 Ladies and gentlemen, coming up next, our next speaker always believed in the incredible power of early childhood learning and harnessing the natural curiosity and creativity of kids. He founded White Hat Junior in 2018 with the vision of making children creators of technology rather than being passive consumers of it. In August 2020, he joined hands with Byjuus, the world's most valuable at-tech company, to further accelerate his vision. He continued to lead the company post acquisition as well. He is a striving yogi who believes in keeping it simple, is a minimalist and views modern life through a yogic prism. He took a sabbatical in 2013 and backpacked across South America and Central Asia with his wife and spent most of the year in forest ashrams and silent meditation retreats. He's also an acclaimed novelist and has written three best-selling novels so far published by Harper Collins India and Penguin Random House. A graduate of IIM Bangalore, he has earlier served as the CEO for Discovery, Inc. South Asia. He's been associated with companies like PNG, BCG and Kraft Foods Group in the past. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Karan Bajaj, CEO and founder of White Hat Junior, who is going to be in conversation with Mr. Nawal Ahuja, co-founder Exchange for Media Group. They will be discussing on driving business outcomes in a digital first world. It's my privilege to please welcome Mr. Bajaj and Mr. Ahuja on screen. Very warm welcome to both of you. Thank you, Khyati. Thank you, Khyati. And good to see you, Karan. It's been a while since we have met. Hopefully, the pandemic will be behind us soon and we'll be able to catch up for a coffee, as Rubina was saying. And for those of you watching, thank you for being here today at today's program. As you know, this is the last session of the day. As every year, we team up with one of the world's largest advertising groups, the Tensu Ages Group, to unveil the Digital Advertising Outlook of the Year report. And this year's report has been momentous in many ways than one. Digital advertising has continued to leapfrog, while disruption happened due to COVID in the Indian advertising industry and the global advertising industry. Advertising de-grew across the board and digital kept leapfrogging. So in many ways, it's been an inflection point for what's happened in the digital domain. And it's not just digital marketing, digital advertising, digital adoption in the economy has gone up multi-fold. I read a tweet in the morning from Amitabh Khan which said, UPI transactions in this country have hit another milestone of, I think, 100 billion transactions. And that's a huge leap given that they've made this journey, this huge journey in just a matter of three years. So the future really holds a lot of promise. Yesterday, I was having a chat with the India MD of P.D. Light who was telling me how there be to be part of the business, which involves a lot of carpenters, masons and the blue-collar workforce is now so glued on. They are meeting through Zoom. They are doing Google Meet interactions. So that's a sea change from where we had primarily in India, the educated class adopting digital to now going down the entire way of the value system. Thank you, Karan, for joining us. Very happy to have a young entrepreneur today in this session. I will come to what you've done with Whitehab Junior in such a short span of time. I was reading somewhere, you spoke about, you've tried five things in life and three of them failed. Two worked or three worked and two failed. So tell me as an entrepreneur failure in a culture which only celebrates success, what's the mantra of handling failure? And your coding platform also talks about training kids for the future and getting them ready, software ready, coding ready. As a father, I also think that failure is one of the important lessons kids should teach. So as an entrepreneur, what have you learned from failure? It's a very good question, anyway, pleasure to see you. Firstly, I would say my biggest learning is that I think good entrepreneurs just show up every day. So I think when I show up every day, I think most days I know, I think the trick is just in showing up every day because there'll be lots of ups. There's just tremendous downs. And it doesn't end. I've been through the dream exit for people. After that also, there has been a spurt of ups and downs that I followed since. So I think my typical mantra is that if you just show up every day, I think most people give up in the middle somewhere because it gets so relentless and so hard. But if you just show up every day and eventually every wall breaks and you keep moving forward. So I've lived through these journeys before. And I think anybody who's going into any creative field, and you are also obviously an entrepreneur and in a creative field, you just need to accept that the odds in a creative field of success are very hard. And I've experienced it myself. I've written three novels, launched a TV channel with Discovery, started my own company. I think as I said, if I look at the last decade, these five endeavors have taken up almost my last decade. And the ratio of success has been probably one or two out of these five. And you have to accept that. That's the nature of building anything from scratch that more often than not, the world doesn't need a new thing. And it'll be rejected. But when it works, it works well. So I think my mantra is that show up, focus on the input, don't