 Okay, so my name is Hitesh Oberoi, I run a company called InfoEdge. Maybe you are not familiar with InfoEdge, but perhaps you are more familiar with Nokri.com, 99acres.com, JeevanSathi.com. These are some of our brands. And of course, we've been around for over 25 years as a company. And over the last few years, we've also invested in a ton of startups. So we have over investments and over 65 startups as we speak today. Some of the better known ones are Zomato and Policy Bazaar. We were the first investors in Zomato, we were the first investors in Policy Bazaar back in 2008. So that's to just give you a sense of the company. So Nokri is 25 years old. Nokri started life in 1997. At a time when there was hardly any venture capital available in the country. At a time when there were hardly any internet users in the country. Of course today Nokri generates a bit of cash, a bit of 300 crores a quarter on the average. So that's how big Nokri has become over the years. It's one of India's very few, but very very profitable internet. Now no longer a startup, but internet company. And of course our second largest business is 99acres. Again doing very well a leader in the real estate space. Getting close to break even. And like I said we've also been investing in startups. So the topic of today is how are CEOs driving growth in this uncertain sort of global environment. Things have changed a lot over the last few years. The world is no longer what it used to be. But before I get into all this I just want to get a sense of the audience there. How many people here work for companies? Work for companies, mid-sized companies or large companies. How do people run their own startups? So this is primarily a startup audience, but people who are already entrepreneurs. The focus of my talk is going to be mostly on how to get innovation going in a startup. Because once you establish yourself, once you've survived as a startup, how do you grow? How do you handle, how do you manage challenges of scale? How do you get innovation going more importantly than anything else inside a company? Because in the beginning startups are all about founders. Startups are all about entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur makes things happen. He's the one who leads from the front. He gets everyone together. He raises capital. He goes and sells. He hires people. He builds a product along with maybe his co-founders. But after a while you need the system to work. You need the setup to work if you have to grow because otherwise you can very quickly get stuck. Sometimes you get stuck at the 1 crore mark, sometimes you get stuck at the 10 crore mark, but you can get stuck as a company. So how do you get growth going inside a large setup is going to be the focus of my talk. But before that, just a few slides on where we are today. Because this is supposed to be a CEO talk and not just a startup talk. Let me just tell you a little bit about what we are seeing from our vantage point and from where we are today. The world has changed dramatically in the last few years. It started in 2008 with the global financial crisis. Maybe some of you had not set up companies by then, but we saw a knockery for a long time grew like crazy and there was a point in time when we were doubling revenue every year and we were very profitable and suddenly we were hit by the global financial crisis in 2008. Overnight we went from growing at 40-50% per annum to declining at 25% per annum. So from 50% growth we went to minus 25% for a few quarters. So that was the first time we saw real recession in India. Of course, things were covered within a few quarters and we were back on track. But that was our first brush with what a real recession is like. Fast forward 10 years, 12 years, we got COVID in 2019-2020. And again, for a couple of quarters, but in fact for three quarters there was a point in time when 99 acres business was down 70%. So from growing at 20% per annum or 25, it was minus 70 for a couple of quarters. And the knockery business was minus 50. So for two quarters we saw minus 50% growth in knockery. So that's how bad things were in 2020. Fast forward one year, 2021 and the knockery business was growing like fire. It was growing like it had never grown before. It was growing like a start-up. So suddenly from minus 50, we were back to 80-100% growth in knockery on a high base. So that's the point I'm trying to make is the markets have been very, very choppy. The economy has been very, very choppy. The world has become a very uncertain, a very unpredictable place as we speak again. Today as we speak, again the IT services sector has slowed down. The start-up world is going through its own sort of pangs. There was crazy funding available for start-up till two years ago. Companies were raising 100 million, 200 million, 500 million dollars. Today there's a funding winter. So the world has become very unpredictable. It's become very uncertain. Governments also globally are thinking very differently from how they were thinking a few years ago. Take the US for example. The US wants to build a manufacturing industry, right? So they're investing in manufacturing, unheard of, right, till some time back. Because they want to create jobs for people who've got left behind by globalization. Climate change. I mean, we are seeing what climate change is doing everywhere, right? The kind of rains we saw in Delhi. I mean, you are seeing such climate incidents everywhere in the world. And especially in the developed world, there is a race to sort of, you know, adopt greener technologies and as quickly as possible. This is going to have a huge impact on the energy sector and many other industries going forward. And governments also want to enhance national security after the war in Europe and given what's happening with China. And the China plus one thing you must be hearing about. Every company, every country wants to sort