Utkarsh Amitabh: The Power of Community in Building a Successful Career

Welcome to the Disrupt yout Career Podcast, brought to you by Clare Harbour and Antoine Tian.

We're passionate about helping everyone find fulfillment in their work life.

We believe that big, messy, uncharted career changes are inevitable and it's up to you to decide.

Will you take control and disrupt or allow yourself to be disrupted?

We wrote the book about it and now we share here our conversations with other thinkers in this crucial area. Settle down and get ready to listen.

To this dose of wisdom.

Welcome to the Disrupt yout Career Podcast. This time it's a great pleasure to have Utkarsh Amitabh joining us. He's the founder of Network Capital, one of the world's largest career intelligence communities that serves as a partner to the Government of India's Atal innovation mission. Utkarsh graduated with an MBA from our beloved Insead Business School. He's a TED speaker achieving Fellow at the University of Oxford and World Economic Forum Global shaper who represented the community at the annual meeting in Davos. He previously worked at Microsoft and helped build India's first smart village, which was recognized in the Prime Minister's Book of pioneering innovations. His new book, the Seductive Illusion of Hard Work, has gone on to become a global bestseller. He also writes for Mint Economic Times and the World Economic Forum. Utkarsh, welcome.

Thank you so much, Claire. It's such a pleasure to be here with you.

Great. Well, let's get started. We've alluded to some of your career milestones and we've talked offline about how your career has gone here and there too. But we'd love to to hear your version of it for the audience. So if you can tell us, you know, you started with a degree in engineering from India. Classic. You worked in consulting. Classic. Then you got invested in startups, did an mba, worked for Microsoft, and since just last year launched Network Capital, which is a large global career intelligence community. And at the same time, you're sharing your ideas on these kinds of subjects to the world through Harvard Business Review, through TED Talks, to the World Economic Forum. So tell us a bit about how your career unfolded and let's reflect on that thing. You know, how much was it planned and defined in advance and how much of it was down to serendipity.

Yeah, I think it's both serendipitous and design serendipity. Because what my bio doesn't tell you is the fact that I tried to build a very serious career as an actor. In fact, you can find me on Amazon Prime, IMDb even today. So I spent many years being an actor, or at least trying to be an actor. It was a hobby of mine, which I decided to take seriously. What the bio also doesn't tell is the fact that I've spent a lot of time working on nonprofits. So before mba, I spent a lot of time figuring out the education space, trying to work with different nonprofits, and the larger realization through insead, through some of my writings, through my work experiences and my friendships, I realized that I'm just somebody who has multiple interests. I don't really have one overarching interest that I've known since I was 10 years old or 20 years old. So the person I'm becoming. My career choices were a reflection of my interests, my curiosities that I'd nurture. The advantage of having a good educational experience and a good work experience is that you find yourself developing more confidence in your ability to take risks. And you also have some sort of an insurance build, which is that if things don't go particularly well, you can lean back on the networks that you've nurtured and so forth. So in my case today, I spend all my time doing exactly what I love, which is building, writing and reading. And I have transformed things like lack of clarity about careers and career insights into a product and a business model. And we recently got funded by Facebook. So all of these things have made me realize that everyone's career is a little bit serendipity, a little bit of design. And I think it's time that we bring our whole selves to the world of work rather than pretend to have a clue, since we are in high school, about one definite career path that we're on. And I think that's really wasted human potential to think that way. And my mission is to help every person on the planet build his or her category of one. That was my first essay for Harvard Business Review, and I really live and breathe with this mission. Every day I go to bed thinking, did I help at least one person build his or her category of one? Yes or no? The daily answer is yes. I sleep well.

That's beautiful. It's such a simple concept and yet something that most of us, most organizations, environments, nations, haven't been focusing on. And you're absolutely right that it's ludicrous for us all to be expecting to know what we want to do and who we want to be when we're 15. So you experienced the sharp and painful end of that growing up in India. But it's not much easier for countries and people in countries where it's relatively easier, but still mind bogglingly impossible to know what you're being called to.

I think I've studied education systems all around the world and my parents are really open minded. My mom's a writer, a professor, my father's a doctor. Of course they have regular parental anxiety, which I think parents have, but they're gently very open minded, progressive, very well educated people. And this is me growing up with them and learning all of it. If I look around, other students have even more of a pressure. And then I started thinking it's an Indian phenomena, maybe Indians are very particular about their careers. And then I traveled around the world and wherever. France to Moldova to Switzerland to the us There are exceptions, but as a norm, the school system, the education system hasn't changed much. It's still designed like a factory. A school is a lot like a factory and it's designed to optimize productivity like cogs and wheels. And that doesn't work anymore. So it's okay to help students become their full selves as opposed to trying to churn them out and create more cogs in the wheels or bricks in the wall.

