 All right, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are joining us from and I want to ask you a question. The question is, if there is an engineer from IIT, what does that guide do for entertainment? And if I say that the hint is he plays rock music, would you think that I am exaggerating or would that be a valid thing? We are going to explore that. But I also am going to tell you that if you know the meaning of the word a big name, if you are listening in, if you put that, the first person who gets it gets a sort of a prize and the prize is a signed copy of my book. So if you do that, just let me know. Until then, here is the response. And here is what I am going to play. Good evening, Sartak, welcome, welcome. Sartak is the co-founder and CEO at Avigen, which is India's largest enterprise gig work platform. Did I get that bit right, Sartak? Yes, Avigen. Hi, good to. Thanks for having me here. How is it going? It's going well. And, you know, let's have the answer to that question. What does Avigen really mean? So Avigen is a Sanskrit word, which basically means a removal of obstacles. So Avigen basically means obstacles. You attach an A behind it and it becomes removal of obstacles. Okay, all right. So is that why you chose to call your gig work platform? Avigen, what obstacles is it removing and for whom? Yeah, so that's essentially the reason why we decided to call ourselves Avigen at times. It becomes a bit of a trunk vista, which I've seen people call it Avain, Avgin and a lot of other pronunciations. But when you know that it is Avigen, it sort of sticks around in your head. And yeah, we essentially remove obstacles for enterprises and for gig workers on both the ends. So you know that, you know, we are a gig work platform. The catch is that we work with enterprises and then we are a gig work platform for enterprises. So we take up work from large enterprises, which is digital work or on the ground rectoring work. We get it done through gig workers all across India in distributed locations, Spain. We have about over a million gig workers on our platform have about over 100 plus market enterprise customers. And we get this done for enterprises end to end and we in a way become an execution partner both for enterprises and for gig workers. On one hand, we take up the work, get it done end to end, build them on the deliverables and not on the basis of workforce that is deployed. On the other hand, we become an execution partner for a gig worker as well. We're in starting from that guy's entire job cycle, starting from selection to training to deploying that person on the ground in a radius of about 30 kilometers of where he or she stays. And then ensuring that the money keeps hitting the bank account of the gig worker. All of that job cycle is something which we guys can do. That's what we do. Wow. So, you know, it's the reason why I wanted to have you on the show was that sometime earlier in the year, I think I wrote a post on my little newsletter, which, you know, every Monday I do, which is also called dreamers and unicorns. I think I'm obsessed with that phrase. But I wrote about this thing called the pin code jobs. And these pin code jobs are going to become very, very prominent in India, which is that people are going to find work in and around where they stay because they are familiar with that area. They can do lots of things there. And in some sense, and one of the examples that I think I don't remember it right, I think I had sort of quoted a witness one of the. You have. And, and I was very fascinated by the, the whole promise of gig work. And when we think about gig work, it is interesting because a lot of people associate gig work with just, you know, the share cat drivers or delivery guys, but actually gig work is a massive spectrum. You know, and I mean, if you sort of look at the entire Bollywood, you know, economy or the movie making, you know, business, it's entirely gig work. So nobody's employed by anyone, except for a handful of people who are studio employees but 90% of Bollywood is like really gig workers or the movie industry in general, or most of the creative work is actually gig work so creative fields have always been there. So are you expanding that definition across jobs and give me an example of, you know, an enterprise with what kind of work do they outsource to you and then who does this work just walk me through end to end as to how it happens. Okay, so to answer to, you know, talk about your first, you know, aspect of whether a gig worker is only a worker who does a very low scale sort of a task, the answer very clearly a widget as you mentioned is no. A gig worker is somebody who has a couple of hours in a week, and you know, wants to set it out in those particular hours and you know, augment his or her income primarily. That is basically a gig worker in simplest of definitions without going into a lot of jarbons of how the contractual systems work there, that is primarily a gig worker and Bollywood is essentially 90% gig worker. I think my mother is also a gig worker in some manner, in some manner or so. Yeah, so you're absolutely correct. And what is it that we do for enterprises see we function in eight major lines of business, whether and we have on the field jobs, we have digital jobs. We take up work which is very core to an enterprise which has to be done in a very distributed manner on the ground. So anything which we're in, you know, enterprises want to variable is their entire PLL that is where we come in. For example, give me an example of an actual company and an actual job. For example, we work with a large FMCT brand and we audit a lot of their warehouses in India. So it is a task where in gig workers go on the ground, visit the warehouse, look at what are the SKUs that are kept there, map the inventory levels of the SKUs with the, you know, with the correct actual inventory levels and try and see what is it that is spent in the ERP. And then look at is there any deviation, is there any difference between the inventory level which my ERP shows and the inventory level which is actually there in my warehouse. And all of that gets captured in our app and it goes on, you know, in real time to our enterprise customer and they're able to look at, okay, that in Delhi, these are the five locations where my inventory level is much lower than what is projected in front of me. So this is an auditing sort of a task which we take up where in this is a very high skilled tasks, the gig workers come on the platform, they get selected for the task, they get trained for the task, they go on the ground, follow the workflows which are there in the app, complete the task and get paid on the outcome that is there. We as a beginner also get paid on the outcome and not on the basis of the amount of hours that are put in by anyone. So