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The big audacious goals that drive Rohan Shravan (incredible serial founder!)
181 Plays1 year ago
Rohan Shravan’s journey is a testament to the never-say-die spirit of the Indian founder. He created the world's first Android tablet, Notion. And even though his dream of building a hardware devices company from India did not work out, he's now pioneering Tresa Motors, set to launch India's finest EV truck. Hear about his journey and his determination to make a difference on a big scale.
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Read more about Tresa Motors:-
2.Tresa Motors unveils India's first electric truck for the global market: See Pics
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Transcript
Introduction to Ruan Stravan and Tressa Motors
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, my name is Ruan Stravan. I'm the founding CEO of Tressa Motors. And currently at Tressa Motors, we are building electric trucks. Let's start with the notion. How old were you when you started Notion? 2009. So I would be 24 years old. And what were you doing? Okay. What were you doing at that time?
Early Career and Return to India
00:00:21
Speaker
So I just graduated from IIT Kharagpur and then
00:00:26
Speaker
Incorrect itself, I wanted to make something interesting and double as well of the future according to me at that time and I started writing the Nvidia and they said that the main discussion is in the US and that's where they have been sort of and maybe if you can come over or have a discussion with someone here.
00:00:44
Speaker
Then possibly you can take it forward. So I joined this company called Shrambaje for three months and they had posted me in India. I think oil processing. Yes, they had to oil rigs and drilling the foil and I was assigned to Oklahoma for training.
Vision for NVIDIA Tegra and Tablet Development
00:01:01
Speaker
And that was the time when I could reach out to those people, decided to leave, come back to India.
00:01:06
Speaker
And the reference platform which we were to get from Nvidia was around a year, maybe six to nine months after our discussion. So I had some time. I came back from India, decided to make a monk. What did you need from Nvidia? Sorry, I didn't get that. So if we go back to 2008, the computers were built on a concept called left bridge and right bridge.
00:01:28
Speaker
There were different memory architectures, and NVIDIA had come out with a processor called NVIDIA Tegra. And Tegra was the world's first SoC, which integrated these left bits and right bits. Today it's common, so when you, for example, pick a Qualcomm processor, it has a 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, everything integrated, including the RAM also, which is sitting on top of it. But early days, the GPU was different, the memory was different, the RAM was different. Even today it's different, but the physical locations were way off.
Spiritual Journey and Insights
00:01:55
Speaker
Everything was not integrated in one single chip.
00:01:57
Speaker
Nvidia had made that and I thought that's the right technology to build something like a tablet. iPad wasn't there at that time and that's where it all started that maybe this device can actually become the future of computing.
00:02:10
Speaker
Okay, interesting. So you came back to India and you became a monk. What do you mean you became a monk? Yeah, so I have a very deep interest in Vedas and scriptures, not from a religious point of view, but just from a curiosity point of view, like what is it written and different things. For example, if you see, they talk about astrology now, right? It takes thousands of years for a Jupiter or Saturn to make a turn around the Sun.
00:02:31
Speaker
So how you wait for that long and figure out what's the turn at all? So I thought like, okay, let's spend some time in learning with us. And I thought that maybe Buddhist scriptures might have saved something like that. So I came back to India, told my mom that for six, seven months I'm going to be a monk, left Delhi and went to Ladakh and
00:02:51
Speaker
There's something interesting happening happened. I would have traveled around six, seven different monasteries and my driver was also getting frustrated because every monastery I'll go to the head monk there sitting in his room in an office where he has a laptop, he's playing snakes on his Nokia, the best of the printers, and he's telling me, you've come in the wrong season. Becoming a monk is actually a business. If you come in July, this was March, April I'm talking about, if you come in July, then probably we can enroll you in some visitor package
00:03:21
Speaker
I said, no, I really want to become longer. I want to understand what is happening. That's not how it works. So my driver got frustrated and finally he asked me like, why are you doing what you're doing? I told him that I'm here to look for some sort of insight, some sort of inspiration which can guide the rest of my life. And what he said actually became the trajectory of my life. What he said is, what you're looking for is deep inside you. Go back and search for it.
Challenges in Industrial Design and Tablet Market
00:03:45
Speaker
So it's like, so that moment for me was like the Saarthi and Arjun kind of. Wow. Amazing. Amazing. OK. So did you go back or did you stay there for that? Yeah. Then I came back to Delhi and then decided to come to Bangalore. So at that time I was looking for someone who can help me design the product. I'm talking about industrial design. And NID was one of the best institutes there. Call NID Ahmedabad. They said, no, that's not what we do here. Maybe possibly we can go to NID Bangalore, where the master's students are there.
00:04:15
Speaker
So I called an ID, I spoke to Dean and he said, just come over. So I come to Bangalore for three days, but after that not left back. Wow, amazing, amazing. And were there tablets out in the market at that time as a form factor? No, there were a few concepts, but they were again based on the Intel concept where you have again the same memory architecture.
00:04:41
Speaker
But a tablet research was not there. The concept itself was not there. In fact, we built the first Android operating system was built by Notion Inc. Wow. OK. Maybe there would have been some Windows devices where the laptop form factor would have been changed into a tablet kind of things. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So that now, again, is on Intel, which would mean that you have the left bridge and right bridge as a concept. The touch screens were still resistive. We had a few patents on the capacitive touch screens also.
00:05:10
Speaker
Okay, the batteries are also thick and big. Okay, so those would have been big bulky tablets not responsive to touch. What is the difference in capacitive and resistive touch? Can you come back?
00:05:25
Speaker
What is the difference between capacitive and resistive touch? You remember old ATMs where you had to go and press multiple times 10 years ago? Yeah, I mean it's still there with a lot of ATMs here. Yes, so those are resistive screens where it works with the pressure. Whereas in capacitive it works with the conductivity of your skin. So they are much more smoother. Capacitive also have multi-touch and hence 5 touch, 10 touch and all the tech we have today. And the stylus as well. Okay, understood.
00:05:53
Speaker
Right. Okay. Got it.
Prototype Success and Manufacturing Struggles
00:05:55
Speaker
So, okay. You found someone at NID then once you let. Yeah. So yeah, I came back and then started working with NID Bangalore. The team initially was very helpful, but the problem was that the Nvidia contact had passed on to India. And they were asking like, who's helping you do this? Because
00:06:13
Speaker
I was naive, so I didn't know what it takes to do it. But NVIDIA knew, and they knew that you would need a lot of money and resources and people and know how to do this. So I would tell them I'm 28 years old because I was too young, according to them, to do something like this. And then there was a chicken and egg issue. NVIDIA wouldn't work with me because I don't have a backup. And NID wouldn't work with me because I didn't have a backup. So there was a chicken and egg. And what I realized is the only solution of coming out of Chicken Egg is to lie for one day.
00:06:42
Speaker
So I told NID that NVIDIA is backing me up. And I told NVIDIA that NID is backing me up. And within a day, it was a lie, but next day it became a truth.
00:06:50
Speaker
I got a backing from NID to work on the design and Nvidia said that, okay, we are happy to work with you, but we don't need to provide reference design directly. Possibly you can get it from Foxconn or Compil or Konta. These are the largest OEMs in the world, largest manufacturers of computing devices in the world. So there was a market gain.
00:07:16
Speaker
No, but why do you need a reference design? You're saying there is no tablet in the market. So where is the question of reference design coming from? Yeah, so when a processor company makes a processor, they just don't give you the processor. They give you a reference architecture of how this can be actually leveraged.
00:07:31
Speaker
because there's something called a board support package, which essentially has all the drivers for different components that I might end up using. My camera might be Sony, it can be some other companies also, maybe Omnivision, so if I have to do that, then I have to have drivers for that. So an architecture from Qualcomm or Nvidia will support these hardwares and give you a board support package using which you can make an operating system deciding what components you have to make.
