 But let's begin right now. I'll begin with Vijay. You've been an entrepreneur since 2001. You started before it became fashionable to become a tech entrepreneur. This was way before Flipkart became a household name or even started. So you've seen several ups and downs. Can you tell me what is happening in the ecosystem right now? I remember when we started in 1999, 2000, there used to be a Gartner report which said, 2008, India will have 10 million internet connection or probably 100 million. It was an order of magnitude big in a way. And that dumb thing didn't happen, whatever the pitch was. But that created that early bubble, if you remember, even in India. And that was 1998, the Nasdaq pre-Nasdaq days. I had a job. I left it. And I jumped into doing something. And soon, 9-11 happened. Now, what had changed since that day and from today is that on that day, we had a hope there will be Indian consumers there. If you metaphorically look at it, IT services happened in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Make My Trip or knockry.com kind of companies came, a little bit of internet companies. And they were also serving, to an extent, an NRI or an IT service customer. So knockry was for IT services customers. And Make My Trip was for NRIs to book flight tickets to India. So the real internet revolution had a requirement of that we have tens of million of Indian consumers. And what happened since 2013 is that we have a magically 100 millions of Indian consumers now available to Indian companies. This is the single most important event that swung the attention of the world, that we were an emerging market to a market which has significantly emerged and still pending a lot to emerge. But that customer base had come. And I believe that local domestic market is the reason that there is just so much of excitement. Indian startups, just before, if you know, Indian consumers being served, there was a lot of rush of going international. There were companies like InMobi, OnMobil, and Dhruva, and a lot of companies, if you remember, there were global companies building out of India. And we used to, when we used to discuss a startup team, we used to discuss, is there a global opportunity for Indian company? And now today, any company which is not focusing on India and vertical instead focusing on international, is there some problem in your business that you're not able to focus on India? So, Diksha, the single thing that has changed now and in those days is, today we have a customer base which is able to build, sustain, such large companies. And the classic Indian middle class customer base, smartphone, user base, and the opportunity to create services, obviously the first service will be of the similar services which are in the Western market or Eastern market, then local services will come. OK, great. So, Mahesh, I'll come to you. And like Vijay said, since 2013, it seems as if this is an industry that has been on, literally on steroids. There has been a large amount of funds that have been raised. There have been ambitious targets. But the last few quarters have also been quite mellow. As an investor, what do you think is happening? What are investors doing differently now? And what kind of pressure does it put on companies? So I think to go with the thesis that Vijay talked about, what's really happened was, first a lot of global investors started applying the standard BRICS thesis, which is, what happens in the US, you can go and replicate in Russia, China, Brazil, et cetera. So, if I build a Facebook in the US, let me build a Facebook of Russia, which is V Contact. And let me build a Facebook of China, which is Render. And if I build Google of the US, I'll build the Google of Russia, which is Yandex. And I'll build the Google of China, which is Baidu. And they came in to say, OK, let's build the Facebook of India. Let's build the Amazon of India. Let's build the Google of India. And I think what's really happened is that in all of these, which is simple, the application, the copy-paste application, virtually everyone has failed. So it's taken a while to come back and say, India does not follow the BRICS thesis. If you look at Ritesh's business, if you look at Vijay's business, there are no global equivalents of these businesses. There are not. So I think the really interesting thing, my most successful companies are things where there is not an American or a Chinese or a Russian equivalent. So it's taken a while for investors to come back and say that I can't apply the copy-paste thesis. I have to sit back and say, OK, what's the problem out here in India? What solves the problem? And unlike, like Vijay said earlier, it was like, from here, let me go to the West. Today, the companies that really do well here actually tend to go to the second world. So my industry companies, when they do well, go to Africa, they go to the Middle East, they go to Southeast Asia. And I think that's really interesting that we don't look at India as a fag end of the first world, but as kind of the leader of the second world, saying what works here in terms of lack of infrastructure, lack of facilities is common in terms of markets with lots of other developing economies. So it's not something that caters to the first billion, but something that caters to the second 2 billion or the next 2, 3 billion in the world. So it's taken a while for people to adjust their investing thesis, and which is why, for example, the guys who came into a huge amount of money to do the copy-paste business is all withdrawn. And now you're again seeing in some cases a slow rebirth of companies saying, well, let's forget the American thesis, let's forget the spreadsheet thesis, let's see if there's something that works for India. And it's a different kind of world that you can address starting from India onwards. But like some of the most well-funded Indian startups are what you call copy-paste business models. And they're all doing terribly. I'm sorry? They're all doing terribly. They're not doing terribly. They are all doing terribly. But they're also solving a need, or they, at that point, they solved a need, which nobody else was solving in India. So just because it's a copy-maste model, do you think we should not start it, even though it is? So here's the thing, right? So why do you do a copy-paste? See, one of the interesting things in the internet economy you'll see is that, unlike in the traditional economy, where if I take the automotive economy, there's Toyota, there's Volkswagen, there's so many companies all with more than 10% market share, right? But out here in this world, so if you take a niche, if you take his niche, I mean, or you take any of these niches, it ends up like the first company owns 85% of the business. The second, the number two company owns 8.5% of that market share, and the number three company owns 0.85% of the market share. So essentially what you have is you have room for one or two companies in a niche. And this is the same. I mean, it's much like, it's the role of WhatsApp and messaging or Gmail and email or YouTube and video, absolute dominant leadership, and kind of this logarithmic scale of one by 10 that happens. So what's the point of coming in and doing a copy-paste when you're likely to end up as the 8.5% player or the 0.85% player? Because Facebook of India is Facebook and the Google of India is Google and I buzz it. And I think Vijay may or may not agree that the Amazon of India will be Amazon, the Tinder of India will be Tinder. So why bother building businesses which are one-tenth this size out here? For what, no, who's gonna buy them, right? So what's far more important is to build the oyo's of the world and the patiums of the world where you are the dominant, absolute dominant leader in those places, and you actually build something which is new as opposed to coming here on a copy-paste, quick flip mentality, right? So I think that's far more important. I mean, it's good that the money is coming, Diksha. It's good because employment has been created. Vijay has bought a house, Ritesh has bought a house. It's good for the housing market in Gurgaon and Delhi, right? It's very good, right? But here's the sake part, right? When I look and talk to my LPs overseas, they say, you know what? 90 billion has gone into India, only 46 billion has come back. So as a country in terms of VC and P investments, we haven't even returned the capital that's coming yet. So if people are making an aggressive bet on India saying, I want to come in, right? At some point, we will have to live up to the bet. You know, you can say 2013, but people have been investing here for 25 years, and we don't yet have a stellar record of returning money. So if you want long-term, say, I started my fund in 2006. In those days, you look at, you know, any fund manager worldwide, he had an asset allocation spreadsheet. There was US, UK, Europe, et cetera, and there was real estate and large cap and, you know, growth and emerging markets. So the smallest sector was for emerging markets, emerging companies. That was India. So you'd get 1% of the global allocation. Today, we get two, three, four, five percent, right? Let's not screw it up. So we've got to be slightly more responsible towards the idea that it would be a nice thing to get money back to the people who put it in, as opposed to saying, well, the money's coming, you, who, we bought a lot of houses. You know, at some point, it's okay. We will have small bubbles out here. They will burst, but on the whole, it's still good. Let the money come in, let it stay in. It's doing good for everybody. Vijay, would you want to respond to, because you're also in the e-commerce play, and then... Now, okay, so I'm going to say, this is a classic thesis. Mr. Abshay goes through this every day, that when offline companies come and say, protect us from this onslaught of large, big companies, and they don't bother about international or Indian companies. Okay, so when a new company forms up, it's in an early toddler teen and so on stage, it needs a lot of protection from weather, which is called competing weather. So if you remember the Expedia classic example, now I'm going to give an example that how US companies are not those companies in India. Expedia of India is not Expedia, and then we talk about LinkedIn, which is match.com equivalent, could be shadi.com if you wish, then they are not of India, right? But the intention here is that, if a company is operating in a... India is a fairly open market, and if a company is operating in a segment where the global competition has started looking at India as a market, which happened after the tripping point of 100 million users, they are going to come inevitably, and if you had enough ample time to build this and capital to build this, you now are going to be a key player left in that segment. If today I start a company which looks like what is an American company, it could be called DUM, but in 2002 or 1999, when Make My Trip started, it was not technically DUM, even though they were Expedias and other a Travelocity of the world. It is all because is the global company looking at India as a market or not? For example, like today, if Walmart comes consumer, every Indian retailer will definitely feel a heat, even if it is a mature market where they have a significant moat and a primary access to the market. The question here Mahesh is, who has a primary access to the market? Yes, there is no doubt about it. Nobody can fight a bottomless battle, bottomless capital battle. I mean, it is clearly said that Jeff Bezos, if it takes few quarters to