think about the output too much. And eventually, if your input is good, then the output will come your way. If not in the first year, then maybe in the 10th year, but you just keep showing up. And that's how I think about it. Well said, Karan. And as you are a yogi yourself, don't get too attached to the outcome, do your job. Right? Yeah, just focus on the input. And you know, to just show up when things are not going for you, to kind of draw that well of motivation from inside you. I think that's also a kind of difficult part. It's easy to say to show up, but there are days when things are so down that, and as statistics tell us for every successful White Hat junior, there are perhaps 10 or 20 failed ventures who never made it to the headlines anywhere. Correct, absolutely. So tell us, Karan, last year has been a year of disruption for economy. Of course, digital businesses have benefited from the disruption. Adoption has gone up, usage has gone up. And you worked across consumer businesses before White Hat junior across industries with Crop, with Procter & Gamble, Brick & Mortar businesses. And you have a very good view of what's happened in the Indian business ecosystem. Which are the companies for you, which have been stand out in terms of their response to the pandemic? What do you think that some of the Indian companies have done where they've really turned a challenge into a huge opportunity because disruption in business, we are really truly living in the VUCA world, so to say. We have been in the last 10, 15, 20 years. So what are the kind of companies that have come to your notice? Overall, I have been incredibly impressed by how people have acted. So I have been obviously in the entrepreneurial bubble. So I've looked at entrepreneurial, like my fellow entrepreneurs, much more closely. We immediately, you know, as soon as the pandemic hit in March and we were all offline, it kind of emerged that there would be some sectors like EdTech, for example, which in a way benefited from that. And people who were in the EdTech sector leveraged that opportunity to say that, look, this is the first time that a lot of people can sample EdTech. And I think almost everybody, right, from Beju to Vedantu to us, to an academy, I think everybody I looked at in the EdTech sector was figuring out that in this very exceptional period, how do we get more users to sample our very high quality product. So that was, and people did various things to do that. On the other hand, I was also very impressed with people who were like even in the travel and tourism entrepreneurs who were obviously very negatively hit, I saw immediately everybody reigning in on costs, using that time to really conserve capital. And in a startup, cash is oxygen, right? If you have cash in your bank, then you have opportunities to experiment a lot, pivot, turn, you know, keep taking more, like, like this is such a hard journey that you have to take many, many swings before you kind of hit the home run, if you will. So more cash allows you to take more swings. And I think I saw people adapt incredibly quickly to that, focus on their cash reserves, knew that one day things would get better again, and cash would allow them to take more swings. So overall, I would say, maybe it's the nature of the entrepreneurial life that people are extremely flexible to, you know, generally people who are very comfortable with ambiguity. And I saw that people reacted to the ambiguity very, very quickly, both on the people who were benefiting from it, like us or the people who were being hit by it. Yes, and you saw many companies using the opportunity and in a year when everybody's thought that businesses will take kind of a backseat in terms of driving growth. New product launches this way, went to the roof. You saw so many companies innovating at the company's sanitizer category has just gone through the roof in terms of how many products were launched. Very true, exactly. I think same with us. I think we are like similar, I guess, to the sanitizer category in a different world. But we knew that people were sampling at tech. And I think a lot of us were very inspired by the mission also at that time. I remember very clearly in April, when we had shut down offices, and it was very hard to run the business, even though people wanted to, for example, in White Hat Junior's case, there is a live online session, there is one teacher connected to one student and they're doing coding. On paper that looks wonderful that during the pandemic, kids are at home, teachers are at home. But the reality was that if in order, for example, to a White Hat Junior ecosystem to work, when you get new teachers onto the platform, we upgrade their internet so that they are able to operate with a large bandwidth and take classes, then we have call centers running so that if there is a problem with kids in the class, then a call center agent can come and solve the technical issues. During the pandemic, all of this was closed. We could not get physical internet upgraded was a problem. All call centers were starting to shut down because of at least for the first few months, there were a lot of buns and stuff. And I think I remembered very clearly that there was a period of time when I said that, look, it's like, we have to make this work. We are among the rare industries or companies that are adding jobs in this period. And I went from pre-pandemic, we had about 1,000 teachers on the platform. We were like