps It's important saying that we definitely need an Indian alternate for AWS Or Microsoft Azure and so on is definitely important

[00:31:49] You know maybe not be at that scale, but at some scale it is definitely important Right and we need to have more entrepreneurs take these large While they consequential bets I feel Okay, let's talk about Vasi decks They got hatch last week and lost over $235 million

[00:32:08] Along with my 60,000 bucks Really? Like he lost money Look, I mean I have pretty much considered it lost I mean I'm not able to transact so Oh, middle class Yeah, if this Okay anyway this hacking was attributed to a North Korean hacking organization called LASIS Group

[00:32:28] Though nothing concrete has been proven yet But one question which I want to raise over here right when crypto currency was all the boom In 2021 and that time It said that this is unhackable, it's the most secure You know form of technology blockchain And I did some research

[00:32:45] And what I came across is that yes It is unhackable, it is code protected And difficult to crack through it But the hacking happens on the wallet level which is a hardware And on the human level through like fishing and whatnot See no technology is unhackable Okay

[00:33:05] You will have to pretty much You know develop a machine at your house And be the one person who's using it So only for your own whatever purposes To, you know, not be hacked Anything connected to a network can be hacked for sure Right

[00:33:22] But man exchanges, exchanges, guard I think the trust deficit is at an all time low at this point of time The trust is at an all time low Right I mean we've seen one after another how these have imploded

[00:33:35] From FTX to Binance to you know some of our Indian guys I mean it's tough Look, it's really tough And I think over the last couple of years The really serious folks are you know people who are still investing in crypto

[00:33:48] I want to call wallet and stuff like that So they made their own arrangements No one is really No one serious is really relying on you know exchanges as such It's tough With a lot of other applications being built on top of web 3

[00:34:05] And crypto for example and I know this person of Tranove Arabati He is the founder of this company called Station X That does crowdsourcing through crypto for you know start up See for the longest time I've said that blockchain Right As a technology is awesome Yeah Right

[00:34:22] We have to develop real world use cases for that Beyond what you know we saw over the last like four years Right which is your doge coin and stop right Create a coin put in an XEA I mean we'll have to develop real use cases for this

[00:34:37] The Marasra government was issuing I think cost certificates or something on that I mean they had a pilot going I mean they're not They're not on the wrong They did land land records

[00:34:49] Yeah land records again right I mean if you look at the cases outstanding in front of the Coats today I would hazard the gas and say 20-25% are all land related Right maybe more And you know we just spoke about the famously short state capacity

[00:35:06] If there is a blockchain solution to help with that That'll be amazing Amazing Right So I really hope that you know folks develop more in order with solutions on blockchain Yeah Talking about innovative solutions Bajaj auto is taking a step towards a more greener sustainable world

[00:35:25] They launched the world's first CNG to Wheeler called Bajaj Freedom 125 It is positioned to cater to price conscious customers It is expected to lower the running cost of a 2-wheel by almost 50% There are few challenges which EV faced and like why it is not as popular

[00:35:43] As you know we thought it would be all that's growing It's because of high upfront costs and Dreaming ZIT and a lack of charging infrastructure And I think CNG is going to CNG 2 we let's could just fill in that spot

[00:35:57] You know be the transition it is because we do have substantial CNG infrastructure across the country Thanks to public transports And well CNG also gives you good mileage compared to petrol and electric See I think it can at least be a halfway solution to the end utopia Right

[00:36:18] If you ask Elon I mean he considers his Tesla cars as robots Right robots that serve a purpose I am not sure that vision can be realized on CNG Okay Ultimately I think your bike or car or any automobile is going to become like one software

[00:36:38] Upgrade away from doing things very differently than the previous version Right now I think I came across an ad by Audi Right where through a software upgrade you can enable headlights automatically turning on If there's a car coming all kinds of stuff all kinds of stuff

[00:36:57] And I don't know I mean maybe I mean it could be like attractive to folks Quar running fleets right where again it needs to be cost effective and so forth But again, but judge not fully committing to EV is again

