 Hi there, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are joining us from, I want to welcome you to this incredible show. My name is Abhijit Bhaduri where I talk to fabulous people in this show and I myself, a person who has been involved in talent management throughout my career. I work with people and organizations on their talent strategy, on their upskilling strategy and essentially how to make people and organizations become successful. On this show, I talk about incredible career journeys and you will realize that everyone's career journey is so completely unique. Just ask someone, how did you land up here? Is this what you plan to do? And most of the times the answer is, I just had a broad idea and I don't know how I landed up here. But I want to start by talking about this person. We will come to his skills in a minute because it's very hard to describe. What does he really do because he does so many different things? To begin with, he's a great photographer. Look at this. It's a beautiful photograph. He loves traveling. He cooks Japanese food so he's also a cook. This of course is one of my favorite photographs that he has clicked. This is gorgeous. And then I realized that he likes to take selfies with wildlife. And because this is another cute photograph, look at the lion is staring at you and he's also known for doing other assisted headstands. So I asked him, what does that mean? And of course, I think we should all hear that answer together. What is this obsession with doing headstands? It just has to take you a second because you realize here is a person who's actually turned one entire industry upside down because he is called the OG of gaming. My friend Vishal Gondal, welcome to this show. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on your show, Abhijeet. Always excited talking to you and especially on the topic of your book, Terrier 3.0, where you are demystifying the future of work, the future of life. And hopefully we'll have an amazing conversation. I want to start by looking at this whole thing of doing headstands because I remember in one of the conferences, and this is actually for the benefit of everyone here, I was at a conference and so was Vishal. We bumped into each other at the tea stall and Vishal just went around and said, okay, I'm going to do a headstand. Who wants to take a bet? So people started putting money that he couldn't do it. And Vishal, of course, did that headstand. I had that on my camera, but somewhere I have to locate it. What is this obsession with headstands? When did you first start doing it? I think it's not the obsession with headstands. It's the obsession of doing something which people believe you can't inherently do. You know, there is this mold everybody has been put into that you have to be an NBA to be able to do business. You have to be from IIT to be able to build a technology company, or you have to be from X to do Y. There are these more people are always put into. And in my case, I'm a college dropout. I never really studied. If you look at me, I mean, I'm not that physically fit that people will think I can do that. I don't have a yoga body as they put it. So I think people always used to say that, hey, I know you can run, you can do marathons and all that, but can you do a headstand? So I was challenged a few times that I can't do it. And I have this belief that you can do anything. It's your first. You have to mentally decide that you can do something. And then everything else, your body, everything else will will eventually take care of it. And that's what happened when I started learning headstands. The most important thing, you know, what I learned in doing the headstand, what is the most important quality? It's coming forward, the fear of falling. It is not anything else, not about having the physique or the muscle. We all have that more or less. But the fear of falling is what stops you from doing these things. Any kind of, you know, inverted, inverted exercise. And to learn that, you need to fall a million times. And that's what I'm really good at. You know, I'm really good at failing and failing and failing. Maybe try doing a headstand and fail a hundred times till I could comfortably do it. And I became so good at falling that I don't even now need a surface to do headstands. I can do it on a road. Normally people have to put, you know, mats and pillows and they kind of have a soft surface. But because my whole training was done from falling again and again, I don't have that fear at all. So that was really the secret behind doing something like this. And that's what I tell people that, you know, that just because somebody tells you you can't do it, don't tell yourself you can't do it. I want to go back to this whole thing of failing. You said that, you know, you're a college dropout. Talk to me about that time when you started doing science in the ninth grade or tenth grade, whatever, you know, and then you kind of say that, oh, now I'm locked into this for the rest of my life. What was it like when you decided to drop out of college? Before I, you know, go to college, actually I started making money when I was in school. I started my business when I was still in school, when I was seven or eight grade. And, you know, I was lucky that, you know, my dad, you know, he always, he saw me as a very curious child. I remember that I used to open every electronics in the house. I've opened the radio, I've opened the television set, anything in the house which used, and then I was not able to put it together. That's another problem. But I was this little kid who had to tinker with everything, open it up and plan, put this together. And early on, on one of my birthdays, he gifted me a computer, which was literally among the first process. It used the Z80 processor. This is pre-intel days. It was called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He got that machine as a gift in the house, and that was it. I was hooked to computers or that device, that device connected to your TV set, by the way. And it used an audio cassette to store data. So my first experience with computers was not even the floppy drive. It was pre-the floppy drive, which is audio cassette, where you were storing and loading data. All I had was a manual of this. There was no internet, nothing. So I was just reading these manuals in and out and figuring out how to code these things, how to play games. Of course, the first thing I did is play games on that, and then I started teaching myself programming languages. So it used something called GWBasic. This is even before MSBasic or MS-DOS games. I'm talking about that era of computing, which is the early 1990s. That thinkering, I eventually bought my first PC, which had this two floppy drives, that time