a 15 month old company, we had 1,000 teachers on the platform, 300, 400 employees. But at the pandemic, I almost felt it was a moral responsibility for companies and industries who were doing well to really accelerate because we could create jobs and we could reverse the decline. And I think that kind of motivation really helped us live through lots of ups and downs as we scaled. We added teachers, we created a lot of hacks around how we could get internet upgraded in different keep call centers running from home, set up an entire online infrastructure support as well to keep accessing the growth. And obviously, the company grew very significantly during that period because we were very guided by that sense of mission that companies like us should be creating jobs and employment right now. Very important for businesses to keep in mind while you're chasing top line and bottom line growth, the people factor because eventually that's the asset, especially for some companies, make sure that you're contributing very positively to economic growth in the society, individual growth and the growth with equality. You also worked with multinationals in India and outside India and every company worth its all wants to groom entrepreneurs, right? Everybody wants team members who are entrepreneurs who have an entrepreneurial mindset who are go get us. What do you think when it comes to large corporations? What are the things, two, three things that you think stopped from people taking a more entrepreneurship role? Very good question as I'm trying to reflect on what differentiates the like, like because I've seen attempts at Proclin Gamble discovery all excellent companies at setting up the intrapreneur structure versus the, like, you know, obviously being an entrepreneur completely on the outside. I think two things happen. The biggest, I would say the first and biggest difference is that in the entrepreneurial journey, the pod that connects the VC to the entrepreneur is actually quite thin. It's not a very thick pod. So what happens is that the entrepreneur is given like the venture capitalist, contrary to the popular belief, right? I've worked like now with like Nexus and Omidyar were my original investors, then I will came into the mix along the way. I obviously met every venture capitalist during my fundraising process. I felt overall that the venture capital manages business with a very light touch. So in the end, the full accountability, you live and die by the entrepreneur's vision. I think in large companies, really creating that versus the very tight kind of chord to the center, the tight chord to the center never allows that complete ownership and accountability and the live and die spirit that an entrepreneur has knowing that look, he has to pay salaries by the end of this month. So he has to get the revenue in and he has to manage the cash or he or she has to manage the revenue and the cash. So that, so you live like, you know, especially when I raised my first capital was $1 million that I had $1 million. You're just like hanging by the thread, right? You need to and vice versa. I think the accountability completely lies on you with big companies. I think there's a bit of a cushion and the link to that center is too tight. So big companies really want to do like the entrepreneurship model, then they have to, you know, like keep the quad very light and keep the budget site, keep the quad light and like, you know, truly let the entrepreneur flourish and be themselves. The deadline between, you know, sort of creating a culture which encourages, you know, risk taking versus something that creates insecurity, right? And to find that right balance is very, very important. And I think that's where good companies really get it right. Correct. Very well. At the same time, they're secure about the fact that even if they make mistakes, you know, they're not going to be, you know, left-handing. I think a startup that becomes a large company typically would have that split like probably an Amazon or something because the entrepreneurs are used to losing the shirt of their back, right? And typically a CEO is not used to that. They always have a safety net. That's very hard for larger companies to compete with entrepreneurs in their spaces because they're used to losing it all, getting back up again, which I think typically in a large company that cushion like you're insulated from the depth of the fall a little bit. So I think companies with an entrepreneurial DNA, they are much more comfortable creating those environments where people can comfortably take risks because they have seen the complete losing everything and getting it back again. Karan, 2020 was the year when you significantly scaled up and then, you know, the pandemic also happened. So you were kind of arriving two cars at the same time, one managing the disruption that was happening in the general economy and also significantly scaling up your business. And in the meanwhile, also presumably talks were by Jews were on in terms of what was going on. You think this pandemic will has changed the role of an entrepreneur or the head of the company in any manner? Are there any new elements of the job that have got added which won't have been there pre 2020? Yes, I think again, very, very good question about because I've been reflecting on this. I think the number one change that would happen is we have all been forced to think much more deeply about culture, articulating