[00:37:16] I don't know right I mean it's a bit of a signal to me that perhaps I mean the electric bikes or vehicles are not doing as well Right and Who knows I mean if we've spoken to apply quite a lot of folks right I mean bounce and

[00:37:32] The others in the EV ecosystem as well and everyone is full steam going up ahead Sales have increased you are on your despite all of the misabsent have happened Right I think range anxiety will go away with the better quality batteries a better infrastructure

[00:37:47] And that is the direction in which it is trending anyway The government emphasis is also huge in terms of EV is an sustainable energy and so on

[00:37:56] Right I mean see whatever commitments we've made on the you know environment front in terms of being net zero by 2070 and whatnot We will need all ways to become sustainable right So yeah, this is another way to reach that goal. I would say Awesome

[00:38:14] Create this week added another product to its list of features in the app this one is called Cred Money what Cred Money essentially does it helps you track your expenses across multiple accounts and provides a consolidated Transaction history summaries and tells you where you're spending money in how

[00:38:32] For recurring payments such as IPCMI's rent salaries and water They'll also send you reminders and this development is coming at a time after Cred Secured and in principle approval From RBI for payment aggregator license in April

[00:38:47] Now it's a great feature. I really wanted to use it because I struggle managing multiple bank Those and keep track of expenses Multiple bank accounts middle class Just your average class guy

[00:39:04] But what also hit me was that I know that if I used this right I know I'm gonna get Unwanted calls about treated applications and whatnot of course Of course see this is just a this is the tip of the spear. This is not a business in itself

[00:39:21] This is a hook basically right and people have been trying to solve this consolidated view of all of your financial transactions for At least 15 years that I can remember right

[00:39:33] I used to use this app called Walnut which would read your SMS and then like you know give you a pretty dashboard on You know where your expenses are going and so on and so forth Right, but you know it has various integration

[00:39:47] Compliance all of these issues. I mean it does come up once in a while right I mean to solutions that provide this So I don't know how these folks are gonna manage me. I mean maybe we have caught up

[00:39:58] Right now to be able to provide this. I mean to do this, but yeah it'll be like usually valuable But they will have to use this as something to build a business on top of right

[00:40:10] I mean some some kind of product of service on top of that right maybe like once they have transaction history They'll understand like who is more credit worthy and offer you products and so on But it's just for the great community like so essentially what is it?

[00:40:25] It's a credit is that top 1% of credit score customers right and then trade launched garage cred loans to mint Water and now more recently credit money now understanding whatever underwriting factors are there for that 1% club

[00:40:38] You're gonna sell loans back to them. Yeah, and that is what I mean they can do anywhere I mean it's not like it's not like a financial complicating cell you cars or air conditioners

[00:40:51] So interesting, but yeah, I mean folks. Let us know if you're gonna see, but this whole unsecured loans business in India It's still like a hugely untapped area right Indian banks and so on. I mean prefer hard assets right home cars land etc.

[00:41:13] The unsecured loan is hugely lucrative right someone's gonna build a mega business on this And there are a thousand use cases why you need these loans right I mean maybe you need money to manage five more days of the month before you get to salary

[00:41:29] Maybe you had someone forcing expense Right maybe you max out on a credit card and you want to pay that amount at a lesser interest Maybe there are thousand maybe and somebody will build or likely many different people will build

[00:41:44] You know businesses along different use cases for this right so yeah All right finally we reach talking about our friends in swiggy But before that one fact here is in July of 2021 so Matto executed India's largest east of bi-back program

[00:42:02] Which was valued almost around 700 crore rupees still no party from India's or not to folks All this I think we should launch an email campaign And now following on similar lines we gave us buying back around 65 million dollars worth of e-sops

[00:42:18] This is the fifth liquidity event in the company new investors will purchase employees shares in a transaction Which will be value in the company at over nine billion dollars wow The valuation multiple is approximately Wait for it

