 So very good afternoon to everybody who's joining us here for the Power Talks. Today we have with us you know Kevin Bharti Mittal who has got as I feel as an editor, he's got many firsts through his credit. I'm in one of course instead of joining the family business of Beirtel, he decided to find his own startup and hike at that you know crack the code or also becoming one of the fastest unicorns in India. So you know it's always good to see and talk to a unicorn entrepreneur who's actually been able to go out there and prove his metal but you know also as an editor whenever I talk to a unicorn I also see and see how not just it's not about the life and the risks that they take but it's also the fact that they're always in the forefront. So whatever actions they take and in the organizations are minor mistakes major mistakes horrifying actions all of them come to the core and are talked about and evaluated and detailed in the media by editors like us but you know that's that's the way life works. So today you know he's also going to talk to us so welcome Kevin and he's actually doing another first which is what we're really going to talk about today is that how today virtual reality and social networking are going to mix with each other as we go forward. So the future of social looks vastly different than what we have known it to be in the last few years. So welcome again Kevin and let me start with one question which I'm sure you get asked a lot but something we would love to know from you is that as a unicorn entrepreneur you know life is hard it's a lonely journey you know there's as many unicorns in this world really as there can be. So what is life like over there and I'm sure who do you go for guidance? I always feel that who do unicorns go for I'm sure everybody they want to talk to want to bite their horn off their head as a unicorn instead of really helping them and giving them real advice as to what could be possibly they do. So you know let's start with that let's understand you know how life has been and how is it that you continue to innovate in circumstances which I feel are most trying for unicorns most of the time. Sure sure thank you so much for having me I'm excited to be here with you and talk more. You know it's a great question and I feel like you know the world has evolved so much in the last couple of decades that I think the approach at least for the younger entrepreneurs and you know I've seen this with many of some you know equals that I have in around the world who are building companies that are even bigger than what Hike is is that we live in the world of the internet and you know and people they undervalue the power of the internet and internet has effectively made information transfer free. So there's always information sitting online in terms of research papers books text videos now because network has become so good and all the information you want is sitting out there. The question is do you have the desire and the clarity to find that information. I think that's one and because you know and there's so many people who build such great companies and systems and frameworks that actually have put everything online and not only do you get to consume this information but you get a chance to you know randomly ping them interact with them if you want to and sometimes they respond and so boundaries have completely been knocked down even of course inside India too so I think that's one and second is you know I'm a first principle thinker I feel like everything needs to have frameworks and people you know look at the world through their perspectives so it's very very important to have a perspective that works for the problem that they are trying to solve and to build a company you know it's actually not that hard you know we initially thought that building a company is a complicated matter it's not complicated it's tough it's not easy but it's actually it's difficult in terms of you know putting the effort in but it's not complicated and you know I have a five point sort of framework that I used to build hike which is vision principles people product process which is do you have a big vision a future that you sort of chasing after the way the world would look like in a couple years from now do you have a set of principles that you're using to sort of chase after that vision and using those principles are you hiring people and those principles are very very important those are your cultural code usually and you hire people who align to your values and principles and with those people can you build some fantastic products for the customers and can you add just a little bit of process to streamline all of the world and so you know that that framework we I developed about two three four years ago has served us extremely well and each piece by the way is evolving the vision is evolving the principles are evolving the people are you know and that's just that's just a fact of life so you know that's how we think about sort of building a company and I go back to the point which is just fortunate to live in a world where access to all of this stuff is just free and that's made life so much easier yes I truly agree and now I mean we're really in the middle of a digital sort of bonanza and I mean anybody who's actually building a digital business I mean the timing could not be more perfect I mean you know everybody is digital today so therefore it's just about your perseverance and going out there and finding your customers but eventually everything is digital so I mean going forward you know what would love to know what has changed for you at hike I mean I know there is you've launched hike land which is a social networking platform and what is it that you are trying to achieve through hike land what is it that you saw was an opportunity I know we talked about digital and digital being a great opportunity but what is the pie that you are trying to capture out of the digital movement or revolution which is now sort of become more mainstream today and what do you think the opportunity is yeah I think you know the world has changed so much in the last two three years and this is also just before COVID happened you know we've got so much new technology 40s become prevalent in the country it's really cheap it's practically unlimited smartphones become very good so people have like you know access to some amazing technology in their hands and um with all this technology um you can finally do things you couldn't do before you can really use the experiences you couldn't build even a couple years ago and with COVID I think the adoption of spending more time online has um has risen tremendously because spending time and lockdown at home means spending time online and it's had a big impact on on how how people are interacting with their friends and family because people are social creatures