Episode 68: Part 1- Building Blume Ventures w/Karthik Reddy
About Karthik Reddy:
Is venture capital about funding the next unicorn or backing exceptional founders who are hardwired to think differently and bet against conventional wisdom?
My next guest on The One Percent Project is the humble, decisive communicator and counterintuitive thinker Karthik Reddy. Karthik is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, one of India's pre-eminent early-stage venture funds. At over $600 Million in AUM, Blume has made 150+ investments across three funds. Karthik also serves as the Chairperson of the Executive Committee at the IVCA (India's Venture and Alternative Capital Association) - India's apex association for Venture & PE Funds, working alongside the Indian Government in policy & regulatory issues concerning Alternative Investment Funds.
In this 2 part series, I speak to Karthik about his upbringing and the values he has infused into Blume over the years.
Listen in to learn Karthik's insights on resilience in building his career, the X-Unicorn hypothesis, why exceptional founders are mutants, how he assesses risk and much more.
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Key takeaways:
Sometimes our desires and aspirations remain unfulfilled for a long time, but eventually, things fall into place unexpectedly. Karthik had a yearning to go to the U.S. for many years, and it took him a while to finally get there. But after completing his MBA, he didn't feel like he wanted to stay in the U.S. and eventually found a sense of home in Mumbai. Life can take on unexpected paths, and one must be open to new experiences and opportunities.
Karthik attributes his ability to adapt to different situations and cultures as one of his superpowers. By being open to different cultures and experiences, one can develop a unique perspective that sets one apart from others and allows one to excel in their career. Karthik's journey from his South Indian upbringing to his experiences in Roorkee, Wharton, and finally, Bombay highlights how being open to different cultures and environments can shape one's personal and professional growth.
Resilience is necessary for any entrepreneur who wants to build something memorable and make a dent in the world. Being resilient means keeping the North Star and the compass aligned, which means not straying from the destination and the direction. If an entrepreneur can maintain resilience against all odds and keep the North Star and the compass aligned, they will not go off the path and will be able to make a meaningful impact.
Blume Ventures sees itself and its founders as mutants hardwired to think differently and bet against conventional wisdom.
Venture capitalists should understand financial markets and their underpinnings well to assess risk effectively. Assessing risk also involves working backward from the end state of reaching the public market and understanding how to extrapolate risks associated with different stages, from seed to public. Market forces drive VC principles of risk, and a good VC must have humility and accept that they will often get it wrong when picking or rejecting companies. VC success is also dependent on resilience and an ability to survive the test of the market, as the market is inefficient compared to the public market, with uncertainties. For the same reasons, venture capital finds its root in ‘adventure.’
Karthik says he does not look for founders to disprove his long-term held market or industry hypothesis to get him interested in funding their startup. Instead, he is looking for founders who can identify and take advantage of technology, regulatory, and waiting-to-be-disrupted industries to build a legendary, large company. Karthik is not interested in incremental entrepreneurs who make only incremental improvements to existing businesses.
Karthik’s direct and honest way of communicating comes from the belief in getting to the point and saying what needs to be said without beating around the bush. While this can spook some people, it ultimately leads to clarity and understanding. For Karthik, communication is a superpower, and knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to say it, can increase one’s chances of success immensely. He encourages everyone to find their own confident and politically correct communication method.
In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
02:39 His journey from Chennai to Wharton
10:50 The role resilience has played in building his career and Blume?
16:21 The X-Unicorn hypothesis and why exceptional founders are mutants.
21:32 How does he assess risk?
28:56 Do founders need to disapprove or disprove your long-term held market or industry hypothesis to get you interested?
31:25 The power of communication.
Transcript:
Pritish: Welcome, Karthik, to The One Percent Project.
Karthik: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Pritish! Pleasure.
Pritish: So, let's start, and let's start from your journey, which basically kicked off in Chennai. So how has been your journey from Chennai to Wharton?