[00:42:34] Around 140 x and this is calculated by dividing nine billion by 65 million dollars So in overall the company has generated over 1000 crores in liquidity for its employees And that's great But this valuation number really stuck out for me 140 x

[00:42:50] Very generous very kind but it's only 65 million dollars some change I mean not exactly some change but very generous for sure If you had one million dollars would you call it some change? I mean middle class It depends on like what the whole price right

[00:43:09] I mean when you compare like a few billion dollars with 65 million it's significant But it's not like bank break is significant So yeah, it's good. I mean awesome man We still pending parties but you know Let it be it's okay No, Trump changed for us

[00:43:27] Okay before we move on to the talk of the town section Here is a quick recap of all the notable fund raises that went on Dhara Nakaphtil acquired over 400 pro rupees in urban company through a secondary transaction Then we have blue smart Raising 24 million dollars from responsibility investments

[00:43:45] Summonds in our MS-Zone family office and existing investors and blue smart founders themselves Lenscartes co-founders, huge bansal and neha bansal along with a mid-chorgian sumit couple You have injected 19.12 million dollars in the company

[00:44:01] Aria which is a drone startup raise around 15 million dollars from 3601 assets startup Xeat ventures and numbing capital And numma athri the trending red healing platform in Bangalore R$11 million from bloom ventures and local google and other investors

[00:44:18] And new mean R$18 million in a series A round which was led by Axel So lot of popular well known companies Lenscartes, numma athri blue smart I'm very glad to see numham capital there

[00:44:32] As well I mean these folks have been investing in deep tech for you know the last five years Very much under the radar Rajiv Manthree is someone I hope will have on the podcast soon

[00:44:42] He's also a good friend so yeah amazing I mean glad to see money coming into deep tech for sure Yeah, if you're a lot of posts for talk of the terms actually But starting off with it's been an eventful So you all know right Indians are built differently

[00:45:02] He's in point, the money wedding and whatnot But this one just blows it out of proportions right what are Indian engineers like Take a look at it Roshan right

[00:45:15] Hey notice you haven't taken any time off in a while just checking in and definitely encourage you to take a break if needed The engineer replies I don't need breaks her my bodies are vessel for the company to find product market fit

[00:45:28] And then there are talks of working 14 hours a week I don't know if that guy was just being sarcastic Just like But it's pretty pretty crazy I mean I can safely say that's not all Indian engineers for sure

[00:45:45] More than more than a few engineering leaders will agree with me So Okay, also a Google has Post an update to Google Maps and I think this is a very sought-after feature We speak about it. You can finally know if you're supposed to take the fly over

[00:46:03] I think the number of times have you know gotten lost or had to take a uterine in Bangalore It's too high. It's especially ridiculous right in India in general

[00:46:14] Or I mean we saw this in Chennai for example right where you have to take two steps to go to the fly over Yeah, I mean it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean electronic city for example It's just a maze man

[00:46:30] I mean it's like the jetzons or something you know been to boobinnace were right. Yeah, did you count the number of flyways we crossed over there? No, I wasn't keeping count

[00:46:39] Yeah, but safe to say that there are a lot of flyovers in India and better UX concerning flyovers is I think the product manager for this feature should get her is for sure sponsored by Gungen From one of his many bankers

[00:46:57] Okay, there's another video we came across which shows that dystopian gacromi future versus the reindustrialization YouTube and future that everyone can contribute to special Americans take a look at it. This is pretty badass

[00:47:54] I'm really apologize. Yes, we are taking a few back very serious You do hear Get a gig that's built the last There is built to last dot com Yeah Fantastic stuff really I mean I you know gig economy has had many positives but I think

[00:48:55] Number one thing I would say is like a loss of purpose your building half of something One fourth of something else and three fourth of like whatever is right. I mean you don't have that sense of belonging that you're doing something significant

[00:49:09] You know, and I don't know how much you can do that, you know, you would have come across many especially rapid oomm Drive was right

[00:49:17] You know I go back home many of them are like saying key even I just got done with work, you know, I even do this rapid oomm thing Yeah, you got extensions for sure