the other day and they yearn for social connection and so people are looking for all these places to hang out online which is benefiting us tremendously too in terms of social traffic and so the big question we asked was you know a year to ago with all this new technology that we have um you know why do social products look the same as they did 10 years ago uh if you could messaging products are built for the 2g world it's still a chat list you know you still have the feed that was built for the pc the world has moved on so why have social products not gotten up and the one interesting data point that we have always um uh cited with hike has been that our our peak usage has been from 10 to 12 30 at night and so that got us very curious and we started talking to our users and we realized that it's not that people are messaging one another they're trying to hang out inside a hike online because they can't hang out offline and so we said okay wow so why are people hanging out in a messaging app in a messaging experience surely we can build something much much better and so that is the the goal of hike land which is can we build a a brand new magical and safe place to hang out online uh that goes beyond the traditional experiences of messaging that goes beyond the traditional experiences of the fee that goes beyond the arbitrary parameters of success likes comments that focuses purely on building great relationships can you build a social product that is truly social and um and technologies come ahead so much that we really believe the user experience to go make that happen is what we call a virtual world is no longer these tabs in a list that say can you bring the sentience of the real world online into a virtual world in a virtual world where you have a virtual you or you can be the best version of you you want to be and that's what we're building with hike land and you know it started off with the hike moji about nine months back which is you take a photo of yourself using machine learning to bring you into the you know virtual world and you can deck yourself out and it's doing phenomenally well people are absolutely loving it and now the big question was what more can your hike moji do and so this virtual world we have your home where you can actually invite some to your home and hang out with them and watch things together there's a big screen where you know we sort of gather people around that the content and media they love and we're literally building the world's first mobile first virtual world and it's exciting today because you know I think through covid we sort of seen what would have happened in two three years happen in these two three months the world has been forced to adapt and spend more time online and figure out these things we want to figure it out I had not been for the last couple of months and so we're excited the the launch hike in about two three weeks back the feedback is overwhelmingly positive we're actually quite pleasantly surprised because it's such an early preview but that's what we're building and we're super excited um yeah I mean we're looking forward to it and you know the first time we talked about it I actually said that you're building a roblox of for adults you know which is like actually pushing a digital avatar out there but you know interestingly when I spoke to you about maybe a month back it was the first time I was hearing something like this but today I found yesterday I found Facebook doing something similar with digital avatars and you know wanting to explore more we've already I've already met one very young event startup who's doing the same thing with trying to bring virtual events through digital avatars in education we're already seeing schools working on that area so I mean you know the whole scope of trying to sort of build virtual reality online is becoming and extending itself into a lot of areas so what particular areas in the social space you feel are going to be very interesting or areas to watch for and I mean are you allowing other developers or outside developers to actually come and build newer um I would say virtual reality uh you know hangouts within uh hike land yeah I know you're right the the virtual world means sky is the limit you know where do you start and where do you stop and so for us hike has always been a place of close friends and we really believe today's social media platforms don't really put the relationships at the center they put the user of the center and make the user a product and with the aim of extracting as much data from the customers possible so they can build you know their ads of business model and we want to flip that on the head and say you know let's go back to having a beginner's mind and thinking and scratch about what it means to build a fantastic social platform that only values relationships and so we have a north star which is great relationships make happy people and what can we do through our virtual world to further that mission statement and relationships come at least the way we are categorized in two forms existing relationships people you already know so can we give them more avenues to hang out online because they can't hang out offline and just like in the real world you tend to bump into other people you build new friends build new relationships can we enable that in the online world too because people are very comfortable online these days and so maybe new relationships would form on the platform as well to start with around the idea of a big screen which is the content you love and these are the first two experiences out of 10 15 experiences we're launching on the platform and you know our target audience also is young it's sort of between 16 17 and 21 22 high school sort of college so we focus on that segment and yes the dream is of course to build into a platform one day you know we have the metaphor of island so the home is an island in in high clan the experience on island why can't we let other people build islands in high clan over time and so yes absolutely I think you'll see us start talking more about sort of building high clan to a platform sometime in 2021 but in 2020 the idea is to release it get the early preview or to get the feedback on whether people are understanding we're building they understand the user experience because it's brand new no one's seen anything like this before sure second of all try our early hand business model because we really believe that the future of social social products will not be admirable the business models will not be admirable there'll be a virtual economy microtransactions and we want to in 2020 prove our hand at some of the stuff as well and once we've proven that the user experience works and people are loving that and that there's potential to build a virtual economy building a platform becomes even easier because other developers