that is the entire model Abhiji. And how large is this market, you know, when you talk about gig work is India, you know, is the third largest gig economy, if you will. Is that a, is that true? I mean, is that your calculation as well? Yeah, absolutely. See, we see this as an immediate market of over $30 billion with a wide space which we are capturing at this point in time just in India right now. And to understand this number, we might have to understand the plight of enterprises and the enterprise demand first of the gig. See, the enterprises in India have been functioning with the traditional methods of getting the work done, which involves putting thousands of full-time people on an enterprise payroll or a third party payroll of a staffing firm. And, you know, we know that staffing, large staffing firms have built businesses solving the problem of discovery, deployment and payroll management of the workforce. Now, this primarily comes along with two major problems. The first is an upfront risk for enterprises. And second one is incremental costs. Risks because, you know, you end up paying fixed salaries with no guarantee of outputs and incremental costs because due to constant rehiring, re-tending, re-management due to attrition which happens month on month. Now, this specifically has been eating up margins for enterprises. If you look at a lot of data of, you know, Fortune 500 companies that are out there, top 500 enterprises in India, you'd see that their EBITDA margins have largely remained stagnant over the past 10 years. They have optimized their expenses at a lot of levels. You know, the challenge is that the fixed workforce costs have increased and have eaten up into some of those margins that they have tried to develop over the years. And now the solution that they are going to is to variable this cost and map it directly to their top lines. Now, to drive this variableization, their go-to solution is gig economy. But the challenge for them is to get the work done through gig workers. It's an altogether different ballgame to engage and, you know, get the work done through gig workers. It's predominant. They are accustomed to getting the work done through workforce where they have a lot of control, where they know where my employee is going to be and, you know, how can I drive the employee in whatsoever mannerism. And if we talk about gig workers, that is basically a workforce which is predominately remote and flexible in nature. And further, you know, the tools which are there with the enterprises, the technology which they need to manage the gig workers is also very different, you know, which they already have in their systems to manage the fixed workforce that they have. This is where we come in. This is where Avidin comes in, wherein we say that it's not just about discovery. It's not just about deployment of gig workers. But it's about end-to-end execution through a tech stack which we have developed over the years, specifically for the gig economy. And we call this gigification of enterprise work, which is predominantly executed by permanent workforce. And that's the key to sizing the market for us. The formal, you know, sector employee costs stand at about close to 125 billion dollars in India. And you see about close to 15 percent of these jobs are gigable at this very point of time. And which is growing at a category of more than 5 percent, you know, at this point in time as well. That sits us at a market of about 30 billion dollars. I personally feel that the market is much larger because I only assume that 15 percent of these, you know, jobs are gigable. But as we move along, we would see that more and more jobs become gigable and, you know, enterprises go ahead and variableize their P&R. So I think that is how we primarily look at the market. So let me, you know, try and see if I have understood this whole process. So guys and for the listeners, we are talking to Ananya Sarthak, who is the founder and CEO of Avigna, which, as he said, AWGN, Avigna actually stands for someone who removes obstacles, which is also one of the names for Ganesha, you know. So this problem that Avigna tries to solve is that typically in an enterprise in an organization, we have traditionally seen that if you want to get any job done, the company employee person is a full-time employee. Now that fundamentally means, regardless of how, you know, how demand fluctuates for the company, they need to keep the, you know, the number of people constant, which also means that the profits keep eroding and that sort of does that. One way of thinking about it is during the pandemic, you know, when the sales were lower, you know, many companies therefore had no choice but to, you know, lay off people, etc. Instead, here is an opportunity that, you know, the work still that they need to do, they're simply putting that work done to, you know, that needs to be done, whether it is, let's say, auditing the warehouse or, you know, in a petrol pump, for example, time to see if they can find all the safety standards. So someone goes and clicks a photograph, uploads it into, you know, your app or something and then they get paid. And the work gets done obviously at a cheaper cost and it takes away this whole business that, you know, people who are full-time, they need to be laid off again, hired back and again laid off and again hired back. You take that off and you're actually trying to get the work done to the pin code jobs, which is what was the thesis of my article also that over a span of time, a place like India is going to see a lot of pin code jobs, which people are going to, you know, do it from the comfort of their homes. Today, we actually see that happening that, you know, people are looking at doing whatever they are doing, including white collar jobs in some sense have become pin code because, you know, you're operating out of a certain area. I want to sort of, you know, move to the second portion. And if any one of you who's listening in, if you have a question, please add that your comments, your ideas do put it there. And I'm going to sort of bring it up on the screen. And Abhijit, just to add on to what you said, it also becomes a go-to way to scale at speed for enterprises as well. So for example, a multitude of enterprises right now want to tap into a lot of tier two markets, a lot of tier three markets. And they now do not have to go through a lot of setup that they have to usually incur at this point in time. Somebody like Abhijit is not there in the picture. So for them to scale, it just takes us about four to five days to give you the first outcome in that tier three town at the end of the day without any set of costs to be incurred by you. So that also is something which I see is the gift brought in by gig economy as a space in getting the enterprise work done. So how many tier