 Good morning, Bangaluru. Okay, what a great morning to start our first session talking about money. And that too with none other than Sharan, who is considered one of the most popular financial influences in India. So, welcome, Sharan. Can we have a huge round of applause for Sharan? Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Always good to be back in Bangalore. It's my favourite city, as always. So, Sharan, we all know about your journey but our audience would be really keen to understand how it got started because we know at the time of COVID you actually moved to the world of digital and started a finance influence channel. So, how was the start like? Can you share more on that? The start was basically me in my parents' house, in my bedroom, shooting videos in my bedroom. I had just... I had a Nexus 5 phone and a broken phone stand from my sister and I had the natural sunlight coming from the window. Back then I did not know the names of any of these equipments. Today Godox is like a very commonly used term in the creator economy because it's something that gives you artificial light. But back then my shooting time was 2 to 4 pm because during that time the sun was at the right amount of brightness to shoot. So, very fond memories back in the day. But most people would assume that it was all a plan. Like everything that I have done so far I envisioned it 2 years back. But everything is on the fly. The initial motivation to start content as most of you would be knowing was to improve my MBA application. And then once I applied for my MBA and I got into Columbia Business School and I was like, okay, the job of funding creation is done. This was always going to be a hobby and now it's time to go be serious and get my MBA degree and become an investment banker and then get into private equity and that was the plan. But then something happened. All of a sudden I had about 100-200k followers never really thought this could be a big thing beyond that but then all of a sudden it reached a million followers in like 11 months. And then I started thinking, okay, Columbia MBA is going to cost me 2 crores and I'm making just about that kind of money over here. So why would I want to give this money to Columbia MBA and give up this income earning potential? So that is where I had a big dilemma. It was not easy. I spoke to multiple people. I had to speak to one guy who had both an MBA degree and is the content creator. He turned out to be Akshay Srivastav, another famous finance content creator on YouTube. He told me go. He told, it's important to get your MBA degree because you never know when content creation can end. But I don't know. I decided not to go and instead decided to start the 1% club. It was again, 1% club was again, you know, supposed to be like a side hustle along with content creation income but that sort of became way bigger than I imagined. So the point I'm trying to make is nothing is planned. It all happens on the go, right? You just need to get started. But you really actually got your maths right in terms of whether you want to go to Columbia or do content creation. Yeah, I mean, I did a big math actually and the math, what I did back then versus what the math has actually happened, that itself is a big difference, right? So when I was doing the math, doing that pros and cons analysis, the assumptions that I put in for 1% club to be better than going to Columbia were kind of already drastic in my opinion. And only if I need those aggressive milestones, it would make more sense than going to Columbia. But it has far surpassed those assumptions as well in terms of how big I thought it could become. So how has 1% club gone over the years? Yeah, so firstly it was called the 1% finance club. It started as a simple finance course. That is your most education content creators do. If you want to make more money than what brand deals are giving you. Firstly, what content creators realize a little bit later is that brands are not your friends, right? A brand might reach out to you on email saying, we love your content, we want to work with you, you know, let's pay for one of our brand sponsorship and you think that brands are your best friends. They are not. They are only there as long as you are relevant and as long as you are getting views. So this is something that I realized a little later but much before most of my peers is that I need to build something of my own, something which I control and even if I am not relevant again in the future, this something that I create will last beyond me and make me money, right? So it started off that way. So the natural progression for most education content creators is to build an education program or an educational course. So because I was a personal finance content creator, I ventured into personal finance program. And back then there was no personal finance course of this magnitude. Everybody was selling stock market course, swing trading course, futures and options trading course because these are easy to sell because people are really hungry for money. People want quick growth. Just to give you some context, the number of crypto accounts in India is more than the number of DMAT accounts open in India. That sort of should tell you, you know, how money hungry people are, right? We just want option which makes us the most amount of money. So coming back to the educational courses and only stock market swing trading, these kind of courses were