also understand that this is a platform that's working and they can monetize as well and that's the path we'll take in the next set of 12 months sure you just mentioned about monetization I mean I know that you know for a lot of startups finding monetizing opportunities have always been tough and you know trying to actually get customers to pay for services they are going to get free of cost becomes a challenge by itself so where do you feel you know monetization opportunities lies at such platform which is about social hangouts I mean you know where where where do you think people would want to pay in order to have these experiences you know you're right I think it's it's always a tricky question but like I said we really believe the future of social is you know vertical communities with a business model built around the idea of microtransactions and you're right what could these microtransactions be and for us the way we describe it you know you spend a lot of money in the real world and if you look at your monthly statement you'll realize 50 percent of what you spend money on is not what you need it's what makes you feel good human beings spend a lot of money and time and effort to make ourselves feel good and if you're not spending seven eight nine hours in the online world of your waking life some part of that money was shared to make your online self really good and we've seen this happen in multiple parts of the world because payments have finally become seamless something by the way that's been you know China's had this for 20 years payments have been seamless there from a very very early point in time right we're finally seeing that emerge in the US because payments have become seamless because of mobile in the app stores and of course in India in the last couple years through UPI and all the innovation that's happened payments have become very seamless too so people will spend online to make themselves feel good and that can be you know chasing after new experiences that can be improving the way your avatar looks it can be anything really that makes you feel good in our in our realm of the great relationships make happy people the the gamut is so wide and so we're excited by the fact that we get to pioneer this business model in this market in 2020 and while there may be equivalents you know sitting in small places around the world that we may take some inspiration from it's for us to figure it out as we move forward and you know we've talked about this multiple times which is we really believe for a big space business like ours which is a digital business we have no you know warehousing no logistics and so on so forth our value is just in the pixels and so revenue for us also is one more pixel it's a feature and so the way we experiment with building features we also experiment in the ways we make revenue and so 2020 is all about what experiments can we run around revenue inside the product and you see us around something the next couple months hopefully. Sure and I mean you also acquired winzo I think last year and winzo do you feel that gaming could be a big opportunity where people would come hang out and play games together I mean we've already seen that happening across other platforms where people are playing games with friends and you know family and all of that so do you feel that could be a big opportunity to explore? Oh absolutely I mean we invested in winzo we're the the biggest shareholder in winzo after the founders that's doing incredibly well it's grown 20x in 12 months and gaming is a you know gaming has always been an important part of our overall strategy in gaming we see as a new form of bite-sized entertainment for the masses and the difference between let's say a content app and a gaming app is that people actually pay for gaming you don't you won't necessarily pay to watch a TikTok video but you will pay to play a game and so we believe it's a fantastic new way of entertainment bite-sized it's also the business model also is very very strong and so we're big believers in gaming and you know we've been we we we stay in touch with the winzo team all the time and you know we're sort of asking them to double down on the traction that they have and yes you'll see the same insights sort of put into high-glend as well you know if great relationships have to be formed you know they're formed around shared experiences and gaming is a fantastic shared experience that can diffuse the tension and if you look at you know some of the other apps applications online that are formed build relationships it's a very direct way of making relationships happen yes we actually believe the opposite we really believe that if you have something in the middle learn which people can hang out it makes things a lot easier whether that's your content in the big screen over time whether that's gaming and inside high-glend so we're we're definitely big on gaming and expect to see some kind of gaming is at high-glend very soon that's good to know and i mean gaming itself is on the rise so that could be a certainly a big opportunity to capture and then when you have people at the platform and games to be played i can only get begin to imagine what is really coming happen it's going to be a lot of fun so you know let me talk on another side of the business which is raising capital so today we find that you know with China India face off coming getting Chinese capital and Chinese capital has been driving a lot of unicorns in India a lot of impact one of your venture fund is a Chinese fund so do you think money is going to be tighter for a lot of funds going forward do you feel that you know there's going to be more pressure to raise capital and therefore be able to make the most of the capital in fact you know the sweat of the capital might now be more controlled by the venture capitalist than it was done formerly the burn the outcome of that burn and so on so what what parameters do you see emerging when it comes to raising capital and using capital yeah so um you know it's it's clear that the all things China apps and Chinese capital of course are you know big no no going forward we do have a partnership with Tencent we value their partnership but Tencent is a very sort of minority investor in the company and significantly minority to a point where you know it doesn't it's like a financial investment so no say in the business however there are companies inside the country big unicorns that have significant Chinese shareholding yeah and I'm sure they're wondering what to do in light of what's happened um no doubt access the capital from China which has been one of the biggest sources by far in India has now been put on thoughts or at least it's become very difficult for that capital to come in and so I think entrepreneurs have to look for other sources of capital but you know um they exist and not