Obedient taxpayers would be another slightly less charitable description. But yes, we're definitely aligned on that. So let's move right forward to what you've been doing in the last year or so. Tell us a bit more about Network Capital. You left Microsoft where you had been for several years, building what was undoubtedly a very successful career to build something that in less than a year has become a community of more than 100,000 people from over 100 countries without spending a single dollar on marketing. I'd love to hear about that. Why did you do it and where are you in the journey and what are the future plans?

So network capital is a career experimentation and mentorship platform. I have been nurturing it as a passion project or a side hustle now for five years. Four years as a part time weekend project with Microsoft, and one year as a full time as a CEO and founder. So I fell in love with how people build their careers, how they choose their mentors, how do they decide to do what they want to do. And I realized that I enjoy people helping people through such conversations and discussions. But soon I realized that I had reached my capacity. I, as one person can just do it for say, 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people, but not more than that. But I tried to ask myself, what if we combine all forces, like if we create a platform where people can come learn with each other from each Other from the platform, people could connect with other people who could turn out to be their employers, co founders and so forth. And also that platform becomes a space for learning where people can come go through life, cohort based courses, attend master classes, learning experiences, attend offline learning events. A lot like what the MBA offers, but through your life.

Sure.

So I started creating this community initially starting with my friends. But what I succeeded in doing early on was to scale trust and to scale culture because it's not a new idea per se. People have been experimenting with different kinds of mentorship for a very long time. Most of these mentorship programs don't work because they're focused on just connecting one person. And I think that makes it either unscalable or it makes it a bit of a transaction. You go out when you need help. But my focus was to build a personal mental gym for the ambitious professional for the rest of their life. And then for four years I experimented. The community organically kept growing. I had set myself a target that the day I find 1000 true fans in my community, I am going to quit my job and focus on network capital full time. And I defined a true fan as a monthly paying subscriber. So in our case, network capital is subscription based company. So we have 100,000 community members, then we have a few thousand monthly paying subscribers. And when I started, I said, okay, let me see whether I can get thousand people to pay me a small sum of money, hopefully for the rest of their life. And turns out they did. And we started growing from there. And then I moved countries from. I used to live in a different country. I now live in the UK primarily and it's been an adventurous journey. We announced our fundraise from Facebook last month. It's part of their community accelerator program. And I'm really looking forward to building and nurturing this community and helping every person know that it's okay to be confused about their career. It's okay to not know what you want to do with your life. And if you do have everything figured out, we'll find you the right set of people who you can share your story with. Because everyone has something to learn and every therapy has something to teach as well.

Indeed, that's a beautiful story. So let's think about this whole idea of entrepreneurship. You've built your own own company. You've also been advising startup entrepreneurs through organizations like Ashoka.

Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about the lessons you've learned along the way and what advice you have for aspiring entrepreneurs, whether in India or somewhere else in the world.

You know, Claire, I have lived experiences of what I've observed. Let me share them with you and hopefully some of your audience find useful. I think there's a lot of merit in staying small and intimate and profitable as opposed to trying to raise venture money just because everybody else is raising venture money. What people really need to realize is that when a venture capitalist invests in your company, that person is not giving you that money to in your bank. It's not your money, it's the money that you invest for that part of the company. I don't think everybody gets it. When people hear like 5 billion fundraiser, 10 million fundraisers, 50 million fundraisers, they think that these are the companies that are going to change the contours of tomorrow. And I hope that happens. But data suggests that that does not. In fact, in most cases, these companies go on to flounder. And one of the reasons they flounder is that they are not able to grow as fast as they had promised their investors. Markets change. So I would love for people to try out both models, the venture funding model and other available funding models. But building a company only to raise venture capital or show the world that you're important is a bad idea because it sounds amazing for two minutes or two days or two months after that you'll be left with no savings, very little. If anyone would remember what that headline was and you wouldn't have really helped your customers. So people really figure out what their financial goals are, what the impact goals are, and whether a particular kind of funding works for them or not, and then go on to do those things. I am a big believer in the venture capital model. It came largely from insead, our school. But it's not for everybody and it's not for all kinds of businesses. I do invest as well in several companies. I've invested in Maven, Gumroad, Backstage Capital and a few others. I just find that this whole space of both VC and non VC we need to be careful of.