available. Nobody wanted to learn how to do asset allocation, how to insurance planning, how to do tax planning. All these are considered very boring topics. So but I still took it upon as a challenge because that's the only thing I knew, right? I didn't know swing trading or options, futures and options trading. So I had to really make something out of personal finance itself. So that's how it began. And on day one, I still remember, I expected maybe 300, 400 people to come up for my... That's the first time I was conducting a live masterclass on Zoom. I had just taken a Zoom subscription for 500 attendees. I put up a story on Instagram saying, hey, I'm conducting this masterclass tomorrow. You know, it's 499 rupees, please come. I put up that and I went to sleep. When I wake up, I expected, okay, maybe 300, 400 registrations would have come. Let me open and see. It was 5,000. 5,000 registrations in 24 hours, straight away 25 lakhs in one day. I could not believe it, right? And then I had to go to Zoom, increase that subscription to 5,000, pay another 2 lakhs to Zoom. And that's how it began. And fast forward to today, we have almost 2.5 lakh people who have taken the masterclass and post that we have built a community of people who are lifetime members of the 1% club. These are like the really serious learners, people who have really deep pockets, people who are the serious investors in the country, people who the fintech brands and the banks are after. And we have 50,000 of such people in the 1% club currently. And going forward, we are going to now go into financial services, right? We've just gotten SEBI registered. I've never said it out there. SEBI registered. And next step is to get into fintech and offer financial services. So we know that the most popular fintech entrepreneur, Nikhil Kamath, is also invested in a 1% club. So what got him attracted in 1%? I mean, he's a close friend, to be honest, right? See, it was a 10 crore investment and considering the, you know, the level of wealth this man has, right? So I would say it was more like a write-off for him. But having said that, I was really, for me, it was still a big deal, right? For him, maybe it was like, you know, just one of the investments, like a friend, right? It was an investment that you do in a friend's company. But for me, it made a big deal of difference. And I'll tell you why. About a year back, there was a lot of negative publicity against content creators like me, right? The whole Finfluencer saga. And SEBI recently came out with its consultation paper as well. And the whole thing stemmed from a few miscreants in the content creation space who were taking negative advantage or, you know, undue advantage of the distribution that they built on YouTube, funneling that audience to telegram and selling, you know, services of stock tips illegally without being SEBI registered. And unfortunately, these miscreants are also called Finfluencer. And who happened to be the poster boy of Influencer the year just before that? This guy, right? So it was a really bad PR nightmare for us. And once, Nikhil Karmath, you know, invested in the company, brought a lot of trust in that space, right? SEBI also, you know, really, really started appreciating what we're doing and now we got the license, right? So it was a really, really big impact when someone like Nikhil Karmath comes into the cap table and the kind of impact it can bring is unmeasurable, right? It's an immense impact that he has brought for us. So when you just mentioned that now your next aim is to build it as a fintech enterprise, so from a creator to an entrepreneur, when you think about, I mean, when you're just only giving financial lessons to now building a fintech company, so how is that transition and is there some learning, unlearning which is happening at your part? Yeah, so the more and more I get into entrepreneurship, the more and more delayed gratification you end up in. What I mean by that is, when you're a content creator, the ROI is immediate, right? If you're able to build a certain distribution or a certain number of followers, then making money is easy, right? You basically have zero cost to make the video and a brand comes and tells you, hey, take five lakhs, right? So that's very quick, right? You get the money within a few days. But then once you get into the education sector, let's say I want to build an education program, it took six months to sort of build the infrastructure, like initially it was a three people team, firstly two people team, me and my sister, and then it had to become a ten people team to build the educational company and it took a six months to launch and then I got that 5000 registrations, right? Now entering into fintech, I think it's going to be a four or five year game. Before I can see the ROI coming out. Because I first need to, right now the team is 100 people by the way, right? 100 people team. And right now, now we just launched fintech, we've just launched our financial services, we are now providing one on one financial planning services to our members. And the problem that we're trying to solve is that India has around roughly 1300 financial planners who are sepi registered. 1300, that's 1300 for a population of 1.5 billion last time I checked, right? 