just inside of India but around the globe uh if you look at you know soft bank if you look at you know people like tiger that we raised from when I was here you see back in 2014 um there are nothing more people around the world beyond China that actually have a massive capital waiting to be deployed in nascent markets like India behind fantastic entrepreneurs right now I'm off the opinion that you know the best entrepreneurs see fundraising as a problem to be solved it's one more problem to be solved and of course the variables of the problem are very different but if you're a good problem solver you figure it out yes and and if you're clear about the business you're building if your customers love you your metrics are fantastic and you have signs of people paying you I mean your life becomes a lot easier and there's enough capital in the world chasing great companies and entrepreneurs yeah and so I think that's the and you know and even during times like over of course it's different for some companies to to to sort of sustain and sort of move forward um it's quite the opposite for digital businesses you know we've seen a wave of absurd and usage so actually it's it's been a a strangely fan in a fantastic time for digital businesses that are pixels only because people are spending more time locked out at homes and spending more time online hanging out with people and so um you know I think from that perspective you know capital raising should not be a problem and there's plenty of capital in the world as a matter of fact I'm just thinking until the last three four years most of the capital that came to India was non-Chinese correct it's one of the last three four years when you know China already set up pushing the pedal so there's more more than enough capital and I think the best entrepreneurs will have the best products and the best companies and the best investors will have access to the best entrepreneurs I think it'll work itself out sure and yeah I mean that's what we wish for right and I mean you know what you just said in terms of the Chinese capital may not be available but we are in digital times right now so do you think particularly for Indian apps this may be a very good time because you know obviously we're not far and we're banning a lot of Chinese apps which have been able to make their headway in the country very quickly in fact TikTok is not there in China at all it's only there in India primarily putting on was in fact it's not there anymore than you cannot onboard TikTok so do you think it could be a good time for a lot of make in India apps and therefore I think a lot of young startups should actually be putting their minds in terms of building new apps and or even partnering with apps like yours to see if they could build another area or a foreground into within high client itself so you think a lot of startups are likely to marry each other within India to create or build on this opportunity I think everybody is definitely thinking about you know how do you opportunistic and go after the opportunity that's been left you know by the lack of China apps being there and they're not just it's not just TikTok by the way there's 59 apps there is UC browser there is shared there is Hago there is a bunch of apps across all spectrums that actually by the way we have a massive user base the Chinese apps combined I think have three four hundred million users getting and now that they've gone you know that opportunity completely opens up and you can see that the top apps in the play store right now are the sort of so-called TikTok equivalents share chat reposo and so on so forth the big question is I think first of all how long does the band last is it truly you know a serious long-term banners are just three four months and so I think that's going to be a big question if the band you know last and this is for here to stay it's a fantastic thing for Indian apps because finally you have one part of the world let's cut off from access to the market and you know as a as a as a entrepreneur building for this market you know our competition has always been global and I can tell you it's a it's a very difficult thing and so we welcome this we welcome the whole you know at the level of Bharat initiative across the board especially to do with apps because I think India needs to build its own ecosystem of companies China's internet economy with you itself is three trillion dollars sure that's bigger than India's entire economy and you know a large portion of that is not just the innovation they did in the market but just closing off access for some time so they can build their champions in the market that are not inventing for the global and it's great to see the government realize that it's time for us to go to this not across just the internet space but across many industries we're talking about agriculture you know pharma manufacturing and you know the smartphone industry is the one that by the way is a great example it's a great case study I think 50 plus market share it's with Chinese smartphones and when you have a home market where you can become very successful then it's very easy to oversupply a foreign market drop prices and destroy the local ecosystem where is micro max where is lava where is carbon they're all gone yeah sure and so it's important to ensure that there's not unfair a unfair sort of playing field for the market and I think that for the Indian app developer just coming back to that point in the midst of all of this I think it's it's a fantastic opportunity but you also have to be building fantastic products and solving a real customer pain point I think that comes first and if you do that these waves become bonus for you they become tailwinds behind you and we've seen that with a couple applications that are building for the market and you know mid to long term the best products win because it's not about downloads and acquisitions it's about retention it's about when people download the app with the stay and continue to use the product in a 12 months from now and I think a lot of people I think the best products that are getting that sort of table when actually focusing on that big way and coming back to sort of new people sort of starting up I think you know this China band has given a massive tailwind to maybe the sectors in which people could relapse you know people were thinking oh my god content why should we build in the content space is buy down to the billion dollars you know that has been completely blocked off yeah and so that that big comparator gorilla space is gone and suddenly the space is wide open so maybe entrepreneurs can start thinking about what sort of things to build in content and same thing with the other app categories that have been banned but just remember it's just China that's been not the world that's true and so you still have the Facebook's