Karthik: So, a few pits and stops in between. I think Wharton was this aspirational, or rather going to the U.S. was this aspirational thing that was a yearning that never got fulfilled for eight or nine years. I didn't ever plan to go for undergrad, but post that, I was part of the South Indian gang in Roorkee, always wanting to get to the US, and I think almost everybody else did except for me and one more guy. I think we stayed back and, at the last minute, made a U-turn and stuck to IIM admissions. And so, Warton is technically my second MBA. And so, I think that itch never went away. I almost didn't, I didn't unpack in Bangalore for almost two weeks. So, some profs who had all come back from the US convinced me that it was India's time and I should stay here. And while I listened to them, made great friendships, and thoroughly enjoyed my two years at IIM- B, which got me my first job in Bombay, which has become my current hometown, in some sense, that itch to go and experience the US never went away. And so, Wharton was a clever hack of getting the best of many worlds. Eventually, I met my wife at Penn, and people asked why I went into a second one. I said that fate had also arranged for other aspects of life to fall into place. We met within the first week, and she's a painter. She was doing her art there. But going back to your, the beginnings of your question, Reddy boy, born in an agriculturalist family in, in Nellore actually, so technically 15 years straight in Chennai, until the age of 17, but my parents moved when I was two to get me schooling in, in the big city, and even for the southern part of Andhra, Chennai was the big city, not Hyderabad, right? I’m going back to the seventies right now. So, we were two and a half hours from Nellore in Chennai. So basically, that's where we migrated. The education system was always acclaimed back then in Chennai, like got lucky. Pretty much the person who gave us the place for rent knew the principal of the school I went to. Oh, how crazily, coincidentally, when back then, when you say the world is a small place. He put in a good word, I joined, never left 14 years, same school, so great friendships. So, I have known some people for 47, 48 years, which is crazy. And so those journeys and those memories are parked in Chennai, always. Sadly, the final death knell on it not being my “hometown,” which I used to say for 45-plus years, happened because my parents decided to move to Hyderabad for health reasons. So, Chennai is this longing place now. It's not home anymore. Parents are literally this week, this bizarre thing that's come up; it’s emotional, but it has to be mentioned that it's this week that their house finally got sold. So, both of them moved here a year ago. That brings the end of that era, in some sense, in my head. It's almost like you, you migrate to another country, and you don't; you decide you don't, can't return to the original country. That's that moment here. I have a lot of memories, and I speak good colloquial Tamil, so I feel like one with the city when I’m there; I love the Margazhi music festival; I can tap at least, I don't know the technicalities, but I can tap my fingers to Carnatic music, love the beaches because of Chennai. Though that’s what Chennai has given me in many ways to live, other than very long-standing friendships and this quick interjection of Roorkee, Bangalore, and Bombay happened for nine years and gave me a shot at going to the US for seven years, but never felt like one with the country. I didn't feel like I wanted to be adopted and become one with the U.S., and today I'm happy and proud to say that feeling is now embedded in me as a Mumbaikar actually. So, 16 years after coming back, 17 actually the next month, and three before I left. So, by far the longest I've stayed in any city, Mumbai is now home. My kid was born here. She says she's from Mumbai. So that's how life progresses.
Pritish: Brilliant! That's a fascinating journey. Before we move on, how much of your South Indian environment, Carnatic music, and education, we as North Indians do see that South Indians are intellectuals and they have a very specific way of upbringing, has helped you in your career?