lose earning, it won't stop him from doing that, just to fight India and win India. That is a quote that was in public and I saw him in person and I heard it literally like that. He actually said that, I do not know why people thought India will be like China, some of the investor definitely thought so and right now they must be regretting, if not then next two years they will regret a lot more. He literally said these words in the room that I was sitting. Now, that doesn't stop and I belong to what Dixar said, that doesn't stop an Indian entrepreneur to start attempting to build an Amazon of India because it takes an entrepreneurial energy to build that no two years. It takes that energy and we have to respect that energy and build that is the respect that we have to give it because that is what creates this excitement and euphoria. Surprisingly, what you create could cost you is another problem because if it was not Flipkart to build what it has built, India wouldn't be so exciting and that is exactly what is causing them cost of it. Now, in such scenario, I believe an entrepreneur will take a swing or block the entries and do anything. So China, they go and they get it blocked and Uber in China, I mean today mornings, Bloomberg article, I'm sure some of you might have read it. It's magically true how the fight went to three and a half billion dollar of money on the table was there. So they spent one billion each two years then the next three and a half billion was put on the table. Other guys said on five, I met Jean in person when she said we will answer three and a half billion by putting two X of that money on the table. That is the kind of fight was. Now, what we're talking is can Indians do that? That is where the government policy and the opportunity comes. In India, it is a problem for an company to raise a hundred million dollar because number of funds that can 900 million check are lesser. India does not have Indian companies putting that money. Forget about international companies putting money. In China, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, local investors, Hill House, everybody who sort of is managing local destination fund was putting money. In India, no Mahindra, no Builder, no Tata, though Mr. Tata individually puts, but that is very small. When I say this, there is nobody who's putting like 100 million and 200 million and here is my billion, my friend. Now kill this country. We don't have that aspiration actually. And I want to tell this that if we as India want to win this battle of supremacy in the smartphone world, we have to have Indian investors chase that battle. People who are Indians chase that battle, not an outsider investor who's taking a bet because this is a market and this company will play a market here. Remember, remember the GSM, the cellular was built by Europeans. It doesn't mean the rest of the world was not fighting but European companies, Nokia and the more, you know the Siemens of the world took it back. And the devices came, the Americans took that battle and Chinese manufactured this smartphone software. This is our home run if you will. Yes, it is logical to think that India is a market for global company which are not thinking is a market, but why are we not playing the big bet? Why are not we building a soft bank which can go and buy a sprint in US? Well, that's a commercially different reason that you may say that's not logical, but the point is why India when it comes to see an opportunity goes back office and in store, not in the front office and owns that building? Why? Why Indian IT services companies build a BPO and not acquire Accenture and Capgemini? Why? This is a time, this is our time. We need capital, we need audacious aspirations and we need people who can take those bets. That is what I believe is India's startup opportunity is. Building a small company which is battling for 8% market share is a second great price, we know that. But why would it be happening? Not because that India is an open market and anybody can take it all back. It is because we do not have a local support from local investors or local market when it comes to that. Even a smaller country like Australia, you go. You travel there, made in Australia, proudly made in Australia. There are battles, countries have to fight of the globalization and remember this is not a battle of a one company or one country, this is battle for all countries out there. I wish this room does not settle on saying that Western companies or for that matter Eastern companies has a first right on our market. I wish that is not the conclusion we end at the end of this debate. If I can add to that rousing words and actually quite agree with Vijay on a lot of this. My sense is there are large businesses to be built out here. The reason why, you know, for example, we were able to, other people were able to build the Google of Russia and the Google of China was because of protectionist countries, right? Russia's protectionist and China's protectionist. And India's not, we're open, right? Given that, what we really need are larger aspirations. So culturally, Vijay, I think the issue is that, you know, I have not funded a single BPO in my life or a single, you know, let's do it cheaper in India kind of process. I think even historically we come from a socialist background, even the Tata's and the Berla's and all the large companies, they started off kind of copy pasting what worked somewhere else and say, yeah, you know, you have a pump company we'll build a pump company here. You have a car company there, we'll build a car company here. It's only now we're beginning to have original thought in this generation, right? It's starting, it's culturally very difficult for us to be truly innovative. This generation is, but our forefathers, even as children we were brought up to be like somebody else. I remember going to school and getting 9,700 in maths and my dad saying, why can't you be like that guy? He got 9,900, right? You always talk to be like somebody else as opposed to saying, look, it's fine, what you got. Mahesh, Japanese built Honda, Toyota, Nissan when Germans and Americans had built their world's largest companies. We have to build products built in India, made in India, made for India, made in Indian context like we just heard. World needs lower cost, higher scalable and largely scalable innovations built out of countries like us. We need to take head-on on Visa and Master in payments. We need to take a head-on on Amazon in the online retail and we need to take a head-on to any category that you wish to take and we need to take that. I believe that newer incremental categories we should not give up. I understand 10 and 15 years of innovation has gone in building a Google, Facebook or an Amazon but taxi ride is not what has been there for 10 and 15 years, my friend. It is happening in the parallel universe in two countries. I just want to tell you why I have this pain is that I was the guy who in 1998 out of college was building a search engine exactly the same point of time when Rajiv Mott Maneeman, two people, Larry and Sergey. It was nothing less that our search engine was looking to do than what it was supposed to do. We never had an opportunity to take a chance. This is our chance, country is giving us to build and prioritize and build something in this country at a cost that we can build it and a scale that we can build it and once we build it, it is our duty and obligation to take it to the world. But I repeat again, world has repeated examples of the countries and categories which have been built. I love Patanjali's Ayurveda's outcome for what categories traditional companies have built. We have to see through the market which is not seen by common companies which have come from the international capital. We have to fight the managerial capabilities by entrepreneurial energy and we have to not find money as the last answer to the problem that we are chasing. So I'll bring Ramayesh in at this point. So, you know, we just said that most of the investors in India right now most of the biggest like big investors, you have Tiger Global, SoftBank, Alibaba, they're all Chinese or American companies. Why is it that we don't have Indian investors and what is it that the government can do to encourage more money from India to be pumped into the startup ecosystem? After that spirited speech of, Vijay is very difficult to come in. Yes. Government has been trying to figure out since early this year what all it needs to do to promote and the growth of the startup system. For funds, two initiatives have been taken. One is that creating a fund of funds for 10,000 crore rupees in four years. So the government gives this money to selected alternate investment funds who in turn take equity in the startups. So far 1,100 crores have been given and we hope, I mean, they are allowed to take up to 35% equity. SidBee is implementing this. They take about 20, 17, 20 or something. So we hoping that this 10,000 crores in four years will mobilize another about, let's say 50,000 crore more of private investment. So that's one initiative. Now it has started implementation. We want to fast track it because the processes are rather slow. We are figuring out, we are also a startup in this thing because before this year, there was no concerted effort by the central government to do something specific for the startup sector. So we are also in the learning mode in many respects, but we are learning fast by engaging with people. Another initiative for infusing funds is the credit guarantee scheme of 2,000 crores. We are in the process of going to cabinet after approvals. So that will give some comfort to banks and other institutions who give credit to startups without collateral. So they are the two major initiatives. But one thing I just like to say, see the government is very keen to do whatever it can. So I don't think this is the end. So for the infusing funds is concerned or support of any kind is concerned. Recently, we have in the last few months, we have tried to gather all the problems that the startups face in the country. This is one of them with regulators, with RBI, ECB limits, with MCA, ESOPs and tax break for IPR, commercialization. And now we have taken up with all the regulators and the ministries concerned. So because there are a lot of issues where we startups face, but the good thing is that this is one place where we are connecting with the startup world and we are finding out the problems with various laws and regulators and trying to address them. Within the government, we tried to do that and it's going to work. There's no way it's not going to work. We'll discuss, negotiate and try to get it done. So this is an important initiative. And Vijay, what do you think about this? Do you think this will solve that big problem that you talked about? I can say that there is no government ever happened in this country which was bothered about startup at all, first and foremost. And whenever a regulator or a ministry had a choice to choose between an incumbent and a startup, there was no voice of a startup. Even the industrial bodies never invited people like us. I mean, this is so nice to see if people like us having this chair itself here. And the government steps, I'm not going to judge what is the correct step or how could have been executed. I'm going to judge the intent and I'm going to judge that they have done incredibly well in publicly talking and making this as a public revolution. At my age, when I started, my parents wanted me to get a job because they knew that I wouldn't get married