and the Google's and all these guys by the way are in all the spaces the Chinese apps are in and have products that are bigger by the way than the Chinese companies yes so one should not forget that okay so you know now we've got a lot of questions pouring in so we've got um so let me start by asking one we've received on fp live which is that by Ravi Varma who says that did you build the app yourself or you had a business idea and came up with the framework and drove it forward I think did I code the app myself um I think what he's essentially trying to ask is that did it start from the idea stage or was it something that you um so did you code yeah probably that did you code it yourself or did you have a team to do it no so you know the we built a person of four five we built a team of four five people it's a very small team um you know I designed the first version like I didn't code it up because I'm awful at coding and so I I hired a couple of very strong enduring leaders to help me work could do that um and you know the vision like I said vision principles people product process you know a founder and CEO is only as good as your team and so you have to build a very strong team even early on uh you know to build a product and fortunately for anyone building in the digital space you don't need many people you don't need much capital even idea it's just you can start building one person can design one person can code there's so much infrastructure available today that we didn't have it through back in 2012 my god we didn't have like AWS back then fully operational and so it's not it doesn't cost a lot to build an idea that does the world you can actually have two free people they can just spin up an idea and start working and the cost is like which gives you no and these cloud companies give enough grants by the way to get you started so you don't even need funding to start um so if you have an idea this is the the best time to build something new sure and I mean with Hygien also I mean did you have a the coding team in India or did you primarily had the coding team spread across the world where coders were working on the product uh no we our culture is very different our culture is a very career setup so we have a team of uh 155 people that actually work of course now everybody's remote but we were working out of the era city our office and that's the team that's built Hygien so it's a purely indian driven effort of the indian team indian engineers indian designers um ground up sure okay so let me start taking some questions so we've got a question coming from Ashleish is he uh is Ashleish uh please unmute Ashleish before you ask the question please unmute go on please yes please go on the volume is very low Ashleish can you be louder no it's not coming I can I can see your questions in the question list do you want me to just uh yes I think that would be a better idea we can maybe just take this question so what what do you think are the new trends which are emerging on social media platform but I think you've really answered that quite a bit yourself in terms of uh but you know somebody I also see as an add-on has asked the question that you have you seen um pre-covid and post-covid with on-hike platform what changes have you observed well we observed a pretty significant jump in traffic yeah seems to be holding um as we speak and actually increasing as we as we as we talk and like I said you know people are finding new ways to hang out online and and hike has been a place that many people have chosen to come to so we're seeing a pretty big spike in performance that's sustaining as we speak right now sure Sarthi is next Sarthi can you please come online and unmute and ask your question please unmute okay his question is that would you like to invest in an up-and-coming startup which is at an ideation stage um I mean yeah it's a pitch but would you like to talk about it send me a pitch at coven and hike.in and my team will definitely have a look okay so we've got a lot of pitches coming to you Kevin I mean there is somebody else who's also sort of said that they it's a founder of a social media app Outbuds and okay I mean so my vision is to help people socialize all over the world so how do you plan that COVID time according to you but I think you've answered most of that really yeah I think tough to build something to the real world today doesn't mean things will not get back to normal but if you have a pitch send it over I'm excited to hear about new ideas from the perspective of social apps yeah so there is Kiran also who's asked that you know is there a opportunity to actually monetize the the team space in India from a social perspective yeah that's a great question I think that the the wallet size for the tg is definitely relatively speaking smaller but the way we look at this and this is a really good question if you don't mind I'm just gonna read out the question you know I have a question regarding monetizing Indian teams what kind of wallet size would they have I understand games like dream 11 have been monetizing but it's because anticipation of money if virtual economy is a new experience and how will the slow down of the economy impact monetization that's a great question so um fortunately for us to build a fantastic business you know we just we think if you go to a place where there are 10 million people paying you a dollar a month you know that's amazing and that's not unimaginable if you look at the Indian market it's about half a billion of users that are online 10% of that is 50 million percent of that is 5 million 2% of that is 7 million so can we get 2% of the market to you know potentially pay us a dollar a month which is about 60 70 rupees we think that's not unimaginable and even for a teen audience that probably has a pocket money of you know 670 10 times that is our job and responsibility will be fantastic product and experiences online where that 70 rupees could shift from something offline to something online but people definitely have the propensity to pay those micro transactions and the technologies become seamless enough so that micro transactions have become very easy to conduct in the online world and of course you'd have a fantastic product that people are sort of paying for as well there's another question which says are you planning to introduce advertising in hike no absolutely not we are we are very anti and in their traditional form in the way current social media platforms have put answer so in the current form no absolutely not sure there's a question by Ritesh which says that do you think with dating becoming an online thing real world it's going to collapse that's a good one you know um I don't think the real world will ever collapse because people you know people human beings are human beings we you know we we we want social connection and I can