of protect or develop, you know, core sort of industries which are important for national security, right? And so you're seeing a lot of that stuff happening in every country as well. And inflation, you know, is new unknown, right? Because, you know, we grew up, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, you know, and at that time inflation in India should be 10, 12, 14% per annum. Fast forward 2000s, 2010s, we got used to 6, 7% inflation. The developed world for as long as I can remember, America never saw more than 1 or 2% inflation, 2% maybe 3% at max. Today, many parts of the developed world are seeing 7%, 8%, 10% inflation, 5% inflation, 6% inflation as a result of which interest rates have gone up because that's how you bring demand down. As a result of which, suddenly those markets have become very attractive for investment, right? And which is why you saw a lot of money flowing out of developing markets into developed markets because suddenly if you can get 5% or 6% on a 10-year bond, why do you want to take equity market risk? Which is what led to the stock market correction in many parts of the world. So the world is a changed place and business has never been as uncertain and as unpredictable as it has become recently. Now, in my view, there's one other big unknown and that is technology change and adoption, right? And that's also actual rating. 25 years ago, you got the internet or 30 years ago, you got the internet and then Google and you got search and some of these companies became very big. Then you got the social networking gang, LinkedIn, Facebook, all these companies became very big. Then you saw a huge migration towards smartphones as smartphone technology became ubiquitous and now everybody has a smartphone and you got 4G and then now you have 5G. And now you have AI and machine learning and chat GPT to grapple with. Again, so every few years you see something or the other coming up and it sets the trend. And companies are not able to adapt to the changing technology world, get left behind. So it's a very important lesson for all of us to understand that if you're not able to use new technology, if you're not able to leverage new technology in your business, in your way of working, over time you'll get left behind and that's the focus of my presentation and I'll talk about it a little more. And people ask us all the time, you have knockeries been a leader for 25 years, how have you guys done it? There's so much money just come in, so many startups, et cetera, et cetera, but knockeries continues to have 60, 70%, 80% share of the market. So how have you guys done it? And the answer to that is we've been constantly investing in technology, we've been constantly investing in creating a culture which motivates people to stay with us and give their best and we've been constantly investing in getting the right talent into our company. So in my view, I'm cultivating an innovation mindset at the top of an organization. So any of people here who are running startups or who work for large companies or who work for mid-sized companies, innovation will mean different things to different people and to different companies, but it's very important that we all cultivate an innovation mindset if we have to thrive, I mean forget thrive, we have to even survive in the world going forward. And so what does it mean and why is it important and how do you cultivate that mindset? I'll talk about that for the next 10, 15 minutes. I touched upon this briefly. Today, if you include Tesla and maybe NVIDIA, seven or eight of the top ten companies in the world are tech companies, right? Google, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, I mean. And they are now trillions of, the market cap is in trillions of dollars. So maybe the top ten companies between them are worth ten trillion dollars. There was not a single trillion dollar company around till a few years ago. So the world is not ruled by the oil companies, it is not ruled by the pharma companies, it's not ruled by the consumer companies, it's not being ruled by banks and financial services companies anymore, it's all tech, right, at the top, right? That's how important tech has become over the last few years. And the pace of change is only accelerating, right? So the biggest hotel company today is perhaps Airbnb, it's not a regular hotel company, right? The biggest media company is Google or maybe YouTube, which is owned by Google. The biggest entertainment company is not a TV company, it's Netflix, right? The biggest news company in the world today is perhaps Twitter. All of us get our news from Twitter now, right? The biggest gaming company is Microsoft, right? So the biggest car company, rental company is Uber, right? So the biggest retailer is no longer Walmart, it's Amazon, right? So look everywhere, every industry, every sector is being disrupted by a technology-first company, by a company which has been constantly innovating, which has been adopting the latest technology and so on. Biggest music company is Spotify, biggest car company now is Tesla. Tesla is bigger than the next five car companies put together, right? And does not even exist in India. So that's how things have changed. The stock market, the biggest sort of mutual funds are not run by human beings, they're run by machines. Quantitative trading, everywhere in the world has become very, very large. So tech-driven, tech-first, data-first, digital-first businesses often combined with, you know, all these data-driven insights from AI and machine learning, et cetera, they over time develop economies of scale, they over time develop strong network effects and become bigger than everybody else. That is what we've seen over the last 20 years and that is what we're likely to play out for the next 10 or 20 years as well. Having said so, all is not lost for the non-tech companies. Companies which are non-tech but have been able