Episode 63: Building Generational Brands w/Raja Ganapathy
About Raja Ganapathy:
What is so unique about Ogilvy, Hindustan Unilever, and Sequoia capital that they have stayed market-relevant and built and enabled iconic brands? How Don Valentine, the grandfather of Venture Capital and founder of Sequoia, built a generational brand. If brands and brand-building intrigue, you listen on.
My next guest on The One Percent Project is a brand builder, a voracious reader and an eternal optimist Raja Ganapathy. Raja spent his conceptual years learning the ropes of marketing at Ogilvy on accounts such as Hindustan Unilever, and his defining stint was as the Chief Marketing Officer at Sequoia Capital India. At Sequoia, Raja worked with industry-defying founders of Byju's, Free Charge, Healthkart and many more. Today, Raja is the founding partner at Spring Marketing Capital, a skin-in-the-game marketing value-added investment firm to build the brands of tomorrow.
Listen in to learn how Raja navigated through his career from Ogilvy to Spring, what is the new world order of marketing, are Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Kunal Shah brands or founders and much more.
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Key Highlights:
First, you build a great product, then a business, and then a brand. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Kunal Shah are all founders before they are brands because first, they built a successful business, creating value, and later leveraged that to become a brand. They are all founders for life.
What happens if the product ceases to exist tomorrow? What is the kind of real pain that it will cause? Founders need to ask themselves these questions. The brand's strength will depend on the pain caused to consumers if the product ceases to exist. That pain might not just be emotional but a loss of productivity in real-time. Products do not sell on emotional appeal alone; product innovation addresses the pain points of consumers that hook them to a product.
Ideas are the easiest substance in the world; everyone has ideas. But the person who takes up an idea and gets to market fast, ships it, and then fixes it forward is probably the person who wins the long-term game in the market.
Raja’s three productivity tools: Walking, Reading, and Practising Humility.
Book Recommendations:
In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
01:59 Navigating from Ogilvy to Spring.
03:37 Building a marketing foundation at Ogilvy.
06:09: What is the new order of marketing? How has the marketing industry evolved?
09:08: Building Spring Marketing Capital.
15:21: How to build a generational brand?
17:35 Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Kunal Shah are they brands or they are founders first?
19:50 Why is an emotional quotient not good enough to build a brand?
22:40: Building great products.
24:53 Why Google is a startup founder’s biggest competitor?
27:28 Is there a difference in how a traditional corporate vs a startup looks at marketing?
30:35 Raja’s superpower?
31:58 Raja’s productivity tools and books?
35:38 Raja’s advice to his younger self.
Transcript:
Pritish: Welcome Raja to The One Percent Project!
Raja: Hi, Pritish! Lovely to meet you and lovely to be here.
Pritish: Let’s kick off this conversation and get your perspective or how do you reflect on your career?
Raja: You’ve begun with possibly the most difficult question. Typically, the host is supposed to ask simple questions first. You have given me a very challenging question because it’s very difficult sitting where I am to actually make sense of my career. I have taken multiple U-turns. The easiest way I can explain it is that every time I got comfortable at work or at my job, I chucked it and found the source of discomfort. That doesn’t make any sense but that’s why I said this is a challenging question. I spent ten years in advertising, then I spent three years in a bank that was launching retail in India and I was a CMO there. And then I spent ten and a half years in a legendary venture capital firm, and those U-turns are very difficult to explain from here. But what I can tell you that’s extremely joyful to me is that almost twenty-four years of all that career actually ended up culminating in an entrepreneurial journey for me right now in Spring. I feel that everything has just come together. When I look back, I can almost find the reason why I began advertising. I can think of where the banking experience helped me. I can think of where Sequoia’s experience helped me. I think where I’m sitting now it all seems to make sense, it’s all come together very beautifully. I look back and I say that different parts of my experience in communication, marketing, venture capital, banking, startups, and launches, all of that has culminated in what I do today which is work with founders and help them build brands and invest in the best of them. So, all have come together very well, in a very strange way and if you ask me for one word for my career, I would probably say serendipity.
Pritish: Going from Ogilvy to Deutsche, to Sequoia to now Spring Capital, what were your building blocks when you kicked off your career in Ogilvy about marketing and branding?
Raja: So, I think I was super lucky when I joined Ogilvy. There were two of us who were selected in Ogilvy. I was not from a fancy college. The other person was from one of the IIMs, and he was supposed to work on Lever because the Lever brand managers and marketing managers were ex-IIM, and he was selected for that purpose. I ended up joining a month earlier, and chance has it, one of the account managers was desperate to have an assistant, and she insisted that I work with her, so because I joined a month early, I was almost shoved into Lever’s business, It was like a trial period, she was probably saying work for a month, and we’ll figure it out. Deep down, I knew that one month is possibly gonna change my life, and that’s exactly what happened. There was a launch happening that month so I just got very well integrated into Lever’s team. The first 5 years that I spent in Ogilvy, working on Levers, part of an amazing team, and working on Pond’s and Vaseline were really the building blocks. I learnt marketing during this stint. Levers has always and always will be a university for brands in marketing. I was super lucky. I was not even supposed to do the job. So, really lucky to have got in through the backdoor. Investing I can say for myself is that I hung on like a limpet, and made the best of my chance. It was a great experience to learn everything about brand and marketing or be a part of a team that is almost like shadow brand managers. We used to end up being part of the packaging team when new packaging was being developed, being part of the research team when new cutting-edge consumer research was being created, part of launches, marketing communication creation, market visits, and part of launches with sales teams. I ended up seeing the entire gamut. It was a fabulous education and as you asked me, it was the major building block of everything that has happened since then.