because people think that this guy did not get a job. That is why he's running a business actually. It was a social problem and social stigma to be called a businessman. Today a businessman comma an entrepreneur is looked up to not look down to. And that is possible because of our prime minister talking about startup India and wake up India and things like that. So there is a larger construct that gets built around it. That is exciting. Obviously individual items, there are inputs and there can be more inputs on that. And I'm all kudos to the team which is at BIPP that there is a excitement that continuously gets built there. Also, you know, we've seen that online companies or startups have been harassed in the past because of some of the laws in India, whichever is telling me that he has an FIR against him. We all saw what happened with Ola and Uber. Is there something that the government is doing to protect the online businesses? We are trying to protect the offline as well as online businesses. You know, that's your answer. See, business getting harassed in India is nothing new. The culture has been virtually, let's not say anti-business, but it has not been very business friendly. The whole attitude of people implementing various laws, particularly at lower levels. I mean, this is a huge problem. I mean, the problem that the online companies face and newer technologies face is entirely different, which is on top of the normal harassment. So, for example, you know, while interacting with people, we find that e-pharmacies are coming now. Now, they're not violating the law, but the police inspector says that you are violating it because the police inspectors are not very well trained in such matters. So now we are trying to take up this matter with the state governments that, you know, give a clarification from the Ministry of Health or Pharmacy and make sure that it doesn't happen. In one of our interactions, we found that a company which has provided 5,000 telephone lines through some Wi-Fi system, they were ordered by the DOT to stop that business. So I connected him immediately to my friend, Secretary DOT, who's very proactive, and he immediately got relief. He is a business well-restored. And now they're changing that entire, you know, they're freeing up the whole domain from licensing. And there are so many other issues. We were having, you know, we have this committee on e-commerce. It's come to this specific question. And, you know, in one city, we will not name it, the number of taxis are capped at 32,000 because of, you know, let's not call it mafia, but you know, it's wasted interest. So you cap the supply and then you also cap the price. And the demand is, you know, huge demand is there. So how do we work? So we need to free up all these things. And our laws, our regulations are completely out of sync, in most cases, with these new technologies and innovation that are coming in. We need to change all that. And we are working with various regulators and all that. But the good part is that we are working with them. You know, we have to sensitize them. You know, it's difficult to get everything done from the right to the top. Yeah, we are sensitizing all these ministries. And, you know, for example, we had this meeting other day, other day to discuss 25-word problems that we had identified of startups. And this person from MCA, Corporate Affairs, said, no sir, this is how it works, this is not going to change. This is the way it works. So we said, yes, you have done a great job in the last 60 years. But now we need to think differently, you know. Because new things are happening now. New innovations are coming in. And our startups are doing a great job. They can do a much greater job. Let's provide them with enabling conditions. If you can't help them, at least don't choke them. So, you know, those are the kind of changes that need to come in, in online commerce, in technological innovations. We know the problem that aggregator of rooms, your rooms are facing, and so many other startups are facing. So we are working on that. And I'm very hopeful that with this commitment from the top, from the Prime Minister himself, these problems will get resolved. OK. And Ritesh, so Vijay said that, you know, when he started as an entrepreneur, it was he couldn't get a marriage offer. And I'm sure right now, I mean, being an entrepreneur, I think I was looking at a Tinder list. And being an entrepreneur is one of the hottest professions. So I'm sure you don't face that problem. But what are some of the issues? You started your business in 2012. So what are some of the issues that you are facing that, say, didn't exist at the time of the flip cards and the snap deals of India were launched, and which is something that maybe the government should address? Yeah, so I think that's still a pain that my mom feels she would have over time. But that's hopefully not a problem. So you know, I think you're too young for marriage. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Now you have a government stamp on it. If your mother says something, she'll say, Modi he said, it's too early. There's a lot of time. Just trying to help him is obviously his mother. So my family used to be very concerned about what I'm doing halfway across the country. They stay in the eastern half at Odisha. And last year, honorable Prime Minister said that instead of being a T-seller to begin with, why did he not start as a hotelier after seeing Oyo? And my mom was very happy that I was doing something well if the Prime Minister is talking about it. So what Vijay was saying about social change clearly is visible out there. So naturally, I think when we started, we were in a much advanced situation comparison to the problems that Vijay is talking about. Incredibly lucky. From all directions, capital was not as big an issue, which naturally consistently is getting easier. I mean, it took us a year and a half to raise 25 lakhs of angel capital, which was raised in two tranches with part of that in loan, which probably nowadays will sound like the most weirdest thing. But that point of time 10 years ago, that was probably a bigger luxury than what I had felt when we raised capital. But naturally, a lot of these things were much easier. I think a few problems that we feel, and these are things that are naturally in the process of getting resolved over time, are especially the local problems. At the top, what we see is that it's clear intent and purpose of doing the right thing for new age companies. But remember that India is not one country. India is 150, 200, or whatever number of countries you'd like to state. And administration is run locally by various local authorities. And it's very important that all of this goes by the bureaucracy down to the last level. The good news is, since there is intent and purpose at the top, getting stuff done on the ground is so much more easier. The second thing is to be specific around a bunch of things. And Nikesh talked about it in one of the events that I and Vijay were together in, which is that most of the laws are being written by people who probably don't know what's going on. And I'm glad that we have people like Mr. Abhishek, who are so aligned to the new age industry. But basically, most of the times, it's not as if people have the wrong intent. They're just writing the laws as if they felt it was the right thing. And hence, it is our responsibility as entrepreneurs to be able to proactively go out and converse with a lot of these lawmakers and explain what these problems are all the way from taxation, where people didn't even imagine that there will be a time when there will be brand franchises, which might not be actually a franchisee and there will be a taxation. Finally, there is no franchisee that's being defined in the Indian taxation formats. So a lot of these things are stuff that are being done for the first time. Remember, India is still a very young democracy from that extent. So I think, generally, our view is problems are much lesser. But they exist. But there's intent and purpose to fix it. OK. And like Mahesh mentioned, all your rooms is one of those freshest and one of the most innovative business ideas that the Indian startup ecosystem has seen. But do you think that, I mean, how would you circumvent the discount trap that a lot of other big, well-funded unicorns in India have fallen into? Because a lot of people would just go on OU rooms and book a room because it's cheaper, not because it has the OU branding. Good question, yeah. But I think, look, there are two specific items there. The reason why Amazon and Uber have clearly won the market in India is not because they've given away discounts. Of course, that might be a part of it. But a large part of it is a service. The reason why Flipkart is still in the game is because they were doing incredibly well in comparison to other e-commerce companies in terms of service. So clearly, in the long term, given a choice, consumer moves in the direction of service versus the other way around. Naturally, price is a very, very important part of the service experience. Amazon, with their buy box theory, has had the lowest prices of every product in America for the longest possible time. So I think, at the end of the day, all of these things are generally built by means of having strong capabilities on the ground. And those capabilities can be service. Those capabilities can be pricing. But pricing doesn't necessarily have to be your funded, right? It could be funded by your merchants if you're enabling different kind of scale of demand to them. Now, I'll come to our specific case at OYO. And I chased Mahesh a lot before OYO when I was doing ORAVEL, just more like Airbnb of India. I'm glad he didn't fund me, because I would have done the wrong business back then. Especially because there's something I realized that if I was in India, there are two big problems. One is discoverability, that you don't find great places online. But that's not as big a problem, because you have Just Tile, you have Google, and so on and so forth to find places. The bigger problem is predictability. That is, what you see is what you get. And that problem is not a problem that you get solved just by sitting at one place and sending discounts, right? We have close to 700 people on the ground, standardizing hotels, auditing hotels every three days, meeting guests and ensuring great guest service. We have close to 35 patent pending products in terms of how we use data sciences, everything from personalization, penalization to our partners, rewarding our partners, and so on, which has not happened anywhere in the world. So when somebody has to come and compete with us, they don't have to just compete with us on discounts, but they have to have the ability to put as much capital by the time they're able to build all of these capabilities over the next few years, which goes back to the point of saying that, are you gonna fight against managerial abilities of executing somebody else's cause, or your entrepreneurial craziness is going to go out and create that impact? So I think, you know, again, that doesn't mean that there's no foreign company that can come in and compete with us in the sector, but we have significant confidence in our abilities of being India first innovators with close to 35 companies copying us in other parts of the world, that we will create large innovative capabilities every day because in internet businesses, you never own the customer, because if they get a better service at a better price, they will go there and it's their right to go