tell you that as a company as well we've been working remotely for the last three months highly productive by the way I mean it was impressive we learned so much about ourselves but we just had a couple of meetings in person we're doing some planning and it was so nice to see the team in person and it's a whole different field so I feel like that's not going to go away things may become a little different but I think once COVID settles down and this wave goes away I might not get back to normal but yes you know in the meantime you gotta think about this very differently meaning new people is very different now can you sort of and that's one of the core tenets of high plan which is you build experiences around which people can hang out and meet like-minded people science actually presents a massive opportunity to build fantastic products so if you have ideas in that space again drop me a line at Covenant Hightower so do you actually feel that Hightline may actually become a platform for like a pre-dating you know hangout before people actually go out and date in the real world possibly as a matter of fact by the way the early feedback is so strong we have people connecting with people inside the big screen and it's not just about you know males connecting with females it's people of the same gender finding like-minded people of the same gender and you know India has a in India the country is so big and people forget that India predominantly is still pretty conservative social norms are still catching up the infrastructure also in the offline world is not the same as the metros in tier one it's still building up and so the avenues to hang out offline are not there for everybody and also if they are there then the social norms still catching up and thus people can't express themselves freely so thus people are looking for places to hang out and meet people online I think that's a you know massive opportunity that we believe exists in a market like India today sure so there's actually a good question that has come up that you know I mean and I was going to ask you at some point myself that what have you learned it's come from Abhishek Jain that what are the success factors for a startup today and you know what have you learned in your journey of building a unicorn you know how can you sort of shorten the distance to become a unicorn and at the same time sort of avoid a lot of errors as you go forward or do you think it's just part of it yeah it's a great question I think that first and foremost you know forget for any entrepreneur listening forget this word unicorn right forget valuation I think the private market is very valuation obsessed and not really fundamentally obsessed and there's a lot of companies out there that are not fundamentally very strong but as skyrocket valuation then you look at the public markets you know the stock goes up stock goes down no one cares but it's all about the fundamentals of business and so care about building a fantastic product and care about building a fantastic business and all you have to do is every step of the way ensure that you're increasing the probability of success off the business so how do you keep every step of the way keep increasing the probability of success of your business because probabilities is something that's in your control and there's sort of this like eight-point checklist that we built over time that if you answered well if you check them out really well you know you're already pointing in the right direction you know first is what's the idea are you riding on an existing behavior I see many companies many founders trying to create new behaviors that don't exist that's almost impossible to do so are you riding on existing behavior are you taking the behavior that exists offline and bringing it online and making it 10 times better second is is that behavior big is the market big is it a big problem to solve third is do you have a unique perspective or a unique approach to solve for that market is it novel enough not to compete you have to try your best not to compete you don't even leave competition is for losers number four is simplicity can your idea in its simplest form have an impact and because you're going to get things out of the door as fast as possible to launch and get feedback so could your idea in a simplest form have an impact fifth is can you find like a niche of people that absolutely love it because all products start off with the first hundred people the first thousand people the first ten thousand people that absolutely love it and you don't have those people you're not going to grow so you don't have to chase after the ten million you have to chase after the first hundred thousand ten thousand that's exactly what we don't like land you chase after the first niche that absolutely love it sixth is going to be automatically word of mouthy well it spread itself and get viral do you have the right team to move fast nitrate do you the right team to build the right product for example has hike where a big space business so we can build like products in the digital world very very fast they ask us to build a food delivery services and set up we're not going to be able to go do that and vice versa and so the DNA of the company in the team we build is also very very important must be suited to the problem that you're solving and number eight is do you like the business model and is the business model disruptive because at the end of the day it's not that technology is disruptive technology enables new business models to enable business models very very disruptive and if you're feeling confident about these eight points the probability of success of your business is significantly higher and then along the way you have to have a mentality of moving fast speed over perfection and in that process you will make mistakes and that's okay as long as the the size of your mistakes is very very small and a lot of people with who have tried to avoid making mistakes because people are so worried about what do people say but mistakes won't happen whether you like it or not yeah and the best way to fail is to try to avoid making mistakes and our approach has always been that mistakes will happen and what you gotta do is just make sure that your wins are more than your losses okay yeah and the quantum of your wins the size of your wins is significantly bigger than the size of your losses and to do that requires doing unconventional things to win big you have to be unconventional and be right because if you're doing the same thing as everybody else you get the same results to get bigger results you got to do things differently and be right and so um and and I think the last last thing that sums up all of this stuff is if you are driven by social signals if you're driven by what people think of you your life as an entrepreneur is going to become