Pritish: You brought up Lever. This week, I just released a mini-episode on ‘The CEO Factory’ by Sudhir Sitapati, which is basically the marketing and management lessons from Hindustan Unilever. It’s brilliant. Everything in that book is counterintuitive.
Raja: Yeah. I can imagine it because I have got to know Sudhir professionally, and he is an amazing guy. I hope to do more work with him in the future. He is just great in his perspectives, learnings, and what he brings to the table. I didn’t meet him at the point that I worked on Levers; we ended up meeting much later.
Pritish: Since then, how or what is the new world order of marketing? What has changed, or how has the industry changed?
Raja: That’s a great question. The truth, if you ask me, and I’m gonna be super honest, having spent almost three decades, sounds scary; a lot of your listeners are switched off the minute I say that, especially the young ones. But take the last thirty years and marketing. Everything has changed and what is really changed is the consumer. The consumer has changed, and the consumer has evolved. The way the consumer accesses brands and discovers brands has changed. The way the consumer consumes content has changed and the aspiration designs of consumers have changed. The sad reality is we as marketers are lagging behind. So, what has changed is the consumer, what has not changed is marketing. While the fundamentals of marketing still hold good today. I’m sure in any IIM MBA class, there’s Philip Kotler being used to teach the fundamentals of marketing. It doesn’t need to change. ln, any discipline the fundamental remains the same. But the application of those fundamentals and the application of those rules has dramatically changed. But unfortunately, as an industry, the marketing industry hasn’t kept in, they have not innovated enough, and they have not managed to convert young people working there to becoming leaders. I always joke saying that when I see a marketing company from my days, from the 90s and I see that the people heading their company are the same people that were heading it when I was working in marketing, and I’m saying hey that’s not all. By now some of them should have become Chairman. You need a new breed of leaders and you need people who understand. For example, for many years there was this person who used to feel very proud that he has never used a smartphone or never used a credit card. And now you are creating brands and communication for helping founders and large companies create brands and helping them create communication. But if you do not know how the youth are managing, how the youth are using media, and have never been on Instagram, you don’t know what Snap means. I somehow come from a world where you act to be in touch with the youth, you have to find ways to do it, even as you get older. You have to find the ‘in’ into the world of today. It’s not just about the youth, even consumers in various age segments, even the older age segments are changing. There is hardly a 40-50 y/o today who doesn’t use a smartphone or social media. And unless you are in keeping with those times, unless you know the lingo of the day, unless you know how they consume content, unless you hear about the products and services they use, I just feel that you will be stuck with the fundamentals and won't evolve. It’s also reflective of the business models in the industry that have not evolved. That’s part of the reason we launched because we felt like there is a huge gap in the industry and no one is actually addressing the gap, so it was the right time, the right place for us. But I do hope that many more people step up because the opportunity exists. There are some very smart people there so don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of very smart, intelligent talent available in the marketing industry. But most of them are getting stifled because they are working in companies that have not evolved, innovated, and have not kept in pace with the consumer.
Pritish: I do feel that the hypothesis that you have on the transition that happened, on that hypothesis, you have built Spring Capital. So, let’s talk about Spring Capital and what exactly it is because it’s a new model and very hard to build because you have first to build trust. Marketing is something that non-marketers don’t understand. Most founders are not marketers whom you may be meeting, and they feel that reaching out or scorching it’s like a spray-and-pray mindset. But how to get them focused and bringing out one voice, one thought, is challenging. So, break that down and double-click on that.