there. So the only best way of stopping them is continuously innovating yourself and delivering a better service every day. Yeah, and like I mentioned, Oyo has disrupted the hotel industry and even Cyrus Mystery talked about that, but last year was also a bit tough for your company. There was a lot of negative press. There were some damning articles written and even on social media forums like Kora, et cetera, there was criticism of the tech. So how does that kind of feedback affect a young company, your ability to raise funds and also attract talent? So I think naturally, we've had our share of good and bad press and I think around all of this period, I have generally learned to look at this in two different ways. The first one is basically saying, look, the press has been so generous to you that literally they put us on the front papers of newspapers for the last year and a half and it's amazing, right? Like the reason why so many people know us here, you knew about us is because press was so generous to us. So when they have the right of giving you so much access and being on the front page of newspapers, they have the right to pull you down when they choose to. So you have to be okay with it. But naturally at the end of the day, a great business is built on three major perspectives. One, are you delivering the right thing to your consumers? Are your owners slash partners happy with the service they're getting delivered to? And are your employees enjoying and creating the impact that they are? If you do this three things, right, you'll keep doing extremely well. So we've naturally seen that because our business and consumers were saying great things about us, we were building a great business with in terms of repeats, cohorts and the kind of economics we had, we continue to raise capital in the right way. On the other hand, we've possibly built and realities every entrepreneur would like to think of it this way. One of the strongest teams in the Indian ecosystem and I was generally lucky that way because most startup entrepreneurs have the luxury of recruiting their friends as the first level leadership. Most of my friends were in school back then so I couldn't recruit them. So I had to recruit really high quality professional talent who had same head on their shoulders which has also benefited us significantly because they've had a great experience working with us and they go out and tell great things to their friends and people who they know. Okay, Sri, at this point I would like to bring you in. When you are investing, how important is the reputation of an entrepreneur? So let me actually just back up a little bit. For this point around money in India, the one thing I just want to point out is that one of the big issues we have is we actually have large pools of capital in the country with the pension funds and the insurance funds. It's just very difficult to access the way the government regulations, the RDA, the PFRDA, the regulations just don't allow investments in startups. And if you look at the history of private equity and venture capital investing around the world, the bulk of the money, the LPs come from the pension funds and the insurance companies. We have to find a way to open up those tabs. I think it's very important. Your question, I just want to go back to my experience when I did a startup in Silicon Valley in the late 90s. I have to say that the experience at that time is quite different also still from the experience that startups face today. At that point of time in Silicon Valley, I remember when I did the startup that we couldn't get a place for an office. The real estate agent wanted warrants in our company. It was that crazy over there. We need to build really in my mind the ecosystem where while there's a lot of press about entrepreneurs and startup, I don't think it is still the aspiration for the majority of people in the country to become entrepreneurs. I think we need to change that mindset and I think there are many things that need to happen over there. One of it is obviously the access to capital but the other is also high quality incubators, high quality mentorship and doing that at a scale that's very different than what's been done anywhere in the world. We are a country of a billion two people. We have to think very, very differently than what's been done anywhere in the world. In terms of my own personal philosophy in investing, I like to invest with people who I know and so my universe is much more limited than let's say what Mahesh might be looking at. A lot of people are chasing him. I think the set of people who come to me are people who generally know me and people who have a good idea. And I depend on people also like Mahesh, other people who know what the investing world is like and I depend on their advice to figure out where to invest. But I do wanna go back and make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that there is a lot of work still to be done. I think we are sitting over here thinking that the game has been won. I think we are probably at the very, very beginning of the game. The other thing that I also wanna point out is that the narrative around startups seems to be around online businesses. And I think we need to make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that startups can and should exist in India in many different areas. We should be looking at manufacturing startups. We should be looking at startups in the agricultural space. We should be looking at startups in high tech, whatever that might be. So I wanna make sure that the narrative is not just what has been in the last few years which has really been about online startups. We have to broaden that for this country to really create the generation of employment this country needs has to come from there. We have to create another Germany. We have to create another United States. And by that what I mean is not just in terms of acceleration of value creation but also the employment that came from middle Germany from middle America. That needs to happen over here as well. So if I can add to what Srivetsan said, I think it's really important again, Vijay. And this is a point to the gentleman from the government out here. The largest untapped pool of capital is actually, I mean the largest potential LP in India is LIC. It's extremely difficult to get LIC to put any of its money. It has hundreds of billions of dollars available which it only puts in the stock market. Strangely enough, I wrote a small piece a couple of years ago saying LIC's largest investment is in the cigarette company in India. So would you rather be investing in a cigarette company in India? Would you rather be investing maybe 1% of your core percent startups? Because that 1% that LIC can put in service all due respect is much more than the one and a half billion dollars that you have committed over four years is 350 million a year. So I think to really get those large pools of capital opened, you need to get larger Indian LPs whether it's national insurance, LIC and so on and so forth. I mean that, or the EPF to be opened up. I understand Japan's a trillion dollar pension fund and for the first time after 60 years, I think Japan has agreed to put one or two or 3% in the private equity economy. I think that's really important. And to the second point again, it's not just the new economy companies that face a hurdle. I'm an investor and it's the largest micro brewery. I can tell you it took us two and a half years to get a license to put a brewery in a retail premise because law did not allow it. Breweries are supposed to be in industrial areas outside the city, right? It took us two and a half years to get the license. Two and a half years when I had to fund the company to wait for the election. Ramesh has to leave, so I'll quickly ask him to respond to your. As a matter of fact, I think this absolutely agree with LIC and other pension funds, et cetera. Must step in after many, many decades EPFO has finally given 5,000 crores and now it's at 10,000 crores in stock market. But definitely that money needs to be leveraged and that is something that I'm making a note. Wonderful. I come to these meetings also mainly for this kind of feedback. So this is very, very important. I totally agree on the need for more incubators in the country. We as a matter of fact feel that we should have very, very large number of incubators around. To our knowledge, we have about 600 or so in private sector and publicly funded incubators. So one thing we are trying to do is to sensitize the states to be more startup friendly. Two months back, I organized a conference here of all the startups and states and all the incubators, investors, and we requested five states to share their policies with other states because we know that states are where the action is. So we have to get the states on board. I'm very glad today, Principal Secretary in charge of startups from Odisha had come to see me and I was going for this Uber exchange program. So I took him there. I said, you interact with them. And he found two startups who wanted to do something in Odisha, actually. There is one here. Yeah, same here. So I think once we get state governments on board, this will also help in getting better regulations. They will be more sensitive to this technology, innovations, and the disruptive technologies, and the need for all that. So that's one very important strategy that we have. In our startup India program, of course, a large number of incubators will be set up and supported by the Science and Technology Department, Biotechnology, and ETIO. But that's not enough. I've requested the corporates. I've written myself to more than 100 top corporates in the country to use their CSR funds for setting up incubators or upgrading incubators. I've gone to CII and FICI's national committees and requested them that they have to come forward because this is something, and if not specific financial commitment, they can just call startups and mentor them, spend half a day with them. So I think we need to involve not only central government, we are trying to do that. State governments, which are not doing, they don't know much about startups, and of course, the corporate sector. So this kind of partnership is very important. So we are trying to promote many of these partnerships because central government from our side will promote this. But I think it's really important, and I think this kind of advice, interaction will really help. When we have discussions in the future, we'll say that why don't we use these funds for startups? I think I have one more suggestion for Sir. So one is, it's wonderful that you're doing this. It's incredible because, like Vijay said, our history was that governments have supported large enterprises to become larger. And for the first time, governments saying, well, you know, for the country to become larger, small enterprises have to become larger. I think one other important way for doing that is to help government expenses. The government spends so much money, but why does it only tend to buy from large companies? Is there an ability for the government to be directed that certain amount, the quantum of the purchases, whether it's in military, science, and technology, whatever, should ideally be encouraged to come from SMEs, right? Just one month back, I have written to all the ministries, secretaries, to share all their annual requirement of goods and services on our website, on Startup India, so that all the starters know what exactly they can do. Part of Startup Action Plan was that the requirement of prior