00:07:52
Speaker
But a reference design is also given because if you don't give a reference design, then it's literally like read the whole spec sheet and data sheet and then make something out. So every processor comes out with a reference design. You need a reference design to start. And a reference design is a design of the board and where to connect what? The reference design, yes. I mean, I'm thinking of IKEA here. It's something like that. This is where you plug in the camera.
00:08:16
Speaker
So it's something like that. It has debug pins. It has a lot of interfaces to interact with the processor and try and understand what might be going wrong. But reference design was not for a tablet. Reference design was for a notebook. They were trying to do something like Google Chrome in 2009. So the reference design, what I ended up getting was also not for a tablet. It was for, you can say, a Chromebook or something similar. OK. OK.
00:08:45
Speaker
They used to be called netbooks or something like that. Okay. Got it. And, uh, so you, uh, I mean, your original vision was to create a device or was it to create a tablet? No, my vision since beginning. And even today, what I'm also working on is on the same lines that machines, the definition of machine is something which makes a life easy.
00:09:12
Speaker
Today, the machines we have, we are reliant on them. If we take the machines out of our life, we are just dead people with a bored life. So my vision, since the beginning, has been to make technologies or products which actually take away all of that load and actually do the stuff that we are doing. Humans are designed to explore, to discover, to invent, and to enjoy what is there in the whole universe. We happy, have humility.
00:09:36
Speaker
have humanity. But now all of us are stuck in the cycle of eat, sleep, drink, wake up, work. And that sort of takes away the, we are supposed to be the alpha of the whole civilization. But if you've seen this movie called Matrix in Matrix, Agent Smith's, I don't remember exact words, but it either goes something like this. Human species is like a virus. We go everywhere, we destroy that area and then we move on to next stage.
00:10:01
Speaker
And that essentially happens because we have to spend so much time in making these machines and use all the resources. But if we can do it properly and focus on just being human, then there's a lot better. So a lot better can be done. So that's the dream since the beginning. So I wanted to make a device which actually replaces the laptops and tablets and all such, which is integrated with AI, can do a lot of stuff. And all the features which we are trying at that time was also something similar. This is something that YouTube has started doing now. But we had a Turbo Future in 2010.
00:10:27
Speaker
Where when you are moving, let's say, from location A to B, let's say in a flight, you press that button, it's going to download YouTube videos and at that time, less of videos. But most of the browsers or websites that you visit keep a backup copy so you can actually read on the flight. So all the features that we're thinking of were on those lines. It was one of the world's first tablet to have a Zigbee also inbuilt.
00:10:49
Speaker
We couldn't scale up or Zigbee used to be a very high performance Bluetooth and Wi-Fi like communication network where we can control IoT devices. It had a DAC or a sort of oscilloscope system building site because it has everything to compute all the electronics, take all the electronic signals and work with all the four years that we need to work on them. So the idea was that why can't we use a tablet like oscilloscope to allow an engineer to do more.
00:11:19
Speaker
What does an oscilloscope do?
Media Attention and Funding Strategies
00:11:23
Speaker
No, that's accelerometer. Oscilloscope would be those machines which you might have seen in labs, electronic labs, where you see those signals going up and down. So when you, let's say, are working on a motherboard or a processor, you can touch the pins and it will tell you the frequency at which you're getting the signal out. You can do frequency analysis and some of the creative stuff which engineers do.
00:11:45
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Okay. So essentially you wanted to make something like what an iPad today is. That's what you wanted to build. Yeah. Like maybe you were like 10 years too early in your ambition. Probably iPad with some of the other accessories that we have to attach it to make it more usable. iPad definitely is a really great product with the evolution it has gone through, but still can't be used as many other things that we can actually use it for.
00:12:14
Speaker
Okay, so you needed reference designs and you just continue the solution. So you got reference designs for a netbook. No, so Nvidia said, I can't give you reference design, you can take it from Foxconn, Compel and Quanta. I have never spoken to them, they are based out of Taiwan at that time, so you have to figure out what to do. And one of my friends just joking, he said, why don't we just go there?
00:12:36
Speaker
So I took a flight next week and just went to Taiwan and uninvited, trying to figure out how to do a contact. So I sat in the cafe, which is in front of Foxconn's main office. One of the engineers came out, I saw him coming out multiple times, approached him and spoke to him. And then, interestingly, within half an hour, he went back and actually got me the netbook that they were working on. So it was still not a reference design. It was a netbook which Foxconn was working on.
00:13:00
Speaker
And he said something interesting. I'm giving you this. You have to install a PSP on top of it. And once you install the PSP, you can do whatever you want. What I want you to work on is one of the applications that I'll share with you. If you can design that application, then I think we both are equal. We both are done in our transaction and we'll definitely help you build more.
00:13:18
Speaker
So I took that boat, came back to India. What's a PSP? You'll have to leave. Coming to that, coming to that. So I came back to India and then told my engineers happily that, okay, all we have to do is install this PSP and then we're done.
00:13:31
Speaker
We looked online, PSP seems like a gaming console or some acronym or some companies or some weird things, but nothing concrete came out. And we were too ashamed to, in fact, call them back and ask, what is this PSP? We probably would have spent a month to figure out what exactly has to happen. And then finally I called him and told him, I don't understand what is this PSP I'm not able to get. He said, it's not PSP, it's BSP, which is the board support package I was talking about. Okay.
00:14:00
Speaker
Okay, so finally when we learned, oh it's a BSP port support package, then we got some files from Nvidia and some open source kernels from Linux and then we were ready to go. Now, I'm talking about early December of 2009 and we plan to make a device for the next three weeks.
00:14:21
Speaker
What I have is a motherboard for a netbook, which is big and ugly and huge. And the reason we want to finish in 15 days is because the CES 2010 was around the corner, I think 6th of January. And CES is consumer electronics show in, I think, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, yeah. Biggest, so just like in India, we have the auto expo for cars. It's like the similar biggest show for consumer electronics in the world. Correct, correct.
00:14:48
Speaker
Correct. So 15 days we have to figure out. We immediately got into action. We made the whole device, whole packaging, everything. The glass is not there. The batteries are not there. We ended up using some of the laptop batteries. Our design was very unique. If you remember, we had a circular shape at the end. For design in such a way, so the batteries are held in your hand. That's our heaviest components. We actually feel devices very light.
00:15:13
Speaker
because the center of gravity is actually very close to your hand. So we got that done, but display was a problem. So I flew from Bangalore to Taiwan, got the display done on 4th of January. I took a flight from there and went to Vegas on 5th. Again, not invited anywhere. But Nvidia was hosting the tech. You were intending to manufacture this in-house, or you were just making a prototype, and then it would be outsourced to a Foxconn to manufacture.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, so India at that time never had any capability to manufacture of this quality. And the plan was to make in India, but the more I realized is that we don't even have a machine which can do SMT for the 16 layer PCBs in the country at that time. So that got clarified as we move forward that we definitely need a partner to manufacture this, where the design and assembly happened as much as possible here, including the software part.
00:16:06
Speaker
So from there flew to Las Vegas, it's 5th of January evening and Nvidia is hosting an event tomorrow, 6th of January on the launch of the Nvidia Tegra 1. It was only announced but the physical launch hasn't happened. And 5th evening... And Tegra 1 is that system on chip which you're talking about. Yes. So Jensen, Nvidia CEO, he's practicing what to say next day.
00:16:33
Speaker
And we were not the only tablet in that room. We had tablets from Foxconn, from Compil, from Kontor, and probably 11 more reference designs, including from Nvidia as well. But the only tablet which was working well in my hand. And tablet or netbook? Like you're saying netbook. Tablet. Oh, you made a tablet. Okay. Okay. So we had used that reference design for a netbook, converted that into a tablet.
00:16:59
Speaker
And when I went to that show on 5th evening, he had 10 devices on his table, but none of them were working. Everyone was a perky, or the touchpad is not working, or the battery is not, or the device is not booting up, but the only device which is working is in my hand. And what was the OS you used? We used Android. Yeah, we used our own custom Android.
