How India became #3 in tech unicorns

All right, Heymanth, welcome to the neverstate podcast. So you want to introduce yourself? You're at Lightspeed. We worked here at a 6th and E. Go ahead.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Been looking forward to this for a long time. Balaji. Yeah. So for the folks that don't know me, I'm a Malpatra and all the partners at Lightspeed. Lightspeed is a global venture capital firm that invests across different regions. Basically, we are aware where entrepreneurship is.

And India is like 1.8 billion, something like that.

India, we manage about 1.5 to 1.8 billion capital. Very early stage focus. You also have a growth fund there, presence in China, presence in Europe, presence in the US and together we don't have an office or team. We certainly haven't Muslims like America at African Vicus. Yeah. And then before Lightspeed, I was at CNZ with Mxu. And then I was like, yeah, known you for maybe seven, eight years before that even. Oh, is it a fun story that I don't think you remember?

I don't know.

So before E16Z, I was at Google.

Yes.

And I was part of this small team of people led by a guy named David Glaser, Genius lower guy was trying to. Who kind of saw the wave of his thesis was that in 10 years from then the next Nobel laureate in biome. Pa. Biostratistician. Not. Yeah, matrix. Not a. Not a MATLAB.

Which has happened with domestic.

Yeah, this happened recently, two years back. So. And what was Google's role going to be there? We were going to be the computer. The computer providers for that. So he pulled together a small group of people and they called it Google Genomics. And one of the people you wanted to work with was a company called Consul. That's right. My first one. Yes. Yeah. So you were there. So I remember getting on a bunch of phone calls, trying very hard to get in touch with you, and then getting on a full console kind of convinced you to use Google Cloud to do all of the analysis.

I may remember this. That's right. And I think we were. I think we were using AWS at the time or something like that, probably. And I was just like, I mean, Google was great, but I was. I remember actually was that the time of App Engine.

App Engine was popular there. Yeah.

And the problem is App Engine, before Google Cloud was something that if you're just doing exactly what Google wanted you to do, it worked. But then it was almost like a blog where like, if you, if you want to do just a Blog, it was fine, but if you want to do something outside of it, it wasn't right.

It was just like Java. And the thing about Java is it'll let you not do anything stupid, but won't do anything smart either. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

That's right. And I think, I mean, cloud is obviously evolved a lot since then. And you know, with the whole genomics thing, by the way, what's funny about. Sorry, were you going to say something more?

No, no, no.

Yeah. So the whole genomics thing, that is a space which should be much bigger and it's kind of being quietly growing. Like, I mean, 23andMe recently went bankrupt, unfortunately. But with 22.3andMe ancestries.com, like sequencing has really radically increased. Right. But it hasn't increased as much as it should. Like everybody should have a personal genome on their computer and so it should be an important file, it should be an app that's top of mind. And part of the reason it hasn't is that FDA attacked the whole space and basically said that you can't offer interpretations of genetic tests and results and so on and so forth. And we're now very fortunate that it's gotten beaten back because with AI, you can now interpret genetic tests. Diagnostics software can do that. It can do that better than a doctor can. Right. Entire concept of, oh, you can't use AI to interpret your own test results was the kind of thing that FDA would have blocked AI from doing. Instead, it's an unregulated medical device. All those things have to be censored. It has to be bottlenecked through a doctor. Right. So we may be able to take another crack at that now that the regulatory state can't block that anymore. Right. Or at least it's much less powerful than it was. And so AI enabled medicine is going to be a big thing. But it required so much infrastructure to sort of break past the regulatory state, the American regulatory state, in order to do that. And I don't know if. Did you guys, was that on your radar at that time? No, not the regulatory part, probably the.

Regular part we did not care about. Google did try a lot to get to what you would call the baseline study of human population so they at least have a baseline genome kind of ready. And then because Google being Google, they tried it in a way that people did not like. Yeah, very sussed. Right, right. Couldn't trust a big conglomerate like Google so nobody would upload their genomic data.

This is a Google Health. And they Tried.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So my team learned a lot of that and it didn't work out. And we wanted to build a federated data set that Roche could use at some time or Pfizer could use, or Bayo Clinic could use for germline studies or specific, you know, like rare diseases. And data really mattered a lot and we just couldn't get there. That's the context of that. We met very briefly and I remember I've tracked your journey for many, many years and you know, glad you've been in touch with me. Thank you.

Yeah, no, it's good. And I think in E6 and Z, one of the reasons I got into BTC was because, and crypto. And so, and so is I. Only when I started a company did I understand how big a deal the regulatory state was. And it was only it was DNA that in, in a sense made me get into btc.

Right.

Because as, as an academic, the government is basically friendly to some of the ED address. Once you go.com, they think of you as like an evil for profit company. Especially in a reg industry, the regulators are like the police.

Right.

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

Right.

It's easier to start a new city than reform San Francisco. That's fundamentally the premise. Right. And there's a lot of people who are working on reform and you know, reform, there's power, it's 99 to 1, something like that, more than that. 99.9, 99.99. But we do need to be able to opt out of the existing system and build something else right out. And it's funny, there's all kinds of verbal tricks that people will use to keep you within the existence system and say, oh my God, you're a traitor, why are you leaving? Or you're a coward, why don't you stay and fight? Or something like that. Or you need to be part of the process. You can't just leave this kind of thing. And I understand where that comes from. And sometimes, obviously you don't leave in a precipitate way you try to fix it, and so on and so forth. But at a certain point, and everybody's point is different, you realize that system cannot be fixed.

Right.

And further capital, further time, further energy going after it doesn't work. That's what Elon just realized. He literally tweeted out. Did my best. So what comes next? Right. Anyway, go ahead.

Yeah, this is interesting because it reminded me of. And we should talk about your bitcoin journey, which are very curious about that too. So it's what you were saying about it is sometimes easier to create a new system versus change an existing old age system. It seems to be true as long as almost as far back as Indian mythology has been around. And even then it was easier to build a new heaven versus to elevate yourselves into the old heaven. So it makes sense that you're trying to do what you're trying to do. I admire you for that.

Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I think. Well, you know, one thing I want to do is actually. So speaking of India, let's maybe why don't we talk about India for people who don't know anything about India and then India for people who know something about India, especially Indian tech.

Right.