two, tier three, tier four cities, I mean how many cities do you operate in? So we operate in close to 476 cities at this point in time, out of which we have about eight tier one cities, 76 tier two towns, 76 tier two cities and rest are all tier three towns and villages. That's where, and this is all kind of across over 12,000 pin codes in India. Wow, and how many pin codes are there in India just ballpark. So we look at it from point of view of about close to 20,000 pin codes in India, out of which we service about close to 12,000. And these are the 12,000 pin codes where we have a lot of enterprise demand. We also have a lot of gig workers who are willing to work but do not have very good opportunities at this point in time. And are happy to spread it out on the ground and actually do the task for enterprises. And so we have a very good product market fit in some of these 12,000 pin codes and we are scaling up there. Fantastic, one element to really sort of start thinking about is that and it's a bit of a no question. Do you guys only work with blue collar jobs or do you also have white collar jobs? And if you do both, then I'm going to separate and talk about that. But are white collar jobs also part of your platform? Yes, they are. They absolutely are. So we do both the kinds of jobs at this point in time. In fact, you can call the job that we do as gray collar where in both blue collar workers and white collar workers can work. We also have specially launched a new platform called Avigna Expert which is a tailor made only for white collar workers, primarily much higher skilled workers into the domains of HR, marketing, data science, technology and product. And there the idea is that when we talk about Avigna as the parent model which we had been running for the past five years, we were primarily focusing low to medium level skills for a lot of enterprises and for a lot of grid workers. We figured that we cannot be myopic and cannot touch upon the high skilled workers which are white collar workers at this point in time because our vision is to become a one-stop solution for everything related to grid for an enterprise and our solution is to also become one-stop solution to upgrade your skills and your incomes for every kind of skill for gig workers as well. So we figured that a couple of months back, I think about five to six months back, we figured that we want to get into this space and we launched Avigna Expert as a new platform wherein we connect gig workers who are very high skilled and enterprises who are looking for their help, wherein these gig workers devote a couple of hours on our platform solve an enterprise core problem and get paid on the basis of what is it that they're solving for them. So that is the idea when we talk about Avigna Expert. So to sum it up, yes, Avigna, if you work, we take up both kinds of jobs, be it lower skill or medium skill jobs of auditing as I talked about, of background verification that we do, of last night operations that we do content operations or proctoring of examinations or invigilation of examinations that we do which involves a little higher than lower skill gig workers, we do all of those and on the other hand, we take up a lot of high skill tasks as well as part of Avigna Expert. Fantastic. So let me come to the core of the conversation today which is what I want to pick your brains on when I advertise this particular talk today, I said the thing that people will learn about today is what is the psychology of a gig worker? What do they look for? Is it different from somebody who's in a full-time job versus somebody who's doing this one-off kind of jobs? How much do these people earn? At the lowest end of the scale, how much do we just so that we get an idea of what kind of earning opportunity is there? Sathak, what money are we talking about? Yeah, so see, when you talk about the gig workers working for us and gig workers in general, we work with a couple of different kinds of gig workers, Avigna. First of all, I'll lay those down for you and then go into the nuances of how much money they can actually make and what is it that drives them actually to pick up a gig job. See, we work with college students. We work with blue collar workers. We work with graduates who do not have a job. We work with graduates who have graduated sometime back, generate less than 30,000 rupees a month and want to augment their incomes. We work with homemakers, especially women who were there in jobs before, went through a maternity or some sort of leave and want to come back again and work. We also have started to work with retired defense professionals, people who are ex navy, ex Air Force, ex army, who have taken up premature retirement and want to work. For example, we take up a lot of invigilation tasks of a lot of examinations in India. And we deploy a lot of ex defense professionals who go there and actually invigilate those examinations. And we also work with people who are specially able, people who are 50% blind, can still go out on the ground and work. People who cannot walk but can sit at home and work on a lot of content moderation tasks. We work with them as well. Now, when we talk about all of these gig workers, these are primarily folks who have certain hours at hand and they can devote those amount of hours in a week and have two larger motives in their life. First is to have some under secondary income in their life. And second is to uplift their skills and pick up a larger skill jobs as they move ahead in their career. Be it at Avigna or outside of Avigna as well. These are the kind of people we work with and 85% of the people who work with us work for secondary income and 15% also generate their primary income with us. If you look at a typical gig worker, let's say a gig worker, they work 6 hours in a day, works for let's say about 25 days in a month. That guy would be able to make 30,000 rupees on an average in a month easily. That is the amount of money that they can make. And of course, if there is somebody who devotes 20 hours in a week based on the kind of tasks that they have picked up based on the amount of skills that is needed for their tasks, they get quit on the basis of it. And that is how it primarily works. And to also give you a certain amount of more color into this, we have over a million gig workers on our platform right now. Out of those, we have touched about close to 200,000 careers of gig workers at this point in time. We have generated the livelihood in the tune of rupees 40 crores of earnings which the gig workers have made through Avigna till now in the past couple of years. And all of this by working in the radius of about 20 kilometers of where you stay. You do not go to a tier one city to work primarily. So yeah, I mean, that is how the gig workers at this point in time look for us. I just think