Episode 32: Miten Sampat- How to build and scale tech ventures?
About Miten Sampat:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is the incredible engineer, inventor, investor and operator Miten Sampat. He kicked off his career in Silicon Valley, then headed strategy for Times Internet, India’s largest digital products company with 600 million monthly users and is now building CRED, one of India’s fastest growing payments apps. He is also a graduate of Virginia Tech.
Listen on:
Spotify | Youtube | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | JioSaavn
In this conversation he talks about:
How his education at Virginia Tech shaped his thinking in analysing and operating new ventures.
His views about the Indian Internet Consumer and the impact of the internet in Tier-3 cities in India.
His experience building his first startup: What he learnt and why it failed?
His experience as Chief Strategy Officer at Times Internet which reaches 600M active users in India every month?
What has he learnt from investing in early-stage startups?
Key Take-Aways:
Underlying conditions will keep changing so capabilities will keep changing and therefore, and user behaviour keeps changing- This is the fundamental principle in building and scaling new ventures.
If there are many gatekeepers between you and your customer, the chances of mortality for your startup are very high.
If you move when there is broad-based consensus, then the magic is already sucked out. It's already been priced in. Therefore, you have to be right about something ahead of it being a general consensus.
Three ways to support the podcast:
#1 Share the episode with family and friends on social media with #OnePercentProj using the share button on the site.
#2 Take a few seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. This helps new folks find us organically. Rate
#3 Leave a review if you feel inclined. We read every single message and love feedback. Review
Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Pritish: How did your education at Virginia Tech help shape his thinking in analysing and operating new ventures?
Miten: That’s a great place to start, I was very lucky, the origin story is that my dad was an IIT and then he expected me to also make it to the IITs and obviously I tried, but I failed and then he was nice enough to let me go to the US pursue an education there during the undergrad, as well as grad school and when I got to the US, I had a very simple thought process, which is 1000s of students graduate out of this process, how do I stand out and I'm kind of making a new life in the US, or how am I going to stand out and so it was clear to me that I had to do something over and above and what is that over and above, I had seen and read about a lot of the great Indian tech founders who had made it to Silicon Valley that were not costless, or any other entire sort of group and the common pattern, I found that they were all a part of research groups, or research assistants are contributed something meaningfully when they were at college, for undergrad, grad, whatever and so it was clear to me that I wanted to go down that path and literally from the semester I got there, I would look around all the different in the computer science department, even outside the computer science department and the big thing I took away from that experience, and obviously was, the interesting part about University is that it's a very focused experience and I was in a small town far away from the big cities in the USA, there wasn't much to do in Blacksburg and that was I think, a blessing in disguise because I didn't go partying,
I think gained the most was for the really deep immersive process of research and American universities and especially the good ones have a very high bar for what is an authentic contribution to the field of science. So, when you're in a lab, your goal isn't to put out a tweet or write a little blog post, your goal is to put out authentic, unique new work and that process there step zero of that process is literature review and you'd really in what does that mean, you have to really, intellectually, honestly put out any work after having been aware of the state of the art and the greatest and latest and greatest thinking, as well as historical thinking on the subject and so that is a very immersive process that I learned fairly early and I think I was lucky because that basically stays with me even today, which is whenever you try to bring something new into the market, whenever you try to solve it, my first instinct always is, we can't be the first guy trying to solve but what's the best and the greatest minds done about this?
It's probably published somewhere, can we understand it before we start to expand the state of the art and so to me, that was a very foundational, and I spent years in labs and read lots of papers and published a lot of papers as well, too. In fact, that was also a very learning experience because when you publish something, you get peer review, and you get pushed back and you get asked questions and so you really have to do deep work, which isn't frivolous, and just quick and snappy and so to me, that was the world we live in today is very much the stuff I spoke about at the end, which is snappy, and quick and fast to judge. But having this foundation I think is very helpful. I think they'll today it lives with me because I spent disproportional amount of time reading dispersion around this proportionate amount of time, trying to understand the state of the art before I try to make progress on it. So, that's the big takeaway for me from there.