So, you know, the thing about India is for people who are Anglophones, right? Like basically English speakers, they could essentially, especially Americans, not the British, of course, because they had a long history with India. But most Americans, many Anglophones, could ignore India until pretty recently.

Right.

Until last, the Indians were more and more prominent in tech, starting with Vino Khosla and so on and so forth and more and more in the 2000s. But really, India has kind of only popped on the radar in the last few years. For example, Ukraine is the first international issue where I can recall Americans, Europeans and so on being concerned as to where India's position was. Nobody cared where India's position was on Iraq, that I can remember. Nobody cared what its position was on the financial crisis that I can remember.

No.

Nor on Syria, that at least that I can remember. Right. Like, but it has now become enough of a global player that people did care about its position on Ukraine. And so because of that, people need to know something about India.

Right.

So Obviously the basics, 1.4 billion people. It's, you know, this multi thousand year old civilization. One thing most people don't know is India is actually a union, like the European Union, like the United States. Right. Why don't you talk about that? All these different cultures and so on there.

Yeah. So I'll Go very far back, very quickly, come to the present day and tell you what's been going on. Very old piece of land, lots of complicated history. It used to be a union more around different religious practices that ended up becoming tribes, and tribes ended up becoming states, and states ended up coming together to build a nation. But from the very beginning, it was always five or ten tribes that were kind of dominating in India. There were southern tribes, there were northeastern tribes, there were, you know, northern tribes and so on, eastern tribes. And we expanded, you know, all the way out to even Afghanistan for the longest time. So the first, you know, maybe 4,000 years ago, 2,000 BC, 3,000 BC this was what Indian diaspora looked like in ammunition of a variety of cultures and so on, spreading, you know, all the way to Afghanistan, Iran on the left and then, you know, to the right. And at that point and for the longest time of India's history, we were almost a quarter to a third of the global economy.

That's that chart that shows.

Yeah, that's all. Yeah, it goes from 30% and then it kind of very quickly shrinks in the last 500 years, 2% with the. With the rulers that have come from pretty much everywhere around to occupy India. But so longest time, China and India were the dominant players in the global economy. And the global economy was part manufacturing, whatever manufacturing meant back then, part trade and so on. Agriculture obviously was a big part. And then that probably stayed till that for about two or three thousand years. That kind of stayed very stable. It doesn't really change that much. There's a bit of up and down here, but it doesn't change much. And that's been the history of India and also to a certain extent China, 4, 500 years ago, of course. And we'll talk more about that. The bigger you get, the more attention you grab. And India build roads to the world, the roads also come to you. It becomes easier for people to come to you. And that's what started to happen. A peaceful land, peaceful people with, you know, not so peaceful people coming.

Right. Especially over in the northwest.

Yeah, probably more ambition. It's fine. I mean, fair to say they may have had more ambition to occupy. They may have had more ambition to.

Sermonate or growing even further back.

Yeah, correct. So cultural differences and then northeast that.

Much because it's impassable to the Himalayas.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So majority of it came from the left and the north. And then once a state like that, which is anyway loosely put together, group of people or somewhat cooperating versus collaborating when it starts to crack. The cracks don't, you know, disappear very quickly. So we had, you know, one crack appear with the Islamic State coming in and occupying, and then that crack continued reserve, you know, extend from there. And then of course, the Britishers came and at one point, I don't know the math, but then they took out about $40 trillion of, you know, some gave very harsh, very large number in today's dollars back to, you know, the dominions. And then India basically striking from being a high per capita GEP country with manufacturing, trade, agriculture, to basically subsistence level GDP and primarily a resource state for other countries. And then that was. This is fast forward to maybe, you know, maybe 100 years ago. Right. 50, 70 years ago, roughly. And then we got independent from independence to now. And I had the story of how Stacey change shape and philosophy. I feel like. And maybe this has happened with other countries and we should talk more about that. You have this period of shape. Country goes through a period of shape and a country goes through a period of regret, a period of realization, a period of hard work, and then a period of ascendance.

Yeah.

And these things can take 70, 80, 100 years sometimes. It depends on a lot of factors. Of course.

It's interesting you see a regret. Right. Because I would not. So the realization, I'd say in 1991, when India liberalized hard work may last 30 years. And now a sentence.

Right.

Why would you characterize regret as. Or is that not the right word? I call it socialism. Yeah, right.

Socialism.

Yeah.

I don't know if the population regrets it. I certainly think people who could have taken decisions differently might regret it. But some element of shape that we were.

We messed up.

Yeah, yeah, we were that.

Right.

I mean, look at our history and all of that and you carry it with you, but then you look at the president like, oh my God, like I'm a 2% BDP country. I learned world war and where was I? In my own memory, you would say 100 years ago. You probably were in powerful state back then. So that regret leads to, you know, hard work and eventually, eventually hard work.

Once there's acceptance of we're not great anymore and we mark down and we're at zero and kind of people keep quick thrashing and screaming. They're like, okay, we have to build our way back up. Nothing but for it, right?

Yeah.

And you know, it's funny, like, Argentina seems to have maybe bottomed out and may finally be there. El Salvador maybe bottomed out. And now it's like on its way up. China Bottomed out. It's on its way up, you know. Well, is Veniceville improving? I think. I don't know if it's bottomed out. Yeah, like. But they definitely have crashed. Right. Vietnam bottomed out as long as way up. So, yeah. So, okay, so basics. India has. So one thing. It's. It's a union. Right. So a lot of people don't know that India has, like, in a sense, the difference in a. Like a Tamilian or Telugu person and a Gujarati is like difference between Italian and a Finn. Right. Because, like, you know, the north and south, like, these are pretty different cultures. There is certainly now an Indian union, and people travel from one part, another to India, trade across India, and nobody really thinks about it. There's a currency union or the rupee. There's transit links. English and Hindi have become nationalizing languages. People marry across various religions and regions. And so. And so it was actually pretty. Pretty frequently. And so all of that, the union has actually become a real thing. In a sense, India is more unified than at any point that's ever been in its history, I think.

Yes.

Would you say.

You know, I feel like it's a little bit. Having lived in Europe for a while, I feel like it feels like the European Union.

Yeah. With more nationalism than Europe.

Yeah, more nationalism. So the European Union with more fluid and weak memory of individual cultures that don't go as far back.