the five and a quarter inch floppy drive. And that's when I got the MS-DOS manual from Microsoft, the original manual. And that's when I also got to learn assembly language, because you could only code using assembly. And this is all neat thinkering. I mean, there was nothing like this. And while all that was happening, in school, I was a national level volleyball player. So I was very fit and athletic. I used to spend a lot of my time in the field. I was playing volleyball, choose my game. Interestingly, while this started happening, sometime I think in the late 1993, 94, I actually set up a computer institute. And this is because I started training people at my house how to code. Because a lot of my friends came and said they wanted to learn how to do this. That led to me starting a computer training academy. And that academy was called FAC, Uchura Academy of Computer Technology, like very fancy name. And we were training people, I had two computers, and we were training people how to program in DOS. And then there were programs like Lotus 1, 2, 3, Wordstar, this is that era of computing, really the early days. And I was the school kid who was the trainer, you know, people coming in and kind of joining. And this led to me getting contacted by a bank in our locality who had, who gave me their first project. They wanted to create a mailing list of all the account holder. And just to remember, I charge them 70,000 rupees. And to some 5,000 accounts, I actually did data entry myself over several nights. But you know, for a kid who was maybe in eighth grade, it was not bad. And at that point of time, 70,000 rupees is like a very, very big amount. So that was literally my first income on my own in my eighth grade. So you made 70,000 rupees when you were in the eighth grade? In the eighth grade, yeah. And what did you spend it on? I bought gifts for my mom and my uncle and my, so of course this was spent as gifts for people because this was literally my kind of first income. And I didn't really have the concept of money too. I was very young that time. I must be what, 13, 14 years old. So it was very, very early. What was that transition into college when you were sort of here? You were building these games and running your own business. I have to tell you a very interesting story before that. So in my school, when my principal found out that I have started this institute, he connected me to her son, who said that he is looking for a career opportunity. What can you do? So I hired my principal son as a manager of that center. So I'm in the school and my principal son is employed by me. This is literally what happened. And of course, I was the king in school because I used to be called by the principal. How is my son doing? Rather than she telling me about or calling my parents, it was I who was being a reporter. I was a son performing at the job because he was the manager of the center and I was the faculty. And then I had a couple of other teachers over there. And then I was this volleyball player with, so I was like the star in the school because I hardly attended classes. So my goal was just to score enough to pass. So that was my entire goal in school, that how do I pass school and score my 10th? And luckily, because I had just about average grades, but because I was a national level volleyball player, I could get into any college I want because there is this special thing called sports quota. You know, before a lot of colleges wanted sports people there. And for me, you know, what the choice was simple. I said, listen, I'm not going to do science because it requires attendance. So the college was chosen based on attendance requiring not education or what it is. So I said, sciences, you want attendance, sorry. Then farmers, I said, if I don't get to attendance, then I will consider it. And arts was anyway considered. So we only had three options, you know, science, arts and commerce. So I ended up choosing commerce, not because again of the college, et cetera. I mean, that was good. I got into a college called Podar College, R.A. Podar. But I got into the sports quota. And one of the things was because I'm the sportsman, you know, I have to go for training and practice, I really didn't have to attend classes. So that was really the criteria of me joining the particular section of college. Here you are sort of in college. And what was going on in your mind about gaming and building that entire proposition? I was obsessed with one thing that, you know, everybody used to talk about movies, movies, movies. And I used to tell people that, you know, what gaming is going to be bigger than the movie industry. And my entire pitch and that entire obsession was that, you know, everywhere else, gaming is bigger. You know, this was a time where, you know, you used to talk about gaming industry coming up and movie industry and gaming industry used to be constantly compared with each other. And of course, if you know today the statistics, gaming far exceeds the movie and entertainment business. In fact, it is even bigger in certain countries like China and all that. Gaming is the dominant industry. So this is the, again, I'm talking about early 2000. This is pre the mobile phone. Mobile phones only came in 2001. So I'm talking pre mobile phone. The betting in my entire pitch was that gaming is going to be the biggest industry of entertainment. And in India, that is the same thing going to happen. And people never believed me. And, you know, the same example of my headstand. Everybody said, this is stupid. It is never going to happen. Who's ever going to spend their money playing games and waste their time? These were the things which people used to say. And I know a lot of people still believe that. But the reality is that, you know, it is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. So going back to my college days, in college I only spent my time having fun. So I was active, of course, playing volleyball. I was very active with the extracurricular activities in college, but I hardly attended classes myself. Again, the college gave me a great environment. And I do believe that a lot of my learning actually came from sports because I was the captain of the team. I was part of a sports team. And my extracurricular activities in college, because that's where you learn how to convince other people, how to gel with other people. And in sports is where you learn how to fail. And then even after failing next day, you have to convince your team that, hey, we will do it again. And normally sports is one area where, even though you keep failing, you have to keep the morale high. So I believe that my learning while college was okay. I didn't really learn much there. What I really learned was from sports, my background as a