Raja: My experience actually began with Sequoia on this front. Again, Sequoia is an amazing platform to spend ten years there, and my ten years were spent during the seminal years of venture capital in India. I joined Sequoia in 2008, most people didn’t even know what venture capital was, and the consumer tech ecosystem that we see today did not exist. UPI did not exist, Jio did not exist, and smartphones were not as penetrated as they are today. There has been a sea change, and I was super lucky to have gotten a front-row seat to that change. I ended up working with lots of smartphone founders. Many of my initial years were spent evangelising marketing and branding; why you should do it. As time went on, today's founder is a super smart person. He or she knows exactly what they are doing. They know the capabilities they have, and they know the capabilities they don’t have. It’s less evangelical now because everybody understands that there is a gap. There are founders who have done this before and who have experience in building consumer brands, but the majority of founders who are operating in this space today do not have that experience. And I think maybe it’s a surprise, but 90%of the work we do for brands, both on the investment side and the consulting side, it’s all inbound or referral. It’s the people who seek us out and say hey, we want to talk to you; doing something here and we think we can become partners. This practice in the marketing industry or the advertising industry of pitching, it’s a terrible practice, it is one of the reasons why the industry I said has not evolved, only by anecdotal accounts 35% of the agency’s time actually goes on working on speculative pitches. That’s not remunerative, that’s not compensating their core business. And it’s also in some ways demeaning, like a “Swayamvar” of ideas without even being contracted. In the last four years of Spring on the consulting side, we have never pitched even once, and we have never participated in any pitch. There are companies that normally select their marketing partners through a pitch who have finished that process for our sake. So, I do feel that the mindset has changed and founders are realising the value of building a brand. They understand where they need that support and capabilities, and like I said the founders are smart. They want to build a successful business and will do whatever it takes to make that happen. That is a very long introduction. For us, Spring Marketing Capital came up because we sensed the gap. We sensed the gap where founders were raising capital, smart people they had, they found a problem to solve, they were approaching it with an innovative mindset, and we felt they needed the expertise of a marketing partner. Part of the reason was that I already spoke about the marketing industry so I’ll leave that be. But the rest of the reason was that we also believe that we have the right ammunition for it. Again, I must confess that I got super lucky in having two founders. So, Arun Iyer was the Chairman and the Chief Creative Officer of Lintas, sixteen years in that firm, twenty years overall in advertising, and if you have spent the last ten or fifteen years in India, you have seen his campaigns, you have seen his brands, and the work that he did is used even today in companies as case studies. So, Arun came on board as Head of Creative, and my co-founder. Vineet is very different from both of us. He built 22Feet which became the pioneering digital marketing agency in India. He sold that to the Omnicom Group. He became CEO of the acquiring entity, and he brings a very strong digital-first focus. I believe that the combination of what the three of us have to offer, me coming from business strategy and marketing, Arun coming from creative, and Vineet from a digital-first approach is required for tomorrow’s brands. And we have tried to create a team that mirrors us and actually builds on our capabilities to take us forward. We have a forty-member consulting team today, and I am very proud of that team, and what it manages to do for the brand it works for. I think once we sense that is really where we build Spring, if you look at our ambition or our vision, if twenty years down the line you pull out the best consumer brands from India, homegrown brands, we want to be investors in many of them, we want to do it across stages, in early stages of that journey. We have two models: a consulting business that is independent, and we take on a few assignments for retainers and projects. Typically, on the consulting side, we end up working with large companies like Byju’s, Tata 1mg, and Wakefit, which have all grown reasonably in size. On the investment fund, we have one currently operational fund, the 150 Crores Fund. We typically invested in a series of marketing experiences as part of that investment. We usually co-invest in all the VC firms operational in India on the consumer side, and we believe that our combination of capital and expertise is what makes us attractive to the companies and accept our capital. So, those are the two models. Going forward I continue building on these two streams; consulting firm is at the heart of everything we do. That’s what provides the expertise and experience that the founders value. At the end of this year, we will have two different funds: the current one which invests from series A to series B and the new fund which will aim to invent series C to aid series A. The new fund is still very early, I can’t speak about it too much, for regulatory reasons. But I can say that our aim in the new fund will be to invest in founders at a much earlier stage because we believe that using an advisory platform can actually power and accelerate growth in consumer companies. But the last point I have to make is that I have been super lucky and privileged. What I experienced at Sequoia, all the work that Arun and Vineet have done in the last ten to fifteen years plus the last four years of Spring, where we have probably touched 50+ D2C companies, gives us a unique ability to connect the dots, which gets strengthened as we go forward, and that’s what we’re betting on, the power of the Indian consumer and growing. We are reading about it every day; everybody is talking about it, that’s exactly the bet we have placed that in the next ten to twenty years, the spending consumer will drive the growth of a lot of home-grown brands in existing spaces as well as new spaces and we want to make sure that we are around to support those efforts and be a part of the campaign.
Pritish: Two things that actually come from your own experience rather than from your response: one is Sequoia as a brand, a generational brand; very few people, even in the venture capital space, probably know who the founder of Sequoia is. The reason is that it’s not around the founder, but it is a generational brand because it has been built around the work that it has done. The second part is actually from ‘The CEO Factory’, where Sudhir says that a great brand is not the one that is recognised when you see the logo but is the one which you recognise without seeing the logo. That is where the power of brand marketing sits, and probably that evolution has happened in the consumer’s mind, and everybody has to actually get on with that mindset and look at the marketing industry.
Raja: I want to respond to what you just said. It’s a very valid point; it was clear from day one that they were building an institution. The founder of Sequoia, Don Valentine was an amazing guy; he has inspired generations of founders. The people who came after him, Mike Morris and Douglas Leone, are all legends in their own light. But what is amazing is that they have always placed the firm and the brand above them, and the desire to build an institution that outlasts them differentiates Sequoia from many other names. In many ways, at least personally, I have taken a lot of inspiration from that journey and from that thinking. If you ask me what I would like to be twenty years from now, I’d like to drive past Spring and tell somebody proudly that you know that I was part of that founding team and I would like the institution and the idea of what we have built. What we are doing in Spring is super unique; nobody has done this anywhere in the world; use a brand marketing first approach towards investing; nobody has really done this. If we are successful, I hope we will inspire many more people to take up value-added investing as a model. But at least, my dream is that the current founders of Spring, irrespective of when they move or when they decide to move on from active work, would like the institution of Spring to remain and become much stronger than what we left.