Interesting.

Because I'm from Orissa, but I know there is a culture like from Kalinga days, like thousands of years ago when Ashoka was part of that and all that. I would have such a strong memory that attaches me to Kalinga.

Interesting.

But a German would probably go by thousands of years and remember what you're.

An Italian has Rome and stuff like. That's right.

So if that's.

There's less cultural memory.

Correct. Less cultural memory. Even though it's loosely put together, union of states, it has less cultural memory specific to the state.

I guess language is the main one.

Language is the main one.

Gujarat.

And there is the literature that is more specific. And I would say maybe even the last 50 years that memory has. 50, 60, 70 years ago, Bengal used to be the literary hub of the country. Abhidnath Tagore was part of that and Satyajit Duray was part of that. And today, I don't know. I mean, there's a South that has a Bollywood type industry called Tollywood and there's. Whatever. But then I still personally don't feel like there is that much dense cultural memory that used to exist probably ended 200 years ago.

Why? Is it due to British and then the Mughals before that?

Yeah, English has played a big part. It's become the common time thread. And you know, over the last 30, 40, 50 years, like you said, trade has become a little bit more easier between states and you know, travel, you know, it's. You don't require a fast boat to travel anywhere in India. Currency is the same and you are you basically still hawken back to a single citizenship. So you have that, you know, that kind of thing that ties it together. So it feels like a, a more tightly put together European Union with less cultural memory of individual states that create that union.

That's why I compare it to. It's closer. In some ways. I would never have believed this in the 1980s, 1990s when we were growing up, but I assume you're also roughly. I never have believed this, but in many ways India is now more similar to the America of the 1950s, where it has a unifying national ideology and many just like you have Poles and Italians and English and Germans and all these different European ethnicities in America. But there was like a common creed, common culture, common currency. That's kind of what India is to an extent that I wouldn't have actually believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. And one of the consequences is even though sometimes it's like two steps forward, one step back, like the public infrastructure is radically improved. Radically to an unbelievable level. Like Bangalore airport. The airports are basically like world class. They're world class. They're step clean, they're beautiful. And you step outside and there's paved roads and they're new and they're stoplight. I mean, this kind of stuff sounds so basic, but the basics are actually hard because you have to coordinate a lot of people. You have to get permissions to build. The government can't be corrupt. And so sometimes it feels two steps forward, one step back. But for anybody who's like part of the Indian diaspora who hasn't visited India in the last five or 10 years, you definitely have to visit India and just see how much it's improved. It's radically, radically, radically, radically better than the east in the 90s and 2000s.

Absolutely. And I remember growing up and I mean, there are things. So coming back to your question about what is this?

Where did you grow up?

I grew up all the way in the mfi. I was in the military. So we kept loading a cigarette.

You have the military jaw.

Military jaw. I don't know. Okay.

The Chad. The Chad Jaw.

Chad Jaw. Thank you. I appreciate it. But. Yeah, I grew up in the 80s, and I frankly grew up without. You know, I grew up in a small village called Joshenmark, which is, you know, like as a crow flies, maybe 60 km from the border somewhere. Where, where, where is that? We know a place called. It used to be called Uttarakhand. Now it's called Uttan Chow. This was a part of up earlier.

Okay.

So northeast, and it's not. Not east. It's more like closer to Yamun Kashvir and then.

Oh, okay.

North. North. Yeah, north, North. And here, if, you know Badinath, that religious place. Badinath Kedana, it's the last stop before you got to start walking or take a meal.

Okay.

To get to that place. The roads don't really take cars. I didn't used to. Yeah, at the time.

Yes.

Yeah, at the time. So grew up there. You know, we would have basically no hot water and going to boil it. We didn't have heaters. So we would have wood in a thing called Bukhara, which you put wood in, and have a chinny that goes out of the house. You don't die of monoxide twice a day.

Just literally growing up, no hot water.

That was low in a very cold place and no electricity. Because you remember, used to use this thing called Petromex to study at nine and all that stuff, which a beautiful part of my life. I remember I would in a heartbeat retire in the Himalayas.

Because the thing is that, like. Because of that, because so many Indians have an upbringing that's like that. They are in general, like there's a daily setback or something like that. But in general, the trajectory has just been up.

Yeah, yeah, you're actually right. Two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes two steps back. But there is absolutely a crediting ferocity that's happening in India. Like, gradually you are ferociously moving up and up and up.

Yes. And from no hot water to finding hot startups.

Yeah, finding hot startups. Yeah. So now let's fast forward a little bit from the 80s, 90s, which was, I would say maybe the transition period for India, when in the 90s, Manmohan Singh kind of opened up the economy, and then, you know, foreign companies could come and, you know, create competition in the local economy. Before what was called license, Raj. Like, to get a license to do a business, you had to get a license from the government. It was kind of ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not. I was not a VC back then. I Don't think you could ever do anything like that. But risk taking was essentially not allowed, frankly. A lot more socialistic 90s we opened up and then I think since then, you know, we were, I don't know, maybe 500, $600 million GDP country. And now we are sitting at roughly 4 trillion. And a lot of that growth has happened in the last, you know, 10 to 15 years. And we've gone through multiple regime changes and demographics have changed. And now I feel like now it's coming together in a way where society is hungry. There is a government that is not a group of politicians who are politicking. It feels like in good pockets, good number of pockets. It's a government that is interested in administrative. Because for India, one of the, that's.

That'S a big thing. Like the, the government is actually now interested in building the platform that Indians can build on.

Right.

As opposed to just taking the money or what have you. Like, they've come in a positive direction, which is, it's way easier to have a garment that goes corrupt than to one have one that actually ascends and becomes, you know, better.

Yeah. And it's, it's, you know, it's a, it's been a journey and I can tell you very openly is corruption is still a problem in India. Maybe the low level stock is still hard to do. But again the whole point of being, you know, stepping forward or slowly but stepping forward but not moving back, I think that feels like it's a monotonically increasing pace that India is at. And I, I was in the US, I grew up in India. I was in the US from 03 till 2018 and I moved back in 2018 and I remember writing about it online, a piece that even though if you Google return for India, this still shows up in the first page. And I was quite shocked that it showed up because I was getting so many people thinking me on LinkedIn. I'm like, how are you finding space? I remember bling it out. This is actually become a popular piece. And I remember talking about it that when I moved back from US to India in 2018, I had to change very little about my life. I replaced Hulu with All Star. Netflix worked in the US the same way in India. Amazon worked the same way it worked in India. I had to replace Lyft with Ola. And Uber works exactly the same. And I still have my US credit card on my Uber. Yeah. Because there's no DP stuff going on. It just, you know, goes through. And what else like, you know, like WhatsApp as payments and all those things just worked out completely fine for me.