it is so incredible that you take the student and sort of what I hear you saying is that you are actually offering opportunities from across the spectrum. So somebody who is not employed, who is partly employed, who is fully employed and who wants to supplement. It can be an additional pocket money kind of a thing. It can be the full-time profession. It can help somebody who's re-entering the workforce or somebody who's lost a job in a certain area and wants to sort of get back. We are looking at defense people who are, you are looking at homemakers. You are looking at people who are partly disabled, disability at various levels. Absolutely incredible. And what I heard you also saying is that, you know, a witness providing the opportunities, not just a local jobs, but also white college jobs. And at an average about 30,000 rupees a month, somebody could be making, which is quite incredible. I want to sort of ask you the other question, which is, what is the job where, you know, somebody has made the most on your platform? What's the highest paying job? What would that be? What kind of money? Just give an approximation then, you know, if you can. Yeah. Yeah, correct. I'll sort of also give you an anecdote, Abhiji. So, you know, that we are in the process of raising a series. We are at this point in time and as part of going through the hustle of that, you know, we talk to a lot of our gig workers and try and get some of their feedback on the platform and how has their journey been with us. So, I happened to be on one of such calls. I think about this was about a couple of weeks back. I happened to be on one of such calls and I'll not name him. He started working with us about three years back. And he showed me a couple of photos in that particular call. He used to work in a one room rented sort of a place in Mumbai. You know, how the living conditions of Mumbai are for people, you know. So, he was living there and he told me that, you know, he had a job earlier because of some of the other reasons he got fired from that job and he was not able to get any job for about a year or so. And he started working with us on a very low-skill task of background verification. He started working on that particular task wherein, you know, the job was to go to, let's say, Amazon has hired a delivery executive and before that guy can work, somebody would have to go on the ground go visit that delivery executive's house, look at whether he's actually living there or not in computer background verification on our app. So, that was the task which, you know, he was tasked with initially. He used to complete, I think, about close to 50 odd such tasks in one particular day. He used to devote, you know, 6 to 7 hours a day. He used to make about close to 30,000 to 35,000 rupees in a month. And this is very, you know, this is not a very high-skill task which he was doing. This is a mid-high, lower to mid-level task wherein you have to go, you have to take a snapshot, the locality and so on and so forth. And slowly and steadily, what he started to do was he started to, you know, he started to get more and more gig workers on Aavegin's platform and he became a worker who used to distribute work among a lot of gig workers who used to work with him. So, he sort of became, so we have a system of, a gamified system of gig workers to go up the ladder. So, he slowly became a team leader in his pin code at that point in time and started deploying a lot of people. And he started making about close to 65 to 70,000 rupees a month as well. He moved from that house. So, he was, you know, visually showing me all of the pictures that, okay, this is my first house that I moved on to. This is the second house that I moved on to and this is what I'm dreaming of right now at this point in time. And he said, one thing which sort of struck me there and then, he said, sir, I take Aavegin's name before I go to work. When you hear such things, you figure out that, you know, what is the value that you sort of added. So, to answer to your question, Abhijeet, is that in gig work, if you actually start working with even the lower skilled tasks that you have with you in your locality, you can start making respectable amounts of income. And just to, but to answer your specific question, which tasks are the highest paid? I would say almost all the tasks are equally high paid Abhijeet because I've seen people who have made more money by completing more tasks, you know, on a lower skilled task as well. So, that is how we look at the work on our platform. When you look at, you know, you talked about women who want to get back to the workforce as one option. Talk to me about women gig workers, you know, what do they look for? What is it that provides, you know, what is the percentage of jobs that are now you've got that? Yeah. So, talk to me about that. So, yeah, I think about three years back, the amount of gig workers who used to work with us were in sub 5% range. So, out of all the gig workers who used to work with us, sub, you know, less than about 3 or odd percent were, you know, those with the jobs which are picked up by women gig workers. At this point in time, about close to 37% of the jobs are taken up by women gig workers on our platform. And this has primarily happened because we've sort of understood what is it that they're looking for. See, Abhijit, we know that women have a lot of unpaid responsibilities back at their homes. So, flexibility in timing is something which they value the most. So, if you give them the flexibility of, you know, of working, when is it that they want to work and, you know, leverage the skills which they already have, that is where they work the most. For example, we have tasks of business development where in, you know, we get tasks of getting, you know, let's say a new product is there and, you know, you want a lot of people to know about your new product and start using it. One of the routes that we have right now is to, you know, market that product on an Instagram, on a YouTube and so on and so forth. What we do is, we get, we leverage the community of the gig workers and women come, you know, pick up, they pick up this task at enormous numbers. So, they come in and they leverage their network and they get a lot of people to constantly keep using their product. So, the key to get more and more women gig workers was to identify the tasks and, you know, market those tasks to them and tell them that, okay, this is something which can easily fit into your schedule. You can pick it up along with all of your other responsibilities. You can start devoting, you know, a couple of hours in a week do not want to work entirely in a day. That's also fine. And, you know, that is how we got a lot of women to start working with us. Also, Abhijit, you might have read and you might be, you know, completely