to adapt to the changing world have been able to survive. And there are some good examples of that. The Economist, a publication which has been around for many years, they now have a beautiful app. They perhaps have more subscribers on their app than of that physical sort of magazine they published today. So they managed to survive and thrive in this rapidly changing world because they adopted technology. Closer home, I have been a big user of the ICIC Bank app for many years and they've done a wonderful job and they were at it early and they continue to invest behind their online offerings and if they do that, it will be hard to displace them. And now Walmart and Disney, these are two big companies that have been around forever and they are very, very aggressive. Walmart has acquired Flipkart in India. So a big American retailer, they are not setting up physical stores in India. They're not doing that. That's what they did in the US. They acquired Flipkart. Walmart labs in Bangalore employes thousands of engineers who work on all the digital stuff they do in the US. So there are countless examples of companies who have invested, cultivated innovation mindset and who have survived and thrived and at the same time there are many examples of companies who could not adapt and have disappeared from the scene. So Nokia, Blackberry, Sony, Kodak, Blockbuster, Barnes & Nobles, many newspapers and TV channels, many of these names, household names we grew up with in the 90s and 2000s, no longer exist. The other point I want to make is the answer to many of the problems facing the world today is actually technology. So if you want to solve for climate change and global warming, if you want to solve for hunger, cancer disease, if you want to solve for financial inclusion, if you want to solve for universal education at low cost, because education becomes so expensive over the years, if you want to solve the obesity problem, the health problem, the answer is technology. The answer to all these problems facing mankind today lies in new technologies and building new businesses and new business models to leverage these technologies, some of which already exist and some of which will become viable over the next few years. So many new technologies are on the horizon thanks to all the investments which have gone into start-ups and building new technologies and research over the years and you combine them with big ideas and old problems and you get innovative companies. And this is where the optionality lies for both start-ups and existing companies. And there are many implications. As a result of all this, software is eating the world. Today, 50% of the jobs on nokri.com are for techies, whether you like it or not. 50% of the jobs, white collar jobs in these countries are for people in tech or digital if you want to sort of expand. Interestingly, we are seeing a lot of jobs on the side for AI because one school of thought is that software ate the world and AI will eat software, right? So it's important to understand where the world is heading. And machines, people say, often people say, did away with the lead for manual labor and AI may do away with the lead for low and cognitive labor. So we need to be aware of what's happening and where the world is heading. Certain kinds of jobs will not exist going forward. There will be opportunities in a lot of new start-ups and industry and sort of companies for AI developers, machine learning developers, data modellers, and the likes, digital sort of, anything to do with digital. So this is where it's all headed. 50% of the jobs on nokri. At the peak, it was 62%. Even non-IT companies, you know, banks, financial services companies, accounting companies, they are hiring IT folks today, right? That's how fast things are changing on the ground. For India, this means a unique opportunity because, like I said, India can leapfrog. You know, India did not ever have land lines. We moved to mobile phones straight away. And in fact, we moved to smartphones now. And the government understands this, which is why the government is sort of investing or sort of keep talking about digital India, start-up India, make-in India, China plus one. These are the buzzwords today because that's where the opportunity is going forward. All these new green technologies and so on and so forth. And Asia, the last thing I want to make is Asia is fast becoming the center of gravity, right? You know, if you go to Dubai and Singapore today, they are the new hotspots in this part of the world. So there's a lot of action in Asia and in the US. The rest of the world, it's almost as the rest, and China, of course. So there's China, and then there's the rest of Asia, and then there's the US. And it's almost as if the rest of the world doesn't count anymore. Innovation also means a massive wealth creation opportunity. The Indian stock market today is 3.5 trillion. Fast forward 10, 15 years. You know, if India continues to grow at 5% per annum, we now have a high base, right? If we continue to grow at this rate for the next 10, 15 years, you know, the Indian stock market cap will be 10, 15 trillion dollars. So more wealth, maybe three times more wealth will be created in the next 10, 15 years than has been created in the last 75 years, if you think about it. So 3.5 goes to 10, 15 trillion. And that's what all the stocks are going to be worth. You know, you can imagine the wealth creation opportunity, right? And what this also means is that perhaps India will have a few hundred billionaires, and India will have tens of new startups which are going to get listed. We already saw a lot of companies getting listed last year. Zomato, PolicyBazaar, Naikap, ATM, and the likes. And there's a whole pipeline of companies getting ready to list. And once that happens, you know, and investors see the success of the Indian startup scene, more investment will follow. There'll be ups and downs. You