Yeah, I think it's very important to avoid fever for fever's sake. And yet that is not what many people do. Let's move on. You said that you love writing as well as reading and building. So let's talk a little bit about your writing. You published a book quite recently under a fairly provocative title, the Seductive Illusion of Hard Work, which I love. Just without having had the time, because we've done this so quickly, to read it all. I love the idea, I love the message that you're sending. Tell us about what led you to write it, and what's the core idea you want to communicate? And if indeed the obsession about hard work creates negative effects like burnout, what solutions do you propose to succeed beyond this eternal myth of hard work?

I wrote this book because of my Network Capital experience, where I got a chance to meet and speak with people from all around the world. And I built this company, Network Capital, as a. As an explorer, as an anthropologist, as much as an entrepreneur. So I observed different stories from different parts of the world, spoken to people, try to test my assumptions, validate some things. And the book is a reflection of some of those conversations which have been either derived or studied from data that we've collected or built upon existing research. The larger point that I wanted to make was that the world of work in the 21st century will look very different from what it did just two decades back. Or people should be very cautious of applying older models to the newer world. And in the past, hard work was extolled. I think hard work really matters. But hard work is necessary, but far from sufficient. Misguided hard work is not going to make anybody successful. It will leave you depleted financially, emotionally, intellectually, and you would have the false sense that you've done it all. In fact, you've not done it all. If all you've done is sit in front of the desk for a certain number of hours, you don't get stunned for disservice. You should work on problems that interest you the most. You should work on people that interest you the most. In fact, finding that problem and finding those people, that's where the hardest work should be employed. Whenever that is not easy. So if you're working hard to identify the problem, identify the people, be my guest. Absolutely. But otherwise, if you're just working hard to prove a point to your neighbor or to impress other people, or to come on the COVID of Forbes magazine, I think you should perhaps think again.

Brilliant. Couldn't agree more. You wrote an article for the HBR recently called the Right Way to Make a Career Decision. And you explain, as we very well know, that career transitions are complex and there's usually a lot more to them than what we see on the surface. Recognizing that these decisions really are tricky and challenging, what practical approach do you suggest for our listeners who want to make a career change?

Claire, on Network Capital, we have a fellowship, a Life cohort based fellowship called I Don't Know what I Want to Do With My Life Fellowship. I own the domain name as well. I don't know what I want to do with my life dot com. The whole premise of a career change is experimentation. Nobody can tell you what you should do with your life. No one can apply a script to their career without contextualizing it. The only way to go about it is to conduct micro experiments, measure the results and see how you feel. If you want to launch a company, try and see whether you enjoy doing it for two days, two weeks, two months. I conducted my experiments for four years before ilf. And it's not. You don't necessarily need to take four years, but it worked really well for me. I went for my MBA at a relatively young age. I was significantly younger than my peers. So I loved my job at Microsoft. And I thought that having that foundation for a few years in a large growing company under an able, competent CEO would be something that I will benefit from. And I did. I got a chance to work with leadership in various capacities, got a chance to represent Microsoft and Davos and so forth. These are experiences that I learned a lot from and they help my network capital experience. Your micro experiment could last four days, but you owe it to yourself to try before committing to that change. And I feel that this space of conducting that experiment with careers isn't present anywhere. And that's what network capital is also trying to do through these fellowships where people come connect with others, figure out what life really looks like, say as a product manager, then do that for a couple of days, product management, and then you will know whether it energizes you or not.

Absolutely. We've been preaching the same with our 4Es framework for years now. The idea that you explore first of all and then you experiment, and that only when you've experimented enough to be much more certain. That's when you engage and then expand and you go round and round and round in the cycle as many times as you want to be changing. But you're right that the there hasn't been much space for experimentation. It's not something that's encouraged or talked about when people are taught, generally fairly incompetently, how to manage their careers, whether in a university, career service or even in schools, I guess, you know, there are systems, aren't there, that are, that encourage young people to go and do work experience even while in middle school or high school. But that usually feels like a very disjointed, very, you know, insignificant, strategically sort of experience. It's just something you have to do along the way rather than presented as this is the first of many experiments you should be doing throughout your Life. So the live lab and the ability to say no, that wasn't quite right is something we should all be encouraging, that's for sure.

And the experiments don't end. My experiments with being, with building go on every day. And you cannot go to an experiment with your mind already made up. You have to be open to getting information, getting data, and changing your mind.

That's absolutely, totally true. Let's think then about this wonderful off use expression of finding your passion that career advisors of all kinds talk about. And we know that evidence shows that this sort of advice of looking for and finding your passion may not really be the most sort of effective advice. You talk about envy, which is an interesting notion, not passion, and you wrote a piece in the HBR about it. Tell us what you mean by envy and how it works to help someone's career.