experience at turnover will be done away with, which has been done. This has been completely dispensed with, as Prime Minister said, that you have to start somewhere. So those things have been done, and we are also going to offer on our portal one page to each startup who wants to come in to just market and advertise their products. So, but then please give us more ideas, more suggestions, some of these things have been done, and I'm sure much more can be done. Wonderful. I have just one specific point to make, Mr. Abhishek, which is that the government is trying to get into the business of funding startups. I would just argue that actually the government does not have the ability to actually figure out which startups to fund. I think they should fund funds, which have the ability. That's what they're doing. But there's also this inter-ministerial board that's creating this. No, no, no, they're only doing funds of funds. That's okay. Sir, I have a question. One only thing that I have, I have a really good answer for this. Yes. So our fund of funds actually, they are taking equity in the selected venture funds, AIFs, and then they will be selecting the startups based on whatever due diligence they do. Yeah. And this inter-ministerial board is basically to give tax benefits. Yes. Whatever little tax benefits are there. Sir, I have a question that you continue to hear a lot of inputs. What is your side of the world view that you wish startups or companies like us could hear from you? And wish that you could say that this should be done? See, I think, I mean, our wish list would be that also we need startups in a space where there are public and social causes are there. Agriculture is a big part of it. Agriculture marketing is a big part of it. So I think these are the areas where large-scale employment, a lot of people depend on this. So if that can be improved, obviously it helps the overall much large number of people. What do they do? One of our investors is in agriculture, but we can't, for example, we buy crops from farmers. We get, nobody can help us because we're a startup. Apparently, if you're a startup, you don't get the benefits that a traditional company gets in agriculture. So while there is intent, we still have some, I think, hangovers from the last 60 years. We have all the hangovers, actually. Only some have been done away with, but we, everything else is continuing, you see. But then, you know, we are the other some, they have some cracks now in the, so. I think we really need to take up all these issues with the state governments, and we are doing that. We are happy to do more. I mean, we need to do far more. So recently we said that let's hire three people from the startup world. So we advertise to get consultants. Every time you can't wait for a meeting to know what should be done. So at least we have three people. So we have advertised these, and I hope that we have really knowledgeable people coming in. We are applying three of us at the same time. Yeah. Pro bono. Pro bono is for that. I thought you wanted us to pay also. That we will not ask out. That's right. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Wow, if only government was really this. And I was wondering if there's anyone who believes that the startup ecosystem is not a gold mine and would like to share their views with us. Because somebody might believe it is a platinum mine. Do you want to come over there? Vijay is ready to beat you up. All right. Can we have a mic there? My name is Arsuresh. I've done two business starts and exits in the executive search and HR space. I've sold a company to the Japanese and to a Swiss company. Now, you mentioned, Vijay, that Indian investors probably have deep pockets but short hands. They don't pull up money and invest. One of the problems which investors have with startups. Of course, India is an entrepreneurial country. Every phase in India, entrepreneurs have done a great job. And current flavor is e-commerce and new tech and they're doing great jobs. Entrepreneurs' lineage in India is fabulous. No questions. But the current phase, the entrepreneurs, instead of focusing on business, profits, cash flow, growth, valuation has become the top priority. Outside in perception, I believe that because... That's the perception. Everybody, and I'm also trying to be an investor in a family office type of thing, everybody's term sheet is so highly inflated. Everybody first starts a company. In one year, there are multiple term sheets. They go and try to... Sorry, things have really changed the last six months. No, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, six months ago, that was probably true. But I can tell you, the same teams that came to me eight months ago are back to me again. And I'm not saying this from any point of gloating, but at valuations which are like one-fifth or one-tenth of what it was eight months ago. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. I think reality is crept in, it's fine. And in many ways, it's about supply and demand. When you have investors out there saying, I'll tell you, there's also a problem on the side of venture capital. Somebody comes with a billion-dollar fund. I've got to invest in startups. I can at most manage 20 investments. I've got to put 50 million in the startup. 50 million dollars, 330 crore rupees is an enormous amount of money, right? So I just go and give it to somebody and say, even if they're probably one-tenth as much, I need to give them five million, I will give them 50 million because I have to use my fund, right? And hence, overvaluation happens. Now, what's happened? The big pocket investors who came to India say, I have two billion dollars. I'm only going to put it on 100 million at a time. They've kind of withdrawn. Now again, reality's creeping up. So it's like expand contract, expand contract. It's two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. It's still net one step forward. Yeah. So you see the headlines. All headlines talk about valuation of the firms. Don't believe economic times. Ha ha ha. There's economic times as one full page for startups. So they keep putting the headlines. OK, OK, I want to tell you one thing. All euphoria, even if it is created due to valuation, is good because it invites enough number of people to become part of it. And then always remember, all booms inevitably go in bust, and all booms move economy forward. So I just personally, I mean, we've gone through three or four of them, and I always believe net outcome of that boom, bust is, we are forward ahead. And I think I don't believe that it is wrong to publishize valuation if that attracts a lot of people, and then people get corrected. It's like a number of flyovers on Outdooring Road in Delhi. If you cross first flyover and second doesn't have a yet commit, there will be a traffic jam there. I remember in NASCOM in 2003 and 2004, the discussion was India doesn't have exits. How can I put money if there is no exit? Remember this, Mahesh, we used to have a conversation. And now in India, it's very cool to have 100 million and couple of 100 million exits. I mean, so whatever the equity is, if I will. The intent is that, obviously, we need a highway. Highway needs a lot of bridges to be created. We create one, and then all the traffic leads to the later one. And then that gets created. Then we go to the next one. And that's how the journey will go through. We and this generation and this set of people are the one who are going through this cycle. After that, it'll be like a smooth highway, and a lot more will be created. Like we just heard, it is truly the early days. Why? Because we're building, we are not even reaping. So again, the thing is that even you go out there, there's equal discussions around the world that Uber is ridiculously overvalued. So it's not just we who have discussion saying our startups are overvalued. Even the US is always valuing. Anywhere in the world, they're making that up. It's OK. It's fine. OK, I just want to give you the final one on the valuation. If you can predict that. He wants to have the last word. No, no, I want to tell you this. This is for everyone who says the startup valuations are high. If the valuation can be predicted, there is one company whose revenues can be predicted, which is Utility Company. Next month's subscriptions are nearly decided because it is a recurring subscription. They get the least multiple. If you can't figure out the business like Facebook before ad revenue, there is ambiguity of the number that what should I multiply with what. So inevitably, ambiguity gets valuations and clarity gets cash. Cash companies do not get valuation. They feel bad about that. Ambiguous companies get valuation. They feel bad that they don't get cash. So his point basically is don't ever build a company with clarity. They just have a say. They have a random something in the thin air, but no cash, man. So we just point is if you really want a valuation, please don't ever be clear. Just talk ambiguously about cloud. All companies that are valued are called cloud. Yeah, just here. So any company that's highly valued doesn't know what they're doing. No, they want to make people learn that. They are pulling their leg. It's OK. But over the last few months, we have the news of devaluation has made headlines. And we talked about the other negative coverage as well. How has that affected the ability of startups to attract talent? You have to answer it. Yeah, so I think two specific things. First off, I don't understand why there is so much pain to people when somebody is raising money at a good valuation. It's OK, right? Like, what's the big deal? Even the damn stock market reduces the price. We are privately listed undervalued in the last three months. That's fine. Your stock crashed. It's fine. All the public markets globally are overvalued, including Indian stock exchanges. I know of companies that are not such exciting companies trading at 40 times multiples, absurd at whatever levels you're talking about. I think this problem is in this business, people are trading at 5,000 times multiples. Or 5,000 times negative multiples. It depends on companies. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, reality is valuations can go up or down. Doesn't matter. At the end of the day, whether the company's going to survive, whether it's going to continue to create value in the long term, that's all that matters. I think reality is, in the last few months, first off, I think I've actually never been about coverage specifically. I think that's one of the things that smart people learn very soon to stay away from. Because reality is, look at any great company in India or outside of India. Patanjali is doing so well, but every day you would have 10 great coverages and one bad coverage. So if that's how smart people are deciding which next job to go to, that's a very difficult choice, I would say. The last thing is in the euphoria of last year, a lot of people who joined startups or wanted to join startups, actually people who were not ready to take risks, they were getting paid very well. In fact, much better than what get paid at corporates. The challenges were not as much. Now you're getting the real guys back again. The real guys who want to spread it out, who want to fight together, who want to sail and sink together. I think that's the attitude all of us need. And we are able to see a lot of those people. You know, it's like separating the milk from the shaft. You're able to do that much easier now. But I just wanted to make one quick point, which is that this point around valuations, which is that I think at the end of the day, evaluation is in the eye of the beholder. I'm going to date myself, but in 99, I went for a startup conference in Silicon Valley. And one of the investors at the time, Ram Shriram talked about how he's investing in the small startup, search engine startup. And everybody said, why would you do that? Because you have Yahoo. And that company was Google. And so everybody talked about why would you invest and give a high valuation to another search company when you had such a dominant search company already in place. Now at the end of the day, he was proven right. So you have to make a bet. And that's what investors are for. Experienced investors are for. And that's the reason why they exist. And for them, they have to figure out what the right value is for any company. That's the bet that they're making. I'll circle back to the job question. Mahesh, you had tweeted sometime back about the crazy salaries that some of the engineers and management graduates in the startup world seem to expect. What do you think is happening here? I mean, we are talking about a slowdown in funding, but nobody wants to join for less than 30 lakhs. Yeah, it's been crazy in the sense, I don't know why if it's just me or somebody else, but I've been probably getting 500 resumes a month from people who were in startups. And the typical expectations are like one and a half years experience, 25 lakhs salary, right? Four years experience, 40 lakhs salary, right? These are things that I don't know. I mean, I probably will pay somebody in my company that with 15 years experience and so on and so forth. So I, looking back at each of them, all of them were people who have been laid off from other startups. And they were getting those kinds of salaries out there. And I think everybody's gone through a belt tightening. And in many ways just to echo what Ritesh said, they were the mercenaries who came out saying, I'm out there, startup is supposed to be a place where you take a risk, but there was no risk here. It was all reward. You got an extraordinarily high salary with no downside. Now, downside is that now they're discovering that they're laid off, right? And I think they'll probably need to readjust their expectations to say, you know, okay, fine. When I was hired as a fresher, with nothing and I was hired at 20 lakhs, I can't expect after six months or 12 months that I get a job at another 20% increment. Maybe I should go back and get a job at maybe 50% less. So I think a large part of the resumes ones getting these days are people who've not done or who have been let go because of belt tightening everywhere else. Everybody's been, all the big guys have been belt tightening, whether it's a Flipkart or X or a Snapdeal or whatever. There've been thousands of people who've been let go for whatever reason. Maybe it's an efficiency, maybe it's belt tightening or whatever. And I think the interesting thing is that they will probably need to readjust because the corporate world doesn't offer them those salaries. So they're hoping other startups will, other startups also offer those salaries. So it's a group of people that they will find the destiny. They made a choice and in some ways they've taken the onus of whatever that choice meant. It's fine, it's all right. These are things that will happen. That institutional memory will come into India that it's just not like this pot of gold for everybody. The pot of gold happens eventually. Okay. And Vijay and Ritesh, do you think you, the other side of the story is that there is such paucity of talent that you actually have to give these kind of insane salaries to attract people from the IITs and the IITs. Yeah, true. Literally, I mean, there was a day last year and last two years, we just wanted day one. I mean, in IIT, we just wanted day one. And I won't tell you. We thought that we can offer 16 lakh rupees as a startup salary, a starting salary to this fresh year out of IIT two years back. And when we went there, by the time, those who came there and expectedly other peers of startup world in the industry, the offer for day one was priced by IIT to us that you will give offers in cash, not less than 24 lakh. From 16 to 24 lakh itself is a 50% hike. That is before we took the cab from office to land in that place. That's a hike. That's a demand. And I think to the Mahesh's point, it's shockingly irrational and dumb both of people to expect that what happens in high tide will happen in the low tide. These are young noobs who have to learn it. They will learn it. And there is no other alternate to it. Okay. This is what happened. I remember, I think during the last boom, IAM, Amdabad came to us and said, okay, your starting salary has to be at least 18 lakhs. I remember they came back in 2008 and said, we'll even do three lakhs. Just don't talk about it. Two three lakhs a month. Yeah, three lakhs a year. Don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. And we'll do it off the record because we don't want our ranking to go down. All the college rankings are based on the salaries that their graduates get. So I think colleges are also... I mean, I am certainly have been flexible. I think Bhethi Ganga, I am washing hands everywhere. Whether it's colleges, whether it's the start-ups employees, whether it's students, whether it's the investor, whether it's the angel investor. And in counterpart to that, I mean, we all have a lot of fun. Right? But also, I feel that some of our elite institutions, like the IITs and the IAMs. They also do not want to expose their students or their graduates to the risks of working in a startup, as we saw after the Flipkart Fiasco this year. They still think their students are diaper changing potty doing in diaper kids, which is dumb, I think. If you're an IIT and you're speaking this language, you should feel ashamed of yourself being called an IIT. Nothing else. I think if your job is to produce people who are part of the startup and risk economy, and you can't insure and say you have to give a high salary, you have to let them flow with the risk here. I'm sure we discussed the VC funding, but can you give us an overview of the angel environment in India? What is happening in the angel investment climate and what changes we have seen in the last year? So I think actually, even though Mr. Abhishek is not here, I must commend the government in terms of what they've done. Over the course of the last couple of years, there have been a lot of regulatory changes to actually increase the level of angel investing in the country. And so I think you're seeing a lot more appetite on the part of HNI's to actually become angel investors. I must say that most of them are inexperienced. Most of them are coming into the market because of the high tide over the course of the last couple of years. They've seen the same headlines in economic times that you're all talking about. And so there is this appetite on the part of HNI's to actually become angel investors, but I don't think they really have a good sense of how to do it. Some of them are becoming part of angel networks. Some of them are part of informal clubs, so to speak. But I would say that there is going to be a significant increase in the level of angel investing from HNI's over the course of the next few years. And I think we will see also angel networks becoming more accredited through the whole SEBI framework and so on. And so I think that's a mechanism that in my mind has to go up significantly. That's what exists in the United States and other startup nations. And we have to see that go up significantly over here. So I have a comment to add to that. I think in the long term I probably agree that the amount of angel investing will grow. But I think what will happen is you will see a correction when the people who started investing two years ago, two years from now, will start expecting returns and they'll start getting 10 cents on the dollar. So they'll be a come to God, come to Jesus moment. Any kind of investing requires patience and diversification. I mean, I've been investing 17 years from now. And now I know that many of the bets are beginning to pay off. It simply takes longer than any day, first of all. Unlike the US where you can get in and out in four, five, six years, it doesn't. It takes 10, 12, 15 years to build a company. He started in 2001. I mean, it takes time, right? So many of the investors will face bloodshed in the next couple of years. A few strong will survive. The stories of those will come. So I think there'll be a small dip and it'll rise again. That's why. I think that's true for the venture capital property world as well. Exactly the same thing. I'll open this to questions now. We'll begin from the side of the room. Yeah, please go ahead. My name is Rajat. And I go back to the debate we were having around whether this is a gold mine. And Mahesh, you also mentioned that the funds that came in India were $90 billion and $45 billion have been written. We also talked about whether LIC's fund could be tapped into. Now, LIC today is investing in stock market, where there are highs and lows. But over a period of time, it was one of the highest. So what hard facts could be shared with someone like LIC? Because at the end of the day, the funding in startup is a very emotional decision. People feel that I'm being able to pick a team, a fund, or a team where, and I know my return would be higher than everyone else. So for LIC, what could be some hard facts so that they start sharing some? There's enough data out there. If you look at whether it's a Kauffman studies or you look at even what Boogal has said, right? So essentially, the top decider, the top quartile of funds in the US, right? It's the only place with enough up in history of consistently return 200 to 400 points, basis points, above the S&P 500 over any extended period of time. So if you're in the stock market, you're gonna go and benchmark against Sensex or against Nifty 50. You will understand that over a period of time, if any investment portfolio will have a mix of assets, you will have to do an asset allocation. So right now, pension funds have not even looked at emerging companies and unlisted companies as a potential asset class. To make a case for the asset class, I mean, I remember when we went and raised one of India's first funds in 2005, 2006 or whatever, we had to make a case for India. You have to do exactly the same case. And you look on historical data, there's enough historical data to suggest that the top quartile of funds consistently over a period of time have outperformed the S&P 500 in the US. If you look at similar benchmarks in the UK and Europe, they already exist. So the reason why people are putting money into venture capital is because it works. Net of fees, it does work, right? It does return you larger than what the market returns. So otherwise nobody would be putting money out here. So it is part of an asset allocation. It's not to say 100% of the money should go in there. Some percent, one, two, three, four, something should go in there. While they're doing real estate, they're doing large companies, small companies, stock market, rights, and so on, so forth, debentures, I think someone should go here. But do you think there is a lack of transparency in the startup ecosystem? Because as journalists, we sometimes struggle. Sometimes you have to deal with GMV figures. Now somebody, like one of the big companies, wants us to look at customer satisfaction as a metric of success. So how does Greg look at this? Any company will only want to give you