sportsman, and by getting involved in a lot of college activities where I could help people organize in need, that's really where a lot of my learning happened in college. How did you end up building this company called India Gaming? So that's again a very interesting story. So I remember 1998, you know, my computer institute was running while I was still in college. And 1998 was a big turning point where the Kargil war happened in India. And I being this Josheela young man, I created a game called I Love India where you could play this game on a browser. It used a software called Macromedia Director. And it was just, so you should remember director. So I quoted that whole game in director. That game let you, basically you were on the border and you could shoot at all these intruders who were trying to cross the border. And it was kind of released. And you know, clearly it had a few hundred thousand downloads. This is, again, the internet was introduced in 1997 in India. And this is 1998, very early days of the internet. And we were featured on television. I think BBC News did a story on this game. And suddenly everybody wanted to kind of download and play this game and get excited. In fact, I remember that we even got an email from one of the terrorist organizations saying that we should put down this game and that kind of made us more excited at that point of time. So this is 1998 when this game was made. And that's when I got the idea that what people are hungry for is local content. You know, this is for the first time somebody saw a game which a normal Indian could relate to. And that's what led me to create India Games as a company with the whole idea that we will create local gaming content which is going to be around Indian themes and Indian storylines. We created a game on only where you could throw colors at people. We could be created a whole host of games around the India theme. But that's where I got my second big breakthrough. This is with a company called Pepsi. Because we all know Pepsi. I saw it there. What happened is that near my house is the Pepsi office. So I created this game where you could shoot at the Coke cans and Pepsi bottle was like a cannon. And you could shoot at the Coke cans and blast them with this Pepsi bottle. And I know that and that was the time Pepsi and Cola Wars were going on. There were these really crazy ad campaigns. And I went to the Pepsi office. And of course I didn't know anyone. So I literally in an auto rickshaw took my entire PC with me and I went to the office. This office is in Devanar. It's called the Duke's factory office. That's where the Pepsi office was. And I went there and I said, I want to meet whoever's in charge of marketing. And they were like, who is this kid here? And so, you know, so they said, okay, please wait. So I waited there for about an hour. But I was sitting with my entire computer desktop. I'd got everything to demo there. Then I finally met the marketing manager there. He came and met me. He said, what is it? And I remember his name is Benkut. He used to be the general manager of marketing. And then Benkut saw this game. His eyes lit up. Think that this is really amazing. And he called his HR head and they said, you know, let's do something for it. And he said, you know what? We have these sales teams over here. So why don't we create this game and install it on their computers so that whenever they are a little angry with Coke, they can shoot at Coke. So the first use of that game was for HR motivation. By the HR team to be installed in the computers. And they paid me some, you know, 50, 60,000 rupees for that. But the big break came after that game was made. I met this lady. They told me there is a national marketing head coming in. I don't know who this is. Her name was Vibha Rishi. Vibha is again here. She was the first major, you know, marketing head of Pepsi who created a lot of campaigns. And then I showed this, I was made to show this game to Vibha Rishi. And she got so excited. She said, you know what? We have deals with movie theaters across the country. So why don't we install this game inside movie theaters and let consumers play this game. And as a reward, we will give them a Pepsi can. You know, that game was national campaign and Pepsi paid me five lakhs, by the way. That was my single largest billing where they installed, I think we must have done about 50 kiosks across the country and in places like Sterling Theater, Metro Theater. So every theater had the Pepsi. All the theaters were dominated by Pepsi. So they created this thing across. And for the first time, what I also did is I imported touch screens. So there was a PC and they installed a touch screen on top of it. And these were single touch screens. And this is still, I'm talking about not even 1998, 1999. And while I'm still in college, you know, this is like at that point of time, I, you know, basically started doing a lot of this business with Pepsi and other brands. And then one thing led to another. You nearly were started working with me. I worked with Pepsi then I worked with ITC. So a lot of companies started coming to me and I started using this word called Adware Gaming, which is using gaming for an advertising combined. And we created that model at that point of time from doing a few lakhs in revenue. I think by 1998, 1999, we were doing close to a crore in revenue. One, yeah. That is when I was like, listen, it's not a crore, maybe a little less than that, maybe 70 lakhs, but still I mean it was significant revenue as a company. And that's when a funny thing happened. I was approached by this company whose name sounded very, very odd to me. They told me they're a company called Price Waterhouse. I was like, I don't know who this Price Waterhouse is. And they said, no, no, we are investment bankers. But they had not heard of investment bankers. So I told them, you know, listen, I don't need any loan. I don't need anything. They said, oh, you want to meet you and all that. Then I spoke to a friend and he said, listen, these guys seem to be legitimate and they're meeting you. So why don't you meet them? I said, okay, we'll meet them. So for the first time, so my office, by the way, just to kind of give you, but I was born in Chembur. My office is in Chembur. Even now I stay in Chembur. So Chembur has this Chembur station. It's possibly the most crowded road where the road is this narrow and there are buses, cars, people, cycle, you know, hot-bullet cars, everything on that road. Everything is crawling there. And there are these little lanes on the side. And in one of these lanes, there is like vegetable vendors. And on that building, second, third floor was our office. So for the first time, there were these three people, two people who came in full suits