150 crore people, right? Of course you can see the huge disparity in the supply versus demand, that's number one. Number two is that India is getting richer every single day, right? We are in an explosive state in this country, the likes of which has never been seen anywhere across the world, right? And India is going to get richer and richer by the number of people who are rising from the middle class to the upper middle class is going to skyrocket in the next four or five years. The number of people who filed income tax of more than 10 lakhs last year was 1 crore and it is projected to increase to 3.5 crores by 2030, right? So even if, forget the 150 crore Indians, if I just look at the 3 to 4 crore Indians who desperately need financial planning services and there are only 1300 of them, right? So that is the space that we want to target. Can we create an army of financial planners across the country? Just like how you would go to a clinic or a doctor when you have, you know, like a health issue. Can you go to a financial doctor when you have a financial issue? Can there be, you know, like 100 different branches of 1% club across all the top cities where there are like lack of financial planners spread across the country? That is the vision that we are trying to solve, right? So in four or five years time, my vision, of course, I can't put a lack of financial planners by myself. That just goes to show how big the market opportunities and there are so many more, you know, so many more companies that can get into it. But our vision is to have at least 1,000, 50,000 financial planners catering to a lack of 2 lakh people. And there are 3.5 crore people waiting, right? I can maybe target a lack of 2 lakh people. So that is the market that we are after and it's going to take us a lot of time. Sure. And we heard your success story and no story is only about the road. There's, of course, their guns, of course. I can't, I couldn't hear them. Okay, sorry. I'm saying that we heard your success story and I'm sure they're not just up, there must be down moments as well. So, I mean, while teaching India the financial lessons, what is the biggest financial lesson you have learned yourself? The biggest financial lesson. I think for me the biggest financial lesson has been, and it doesn't come from me, it came from my mother, is to live below your means. About couple of years back when I had just started being a content creator and seeing the money that I was making, it was very easy. Had it been any of my college friends, I'm sure they would have bought three cars and couple of bikes just to show off or bought the big house, living way above their means. But thankfully I did not do that. I lived below my means. Maybe if my income increased to NTX, I increased my expenses by 30-40 percent. And because I was able to keep my focus and keep my expenses in place, I had built up a certain amount of corpus, which firstly, A, allowed me to be financially independent. What I mean by financial independence is that the money that I have saved and invested is invested in the right places because of which the annual income I'm getting from that money is more than enough to support my expenses. Now because I was able to reach that state in life, I could take even bigger risks. So starting 1% Club, the risks that I had taken, meaning I had to put upfront capital, so far we have invested almost 25 crores in 1% Club in building what it is today. So all of these risks you can take when you are financially independent. So I think that has been the biggest learning lesson for me. When you are making a lot of money, do not overspend, save it up so that one day when you are financially independent, you can truly take big, calculated risks in life which can really make big impact to the society. So before we throw open the floor for audience Q&A, I want to know any personal finance lesson you can give to our audience. I think they will ask questions. But the biggest person finance lesson according to me is, I mean there is a lot, but the biggest one is first focusing on investing in assets and this is something which Robert Kiyosaki says a lot. Now there is a big misconception out there, people are saying who is this Robert Kiyosaki, he himself is in debt, 1.2 billion dollars, so why should we listen to him. You guys are forgetting the fact that he has purposely taken that debt to buy assets. He has not taken that debt and partied it in Las Vegas or Dubai. He has not spent it all. He has gone about and bought real estate assets and those assets which are primarily in the US, not in India, the rental yields in US is 2 times to 3 times more than what it is in India. So most of that money is invested in those assets and it is making him additional income. So that is something that people need to realize that all kind of debt is not bad. The term debt is automatically having a negative connotation because of our Indian mindset that I should not have any loans or liabilities but all kind of loans are not bad. For example, a home loan which you are taking is not a bad loan. You don't need to, if you have 2 crores in your bank account and if you are about to buy a house in Bangalore, 3BHK house in Bangalore for 1.5 crores, most people will be like, I have 2 crores while I can buy the house outright. That's a bad decision. You know why? Because the cost of capital is very, very low. The effective interest rate of home loans after the tax benefits is around 5.5-6%. So if you have 2 crores lying in your bank account, why would you give away 1.5 crores to buy that home outright when you can borrow money from the