Pritish: When you were at university, and you did this research, and this got imbibe as a part of your personality, there was one objective and doing it well, and you had time around it. But when you do this for hyper growth startups, Time is not on your side. So, how have you been able to adapt? Or inculcate that practice in a fast-moving environment?
Miten: Also, great question. I think this goes back to that 10,000 hour of doing something that kind of makes you good, and then continue to keep you good. So, one is obviously having a very active sensor network of people, of reading materials, of things of understanding technology deeply, which I think is fundamentally important, and being able to connect the dots and I think there's a lot of time also being spent on trying to forecast what might happen with business models with technology, and also with companies and things of that nature. So, I think markets, innovation, and consumer behavior are not right and that's the thing, which I think most of us find hard to appreciate, which is underlying conditions keep changing. Therefore, capabilities keep changing, and therefore end user behavior, keep changing and so always keeping that in mind.
It's fundamental to being able to do anything new, or scale anything and now when you think about how do you implement that, which let's look at FinTech today, and why is FinTech happening? Now, why didn't it happen three years ago, four years ago, and why is this now the perfect moment? and if you look back and say look, Gio happened, it brought a lot of people on the internet demand happened and brought a lot of people due to payments after that UPI happened there for this and so now there's enough a groundswell which makes a certain sort of things possible and so having an insight on that developing a mental model or as I said, Markets products and consumer behavior, markets, innovation, intangible behavior, I think is important and so, before you go into any of these sectors, it's always important to get that context and if you don't have that context, then you're going to miss out and so for me, it's always about having a clear frame of where are we in that journey?
Pritish: How would you define the internet consumer market of India first through a lens of an engineer, and then potentially through a lens of a philosopher?
Miten: Interesting question. I think the internet consumer market in India is no different than internet consumer markets. In most geographies, there's always a cycle of what people do on the internet and then there's a maturity curve, or that they go with and the simple thought process there is all of us, whenever we came to the internet, for the first time by the web, one dot or two dot mobile, the first set of things we did were information, entertainment, a little bit of social, the next set of things we started to do were explore shopping, trying to trust other people with a little bit of financial transactions and now and then basically jobs and connecting with each other and that sort of starts with a bit of entertainment, then move to liberal professional stuff, and then ultimately gets to a way of living, which is now pretty much everything you do with internet enabled or internet connected and so that's the same curve.
I think we're going through in India as well, which is a certain 40, 50 million user base today is at the end of that curve, which is they rely on the internet for pretty much everything they do and then there's about three 400 million users who are somewhere on that continuum, where they started basic information, basic search, getting to know each other a little bit of social networking, a little bit of that stuff, and then slowly adding more and more things and so I think the way I see it is there's a bunch of people who are already very comfortable with the medium and there's a whole host of people that are slowly getting more and more comfortable and the opportunity, really, is to figure out what you're building for which segment and what how do you think about market share in that context?
So, in that sense, it's no different than others. But we are in that sort of adoption curve and that makes life very interesting to the second part of your question of answered it. As a philosopher, I think it's the same human behavior. In all markets, people want the same sort of things, they want to be more informed, they want to be more entertained, they want to get better jobs, have better sort of professional outcomes and these are the three things that will kind of and have access to things right. So, markets are becoming more and more fungible. So, I think these the same four things that that apply to American internet user or South American one, a Chinese won a European one and same for the Indian mansions, the same sort of things that we all ultimately.
Pritish: Do you think that internet has become a critical or a commodity for tier one tier two cities?
Miten: Internet is all internet enabled things or mobile internet enabled things and use cases are pretty much mainstream. Now, I think that if you take it away, life will feel really high friction, right and it literally what these things do is remove friction and that's why that's why adoption moves and I think that in some cases, the impact of the internet is far greater. In tier two, tier three tier four cities, and tier five tier 10 cities than it is on tier one cities, I'll give you a couple of simple examples. Let's say you want to buy Aldo shoes, right, and let's go back five years, you could only buy that in Bombay, or Delhi or Bangalore. Now, you could be sitting in Darbhanga, Bihar and go to Taraalex.com, or Myntra, or whatever.