culture, articulating values. This was always important, right, traditionally has always been important. But what I saw was that especially in a young company like ours, because I started in late 2018, technically left discovering February, March 2019. So the company was only one year old pre pandemic. Even when your values, your cultures, your mission is not explicitly articulated. And in the first year, you're barely you're trying to survive. So you barely write, put things like these down on paper, because you live it every day, people can see you and you walk around the office as a CEO, as the as the leaders of the organization, that culture osmosis is very strong. I think in the pandemic, all of us learned and we scaled from 300 to 5000 plus people in eight months, right, during the pandemic, we were like, scaling very rapidly from 1000 to almost 11,000 teachers. So we went from like an organization, which was almost on a first name basis, to like a very large disparate organization. And I think we all learned during this period, the incredible importance of being able to create mechanisms, where you're doing a cultural osmosis in a very deep way. And because you can't rely on the physical, you know, the physical life alone to do that. So that I think would be the the CEO as a culture champion, is probably the one role of which I think I also took a little while, you know, like embracing overall. But that would be probably the most significant change. Very important culture is what eventually defines the brand and you know how consumers look at the company. Tell us Karan, it's been now 2018, October 2018 is when you started this company, it's been two and a half years. It's been relatively a short journey when you talk about the age of a corporation. When you start a new company, obviously, the first few months, a year or two is spent, based just managing survival. And there is a very strong urge, temptation, tendency to scale up versus get money in place quickly, versus how quickly do you go to the market. So how do you find the right balance between these three seemingly contradictory, you know, approaches where, you know, you also have to get the product, you have to create a bare minimum scale for you to be able to attract enough, you know, investor interest for consumers, you know, a decent mass of consumers to be able to like you. So what are the lessons that entrepreneurs can learn from this kind of approach since you've done that in a short period of time? Again, Naval, a very, very, very thoughtful question. I think there are two things that I've learned overall now, after if I reflect on the last couple of years. The first is that this whole idea that your product should be 10 times 10x better than the alternative in the market is very critical. Until you've hit that point where the product is 10 times better than the alternative, you should not press the scaling button. Because quickly what happens is that if you have a moderately better product, or an equal product to the alternative, then what you start to realize is that the spend on user acquisition is very high, because users are not talking about the product to other people. And as a result, the positive effect of virality, which leads to marginal cost of acquisition decreasing as a result, scaling with not proportionally raising funds exorbitantly becomes very hard to get that positive virtuous cycle going. So what I've seen is that when people lose that patience that before the 10x product just because they're funding, they start to scale that immediately burns a big hole in the pocket and immediately, and the startup right one month could lead to a shutdown. So I think the first learning is that you should always have a 10x better product. In my case with coding, for example, and I look at two different products. The first product we launched was coding. Since there was no physical alternative, since there was no reference set, what we provided was a very big bow for the parents and the kids because they had a live one-on-one teacher. They had a very creative curriculum. All of edtech before that was focused on test preparation, mathematics, science, and here there was something in which kids were building and creating things, really enjoying the delight of being a consumer, by being a creator, a teacher who was like very especially connected to them one-on-one. So that was a very good 10x experience. So since there was a vow, we were able to scale very rapidly with very little acquisition because people were talking about the product. Everybody was talking about the Whitehead Junior at that time and it was growing very fast. When I look at Maths, for example, which we've just launched, it was a very different approach. We spent almost nine months researching the product before launching it because Maths was a very busy category and we wanted to make sure that whatever we launched in Maths was 10 times superior than anything in the market. So I think one principle is that until you have a 10x product, you should not scale. And second thing which I've also learned here is that the skill set required from 0 to 1, 1 to 100, and now 100 to 1000 very distinct skill sets. In 0 to 1, you are focused on a 10x product. 