Karthik: I think one of my superpowers, if not for others, to see, for my own preservation and enjoyment in life, is the ability to pretty much experience as many things in life as possible, assimilate what I like, and become one with it. And so, I love my Roorkee experience, which is a shock for me because I never crossed the Deccan Plateau until I was 17. And so, lining up at the end, 60% Bihari, UP, Punjabi sort of population, my roommate was a Bihari, and thankfully my second language in school all the way in Chennai was Hindi, so I was amongst the better Hindi speakers in that twenty-member crowd of 300 of South Indians. And so, I adapted far more easily. But to answer your original question, I think even in, that's why I like Chennai because I think it appeals to my sensibilities more than, let's say, where my cousins grew up, the bulk of them in Hyderabad. And I always used to object when somebody said, I'm from Hyderabad, because it's not me. And Hyderabad as a lot of you might have heard in the North, that the Reddys of Hyderabad are more like the Punjabis of the South, in a good way, in a fun way, but also in a flamboyant and outspoken way. And we come from both the ability to be migrants, agriculturalists, and civil construction, etc, which is a lot of my side of the family who got their big breaks in lives, and so it was just not me. I was very different. So, I think that happy blend of entrepreneurship in the blood in some sense, which I didn't, I was fighting. I said, I don't think I can be the entrepreneur that India champions, which is hustle at any cost, like cutting corners or working with too many broken systems. And therefore, when you work with systems which are broken, and you have to survive, you'll cut corners. It’s like being in a prison, to survive you will make amends to yourself. And I didn't like that existence as what I saw of my relatives, of my father, etc. And I thought I didn't want to be an entrepreneur and I was fighting it I think for a long time until I started Blume, and one failed startup half-heartedly. So, I won't call that a proper stint. And then there is Chennai which is very spiritual in one way. The way it operates, it is very disciplined, very obsessive, and very content. And so all of those are absorbed from that Chennai water with a little bit of that Andhra, south Andhra blood is basically my core. And the rest is not like my core. That's why I don't think I could adapt to the U.S. I don't think I'm a natural, let's say in Delhi, I love certain aspects of it, I love certain people, but I don't think that's my natural self. Whereas Bombay allows for you to be individualistic in that sense, more than any other city I think in India. It’s not that I don’t like Chennai, but I don't like that it curtails me, curbs me in that sense. And so, finding a place like Bombay, which allows you to be yourself, and yet bring elements of multiculturalism and all of those into your daily existence. can be in the flow without having to fight it. I fell in love with this city and that and those I, that's why I think the industry and the rigour and the hard work of Bombay is basically the ultimate upper layering of my DNA today. So, it's those original roots, and then this is the layering. I think these three probably have shaped whom I have become the most. That's why it eventually becomes a superpower. Because I can't be closeted or bucketed into a little window and call me out a Chennai guy, or a Reddy guy, or a Bombay guy. I'm too much of all.
Pritish: Actually, that leads me to ask; in 2010, you kicked off Blume. And at that time, I don't think one would say that a homegrown VC fund would be a very popular concept or an idea. What has been the role of resilience in your career in actually standing your hypothesis going forward and pitching and building something like Blume?
Karthik: I think it's a sort of core necessary and not sufficient, but it has, it is a necessary condition, if not sufficient, for any entrepreneur, I would argue, if you want to build longer, if you want to build something memorable, not if you want to make a quick buck and retire in five years and then figure out how to build on the beach and invest, which is fine, I'm not judging anybody, but I feel like that is a different entrepreneurial practice. What maybe I didn't know that I was setting out on, I'll be honest is I think it was the excitement of wanting to do what I believed, which was the model of venture capital that I had studied in the U.S. and but more from the outside, in something that I felt had legs and I was happy to know that I won't know what the end product is and like go and get started somewhere. And so, it started ironically to me being a corporate investor from the Times Group in one in Mumbai Angels. And so, when you get to learn the environment then, and then you see this big enough gap, then you feel like the hypothesis was right. That's severely constrained regarding where to get venture capital for young entrepreneurs. And if you look at it from a classic business school framework of gap analysis, entrepreneurship, that was the gap, right? Now, if you look at the emotional weight and the thrill of being a VC, there's a wide spectrum, it can be Tiger Global, and it can be Blume, and I wouldn't be them as much as I love them as my co-investor. My DNA is to be Blume, which has basically been to be in those early parts of the journeys, shape entrepreneurs, get a kick out of seeing a brand-new idea, which you've never seen before in the world, and just be amazed by younger and younger entrepreneurs who can, who have this madness to go and change the world. Now, all of that, you can claim that you can get in late-stage VC and private equity, but in all humility, bullshit, you can't. Then everything is cooked. You're not