That's because I think Internet first is actually the way I think about the world versus country first. Internet first.

Right, yeah, that's a great point. I was living in it. I didn't realize it. I was not living as much in the physical infrastructure as I was living in the digital infrastructure in the US and all I had to do was I literally moved back two bags, two bags of 15 years of life, two big bags which I had to buy it or loan it.

It was offline stuff. The Fiat stuff that took longer, the cloud stuff. You could just log in and get back to work.

Right. I had no house, I had no car, no scooter, no motorcycle, nothing.

Yeah, the only thing you had to change, like maybe you had to get residency. You have OCI or.

No, I'm your OCI.

Yeah.

I was an H1B for 15 years in the US.

Oh, got it, got it.

And I just didn't have a green card. Okay. But I just ships it, so that was easy. That was easy. Yeah. Yeah. But even if I were a green card holder, OCI now is easy to get. So you basically have a digital passport of sorts and you live in two countries.

Oh, overseas.

It was a very smooth move. Now again, I'll talk more about the India move if you're interested. But yeah, it felt like a pretty straightforward move to me. And then, yeah, there was a bit of this, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you would feel this culture shock. I didn't feel any culture shock. You would, 20 years ago you would feel an infrastructure shock. I felt a lot less of the infrastructure shock. Sure, there is pollution in India and Delhi is much worse than Bangalore and Goa is much better than many cities here in the US and you know, raise traffic, of course, but I remember being stuck on 101 in SF for many hours. So it's not that better or not that different, except somebody drives you much more cheaply in India versus in the US and politics is. Nowhere in the world is good. Great. So India is basically no better or worse than any other country.

You know, the thing is, I disagree. I actually think India will be. India is going to be, I think, a dark horse in terms of it's surprisingly well run. What's one example? The votes for the recent election, they were counted in a day, right. For a billion person country. And so while the US it took like weeks, months to get it done.

Right.

And that just shows that State capacities on some axes actually flipped. Right. UPI is very, very good. Other is very good if you have criticisms of these systems. But an identity system that works for a billion people, a payment system that works for a billion people, a voting system that works for a billion people, that's pretty good.

Yeah, right.

I mean Isros land a probe on the dark side of the moon. We have these new trains, we have these new highways in stuff and all this kind of stuff that the airports. And yet it's still at the J curve, it's still at the bottom of the upward trajectory. And the way I think about that, and I'd love to know your thoughts on it, is now that it's overlayance geo we have the cheapest 5G Internet service in the world. Right. And all of these things we observe in India and that's actually quite new. You know. What else am I missing?

Those are pretty.

There's a whole tech ecosystem there.

Right.

Yeah, go to.

Yeah, so absolutely right. You're not missing anything big. Maybe. What I would add to that is India, a bit of JIO thing that happened nine years ago now. I think India has one of the most digitally awake population in the world in terms of volume and time.

They spend a few periods about.

Yeah. So in 2015, Ambani, who's, you know, one of the main guys at one of the biggest conglomerates in India called Reliance, basically took this generational bet. He said that I'm gonna spend 10, 15, $20 billion and literally put it in blue ground. He dug up places because, you know, you can't when you're that big. You can take anything you want and the government will let you to it. But he did it in a way that actually was quite strategic and really has changed the nation's trajectory. He essentially provided literally free Internet to the entire country. Indian in India, for those that don't know the price of 4G and now 5G is. Let me tell you what I pay. I pay about 170 rupees per month. And at about two and a half, two dollars odd roughly.

For 5G Internet.

For 5G Internet. And I have a 3Gd per day limit.

So I couldn't hit that piece.

I never hit that. Yeah. And if I don't hit it, it sometimes there are some plans that it rolls over to the next one signal and watch TV on Netflix on it's.

Like basically a hundred x that amount in the U.S. yeah.

So it was crazy for me and.

The Xavier something like that.

Yeah. And Netflix in India is 699 versus whatever it is in the US I mean, so on and so forth. Sure. So digital infrastructure has become so cheap and cell phones cost maybe less than.

$100 and they're 699 in the sense of zero rupees.

Rupees, yeah. Rupees less. About less than $10. Yeah. So when Jio essentially digitized the entire country, they became the rails on which everything else kind of got built out.

Quasi public, quasi private infrastructure.

Quasi public, quasi private. They had the spectrum and kind of all that good stuff. And now we've got world's cheapest phones. And then most people have several phones. Like, you know, I know people that are in the up and coming part of society that actually have two phones. You drive in an orange India, you'll have two phones, one for Ola, one for Uber and you can take rides on both. And these are both phones that probably cost less than 10,000 rupees. So that's been very interesting to see. And on top of that you could then when you get distribution, mass distribution, you can build interesting companies, you can experiment more quickly and learn what works for a consumer versus not. So we start to see this venture ecosystem come up and take more bets and founders coming up and going on building riskier, riskier things. And then we saw essentially this massive amount of entrepreneurial energy sort of just really coming out and just like bursting at the seams. So last 10 years, India, I've just been there six years now. I think it's been a remarkable shift in terms of the risk appetite the nation is willing to take in terms of the infrastructural built out the country is doing. We spent more in infrastructure built out in the last five to six years than we spent in the last 70 years since independence. And we are spending more than what we spend in the last seven years. The next five years.

Well, the nuclear reactors are coming online. That's a really big one. Brownouts will be a thing of the past, hopefully if those come. India is actually either number two after China, or it's either. There's a graph of nuclear reactors we can put on screen, but planned nuclear reactors, I think India's number two actually on lots of graphs, for example, steel production, China's far and away number one. But then when you delete China from the graph, India is the real distant but real number two. So that's on steel, that's on nuclear, so on solar, it's on the number of unicorns, for example, it's us, China then India is like distant to China, but it is number three solid. Right. So it is actually really rising and really, I think underpriced in a sense. And on, on the world stage. Right. And of course it's possible to overhype it. It's possible, but it's also possible to underhype it.