there. The entire market like, wait, and it's like, you know, then these two people who come to meet me, of course I'm in T-shirt and shorts and these two guys come in, they say we are from Pricewaterhouse and we saw an article about this game and we believe that you can raise venture capital. I said, listen, I don't know what venture capital is. I said, no, no, no, we believe you can raise two crores in venture capital. And two crores at that time was like, you know, to give a context that's like, roughly two million dollars, what they were talking, you know, if you 10x of that, right, two crores, I said, listen, I don't need any venture capital, I don't need any of this. So they said, no, no, no, think about it. And, you know, so I told them, what is venture capital? And they explained. So they finally told me that, think of it like a capital which you don't have to return back because the only concept of capital was a loan. So they think of it like a loan which you don't have to give back. And that's when, you know, I spoke to my dad and said, you know, this is this company who wants to give me a loan which they don't want me to return back. The great idea was, you know, if somebody is going to give you a loan which you don't have to return back, why don't we, they said, okay, so I said, okay, we'll hire you. So then they came and said, we will only be hiring me. So they need a success fees. We'll give you a success fees, what's the big deal in that? And we signed up PricewaterhouseCoopers. Wow. And then they said, we're going to create an Excel, a business plan. Again, I had no idea what a business plan is. So they asked me a few questions and then they created this Excel sheet which I know a lot of people here will find very interesting. It was one sheet which had 20 things. And when you click on one, it opened another sheet, another sheet, another sheet, another sheet. And it had all these different columns and you could change one number and everything in the sheets changed. So it was this very, and they called this a business model. They said, no, it is all these. And they told me, give me some assumptions, et cetera. And they created this business plan. I had no idea what that was. They just told me that you talk about gaming and rattles. We'll tell you these numbers you should rattle. And we will help you raise capital. I said, oh, great. So we did three meetings. You won't believe. In three meetings, before we could say yes or no, we had a commitment of three and a half crores. We wanted to work two crores. And the business was, we are creating India's first gaming destination. That time it was the portal because there was no mobile. This was basically IndiaGames.com. So it was the dot com era. So we were the games.com. So basically the thing, there needs to be a dot com for everything. I was the gaming.com, IndiaGames.com. There were these venture capitalists who were falling over each other to fund the company. And I had no idea what's happening. The only thing I knew was that this is money, which I don't have to give back. I was very clear. And by the way, all of this is while I'm still in college. So for me college was more, the reason I gave up college was because I was like more other things going on. And I was already hiring people from other places to work for me. So it didn't really make any sense. So I was able to raise that venture capital without knowing what's a business plan, without knowing what's a business model, without knowing anything. The only thing I knew was how to make games, which was the most important thing and which is why I survived because most of the other people knew what a business plan and what all that was, but they did not know how to make a product. So just to sort of look at the skill involved, what is the biggest skill if you had to now sort of distill this down and deconstruct it? What is the skill that you think worked in your favor? I think gaming I always see is an entertainment business. Most people think gaming is like software. What is the big deal? You can buy an engine and put some character and launch a game. So that is the, a lot of people try and simplify every business as saying that what's the big deal? I can get two people to build something for me. But gaming and to a large extent even today a lot of products come when you have extremely passionate people building this. So I was it for myself. All the people I hired was because they loved playing games and loved making games. So gaming is I say it's art and technology mix versus you know, you know why there's that time there was not as much tech on filmmaking and other art forms but gaming was totally combining art and tech. So you were first of all looking at people who played games, who were passionate about games and they could then convert their art into a product. That was the most important insight of this that you need to find people who are passionate about gaming. The second thing was we used to basically always look at people who we got on board as do they gel ourselves as a team? Because gaming is a very team effort. You know, there is a coder, there is a game designer, there is an artist, there is a copywriter. So you know, a lot of these teams come together to create a product. Very rarely can the programmer also create art and the artist can also do music so it has a lot of these moving elements and then there is the game design. What is there in a movie? So because the game designing process itself is very, very team oriented, it required people who can really collaborate with each other and which is why we played a lot of multiplayer games. So you know, we used to have LAN sessions in office because one of the best ways to gel and bond was to play LAN gaming that time. You know, we had Counter Strike and all these kinds of games which we were playing on our computer. So you know, we used to be spending a lot of time making games and playing games at the same time. Then there was this moment when your company India Gaming got bought over. That was much later, right? I mean, this I'm talking about 2000. We sold the company in 2012 but there was a massive journey in that 12 years which saw lots of changes. In the first phase, we literally went bankrupt because Dotcom busted. All the money we had was blown away. By the way, I hired that same Pepsi guy to become our president. Then the guy who gave me the first contract, we hired him but of course, he was too big to be in a startup. So you know, that didn't work out here to lead. But basically everything we could do wrong happened and we literally were not gonna survive. And you know, the way we survived was because we had this very fancy office in Bandra. So we actually found out that there was a lot of deposit we had given the