00:17:20
Speaker
Okay. So he ended up taking our device on the stage and showed to the world that this is the future of computing. And this is built by a company called Notion Inc. based out of Bangalore. Wow. Amazing. What an introduction. Amazing.
00:17:34
Speaker
And the moment that happened, everyone took crunch to crunch care or everyone was behind us. In fact, then Nvidia decided to give me their own booth to talk about Nvidia and the tablet. And I was in the Nvidia booth in Vegas talking to different people. We had built one digital magazine concept. This is the future of digital magazine.
00:17:53
Speaker
And I was explaining to one gentleman who had these spikes, very long spikes, that the future of magazine is going to look like this. This is what we've done for popular science, for example. You will have different pages and animations. And then when he was leaving, he gave me his card. He was the editor of popular science. Wow. Amazing. A lot of interesting stuff from that point on.
00:18:19
Speaker
So that was the highest for us. We build a really good solid base of people who love notioning. The design was also open. We shared with people what we're doing, what we finished this week. Every Saturday I used to write a blog. If I get lead by an art, we'll have comments on the blog. Where's the blog? I just want to understand what's the processes. But when I came back to India, yeah. This was like you were essentially doing what is today called as building in public. Building in public, yes.
00:18:46
Speaker
Okay, so you would tell people that okay, we are now reaching prototype stage, we are now reaching manufacturing stage and so on, like just to keep them engaged until you are actually able to have the inventory to sell.
00:18:58
Speaker
So not only that, it's like to get the idea also. Now, for example, one of the person give an idea that our speaker grins must be in a particular shape and we incorporated that. Now, for example, that idea was given by you. Suddenly you'll have an ownership of the product that I'm making. So the affection you'll have for the brand and the product is very different because you're being heard from the day of zero. Right. This is the pre Kickstarter era. Kickstarter was not there at that time or it was just coming up.
00:19:24
Speaker
So we did that and everyone is excited. Our team is excited. And until that time, by the way, I have not raised the money. What I realized in my list is that you don't need money. You need money to do something. So if you want to do something and if you can get that done, then you actually don't need money. So you had not raised money at that time. What I had done was I pitched two universities. One was JNTU and the other was BBRIT in Hyderabad.
00:19:48
Speaker
And I told them that I will get my best friends from my college. They're working in Google, Oracle, and such companies. We are going to teach your students. You need to give me a lab where I can teach them. They're not going to go to your university. They're not attending your classes. They will attend the lecture which my friends and I'm going to give them. And they're just going to come back and give an exam.
00:20:08
Speaker
And BVRIT gave us one acre of campus which was designed for Microsoft, but because of the telegana fights at that time, Microsoft couldn't come in. So given one acre of posh facility with the highest end computers and internet connection where these 35 kids came learned and actually designed the operating system and the software we were writing at that time.
00:20:29
Speaker
OK, amazing. So essentially, these were interns whom you were also responsible for educating the academic part, who built up the software stack for Notion. Correct. And on the design and manufacturing side, what did you do there?
00:20:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I've been designing since 2006. In fact, since 2006, I've been using Blender. Blender is one of my favorite software. It's a 3D animation and design software. So the whole thing that we did was design in Blender. And we had help from an idea also. There's a designer called Makran Kulkarni. He had designed the first PEP Scooty.
00:21:11
Speaker
And he was instrumental in designing what we did. And in fact, most of the design actually go to him. I was only telling that, can we do this, can we do that? Where design was phenomenal on what he did. And then finally, we had the prototypes also ready to be able to show to the world. And how did you do this without money? I mean, you're like a fresh IIT graduate.
00:21:34
Speaker
And you hadn't worked, so there will be no savings. Did your family support you? No. So the family support was in a form that go ahead and do what you want to do.
00:21:45
Speaker
So I come from a middle class family and with strong ethics and desire to do something interesting always. But my family had already done a lot for me to get to that stage where now it's on me. So I never asked for it. I'm sure if I'd asked for it, they would have done something. So for the software development, whole development, we don't need any money because the lab is already given and these students are not being paid at that time.
00:22:09
Speaker
And for the dean of the college, himself invested a small amount of 25 lakh into the company. And that 25 lakh allowed me to go to Taiwan. And I also got some savings from my Schlumberger 3-4 months. They pay really well. So I got that money also to invest back and get the things up and rolling. Amazing, amazing. OK. OK, so you did the design then for manufacturing, like you would have had to pay them upfront. How did you find that?
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, so all of this is within this 25 lakh plus whatever I had invested. So we were very frugal in the way we want to do things. So we're not talking about entering tooling yet. We are just talking about a prototype. Now, what do you mean by tooling? Okay, so when you make you have you heard of injection molding? Yeah.
00:23:00
Speaker
So, you mold, you inject this liquid plastic into something and the thing you inject in is called molding. So, you need to take a steel, big steel slabs, CNC out the negative of what you want to make and then pour metal in case of Tesla for example in Giza factory or plastic for injection molding. So, tooling is very expensive, that is one of the most expensive part for an email transaction.
00:23:25
Speaker
So we didn't have money at that time. So now we had proven to reward. This can be done. We have a lot of media attention and people following us. So now is the time to raise funds. And that was the time I started teaching out of the VCs. OK. Indian VCs?
00:23:38
Speaker
At that time, Indian VCs, yes. But they would have been just like a handful of Indian VCs at that time, right? No, Shikar was there, IDG was there, when Jareesh was there. In fact, I would have approached 90 plus VCs, all of them said no. Okay, despite all the media attention. Despite all the media attention. So the comments would be like, you look too young to be able to do this, how can you do this, if you do this, how you sell, etc, etc.
Legal and Operational Challenges
00:24:05
Speaker
I've never been done. Hardware software you can still see. Not a lot of VCs invest in hardware software. True, true, true, true. Yeah, yeah. The formula is to invest in software which can scale infinitely. Yes. Got it. OK.
00:24:18
Speaker
So then what happened is like while this is happening and in the early stages, one of the VCU was very positive on investing and I was in a very good contact. They are probably the best VC in the country also. I was talking to them that what exactly should we do. The solution came in and at that time we were very close to finalizing.
00:24:38
Speaker
Then because it's going to go public, I'm not going to take names. One of the largest businesses in the country approached the CTO of the company directly called me and said that we want to invest and come and meet me.
00:24:52
Speaker
And this was in Bombay. And then from Bangalore, Hyderabad at that time, I flew to Bombay. And the meeting was at 10 PM at night. And before entering in, me and my partner, we are waiting outside the hotel. So their team went inside the hotel, made everyone just come out. So it's like proper movie scene. There are 10 black cars coming in. And I find inside there's a set up. There's a projector on which the projection is happening, and what the company does, and how big the company is. And then I enter inside. And the pitch was very simple from their side.
00:25:20
Speaker
write a number which you want, we'll invest that money, but we need 51% of the company. The pitch was very simple from their end. And from our side was like, okay, what's happening? We don't know. And then I asked this VC also that, what do you think I should do? And hearing the name they said, like, see, they have the kind of resources they have is, you should just go ahead. This will definitely help you a lot because we will invest, but our investment is also not going to be comparable to the quantum they can invest and take you up.
00:25:46
Speaker
So this is me at 24 years old. I agreed. And we signed an MOU. The MOU did not have an end date. The MOU said that I cannot raise funds outside. And then six months of nightmares started for us. Six months went in. What was the money that you were promised for 51%? This is 32 crore. Yeah, 32 crore. And 3 plus 2 is 5. 32 crore and 4 rupees.
00:26:16
Speaker
Okay, 4 rupees. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I used to love the number 9, so the sum has to be 9. That's 32 crore, 3 rupees. But MA did not have an end date. We had 51% ownership on the product, technology and the future. They had 51% ownership on the equity. That's the kind of team which was supposed to be there.
00:26:43
Speaker
But nothing happened for next six months. Next six months was me spending time and taking them to Taiwan, introducing Quanta, Compel, Fox on all the connections. This is essentially the learning how to make a product. And slowly me and my team got some idea of what exactly is happening. And at the same time, we are talking to people and people expect a product to come out on time.