bank at 4.5% or 5.5% blended interest rate? Why would you give away your money when it can be invested in the market and get your 12%, 15% returns? So you really need to look at what is good debt and bad debt. So coming back to the question, my main advice is early on in your career, invest in assets. Now in India, unfortunately, I consider the house that you are living in is not an asset. So assets could be your mutual fund investment, equity investments, FDs, gold. These are good assets. So what most people do is as soon as we get married when the late 28 or late 29, almost 90% of our money goes into our primary residence, which is not an asset according to me, because it is not going to pay for the next 50 years of your life in terms of your expenses. It is just a shelter over your head and a shelter over your head can be bought with far lesser money if you know how to use your capital. Sure, on that note, the floor is open for questions. Please raise your hand. The mic will be passed on to you. Yeah, please pass on the mic to the lady. Hi, thank you. I'm from Australia. Hi. Hi. My name is Tia. I'm curious as to what is the diversity of your audience. So how many women versus men and whether you see a difference in the needs between those two different audiences in terms of the level of financial literacy? Yeah, so the demographic data, 80% is male, 20% women, and most of them are from your top five metro cities, which is where all the wealth is in this country, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune. Primarily Bangalore and Pune, because I'm a Bangalore boy, so most of my followers are from there. In terms of the major difference, I would say is of course between men and women and the way they look at finances. The women in this country, they usually don't, are not accustomed to managing the money by themselves. They rely on a male figure to give their money. They probably give it to their dad when they're young and then they give it to their husband. So I think women are naturally not that inclined to learn about money, but I think that is slowly changing now. And like most of the people who recognize me in public, it's men, but if it's a woman, they're usually working in a big four company like your KPMG and PWC. They already have a finance background, but I've not really come across women who are recognizing me without having a finance background. So there is still a gap in this country for women financial literacy to increase and for them to take control of their money by themselves. Thank you. Hi Sharon, this is Kavya. I'm a follower on Instagram in the last two years, and I kind of fall in that category where I earn and I give it to my husband to do the money management. My question to you here is what advice would you give to someone like me? I was a studious kid doing a job, doing my work. I've not learned much on the finance side and I feel I don't want to break my head. And now that I realize that it should not be in that bracket. And I have a lot of friends who are like me and I would like to know what advice would you give as where to start? Take control of our finance. Perfect, so firstly look at money as your source of freedom. So when you're giving your money to somebody else to manage, you're giving up your own freedom. So why should you be answerable to somebody else whenever you want to buy something? So my first advice is learn it yourself. Now you mentioned about you don't want to take the time and effort to do it and you don't have any finance background. Neither do I. I don't have a CAA, CFA degree and I didn't even go for my MBA. So I'm a mechanical engineer. So that cannot be an excuse for not learning about finance and it doesn't take a lot of time. Most people confuse, okay, CAs take five years or whatever, three, four years to become a CAA. I don't have the time to do it. But that's very, very different. What CAs are learning is a comprehensive tax laws and ecosystem of our country and most of it is related to, you know, your business taxation and all of that. But for most of us, we don't need to learn about business taxation. What we need to learn is about our personal finance taxation and it's not that much. If you ask me 10 to 15 hours of dedicated effort over one month should get you to the point where you can manage your own money and that is what we do in the one person club. Like in four weeks, 15 to 20 minutes per day is the time commitment that everybody needs to give and then we give them financial planning tools and we build a community of people. So the challenge with education today post getting a job is that people are really, really lazy. We procrastinate a lot. It's very easy to buy an online course but it's very difficult to watch it and complete. Go back to your school and college days. The reason why you are studying is because there was a strict teacher, you were competing with your friends, your mom used to scold you and there was an exam at the end. If a tech doesn't bring that into your learning you're never going to study because after coming back from home after a 9 to 5 or a 9 to 7 job you're automatically going to switch on Netflix because you're like, I'm going to have to reward myself. There is this new show out there. I'm going to have to watch it. So if that is the world that we're living in today, this low-attention span world it's going to be very, very difficult to learn anything new post getting a job. So that is