property owner. So we gave up that office, got the deposit back and went to this little office in Chemgur and that deposit is what made us survive the next few years. And that's when I went back to my core of game development and we took a big bet. And again, that bet is what got us here and that is what I always tell people that you have to bet your company on something. And we took a bet on mobile games. He said, and this is right when mobile was introduced. The first Nokia Color 4 was coming in and we said, we are gonna make games for mobile phones. And again, people said it's stupid, nobody's gonna play games on mobile phone. We were the first company who created not one or two, we created a series of 12 games for Nokia devices. And what happened is Nokia launched that phone and it was a worldwide hit. And what happened is literally Nokia took us to every mobile operator in the world and said, you need games for the phones. This was basically three or four companies and they said, you now need to get a contract with us. So we sitting in India at contracts with 65 mobile operators everywhere in the world, right? From Singtel to Telefonica to Vodafone to Verizon. Name it because we were the first with those games and when people launched those phones, they wanted the game. And guess what? The model was revenue sharing and we said, okay, we need to do revenue sharing. And the best part was Nokia had already paid me the game development. So Nokia made me money to make those games. Actually, I had already made the games and had the money and then they got me these revenue shared deals. And now I started getting money from all these operators all around the world. So from literally having no money by 2004, our revenue was close to two million don't. Wow. Because suddenly these games were all getting in and that was the time we got a investor from China. They were one of the listed companies called Tom Online who came in and bought our investors who came in early at a 16X return. So they came in and the investors who had put in the early money, they got an exit of almost 16X and this is 2004. So actually I sold first partly my company in 2004. That's when the early investors got out. I got Tom Online, but I got two other very interesting investors from Silicon Valley. One was Cisco and the other was MacroMedia itself to invest which then became Adobe. MacroMedia was then bought by Google. So it was MacroMedia and then Adobe came in and then the goal was we are going to expand globally with this model. So I set up an office in Los Angeles, an office in London, an office in of course China. We had an office in Spain and the model was we are going to acquire licenses from across the world and create games. And guess what was our first major license? It was none other than Spider-Man. So we became the host company to license Spider-Man from Marvel Comics and created the Spider-Man game. How old were you then? Well, this is 2000 when Spider-Man was released in 2002, I think, sorry, 2004, 2005 around that time. So we did that game. This is the game I'm talking. So we were the first major licensing deal of Spider-Man. It was done by me on the gaming front, on mobile games. And we then acquired rights to every major Hollywood property. So whether it is Bruce Lee, Predator, there was this movie called Day After Tomorrow. Listen, 20th Century Fox, Buffy the Vampire, Slayer, all the Disney titles. So basically we were the company which any good brand owner would say take my brand and make it into a mobile game and distribute it across the world. So this is all pre-iPhone type. This is all pre-app store era. This is the era which was all dominated by the mobile operators at that point of time. Apple came in much later. So we were becoming bigger and bigger in the gaming space. And at one point of time, we had almost 63% market share in the Indian market. And that's when our third transition happened that the Chinese investors had some problems in China and they had to exit. And then I got another person on my company and our board again is a very fascinating person and he's big in the world of careers himself, which is Ronnie Scruwala. Ronnie now runs Upgrad. But before that he was running UTG, which was the biggest movie studio of India. And the idea was he wanted real gaming and he wanted movie licenses. So getting him was a very strategic bet because he would give us the movie licenses and we would make the game. So it was a great combination. And then it was even bigger. We scaled up even bigger because we had the entire backing of India's biggest studio, which was UTG. And in fact, we worked with Shah Rukh on the Ravan game. We did like gaming. We were like completely dominating the market. At one point of time, we had almost 400 people studio, possibly the biggest gaming studio in India. And finally 2012, that is the time when we sold the company to Disney. So there was a lot again, I'm still kind of going summarizing these things, but the journey had so many ups and downs and so many near misses and clashes and unbelievable recovery that like I said, that for me, I always say that I find peace in chaos. Because if there is no, if there is anything is going wrong, right means there is something's wrong. It's the other way around. And then finally we sold the company to Disney in 2012. And that would have been a couple of hundred million dollars. It was a decent number. Let's put it that way that, you know, everybody, all our key employees made a very good return. Our in, of course, our invested had a good return. And even, you know, me and my family had a decent return. And I jokingly say that I directly got a job in the world's biggest media company without ever being interviewed by anyone. So I, by the way, in a date, I have never had a formal job, never because I started the company itself from school. So I've never really been interviewed as an employee ever. Of course, I, I get interviewed by all these other people to invest in companies that's even worse, but I've never really been in a shoe of an employee. When you, you know, listen to people, a lot of people will say that, you know, I want to make my millions by the time I'm 30 and then I'm done and I don't want to work anymore. You are one person who did that, made your millions. And then what, why do you continue working? I mean, what's the reason to work there? Because I don't think so. I ever did this for money. Even whatever I'm doing now, money is not the goal at all. Money is a byproduct which may or may not happen. If you start doing things as money as a goal, then you're already designing yourself for failure because that doesn't work. You need to have a powerful purpose on what you are doing and why you are doing it. So for me, that was never the case. The