00:27:02
Speaker
Now, certainly there's a six to nine months of delay, which is unaccounted for in anyone's imagination, including mine. So now when I'm going back and seeing the products getting delayed, that's where slight desperation starts coming in. Is it a vaporware? Are you even going to make it? And finally, we approach for the lawyers to understand what can we do because of this MOU.
00:27:21
Speaker
And they said that an email is a legal entity. So if you send an email saying that, OK, you are taking me along, we like to explore outside, are you OK? And if they apply to that, it's OK. That's a legal document which you can use to say that, OK, you had agreed, and there's a written proof of that. So we did exactly that, came out immediately. And at that time, I got one of my connections to invest a couple of crores in the company that allow us to move to Bangalore and set up the office and start. But I don't have money for the running capital actually entering manufacturing and doing all what we're looking for.
00:27:51
Speaker
Because the injection mold would need a lot of upfront investment. Yeah. So when you make a product, you have to invest in something called tooling, as I explained the injection mold parts. And second is called NRE. NRE is non-recurring expenditure. So that's the cost of development to the, let's say, Foxconn or someone else who can make it for you. So I thought, OK, let's talk to Foxconn at least and understand how much they're going to charge. Foxconn gave us a code of, I think, around 4 million at that time, and we had
00:28:22
Speaker
in lakhs of money in the bank account. So we knew that, OK, Foxconn, we can't work with. Then there was one company also based out of Taiwan and China both. Foxconn were also moving to China at that time, which gave a quote which was acceptable to us. We figured that we can do something. And they were also very keen on doing something like this. And so we worked with them, designed the product, and gave initial money to them. But we are running out of capital very fast. And we had to figure out a way of injection.
00:28:48
Speaker
Now, iPad is already launched by then. We're talking about September, we're talking about August of 2010. iPad was launched in March of 2010. And was there any Android tablet out by then? No, not yet, no. Okay. No. So, and so we're already late. Now, when we go back to the same VC, who are suggest you can work with them said, no, iPad is already out. Now, how will you compete? How will you make? So we knew that VC is not going to work out. So we did something called pre-order.
00:29:17
Speaker
We allowed people to buy the product before we shipped. And because the positivity and the overall momentum of the product was high, we were sold out within seconds every time we went out for the first four times. So we went out. And this was an Indian audience, which was buying? No, we did not sell in India at all in the first two iterations. So the problem is that how do we take money?
00:29:40
Speaker
There was no international payment gateway in 2010. Your bank account is in India. Exactly. The only way you can take money is Swift. And Swift is slow. So we build India's first international payment gateway with CCI and ICICI. Wow. So there's a lot of things that we should not have done, for example. This itself is a business and we did the whole thing, worked the whole architecture out and went online.
00:30:03
Speaker
Now, the moment we went online, there are some mistakes from our side also. At that time, when I'm asking you to fill the address, and instead of phone number, you write, let's say, my name, the form will still accept it. It's definitely a stupid mistake, but these mistakes happen, and we should have tested much better. But again, this is me coming from doing it for the first time. I take the blame even though I can blame it on my software in general also. That happened. And then what happened is, I say I had a limit of how much foreign capital can come in in seconds.
00:30:34
Speaker
We sold around 1000 units each at $650 in 4 seconds. So we were blocked by ICICI. And on the website, it was set as some unauthorized activity going on. We are sorry, sorry. Now TechCrunch picked it up.
00:30:50
Speaker
And they just blasted the head out of Notioning online. They just said this has everything for a scam to be making. And the payment page has mistakes. You can write your name instead of phone numbers, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a big, big nightmare. Then we went back to ICIC. I explained what's happening. They opened it up. But damage was already done. And now I'm talking about December 2010.
00:31:14
Speaker
Now TechCrunch challenged me that if you come to Las Vegas CES 2011 and show us the product and if we think the product is real, then I'll eat my own hat. One of the very interesting journalists just openly challenges us.
00:31:29
Speaker
So I went to Vegas, I took the device, I showed it to him and he did the live coverage of the whole video and he loved the device. He saw the animation that were there, the overall screens. We had this, when you press Windows, sorry, the options key or the command tab on your Mac, you get this or your iPhone, you get this animation right, multiple screens.
00:31:50
Speaker
That's something that we had built in Android in 2010. We had a multi-window system already in 2010. We had three applications that you can open at the same time. We saw all of that. You heavily customized Android for that. We heavily customized. In fact, Android didn't have a tablet experience in the early years. No. So what we did interestingly was, Mentor graphics is really good in automotive.
00:32:12
Speaker
Most of the displays at that time were done by animation, were done by mental graphics. So we worked with mental graphics to take the automotive solution, put it on tablet so we can do those animations. So the whole user interface was done on mental graphics. Okay. What does graphics for automotive in what sense? So when you see a dashboard, for example, when you see BMW, you see those icons and menus, all that, right? Okay.
00:32:37
Speaker
the UI in automotive. So in automotive, you don't have an operating system essentially. Everything is embedded and can have different variants. So there's an OpenGL or a graphic layer that sits on top of the OS and that layer takes care of all the animations that you can design. So I'm talking about 2010. If you sit in an audio in 2010, you will still have beautiful animation which immediately boots up.
00:33:00
Speaker
So like a luxury cars had like a touchscreen. Exactly. At that time also. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we picked that and then we build that into our tablet and made the whole UI animation, ensure it to a tech crunch, but better time damage was already done.
Competition and Product Development
00:33:16
Speaker
But even after that, the next few times when we went online for our sales, we were sold out. But now the problem is our tablet had few components which were never used. One of the component was called a Pixel G display.
00:33:29
Speaker
What display, sorry? It's called Pixel G, P-I-X-A-L-Q-I, where the pronunciation is G. Now Pixel G is coming from a background of OLPD, one laptop per child.
00:33:43
Speaker
One laptop per child. So there, this company or their promoters had invented a screen where in sunlight you can read the display. So essentially your display turns into black and white just like a Kindle. When you go inside, let's say in a slightly dark room like the room you are sitting at right now, it will become a color screen. But the moment you go out in the sun, it's going to become a black and white display. So we're using that display because we felt tablets are supposed to be used everywhere, outside, inside, in our factory.
00:34:10
Speaker
Then when we hit production, this company comes back to us and tells us that we can't give you more than 800 displays a month. And we had already sold 4,000 units.
00:34:21
Speaker
This is because of Pixel G. I think this is the first time this is coming out ever. I've never blamed them for anything. So I'm not even today blaming them. It is my responsibility to ask how much you can manufacture before selling those many. But it was a shock to me because 4000 is a very small number for ACDs. Who is putting the constraint here? One laptop per child or the Taiwanese?
00:34:43
Speaker
No, one laptop with child's founder made a company called Pixel G after that project. Okay, so you were directly buying screens from Pixel G? Yeah, buying screens for them. Well, very beautiful and had...
00:34:56
Speaker
Immense future, but I'm not sure why it didn't pick up. Essentially what other people have done today is like pumping so much lumen that is still color or visible outside. But that's a very... So our tablet had a 9-hour battery life on Android in 2010 because of this display. One of the best tech which we had seen at that time. But the capacity was limited. And because we can only make 800, not even 1200, of bad quality.
00:35:21
Speaker
We can only make 800 now we have sold more and then we have to wait. Now, so the message going out to users is that our shipment is delayed our production delayed you're going to get later on. And one of the search tablet purchase was tech crunch again, they want to check the
00:35:36
Speaker
Check the tablet in person also. So they started pushing out videos on Hitler. You might have seen those memes where Hitler is banging in the floor. Where is my... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They made the whole... They changed the subtitles. Yes, they made... If you search TechCrunch Notioning, you will get that video. They made a video where Hitler is getting angry at everywhere in my tablet. And the others are saying, if your tablet was here, then went there.