aware that there is a new social security code which is coming in. You know, it would be most likely implemented next year. Now, that social security code is going to dictate clear routes for a gig worker to avail benefits like an insurance and a pvm. So, gig workers at this point in time is not a legal term primarily. It's a term which, you know, you and I have coined in a way. Right? And there's no legal terms in labour laws of India which says it's caused a gig worker as an entity and gig workers are not liable to get, you know, a lot of these benefits at this point in time. The moment this gets implemented, it's going to encourage a lot of gig workers to come in and especially a lot of women gig workers to come in because traditionally we see we associate a lot of social security to a job. You know, about 20 years back, a government job used to be one of the most sought after jobs right now also. It is the most sought after job because, you know, you get a lot of respect around it. You get a lot of non-military benefits along with it. That is something which is going to change and my sense is that a lot of women are going to come up and pick up some of the big jobs the moment this code gets live as well. So when you think about, you know, so when you're looking at these jobs in the new social security code, you know, it seems to me that there is going to be, you know, hope for, you know, more security even for the gig workers or freelancers and all that. And what I heard you say multiple times is the fact that it's not just blue collar jobs but also fairly high end, you know, white collar jobs. You talked about three, four of them that I picked up, you know, you talked about data scientists, content moderation, content HR. What are some of the other white collar jobs that you see people doing? I mean, what kind of jobs would you talk about? So we work with one of the largest, you know, largest enterprise in the BFSI and IT sector in India. And we have gig workers who are Java developers. We have gig workers who are Python developers. We are gig workers who are adept in data science. We have gig workers who are very good in UI and UX who are very good in HR as well. So across all of these streams of, you know, people who have had good amount of years of experience with them more than five years of experience, sometimes more than 20 years of experience with them, they become experts in the model of how we can export. These are, you know, this army of gig workers is basically an expert for us and we get these experts to work directly with the enterprises, solve a very poor problem that they have. Either it is a new platform that they are building or, you know, they want to test the new platform that they have built or there's a lot of data and there are a lot of dashboards that they want to create for their customers to look at or, you know, they want to run their recruitment and but, you know, they want to have 100 odd recruiters spread across the country in various regions of India speaking various regional languages to recruit, you know, people for them on the ground. All of it is something which we right now, you know, are fulfilling in terms of white college jobs, primarily. So, you know, when you think about the Indian economy, when it comes to the job landscape, if I were to think about, you know, I look at three broad chunks. One, I think is, you know, most of the times when you open the newspapers or what people go to business school to study and all of the kind of jobs that they take, that's really actually a very small percentage of formal, you know, jobs, full-time jobs that you think about. There's a range of informal jobs. Yeah, so that's another stream. And then you have, you know, the freelancer gig worker jobs ranging from, you know, blue collar jobs to, you know, white collar jobs and very high end expert jobs. Yeah. What do people look for? What motivates the people? I can understand that you talked about a couple of scenarios that they can supplement their income. Or as a student, you can make a little extra money. Or somebody is out of a job or they want to come back to the job. What motivates them? You know, somebody is, and you made a very interesting point right in the beginning, which is that most organizations are, you know, they are tuned to, they know how to manage full-time employees. You know, there's an employee engagement program and that, you know, incentives and this, that and the other. But do you think to survive and thrive as a gig worker, you need a completely different mindset? And if so, what is that and what have you learned about the psychology of a gig worker? Yeah, perfect. See, if I look at the job landscape in India to start from the very first point which you've made, you can look at it in three major sections. You know, the workers who are a part of formal labor, workers who are a part of informal labor and those, thirdly, who do not even get labeled as labor right now in the first place. So out of the population of about 1.3 billion people, we have about close to over 700 million people in the working age population, I believe. And out of that, about 400 million people in India are classified as labor. Now, you know, that out of this, 84% of the labor sits in informal sector, 16% sits in the formal sector and the unemployment rate that gets calculated and published, you know, is out of this labor workforce in India. And labor, we usually define as people who are currently unemployed or are looking out for work and can be engaged in employment in exchange of cash or in exchange of time. So apart from the labor, there are over 100 million people who are currently in colleges and universities who are going to graduate tomorrow and probably wouldn't find a lot of opportunities to work. There are over 100 million more people whom we call as disheartened youth who have stopped looking out for work at this point in time right now. They come, they factor in as, you know, working age population of India but do not get classified as labor because they have just stopped looking out for work and all of these people do not even factor in the calculations of unemployment and all of that that we look at. And, you know, needless to say, we all understand that there's a large gap in the job market which has gotten worsened by COVID where in people have migrated to a lot of tier to certificate accounts and of course find a lack of opportunities there or find themselves engaged in jobs without any formal contracts, without any guarantee of incomes, without any guarantee that the money is going to hit my bank account or not. Now, if I look at the entire landscape, if I look at what is it that is plaguing the, you know, India's employment gap, I look at two major challenges from the point of view of a gig worker, from the point of view of a job