a part of the kitchen at all, you're just in the dining room. And so, I think being a part of the kitchen is the thrill, and this makes new enterprises. So that was always the motivation. If that was not there, I wouldn't be doing this aspect of venture capital. If I'm not able to see the future in any non-humility, in whatever humble way and then take a punt on that, both the combination of entrepreneurs and the capital that goes into building that future, I wouldn't be interested in what I'm doing. And so that's what drives me. And it felt like when we started Blume, that's what would allow us to manifest ourselves out there. But also, I'm reasonably good at understanding risk capital markets. That was my kind of grounding from ‘96. I can't say again with no disrespect to a lot of VCs, not too many VCs get data. They don't have the foundation, I would argue. So, the combination of that meant how to construct a portfolio, how to price early-stage venture capital, how to build a fund which is right sized. These are also, I think, core thrills in some sense, that keeps my love for financial services also intact and going. Otherwise, you can be an operator VC and not bother about any of that. I'm also a Gemini, so I guess I need two of everything. I think I have the ability to use both parts, both facets of the mind. I'm also an industrial engineer, so everything that I get back, is around a natural sense of optimization, making things better, improving things, making the world better, climate change, it's all directed in that sense. So, the mission and the skill come together in this. So that was a driver. When we started, I would lie if I said I knew exactly where we'd end up, but therefore, as an entrepreneur to ask, to use that specific word, resilience is all you have and so you, against all odds, if you can keep the North star and the compass aligned, then you won't go off path. If one of them is misaligned, you pick the wrong North star or follow the wrong compass, you'll be landing in some hayward land and you'll claim that's where you wanted to go, but you'll be fooling yourself. And so, I think why we are happy, what we are doing, why the ecosystem likes what we have done, is because we've never strayed from either of those, the destination and the direction. And as we evolved, I think it became very clear. Actually, you asked a very interesting question. I think that ‘aha’ moment was somewhere between 20 14, 2016, when we realised that it is not a pass time, it's an institution-building exercise. If you really want to make a dent, you can make a snick, but you can't really make a dent if you don't get deeper, and you can avoid it and say, no, this is not what I signed up for, it is choking to my colleagues, and that really, I didn't think I was signing up for this. A forty people team and this much management and hundred companies at any time. But I think you realise that if you're not doing that, then you're really not shifting anything from the status quo dramatically. Others might, but you won't be a significant part of both ownership and credit for that. That became a life mission somewhere along the way. And you suddenly saw the star better, and you wanted to set the compass better every time, next part of the journey. Those are milestones; those two things have to stay intact.
Pritish: That's fascinating. And the reason for the question about resilience came up because I was going through your X-Unicorns podcast, which Blume produces, and it showcases the resilience of all the founders. And that is when I thought that I'm assuming you see yourself as a mutant who has stood the test of time. And obviously, I don't think it's a one-man effort; it’s the whole team who has stood with you and believed in you, and obviously, the founders that you have believed in. So why don't you actually tap into the X-Unicorn concept, the hypothesis, and what you've built, it's fascinating.
Karthik: No, it's again, I think it’s easy to say that we knew again, that this might happen from the beginning, we had no idea. So, I say it to my founders’ faces as well from that era, a lot of them are from pre, from fund 1 era, which means none of these companies we actually have showcased so far are less than seven years old. So, the seven-year-old company might say, why am I not on it? Maybe Niraj who is borderline seven, Spinny, but he will ask why are you not showcasing us? Because you actually have not gone through that, the ups and downs, you've only seen an up and up and the journey is, there's been no sort of massive bottleneck in the journeys yet. It's not like I'm waiting for that or a wish upon anyone. So don't get me wrong. If I had to redraw the odds, I would fund all of these companies far better, give them more capital. The market has improved now so they don't have to slog as much. But it becomes a realisation that just that physical and mental effort of having gone through that journey, prepares you for a much longer journey. I actually believe the motivation to do an E-Unicorns came from here. We thought this was entrepreneurship. The market was telling us something else. It was about frothy evaluations and quick money and all of that. And then you couldn't have said, no, even my entrepreneurship wins until you create winners. And when the winners come, it's like, oh my God, finally, it's happening. And then you can go and champion them. Mutants can look ugly and dwarfed. And then you say, who smiles at the dwarf mutant? That is the market. Until it starts looking powerful and uses out something that nobody else can, one celebrates in some sense. So, I think you're absolutely right. The reason we doubled down on it is that we see ourselves as a mutant as well, we see ourselves as something very unconventional. And despite all the odds people put