 Namaskar, I'm Professor Devdi Purkayastha from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Welcome to my course, Business Fundamental for Entrepreneurs. As part of the course, I'm very happy to welcome a very illustrious guest, Professor Rajan Rajya Swa, to tell us and share with us a few of his experiences and learnings. Before I hand over to Professor Rajya Swa, a couple of lines of introduction. Professor Rajya Swa passed out of IIT Bombay for his undergraduate in 1975. He went on to do his Master's in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and then he went on to do his MBA from Stetson University. He went to become a serial entrepreneur and he actually founded three companies in different capacities and one of the companies went public with a huge multi-billion dollar valuation. He also volunteered to serve on Thai, which is one of the largest network of Indian entrepreneurs across the world and he served as the president of the Thai chapter in Silicon Valley and then he went on to become a global trustee. He is also a young faculty at IIT Bombay's own School of Entrepreneurship and he has been teaching, mentoring and stimulating entrepreneurial students for the last seven to eight years. So it is my pleasure now to hand over to Professor Rajya Swa for his module. So when an entrepreneur starts his journey, he is always wondering, you know, how do I decide what company to start? How do I decide that this is the right time to start? What is the opportunity in front of me? How big a company can I build? These are the questions that an entrepreneur faces. So let's try and give you some sort of a framework in order to understand, you know, how opportunities show up. What kind of opportunities will result in great businesses being built up? So what we are going to look at is how an entrepreneur can use technology trends to build great businesses, to find openings and opportunities in the marketplace that will result in their startup idea flowering into a great business. So I'm Rajya in Jaswa. I've been teaching entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay and IIT Gandhi Nagar and other institutes for over 10 years and I'm a young professor here because I used to be a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for the last 25 years and since then I've been teaching entrepreneurship. So I have seen directly the opportunity to use technology trends in order to find opportunities to build great businesses. So what is the fundamental driver that creates these opportunities? What is it that results in a spurt of new startups happening? And believe it or not, it's a 100 year plus law that is the fundamental driver to opportunities opening up for entrepreneurs. So what is this 100 year old law? It's called Moore's Law or Gordon Moore's Law who saw, he was one of the founders of Intel Corporation and he saw in the 1970s that every two years the computing power per dollar or per rupee doubles. And when something doubles and keeps doubling every two years, you have something called an exponential curve. And then he also noticed that if you backtrack, this was 1970 and if you backtrack for the 70 years prior to the start of the 19th century or the 20th century, even though the technology, the foundation technology for computing was different, even then every two years the computing power would double in terms of the computing power per dollar or computing power per rupee. And it moved from mechanical to relays to vacuum tubes and then transistors, which was kind of the dawn of a whole era of semiconductor integrated technologies. And since then, since the 70s, we have been living in a world of something called semiconductor technology. Now, even semiconductor technology is moving on to quantum computing and there'll be all kinds of new underlying platforms for driving this, but integrated circuits or semiconductor technology from 1970 to the 20s, so 50 years the driver of new advances in computing power. Now why is this computing power and the doubling of computing power so important to an entrepreneur's life, to an entrepreneur's journey? So what computing power does is that it grows exponentially and as it grows exponentially, things that were not possible suddenly become possible. So amount of memory that can be available on a computer doubles every two years for the same price. The amount of performance, computing power or the speed at which numbers can be crunched doubles, the speed at which logic can be executed doubles. So everything doubles and when something doubles, all of a sudden things that did not look possible suddenly become possible and that is what the entrepreneur looks for. Now most of the economic world works on a linear model. So companies grow by 10% year over year. They don't double every two years. They grow by 5%, 10% year over year and that is regarded as a very good growth rate. Now when an entrepreneur looks at an industry that has been growing at 5%, 10% and then suddenly has in his hands some new technology that is twice as fast, four times as fast. All of a sudden they can shrink the product, they can increase the performance, they can increase the functionality, they can do things that were not possible otherwise. And that is what entrepreneurs leverage. So how does this entrepreneur leverage this digitization movement that is underlying the whole economy based on Moore's law that keeps on doubling computing capability or performance every two years? So the first thing is when you digitize things automatically the product will just double in quality or capability every two years. So that is tremendous value add for consumers or for industry or for government to leverage. So they can get productivity improvements just by digitizing things. But there are some other key benefits and drivers that an entrepreneur should keep his eyes open for and this is what is called the 6D's exponential framework. And it talks about the 6D's are digitization, of course, deceptive, disruptive, dematerialized, demonetized, democratized. So what is all the 6D's about? Each of those D's or capabilities that the D provides or the change of behavior that the D provides opens up new opportunities. So now let's look at what is democratized. What democratized means that all of a sudden a whole new population will now be able to use a certain functionality. So let me give you an example. So if you look at Africa there are a billion people who are not maybe particularly well educated, who are not particularly technology savvy, computer savvy, software savvy and yet this billion people can afford a smartphone. And when a billion people can afford a smartphone, guess what happens? You have democratized a lot of functionality which means that messaging can be done to a billion people without too much cost. You can do financial transactions, billion people can do that instantly. They can do banking transactions, they can do purchases, buy and sell. So democratization is this benefit that now spreads across populations that never expected to have these benefits. So that clearly opens up big new markets. So now let's take a look at another one of the 6D's. So let's look at dematerialized. What is dematerialized? Means something