Right.

And in a sense I think I said to you I'm moderately bullish on India but extremely bullish on Indians. So India as a system is getting good enough to be a launch pad for the world. And one of the things I think a lot about is this is very. And maybe you have some estimate on this. So there's about 7 million or so Indian Americans, right. I think that's a rough number. And they're doing pretty well, right. Like they are, you know, producing now, now that the second gen has kind of, you know, started to grow up a bit. You've got people in politics like you know, Vivek or Usher Vance or Cash Patel. You have people in media like lots of, you know, like M. Night Shyama was one of the first. But lots of other folks obviously tech, very, very gas based finance and so on and so forth. But, but there's like way. And of course medicine, lots of other professions, engineering, blah, blah. But there's an interesting. And the diaspora has done pretty well in other countries and it's certainly in dubai and the UAE. Like that's like about 80% Indian and that's a country that's doing extremely, extremely well right.

At the uae.

And but the question is how much potential is still in India, right? Because there's a degree of selective migration, right. There's, you know, not many people are coming to the US or places they have an engineering degree or do some qualification. So how many back in India are at that talent level? And Even if it's 5%, I don't know the exact number.

Right.

If it's 5%, that's like 70 million people out of 1.4 billion, right. That's like 10x what the Indian American population is. So that's a massive new economic disruptive force on the global stage. That's like a new Germany coming on.

Yeah, right.

A new Japan kind of thing, you know, like at that scale coming online and you know, maybe you have some thoughts on that.

Yeah, I think, look, I mean we obviously are very bullish on India. I mean we have continued to double down in the last 10 to 15 years in India. We feel like this is where, you know, the maximum alpha is right now. And you're right. I think India feels underpriced even at this point in time.

Or Indians.

Indians under price. Yes.

Where the finishing. I'll say something.

What do I think about the potential of India? What of it is starting to get realized? What it is, is still latent and will be realized. Oddly enough, I have been a lifetime skeptic of governments and in the context of India, I came in skeptical. And one interesting thing that I realized is there two things. One is if you are a government who is not proud of your country, you're not going to improve the country. If you are a human who's not proud of your body, you're not going to improve the body. If you're somebody in a relationship, you're not proud of your relationship, your partner, you're not going to improve your relationship. For the longest time, I think India suffered.

They were. They didn't have a sense of national self and privacy.

I never had a sense of national self. And there are shades of gray in there. Sure, there's a lot of, you know, places you can slip and fall in. But I think it is an important thing that ties India and Indians together wherever they are. And I think that sense of national self was not there for the longest time. When I was growing up, people just woke up and complained about India all the time. Right.

In the 80s and 90s.

Yeah, 80s and 90s I was working. It took two years to get a telephone in your house and for TV and I was having the line somewhere, blah, blah, blah. Now I think there is a sense of rising optimism. There are pockets of pessimism for sure, but a sense of rising optimism as a whole. And so for. So where am I going with this? I think for a country as large as India, I 1.4 billion population, you have a challenge that requires a platform level change to happen. JIO may have been a platform level change. Policy is another platform level change.

The kind of Governance and Administration, 1991 liberalization in general. So we see a moment for people who don't know from independence till roughly 91, India was. They actually wrote socialism into the constitution or India like the socialist state of India or something like that. And so of course Fabian socialism arguably was the second colonialism, right? Because Fabian socialism came from Britain. And so it was something that kept India poor. And it was, you know, all these NGOs were handing out an like the whole Mother Teresa thing is meant to for a country that's prostrate. Right. And like basically, you know, it's not actually meant it's investment is more. Investment is a real charity in a sense, because charity keeps somebody dependent and investment makes them independent.

Right.

So charity, you know, like it's a. If you give a man a fish, you keep them independent, but if you invest in their fish company, they might actually do something. Right. So until basically the late 80s, early 90s, India was essentially socialist and you had the license, Raj. It was impossible to do anything. And talented Indians were just either like kept poor or they left. Right. And then 1991, because of the crisis, you know, the Soviet Union fell and so on, and socialism was clearly not the way to go. India made the right turn. Now, by the way, that wasn't guaranteed. Like, Cuba remained communist, North Korea being communist. Right. So it was the right leadership who saw the right opportunity at the right time and took the right door. And India went at least somewhat capitalist. Yeah. And there's still a million criticisms. You can have, like air conditioning is taxed and it's. By the way, if there's one thing we should get all Indian VCs, founders and so on, basically repeal the tags, the luxury like the Indian air conditioning tax, of all the things. That's a very simple line item thing to repeal will completely transform India. Right. Jonathan attacks. Yeah.

And now we have a new thing where you cannot put your air conditioning to 19 degrees Celsius.

There's something really, something stupid like this. Right. But at least that one is a little harder to enforce or whatever. Right. The AC tax, though, is just, you know, Lee Kuan Yew knew air conditioning was necessary.

Right.

It wasn't like an option in like a sub, you know, like a, like a tropical kind of environment.

Right.

But why did I get on that? Right, so. Oh yeah. So after 91, capitalism hit India and started to grow.

Right.

For China, it was 1978. So that's why China's, in some metrics, roughly about 10 years, 13 years ahead of India.

Roughly.

Other metrics, it's way ahead. Other metrics, you'd argue it's even behind in some metrics. But like China's diaspora doesn't do as well as India's diaspora. China plays a better home game and India plays a better away game and vice versa, I'd say. Right. But so that was the moment that India turned capitalist. That's why India is actually rising now. And I think over the years to come, you know, China was always the number two communism after the Soviet Union for, you know, like decades. But then the Soviet Union made a bunch of bad decisions and basically tried to Ideologically reform, for economically reform. And then it just blew apart in the late 80s, early 90s. And then China, in a sense became, quote, the leading brand of communism. Right. Even if it doesn't export communism, even if it doesn't think its system is the ideal system, it became the leading brand of communism. And Vietnam and others, you know, like basically all look to China or what have you. And now I think we're on the verge of something similar happening in the Western world where the US and other Western countries, like what they call democracy, is going to financially, socially, politically, physically melt down.