So, the actual impact of that in places where traditional forms of infrastructure, retail entertainment, education, imagine the impact of education on internet enabled education on people in places, as an impact is actually much, much higher than it is here and so I don't think there is a lack of need, in fact, the need is greater in different markets and I feel like a lot of the growth a lot of the value creation will become a lot more broad based as a result of the internet. So, it won't matter that you had to be in a big city, you could be anywhere, and I think you're actually seeing this for a lot in the creator economy as well. Right early on. You had to be in Indur or Bandra to get into Bollywood or to do get access to certain sets of things. Now, you could be you know a bit far away as well and broadcast and reach anyone right? If you have good talent, of course you will ultimately move here and all that kind of stuff to become a part of the industry, but it could be discovered pretty much it's a great leveler, and I think it's a great enabler. I think in fact impact is much more for watch I say rural India than for urban India.
Pritish: You were a CTO of a Silicon Valley startup: Is building a business hard and what do you learn from it?
Miten: Building a business is incredibly hard as they say, nothing must go wrong and everything was good, ultimately, we'll build a successful business and so my experience at Viva was a massive learning experience on many different things. So, what we were trying to do and what we trying to build, actually, we build the technology successfully, was if you take a step back in 2006, and seven and eight, that's the time at which we were building Wi Fi was not everywhere, location awareness for the internet was not everywhere, because you didn't have smartphones. So, the thing we were building, how do you make the entire internet location aware and if you do that, the impact of that is massive, because analytics will get better. Personalization will get better, security will get better and every internet application could use it and the way we went about it is we invented something that sat in the middle of the network, which is the ISP and that's where the biggest challenges began and the biggest learning for me at that point was, which I continue to hold on, you need a massive gatekeeper to approve of you to get to your end customer, the chances of mortality are exponentially higher, because you don't control the channel directly between you and your customer and that's very hard and so our challenge was we needed isbs, to agree and to accept the business model that they would want some new revenue for us to be able to enable and embed our technology in the network and start to create the value on top.
So, that was one big learning. Second big learning for me was I think, but in particular, myself and few of my sort of peers and colleagues at Viva, we were stuck in this innovator’s dilemma situation, we had invented the hammer, and we were just looking for nails and so the technology that we invented was to enable location through the network by putting in some metadata in the middle of the network. But our ultimate goal was to show to showcase the power of location and to bring the power of location to the internet, there could have been other tactics we could have done, that would have kept us alive and given us a business model and viable revenue. While our breakthrough Big Bang innovation would have taken some time to come to the market and so we got too stuck in trying to just solve this problem that we just shut ourselves out from saying.
We can also we weren't, we were trying to improve the state of the world threefold, as opposed to trying to improve the state of the world 2030 40% and Simon, so we should have actually done that 20, 30, 40% in parallel with the, the 3, 4, 5-fold and that's the big mistake that we made. That company ultimately went through bankruptcy in the US. But what came out of it was a lot of IPS, I put in mentor in my profile. A lot of people don't know, but that's where majority of the patents that we that I and my colleagues that co-authored came and we get a lot of cool stuff. A lot of it is now used by telecom networks all over the world. Unfortunately, we don't get credit for it, it was a massive learning expense, I take that again with me, which is just to summaries again, which is if there are many gatekeepers between you and your customer, the chances of mortality for your startup are just exponentially.
Pritish: You had a standard reliance did you expect reliance or Gio to be what it is now and why is you unique compared to the other operators in the market?
Miten: So, good question experience there was a very short when I was in college back in 2005 so well before the Gio thought process it was actually called our comprehend by anil money and in there actually no, it was done by mutation money also at that point, and I was there actually after I finished my internship is when that transition happened so good experience I went there again to learn how telecom companies operate and how do you build stuff there and things and I was very lucky. I had two great mentors there who really enabled me well to the second part of your question. I think God basically rot a completely different mental model to why people connect to the internet and why people connect to mobile services in a globally first manner nobody in the world in the entire planet had thought about the idea of crashing and not charging for four minutes so you just it's like you completely go into an industry and change the metrics and suddenly like okay, people have been in weight class people are talking about food consumption and you come back and say, oh my god, it's not about food consumption.