00:36:02
Speaker
I can laugh about it right now, but I can't tell you how big a nightmare it was for me. The biggest media is writing something like this. Okay, we got the next batch. We started shipping out. Now Japan's tsunami hit.
00:36:18
Speaker
Japan is where the camera sensors are coming from. I don't have camera sensors to make tablets further. So like those delays kept happening and we had a very unique bug in our first hundred devices that were shipped.
00:36:32
Speaker
So we had update continuously coming in. But in the first 100 devices, if the update comes in, the device gets bricked. The meaning of bricking is it doesn't boot up. And the reason was... It's just a brick, basically. It's a brick. So the reason is that when we flashed our device, flashing is you changing operating system with a new one. When we flashed our devices, they were already flashed multiple times.
00:36:57
Speaker
But when we are flashing a device which is shipped to a user, the bootloader ends at a particular address, but we are flashing from some other address. These addresses don't match, so the device can't do anything. So people who have shipped additional software online, which they can download, put on a pen drive, and so they could recover it. So it was not a brick, but it's like two hours of still nightmare. But again, they conspected it up, or they picked it up, and a big nightmare. But still, the first four times we sold in 88 countries,
00:37:27
Speaker
One of the mothers bought this tablet for her son and she wrote back that, I can't tell you how happy I am and how thankful I am to you for making this tablet because my son suffers from this issue where he can't look at light. And just because of the tablet, my son can actually study.
00:37:44
Speaker
We got people from U.S.S. ships, naval ships, that because of your device I can actually work on my deck because it's black and white and I can read and at that time there was nothing else I could actually afford as well. So really good reviews overall. The warranty policy was five years, so anything bad will ship just swap a device with a new device. No issue on the hardware at all.
00:38:06
Speaker
none literally zero software had bugs which we kept fixing but as such like no hardware issue at all our warranty recall dates okay so another issue I'm shipping to 80 countries how do I do warranty service now so the plan was simple if something happens we are going to ship a new device that force the manufacturer and us to make sure that there is a zero failure on the device so after manufacturing while manufacturing before packaging the device was tested thoroughly before it actually goes out
00:38:32
Speaker
But now things have to again change. So now Nvidia comes back and says, I can't give you my processor anymore. Why? Because I'm exclusive to Motorola. Oh, OK. And Google comes back and says, you can't use my Android 3.0 honeycomb. Because of Motorola again. Because I'm exclusive to Motorola. Google had bought Motorola at that time. OK. And then they came out with Motorola Zoom tablet.
00:39:00
Speaker
We still had inventory, we still had our own operating system and supply. Which year was this? This is 2011. We are not talking about 2011, our second half. So we were competing with Motorola Zoom. We had limited inventory left, but we still ended up selling more than Motorola Zoom. Motorola Zoom, I think 20,000 units were sold. So if you look at from a commercial point of view, it's a huge success. We made at least
00:39:27
Speaker
I don't remember the exact money, but we were at a 50% gross margin and we would have $650 you were selling it for, which is even in today's market, $650 is a fairly premium pricing. Yeah. Yeah. So 650 and 350, 450, there were two tablets at that time because PixelG said they can't supply. So we made a one regular tablet also with a normal display.
00:39:50
Speaker
But Pixel C's were the ones, the two in one displays were the ones which were sold most. So we were cash positive and we knew that, okay, we can't work with anybody anymore, but we had enough capital to run for the next two years. Now the team size is 140 people. And how much revenue did you make in 2011? Do you remember? The four year revenue. Not four year, like four iterations, we were talking about half a year and we would have made around $14 million at that time.
00:40:18
Speaker
Wow. Incredible. $14 million in a hardware business sitting out. Amazing. Amazing. When I said gross margin, that would not be part of this footing. Okay. Yeah. So I think after everything we were left with on $4 million or something.
00:40:38
Speaker
after paying salaries and clearing up the inventory and paying for the NRE and tooling, which because now we are doing well, manufacturer came back and said, I helped you now, why don't you pay me? So all of that left us, I think $4 million or something.
00:40:53
Speaker
And you had just raised like a couple of crores from your friend. Yes. The 51% stake, was it actually with the corporate or that transaction never. No, that never happened. Right. Because on the MOU, didn't give you any money. That never happened.
00:41:13
Speaker
Yeah, so numbers, because it's long, I'm still trying to be correct. What I do remember is that we ended up with around $2 or $3 million in the bank after paying everyone. That's the correct number. But on top of the revenue, I'm not able to get the exact. I can calculate, but then the keywords won't be correct.
00:41:31
Speaker
That's OK. My CFO would know at that time. So now we have to start again. And we have to make Adam 2. So we're thinking Nvidia is a rule out. They're not going to get the chips. And this time you're going to pick a processor which has a life of 10 years. And the only company which does that is Texas Instruments. When they make a processor, the life is there forever. They're going to support that processor for as long as possible.
00:41:55
Speaker
So we pick OMAP5. Why is NVIDIA's life not 10 years? What is the reason for that? Then consume electronics. Then consume electronics. In consumer electronics, the processors keep changing every year. So next year, Tegra 2, then Tegra 3, then Tegra 4. And they stop supporting the old processor with software. Yeah, the old processors are supported for like, say, next three years or four years. But because NVIDIA was also starting, they were supported. But anyways, they are already ruled out. We can't use the processor. Tegra 2 was also probably not have been given.
00:42:25
Speaker
And when you have big OEMs coming in, the volumes are going to be millions compared to R, which is going to be 1,000.
00:42:31
Speaker
So we picked a Texas instrument because they're good. The support is really good. We got the OMAP5 invested a ton of money because this time we did the PCB design also in-house. The full reference design, which was given by OMAP, was redesigned to add some of the features that we were looking for, like the DAC I spoke about, the oscilloscope that we spoke about, to support external peripherals and accessories. And seven months into development, Texas instrument comes back and says, hey guys, we have stopped the development of OMAP5.
00:42:59
Speaker
because they were trying to sell it to Amazon at that time and I think the deal didn't go through. And then again, a short fact, what exactly should we do now? Now we have spent around nearly most of the money. Then we are at the end of 2013 right now. We have spent one year in designing this and the process is not going to be made. Again, we have to start. 2012, you didn't sell anything because your inventory would have run out by then. Inventory was run out in 2011 itself.
00:43:26
Speaker
In 2012, we started the whole design and 2013 was when we were planning to launch. But just in 2013, they came back and said, they can't give the processor, so you have to start from scratch now. Then this time, we went out and saw the processor, which can actually work out. But because we're short in time, we literally picked the, the MTK is there in all the Xiaomi phones now, picked that processor.
00:43:47
Speaker
along with one more processor called Rockchip, which is very famous in Chinese devices. There were new entrants at that time, so we picked those as a motherboard and started making our device. By this time, our team is also slightly different.
00:44:06
Speaker
So my partner started taking up technology, and I started taking up the business. We got a device, but the pricing on the device was not right. It was done at a price point where it would not just sell. And we had a disagreement on what price we would sell at. And how much was it coming to? It was $35,000 is what the price we were selling at, whereas the bond was just $9,000. So probably you should sell it around $15,000 or $16,000. That was the correct price point for that. It rupees, you're saying? Rupees, yes.
00:44:36
Speaker
Okay, you're targeting India now. Now we're targeting India because now flipkarts and snap deals. Yeah, flipkarts and snap deals are big now. So they are long looking for partnerships and then scale up. Okay. So price point is correct. Yeah. Price points were, and we were shipping outside also, but now we want to scale from India also.
00:44:53
Speaker
And when you say the BOM, that means bill of materials. So the cost of putting it together was 9,000. And so you thought that 16,000 is the right price to sell it. Probably the right price. But in general for this industry, what is that ratio like bill of material versus? 50%, 50%. Okay. If you're Apple, then you can command 50% for the end product. If you're somewhere else, then the 50% includes a lot of other things also. So the end profit might be around 20%.