know, there'll be, you know, all that will happen. That's part of the game. But this is the long-term trend. This is where it's all headed. So the question, therefore, is then, so why don't we see more innovation in companies? And many of you run startups here, and you will realize it's not easy to innovate. And why is it not easy to innovate? And what will it take to innovate is what I will spend the next, maybe three, four, five minutes on. And I will basically share some learning from our InfoEdge experience. It's not easy to innovate. And these slides are a little heavy, right? Because many things hold companies back, right? Often, companies don't believe in innovation. They've tried in the past and given up, and they say, we tried, it doesn't work. Right? It's risky. Innovation is risky. I mean, not all innovation is going to succeed. So a lot of ideas fail, you know? Companies often don't have the skills and talent to innovate. So like I said, once they are done with the founder, all talent stops at the founder. After that, it's very hard. So they don't have the skills and talent. They're always dependent on the founder to innovate. Founders can't think of all the ideas, right? So innovation therefore requires investments and resources. And also what happens, what I've seen over time, is that once companies become successful, they become complacent. Hey, man, we're done. Now we're set. Now we can take it easy, right? And before you know, for a few years, they take it easy and then suddenly they get a jolt. They get disrupted. So innovation is risky. Innovation is expensive. But not innovation. Not innovating is even riskier. It's even more expensive in the long run. And many companies are able to invest in what I call incremental innovation. They keep doing small things, but they shy away from doing big disruptive things because that's even harder. And I don't know how many of you are familiar with the concept of innovator's dilemma. Anybody here familiar with innovator's dilemma? As a concept? So innovator's dilemma basically is that innovation is expensive. Innovation takes time. And when you want to do something disruptive, often you end up destroying the business model you already have. So for that reason companies shy away. If the economist which wants to move customers away from physical to offline, they'll end up hurting their physical revenue. For a long time, therefore they shy away. They say, this may margin come over, it'll hurt my existing business, so why should I innovate? And that's a big mistake because somebody else will then come and take your cake away. So it's not as if today, car companies say, we're not going to build electric cars because electric cars are disruptive because you have to invest in a whole ecosystem to get electric cars going. Sooner or later, somebody's going to eat their cake. We're already seeing that. So disruptive innovation for reasons like innovator's dilemma is always harder. You think, my business will be affected. If you don't do it, someone else will do it. Often management, once companies get managers, they become corporatized and they hire professionals. They fail to incentivize them to innovate. They're often judged mostly on quarterly targets and annual target while innovation takes time. So you need to understand that if you don't create a system which encourages people to innovate, you will not see innovation. So this is some of the reasons why innovation is very hard in companies. And therefore, we realize that at InfoEdge, it's not as if we have solved the problem, but we realize that we are aware and that when you're aware, that's half the battle won. And we are trying very hard to sort of create a culture which, you know, and to do a few things which get innovation going inside InfoEd. Like I told you, we are also 25 years old as a company. So 25 years ago, I was 27 years old, 27 years old, now I'm 51 years old, right? I continue to be. But how do you get young people in? How do you create a culture which gets people to stay and to think long-term and to build new things? So it starts with, you know, hiring people with a can-do attitude, right? So when companies grow, you know, you need two kinds of people in my view. You need senior managers and that's what people acknowledge and understand. I need a sales head, I need a marketing head, I need a CTO, they understand all that. And they get busy hiring those people and to get these people in and to settle them down is very, very hard, as we all know. And often you go wrong. But at the same time, you need young talent. You need people who are curious, you need people who are dynamic, you need people with a can-do attitude, you need people who are more aspirational, you need people who get all the new stuff that's happening in the world today. And therefore you have to constantly induct new talent in the company at all levels. And you have to invest in up-skilling existing talent. You know, and some people, many people here are entrepreneurs and we all know that, you know, in the beginning there are people who play a very big role in getting the company to where it is today. But often some of these people are not able to keep pace with the changing sort of environment. They're not able to upgrade their skills. They sometimes get left behind. And it can be very, very hard for them if you don't invest in their up-skilling, right? And if you don't, and they can get upset about the fact that you're hiring new people and not up-skilling them internally, right? So we need to sort of balance both. And you need to promote good leaders inside the company. That's very simple, right? But anybody who shows leadership skills I think should be pushed up. So that's the first thing, you know, these are some of the things we believe in at InfoEdge and we've done successfully over the years. The other thing we believe is in running an open culture, right? It's