It's about the air you breathe, whatever some something so radical that people are just stumped and is this even possible and I think that really enabled them to become what they are today and of course, the scale of capex that they did, even before they started. So, in some markets, especially in Telecom, it's clear now that the last mover may have a disproportionate advantage or a late mover may have disproportionate advantage, a lot of it has to do with technology cycles as well. But I think this is a phenomenal business hack, if I may call it that, I did not expect you to be successful, to be honest with you in the industry, you would often hear it's coming I used to, I have to admit that I was one of the people who was very skeptical about whether this will ever launch. But phenomenal execution, I think it's one of those companies that could an ecosystem that could ultimately become $100 billion ecosystem out of India. In terms of market cap, one of the first.
Pritish : Tell us about Times Internet and what does a corp dev team do?
Miten: I'll start with the first one and there we go. The second one. So, times internet is the internet division of The Times of India Manikandan group, the company actually was started in 1999 by 2010 and actually, the first property that they brought online was economic times. So, the Economic Times website, was the first property and I think it was a very interesting initial vision, which is that obviously, as I was saying that if you look at the evolution of consumption, and media would be one of the first things that would move online and so many teams started at the right time, I'd say, by the time I got there was like I joined the company in 2013, when a very young guy called concept certain. Advani was the CEO, when I joined again, a couple of years younger to me, as well. So, it's very interesting to be in a company with such a young person driving a large platform and it's quite an exciting time, and still is an exciting company. At that point in time, the internet in India was also pretty small, right?
There’re about 50, 60 million users mostly doing basic things and growth rates were interesting, but not like massive, and it was not attracting a lot of investment. So, very early internet days and our goal there was very simple, which is given the breadth of internet products that we have, whether that's news, entertainment, online, real estate, matrimony, all those types of things, music streaming, but just be relevant to every Indian internet user and the goal was, we should at least one if not multiple products used by every internet user in India, so literally 100% market penetration with at least one product and that's how we started and then the idea was that companies that have large distribution, have a disproportionate advantage to be able to create more platforms and more companies and more use cases and so that was really the high level objective, which is with the distribution muscle that you have, can you really create a leading platform for a whole bunch of new use cases, Ghana started much before Spotify, or YouTube Music even thought about India and same for same for many other use cases. and I think a company is obviously not very vocal about its scale, and its impact and stuff like that. But the promoter family, in general prefers to be a bit more laid back and understated about it.
But they're very successful. I'd say today, I think that if I had my numbers correct times internet reaches about 600 million monthly active users in India, it really puts it in a very small group of probably 10 internet companies globally. Yeah, I mean, talk about 600 million as a huge number in this one product that is used by any internet user in India, at least one product will be attention to that product and that gives the platform a massive ability to cross that and do a bunch of other things and what's also unique in that most internet companies end up having that one use case is that that is the core use case and that drives all the usage times it actually has multiple gems, you've got the UI which are very large. You've got cricbuzz, which is massive, you've got magic bricks, which is market leader, you've got MX Player, which is market leader, you've got gala, which is marketed as multiple market leading products from a single stable, it's a rarity and so my role there was, work closely with Satya and Gotham was the CEO now and all of the different sort of leads of the businesses to really architect and build out the blocks of what businesses do we enter what ones do we exit? Where do we invest? How do we allocate capital?
What are the things that will make us increase our chances of winning in a market was and then the thing that was that's again, very underappreciated about times Internet's achievements is that it competes with Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, all these massive companies, Netflix, Amazon, and compete with global giants, which have tremendous amount of capital and innovation and profits and to fighting with each of these things? Each of these companies is standing out in front of them. I think we achieved managed to do a lot of things that and I'm actually very bullish. I think when you as in many times internet gets valued as a as a collective asset, it will surprise many people on what the potential is. So yeah, phenomenal time, I think they will get to a billion users before many people anticipate that and to the second part of the question, what is the cop dev team do so the actually wrote a blog post about it, and I'll send it to you after this, the goal of the cognitive team is to live a little bit in the future, and then bring that future back to today and say.