on us, we've come through somehow, a long way to go, but I'm saying, even reaching here, people didn't give us odds. And similarly, to a lot of our companies, and we said this is, we are all built the same way. And if this is our core DNA, we should celebrate it. There'll be exceptions to the rule. They'll get celebrated in a different way. But how can there be such a disproportionately high share of these in our portfolio? And so that's who we are and let's celebrate it a little more than we can because that region we own as nobody has that kind of wherewithal to stay those journeys, even as an investor, forget about it all. And we've done both. We've stayed with them if their companies were 12 years old in the portfolio and we've given an exit to the investors, who were a little pained why it's taken 10 or 12 years, but we're still continuing with 10 of those journeys. So, it’s unprecedented. Nobody's ever done this to engineer seventeen-year journeys, sixteen-year journeys with your portfolio companies. And so, you have to put your money where your mouth is. You can give and just walk away or say, no, I will just back them. This was a, there's one company, let's take the name and give them some spot in the sun, Zopper, which was originally, believe it or not, a 25 Lakh check. That's how it started. Then we must have added like a crore or something like that. And then we didn't have money and then they didn't raise around for seven years, between 2015 and 2020, and then they raised the money, and now when they actually rolled over, I've rolled over through my fund position as well and 50-60 crores into that company, fresh money. I bought out the position. So, I'm not doing that to spite myself, and people say, oh, you're just passing hands, what rubbish! I obviously believe that this guy will make that 6,300. That's why I'm betting on it. And the fact that it can happen is unprecedented. Nobody's done this in this country. So, people say show me a quick buck, five years, I need to show IRR quickly. That's a financial problem. I get that, that's what I get paid to do. But I think the thrill and the journey with that founder is unparalleled. And that's what we've realised. That's what we are about, and that's what we get the biggest kicks off in what we do. And thankfully, our founders reciprocate that love both publicly and privately, and they begin to realise after a few years that we are a little different from most others. No, I'm not saying better or worse, little different.
Pritish: Brilliant! I would recommend everybody to listen to X-Unicorns. I think fascinating stories, insights, and a lot of understanding on how to persevere over the years, not only months, to get to where they're today.
You talked about a few things, which obviously, I want to get into long-term brand building, but before that, you mentioned risk. In a venture capital world, there is risk in investing in a startup; there’s risk in setting up the fund, and there are multiple risks associated at different stages. So how do you assess risk?
Karthik: Good question. I think I'm not trying to rediscover financial principles of capital markets, not even a speck. That's like, now to contextualise thinking that earth is relevant in the scale of the universe. I'm not bigger than the markets. I'm not bigger than the financial principles that everybody else operates on. I can’t have my own finance, you know, I have to operate the finance that my next round investor, my entrepreneur, the public market all believe in. That belief is, this is money, how it grows, what we invest in for, and how it can actually give back money, which is the concept of markets has to be understood. So, I think I like and am reasonably good at those aspects, which is where I said the underpinning of financial markets built into me through two MBAs and years in between and the years after served me well. That underpinning is probably not as prevalent in the venture industry, both even globally, I would argue, which is why you see far more bubbles than I should venture, in my view, because the valuation is funny, the maths is funny, there's no answerability to public markets, so they can do whatever the hell they want in this private market. But eventually the Mecca is that, the public. “Sabko Vahin pohochna hai '' (Everyone wants to reach there), somebody who is in the public market. Public market is big. So eventually market rule is all I'm trying to say. Essentially that is also a market. It might be in the private domain, but it's also a market. So, my principles of risk are driven by, if that is the end state, how can you interpolate and work all the way backward to what it takes to understand seed stage risk? Relative to A, B, C, D, E, F, public. And so most, the biggest publicly known secret in venture capital is, all of us work hardest and rewards backward. Bottoms up is that it gives you cues. For example, if you have 25 year old founders versus 35 year old founders who have worked in the domain and 30, 32 year old founders who actually built a very quick four year exit and worked in a unicorn. That's people's risk. Scaling risk, skill risk, ambition risk, all of those. If you take all those three varieties of people pitching you theoretically the exact same idea in three 30-minute intervals, you would price them all differently. And to flip that, suppose this same person, same skill set, same experience, which three different ideas you would press them. Because you have a perception of the end-state, market, and business model. You will get it wrong, eight out of ten times, both when you pick a company and when you say no to agree; what does it mean that you pick, you didn't understand those well enough and that's the reality of the market 90% of the time, even the entrepreneur doesn't know it.