Right.

The sovereign debt crisis is going to hit. And I think that if India can weather that, that it actually will keep, in a sense, the flame of democracy alive. It'll be like China was the number two that then became effectively the most pragmatically run country. Whether it was actually, quote, communist or not, it preserved the name of communism. Right. So India becomes, I think, the world's leading democracy by the late 2000s, early 2000s or thereabouts. I think, think really the Internet is also a big part of that, because the Internet allows us to do cryptographically verifiable voting. It allows us to do, you know, like votes where you can not just, you know, your vote counts, but you can count all the votes. So the Internet also is a big part in kind of guarding, quote, democracy, because communism will be very strong. Chinese Communism, I think will be. A lot of people will think that's the way to do things after the sovereign debt crisis. And I think it's going to overcorrect in that direction and we'll have to have a counterbalance to it. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Just, just the fact that India can count all the votes in a day, for example, health, not a small thing. It's like in detail though, that shows that operationally it's actually able to do that. And somehow on net it's working within India.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, coming back to your point, and I'm going to merge the two about the potential that India has beaten to realize and the potential that's late. And I do think some of these big ships happen when big bets are taken, and some of these big bets can be taken by large conglomerates and large governments and policies and all of that. And I think that's what's begin to show some promise and results in India. And the kind of stuff you see in India different from 20 years ago is over the eye and because the government and the conglomerates have done well. It is creating a sense of optimism and is becoming a petri dish where ambition and risk taking can survive and thrive. Twenty years ago, when I was in college, if we were to start a company and entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur, you would not get married. Now, if you're on Tinder, I think if you're a founder, you get a lot of dates is what I hear. So that cultural shift, I think allows ambition and it doesn't tamp it down, actually says, yeah, you could do this and you know, go on that journey and there are people who back you and if you come back failed, you know, you already a joke and all, you simply get patted on the back in a bar.

So the failure tolerance, a cultural shift is important as opposed to only taking the safe job of engineer. Doctor. I mean, of course, being an entrepreneur is a kind of engineer, but. Yes, correct.

So now I think that petri dish is somewhat ready. It still will take a decade plus multiple decades perhaps to get it ready to where we need. But now I think we are starting to see ambition and risk taking happen, get back and get results. And we're probably in the first cycle of that. And you could argue the first cycle was 2013, 2014, and now it's sort of showing up in public markets in India with companies.

You just hung out with Bini Balanced Flipkart. Right. And so we put up a clip. He was from, you know, a friend of both of ours. He's on the POD before and basically the, you know, he was the first large exit in India. Right. $18 billion for Flipkart and kind of showed it was possible.

Right.

And you know, now, you know, one thought. You have a thesis. Why don't we get to Indian tech for a second? You have a thesis on Indian tech? I have a thesis. I'd like to hear yours. I'll give you mine.

Yeah. Thesis on India tech. Wow. It's a broad question.

Yes.

Thesis of India Tech.

Should I give you my in the group first?

Yeah, please, yeah. He's going, yeah, yeah.

So my view is that India itself is a market. Yes. But I'm actually more interested in India for the producer side than the consumer side. That's to say I'm more interested in India as a source of talent for engineering, for finance, for media, for basically Internet first. Basically all of the, you know, AI is amazing, but AI needs prompting and it needs verifying. That's actually the new bottleneck. Right. Because the prompting is actually writing programs in a higher order language. You have to be verbal enough, you know, to be able to do that. So I'll say Indians winning spelling bees as a. So you heard it right? So you have to be able to know all kinds of crazy vocabulary terms, actually. Like, for example, art history is now an applied subject. You know why? Because if you can say Cezanne or Picasso or something like that, then you can invoke that as a library call when you're using AI, Right? And so every subject, more vocabulary. And not just vocabulary, the more terms, concepts. Because using them correctly, you can prompt it better, you get a better result. And then verifying it is if you have expertise in there. So AI doesn't take things away, but take jobs away. But what it does do is it shifts them to people who will have time to do prompting and verifying.

I don't know if you saw that recent video by Karpathi where he kind of does his analysis of GitHub code. And more and more now the GitHub repositories have English embedded in the code because now the code itself is becoming natural language more and more.

Yes.

So metal board dense, back to your point about. Yeah, that's right.

And exactly. Like prompting, programming, assembly, like, you know, right. And. And India is good in English, or at least a lot of Indians are good in English. And it's in some ways, depending on the numbers you can argue India has already actually become the number one source of English speakers on the Internet right over the US which used to be the default. Right. And I think as more and more Indians acculturate English, that will become completely true by 2035 or 2040 or thereabouts. Right. Because they can learn languages quickly or whatever. So my view is like, if we're sitting on this chair, this chair doesn't feel like a Chinese chair.

Right.

It may be made in China, but it doesn't feel like a Chinese chair. In the same way, I think, like, what is a thesis for Indian Internet entrepreneurs? They'll build software that's just globally competitive software that happens to be made by an Indian or even in India. But it is Internet first. It's not India first per se, it's Internet first. It's almost a little bit like Europeans who, if they're in a small country in Europe, they have to actually think Internet first if they're an entrepreneur, because their whole market is just not big enough. And so like the translation has to be there from the beginning. And, you know, they have to be Internet first. That's got problems because that's a tax if compliance and stuff you have to do. But it's got its benefits because you have a holistic view on the world, right? And so like you know, build in India or build by Indian, sell to the Internet. That's the kind of business I'm interested in investing in, which is an intranet first business that happens to be founded by Indians. Now of course sometimes it may turn out that someone like Olaf for example is necessarily got a very local and geographical component, right? Some businesses will be built which are necessarily going to be domain or geo locked and you have to start there. And I'm not saying India is a pretty big market. You can definitely get to a pretty large market over there. But I do think Internet first is the way to go and I think crypto is going to help with that a lot because it means global rule of code, right? So an Indian may be a second class citizen in America where H1BS and so and so are becoming much more attacked and so on in the US and they're basically, they haven't eliminated them, but they made them so much more of a pain in terms of forcing people to go back every year rather than every few years and making the renewals more longer and uncertain. That's not a small issue. That's a big issue because it means you can't. First of all, just the fact people may not know this, but as an H1B you have to periodically go back to India, wait for a consulate appointment, then come back. Now if you're just working at a job, this is like, okay, I need to pause. I need to take an international flight, I need to wait for an uncertain duration and then come back. And that is a pain. Even if it's like a day on both sides. If it is an uncertain multiple month thing over here, you can easily just lose your job in the US it makes hiring an H1B something where the bureaucratic overhead means you wouldn't do it, right? So their point is to make it, their goal is to make it disadvantaged enough where the program still exists in niem but not in substance, right? So as that door closes and I don't think that Indians should go to America anymore. I think if you're. It's just like a big not welcome sign is being put there. If you're a CEO, much of the American left hates you. And if you're an Indian immigrant, a Gachenko American right hits you. So just listen to the signals there, right? And just don't go to America anymore. And it's True for many other countries as well. Like even German tourists are getting strip searched and what have you. Right. America does not want immigrant entrepreneurs to come there anymore. It just doesn't.