figures that it looks good in. And as long as you have a hunger for news and they have a hunger for getting something out, you'll put some number out there, which makes no sense, right? That's okay. But you want to get the actual numbers, go to the people who invested in the funds, who invested in the funds, which invested in the funds out here. They have the real numbers. So how did that investment really do? No company, or very few companies will actually go and say, yeah, we screwed up for the last eight quarters, right? But you will have to go and find the story somewhere else. But again, you don't want to find the story. I mean, how many journalists in the startup world have actually written pieces which are fairly critical? A lot of them are Huzanas. I mean, I have seen articles in economic times about somebody getting one lakh rupees as an angel investment. My God, you know, even 20 years ago, people get the children one lakh rupees to start up Pankadhukan, right? That never got into economic times. But suddenly today, one lakh rupees makes it into economic times if it goes into a startup. I think at some point, again, even within journalism, there's this wave of exuberant, you know, irrational exuberance and harsh aerated. Truth is, it's somewhere between the two. It is not, you know, irrationally exuberant and it is not depressingly downbeat. The truth is, it's somewhere in the middle. Deeksha, I'm going to quote another example. People say, Amazon doesn't make profit and it is so highly valued, classic case. The problem is that publicly stated data companies are also not the real truth of the company, what it does. They have a ton of free cash, which gets generated and a ton of free cash gets, that gets in turn deployed on future projects. So net, they don't generate dividends actually. That's the problem. And that's exactly the problem of the generalization of the world's view is, if you want to value the company based on EPS and that is where you think is a moat, well, that is also proven that that is not the correct number anyway. So yes, which company needs to be monitored on which factor is because these companies are going through their own life cycle of reset sets and targets. That is why companies sometime will say, look at NPS, because I'm changing that, because I've learned day before yesterday that ultimately NPS will matter, not the GMV will matter, or vice versa, and so on and so forth. So is there a holy grail pre-decided list of, okay, so now you're four year old, I'm going to look about repeat cohort. How about that? No, you can't do that. Or maybe investors do that, and then triangulate the data. But don't trust anyone, yes. Especially startups. I'm glad I have a female voice, go ahead. Hi, so at least to me, the perceived focus in the whole startup boom has been tech, but the reality is that whatever smartphone penetration numbers are there, data penetration is much lower. So what is sort of the, and you all touched upon this briefly, but what is the investor mode for non-one to 15% market startups? Be the one in this, I'll give you my point of view, but you must get the real data from Vijay and others in terms of data penetration in India. Data penetration is not at 1% or 15% is much larger, so we'll really come to that. From my point of view, I don't see tech as necessarily the product, I see the tech as accelerate of any kind of company. So I have an investment in a food grain company, we use a lot of tech. We have an investment in a micro-brewing company, we use a lot of tech. Beyond India's largest chain of dental clinics, we use an enormous amount of tech. Is a dental clinic a tech company? It's not. So tech in some cases is the end product, or is like for example, in PTM it is, but tech in many more cases is simply the enabler that allows faster growth. Why do I want companies to have tech as an enabler is because if they grow faster, I can exit faster, that's really it. So it's not necessarily tech as the end, so you wouldn't think of an agricultural tech company but they use an enormous amount of tech. And Shree, do you want to jump into as an investor? So I would say that, let me start by saying I agree with Mahesh. I don't think there's any dispute about the fact that tech in many instances actually, and we work with large clients as well, not just with startups. But for a lot of our clients, tech is becoming a disruptor that you have to pay attention to. It doesn't matter if you're in construction, whether you're in cement or real estate, you have to figure out how to use technology as a means to not get disrupted. And that's true also for the set of technology startups that are in different industries. And so I talked about agriculture as an example, right? Why would you not actually think about a startup in the agricultural space that uses technology as a way to whether it's accelerate growth or provide better service to your customers and think about how you can actually integrate that into the broader world? So I don't have much more to add to what Mahesh says, but this is true, not just by the way for startups, but this is true today for every single company in the world, every single company in the world. And I think naturally, for us as a company, for example, we operate in management contracts, hundreds of hotels already, right? Which is an offline business, right? But in all of that, remember, 100% distribution is online. We distribute everything through our mobile products, which either can be bought by a real consumer or by a corporate or by a, and you know, example of that is Airtel, right? 800 million mobile phones in India, but entire distribution being run digitally by using easy recharge, which, you know, the Lapu system became extremely famous at one point of time. So mobile can, like Mahesh said, accelerate your development while you might actually not be in the business of internet. And final one line, that tech cross with industry. Industry loses tech companies which learn the art of industry win, and that is where the tech becomes a primary mode instead of the industry mode. Just introduce yourself, Anil. I'm Jayadip. I'm a global shaper from Chandigarh. I am involved in the electrification of the remotest villages in Ladakh, and we've electrified 15 villages till date. My question to you is, we've seen a lot of investment in the e-commerce space and the service space, but when it comes to initiatives like us, they're treated as good causes, but not as business models. And you know, when people ask, okay, what is the rate of return? I mean, you're asking from the poorest of the people who've not seen a light bulb to actually pay back. That's one point. And whereas at the same time, you're investing in companies where there's almost 20, 30 million of cash when happening every year or every, you know, so forth. So where does, you know, startups like us, which are actually reaching out to the poorest and actually improving their lives start being taken seriously? And also the kind of innovation that we are doing. So one is, you know, setting up these decentralized microgrids and also setting up innovation hubs where places where the mobile phone does not work, we are able to set up offline internet and provide access to those kids. So for instance, you are responsible venture capitalists. You invest in all these loss-making e-com companies, give good cause for money. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing, right? Strange though it may sound, we also have people that we are responsible to. I mean, I'm responsible to my LPs. So while when I invest with my own money, I have a far more patient view of the world and I can be 20 years and I can do things that I like even if it doesn't pay back because I want to do it, it's my own money. But when I invest other people's money, I have signed up for something. I have signed up to return money in eight plus one plus one or 10 plus one plus one years. I have signed up to, you know, maybe try to hit a particular IRR. So I will then have to judge you based on the same norms that I judge anybody else and I have to take a call and whether you're capable of delivering that growth or not, right? So you may have a far higher likelihood of delivering 8% IRR but I will be more attracted to somebody who has a far lower likelihood of delivering 20% IRR because that's the nature of the beast. That said, there are funds which are social funds or which are other funds which are specifically directed towards the sector. They're government initiatives which are directed. They're foundations which are directed to a sector. So there are places to go but a typical VC is not probably the place for you to go. Yeah, I agree. But there are funds like Mahesh said, like Aavishkar, Unitas and so on. There are funds who do exactly what you do. They have a second double or a triple bottom line that they respond to where they do as long as there is a return on capital, there's also a return on social capital. I mean, there are two or three bottom lines there. That's probably what you would want to look up to. That said, we are still evil venture capitalists. Okay. Thank you. My name is Ashok Lalwanyam with Baker McKenzie and I'm a capital markets lawyer. So I'm going to ask you a capital markets question in terms of exits and listings. What's the current thinking on sort of listing domestically versus overseas? And what are the challenges faced and what kind of changes would you make it easier? Because we haven't seen as many exits through IPOs as we would have expected given the climate. So I'll give you the investor point of view. I think you should also get the the investor point of view, right? I'm happy to, for example, one of the people that I'm on the advisory board of is the Bombay Stock Exchange, small and medium enterprise exchange. So it's really interesting. The SME Exchange India has already had 155 successful listings. You only need one year track record. You only need three crores in paid up capital. And they're doing well. I mean, if you index only the small and medium enterprises on that particular exchange, that index is up a thousand percent in the last three years. So that index is about 950 based on it started at zero. So it's there and I'm actively looking to list two or three or four of my companies on that exchange. The point is to list on the big board, the main board of the BSE, the main board of the NSE, it's grueling. It's three years profitable track record, blah, blah, blah, 50 crores in profit and so on and so forth. Our exchanges have like, you know, we as I said have typically worked on you need to provide profits and you need me to be able to calculate and earnings per share, which means you have to have earnings. You have to be profitable to list, right? Which is an issue. We don't have the equivalent of a NASDAQ for India where it doesn't matter if you have your negative, you can still list. And that's one issue out there. You wanna add more? But Shree, do you have anything to add on the listing bit? So I'm at the board of a company that probably will, that's going through this whole discussion around listing. And it's a real issue, which is that I think the predisposition seems to be let's list outside as opposed to listing within India. I think the government is also doing whatever it can to sort of bring the discussion back to companies listing in India. There's a lot more work to be done. So if that's a specific question as to how companies are thinking about it, I would say for the most part, and I'm curious to hear what Vijay has to say about this. But for the most part, I