So, it goes back to the necessary ingredient of resilience. Because without that, you can't survive the market. You're not copying; you’re not building another cement factory, and you're not doing solar installations. You're trying to reinvent the world somehow, which means you don't know how it'll play. So, if there's humility in that, then all you're playing with is a massive market; I’ll discover it. And you have a view; you have an opening view. If the view is shaky, you won't pick the thing. You've converted risk-pricing to a zero-one decision first. No. So you don't have a view on something which is zero in your head. That means I won't even play. That means you don't understand the risks, so you stay out. That's actually the humility of a good VC, if you ask me, if you didn’t get it, stay out; if you got it, then you go and play that. Then you try to assess one of these two. The more confidence in how to assess people's risk and how to assess market risk, the more accurate your pricing might be, and your understanding of that risk might be. Doesn't mean anything. Do you know why? Because until you can fund this ad infinitum, you will expose yourself, the founder, and the business afresh to the God state, which is the market, 12 months from now. And that market is absurdly inefficient compared to the public market. Anything can happen. As they show in the movies where you are walking, and your dream life partner walks by 10 feet apart, and you don't know they went by. That can happen in VC too. There might be a person sitting two doors away in another VC building who is looking exactly for something like what you're doing, and for whatever reason, I didn't meet them. You can ask how that could happen. There is a perfect market; pitch everybody. That doesn’t happen. There is timing, thesis, and there is a gap. Somebody might say I really like it, but I've done two deals in Jan and suddenly, so I'm not doing anything for the next few months. What logic is this? That's not how to assess risk, price it, or pick a company. Believe it or not, it's such a thin market, so inefficient a capital market that has actually happened. Somebody had bet on a very similar play last year. They said, hey, that founder is saying the business model might overlap with what you will do, but stay away. But I really like it. And then, eventually, the one you really like might just whip the one you just said yes to last. Instagram was that part, by the way, and the legend goes, they bet on something from the core fund and something from the option fund. The option fund was Instagram. So how do you know? You don't know. And that is why Ventures for 55 - 60 years still have a loss ratio and small-large outcome ratio in every portfolio, vintage, market, VC, and site in the world. So, you say there is so much wisdom in the world; how is this happening? Show me data proving otherwise, and I'll change my mind. So, I tell LPs also this, don't be absurd. Don't make us look bad. Tell me who in the U.S. has done this better. It's just that the markets, their size of markets, the size, the people, fields are all little cycles ahead of us. It's a more mature market. They get a hundred-billion-dollar outcome once in a while. We struggle to get ten billion dollars, so their outcomes look better. I am not denying that. Are you trying to say the guy is more intelligent because he picked better and all that? No, that's not true. It's in the market, they explain. There are too many risks, so I think it continues to be called venture capital. Its root, as you may or may not know, is from adventure, so it's called adventure capital. That's what it is.
Pritish: Oh, brilliant. I actually didn't know that. I will read up on that. It will be fascinating. You talked about founders and their pitching and the timing, do founders need to disapprove or disprove your long-term held market or industry hypothesis to get you interested?