Right.

So where do they go instead? Somewhere else.

Right.

And so we have network school. You know, we've opened that. There's Dubai, there's tons of other countries that have digital nomad programs. And of course there's India itself. And finally there's the Internet.

Right.

Which you can be on from anywhere. You can be a digital nomad. Right. And I think that shift, I'm starting to see that shift. Somebody posted the other day that like there was two really great Indian entrepreneurs that just chose to, you know, not take their U.S. offers, just, you know, stay in India instead. And I'd love to hear your or, or go to Dubai or go to Singapore, go, go to something like an S and so on and so forth. I'd love to hear your, your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I, first of all, I do agree how hard you came back. I came back, yes.

I think you're an early adopter or. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I came back before it was. I mean, yeah, there were a couple of waves in India that people have returned to India. One was in 20, 2010, I think only nine. 2010. And the next one probably again around the time I moved backward. Well, but mine was normally in Waypoint, just moved back to them. I wanted to move back. But I do remember how hard it was to get my H1 Vista. I got stuck in Mexico in a place called Matamoros for six days to get my visa appointment and it just kept getting delayed. And that place was literally bombed out a week before because people had stayed and hidden there. Drug dealers had hidden there, so the Mexican police had literally had to bomb them out. So the faraway hotel was actually a big circular hole in there. So we were living there anyways. It was an interesting time. But yeah, it is getting harder and harder to stay in the US or enter the US and we're all about.

Thinking about the 5 and 10 year and 15 year horizon. Right. So you make an investment, say you're thinking about where the world is going to be in 10 years. Correct. Is America going to be more or less welcoming to immigrants, entrepreneurs in 10 years? I think it's going to be much.

Less welcoming, much less welcome. That's what I hear. I have friends.

Meaning worse than today. Worse. Right. Yeah. So if it just is getting worse, you never want to bet on a curve that's going like this, you want to bet on curves going like this.

Yeah, it is, it is much harder now. My friends that are living in the US 10, 15 years are afraid to come back to India to see family because they feel like when they go back to the US or legitimately stamped for me, they would be stuck at the border and minimum. So I think it is getting surprisingly back. I was quite shocked to hear that just a couple of months back when I was in the us.

It's also the thing is just the randomness of it deters a trip.

Yeah, right, right.

Because if you have a 10%, like you're spending money on this plane, flight, on this hotel, all this kind of stuff, and then you can be just randomly stopped at the border. It's almost like an investment. Why'd you make an investment that can randomly go to zero?

Right.

Why'd you have a conference in America, like a tech conference, if you can't have international guests? Right. Tech is an international thing. You embase it there.

Right, yeah.

So it has lots of knock on effects.

Yeah. I mean, the debasing of the institutionalization or the institutional powerhouses of the US is quite sad to see because I kind of really benefited from it. It was probably one of the things that made it a superpower to begin with. So, yeah, I think it's sad to see and I don't know if the trend line is ever going to reverse, but it seems to be accelerating and growing some. Now coming back to your question on India and tech thesis on India, again, it's a hard question for me to answer because like at the end of the day, we are in the people business and I'm not in the business of predicting what future needs to exist. I'm in the business of just understanding the motivations and intentions of a founder that's trying to create a future of certain kind. And you know as any, you know as well as anybody else, they are primarily the people business. So my intention is to keep the best people in India, stay in India and build in India, even the best people from around the world, to move them back to India somehow. That's my primary. Interesting. Okay, yeah. So now what's interesting about India?

Do you only fund entrepreneurs in India itself?

There has to be some connection to it. From the India fund, we have the back entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia and India. Okay. Got it from a global fund, you know, different regions and different functions. So what is interesting about India? I think you mentioned this earlier, biology. And India actually lives in the cloud a lot more because it's much cheaper for us to go live in the cloud than any other country. Everybody literally lives in the cloud. And India has all free time and they watch the same movies as the Americans do, and they play the same games as, you know, popular around the world. And, you know, they are all sitting on Reddit and shit, posting everywhere they're on Twitter and all that stuff is happening. So the more unplugged you become from the physical infrastructure, the more plugged in you are. The digital infrastructure, that is a very fungible thing that you can move people around with. So they are much more at home because they speak English, they are culturally easy to assimilate in any other culture, and they can move around. So what you might be seeing, and I would love to hear how you're seeing in that school, I think you began with the idea that you can literally put together a set of people that believe in a similar vision, that have similar culture. And the culture is not regional related. It's more about a digital culture that exists in the clouds and sorts. You can institutionalize that and create a movement around it. And I think Indians are actually a really strong and a great perfect fit for this new world that is emerging, which is going to be this network state of sorts, where. But they are the native citizens already.

Yes.

And they will have the least friction to get a passport and get citizenship in this new world that you are creating.

And what I mean by that, by the way, is it's a little bit like people understand fiat currency and cryptocurrency now that there's like an Internet native version. There's a land native version. I think the next step, which we're kind of already in the middle of, is fiat identity and crypto identity. Because, for example, your Google login is in a sense a digital identity. Right. A very important one, in fact.

Right.

Your crypto wallet is another one. Your pass card to your hotel room, your Tesla digital lock that opens it, whether you use a phone app and your2fa. All of these kinds of things are pieces of digital identity that eventually I think will get consolidated into like effectively a crypto passport. Digital passport that gets you into online and offline property seamlessly. Right. And India's part of the way there with other and other things.