Pritish: Brilliant. Look forward to that. The comparison is that everybody knows Mark Cuban, but nobody knows his funds, and that probably doesn’t create a generational brand; hopefully, it does, but we will see how that works out. Should brands focus on today or tomorrow?
Raja: This is a slightly personal view born from my experience. It should always have a longer purpose in mind. Brands should always know what their ten, twenty-year horizon is. They should use that to inspire all the key stakeholders in and around the brand. But that’s not good enough. When they speak to their consumers, they should speak, keeping today in mind. It is a mix of both. Knowing the long-term purpose and knowing the long-term vision is supercritical. The best brands in the world always begin by saying this is what I want to be in the long run. So that is one of the reasons why I love working with founders, the founders begin with a vision. I also believe that the future will belong to founder-driven brands for this simple reason. Founders are driven by a vision and a purpose. They want to create a positive change in the environment around them. When we write the scorecard years later, you will find that a lot of these founder-driven brands will start replacing legacy, multinational brands for the simple reason that the long-term purpose will actually result in some very positive actions around the brand; they will remain consistent over a longer period of time and a founder driving that vision will also ensure that they will not deviate from their core. The biggest challenge in multinational companies is that people come in and go. And fortunately, being part of a multinational company myself, I can say that your goals become very short-term oriented. It becomes very agenda-driven, it becomes annual sales, and dilutes the long-term brand. So, that’s one large point. But it’s also very important to remain humble, grounded, and know what you are today. You may have a vision for the future, but you must know what you are selling today and whom you are selling it to and that’s what allows you to take those incremental steps toward the longer vision.
Pritish: That brings me to ask, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Kunal Shah, are they brands, or are they founders first?
Raja: I know Kunal personally. I can answer it, and Elon and Jobs, I’ve read a lot about them. Currently, I am reading a book called Founders, which is about Elon, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin, the Paypal founders, and the story of all of that is very fresh in my mind. If you were Kunal today and asked him to choose what he is today and what he wants to be tomorrow, he would say founder. It’s a role that they all relish. If you look at Elon Musk, he sold his first company and made some twenty million, then when Paypal was listed, he made some hundred million. He is on record saying he took the first twenty million and he put it into Paypal, and he took the next hundred million and put it into Tesla and SpaceX. As far back as 2000-2002, we were speaking about going to space; this is a visionary. If you look at Steve Jobs, all of them were founders first. The truth is that they are all smart people who also know that to be a successful founder, you also have to be a brand. The brand bit comes later. First, you are a founder, first, you build a successful business, create value and then you use that to become a brand because then, through that you can actually become a bigger firm. So, these are all founders for life. If you look at all of them, Kunal is on the second venture, he is always dreaming of ideas, he is always restless, and he can never be at peace. The same goes for Elon Musk from what we know of him from the outside. It’s a very interesting question you asked because actually if I look at it, it’s our view of how brands are built. First, you build a great product. On the back of that product, you build a business, and then you build a brand. This might sound a little strange coming from a branding person, but I always feel that there is a right time for you to start building a brand. You don’t begin a brand. It is founders who begin the brand first, don’t end up very well, in my personal view. I don’t think they become long-term legends. You have to build something of value, and you have to leave a mark before you can become a brand. Similarly, to have a great product first, you have to impact a certain number of people positively before you can actually qualify for becoming a brand.
Pritih: You also said that for today’s brand, an emotional quotient is not good enough; an emotional appeal is just not good enough. Can you double-click on that?
Raja: A bit of a fundamental marketing thing, which I have tested through many years of experience, made enough mistakes to realise that thinking that a brand can be a pure emotion is wrong. A brand, in my opinion, is a combination. We call it a triangulation of arriving at a proposition in Spring. It’s a very simple device that we use: the founder’s vision, the product promised, and the deep consumer insight you have used. When all of these come together, it is when I manage to create a springboard, we literally call it the springboard, for a successful brand. And we have succeeded everywhere we managed actually to craft, fine-tune and hone these three points. It sounds very simplistic, but it takes a lot of time, effort, craft, and hard work. To me, a brand devoid of a product promise cannot exist. When anybody says oh people love this brand, and they will be willing to do anything for it, actually they also love the product. They find the product super important in their life. The question that we always use to ask and encourage founders to ask is, what happens if the product doesn’t exist tomorrow? What is the kind of pain that you will leave in the world? What is coming from the strength of your brand will depend on the pain if your product does not exist tomorrow. If you don't exist today and the next day, life goes on as it is, then it’s not a great brand; that’s not strong enough, it’s not purposeful enough. In the examples that you gave me, take Apple. If Apple does not exist tomorrow, millions of us will feel pain. Now, is that just emotional pain? That’s not true, it’s not just emotional pain; these are real products, and they play a real role in my life, and I have come to depend on these products, I have come to love them. Of course, there is a design element, and of course, there is an emotional appeal that the brand makes. Emotional appeal by itself is not enough. I have seen marketers sometimes use the Apple example to justly esoteric and weird language, and I completely disagree. Apple always remained very grounded in its product. It was always very clear that the first step began with a great product. Everything else followed. And it’s not as if they haven’t had failures, but the biggest success of Apple is actually product success. The brand is a layer on top. When we meet early-stage founders, they ask us; we tell them yes of course you must think about the brand. It’s just one element in the mix, and there will come a time in your journey when you start double-clicking on the brand and investing in it. The first step of the journey really is to make a great product, a product innovation, make a difference in the life of the consumer, to solve an actual pain point. This is very super cliché and maybe something that comes out of a textbook, but all my experience tells me that, actually, this is the right way.