Karthik: It goes both ways. I think there are too many variants of risk takers in the even at every, at, even at every stage, but they tend to sift. So, this means somebody who's not capable of judging generally won't do what we do. Did all the hard work be done by these hundred funds like Blume, let them figure all this out, I'll wait for three years and see that risk looks more and more like what I'm prepared to take and what the end state market might look like, which means business model, pricing, go-to-market. founder stability, co-founder stability, and ability to hire senior management. That's what you need to build a legendary, large company. So, when I'm beginning to see far more sightings of that is when I'll bother. So, we have removed this. In fact, people will say, I don't like technology risk, I don't like hardware risk, I don't like business model risk. They'll say it to your face. Cause if you have not solved for them, they're not cutting the chain. That's their DNA. So, from my lens, I'm not looking for that, cool to have criteria, that sell me the idea that’s path-breaking or world-changing necessarily. So, I think it's naive to think that only those can succeed. There are enough examples of people coming and breaking what is an existing business model, improving on those business models dramatically, and taking advantage of big regulatory shifts, electric vehicles, fin-techs, etc. It wasn’t possible to sell those same businesses three years ago. So that's what I think you're looking for as a VC. So, technology, regulatory, and just lethargy/waiting to be disrupted industries, is where you want the founder to come and tell them why they will do any of those. I've also written a blog maybe eight years ago, and I remember the title because I refer to it occasionally. So, the incremental entrepreneurs are not ours to back; that was a little controversial headline. So, I'm not interested in someone coming and making incremental improvements to our businesses. That's private equity. That's not us.
Pritish: That's brilliant. One thing I've observed from your interviews and on your blog is that you have a very decisive way of communicating. Is that something you’ve developed or came from your reading or observations? How did that happen?
Karthik: I think many people say this in different ways. Thanks for the observation, but we get this in different formats from different people, and it spooks many people. It spooks a co-investor because you're saying something they don't agree with. It'll hurt a founder because they don't like to listen to things that are contrary to how they imagine the business. They think you’re like a sort of looker to my business; how can you know it better? It spooks an LP because they think we're too idealistic. They think we don't know how to make money; we just talk through our heads. So hopefully, we started proving some of that wrong. But I'm saying that until we did, we used to spook them. But fundamentally, the underlying element or the common thread between what you said and all of these three things I had mentioned is eventually, either at that point in time or during the call or after reading it, after sleeping over the next day, next year, next fund, they come back and say, now we understand what you said. And we love the fact that you're always honest in what you say, in what you believe. I said we do; thankfully, for better or worse, we don't know anything other than that method of communicating. So, I think it's just a criminal waste of everybody's time, and I don't have time to beat around the bush. So basically, I might as well get to the point and say what I must. I don't need friends at the end of every conversation. There can be dissonance; it’s perfectly fine. So, I think it comes from that philosophically. I’m trying to push as much of that in the organisation. The challenge is that that's my persona. It's not necessarily everybody's persona. So culturally, we allow for it, and that forward thrives, I would argue. So, Blume as a brand will weigh towards that. You can never be what I am. No. Because that's me. You have to have your own confidence in what you're saying. You must have a persona that says what you can say and not worry about consequences. And you also have to be politically correct. I am the chairperson of IVCA now. So, if the industry has given you that position, then you better speak in enough politically right manner to everybody. Not that I wasn't trained enough to do that, which is why I got nominated to IVCA; who thought I was capable of that? But broadly, I do tell youngsters in the team and otherwise saying that communication is a superpower. And you should know what to say when and how to say it. Sometimes it's about waiting 12 hours. Sometimes it's about leaving a voice note. Sometimes it's about adding an emoji. Sometimes it's about using a podcast, which is why I enjoy these sessions. So, thanks for having me again because it allows you to communicate something which a natural setting will never offer. And an outside-in curiosity that you bring is not something that people around you don't ask; number one, they don't have to articulate this question, and two, they take it for granted because it's how you listen to your parents. You take what they say for granted. And so that happens a lot with our and our team. So, the podcast allowed me to contextualise or summarise views at the level that they don't hear from me otherwise. So that's why you hear them the way you do or read them the way you do, wherever they're in the public domain. They're the most clean, straight from the heart, with no agenda, either kind. Nothing to hide, conversational style.
Pritish: That's a brilliant answer, and thank you for saying it ‘as is,’ I observed it not because in one conversation, every other conversation I heard, I saw that you direct the conversation in one direction. You give the backing why it is like that. So that has been amazing, which obviously shows in the blog.
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