1 to 100, you are focused on scaling business systems for the leader to go from like product leadership to actually scaling business systems. They have to be very good at setting teams who can complement their product skills with business system setup. And then I realize now the 100 to 1000 journey is actually all about scaling a culture and that again requires the real leader to wear a completely different hat. So you go from a very product business model hat to a business scalar business systems hat to like a completely human resources oriented culture hat. And the leader has to just kind of quickly keep turning those hats and any gap in that and you'll see that the organization takes a step back and I think that's what every entrepreneur has to. Unfortunately for me, that journey just compressed in very quick periods of time and I was always thinking catch up a couple of months ago but if people had five years, I would plan that a little bit better. So tell us where does Baidu come? Baidu's come in in this third phase of journey, so to say, where the scaling of the 1000x, so to say, you have aspirations, you have plans to take this global, go to other parts of the world. So how does Baidu complement or fit into this plan beyond of course providing the funds to yeah. Yeah, so I think Naval, I mean, I would say like just from a story perspective, I think there were, I think there's a pivotal moment in the company. I remember when like six months or seven months into the company, there was a nine-year-old in Assam who created an anti-bullying app. She did no coding. She took Whitehead Junior. Then she saw bullying in her school. She created an anti-bullying app which actually worked to a large degree and I remember then that I had this very clear moment that we had created something which was a bit bigger than ourselves. Earlier, I meant for it to be a coding platform but then I realized that only an Indian company could have put together this model of creative curriculum supplemented with a one-on-one teacher who actually allows the kid to express the creativity fully because that was the, as I said, there is a very unique demographic difference in India in which 50% of college educated, 50% of women, in college 50% of representation is with women and in the workforce, only 20% of women are present. Every year, India is losing this huge, very educated, qualified workforce to which in any country that's losing this highly qualified workforce is not going to be able to actualize its potential. So we were able to take those women and they became teachers which were the heart of the whole platform. So I realized then that this very unique model of a teacher who's allowing individually to help a kid express his whole creative potential which can never be done in a one-to-many school setting and so we were almost creating a parallel school which was about individualization, customization, personal learning journeys, personal outcomes and I realized that look if you approached any subject like that beyond coding like math, science, English, your relationship of the kid with a subject would change forever. They would think of a way, the subject as a way of expressing themselves and then I knew from my own example that there were thousands of women in India who can become teachers for kids all over the world. When we launched in the US, it was the product was very successful. So I realized there was a very unique generational opportunity to take this powerful workforce in India and create these excellent creative curriculum for kids all over the world. When I had this feeling around the same time, that's the time we scaled up and around the same time with the Beju's discussion happened, I felt that everything I wanted to accomplish on my own would be much, much faster with Beju's. They were global in their presence. They were subject matter experts in education which my team was slowly building the skillset for and I felt that look multiple categories and could be disrupted with this almost parallel education system which is about individualized learning and be tremendous impact on the kids in the world as well as create teaching jobs in India at a very large scale. So I felt like this kind of an impact, it's too small for me to think of I should do it independently and I'll go on it on my own. Especially at my age, I don't think any entrepreneur is thinking like that. They're thinking that look I have an idea, let me, which is very impactful, let thousands of people experience that. So I felt like the Beju's that could happen much faster because they were very present internationally, very deep subject matter experts, deeper than we were. And with Beju, I sense the same very boundaryless vision of the world that I had. I always felt like the world was very boundaryless. My life was a bit like that. I traveled and lived in various places. My wife was not Indian. I'd always felt that the world in itself is very boundaryless. So I, with Beju, I recognize the same feeling that look an Indian tech company with this powerful like women education force and this very creative curriculum should reach kids all over the world. So I felt like, you know, doing it on my own is a very small objective in comparison to doing it larger, faster. And that's how the like I felt that the Beju's would be good for the company. One of the sort of undervalued aspects of tech business is the contribution to make the society, you know, which is not entirely possible to quantify in terms of, you know, money value, especially in a country like India where education is still the privilege of, you know, people who have money who don't have full access to private education. And to be able to contribute