second thing was, you know, people talk about, they say enjoy the journey and not the destination. And for me, it's actually more than the journey. I say it is the companion and the people with you in the journey, which is more important. And the reason I say that is because a lot of my team members who were in India Games, most of them are CEOs of company. They are all doing so well in their own journey. And we called ourselves a India Games family. We even have a WhatsApp group there. And I think that's the best part, right? The people who were with you, I literally grew up with them. In fact, I even got married to, I found my to be wife that time in my same organization. You know, she used to be heading marketing and sales. And I have to clarify, I did not recruit her. She was recruited by somebody else. But my point is that in fact, a lot of people in India Games even found their soulmates within the organization. So India Games was one place where a lot of people came because everybody who came in was young. You know, the average age of employee was 23-24. So and a lot. In fact, even my current co-founder Sachin who was part of my Goki journey, he was in India Games and he also got married with another colleague at India Games. India Games made a lot of families where it was really created, where, you know, people met each other for the first time there. So I always say when you are enjoying the company of people, and that's when you want to do next thing with another set of people and enjoy the company and the journey and then the destination. But if your company is bad, you hate the journey. Again, about reaching the destination. So it's about making sure that the people you are surrounding yourself with are adding value to you and themselves and the organization. That is really the key thing. And if you think from that perspective, you will not think of retiring at all. So you sort of left India Games and then started on this journey of building Goki, which is where you are now. I was one of the early recipients of your Goki handheld device, you know? So I remember that moment. So it was incredible. And I kind of thought that that's a ridiculous idea. And I noticed this trend in you that, you know, you always think of a ridiculous idea and make that ridiculous idea work. And, you know, which is what makes it so much fun, you know, that's what I kind of have always admired about you, that here is this guy who, you know, that headstand model. It's not just, you know, doing a headstand, you know, for a sport, but that's also the way that you are looking at a whole lot of things that I think about in your career, whether it's looking at your career really like a game. And that's so amazing. You know, how do you sort of look at that? And that's what I find incredible. We'll come to the game part of it. But before that, I want to know about Goki. What is the trigger for that? And why did you go into Goki? What are you trying to build with that? You know, while I was in school, I was a national level volleyball player. But running the gaming company, all the travel and all the pizza and all the Pepsi, I jokingly say, made me a volleyball myself. I was 120 kgs, extremely obese, unhealthy, pre-diabetic. So I had all these health challenges. And you know, me, people challenge me that, hey, you can't do this. So, you know, I tried gyms, I tried diets, I did everything, but nothing worked. So what finally I did was, this is 2010, 2011, I met a coach in my neighborhood. And he said, I don't have time. I keep traveling. So he said, okay, you have WhatsApp. I said, yes. He said, send me a photo of everything you need. And I used to wear the Fitbit that time. They had this Fitbit thing which you could put in your pocket. He said, send me a photo of how many steps you need. So I used to basically message him and share these things. And he used to tell me, do this, do that. So I basically completely remotely worked with this coach. And I then ran my first half marathon in 2012. And since then I've done 13 half marathons. I've done four ultra marathons. I even trek to Everest Base Camp. So I was able to make a change in my own lifestyle and health. And that's when I figured out the problem. The problem in health is most people believe it's an information or an access problem. When you talk to anybody, they'll say, give me some diet or give me some person or give me some coach or give me some doctor. So either you're asking for information or access to somebody who will help you solve this problem. But the real problem is it's a motivation problem. Most people know they should not be smoking or drinking too much alcohol or eating junk food, but they do it not because they don't know. It's because they lack the motivation. And the reason they lack motivation is because it's very, very boring. Becoming healthy or it's very, very hard. And this is the problem which games solve very well and that is what I'm gonna explore that. And the expertise which I have is making something fun. And people say, what is fun? People don't understand the concept of fun. You say fun is games, but how do you make being healthy fun? And to kind of put you, give you a little context of that, right? So think of the x-axis as difficulty of a task and the y-axis as your experience level. So what happens is you go to a gym or a dietitian or a doctor, they'll say, from tomorrow, stop all sweets, only eat boiled vegetables, don't eat fried food, they'll give you. So you are at level one and they give you a task which is level 10. So you will do it for one day, two day and then you will get frustrated and say, shit, I don't wanna do it and you give up. Or the other extreme happens that you are this very active person who is let's say fairly advanced and they will tell you, okay, from tomorrow, drink three glasses of water. So they give you a very, very easy task but your level and humility is much higher and you find that boring. So what fun is when you are able to give you a task which is slightly more than your capacity and when you achieve that task, you need to be given another task. So you are able to layer it, but more than the layering, then what happens is after 10 such tasks, you are given a big problem for which you have to strive harder. We call it the boss level in a game. So before you go to meet the boss, you have to do the small fights and we call that small fights grinding. So you do a lot of grinding first and then you go and kill the boss and you will lose two, three times but then you get this amazing power and you level up. This entire aspect of health is completely missing because it's largely boring. You don't want to see a health app in your phone because it constantly reminds you of negativity. You know, shit, I did not eat my