seeker, Abhijeet. First is finding jobs which match my skills, my interests and my constraints as a job seeker. See, finding a job is like a chemical reaction wherein, you know, multiple compounds have to come together in right amounts to get an outcome which is favorable. Now, there can be multiple chemical reactions with multiple compounds to achieve the same output at the end of the day. You know, now finding these compounds is like a true engineer, IIT, you know, chemical reaction. Yeah, I wish I had gotten still more marks in chemistry early on, but yeah, you're correct. See, finding these compounds, at least you got some marks, you are looking for improvement. I got no marks in chemistry. So let's not even go there. Sorry, let's get started. Yeah, so just one clarification. When you say informal economy, what are informal jobs? Let's just get that definition. So formal is those who are employed, let's say in a full-time job in a company, formal jobs. What is an informal job? So informal job is basically a job where you do not have any formal contract defining the terms of your employment, as simple as that. So it does not matter whether you're working, you're a temporary worker or a full-time worker, you're probably working with an unregistered company and you do not have a formal legal contract defining the terms of your employment, whether it's a part-time employment or a full-time employment. And 84% of India's jobs are in informal sector right now. Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, perfect. Yes, please continue with your previous. Yeah, so I think we were in the world of chemistry. So basically our job, the challenge which we have to solve is to find those compounds in the practical reaction which work for me as the job seeker. I get paid fairly, the job is aligned to my skill sets is in my own city and is aligned with the number of hours that I can spend. That is the first challenge. The second challenge is for me to become capable enough to fulfill the requirements of the jobs. Now lack of skills is a large demon which we are fighting at this point in time. About close to five years back when we had started Awakener, we thought that the only thing that we have to do is probably get the right people, map them to the right set of tasks and the tasks would get done. Within a month, we realized that lack of skills and experiential learning is a large problem statement and we have invested a lot just to make sure that we first re-skill and then up-skill those who come on our platform then absorb them in a task which maps with their which maps with their skill sets and then guide them along the completion of the task as well. A lot of companies are trying to solve either of the two problem statements the discovery of jobs and making you capable enough for the job. At Awakener, we are trying to solve both problem statements in through the platform that we have created where in the gig workers come they get trained, they get job ready and then learn on the go in their jobs as well. That is basically how I look at the job market here and to solve all of this we have come up with gig economy as a solution. Workers in the formal sector can augment their incomes and also their skills while continuing to work where they are working along with the economy. Gig economy is also the way where the workers in informal sector move to gig work with formal contracts wherein they get assurance about the money that they are going to get at the end of the month or at the end of the task where they know that this is the timeline in which I am going to get paid. They also get some of the non-monetary benefits like an insurance with a mature gig work platform like art and they also get a roadmap to upskill themselves and get capable of executing higher skill tasks as they move ahead. Now for the people, the third section which we talked about which is the people part of labor right now. They are either studying in colleges they would enter the job market soon and they do not know the major problem with this population is that they are not sure what is it that they would like to do where it is that they would fit in best and where would they get generate the highest income and in addition to that there is a large gap between what gets taught in college and what gets used on the crowd so they are clearly not job ready as well. Now gig economy comes with a clear path for them wherein they can start picking up tasks which interest them see that if it is something which they like to do or not and it is also not like an apprenticeship wherein you are not going to get paid of what you do, you would not do anything for free to get paid for single ounce of work that you put in and you figure out a path that you want to take going ahead. So what I am trying to say to summarize here is that in this job space the clear path to generate next 100 million jobs is gig economy and that is the best go to solution for India to create the next 100 million jobs in the country. Now to come on to the next question which you had asked Abhijit what is a typical gig worker how does a typical gig worker thing how are they different from the traditional jobs which are there what is the psychology of the gig worker which is the title of our position today as well. See in the current market in the current scenario let's try and define a gig worker Abhijit. So as we have said it's a person who has a couple of hours in a week to spend gig workers today at this point in time in market are typically younger over 50% of them are in the age group of less than 30 years of age in terms of education 30% of them are graduates and rest are non-graduate majority of them not going beyond 10 standard as well. More than 50% of them Abhijit pick up jobs to augment their current household incomes either it's their EMI that they have to pay or they want to save a little more for their future as well and that is the primary reason which drives them to pick a gig job. Now if you look at a gig worker who is engaged in a non-gig job those guys they typically seek stability they typically seek respect and the brand they are working with and a lot of non-monetary benefits which come along with the job. On the other hand if you look at a gig worker the gig worker seeks very simple things at this point in time his aspirations are not of a large brand but his aspirations are of a short payment are of flexible timings are on getting paid on time on the day that I was told to get paid I should get paid at that particular time slot itself and you know we see that only 14% of the gig workers who work with us only 14% of them site non-monetary benefits for picking up a job so they do not even have an expectation of that because traditionally gig jobs do not give you a lot of non-monetary benefits like an insurance like a PF so they sort