What changes do we make in our operating strategy now whether we allocate more capital to certain internal things, we kill them, and then we acquire external things and a lot of this is not just about acquiring businesses for what they are. It's about acquiring businesses for what they could become and that was, I think, the biggest thing we did when we acquired Dine Out, nobody anticipated eating out with food with the table reservation and payments, your use case would matter. In India, we were like, oh, who needs bookings? Same thing for MX Player, when we went and acquired MX Player, people his is like an offline player what's happening and look, today, it's the biggest Ott and same thing for credit cards, it was a tiny business, and we saw it out of time and look, that's where the biggest rewards come, right. If you move when there is broad based consensus, then the magic is already sucked out. It's already been priced in and so you have to be right about something ahead of it being general consensus and that's where the real sort of big upside and big, amazing fun things happen.
Pritish: I would probably just take a step back, and you joined in 2013. So, what did you see in these businesses, then, that made you think that the MX Player, the cricbuzz, or any of the other assets that you acquired, would make sense and will grow? and obviously, there were certain things that didn't work out? So, what were the learnings from there?
Miten: Great question. I think the on the first part, I think we were very tuned in to the market’s evolution, and where it was, which is, it goes back to the first thing we spoke about, which is on the rural versus urban, and then that continuum, right? and to be very clear that what where is the smartphone cycle? How many people have it? What are the sets of things you want for the scale part of the business I'll make it very tangible, which is, there are certain types of business models which survive on frequency. So, there are high frequency low value transactions and then there are few low frequency high value transactions. So, real estate is a low frequency, very high value transaction, watching a video or reading a news article is a high frequency, very low value transaction and so you're building businesses on this to continue and then obviously, there's something in the middle and I think, for a lot of the high frequency use cases, I think we managed to do a reasonably good job of being relevant and building products, I think we didn't do a great job of building for the low frequency high value businesses.
So, real estate, obviously, magic bricks team has done a great job. But there's a bunch of others, right? There's matrimony there's jobs, there's travel these things, I don't think we did a good job, I think for the combination of not having the right team members to figure out how do you solve for those things, and also not having a starting point wedge into those, right? So, for example, for travel, we did try, we build a content destination with ultimate hope that if people come and try to find destinations with us, then we could potentially cross sell them into the transaction. So, we build a business called Happy trips, and we started writing it off. So, we'll create content, again, that failed to take off. Similarly, we thought a lot about as more mobile and payments and cards and all these things were getting linked, we should actually be in a transaction business and that that was a hard thing to crack, right? In a market where you've got a lot of your peers who started very much from a transaction first, a company that starts from an engagement first point of view, it's just again, one of those innovators dilemma things, which is you're generally going to go towards trying to solve a problem with a set of tactics, which are very good at in solving problem A and they may not necessarily apply to problem B and I'll give you an example.
We tried to we're very excited about the whole Jed wallet transactional commerce idea and so we acquired a company or took a meaningful stake in a company called haptic with the idea that if you have intelligent bot interacting with users, they could ultimately get into that kind of product space and we tried different things but I think our ideas didn't work and I think we got out executed by a bunch of similarly a few others that we thought a lot about couponing and discounts and if you think about it, Groupon was a big thing and people wanted to build sort of Groupon type companies in the market. So, we attempted that and didn't succeed to the, to the level to our ambition, the level of ambition, but yeah, lots of these learnings in both of them. I think you have to often be a lot more judicious about. Do you have the team do you have the insights and but again, people get very ambitious and that's what makes it fun?
Pritish: Absolutely. I completely agree to that. So, you brought up a very interesting point WeChat. Do you think anybody in the Indian market has been able to crack that business?
Miten: I think it goes back to the evolution of internet usage in each market. I think the fact that WeChat was very much there, at that sort of inflection point of China Internet, and they innovated uniquely the plugin all these other use cases. Again, it goes back, they had the frequency, right, there's one thing you were saying, which is, if you have frequency, you can build a bunch of things on top of that, and so they are the ultimate frequency, which so I'm excited to see what happens with WhatsApp, because WhatsApp is that internet scale product in India and as they add payments, all these other use cases could potentially, they could actually potentially build that I think outside of that the companies that have the ability to build something to that nature is the ones who have transaction frequency and you've seen a number of those, in fact, if we look at the BDM product, and if you look at the WeChat pay product, and the RDP protocol looked very similar today already you can do a whole bunch of sort of transaction things there and I think, of course, if you had the frequency of chat, then you would do a lot more, because that's the product you'd have a lot of people reach out to the internet, right? Because you do everything in that.