very important. We understand, in fact, we know that not all the best ideas will come from people at the top. In future, we are not hierarchy-driven, right? We are ideas-driven. We are data-driven. If it makes sense, no matter who you are in the company, we are happy to support it, right? It doesn't have to be that the idea will come from the CEO only or from the CF only or from the CTO only. In fact, I tell them, boss, your job is to get the best ideas, right? Not produce all the best ideas. There's a big difference in getting the best ideas because ideas can come from anywhere. Ideas can come from competition. Ideas can come from an event like this. You check out some of these stalls. You may just sort of fire something in your brains. Ideas can come from new people you hire. Ideas can come from data which you analyze, right? So, it's important that you have a bottom-up culture as well in addition to a top-down culture. Every company has a top-down culture. It's important to create this bottom-up culture inside the organization. The third thing I have learned over the years and this I have learned especially in the last few years is it's very important to break down silos. What happens in a growing company and now you have started to growing and they're fighting the same battle and they want to solve a customer problem and it's about survival. But the moment you cross that hump, you know, departments start getting created. Now these are the people of sales, marketing, tech, finance. And these silos get created and then sooner or later communication stops between silos and people start operating in their own sort of freedoms. That's not important. That's not great for innovation. A customer doesn't care how you're set up internally. He wants his problem solved, right? So, it's important to innovate what we've learned is it's important to create diverse cross-functional teams, right? To solve complex problems. It's very difficult for one guy to get everything, but the moment you create a team and of course the team needs a good leader you find that you have a little marketing and then you get the full problem and then you're able to find a solution. If you operate in silos, if you don't involve functions, different functions in the innovation sort of team, it can get harder. You may end up solving the wrong problem or you may not find a solution to a problem. So, you need to get rid of bureaucracy, you need to get rid of silos, you need lean teams, not very big teams, but you need cross-functional teams often. You know, often you need a guy from Ops, a design guy, a tech guy, an Ops guy, a sales guy, and then you tell them listen, you fail together, you succeed together, right? So, you're in it to solve this problem. And to create this kind of setup inside a company is not easy but there are functions and there are bosses who run those functions. But if you want to innovate, it's important. And last but not and some more points, discipline. A disciplined approach to innovation is also important. Innovation has to be business first, not innovation for the sake of innovation, right? I don't think we've reached that point in India as yet where we can just have innovation for the sake of innovation. There's no place for free-loaders, people who buy their time or not interested who are not happy to collaborate, who don't think accountability. You know, they should not be in the innovation sort of setup of any company. And it's important to have frank conversations because it's important to solve the problem. Frank conversations cannot, discussions are important if you want to solve the problem. And then in general, if you want to promote a culture of innovation then you have tolerance for failure, right? You have to give people a safe space. If everyone is scared, or my project is failed, I will be fired, my promotion will stop, this will happen, that will happen, then nobody is going to take up the challenge. Nobody is going to raise their hand and say, I will innovate. Everybody will want to work in existing business in a business just doing well, where all the money comes from. Nobody will take a risk. You have to provide people with a safe space to innovate. And of course, when you get innovation, you should be able to reward innovation handsomely. Otherwise, why will people take the risk? I mean, disproportionate risk should result in disproportionate rewards. So if you want to promote a culture of innovation in a company, people are willing to raise their hand, take chances, take the risk, should be rewarded disproportionately, then people who are only willing to work in safer environments, right? And these are some of the things we do inside and some of the tools we use inside Infoesh to encourage innovation. You know, we have Friday sessions where people discuss what is the new stuff that they're doing inside the company. We have cross-functional boards, which we set up in areas where we want to innovate. We have, annually, we have a merit award ceremony. So we have a big function every year where we call lots of senior leaders and we reward people who are successful at innovation and at moving the needle forward during the year. You know, we... It's very important to be in touch with your customers if you want to innovate. So in some of our businesses, we organize market days, customer days where everybody goes to the market on those days to learn from customers because, like I said, ideas can come from anywhere. Some of our best ideas have come from customers. We also keep an eye on the start-up world to see what's happening in the start-up world. So I have a corporate development team which reports to me. Over the last few years, we've acquired a few start-ups. We've invested in many more. For our operating business, one is the financial investments and the other is the financial policies. Those are for financial reasons. But for our own businesses