why choose an educational course or an educational company. We sort of try to build that environment of your old classroom environment back into this. So what we do is that we have a mentor allocated to you. We sort of also have a community of 50,000 people who sort of help you solve your doubts and questions. We have an exam and assignment. So that is why our completion rates will be close to 70%. And the average tech completion rate is 6 to 7%. So the biggest problem that you guys have is not access to knowledge. It's your own procrastination. I agree with that ladies and gentlemen. We will be taking one last question. I see both of you having mics. I will be only able to take one last question. You're just running short of time. Hi. Hi Sharon. Hi. My name is Sagar. I'm from Pune. Actually, you answered my question about the red and asset and robot chaos. So just to take that question forward. Now we have one mindset who is creating the asset. And now we have one more mindset like Elon who doesn't have the asset or he's selling his asset. So what do you make out of these two mindsets? What is the different thing? Well, Elon Musk is big enough to be his own country. So I think it's not fair to compare us with him. See, Elon, most of his money is equity in his companies and he takes loans against those equity. So what happens is let's say Elon Musk was $200 billion and let's say most of his money is in Tesla or SpaceX or whatever it is. Now if he were to sell his equity for money he has to pay tax on it. So he will not do that. So he'll take a loan against his publicly listed equity and when you get a loan that's not an income and there's no tax on it. And the loans in US is very, very cheap. Here a loan would be 9 to 10, 11% at the minimum. There he can get a 3 to 4% interest rate loan. And the taxation there is 40%. So the rich really know ways to really leverage money and they've understood money to such an extent that eventually what ends up happening is that the bulk of the taxation as a percentage of your income is borne by the middle class and not by the rich. So you need to start learning these things because the more you learn about money the more you realize how it can be leveraged to your advantage. It's not a fair word but if you learn you can have that unfair advantage for yourself. Thank you. Thank you on that. Now we'll conclude the session here. I'm really sorry for running outside. I came for the event because of shell negative. Please take that. Yes, yes, yes. Please go ahead. The fan following, you know, it's real. Let's go ahead. Hi, Sharon. I came to the event for you itself. Basically, I saw the event. I saw the criteria. I'm a huge follower of yours. Okay. So I'm Banga Boy. So my name is Altia. So I'm an early stage entrepreneur. So what financial advice would you give it to me like an early stage entrepreneur in my success story? Like what's the key factor? Like I'm a solar founder right now. So I'm looking for investors. So what advice would you give for me as a budding entrepreneur right now at this stage of the Indian era? Yeah, great question. And I would say even I am a very early stage entrepreneur myself. It's just been two years for me and I'll tell you some learnings that I have which I'll share with you. Number one, you don't necessarily need investors' money to build something, right? Because most people assume that only if I have investor money I can hire expensive people to do the job for me. But the real magic happens when you cannot buy of course. When you can hire affordable people and train them to be as good as the expensive people. That when you're really early in your game that is the way to do it because otherwise your costs will be really, really high. And even if you raise investor money what ends up happening is you end up in a hiring frenzy and keep hiring more and more expensive people and your fixed costs become so high and when there is a market down which is currently the situation that we are in your fixed costs will be high and then you start burning money. So number one is hire people who are maybe two to three years of experience take the time and effort to train them it's not like I hire this person give them the task and they'll do it. No. You need to sit with them, train them and then they will take it out, right? So if I had to tell you today today I have people in my company who are at you know 6 to 11 lakhs per annum who are working at the level of 35 lakhs per annum guy because I took the time and effort to train him now this guy is a fresher right out of college, right? So that is still good money for him but because I have taken the time and effort to train him he is operating at a level which is of a 35 lakh per annum guy so that is the biggest lesson that I've learned is that you don't necessarily have to hire expensive people to do the job for you. Thank you. If that answers your question can we have a huge round of applause ladies and gentlemen just adding on to that we have an investor's lead happening at it's from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. if anybody wants to push we have an investor's zone make sure you guys head out there thank you so much Sharon and thank you so much we need them coming in doing the first fair side session. Thank you so much guys it was wonderful talking to you guys I hope you guys learned something new today and all the best for the rest of the event. Thank you, thank you Sharon.