Right.

Like that actually can log into online services, but it also gets you offline, right?

Yeah.

And they have. What's the thing at airports where it's just like face recognition, you get. Yeah. Digi Altera. Does that work?

Yeah, it works beautifully. Yeah. I don't have to carry my tell to the battery. So Digi Auto is this digital entity that you know, it essentially scans your face at the airports and then now you are, you know, you are in the system and then you don't have to carry your passport. Well for international travel you still have to but domestic travel you know how to carry any entity approved. So what you do is you just stand in front of the screen and then it takes your, it scans your face and your, the door opens and you, you get into the airport and it used to be, you know, a few years back and it still is there for majority of the airports in India year for sure. And if you take your wallet out and you carry, if you forget your under the car then you got to go back home and pick it up. And today I don't really carry anything to be card with me. I actually don't really carry my wallet. I do really remember carrying my wallet when I'm in Singapore right now or the US And I tend to forget. You don't need a credit card, debit card, digital UPI and QR code base. You don't need to carry Unity card. I have this thing called Digilocker which keeps my DD and it's a legal way to show your NDD to people. You cannot be denied entry if you show that and and so on and so forth. So now when you combine this digitally native cloud, native population of you know, very, very young people, really hungry, really ambitious and you combine that with the infrastructure the government is providing, combine that with a venture money that is didn't take risks with very young and unproven founders.

And they're also pretty capital efficient there.

Very capital efficient. Yes.

Right.

Then you get this. That's where the future of India is. And on top of that you have this fast growing middle class with higher and higher disposable income in frankly India has obviously multiple parts. There is a really, really rich part of India has very high per capita gdp. There is this middle part that creates differently and there is a border. The bottom is really quickly coming out of poverty and below poverty line. It's coming out of poverty, some disposable income and then they are already aspiring to be somewhere the one or the middle. What does that mean? What it means is they want to go take their girlfriends and boyfriends to a movie once in a month, once in six months, take them out to lunch or dinner in a small restaurant.

Consumption is starting to increase. Yeah.

If you look at the number of iPhones India buys every it's quite massive as well. Rise in the usa.

That's another important stat that I was surprised at seeing recently. India's risen from 1% to 20% of iPhone.

Manufacturing.

Manufacturing, which is again, it's like, it's rare that something keeps surprising you to the upside.

Yeah.

You know, like, as you said, like governments, things tend to, you know, somebody said something like, India disappoints both the pessimists and optimists.

And optimists. Yes, exactly right. It's true. It's been true for India for the longest time. It probably won't be true forever. But that's what's interesting about India. Now, why is that happening? Look, 10, 20 years ago, my parents really saved up their entire savings to buy a house or for somebody's marriage or they would buy gold or they'll buy a vehicle. India, the new India, doesn't care about that. Nobody wants to buy a house. Their kids don't want to buy a house.

Interesting.

They don't care. They don't want to have possessions. They want to rent.

Yeah.

Now to wear gold in public is tacky for the young people. So they don't want to buy gold and keep it in their locker where the money go. They don't want to buy a vehicle because they want to just take Ubers everywhere.

Like, oh, so they are Internet first. They have leapfrogged into that.

Yeah, they don't really. Yeah, they want to have. They want to plug in, plug out of infrastructures, banking infrastructure, you know, vehicle infrastructure.

So it's a lifestyle of sort of. The San Francisco tech guy is actually the. The default lifestyle, albeit a much lower price point, but actually comparable quality. Honestly. It's like maybe 10 or 100x in some cases cheaper than California, but it's comparable or better quality in many cases, like foodlery, like Uber, all that, all that stuff exists. Right. You know, you can. You could be completely productive with great coffee, MacBook, air conditioning, everything there. And it's not like super expensive or anything. It's accessible to a very large number of people.

Yeah. And you can get all of this stuff in 10 minutes in the big cities and pretty soon in the K2KT cities in 10 minutes because economics doesn't work out.

Now, the one thing I will say is when people go to India, they'll find places and there are plenty of places that are still filthy or there's terrible streets and something like that. And that's absolutely true. And the way I've actually started to express it is India is like California in reverse. And what I mean by that is California is fractally getting worse.

Right.

So everything that's old is like beautiful and it's got like amazing, you know, Spanish roof architecture or its speeches. But everything new is like in California, it's like a homeless encampment. It's like a burned down town. It's like a Waymo set on fire or something like that. It's like the new stuff is bad unless the buildings that are new are bad because they're not buildings, they're destroyings really. Right. And in India it's the opposite. The older it is, with some exceptions, like the Taj Mahal, which are really, really old. Right. But in general, the older stuff is like, it's like a slum or it's like a bad street. Though poverty is radically reduced in India, like the rate of extreme poverty has dropped off a lot. Right. So it's like, you know, it's like a messy street or something. But the new stuff, it's like a shiny new Apple Store or it's a new restaurant or something like that. And importantly, a lot of the people are very, especially English speakers. And of course not everybody speaks English and so. And so, but a lot of people do are very okrant with Internet memes. You know, they're like, they're extremely conversant with everything that's happening on the English Internet. Right. And so that's surprising to people if they haven't had, you know, time there. They may, you know, because people type without an accent.

Yeah, right.

You type without an accent and so they're completely conversant in written English and there's like a slight accent in. Within India. But even then, like, you know, because Indians learn languages reasonably fast, so it's fractally getting better. That's kind of how I think about it. Let me know.

Yeah. In.

Is that because you've also lived in California and India, right?

Absolutely. I think in India you can, you can visit three to four countries in a day. If you wanted to go to Mumbai, you can.

Tier one, tier two, tier three. Yeah, talk about that pretty much.

Right.

So you go to Az Shahs, I think, think.

I think he mentioned that perhaps. And then our friends at Bloom Ventures, Sajid's partner, has that. I mentioned that in his recent. I think it was last year, a couple of years back in his publication. He does a very good job of that. It's called Indus Valley Files. And I think he's got this really, really interesting observation that, you know, in a single day. I don't know whether he said this or not, but this is my interpretation of it. In a single day you can, if you go to Mumbai or Bangalore, you can land in an airport that looks like a seven star hotel, drive on a highway that looks like absolutely brand new and flowers and trees on both sides and.