Pritish: Brilliant! I have built my own definition of a great product, and in my mind, a great product is something that actually makes you dumb, which is Apple. So, what I mean by that is, it is so seamless that you don’t have to worry about what’s happening in the background. On the other hand, if you use a Microsoft product, it prepares you for doomsday because every other day, there is a flicker, there is a virus, there is something that is going on, and you need to figure your way around it. Sometimes the mouse is not working, sometimes the projector is not working, something goes out, and you need to fix it. So, a great product has its own pluses and a not so great product also has its own pluses, it’s, however you want to say it.
Raja: That is actually true. One of my ex-bosses, Ranjan Kapoor, the chairman of Ogilvy, an amazing guy, somebody we all used to look up to, we all owe him a lot, had a really smart theory about brands which have a little bit of a failure point. He used to say that perfect brands don’t become very successful. Those brands with few flaws, which look a little human and make a few mistakes, are also loved. The example he used to give me earlier on was Royal Enfield. When the bullet was launched, bullet practitioners used to take a lot of pride in the fact that they knew some mechanic who could fix the issue for them. It was almost a matter of pride for them. It didn't seem like a disadvantage. Or you could break your ankle if you got the kick wrong was a good thing for them. They were like hey, that’s great it excludes all the losers from our club. So, I do feel that it cuts both ways; I completely agree with you. It’s not just about the perfect product; that’s why the power of a brand comes in. If it was just a perfect product, I doubt if Apple could have charged the premium that it charges, and people happily pay that premium time and time again. The combination of a great product with a phenomenal brand story that’s woven around the brand, and once that kicks in, you’re willing to forget and forgive some of the problems. Let’s take the classic airpods falling off, and you know, losing the AirPods issue, all of us have seemed to make a joke on it. Memes were created. You know it costs a lot of money, but we are willing to live with it because we also love the brand. That interplay is a little bit difficult to define, but it does exist.
Pritish: Double click on your thought where you say that you say to a start-up that your biggest competitor is actually Google and not your next-door neighbour.
Raja: I think the biggest challenge, and I think lots of D2C companies are starting to realise it, unfortunately, some of them after spending a lot of money. Performance marketing only takes you so far; all the money that you spend on Google and Meta, and so on. The challenge here is that I think it’s great for getting your product in the hands of the first set of consumers, it’s great for trial, and it’s great for building a product club. But at some point in time, you need consumers to start buying in the franchise, and I think the biggest challenge for companies like us is to get found, to get consumers to actually type in the name of the brand in the browser. So, don’t search for an onion hair shampoo but for a particular brand; don’t search for a face wash but a brand. I think searching for a brand, getting organic traffic onto a website, getting organic traffic onto Amazon, getting people to actually find your brand on a shelf, getting people to tell other people that try this new brand, you should try this new product, that’s really the crux of brand-building, and in the absence of that, the customer acquisition cost will just break you back. The truth is that the dy/dx on performance marketing will never work out in your favour unless there is an organic build-up to the brand. Sometimes it can be a little exciting, and it can be heady to see a lot of initial sales; I met a big investor today, and he said that the company had reached one hundred crores of revenue, and then he realised they spent one hundred and ten crores to get there. Now that’s unsustainable. We saw a lot of this happen in the last year. The acquisition costs have really gone through the roof, and this is a huge challenge for Indian companies in the last 6 months. And hence, this is my point of saying Google is a competitor because Google is going to sell its Adverts to everybody, and then you are in this bidding grey, constantly sinking more and more money to try and get your brand and your product visible. I remember an exercise a VC did once and shared the numbers with me. He said 35% of the money that they had invested in the previous year, in a couple of years, had actually gone to Google and Meta. He told me how shocked he was when he did the analysis; he said I seemed to be a rooting mechanism for these large multinational companies that make a lot of profits. So, I think that was the point that the whole purpose of building a brand is actually to build organic fraction, whether offline or online. Get consumers to search for you, and get consumers to type your name.
Pritish: Brilliant! Actually, that leads me to ask you, how is AI, popularly ChatGPT, transforming or will transform the marketing landscape?