Yeah, so when I talk of passion, Claire, I often ask people to replace the word passion with curiosity. Because when we hear the word passion, we think that there's something within us that we have to discover. And that's partly true. But passions are also nurtured and developed over a period of time. And in my case, I was passionate about, or I was curious about both acting and writing. But the more I did it, the better I got. The better I got, the more I enjoyed it. So it was also a passion that was developed going or starting with my curiosity. There are things that some of us innately like, and that's fine, but being hung up on trying to figure out your passion at a given point in time is misdirected. Passion does not follow a timetable. It'll happen when you conduct enough experiments and connect with the acts of people. And it's a discovery process. I connect it with envy in a slightly different way. Envy is a force of good and a force of bad. So the article that I wrote in HBR was that envy can be benign, where you draw inspiration from other people and they say, oh, I wish I were like her. Or it could be malignant, malignant envy is that, oh, I want to almost snatch what she has and you know, like, get out of. So malignant envy is obviously bad. And then there is a schadenfreude, which is deriving pleasure in another person's suffering. This is like, you know, like next level even. But benign. Envy is something that everybody has, no matter who you are in life. I wish I had this happened. I wish this was so. I wish I became a partner here or I wish I funding from this. As long as you don't forget that you are in your own journey, building your own candy of one. Benign envy can help you sort of augment your purpose, where you can draw inspiration from other people, contextualize it to your story, because you're not competing with them. You're building a category of one. They are building their category of one. So, yeah, I mean, envy is. Envy is like a fact of life. We can use benign envy and, you know, learn to level up based on that instead of trying to wish bad on other people or what are you about what might happen.

It's interesting to reflect, as you mentioned it, in that way. It's absolutely how I got into coaching. I spent 10 years envying one of my close friends her job as a coach, thinking that I would never be capable of doing it because I think too fast and look for solutions. But sure enough, all that looking and observing and wondering and exploring meant that in the end, I became, you know, my. My clients like to say a pretty good coach, but it took 10 years of, of that curiosity around the. Seeing the difference. I guess it's about spotting the gap, isn't it, and seeing whether there are things that one can do to. To bridge that gap and whether that will be productive and fun and interesting and certainly, certainly I think I have the best job in the world, so that's all good. That's worked for me and a wonderful.

Example of benign envy. So you are not saying, oh, my God, I want to take Muja job away from my friend and like, start doing that. You say you found it really interesting, and perhaps that little nudge helped you start conducting your micro experiments, perhaps through experiments, you started collecting data, started writing and so forth, and discovered through a process of step by step by step iteration that, yes, this is your category of one. People are willing to engage with you meaningfully on it, and you build your own category of one doing what you do. So that's essentially the story of progression on Network Capital that we try and do for every professional.

Definitely. Now, you've alluded to the masterclasses and podcasts that you've been building and collecting on on on Network Capital, and you've interviewed tens and tens of great professionals around the world on career transition. What have you learned from them overall? And what do you see as ideas around career change that could be counterintuitive in some way or new or surprising or just particularly effective?

So we recently hosted the former Pepsi CEO Indra Nui on our platform, and I asked her about career transitions because she has transitioned multiple times about countries and changed sector geographies and built her category of one in a very unique way. And she talked about the importance of people and a tribe of mentors that you can cultivate throughout your careers and really learn from their experiences and couple them with your own core values. So if you look at some of the transition that she made, she talks about it at length in her book and on network Capital tv. I found this combination really powerful of reminding yourself of your core values, often even amongst the most difficult circumstances, and giving adequate importance to the advice from your tribe of mentors who nurtured you, cultivated you. And Indra has been blessed with a lot of mentors and she's done a terrific job of keeping those mentoring relationships intact. And now she's, you know, she's been doing this payback or helping others pay forward rather for, for a while. And I think this combination is something that others can also learn from and apply in their own small way.

Absolutely. It's such a simple idea, but it does take forethought and generosity to be putting it into place early on. So that's a great little nugget for our listeners. So, Utkarsh, I think we probably regrettably need to stop this now and get on with our respective days. But I want to take a moment to thank you from the bottom of my heart. It's been a beautiful conversation. I know that our listeners are going to get all kinds of wonderful things out of it. So just thank you for taking the time and sharing, sharing such strong and generous opinions on how we can all become more joyful, more fulfilled, and more aligned with who we are and what we do.

Very kind of you to host me. Thank you. Claire, I admire the work that you've been doing, the way you've led your life, and I wish you the very best. May you build your category of one and may you help all your clients build their category of one.

Thank you, Utkash. Bye. Bye.

Bye. We hope you enjoyed hearing from this month's guest as much as we did.

Do go and check out our work on disrupt-your-career.com and come back soon. Thank you.

Sa.