also, jobs, real estate, matrimony, over the last few years, we've acquired a dating company. We've acquired a recruitment software company. We've acquired IM jobs. We've acquired a bunch of such companies and we've invested in a few more. So understand what's happening in the world outside. Right? And like I said, we incentivize people with special rewards and special ESOPs when they do innovative work and raise their hand and say, I will build a new business. So today we have, you know, we are building a new blue-collar job board inside InfoEdge called Job Hai. Right? It's getting good traction. We've put together a team for the same and we're going to reward that team differently from other teams if they succeed because otherwise, why would somebody give up a job and say, I'll work in my job. Right? So these are some things we understand. And as a result, there are three areas. Talent, technology and culture. And as a result of this, our business has got transformed over the years. So today, you know, we are five and a half thousand people. We have about 1100, 1200 people working in what we call core product development, technology, data science, machine learning, UX, product management, these kind of roles. We've got a strong leadership layer now. We have more of course founders and promoters, but under them, we have another 40, 50, 60 people from some of the best institutes in the country who run our various businesses, who run our various functions. You know, earlier, we were mostly a tenure-based company. It's been five years, 10 years, 15 years. Now we are a two meritocracy. That's how we've transformed over the years. So you could be somebody with just two years in the company and you could be doing better than somebody who's spent 10 years in the company, by the way. So that happens often at InfoEdge. And like I said, we have now young people who run vengeance inside the company. So often people who raise hands are young people because they have aspirations, you know, they want to grow, they want to do something with their lives. And at the heart of all this is our core belief that listen, it's all about people. At the end of the day, we are not a very capital intensive business. We are not building hotels, we are not building flyovers and we don't do any capex. It's all about ideas, it's all about technology, it's all about creating a culture, the right culture. And for that you need the right people and you need them to keep their 110% at work. Right? And you want them to sort of think big and be around for a long time because the other thing you have to understand is that you cannot build anything if people come and go every two years. Right? But if you want to build something long lasting, if you want to build something for the long term, you have to have people who are around for these 10, 10 years, 15, 15 years in your company. So you have to create a culture which sort of, you know, incentivizes that. All the stuff you've done in technology. I will give a tell you a short story. Till 2005, in Naukri, we had a three people technology. Two, three people in technology. We had zero people in product development. We had zero people in UX design. We did not even understand how important it was, how powerful these things could be for us. We did not invest in them at all. Right? Over time, we learned and we built these teams. Right? So in the beginning, it was all about sales because all about survival. And at that time, there was not much venture capital funding also available. So we had to manage what we had. Total money raised to build Naukri.com seven crores. That's it. Right? Only one round of funding in 2000. A month after we got funded, we had to raise money ever after. We had to break even and manage whatever we had. And we put a lot of energy into sales and one or two products, which we were building at that time. And everything else took a backseat. But after a while, when we became profitable, we realized that it's important to do all this if you have to grow. Otherwise, it's very, very hard. Today, the Naukri business is about 2,000 crores. Just the Naukri business makes a 1,200 crore bidda. That's what we made last year. But it's managed to survive and scale and stay on top because we've constantly been investing in new areas. So we invested in search and scalability. We invested in mobile in a very big way. And for the last five years, people have started talking about AI now. We've been investing in AI for the past six, seven years now. Right? And now we are setting up a generating AI team as well. So we are doing mostly machine learning and deep learning and some of those algorithms still now. We have 66 people strong at InfoEdge. It's been built painstakingly over the last five, six years. So this is and this is therefore, you know, like I said this is a history. The transformation we went through on the technology side, on the people side and that led to the business also transforming itself over the years. So this is somebody asked me once how did you deal with the highs and lows at InfoEdge. So this is what came to my mind. So put it here. We've seen two big recessions, one small one. We've seen big competition from Google, Monster, LinkedIn, India. In the early days we had to deal with a lot of big companies in India who were very aggressive. And even now, but what has really worked is focus on the problem, focus on the customer, focus on people, focus on long term investors and focus on doing things right. And if you just if you don't get distracted and if you do all these things there will be ups and downs. In the end, because you will solve the problem right for the customer right, things work out. You get distracted we try solving the problem for the investor if you're trying to solve the problem for somebody else you're bound to fail. In the end, you have to make money from customers and you have to solve their problem if you solve