medicine or I did not follow this. It is always reminding you of something negative versus a game which is always telling you, I'll click this and you'll give you four hearts or Candy Crush is going to give you four candies. So the gaming model is a model which is always motivating you to come back. Said that what is missing and what is my capability is to connect gaming to this world of healthcare and create this unique model. In fact, I don't know if you remember, we don't even call Goki users, patients or customers. We call them players. So as a go, you are a player of the game of life and what your goal is to level up and the way you level up is by doing all these tasks which kind of give you points which we call Goki Cash and the more Goki Cash you earn, you can go and get rewards in terms of stores, et cetera. And by the way, the latest version which we are building connects it to your virtual avatar who becomes younger as you become healthier. So we are connecting it to longevity. We are creating it into a completely virtual pet game where you are your own virtual pet. Incredible. What a brilliant thought process. When you look at gaming as a sector, if somebody wanted to build gaming as part of their career journey, what are different roles that they should be thinking of? Going forward, is this going to be something big? Do you think it'll die out in the next couple of years? Is it going to boom in the next couple of years? What are some pieces of information you can share with us? First of all, gaming is no longer gaming. Gaming has what I use the word transformed into meta gaming. It's about gamification of a number of things in your daily lives. Even LinkedIn, when you log in, it shows you that your profile is x percentage over and there are many case studies of how LinkedIn use gamification to improve people to complete their profiles and things. So if you look at gaming today, it is actually now becoming a part of every major product development and service development. So while it started as as entertaining, the other very important thing is that actually it's, it's a very interesting fact for a lot of people here. Any kind of innovation happens into industries before they reach anywhere else. One is gaming and the second is porn. Porn, yeah. So these are two industries which always use the most cutting-edge technology. Why is that? Why is that? So gaming, first of all, itself is about communities, friends. So the whole social networking, how do you team up with friends? How do you do quests together? Quiet hyper collaboration. So what's, you know, platforms like Slack, we're trying to do is what gaming platforms did for the longest time. And now discord is the new place and discord was built for gamers. But today discord is becoming the new destination because gaming required that level of collaboration. In fact, just to give you an interesting insight, now people who play games like Fortnite, they have their discord and they're live talking to you each other while they are playing multiplayer games. So it's almost like you're on the battlefield on walkie-talkie with your comrades while you are fighting. So that is the level of hyper collaboration required in games. And we are talking about people still not getting and replying emails in the corporate world while gamers are hyper collaborating in the hundreds to do quests in real time. So that is one big reason why gaming is so far ahead. And discord is all about immersion. And when they want you to immerse in whatever experience they are trying to give you, but at the same time, they want you to transact because people, they want you to also spend. So if you look at any kind of innovation happening in payment models, transaction models and immersion, that happened in that industry because again, that's the nature of that business itself. You know, people want that. That's the only core proposition for them. So sure, all the new things happen there. In fact, if you really see what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with Meta and I, I'm telling you here, a lot of people don't see what he's seeing because I come from the gaming world. What he's essentially trying to do is he's saying he already has people on his social network. He just wants to upgrade them and become like a fortnight where everybody will have a character, everybody will be walking in virtual reality. So he's basically gonna convert his social network into a giant game. That's really what he's trying to do. And that is if you see slowly he's introduced avatars, he's introduced this and within some more time, you will basically not find any major difference between what Facebook or Instagram is and then what fortnight is for example. When you think about learning something yourself, what is your method of going about doing this? You know, you sort of had an incredible journey and it was so inspirational that you've always learned what somebody has not formally taught. So in school, it is about building that little computer. There's about, you know, moving deeper into that and then teaching others, inviting others, building a company. Effectively, a company is all about teaching what you know. So that's really the whole model of an organization. There's more people do it as well as you do, you've got a great team and you've got collaboration. And yet in the world outside, we find that collaboration is such a problem in organizations that grapple with this whole thing of collaboration. They say that people don't want to work with each other. They don't give each other feedback and you know, feedback, you have to be very cautious. Oh, you know, you don't want to hurt this person. You don't want to do this. And yet game is just the reverse. You're bad, you don't go past level one. You will not go to level two until you've really mastered that. But in the organizations, you know, you don't promote me in X number of months or years. I will quit. I will go somewhere. What is the beast that real world is missing that gamers can teach us? Part of being a gamer is about having this whole aspect of leveling up. So the way you fight a bigger battle is not with a weaker character. Your character cannot be at level one and be at level hundred. Versus what is happening in today's organizations is that there is a level mismatch all the time. And HR is trying to tell people that please do this course and do the learning and do this development. And nobody wants to do it because this is not coming from within. Because within they don't know what their level is. They think they have X level, but there is no real way for them to know where they are in the organization. So what happens in the world of gaming is that you are constantly, you know what level you are. And then you also