a hundred times more difficult because as an entrepreneur you're trying to cause change I mean you're trying to cause change you're going up against what exists today right people are very comfortable and so you have to really believe and your team has to really believe in what you're doing the change that you're causing for that to come to life and that's the only way you think about unconventional things that nobody thinks about and your DNA of trying a lot of things and building superior judgment over time will actually give you that big bank success that you're looking for that will give you that you know massive user base fantastic business that you're chasing after um and I would summarize everything in in those two or three points sure um we have an interesting question from GN uh can we give the audio to GN I would rather he ask or she asks it uh themselves can you please unmute yeah go on yes okay thanks can you hear me okay yes okay great so essentially I was saying that uh since uh since the you know the whole rationale of uh technology and we keep talking about it is that since the uh the uh the success rate you know like what do you what how do you understand that uh other software uh developers not necessarily from India can create products that can replace the google android or the ios you still kind of uh it's still kind of monopolized by these two players right so uh the question question worry was that uh when small entrepreneurs have an idea that's potentially revolutionary and they begin to invest in uh building that technology but you know two or three or four months down the line after they get the poc there is uh other players who have bigger players who have the ability to replicate uh that idea and offer it at a you know at zero price to a similar market which kind of destroys uh these small software developers how how do how do software developers mitigate this risk thanks yeah it's a great question and I have a simple answer to that which is you know you know don't build anything remotely similar to these big guys go go find go you know go find your own you gotta go play your own game if you think they're a game you know it's their rules they've mastered the rules they will come at you with full force go create a brand new game and you know I think there's a word for this it's called like the sword and shield strategy and the shield is your go-to-market strategy your go-to-market strategy is so different from the incumbent that they don't feel the need to come after you right as a matter of fact initially they would dismiss you saying what what are these guys building it's too small for us and the sword is you know over time and what your building becomes bigger and bigger you tend to accumulate skills in that new game over time and by the time the incumbent wakes up the asymmetry of skills that you have is so overwhelming that it doesn't matter so you have to create your own game don't chase after things that the big guys are already building because that's their game they'll do that better and even if they don't do it better they'll have many more resources working in the same thing you have yeah and in the big space world you know if you get some success hundreds of people are going to come chase after your opportunity and so you also have to just accept the fact that in a big space world and I think any business but most of the big space world you have to continuously innovate just you have to be in that real 24 so and you know we've seen this happen globally even with you know companies like others you just have to be innovative all the time and building things that are fundamentally different from the market and you know with high clan for example its case in point we're building something that is so different that's not seen by the world that it's a game that we're going to play ourselves and build our own game and we got to move fast we got to build our own skills in that game as soon as possible so that if this opportunity when it becomes very big and people start looking at it we're so good at that game that it doesn't matter okay I think Karan Pahuja is next can we give the audio to Karan please unmute Karan before you ask can you hear me yes so I just have a quick question so you were talking about combining gaming and high clan what what do you have a roadmap in your head or you know what are you planning to do with the gaming um and you know how do you put these two things together and in case if we have like one minute I would just want you to ask like geo is doing with whatsapp you know we can do payments on whatsapp is height planning to do something like that well you know you see the the manifestation of the gaming side of high clan soon we launch it um I think we're working on something pretty neat I think that the customer is going to love and we're no longer you know like I said our our whole thesis is that messaging is done you know like that's the old way that's the old user experience and you know hundreds of millions of people billions of people still continue to use it that's not the future you know and messaging as a business is pretty poor you know whatsapp doesn't make any money still and so um we don't look at what the competition is doing we don't look at what the old space is doing we just focus on what our customers want to be built for them so I can't count what facebook is going to do with geo and so on so forth I'm sure they have something planned for our goal is to be built for our customers to make high clan and do a magical product that people love and also prove that we can build a fantastic business model around high clan sure we'll take one final question from Prahlad Modi um can we have Prahlad online these are mute Prahlad before you ask these are mute okay so Prahlad's question is that uh high clan uh with all the virtual profiles and no concrete way to audit or verify the authenticity of the profiles how how do you tackle the problem of fake profiles uh products like Tinder etc have invested a lot in that problem uh so you know how do you guys put enough thought to this or you know so what what I'm sure that there's a lot of uh other areas not just about the profiles but hacking and cyber security I'm sure these would all become areas of concern once the once you have a lot of users coming in so how will you tackle it yeah it's it's a problem to be solved and well we've gotten pretty good you know solving problems and solve it and as a matter of fact it's something already working on which is uh you know with the high camoji there's the benefit of you can be who you want to be on the other side you can be anybody you want to be and so it's got a pro and a con and so we're working towards making sure that um uh where she were already working on a few things to solve this problem you'll see us announce this soon but you'll see