to that story, to democratize education, so to say, is a very, very, you know, important contribution to the society. Yes, these are highly valued companies, the owners, the entrepreneurs have sort of done well for themselves monetarily. But that doesn't take away from the fact the contribution that these companies are making to the sort of movement forward in the society. I remember last year, Ravindran Baiju was the recipient of the impact person of the award. I remember talking to him about it, how software aspect of tech business kind of never gets fully highlighted. As, you know, culturally, we are enamored by commercial success and that part really comes under spotlight. Karan, tell us, you know, when we were all going up in this country, 30, 40, 30 years back, economic growth was primarily being driven by the large metro cities. And that story has changed. It's interesting you mentioned about this girl from Assam who created a app about bullying. And we've seen this in the last 20 years. You look at sectors like auto, FMCG, mobile services, a lot of growth has come from what we call non-metro, the part of the semi-rural, the semi-urban and rural areas. Tech companies, by nature, of course, you start with metro areas and then you percolate down. And tech is kind of, you know, the next frontier. Are you already seeing a lot of adoption for your kind of platforms coming from, you know, smaller centers? And how do they pan out, say, for the next two, three years? Do you go global before you go completely kind of penetrate into the rural areas of India? Very good question. So currently for Whitehead Junior, 60 to 65% of the users are coming from outside the top 15 cities. So we, surprisingly enough, because when I started the company, everybody said that coding is very niche. It's only for the upper income and that was the natural bias in the beginning, I think overall. But what we saw very quickly was that if there was one kid from Jammu who signed, suddenly we would see within 10 days, there would be 70, 80 kids from Jammu who signed up because the word-of-mouth factor in smaller centers was very, very high. Sikkim, somebody, like, you know, we had one or two kids in Sikkim take up and suddenly we would see 350, 400 kids from Sikkim suddenly. So we saw that the word-of-mouth spread was very, very high. And the aspirations, the dreams, the discerning power of good education equal, completely equal. So they are able to look at it and say, this is powerful. And then the ability of tech, right, what we had was very early, we built on a vernacular matching algorithm. So if a student from Tamil Nadu signs, our tech reads it, that they are coming from Tamil Nadu and they connect them to a Tamil teacher so that she can switch between English and vernacular very quickly. Now today, almost 25 to 30% of our classes daily are happening in the vernacular language. 25% of the classes are happening with, because we are able to connect with tech, the Tamil student to the Tamil teacher and we are seeing about 20 to 25% of our classes happening in vernacular every day. So I would say the depth was, for us, was not like a linear journey that you saturated the metros first and then went to the non-meters. Almost organically, since it was the internet, people signed up, our ecosystem was people signed up for a free trial. Then there would be a teacher who met them and then there would be a class and then they would decide to become paid users. We saw almost immediately a very, very good pickup from non-meters. Almost immediately, I remember the first few months itself, we saw a very good traction there. So I always thought of it as a bit of an end. We didn't have to customize anything for to go deeper in India. And as we go broader in the world, also surprisingly enough, I would say the other part of it is it was very universal. At least our model was very universal. When I first launched in the US, everybody had told me once again that Indian companies don't do well in the US without a lot of cash reserves and stuff. And I was just on my first round of funding. But off the gate, the Indian teachers were very well received in the US with American kids. So I think American kids, same teachers are teaching Mumbai kids as they are teaching kids in Sikkim, in Gangkok as they are teaching kids in New York City. And it's very universal. The love and empathy and compassion of a teacher, the creativity of a curriculum, these are very universal, which I think should be, I think it's very inspiring for any entrepreneur who's planning an tech future that it is actually a very brown, realist global world. Very interesting because that also ensures that it democratizes the sort of access to education. Culturally, for society as a large makes a huge difference in the long run. And I think that's one of the things that has kind of held the potential of this country back, which is democratic access to education to anybody who wants it. I think tech really plays a huge part in that. Karan, let me come to some interesting marketing parts of what White Hat Junior has done. There's been this traditional theory about digital that it's more a lead generation ROI driven media. What I've seen White Hat doing is you created a brand by primarily using digital as a medium. You are yourself a naturally a digital company, but we live in an era where digital companies invest huge amounts of money in television, print, and other media. But White Hat Junior has been a very different example. I think it's been a unique example where you've shown that by using just digital media, you're able to build a brand and you don't need to use digital just for ROI and lead generation programs. Was it conscious? Was it driven by lack of larger budgets to do television? Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention. But I had a very strong belief in the digital medium from the beginning. So I always felt that a great product with the efficient user mechanism like digital and then digital also allows, I would say there's a lot of top of paid digital, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, etc. But what digital also allows is this very unique opportunity to share and refer and have all of these organic hacks to get people to tell other people if they like something. So I think we leverage those very efficiently, I would say. So overall, we were at like $150 million, it's almost more than 100 crores a month before even the first television and before we did the first television. So like everything, we grew the entire brand on digital. But I would say what helped us was that almost 50 to about 65% of our revenue came from word of mouth and organic and reference and only 35% of it was paid. At a very large scale obviously, digital hits diminishing returns. We reached that very large scale of diminishing returns at more than 100 crores a month of revenue. So we had a lot of like a leeway because we reached a larger revenue just because people were telling other people. So as long as you have a good product, digital can actually take you very large in scale before you invest in television. One of the undervalued things is word of mouth because I remember my kid started White Hat Junior even before we had seen any of the digital ads, perhaps this was in a half pack around the time you would have launched and it was this word of mouth people talking very highly about it and the kids getting on to it and so much focus is spent on digital marketing, creating television ads, social media. I think as much attention needs to go to what your existing customers are telling you because they're the best brand ambassadors and a lot of marketers, marketing teams end up missing that much. Without having the year to the ground, they focus a lot on what's happening, the online chatter without really getting into what the actual consumer is talking about. That brings me to the next point Karan and this is a question to you as a entrepreneur and having run businesses in the past for multinationals. We live in a very polarized world at the society level, political level, everything is polarized, social media has given a tool for everybody to have opinions. We've had instances in the last one year say, I won't name examples where brands have been made to do things that would have been seen mundane and irrelevant to the larger topic of discussion. So in an era like that, what do business owners, what do brands do where there might be a small set of consumers who take offense to something that is being done by the brand? Whether it is logo changes, whether it is ads being pulled out, how do you deal with a situation like that because everybody is entitled to a view and social media really allows amplification of that view, whether that view is right or wrong? I mean, we would probably be the posture child of this. People having a very large opinion of us online. So I think there are dozens of brands. See, the truth is that I think with everything which is online or offline, I think the best thing to do is to look at all of this, see if there is a kernel of somewhere that can make your systems better, take that kernel of truth and then eventually learn to shut everything else off because otherwise it's a full on, the democratization of social media, which I think is excellent, by the way, has enabled everybody to have a very strong point of view, which is I think, okay, but I think if there's a kernel of truth in all of it, which I think in our case, there was severe criticism out of which I did feel a fair amount was true. So I looked at it and said that look, where did I, where did we go, not do right? And then let's go and fix those systems and make them better for the future. So I think that's the best you can do. I think overreacting to it is also not good. So I think that fine line is very important, especially not bringing ego into play, looking at things more objectively and then taking a decision. That's a very honest answer. Thank you for that. Before we go, Karan, I know we have limited time. You've been into yoga, you've written books, some of them have done well, others not so well. What's the, what, I have two questions from that. What's been your learning from, you know, some of the non-business things you've done that you bring to business? I think the general learning is that everybody should build their first thing, like should start building things early. So I think what's, because it's a very, it's a very similar journey, right? So I think entrepreneurship for me was not very distinct from writing a novel in some ways because in a novel also, when you sit in front of your laptop and you've, just this act is very intimidating that I'm going to take this blank page. I'm somehow going to write 300 pages out of this, which one day will be published and people will read and lots of people will read and that's the hope that I embark on this one year long project on your own. So it's a very big leap of faith and tests you, a test your strength of conviction about your idea, your confidence, your sense of mission, because in the end, I would say both novel writing and entrepreneurship is, I don't think anybody and like, there's a lot of like, as you rightly said, to talk about commerce and money and how much money I have made or people have made. But the reality is that nobody in the right mind would write a novel or start a company with these incredible odds against you, right? Startups I think are 90% chance of, I remember that statistic, which is very correct, right? 