poof, it's gone. You think it's real and suddenly poof, it's gone. In my career, in my 60 years that I've been, 70 years that I've been around, in the last 30 years I used to enjoy, you know, listening to music on transistor radios. I used to enjoy, you know, recording and videotaping, you know, my children, my grandchildren, etc. My friends, my wedding, my everything. I used to enjoy the music on CDs and DVDs and things like that. So all the things that you see this man carrying were things that I enjoyed. And these were products that, you know, big businesses that were available. And guess what has happened today? None of the things that this man is carrying and the things that I enjoyed exist anymore. They are all in the hands of a phone, a smart phone, right? A smart phone today includes all of this and it even includes them in better quality and in wider range and so on, right? So all of a sudden billions of dollars of business, crores of rupees of businesses have evaporated. Now it doesn't mean that the business or the capability or the revenue potential of music creation, the revenue potential of creating photo albums and videos disappeared. That content does not disappear but how it is delivered disappeared, right? So dematerialization is one of the six D's and that D is very important for entrepreneurs starting off because when you dematerialize, guess what, cost changes dramatically. The way products, functionality is delivered changes tremendously. The way you price things is changed tremendously. The number of people who can take advantage of that functionality, that changes. So dematerialization is actually this game changing thing that happens to industries and entrepreneurs have to keep an eye open to see if this new technology that is coming in that is benefiting from Moore's law. If that technology can suddenly dematerialize something that people have been spending money on, right? So basically we are going to see by the end of this talk how, where we are in this dematerialization environment. So the six D's are things that now we have to apply to any new technology disruption that is being unleashed on the world, right? And the disruptor that is being unleashed in 2023 is what? Artificial intelligence. Now I started my first AI company in 1996, almost 25 to 30 years ago. And in 1995, 96, which is when we started, you can see from this particular chart, AI has been going on for a long time in universities, in defense labs, in research areas and so on. But suddenly in 1996, I felt that me and my co-founder felt that there was an opportunity to take AI and disrupt the order taking business on the internet platform. And we launched a company called Selectica. And this company ended up disrupting the way business was done by big companies. And this company went public five years later for a five billion dollar valuation. That's equal to close to, you know, 40,000 crores was our IPO, initial public offering in 2001, five years after starting the company. So we were one of the earliest artificial intelligence companies. But you know, the world of AI was then restricted to some business to business applications. And it costs close to a million dollars for our application package. Very few people can obviously afford it. Maybe 50, 100 companies per year would buy this licenses technology. However, in 2023, something interesting happened, right? Company called OpenAI decided to offer artificial intelligence capability to the masses. You just download it, download this AI application on your smartphone, on your laptop, on your computer, and all of a sudden you have the power of artificial intelligence to, you know, do your PowerPoint presentations, to write your essays, to do research, to do market analysis, to plan your vacation. All kinds of things were suddenly unleashed on the consumer. And that day the world changed because AI was now democratized, which meant that it wasn't restricted to a few thousand big businesses. It was now available to billions of people, right? And so it was democratized. And as it's democratized, guess what? Entrepreneurs were unleashed also to now use this artificial intelligence technology in order to go ahead and dematerialize a whole bunch of other businesses. So recently, you know, at a legal hackathon at Stanford University, they said, how do we dematerialize the legal profession? So the legal profession writes a lot of papers, does a lot of analysis of legal situations, and they said, why not let AI be used in order to automatically search and generate all kinds of arguments in order to, you know, support a legal dispute? So you can see that AI, once the technology is unleashed, this disruptive technology unleashed, now you start thinking of all the six Ds and saying, okay, what can I do with this? So if you're in the semiconductor business, the way NVIDIA was, they said, why don't we use a graphics processor to start doing and start executing AI algorithms 100 times faster than it was previously done? So basically they are leveraging the digitization D. I explained how legal industry was going to be dematerialized so all the big dockets of information were going to be replaced by AI going ahead and writing all these arguments and even presenting these arguments. Salespeople decided that, you know, they would, you know, automatically get AI to draft letters for them, you know, draft responses to them. Computer call centers decided to use it in order to answer questions that customers have. So you can see that the six Ds are now being leveraged by entrepreneurs to go ahead and create new startups that will leverage this artificial intelligence that has been unleashed in 2023. And you can see what Google is up to with BARD. You can see what Microsoft is up to with being coupled up with a co-pilot, which is artificial intelligence. And you can see that everyone, big companies, small companies, entrepreneurs, you know, are trying to now leverage this artificial intelligence in order to use the six Ds in order to go ahead and create a breakthrough capability for their, for whatever market they think will benefit from it, right? So, you know, I want all of you to basically take advantage of this amazing disruption that has happened in the industry in 2023 in order to go ahead and come up with a whole new way to dematerialize businesses, to democratize businesses, to digitize businesses, to use deception, to use all of these capabilities. So let's go back to that chart and see, you know, all these different, how these six different Ds are going to allow you to create brand new companies and then, you know, with good management, good people skills, good networking skills, good company building skills, how great new start enterprises happen that will, you know, be of benefit to humanity over the 10 years or a decade from now, right? How are these new great companies going to change the world in the next 10 years is going, has a starting point today in 2023, if you use the six Ds in order to go ahead and come up with a breakthrough company or breakthrough solution with great product market fit for your company. So with that, enjoy your journey as an entrepreneur, it's a brilliant opportunity ahead of you. So good luck and go for it.