Pritish: Yeah. You're less known fact, times when it does own properties like Uber for India's expansion and a few others, when you look at the international companies coming through the times internet gateway, what their minds are different from businesses that have home grown to the same level.
Miten: So, the model, there was a very lightweight model, which is that didn't really come through us as a gateway, we were basically market to some extent, entry partners, to some extent, scaling partners to some into some cases, brought them insights, for example, what team to put into place, how to think about legal staff, how to think about regulatory staff how to think about or how to get that initial bootstrap of users going. So, that was the kind of thought process and what we did was we invested in the parent companies, and then we usually became the sort of a market partner. So, to say, I think what we found about in that model, and it continues to exist, it's called Taints Bridge is that for a lot of global companies, India is a pretty large, unknown beast and there's a lot of nuances to trying to enter India. So, I think being a company being a platform, and I think a bunch of set of operators who lived in both worlds helps build that level of familiarity and if you have operating scale, then you can help with that initial distribution, because most products ultimately need that initial bootstrap to get relevant in the market.
If you get relevant, and then the product is good and the framework is simple, which is that you would only partner with products that have already made been very successful in their own sort of home markets and then you bring them here. So, it's a very late-stage growth thinking and it's about market potential. I think that it's a pretty novel idea, in terms of how it's built for the internet and the traditional world, there were a lot of companies who did franchising and even in the traditional, a lot of the brick-and-mortar world, you see that happening today as well, for example, reliance brands is a collective of global brands, and then they push them in the retail environment. So, those are more JV type things. But these a lot lighter because of internet.
Pritish: What have you learnt from angel investing?
Miten: Sure, I've learned a lot of things and lots of money, which is when you learn the most, I think there's the reason I do it is I find a level of paid for thinking around saying, I've been through this zero to one journey a few times, can I bring that value to early stage founders, I think that's a lot of value that they find in me in terms of even getting me onto their cap table allowing me a shot at investing there and I always take that as a privilege and I keep working hard, saying listen, I have to be very relevant for a great founder to think about having me on their cap table because the cap table is unfortunately as zero sum game and so that's the starting point. The next thing I think hard about is when I see a problem statement, do I think this is a problem. This is this the future. So, Marc Andreessen said this very interesting statement. He said, look, Warren Buffett invests with the mindset that the world is not going to change, and there's going to be more of the same people are going to continue drinking Coke.
People are going to continue eating serious candy, whatever things like that and Marc Andreessen and his group invest in the complete opposite end saying the world is going to change meaningfully and what happens now is wrong and the next thing is going to be better and so I live kind of in that edge, which is the world's going to change and so what is that future state of the world and is this company with this kind of problem solving approach one of those sort of components of that future. So, that's how I typically think about it and then my approach generally is to be very low touch unless the founders really want my help or want me to engage and I think the way I've found to be very productive and helpful is ICO invest with a friend of mine accurate and so the both of us end up creating WhatsApp group, but most of the founders we've invested in and so we have always there whenever they need sponsored pointer itself and be a sounding board and stuff and I think slowly and steadily patterns have emerged, right?
So, as I said, one is the is just one of the companies, which is part of the future of the world, future state of the world. Second is always look for founders who know something uniquely about this market, or this policy statement and are you ready to the problem statement deeply? Or is it being you accept, there are many cases where I've said, no, when even the metrics are exciting, the founders have good pedigree, but they landed on the problem statement, because it's a hot product and I kind of have refrained from that I've lost a couple of good opportunities because of that, which is fine. But it doesn't fit in my mental model that if you can't just be jumping into a product because it's hot right now, right? Because the whole bunch of shit will go bad and when it goes bad, you've got to be excited about solving the problem and not just trying to make money and so I think those are as mental models towards that and I actually think we're now in a golden phase of Indian startups, because there's a phenomenal groundswell of good talent.