[00:49:26] Yeah, I mean so that is tremendous right I mean the fact that people can work on their own time But also I mean we've seen that you know the way incentives are structured and so on and so forth

[00:49:37] You think you own your time, but you're really working for the algorithm, you know, and that can feel like very disturbing and for sure But I like the end scene in this right where they're all working to build something

[00:49:51] That's amazing man. I mean there's no equivalent to that I mean I can only imagine what it must feel like to be a part of like a rocket that's going up to Mars or something, you know

[00:50:02] I mean we feel so proud about software products right something that could potentially crash the Clans some to the but yeah, I mean interesting very interesting and I'm glad to see that the US is sort of opening up this thing

[00:50:17] Right I mean you know from from 90s onwards with this whole globalization push everything was outsource outsource outsource in fact I mean if you look at the last

[00:50:26] Wonder how many episodes or in seasons of Shaktan you only think you heard is, you know, do you know how to manufacture this at scale in China That's all right that language and tone and tenor has changed you know, so

[00:50:39] Make America greater again perhaps I don't know have you was the boys No, I haven't I've heard ridiculous things about So there's those the correlation between the boys and the ongoing US elections

[00:50:55] It's like it's scripted dude. I feel like this whole thing that we're living is a reality TV show Human show yes, you know, there's this video of Gerald Ford from god knows when

[00:51:06] Gerald Ford is a US president and he was asked at the time if there will be a female US president right and he's and he describes how that will happen and that's exactly what's happening right now You know, okay fine. I mean I think he was like

[00:51:25] You know smart guy intelligent for short perhaps right But it just feels very scripted, you know, it could be a I don't know Virtual reality could be living in there are people's galley that escape the matrix Join the date date gang

[00:51:47] And you're part of their community or something You know who is the most college person choppy on my list Yeah, go you know with the most followed person and Twitter right now Yes, I know

[00:52:02] And of course it's a prime minister and I'm in the movie G and I'm very glad that he follows me as well Right, but awesome man. I mean Elon acknowledged that graduated him also Hopefully he'll cut a little bit of facts

[00:52:19] Right, so but fantastic come in you know for folks Who may not know right 20-12-20-13 was a wild time to be on Twitter People used to post about the sandwiches they had and

[00:52:36] Generally post music I used to post music around the time I joined Twitter around 20 What was it 2009 to 2010 perhaps so you would post weird music links or just random music Right, I mean it wasn't as popular Especially in India would say so yeah, I mean

[00:52:55] Modiji recognized the technological revolution the social media phenomena way before everyone All right folks with that we come to an end of this rather long round up hopefully interesting

[00:53:07] Yeah, we covered a lot of exciting developments that happened in the past two weeks and maybe there were more exciting stuff coming up in the next few days as well So make sure you're following us on YouTube on Spotify app will or any other platform

[00:53:21] You get a podcast on and also follow us on social media and if you found any bit of this conversation interesting, I hope you did Do like this video and read this episode on wherever you'll listen to your podcasts Yeah, speaking of podcasts

[00:53:35] We have a couple of good episodes coming up. We have a press conference We have a press conference such as who is the co-founder of apps for Bharat. They have a fantastic app called stream

[00:53:44] Under on the app and play stores that have about three and a half crore downloads And the conversation focused on building an applet business right growth scale monetization all of those things

[00:53:55] phenomenal insights in that very practical and tactical stuff that you can apply that and we also had They went wrong as I mentioned a founder of Dexter Capital and quite a unique personality as well

[00:54:10] He's been an investment banker. He's been a founder and he's been a VC so he's kind of seen all of those different roles Very unique insights doesn't hold back We got talking and we spoke merely for a couple of hours

[00:54:24] So much so that we had to split the conversation into two So I'm here to record the second half but again phenomenal insights on venture capital in 2024 You know what VCs expect right now how founders should operate so on and so forth

[00:54:39] Yeah, couple of very interesting episodes are coming up so stay tuned Hi guys see you again next week with another fun conversation