Raja: Too early to call. At this point, all of us are just playing with it a little bit and posting funny social media updates. Many memes are circulating about how school children are being caught using it. I have seen some friends who are parents of younger children who showed me notices from their respective schools saying strict action will be taken against the child. Actually, that tells me that this is here to stay. I think the best way to ensure that something becomes part of your life is to try and shut it out and ban it. While it is very early days, the technology itself is exciting. If you have used it enough, you will also know it occasionally throws up from random stuff. I think it will take time, and you know, generally, AI learns over a period of time, so the more people use it, the more predictive it gets and the smarter it gets. It’s too early to call, but I guess it will change the landscape just as web 2.0 changed the landscape a few years back. If you think about it, technology has not dramatically innovated for a while. We are still waiting for the next big thing. Crypto was supposed to be that, but I don’t know; it has fallen into a lot of questions and challenges. I wonder if this could be the next big innovation. It’s probably many years late in coming. AI itself is here to stay. All of us are using AI, whether we know it or not. The tools and the platforms we are in use some forms of AI. Some of it is rudimentary, some of it is just smart listening, and some of it is actually a little more intelligent thinking. I think AI is here to stay. The ChatGPTs of the world, what will happen to them, I can’t even hazard a guess, but it is our duty to learn, keep our eye on the ball, and see where it goes.
Pritish: Brilliant! I think the CEO of Microsoft said it very well. He said that blockchain/ crypto needs a ChatGPT moment for adoption, and hopefully, that may or may not happen, but ChatGPT definitely seems to be more popular, but I speak to a lot of other people, and the younger people, and I ask them have you heard of it? And the penetration hasn’t happened to the level that I expected it to, but I think over a period of time, it will meander its way into everyday life.
Raja: I think the single biggest threat you know is how Google reacted and how they have been reacting to it in the last few months. I think it’s clear that the way we search will change. It almost feels like sitting outside, and it’s easy to comment when you are talking about a company like Google. If you look from the outside, it does look like they had settled down to a model that was very comfortable for them. Some of the recent trends are showing us that people are actually going to YouTube first; many customers are going to YouTube and typing onion shampoo because they know that they will get content on YouTube which allows them to understand the product a little better than if they were to just search on Google. So, I think the way that human beings search will change. That’s the reason why I am a little more optimistic about ChatGPT and the world of AI because it has captured possibly fundamentally the way we are going to search. Now, who knows how that’s gonna happen, but just the way we are going to search, the way we expect the results to be thrown at us, feels like Google got complacent. As I said, take that with a pinch of salt, we are all sitting here and looking at giants, and we’re commenting on it, but just from the perspective and the benefit of it from hindsight, it does look as if Google got complacent in its search and maybe this is a new way that people will search. For example, I think many platforms got taken aback by the video. They were late to the game on video, and it cost them. I think the way video took off, especially in India, the speed with which video took over, and the way we consume content almost feels like this was the world. I recently saw a stat that said, if I’m not mistaken, that Insta and Meta's reels are bigger than YouTube Shorts videos. That’s incredible. When these platforms first adopted videos, all of us complained. Sophisticated guys said, hey, what is this? Insta is a photo-sharing platform. It’s a visual platform, and the beauty of the idea is completely destroyed. Today, I’m sure on your average feed, you’ll see more videos than visual photographs on Insta. I think there is no point in saying hey, this is my core; I’m a photo-first platform. You’re a photo-first platform till the consumer wants a photo-first platform. My partners Arun and Vineet make great fun of me; they say with Raja, it is never actually till he does it. And I think that’s a good thing. I think all companies, all individuals, need to evolve. These are all points of time thinking. You want to be a platform that enables consumers to share their moments with their best friends. That’s a very broad definition. Don’t call yourself a photo-sharing app because one day, you will find that consumers don’t want to share their photos anymore. They may still want to share their moments, but they may not want to share their photographs. It feels like search will change, both in terms of how we search and view the results. Is ChatGPT the answer? I don’t know, but it is quite exciting from where we see it.
Pritish: Brilliant! Actually, that’s a great example when we are doing this podcast. Joe Rogan and Tim Ferris, probably the most powerful podcasters in space, don’t call themselves podcasters. Joe Rogan calls himself a comedian, and Tim Ferris sees himself as a writer. They say podcasting is just a channel to communicate their thoughts and ideas. I think that goes back to your analogy of a photo sharing platform. It’s like stigmatizing yourself; you will become irrelevant if the train moves on. Raja: This is the point I made earlier about having a longer purpose but also knowing what you are today. I don’t know how Instagram went about this journey, but if they saw themselves as a, I’m just making this, but if they saw themselves as a moment-sharing platform, you can be relevant forever, provided you know today that you are a photo-sharing platform and you have to create the best possible experience for people to share their photographs. For Twitter, I think Twitter itself is going through a massive evolution, and it’s exciting to watch it and see where it lands. But I feel that sometimes you can get caught as people, brands, and businesses. Sometimes we get caught with the wrong notion of who we are and what we should do, and I think the world just passes us by. At Sequoia, I had this favourite, every off-site used, to begin with, a slide with all the companies that were ruling NASDAQ thirty years earlier, and then the timeline used to shift to today, and it was amazing to see how many of those companies disappeared and how many new companies appeared. The point was about how evolution takes place, how rapid it is, and how some of the legends of our world today may actually not exist twenty years later. Part of it is we spoke about Levi’s being so dominant for so long. I think just knowing your long-term vision but having the speed and agility to respond, to evolve, and not to be very stuck up about yourself. Finally, I think brands are owned by consumers, not by marketers. I should have the humility to say if the consumer views my brand in a particular way, there is no point beating him or her and saying; please look at me like this. So, I think that a little bit of evolution helps us, but it all begins with our ability to see a larger purpose and our ability to keep ourselves broad. You never know; you may still be relevant for the stories you are exchanging; you may just not be doing it as a podcaster tomorrow.