People who worked at the first generation of unicorns, they've seen scale, they've seen problem solving approaches, frameworks, methods, and they're now coming out and trying to build their own companies and it's that first couple of cycles have happened. So, great talent is coming out. Also, markets are becoming more global. So, you could sit in India bill for the world, take any idea from the world, bring it to India. So, all those cycles have just become faster and faster and there's enough capital now the internet base is large enough. 500 million plus users are there so good time to be building
Pritish: I think we will now move on to your present a company tread very interesting business model. So, my every time I look at it, and look at credit, and read everything that Kanaan Shah sends across through his social media. Why does India need credit?
Miten: It’s an interesting question. I never thought about it like that. But I think the simple thing we're solving for is that credit worthy individuals should have a slightly differentiated internet experience, and actually should have a slightly differentiated, experience, the internet just makes it easy for you to make that happen with lowest friction and that's the audience we're building for and I think it's never been done before in the world, at least in this manner and that's what I think makes the mission very exciting and I think financial, sort of literacy, financial awareness is pretty what I said, there's a lot of I don't want to use the word misinformation. There's a lot of basic knowledge and basic how toss and frameworks and ways of thinking that young Indian people don't have even sort of, you know, my older people don't have and so I think if we can say, listen, for the most trustworthy, most credit worthy, if you could build a product and an experience, which is one rewarding, because if you behave well, you should be rewarded. That's how life should be and if you consistently do that, you should have a differentiated experience across a whole bunch of touch points.
We start with credit card payments; we start with a curated commerce and there's a few other things that we've slowly and steadily do. Why does it need it? Honestly, answer is, probably doesn't need it. But it will be nice if it exists. I think our current sort of product is finding meaningful with our target market. I think people like what we're doing, people are using it with frequency and obviously that is telling us a lot about what we should do next. So, it's quite exciting.
Pritish: Your views on leadership in a hyper growth environment?
Miten: Yeah, so if I was to say simply intellectual honesty, transparency, these are two things I would say absolutely important. If you don't do that, you're going to be sidelined soon, sooner rather than later.
Pritish: Do unicorns create new market segments?
Miten: They often do. Yes.
Pritish: Do you think India is going to be a SAS capital
Miten: It’s definitely one of the top three for sure and I think the question is, does it become number one, but it's in the top 1 2 3. Yes, absolutely.
Pritish: Do you see Indian consumer tech businesses having a chance in a competitive market like Southeast Asia?
Miten: Yes, absolutely. I think you're going to see this happening with a few companies that are starting to venture out into those markets to which I know that are already out there. One is live space with live space is expanding into multiple markets, or the second one is urban company. I think they are doing a lot. I think you might see companies like lens kart do it. So, there's a lot of companies we'll get to some scale and market share growth and viable business models who will start into other markets, and I think again, the next five years is going to be a period where you will see a lot of that happening. Zomato obviously did that first when they went out and try to build in various other markets and I think all those in many markets as well so it's going to happen.
Pritish: Evie, you spoke about it in 2015 podcast. Do you think India is not ready for it?
Miten: Boss I'm disappointed by lack of imagination as a country to create the underlying conditions to make it happen right electric mobility for bikes should have, we should have been the market leaders globally for it because we have the installed capacity to make bikes at scale. We've got the companies to do it and we just don't have the policy support to enable that, and I think this is to me been a massive disappointment continues to be even four wheelers. There are so many countries have just leave and I just if you ask me, I fail to understand why we haven't taken these steps.
Pritish: We’re going to get to a quick-fire rapid fire. Three questions. One word, one sentence. Are you ready?
Miten: Yes
Pritish: What is the toughest part of your job?
Miten: Imagining the future.
Pritish: One book or blog that has transformed you personally and professionally.
Miten: Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
Pritish: Who's your most favorite superhero?
Miten: It’s an interesting question. Most I don't believe in this fiction superhero stuff. But if I was to put the name of maybe an entrepreneur to be Jeff Bezos.
Pritish: Thank you again, for being on the 1% project. Thank you so much for this.
Miten: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the breadth of our conversation, and it was a very unique one.