of feel that I won't get this I am not going to get this in a gig job but I think that is something which could get changed with the social security put along with that some of the platforms like who have the capital with them who have become a bit mature we now have started to roll out insurance which gig workers can pick up themselves even without the government doesn't mandate us to do something like that so that is typically the landscape of a gig worker Abhijeet I hope I was able to give you some color on how a gig worker thinks at this point yeah you know I want to ask a different how long have you guys been doing this by the way by how old is Abhijeet now we started in 2016 cartoon on yeah I saw a sketch kind of a thing on twitter and I so that was to celebrate your five years we we just celebrated the 50th anniversary of Abhijeet on July 6 so Goodpreet Praveen and I we are the three co-founders we had incorporated the company on 6th of July 2016 that is when it all started it's been about close to five years we have become India's largest enterprise focused gig work platform in India at this point but you know I feel that we have only scratched the surface Abhijeet we are on course to touch more than 100 million lives and I think we have a long way to go and more power to you to do that I want to also look at you know you mentioned your co-founders when did you meet them let me guess in the hostel sharing a pizza they were roommates yes no yeah typically I think I met Goodpreet in college I have known Goodpreet for about close to 11 years now I have known Praveen for about close to 11 years as well and so I graduated from an IIT a couple of years back Goodpreet and I we were batch mates out of college I am a mechanical engineer and Goodpreet is a company science engineer our journeys out of college were very different because you know mechanical engineers do not land up a very good job even after they go to an IIT but Goodpreet's life was a little different he was a company science engineer and you know got a very good opportunity early on for me you know I had to struggle a bit in the initial couple of years of my you know career I got a job with a large you know large MNC as a GT after just graduating from the college and honestly I was quite arrogant at that point in time and I told my parents after coming back from college that okay I am going to get you know five new offers within a month and I think I had given about nine to ten odd interviews I got rejected one of them and that's when I sort of realized that okay you know I probably do not know anything at this point in time I do not know how things happen and a lot of the years of college just went by in doing non in doing a lot of non learning activities which you know a lot of people engage in and I figured that I would have to work on myself primarily to do something or the other in life I started doing a lot of courses in operations finance and HR my entire idea was that I want to gain knowledge which is at power and MBA without actually doing an MBA at that point in time and then I moved into management consulting and I took a job in American consulting startup based out of Delhi and we used to sit at clients ends build strategies implement them and then we used to get paid couple of IT daily folks who had launched a company and I figured that okay these are very smart guys I would get to learn most out of them that was my only that was my only incentive which I you know I was seeking at that point in time and I rose to one down the founder in about six months or so started doing a lot of things for them and generally good amount of revenue for the company and that's when I got the idea of in my head wherein I wanted to start a beginner but I was not able to build a team in Delhi majority of my network out of college or the people whom I used to hang out with they are either shifted to the US to do something or the other or I had gone to a Bangalore to Bombay and you know I was not able to build a team so I came to Bangalore in February 2016 and that's when I decided that okay I left I sold off all of my assets in Delhi I decided that okay I'll take all of my savings and try and run this and I lined up in Bangalore and Goodpreet was there in Bangalore he was working with Arista Networks at that point in time for about a couple of years and I re-met with Goodpreet at his house you know after I think a couple of years of graduating from college Goodpreet and I we were both batch mates in college and we also became a part of we also had started a rock band in college at once upon a time I used to have hair which used to drop till my shoulders as well which is and so that's something which we completely believed that the kind of music which we used to make was quite bad although so I think Goodpreet and I we took a very good decision of stopping what we guys were doing at that point in time a very good decision for us and a very good decision for those who had to go through the misery of listening to us at that point in time and we both decided to go separate ways but at some way I knew that Goodpreet and I both knew that we've had a share of fights back in college and we've had our own share of you know silly fights or whatever difference of opinions in college and we both can you know manage to work with each other quite well so I met with Goodpreet at that point in time Goodpreet was at the crossroad of his career he had just taken a GMAT he had gotten a Humongous score there he had gotten a 717 GMAT and I had lined it up at his house and he was asking me should I go to Harvard should I go to Kellogg's and my pitch to him was that you leave your score, you leave your job and let's start our business together so I think it took him about a month to get entirely convinced of what is it that I had in my mind that I wanted to do and he left his job, he left his score MBA hasn't happened for him till now hopefully wouldn't happen in the future as well and we both came together and we started a week at that point in time and I think in the initial couple of days we did a lot of proof of concepts Goodpreet got the first customer I got the second customer and we started doing a lot of proof of concepts we realized that the enterprise customers are happy, the gig workers are happy we had a decent margin in the game and we figured that this can be a really large business what we also realized at that point of time was that this cannot scale up without technology at all and that is when we figured that we need to get somebody who comes and runs our technology and builds the product that's when we got Praveen Praveen graduated a few years ahead of us from college he is one of our seniors from the same college he is a science engineer after graduating we worked with Flipkart for a couple of years in 2010 to 2014 Flipkart