us get to a point where um you know once you've chosen who you are once you've chosen your name once you've chosen your gender age you know all that's all those sort of parameters you will not be able to change all those things and second of all is when you take a photo of yourself to create the hike moji we can authenticate you if you're you know a guy or a girl um and so there are many things that we're thinking about and that we're sort of working on to to make sure that we solve for this and no doubt it's a it's something would be massive attention to because we want hike land to be a not just a magical place for people to hang out but a safe place to uh and that's something that that's uh is at the very top of our list sure um so I think with that we learned the questions from the audience you know one thing before we conclude Kevin you mentioned one thing that you know information today is something that is easily available and I see a lot of books behind you so what I've always known that unicorns you know tend to read a lot of books and I always hear about Elon Musk and you know everybody in the silicon valley reading books all the time so what books are you reading what is it that you enjoy reading the most and you know it's given you great insights wow that's a loaded question Ritu I I read a lot and my my interests are very very diverse um you know I read um stuff from you know all the boring business books the uh all the autobiographies you can sort of find your hands on to quantum physics the you know and I've just been reading some of the open issues in the last year that are very intense and heavy books but they're phenomenal and I feel like it's it's strange that we don't teach them to our kids in in this country um the one that I was reading recently that just finishes uh book by Richard Feynman the pleasure of finding things out he's one of the best well-known sort of physicists office time still is and he had a way of approaching problem solving and learning that um I've picked up that it's just phenomenal that lets you pick up new topics very very fast and so a lot of us to do about just you know how do you unlock for me a lot of my and you know just beyond the books I spent a lot of time just asking how to unlock my own potential human beings are very capable species and for some reason we're not taught to unlock a lot of that potential at all through our education and you know kindergarten middle school high school college we're just not taught and I feel like uh some of the best people in the world somehow either consciously or subconsciously figured out how to go do that and um so you know books like the one that I talked about which would find in this book it just shows you how the way he thinks about stuff um and there was a fantastic book that I read last year that I published also my top 10 books on my blog uh was atomic habits I think people on this form would actually love that which is about you know there's a there's a saying which is if there's a gap between your goals and habits your habits always win and so the habits that you develop in your daily life actually become who you are and it's a very simple thought but something that you would not think about because no one teaches you about being self-aware and understanding sort of who you are and what you do and then there is uh like I said deeper stuff you know I finished a bunch of Stephen Hawking Hawking books last year and I my fascination for quantum physics and all things quantum and the leaders and open the shirts actually have a common spine that I didn't realize it's all it all talks about one of the same thing and you know I and this is gonna sound maybe a bit sort of you know at a different plane but um I'm a very spiritual person and this journey started for me about eight nine ten years ago and I spent a lot of time um furthering that I can't call it a mindset I don't have the right words for it but whatever that is and uh so I invest a lot of time um not just reading all that I can read but also finding time for solitude you know um every every Sunday I have at least two three hours if not four hours where I just sit in silence um and I think that's very very important because um we are so trained to take these searchlights spotlights that we have and turn them onwards and go chasing for answers in the world but nobody turns those spotlights inwards and when you do all the answers the same right there and and people frequent this is not a just a spiritual sort of you know mindset but you know human beings the building blocks of human beings is DNA and and DNA is cold storage for a lot of information that's stored millions of years and so I feel like you have I mean human beings have the opportunity of unlocking that a little bit from time to time and so that's why I spend time myself because I feel like so many times that I'm looking for answers to a very complicated question just sitting in that silence by doing nothing answers will just drop in like these epiphanies that you have and whether it's you know your mind is stimulating all the information that you've read or that's just turning off your conscious mind and tapping into something deeper and I feel like that's a practice that's worked really well for me so I feel like finding time for solitude every day and more so you know longer sort of period than Sunday and also reading a lot of good material and putting good things in your mind you know that helps a lot and you have only so much time on the day and it just takes 15-20 minutes a day to do some of this stuff not more and I feel like it's a habit that if many more developed the world would be in a very different place. Sure and you know and such great things come out of the silence I've seen you know I glad I'm sure came out of that silence only. Well thank you so much for talking to us Kevin I think it was it was an extremely insightful talk and I feel that the ideas that you're bringing out today are probably going to be the ideas that we will see in all full force out there on the ground and people actually mingling out there on social hangout places that you're creating today at Eitlern and we obviously are very keen to explore the platform and enjoy the various you know arenas that you've created for all of us out there so thank you for joining us today and to all the attendees please keep on posting the questions don't stop them from coming. Kevin if somebody in your team could actually answer we've got a lot of questions on Facebook live if somebody could take a while to just answer some of the questions out there and sort of talk to our attendees from time to time in the next few days that would be very helpful. Absolutely we'll do that thank you so much for having me it's always a pleasure to catch up with you and thanks a lot. Thank you very much and hope you enjoyed the talk.