90% of the time you'll fail, 7% of the time you'll achieve a break even versus your existing option of doing a job, right? And in the 3% of the case, you'll succeed out of which in two out of those 3%, you'll succeed enough to start another company, which is another toll on you. And in only in the 1% of chance will you really make it sort of a thing. So nobody starts an endeavor like this on a one out of 100 betting stakes, right? You start with the idea that look, I've got something powerful and I want the world to like, I want lots of people in the world to read it. So in that sense, I feel like the act of building something takes you to that zone of believing and the conviction of taking your idea and then living through all the very predictable things that come, like my third novel was rejected 61 times. I kept revising it, kept revising it, kept revising it, kept getting rejected, kept getting rejected. And I wouldn't just give up. I would just keep revising it again and again until for one year, I was like, okay, I'm just going to keep revising it until somebody accepted in random house in the US eventually embraced it. So by the time I did a startup, I was like, 50, 60 investors might say no, but I'm just going to stick to this until somebody says yes. So I think that's it. The journey of creation early will take you through these, I would say, like really kind of tough journeys of like pushing your stretching, like believing in your ideas and then accepting all the failures and rejections that come your way and then subsequently every creation journey after that becomes a bit easier. Like you said, start showing up. You showed up at least 50 or 50 years. I think that's perseverance and how you handle failure. I think two very, very important aspects because if you're an entrepreneur, these two things are kind of your bedmates, so to say. Last question before we go, Karan. A lot of entrepreneurs, you've tasted commercial success early in this venture and when you make good money by those standards, a lot of entrepreneurs kind of lose steam, they lose motivation. So what next, what keeps you, what will keep you motivated next three years because one of the key goals, let's accept it off, starting these businesses is also commercial success, which has already kind of come your way. So what's the next thing that will drive you, keep you motivated to be able to kind of scale this business 1000X as you said and keep going three years and perhaps beyond? Yeah, I think, I mean, I have always thought of work as a bit of a tool for self-transformation, if you will, like getting myself in a way, struggling against odds, climbing a new mountain to the extent that I see myself, I can visibly see myself better and better, getting better and better as a person in this pursuit, if you will. So I think even with discovery, we know each other from then. Like for me, the whole act of like trying to kind of scale discovery, launch it like a GC channel, I did my best in the same way that I did in this journey, I kind of like wrestled all the forces and tried to do my best with the same spirit to, it's a tool of expressing your mission and a tool for transformation. So I think, I didn't look like, I mean, the post acquisition has meant almost nothing to me, right? Like I think, I mean, I didn't do this journey for financial reasons, I believed in what I did and then I feel like right now there is still a huge mountain left to be climbed, right? After the acquisition, again, I learned so much about what I could have done better and right, that I feel again that there is like a whole new mountain to climb and in this mountain, I'm transforming myself. It's a tool of transformation personally and a tool of like taking a very powerful mission around the world, right? As I said, invited junior, particularly for example, my mother, like she was a deli on a street talker and she could never have a career because she was always following my dad, who was an army officer to Sri Lanka, Le Ladakh, Jammu and then, you know, Tezpur Assam, she kept moving and when I like, when this model, one of the most satisfying things is that there are 11,000 women like these, you know, army officer wives or women who have kids who didn't want to go and join a conventional workplace again, who formed like who are contributing back to society, who are like self-fulfilled because they're doing a very powerful job and I think I'm just, I feel like it's too early for me to even think about anything but to like really like magnify that impact to the extent I can, to the best I can serve. So, yeah. Fantastic, very inspiring Jharni Karan, wish you very good luck in the next part of the journey. Thank you for joining us and hope to see you sometime very soon for a physical cup of coffee. Thank you, thank you very much. Okay, okay, bye-bye. Thank you, Nawal. Thank you, Cathy. Bye-bye.