was one of the sort after companies to work as a developer Praveen got an opportunity to work with them then he started his own company based out of Bombay that raised about a crore or so but it didn't go that well and then he started working with Ola in their team and that's when we got Praveen a different set of challenges with Praveen Praveen comes from a very humble background with one of the sole bread owners in the family and he was sitting at a humongous paycheck I'm not going to name what is it that he was making but it was humongous at that point in time and my pitch again to Praveen was that you leave your salary I do not have any fund wherein we can draw salaries but this is what we are looking to do it took him about a month he left what he was doing he disturbed the company on 6th of July and that's how everything started there on absolute so if I were to summarize the journey of the three of you it would be you know somebody got a humongous GMAT score of 770 in one month decides not to go to any of the places to do a MBA somebody has a humongous salary in one month you convince that person not to continue in that job and what do you think you gave up the most what did you give up in a month's time and what was your equivalent yeah so I think if you look at my so I have given up a lot of things so I think I have been somebody I have been very cognizant of what is the amount of money that I have been spending throughout my life I throughout college I have kept a ledger of amount of money which I spent in one given month I also figured out opportunities to make money I stopped asking money from my parents back in college itself and the moment I started my business at that point in time I just couldn't get a hold of how the money was just running out of the bank account and everything was running through our savings at that point and all of a sudden I find myself having run out of all of the money in the starting months of launching the business and at that point in time did not have a place to stay I was staying with a friend in Bangalore and the rent and everything is exorbitant in Bangalore and I did not have any place to pay the I did not have any money left to pay the rent to one of that friend so I sort of didn't have anywhere to live I convinced a couple of my friends to allow me to stay at their place for about 2 months or so rent free and then I had a deal I am going to pay you after 2 months just allow me to stay for 2 months and again I did not have an option to go to my parents or to anyone to ask for money that I have not done for a lot of years in my life and at that point in time we started doing a couple of proof of concepts and we started making some amount of money I paid those guys and I moved at that point in time I never lived in a PG in my life honestly and in a triple sharing sort of a room which that sort of became our first office for Avigna so Goodpreet after his ask before he had left his job he used to come to that room along with 2-3 more other guys in that room who have no way related to Avigna he used to work on Avigna so I have given up a lot of comfort I have given up a career path in which probably I could have get a lot more money in the early initial years of my life and in I think about close to 1.5 years or so of Avigna journey we did not take up any money out from the business as well so I think that is what every entrepreneur has to go through I am not an alien to say all of this but yes that is something which we have given up we have had instances where we did not have money to pay out the salaries I remember in 2017 our seed round had not happened at that point in time and only an angel round had happened a year back we had raised very little capital at that point and there was a month in which we were running out of salaries and Goodpreet Praveen and I we sort of pulled in money from house ever routes and we put in money in the company and we ensured that the salary does not get delayed at that point in time the monthly payroll was sitting at 5 lakh rupees 2 years down the line we lined it up in a situation where it was a similar sort of a scenario there was some delay in our series A conversations I think we had gotten the entire process delayed by a month or so and there was a juncture where we had run out of cash to pay the salaries of the employees and at that point in time the payroll was sitting at somewhere up to 50 lakhs so you realize for 3 people to pull in 5 lakh rupees in a month is fairly an easier sort of a job to do and we figured that probably we would not be able to sustain at that point in time but within a week we got that and we got the salaries going and then we thought that this is the largest problem that probably can come to us and then in April 2020 the world got shook by COVID at that point in time and that was a new set of problem statements that we have had so I think it's not one thing which I think either of us have given up it is basically a lot of comfort it is basically a lot of peaceful nights of sleep every single day which an entrepreneur has to give up and I think we are no alien to that so there is a question from one of our viewers they say that what about freelancers like art and music teachers can they also do work on your platform not right now certainly in the future so we are looking see we built a platform Abhijith and the person has asked the question we built a platform in which for us to add a new kind of work it just takes some amount of configuration on the platform and we are good to make that particular line of business life in a couple of hours we don't have to write any code to make a new line of work life on our platform so that's the beauty of the platform and we have leveraged it to launch a lot of new service lines a lot of new lines of business in the past financial year itself in the next two years a lot of new service lines in one service time can be around learning of arts it can be various kind of art forms it can be music it can be for example I used to do theatre at one point in my life in my schooling days so it can be theatre it can be painting it can be anything which we can launch but yes that is something we do not do at this point in time but certainly you have to stay tuned for it and we should come back with such a value proposition in the future certainly I just want to we are coming up to the end of the hour and it's time to say goodbye but I just want to say thank you very very much for coming over to the platform sharing your team and good luck I hope you always live up to the name and never have any obstacles that's my wish for you and may those 100 billion jobs happen not just in theatre but should become a source of employment for all the people who are looking to make a better future for themselves that's my wish for you thank you very much