their problem without getting distracted without losing focus everything else follows. But increasingly like I said to do this you need to invest in culture and technology. That is at the heart of all this, especially if you're a tech first company and it's not easy, it gets expensive every year, but you have to be at it. With that I'll stop if there are questions I'm happy to take. I don't know how much time we have yes, do we have time? Do we have one or two questions only? Okay, thank you. Hello sir, thank you so much for your valuable words. You wrote there have unreasonable goals. Have unreasonable goals? Yes, yes. Unreasonable goal. See when you're doing something new it's very easy what I've seen in our company also after a while what happens. When you're a small company you think you have to do 1 crore. But after you do 1 crore you can set a 1.5 crore target for yourself for next year or you can set a 1.2 crore target or you can say I want to be 10 crore in 2 years. I think 10 crore in 2 years is what you should be aiming for. If very quickly you fall into this trap of it should be realistic achievable also. Realistic achievable? But sometimes it's a mindset thing. People fall into this trap they become complacent. They say it will go on like this it will go on like this. But if you don't aim for something high how will you even get there? It forces you to think differently. I'm not saying it should be the target for your sales team. I'm not saying that they have incentive plans. But as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, as a founder you have to think big. And if you don't the danger is that you will get complacent you will become happy with 8-10% growth and sooner or later you will fall behind. Be not satisfied. One more thing sir If we teach our team so much so much then they leave us and go somewhere else. Correct. And if you don't teach them it is a big problem for us. I agree. An even bigger problem in my view is you didn't teach them and they stayed with you. No. Okay. So therefore you see I think what you have to do is we have to invest in them. In my view, people leave because There is a question behind this question that how to build a core team honest team. Correct. Correct. So this is very important especially in start-ups. There are 2-3 things in this. What I have seen in my 25 years is that in the beginning in the beginning you need people who are like-minded often you need people who know each other right because how will you know that they are like-minded otherwise So you see a lot of start-ups worldwide. They started by 2 friends in school or 2 people who knew each other or 3 people who got along well etc etc Even Infosys, they were all together in the same company and they left and started Infosys right. So you need people who are in it for the long run who you've known for a long time who you think often have complimentary skills. If your strength is ABC, their strength is XYZ and both are required for the company to succeed and who are willing to stick it out right. So often these are people who are known to you but sometimes you are not able to get such people right. So then you have to work extra hard to get them The other thing you have to keep in mind is that you need to incentivize them right So a lot of people companies in India shy away from sharing wealth right. So if you are an employee you should have an attractive plan If you are getting co-founders of equity to stay in the company for the long run So these things are very very important You have to get them right in the beginning itself otherwise it becomes very difficult Sorry, last question Good afternoon sir Hi, this is Ankit. I'm from Roche Healthcare I'm head of engineering So I'm handling a team of technical So I'm very much pissed off with some of the people who spread negativity in your different verticals and say about your team and defaming your team image or doing the office politics So how to deal with that kind of person The question is not so good. I couldn't understand the question I can't hear it clearly So my question is that like I'm handling a technical team Yeah, okay So I have 5 to 10 employees there I have a different vertical of marketing that is you can say the person is in the same position which I'm holding So every time the department is creating a negativity or they are doing the office politics so how can we handle that kind of things Office politics you said So every time they are defaming the image like technical team is doing nothing or that kind of image Look, politics goes everywhere I think it is very important in a small setup that there is company transparency that people are honest each other like I mentioned frank conversations and candid conversations because a lot of the stuff which you know when people start calling politics is a result of a lack of communication and a lack of transparency and people working on different objectives So their goals are not aligned So it is important to ensure that the goals are aligned and that people work towards a common goal If people have different goals they have different objectives and different policy politics So whoever is a leader has to ensure that everybody knows what they are working for what the big goal for the team is and what we have done in the cross-functional team I mentioned we have told everybody you succeed together you fill together You have not met the goal You have met the goal So that has worked for us Thanks I will be outside for a few minutes we can chat outside To felicitate Mr. Obroy let's have on the stage the editor-in-chief Entrepreneur India and APAC Miss Ritu Mariah That was a captivating keynote I must say where the world is evolving exponentially Your word sets perseverance for all of us A token of regard and immense respect on the behalf of India to you sir We have with us Mr. Hitesh Obroy, the co-promoter, MD and CEO InfoEdge India Limited