think companies that are in the window of looking at listings, the predisposition still seems to be, let's go outside rather than list in India. So I tried listing in 2010 and a main BSE NSE board in India. And two things I learned was totally surprising for me. One was that you have to have a project plan that gets funded. Technology companies and project plan with predecided quotations that are submitted. I seriously mean it. And then the hack around that is that you call an EGM to say, now we have changed the plan. That sounds totally non-starter for a person who would not want to do that or the stock exchange which wants to invite companies which are not working on a project plan. And they're mostly project funding IPOs, by the way, they're stated like that. Standard SCNA is like 15 or 25% in a maximum scenario, which is totally odd. One, second is Indian stock market has a depth of this fit size. I mean, you know, they can't float. I mean, any little buy or sell can swing up and down. It doesn't have a depth to hold large cap actually offer tech kinds yet. The companies which are valued like investor kinds, everything is meant to like profit generating very much in a slot yet company. NASDAQ is not there. Companies in tech world, tech world have no obligation. Last I know, I was in a, my investors have JustDyle. My shareholders also own JustDyle and I was part of an interesting discussion where JustDyle was obligated to give guarantees that to the retailers, including a fallback price to a fallback price, et cetera, et cetera, which was Sebi was asking to list. I mean, this was so dumb to finally choose. Everybody was like, oh gosh, you wanted India. I'll always said don't do India, that kind of stuff. When would you try listing again? Not three years forward. So again, I mean, the lack of the float is actually what the founder does, right? Because he holds all the shares. So the point here is, you're forced to float 25% of your. Yeah, that's also the case. I mean, no, hold it. Especially to create a float, you're asked to liquidate, to create that amount of float. The point is, even out of the 25% the founder through proxies owns 15, 20% because the remaining 5% is actually what determines the price and he's able to take the price up by doing that. The new stock market is a playground for few. For many. A few. Many equal to those who are playing like a playground play. Let's get some questions from there now. Indian government. Let's want to put something. You know, we have 5,700 listed companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange in India, which is the largest number of listed companies on any exchange in the world. So while it is true that some tech companies prefer to list overseas today, in the large part of the large economy in India, listing is the way to go. I mean, a lot of us made wealth because our parents listed in Dhirubhai and Bani's reliance. That's why we're all here in some bays. Educations were paid for by that listing, right? So we are still a very listing friendly country but not so much in the tech sector. I just want to put that out. But the flip side to that, what Mahesh said is that out of the 5,700 companies that are listed, only 500 are tracked. Which means that if you actually want to understand what's going on in those companies. You have analyst reports on about five or 600 of them. That's it. That's really it. You have questions in the back? Go ahead. Hi, my name is Prashant Pillai from Thomson Reuters. So I have a question for Vijay or Ritesh or anybody else. One of the challenges that I see is foreign funds coming in, investing, startups really trying to acquire market share. How important is getting unit economics correct fairly early on so that we don't end up bleeding? A good example is the taxi ride business, right? They pay huge commissions to the drivers. They pay bird trip charges. They're giving discounts to customers. This is very sustainable as long as the fund flow is in place and you've got consistent lines of funding. But when that starts driving up, at some point in time, you need to look at unit economics, right? What is your sense of that awareness within the community? Unit economics chapter comes in class 12. These guys are in class 8 right now. No, I think just to add on to that, unit economics are key. But at the same time, it's also very important to remember that if you have visibility to that, you might as well invest, especially because you are in such early stages of the market creation. So you make the choice of whether to be unit economic profitable or not, or hopefully not make the choice. So it depends on what direction you take. So actually, it's driven in many ways by the investor that got into the company. If the investor believes that I can put this company under somebody's head fast, all I need is market share. He says, to hell with unit economics. If the investor comes and says, no, I need to list this company. I need to own this company forever. It has to be a profitable company. Then from day one, he says, unit economics. It's largely driven by how the investor wants to exit. 100% true. OK, we have time for only a couple of more questions. We'll bundle some. Utkarsh, why don't you go ahead? Thank you. My question is about cybersecurity. With a lot of connectivity coming in, are investors or entrepreneurs running companies? Is it a part of conversations, or is it still an afterthought? And we'll take one more question. Is there anyone else? This is Govind Arya from Egon Zender. It's a slightly different question away from money and all that. It's more about social responsibility. One of the things that's happened over the last five years is a great startup movement in India. But I think what's coupled with that is also expectations. I think Vijay and Mahesh were talking about the $3,000,000, I am $24,000,000,000,000,000 starting salaries. That's really affecting the minds of youngsters, because they're getting so much more money than they should. And I'm curious to know whether in the startup ecosystem and in the investing world, whether we're doing something to make them solid, more mature about how to deal with money. Because this story is going to last forever. And at the time will come when there'll be a social fallout on that. And I'm worried about the impact it'll have on the 25 to 35 year olds. No startups talk to each other to build common policies across each other. We have no known poaching or restricting salaries or anything. We are truly open market. The one who has more money throws more. The one who has less money tries to wait till the time that guy's money is gone. And that's the simple business we are all in. And if I believe that I am one up is because I have more money, not because I have a more customer or more talent, that is the kind of concept that we're coming from. Today, people want to be rationalized, like we heard a while back, Mahesh said it, that now those people who were even having a ton of money and spending money, because in a way, it's sort of a rush to go to the airport and you want to pack, OK, let's pack five CDs. No, let's pack the whole store, man. I mean, we can take them all together. So, oh, I don't need these CDs. OK, just throw them because I can't pack them in the bag now. That is the kind of concepts in CDs for those people, effectively. So what we are trying to sound in this conversation is that this irrational exuberance is an outcome of many demand supply gaps and an intended supply that we needed. Over the period, rationalization of what business model and what needs and what kind of culture you build settles down. And these mistakes, these are technically mistakes and everybody who's built businesses knows these are mistakes and this is not going to sustain. Even the board members would have said it. But what do I do if I leave this guy on that side? Do you think you would have bought ways for $10 billion if it is a mapping company and you own Google Maps? Oh, I have to block that guy from going there, my friend, because otherwise those guys will make most of it, not me. So, so many times, what goes behind the scene is something which is not visible. Let's just say this. It was irrational. It'll get sorted by the virtue of demand being set. And as far as social good and bad, I think there are, even today, I mean, I remember 15, 18 years ago when I used to go and talk at IIT, say, how many of you are going to start a company or be entrepreneurs, three hands out of 300 go up? Today, three hands stay down, 297 go up, right? So these things go in waves. The truth is probably neither is three out of 300 healthy and neither is 297 out of 300 healthy. So we will expand, contract, these things happen in waves. You take a longer view and people learn. I mean, if somebody where there's an IIT, it doesn't matter if he gets a 24 lakh salary and he's overpaid, he quietly takes it. But if he has wisdom, he knows that he's vastly overpaid. In two years from now, he could be working at one third or one fourth of that salary. He must have the wisdom to do that, right? And Vijay, do you want to also talk about the cybersecurity? Cybersecurity is a topic that we are rushing to the airport and there might be an accident. We don't talk about it. We hope that we won't go through this problem. It's sort of that topic. As an investor conversation, I had investors who are savvy technology dudes who go through see-through, even cloud and systems and so on. There was a lot of discussion on cybersecurity. Especially in our scenario, there was a lot of discussion. But I think that is not when I see financial investors because they themselves are not savvy about the depth of the technology we're talking. They don't talk about will you build it in Node.js or will you build it in Java. While the other kind of companies which are called strategy, they actually ask you why did you choose Node.js and not go as a language. So those kind of things happen. I would have a different spin on cybersecurity in terms of the regulatory point of view. So two, three years ago, we all make a lot of noise because the government had put in a system, the entire, I'll SMS you your OTP and all that, which to us we believe was really slowing down e-commerce. Imagine waiting for a damn SMS to come. Nowhere else in the world do you have to go through the system. But guess what, three years from now, there's a bunch of companies you announce between them they had like three, four, five, seven million orders in a day. Even today, for example, you talk about Wi-Fi, you need to get authentication to happen for cybersecurity. Is it a problem? Yes, it is. How do you get Wi-Fi in local areas when they don't have a phone? There's no SMS and you can't authenticate. Well, they don't get Wi-Fi. But at some point, I believe that I'm a little less, you know, the need for cybersecurity as a friction that long-term holds up a business. I don't so much worry about that anymore. Three years ago, I was seriously worried, saying, you know, why are you guys stopping e-commerce by insisting on this ridiculous two-factor authentication that nobody else insists on in the world? Today, it's like it's a pain of doing business. We go ahead with it. That's my view. Ritesh, you were trying to say something? Yeah, I was just saying that in terms of compensations, agree with Vijay in terms of saying that look, at the end of the day, we are a clearly open market and companies who are doing well. If an employee likes it, it's his choice. Okay. That's all we have time for. Thank you so much for this engaging conversation. Thank you. Thank you.