know what you can do to improve your level or improve your character. And that is exactly what I do in my own personal. So first of all, I believe that in today's world I can learn anything I want. I don't think so. And Elon Musk wrote about rocket science on a flight back on the book. He did not go to any college to learn about rockets and he's built SpaceX. So the bottom line is that today between YouTube, Wikipedia and Reddit and every other forum out there, there is nothing that you can't learn. What is lacking is the motivation. So everything else is an excuse. People say I can't do this. I jokingly say people again that we blame the education system. Education system is bad. This is the same education system got APJ Abdul Kalam who studied under a lamp post to become the head of DIDU and then the president of India. So don't tell anybody that the education system is bad. It is you who have not been able to take the advantage of the system. It's very, very easy to say this is bad and that is bad. I always say that especially in education and health and career development, it's about yourself. So the framework I adopt on myself is I literally say that just the way we want our PC to be upgraded, we say or our mobile phone, we want the latest iPhone, we want the latest software, we want the latest memory. If I was a product and I am let's say version 1.0, list your teachers, what can you do in three aspects? Physically, mentally and spiritually. So there's the mental aspect, the physical aspect, the mental aspect and the spiritual aspect. And the way I call it the hardware, the software and the operating system. So you have to fix these three aspects of your body and it's very easy to do things physically. You do things physically, you have to work out, eat healthy. So if you can today do five push-ups or you can walk for 500 meters, let's say that's your version one. Can your version 1.0 or 2.0 run one kilometer? So can you upgrade yourself in that department? Secondly, your brain, the way to do that is how many books are you reading? How many podcasts are you listening? How many lectures are you attending? So how are you giving knowledge? Instagram, Reels and TikTok don't count here, but what are you doing to keep your brain? And another thing which I do and I recommend everybody to try something of that sort. I use Duolingo to learn a new language. The best way to upgrade your brain is to learn a new language. And Duolingo is gaming combined with language learning. So right now I have learning Japanese on Duolingo and it's because it is the best way to keep your brain young, learn a new language. And you can pick any language, there are like a dozen languages there. And the simple way you can say is your version 1.0 did not know a single word of Japanese, but your version 2.0 has learned 100 Japanese words. And thirdly, on the spiritual side, you know what really enhances that is travel and not travel for business. Travel for a wildlife safari, go to a spiritual place, go with friends. So when you travel and get experiences, these are things which are adding to your operating system. Or when you are spending time in spiritual places, you know, which kind of give you mental peace where you are not worried. That is what, you know, enhances your spirituality. And then one habit which I took up and I recommend a lot of people to take up is some kind of mindfulness or meditation. And that kind of adds to your spirituality. So that's your version 2.0. And then you create your version 3.0 and just upgrade yourself every time. And you will see like today my version can do a headstand. Maybe your version currently can't, but that does not stop you from saying, you know what, my next version can do a headstand on a wall. So you have to have that mindset and that's what makes it fun. Don't give yourself a very difficult challenge that tomorrow I'm gonna climb Mount Everest. You're not gonna do it and then you'll give up. So you have to challenge yourself slightly above your way and that's what gives you. So that is the framework I have adopted for myself. And I always tell people the same way that, you know, this is your time to upgrade. And this thing applies to your career, your family, your relationships that you need to look at them as something which you have to invest in upgrading. I'm so inspired by what you just said. I kind of, two or three big takeaways from our conversation today. One is this whole notion of how we view careers, a legacy which has been handed over to us saying that you can only choose science, arts or humanities and commerce. You choose between them. And then you are in that lane and you'll end up wherever you return, that's what it is. I personally agree that it's an absolutely obsolete model which is what led me to write this book. I also think that this new economy is going to be a lot about, you know, we are going to live longer. So therefore health becomes an important part. How do you gamify it? And don't treat it as tomorrow I'm going to stop doing all this. How do you gamify it and become a little better, a little better, a little better and that whole process of doing it. And of course this whole thing about the skills that you build, the different ecosystems. It's interesting, curious to see what are the next big things that are going to happen in this world and how do you become a part of that. My final memory of our conversation is always going to be this whole thing that you, while trying to do that headstand, you fell down so many times. And it's just basically falling down was not really a problem that you're dealing with. You just do it so many times and so it's not just the skill but the failing. And I kind of define that as the wobbling phase of when you try to learn cycling, you wobble for a long time. And once you give up the fear of falling, you graze your knees once you do it again. So big deal. Once you adopt that gaming mindset, you lost out in level three. You almost made it to four. You just missed it by a risk. Can you come right back and do it again? So I think that's the magic and Vishal just wish you the very, very best in your dreams because your dreams are very large and I hope you truly get a chance to solve those kind of problems that you're aiming to do. And we look forward to following your journey. How can people get in touch with you if they want to? What are ways in which we can do? I think that the best way to connect with me is on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm quite responsive there. In fact, the worst way to send me is an email. I hardly look at it. Perfect. And what's your handle on Twitter? At the rate Vishal Gondal. And same has said on LinkedIn. Thank you very, very much. And I so appreciate your taking time to talk to us.