00:45:23
Speaker
Okay, there's a brand value which also comes along so you can push. Now, yeah, but I have an OCD on testing. Every device that's made has to be tested, but that's it's a character you can't pass on. So the team that worked on the hardware did not have that OCD.
00:45:41
Speaker
And every tablet which came in India had a hardware problem. So of course, it's faulted. Every device and then my partners decided, why don't we sell it to universities? They cracked a deal at a very low price, literally at a bomb price. And at that price, no tablets there. The university said, yes, why not? Because tablets were becoming cheap. But kids are kids, students are students. And the moment they will plug in the USB charger, it will just break.
00:46:07
Speaker
And the hardware failure of that scale is a massive problem. So we recalled everything, opened it up, and fixed it, and then started making again. But now again, we are stuck with the inventory and the bad product on the hardware side. Software is good because we're using Stack On, right? There's no software customized, which is going from our end. By now, Android started supporting tablets. No.
00:46:31
Speaker
No, not yet. OK. Samsung Galaxy had come. Yes, they had started. Yes. We're talking about Android 4.0. Yes. Tablet. Tablet OS was there. And Google also had allowed more vendors to come in. So Google also had activity for Motorola. Yes. OK.
00:46:48
Speaker
So now, notioning is acting literally like Micromax or Lava. Except in our case, we are designing the industrial design, the overall design of the product. But everything else is exactly what Micromax would do. Go to China, pick something, and come back here. That's what we're also doing then. So it's like going out of the soul of what we started with. Second device also didn't do well. We probably would have sold 1,500 units of that. A lot of inventory stuck in China, which we couldn't take back as well.
00:47:15
Speaker
So then we decided, okay, if you have to continue, I have to think out of the box. Then we thought, okay, windows is getting better. So the next generation devices can be on windows. And there we are getting that industrial design, but this time very frugal. I've came back into technology, made a product, and we do something called notioning gain.
00:47:35
Speaker
And that was a two-in-one, India's first two-in-one, and was priced also very aggressively. And we worked with SnapD, and it flew literally off the shelf. So whatever we had, the inventory was sold out.
Internal Conflicts and Market Shifts
00:47:46
Speaker
So two-in-one meaning that the keyboard was detachable, or it would like fold out? Keyboard was detachable, or something like Microsoft Surface.
00:47:54
Speaker
But when the Adam 2 failed, the cracks started happening between me and my partner in the future. I said that we should do Windows because that makes sense. He said, no, we should still stick to Android and raise funds. We can't raise funds also. So finally, I got an investor who was ready to invest in Notion Inc. And the investor, we had a deal. You're going to invest $4 million for 30%. The company valuation is kept low because we don't have money anyways.
00:48:20
Speaker
But my partner told him that you don't have to invest in Ocean Inc. We can actually start a new company where you can give me let's say 10% and invest all your money there and you end up owning 90%. I don't know exactly 10 or 90, but I know numbers are 30%.
00:48:33
Speaker
And that happened. And then so my partner came and said, OK, we can't work together. I'm quitting. I quit. And that's when we started a Windows journey. But in parallel, they're in Hyderabad designing. And the agreement was that it's not going to enter in the same way. But they're doing exactly the same. They're designing Windows tablet and doing exactly what we were planning to do also. They were spent close to $100 million in that company. And the company got bankrupt.
00:48:59
Speaker
pretty soon because money is not everything. They had Sachin Tendulkar as a brand ambassador, best who's who in the business division. But the product itself, you have to have that soul or knack of making something which really kills. And at the same time, tablet only company. Is it a tablet, a mobile phone, then electric cycle, IoT devices, AI for everything you can imagine in the sun. Big team of probably 400, 500 people. OK.
00:49:30
Speaker
Now we're talking about 2014-15. We did really well. We launched Notion Inc. Cane. We launched Notion Inc. Black and then we launched Notion Inc. Able. And these are all Windows? All Windows 2-in-1 and we're doing really good volume. We are cash-positive and we're able to manage our running capital really well. Essentially now you're selling this as a low-cost laptop, like a Netflix version 2. Literally a low-cost laptop.
00:49:55
Speaker
But it was still around 50% more expensive than what Micromax or Lava were doing. Because we were taking care of the quality and the overall specifications. The RAMs were very high. But they were not doing Windows devices, right? They were just doing Android. They were not doing Windows till 2015. Now we are in 2016. Now Notioning Able is launched. Now Micromax, Carbon, Lava, all of them are coming in with half the price of what we are doing.
00:50:19
Speaker
And they saw that there is a market for Windows. Yes. And now I'm going back to my partner and asking him that can you sell back your equity because you're not here and I need to raise funds. I cannot raise funds by telling the incoming investor that I have a debt promoter doing exactly the same stuff. That didn't work out at all. And we saw that now Micromax and the price war has started, something which you cannot play unless you have a real good amount of money.
00:50:46
Speaker
You stopped your global sales altogether. You were just focused on India. We're just focusing on India at that time. Because for global sales, every business has two most important components, receivables and account payables.
00:50:59
Speaker
So if you have to pay today, in fact, because the way we are manufacturing, we have to pay 60 days before we are going to get the order. And the receiver was at 30 days after I get the product in hand because that's the time of inventory clearance. I have to figure out four months of running capital. So the plan was that let's fix the running capital because no one is ready to invest. Once we have that, then we can scale out. But that problem stays the same whether you sell in India or US. But in US, you'll probably get better margins.
00:51:28
Speaker
In the US we get better margins, but now there's so much competition that in the US itself you have Walmart selling a tablet, Android tablet at cutthroat prices, you can't compete. And the international market, having touched international market in the first product, I knew that the product has to be outclassed, it has to really speak for itself.
00:51:47
Speaker
I didn't want to be an Indian company making a Chinese product and selling yours. That was not the aim. I've always felt that if my product is going out of the country, it's representing my country also in some way. It has to be really the best or if not just go out. Okay. Did you ever cross that 14 million roughly whatever? Never again. That 2011 revenue. Okay. No, never again.
00:52:17
Speaker
Yeah, so now we're in 2016 and this discussion happening. My partner is not ready to return the equity back or sell back. He wanted that evaluation, which was not possible at all. So we decided to shut down motioning. And one of my colleagues made
00:52:34
Speaker
from Karakpur, joined me in 2014. He helped me actually scale the whole Windows business. Operation-wise, it's fantastic. It took care of all operations, manufacturing, sourcing, logistics, and everything went flawless. And we both realized that because, of course, he's a partner. I have to give him equity also. And I can't because now my other partner is not leaving. So we decided to shut down and start a new one. And then we started Incaars, Incaars technology. Do you think NoSending had a future if you hadn't shut it down?
00:53:04
Speaker
It has a future. So there's no, it still has a future. There's no Indian mobile slash tablet company to speak of, right? I mean, all the Indian companies are now just like, you know, very sick, marginal players like Micromax, etc. are all marginal players today. It's totally dominated by Chinese or like say Apple and
00:53:30
Speaker
So it's a first baby, right? The first baby
Transition to Electric Vehicles and AI
00:53:35
Speaker
is also very, very dear. So till I'm alive, I'm going to make sure that I get the notion back, because the concept is not dead yet. And in 2008, I wrote a 20-year plan of what I want to do with the rest of my life. I thought I'm 23, I'll do 43, I'll retire. But in that plan, I've only covered two years. 18 years of my plan is still left.
00:53:57
Speaker
And what else is there in that plan? The first product was called Adam. The second was called Abel and Cain. So Eve is not there. You're very inspired by the Bible. No. So if you have names, then you can actually talk about them. And the genealogy makes sense. But I can just use it. So if you follow the genealogy, the last product is supposed to be called Nahor. Nahor is son of Moses. And Nahor is the reverse of my name also, which is Rohan.