Pritish: Brilliant! Coming back to your Google to Microsoft or, let’s say, ChatGPT moment, I think Reid Hoffman said that if you are not ashamed of the product that you have just shipped, you are already too late. So, it’s not that Google was not working on something similar, but it assumed that consumers might not be ready to use it, or it may cannibalise their traditional search system. So, I think that moment has completely come true, and Google's out of strategies.
Raja: I always feel that there are two kinds of creators: people who want 100% perfection at all costs, and people like me who are very happy with 85%. I love shipping something out when it’s 85%. I learned a beautiful phrase when I visited Silicon Valley for the first time, which was fixed forward. I love the idea of fixing it forward. I think as a resource; it is actually decreasing. It is a strange thing, but I think we are running out of time fast, and maybe it’s not 85%, maybe 75%, but I love founders who get to market first, make their mistakes and are willing to evolve or not stubborn Vs. a person who gets super frustrated, when you take a couple of years. I think that the luxury of time does not exist anymore. Someone else is gonna come up with the idea. I think ideas are the easiest substance in the world; all of us have ideas, thousands and thousands of ideas. But the person who takes up an idea, gets to market fast, ships it, and then fixes it forward is probably the person who will win the long-term game.
Pritish: Brilliant! My last question on this is that you have worked with incredible new-age brands and founders like Byju’s and Wakefit vs. traditional Levi’s. Do you see a difference in how they look at marketing and branding?
Raja: Yes, I do! I think I would keep Levi’s out a little bit. I think Levi’s is a bit of an exception. I think I explained that our brand and business has managed to remain relevant for a very long time, so they are obviously doing something right. I would take a founder-driven brand like Wakefit, for example, with maybe a more traditional legacy company with very large brands. I think the single biggest difference is risk-taking. I remember my first ever meeting with some of these founders, and I think they get excited by the concept of taking a risk. They get excited by disruption. They don’t want to do stuff that’s been done before. When I used to work with larger companies, a typical question was, has it been done before? In that world, if you say yes, they get reassured. In the new world, if you say yes, they don’t want it. So, I think the ability to take a rest, to move fast, to take quick decisions are some of the reasons and, like I said, the ability to dream big and have a vision which you use to inspire everybody to work along with you. I think that’s where the magic comes in. That's why to me, I think all of us have chosen the path of working with founder-driven businesses because we enjoy that. We enjoy the speed to market, we enjoy fixing it forward, and we know we will not be perfect every time, but we love the idea of experimenting and trying out new things. Wakefit is a great example. Someone in my team, Sandeep Balan, who heads content for us, had just joined when he came up with this idea randomly of the sleep internship program for Wakefit. I loved it. Chaitanya, the founder of Wakefit, loved it and said, " Okay, let’s try this out.” We carved out a small budget. It sounded insane when we first heard it: can we pay people to sleep? If you are all about sleep, our internship program should actually pay people to sleep. We should reward people for sleeping. That’s how it began. I think all great ideas sound a little outrageous from the get-go. The famous Airbnb example is that they walked into the Sequoia office, and then in the first meeting, they told the Sequoia partners, do you all have a couch in your house that you don’t use it all? And they said yes. So, Airbnb said, hey, we’re gonna show you how you can monetize that couch by renting it out to other people. And one of the Sequoia partners told me that I almost got up and left the room at that point. It’s so crazy, but it became bigger than that original statement. But I think that the ability of founders to understand something outrageous can actually work. The large board rooms, just the way board rooms are designed, don’t feel like coming up with an outrageous idea. You feel stifled. The environment itself does not allow you to break out of the box. This is not universally true. Many of the large companies are actually setting up smaller, smarter units. We are working with a large multinational working with us on a couple of projects, which are specific aims, small teams, and moving faster. So, I think everybody is learning there. Similarly, when a company like Wakefit becomes larger, they need to create a brand code, become a little more systematic, and focus on the fundamentals. So, I think it’s a little bit of learning on both sides; it’s not black and white. Personally, I enjoy working with people who are quick to react, make decisions, are willing to take risks, willing to try the outrageous, and are willing to experiment. I think that’s what makes the journey exciting.
Pritish: Brilliant! What is Raja’s superpower?
Raja: That sounds difficult to answer because I don’t think I have any, and I’m not being humble. I think, actually, again, I think the answer to what makes me tick in at least the limited ways that I tick, I think has changed every five years. The truth is typically in all appraisal forms; you are supposed to write what makes you tick and what’s your superpower. In my first five years and Ogilvy, I wrote confidence, which was correct. I think it was confidence because at that point, I had nothing, no knowledge, no experience, and I could only wing it with confidence. You show your confidence, people trust you, and then you build on top of that. At some point in Sequoia, I remember one of the partners who used to work with me very closely said that my biggest superpower was EQ. I said wow, no one has ever said that to me before. I think superpowers and powers and your core value, skills, I think they evolve and they should evolve. If you have 25 years of work experience, 30 years of working and your superpower remains the same, then I think you have not changed, evolved, or learned. So, I think I don’t know what it is today. I can ask my partners at Spring, maybe they can give you a better answer. But at least when I was in Sequoia in my last five years, I used to think it was EQ.
Pritish: Three Productivity tools.
Raja: I’m actually gonna go with slightly off beat ones, not apps, not organizers. My first productivity tool is walking. I walk a lot. I solve most of my problems while walking. It’s really something that I have been doing for many years. It helps me think, it helps me break problems that sound massive when I’m sitting at my laptop, in my workstation but it disappears when I’m walking outside in my community. A lot of my problem solutions happen during working and I highly recommend it to people who want to get out and want to find a healthier way to beat stress. I think it's super healthy to spend some time with yourself, also be healthy and at the same time problem solve. That is number one. Number two is reading. I think I grew up in a fairly lower middle-class home, didn’t have high exposure, didn’t go to a great school. I think what helped me during all my formative years was reading and I read everything: history, fantasy, science fiction and mysteries. All of that kind of opened up the world to me. It showed me a world bigger than my little house and what my little school could do. I think that’s something that I have kept very close to my heart all these years, I read a lot. I read everything that I can lay my hands on, I am fairly non-discriminate, which has helped keep my thinking fresh. That’s two. The third productivity tool I think is humility. That’s the biggest productivity tool in the world because if you are humble, you will learn. I think the ability to get up and say look I’m not as great as I was is possibly an evolution. I did not used to think like that in my early years, but I think I have learnt that being grounded, staying humble is the best way to evolve, and grow.
Pritish: That brings me to three books or blogs that have impacted your career, and thinking.
Rja: Oh my God! That’s super tough because like I said I have read a lot and at various points of time I think books have influenced my thinking, my way to operate. They have had an impact on how I want to conduct the rest of my life. So, personally for me it’s almost impossible to pick three books that have been like changing. Maybe if I sit down and think I may be able to come up with ten or twenty. But three is almost impossible. So, let me do one thing. Let me do a cheat answer and let me just tell you the last three books I read and two of them I would highly recommend. One of them is a book that I actually re-read. This is ‘Leading’ which is by Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz. It’s a book that I went back to because I had some fundamental questions around leadership, to some work-related stuff and I think it really helped me. I think the book does a beautiful job. Mike is a fantastic writer himself and he has done a great job of taking the insights from Alex Ferguson’s fantastic career and converting them into leadership lessons and the beauty is that I am not even interested in football, it’s a book that worked for me in spite of that. The second book is as I mentioned, The Story of PayPal. Again, it’s fascinating and tells you that companies evolve so much, they pivot so much. I think twenty years is nothing in a lifetime. So, I think it also teaches you that near death situations, difficult situations or something that we should all take in our stride. It's amazing for a company like PayPal for what it went through. It is also amazing how you read about these great individuals. At many points of time, they made mistakes, they didn't know what they were doing, went down the wrong path, their calculations were wrong. I think it's OK, it reassured me that all of us can be eventually successful. The third book is actually a piece of fiction, which again I found interesting. It is the book called ‘Beartown’ by this author called Fredrik Backman. It’s set in a little town where hockey is everything and it happens in the town as a result of a pretty heart-wrenching incident that impacts the hockey team. So, three very disparate books, but those are the three books I read recently.
Pritish: Before we close, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Raja: The real truth, Pritish, is I would actually not change anything in my life. I think we are the sum of everything that's happened to us. So, I look back at my younger self and see that I made so many mistakes, I am embarrassed of so many moments. It's taken me a long time to even share those moments with my family. But I think we are a result of all of those mistakes, all of those failures, all of that success, all those embarrassing moments, and I just have learned to live with it. As far as we learn from those moments in our life and as far as we remember them well, I think history is the best teacher we can ever hope for. I would not change a single thing. When I was making those mistakes, when I was behaving badly, I think I felt on top of the world, I would never want to change that, the outcome be that and in spite of everything, I’m happy with where I am today. So, I would change nothing. I also have a bit of a philosophy that I use with younger people; when I’m asked what do you advise? My daughter won’t listen to anything I say, and she shouldn’t. All younger people should live life the way they live. They should follow their ideals, and it is an amazing world today. The opportunities are way more than they were for someone like me. I would say just chart your own path, and don’t listen to older people; they don’t know better even though we think we do. Yeah, no advice at all.
Pritish: Brilliant, Raja. That’s a great place to close this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.
Raja: Thank you, Pritish. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. All the best.
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