00:54:24
Speaker
So that was the last product which I wanted to end at and that's the product which is going in space. You can buy that product on Jupiter, Jupiter's moon or let's say Titan and that product represents you in the space which has ionic engines. So because we can dream that dreamt that why is that not possible? Why can't I make a device which is in the ocean representing you? So you can actually feel the ocean, go at a depth where you can't be in the moon, allow you to construct your small house like we do on the beaches. All that is possible. So it's like the vision goes beyond
00:54:55
Speaker
What is even happening today? Eve itself is, for example, the definition of Eve, even today, there is no one who has made that. And the definition for Eve is very simple for me. This moment here, right now, I'm talking to you. There's no one going to capture this moment in such a way that I can relive this moment again.
00:55:14
Speaker
For me to relive, I need to get everything in 3D exactly getting the same temperature in this room, have this kind of emotion in which I'm right now. There's no such device which can do that. E for me was literally a flying Amazon Echo with charge EPT inside with enough intelligence to be able to capture the reality in 3D and recording in 3D doing compression. So whole definition written. But even today, like we're not there yet, probably two years from now, the definition might become reality. So that's the second product. And there's a huge ton of lineage to come.
00:55:44
Speaker
Okay, okay, interesting. Okay, so once you shut down, no sending a salad incurs, what was incurs doing? Yes, but in between in 2014, one of my one of the guy came approached me and said that he is making electric motors.
00:56:02
Speaker
would you be interested? He wanted to become a distributor of Notion Inc. And I met him and knew that he didn't have money to become a distributor, but was very interested in what he was doing. And he was making electric motors. And I also always wanted to be an automotive industry. I designed multiple vehicles and concepts in my college as well at that time, when I was in college. So I got interested and invested every penny I had personally into his company. And then I became a partner there also. And that's so real, continue. This happened in 2014, 2015.
00:56:30
Speaker
Now he was making electric motors for what for like.
00:56:34
Speaker
But no, bikes and racing bikes and the RBC college here in Bangalore had used some of his motors for the international competition, racing competition and the team came second, third, fourth sometime. Okay, bikes basically. E-bikes and this was the actual flux motor. So the origin of actual flux or introduction to actual flux to me was through this particular friend. I'm going to stitch this through.
00:57:01
Speaker
Yeah we will understand what is this term we use action flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux, Axial flux
00:57:17
Speaker
Now, 2016, now me and Manish, my partner, who joined me, as I said, in 2014, we are thinking, what should we do? And the dream was simple, that we want now, AI is the next frontier. It's 2016. Most of the people have learned about AI in the last four, five, six years properly. With 2016, we are clear, because we had already started working on something like that. In fact, my BTEC project was in AI in college.
00:57:40
Speaker
And that is also a funny story. I read the constitution of Kharagpur. It never said that you have to do your BTech project in your department. So I did my BTech project in computer science, even though I'm from mechanical, and submitted my project there. So on the report card, I have an EX from computer science, which starts for excellent, and an F from mechanical, because I did not submit it.
00:58:03
Speaker
So my head of department called me and said that, okay, you figured out a loophole, but you have to do a projection mechanical. So for computer science, my project was face detection. And for mechanical department, my project was nuts and screws and the bolt detection and some defects in that. It's the same tech I could use. I was exposed to the AI part already at that time.
00:58:25
Speaker
So 2016 now, you're talking of phase detection, like facial recognition. Yeah, recognition is the second part. First you detect a phase, then you detect who that phase is. So phase detection. 2016 is there. In the last one year, I spent a lot of time in learning convolution neural networks. That's literally the main algorithm which even today we use in vision, computer vision.
00:58:49
Speaker
So 2016 we are brainstorming and we figured that we need to move into AI. The dream since beginning has been to make computers work for us. This was for the notion tablet you were learning the convolution neural network for? No. So that I was learning from my interest only. I was planning to use some of that in the device because the device has to now have some sort of AI to start differentiating. We were thinking how do we make our devices different. So the device had
00:59:13
Speaker
AI, definitely very different from other people. But my partner is not quitting, so it makes sense to just stop it and start from scratch. So we started from scratch, and then this concept of Eve, what I just explained to you, we started with that concept that we are going to make this device. But in two years it was clear, and we had raised around a million dollars also from Sachin Bensal and Binny Bensal. They loved the idea, especially Sachin, and that this is sort of possible and
00:59:39
Speaker
that can happen from India as well and this looks like a future. So they had deep interest in B2C and we are talking about a B2C device.
00:59:47
Speaker
So we spent a couple of years in designing the device as much as possible. But now let's talk about a device. I'm talking about a device which is 100 grams. It can fly in air, and it has charge GPT in 2016. It can fly for 45 minutes and has enough computation to process things like video compression, recording videos, and all that. So tech is just not there. And again, I overestimated how fast AI can move.
01:00:18
Speaker
Where's the flying element coming in this? You want to make like a device which will record and you wanted that to be like a drone. Yeah, because if you have to carry your device with you, then so for example, if your daughter walks for the first time, are you going to take your phone out and take that video recording or you just want to enjoy that moment?
01:00:39
Speaker
If you want to enjoy it at the moment, the recording has to be done by someone else from the best of the cinematographic position. Not just sitting somewhere and you have to keep it somewhere to record. These devices must be mobile on its own. You should be able to tell the device like why don't you go and check whether my car, tire is good or not or someone at the door.
01:00:59
Speaker
So that's the kind of device we are working on. We have a lot of flute simulations. We figured that the device can fly for four minutes, not 45 minutes. The computation is not there for doing the stuff we are looking at. And we are also running out of capital slowly.
01:01:15
Speaker
Then we decided that, okay, the stack, and that's where you can say the pivot happened for Inkers. We decided, okay, we want to do all of this. There are a lot of AI algorithms we've already built, but we have also built a sensor fusion technology where we can fuse just different camera frames to create a low-sparse 3D point cloud. A point cloud is a representation of a 3D space.
01:01:37
Speaker
And we won an award also for that from DRDO. The idea was simple. Take a cheap camera, put it on a drone, send it to your enemy territory. It's going to create the 3D of that and deliver that so you can actually plan the attack or anything that you have to do. But by this time, both Sachin and Vinny, they were not interested in B2B. Now we're talking about B2B. So they were clear that we only want incurs to be a B2C company.
01:02:06
Speaker
So, but we continue building it because we could see B2C week. We can't build. We need far more capital. We need hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to do Amazon echo spend around $50 million to reach where they are. And then you have Apple coming out with their own small speakers where series also involved. So just kind of resources and competition requires like not possible in the amount of money we have.
Real Estate Technology Innovations
01:02:25
Speaker
You wanted this flying drone to also have the ability to hear your commands and process them.
01:02:32
Speaker
Here you come on, process them, talk back to you. We're done enough. In fact, a lot of you exist also. I give you a small example. Let's say you are with your girlfriend and having a private moment. And you forgot to turn the privacy settings off. Then the device recorded something. Now you have a breakup with your girlfriend. What happens to that data?
01:02:56
Speaker
We've gone to that extent that who owns the data and according to us, people who are in the data own the data. So it's not just you, it's her also. So she decides that this data cannot go out. She can actually go online, look at the data and then say that this data can never be shared unless I give permission because of a very personal device we're talking about.
01:03:21
Speaker
You know, it sounds very, I mean, it sounds like a hard sell, to be honest. I'm not sure if there is a market for such a device. I mean, the thing is that nobody would have thought that there is a market for Amazon Echo until they actually got it out and people experienced it and they realized, wow. So yeah, I mean, if you if you if you actually think about it now, today we have
01:03:48
Speaker
DJI drones, right? They're small enough who follow you, take your selfies and take a video. The moment you integrate a DJI drone, which already flies for 45 minutes with Amazon Echo or let's say an Apple speaker, it is exactly what I just spoke about. Right. Yeah. But it doesn't sound like a mass product. No. How many have you seen people walking around with this DJI drone? What is the DJI here?
01:04:16
Speaker
DJI is the best drones that you can purchase today. It's a Chinese company which probably has. DJI is the largest project. DJI is the primary. I mean, I've only seen drones used in India for marriages. Yeah, because they're already made illegal and you need to get a license to fly them. So regulation is also slightly stricter. Okay, got it.
01:04:41
Speaker
Right. So yeah, coming to your journey, B2C pivoting to B2B. So we moved from B2C to B2B. And for B2B, we made a whole stack where we are making something called offline cookies. So the idea was that, let's say you go to Louis Vuitton in a Delhi store, and from there you are going to Amis, if it exists. We can tell Amis that you went to Louis Vuitton, but did not buy anything. And you'd come in an Audi.
01:05:05
Speaker
So we are tracking you everywhere. So that's where the face recognition is coming in and user behavior is coming in. I can tell him is that this guy came last month also, but at that time he did buy it. So the kind of sort of a website cookie where the stores now know that how good customer you are. And the solution was ready. We started deploying it in Delhi malls and Bangalore malls. And that's when the COVID hit. But this sounds, uh,
01:05:31
Speaker
Very controversial. Yeah, the way we were solving it was by never linking your name to the data we have. So I will never name it. CustomerX profile will be shown that CustomerX has visited your store five times in the last one year and his average purchase. But how will you know how much he purchased?
01:05:55
Speaker
We don't know how much he purchased. I just know that he purchased because we are not linked to the... But if you go and do it all and come out with a bag, we probably would have purchased good. Right. Okay. Or you would have seen him at the Castile. This was in store or just outside the stores tracking? Outside inside both. All the cameras. The whole tech was built to handle 100 plus cameras at the same time.
01:06:18
Speaker
So right from parking, where you're going to park, which car you came into, how you're traveling, everything was basically integrated in one single solution. At the same time, we were also working on the sensor fusion tech. Now we started working on a lidar and camera concept also, where we can make 3D in reality faster.
01:06:36
Speaker
and capture the whole 3D and it will go back to Eve. Eve needed that 3D system. So what I'm going to talk about soon is going to interlink with each other. So that 3D stuff is what we're also getting better at slowly. But by the time the solution started getting better. This is Michael Mall Pilot, which you were doing. This was a paid pilot? It was a paid pilot, yes. How much were you charging there? It was, I think, around 4 lakh a month.
01:07:02
Speaker
Okay, and this depends on go to the stores, each store would get this intelligent will go to the store. First, it was for the mall, the mall owner and the mall owner will would provide this as a feature to the store owners. That was the original idea. Okay, okay. And we took part in a lot of smart city projects also, but they don't come to fruition at all. Just like you keep on doing pilots and there is no end. But that's when the code hit.
01:07:31
Speaker
And our solution was designed for malls. Now malls are not open for one year. Yeah, right. But now going back to the motor stuff. Now we are talking 2019, 2018 now. So we have spent four years. We've done enough prototypes. And I pumped in all the personal money I have in this company. Motors are not scaling up. So there are two kinds of motor. Brushed motor, brushless motor.
01:07:57
Speaker
Brush motors are the ones which I use in mixers and you see them sparking. There is something touching the coils. Brushless, the computation does not involve any physical contact and they are very difficult to design. So, brush motors, what he had designed worked very well. When we started going to brushless, we were not able to make samples also. It was very difficult.
01:08:17
Speaker
And every time you make a controller for such a motor, you're burning a lot of money because it needs very high power MOSFETs which you need to switch very fast and will end up burning them. Each MOSFET would cost something like 50,000 to a lakh depending on whether silicon carbide or not. And we need six of them for each design. Every time you burn one, the whole thing is gone. We will start again. I'll link this back again in 2020.
01:08:41
Speaker
Now, and what is axial flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex flex
01:09:04
Speaker
Okay, okay like like your water motor at yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, the longer so the magnet sit on top of the radii right on the circumference the magnets are there so this is called a radial flux motor because the magnets are radial and the fluxes coming in the radii direction.
01:09:26
Speaker
In case of axial flux, the motors are very small. They are little like your, you can say a scooter tire, that small. And the magnets sit on the sides on the front and the back face of the cylinder. And here the magnetic flux is axial. It is parallel to the axis of rotation. Okay. Now, just because of this change in topology, the axial flux motors have far better magnetic flux for the copper to interact with. And they have very high density of power delivery, but they are very difficult to design.
01:09:55
Speaker
So theoretically, an actual flux motor can be 10 times lighter while delivering exactly the same, same torque and RPM while being 96% efficient also. So that's the kind of motor we're designing. Okay. Got it. Got it. The conversion of energy to motion is much more effective in axle. Much more effective and the motor is also very, very light. Okay. Okay. Okay. So now, now we are in COVID.
01:10:21
Speaker
And that's the time when I brainstorm again what we need to do. Then spoke to one of my investors that this is what I'm thinking. I'm thinking of entering real estate. That gentleman was already in real estate. And then we figured that in real estate, one of the problem is that there's no tech, first of all. It takes a long time for a new tech to come in in real estate because the projects are very, very long. And second is,
01:10:50
Speaker
There's no clarity. I am, let's say, a builder. I'm going to hire you to design the building. You're going to hire a contractor who's going to make the floor. And the contractor's going to hire someone else who's going to contract the people who are going to come. And the amount of time it takes and the data flows through so many different levels that you actually have no idea where the construction is. If you've done your house interior, I've not heard one single person telling me my house interior finished on time. There's no construction that I've seen that finishes on time. You're always over budgeting.
01:11:20
Speaker
The problem is that you don't have the exact data. So what if I can actually create the exact data where you can go on a site with a sensor fusion technology, take the whole 3D scan of the building and then I can give you immediately a real 3D model where you can play at and the model can also tell you that this pillar is not right, this column is not correct, there's a water leakage happening from point A and then all that happens within a day and at a price which is one hundredth of the competition.
01:11:43
Speaker
So that was a pitch. And the investor liked the pitch. He introduced me to this company called Colliers. They are partners right now. And Colliers also got really excited. And they also had some idea that this kind of tech should be there. And we started working on the prototype. Colliers is an IPC, the industry term. They are PMC. PMC. PMC. Yeah, project management consultant.
01:12:07
Speaker
Okay, so they work with like a DLF to manage their construction projects. Yeah, so the embassy kind of buildings will be built by them and they are responsible for designing the whole building and delivering and handle apart. So we worked with them and got a good idea of what exactly the requirements are, started working on it. One year, just in a room, 24 hours, as much as possible, build the whole system. And finally, the system went live in 2021.
01:12:32
Speaker
2022 and the system is very sticky and now we are scanning, I think we have scanned close to 2500 different floors as of now, 150 million scans have happened and the tech that we committed we are building is there now. So if you give me a site, let's say a school or
01:12:55
Speaker
The whole process takes as long as it takes to walk. So you hold the device that you make. You walk in a site. The device has a thermal camera, a spectral camera, a normal camera, and a lidar. And it converts, captures the data. And for a 100,000 square feet kind of site, for example, a two acre site will be captured in 15 to 20 minutes. Why people are working and no clearance required. The data we generated is around five.
01:13:19
Speaker
This device, you have to point it everywhere or there is some rotation happening inside the device so it captures all directions? No, so you have to point it everywhere. When I say everywhere, but it still has a very large focus, just like your phone camera. Okay, so it's like walking with a phone, taking a video of the whole place. Walking, exactly.
01:13:39
Speaker
So we have two, three different devices. One device is like that. The other device actually has a 180 degree dome. So it captures everything that you're looking. So you have to then make sure you're just walking properly. You don't even have to point that device. So 100,000 square feet kind of site is going to take around 500 gigabyte of data. That's the kind of data that we generate. Now, our competition takes around a week to scan the same site. Because in how the technology
01:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, again for other technology you have to go, take the lidar, keep it at a particular location, the lidar will rotate and you get the lidar. Now you have to go 10 feet from there, keep the lidar there again and then capture. So when you scan a 100,000 square feet side, you probably will have around 2,000 scans. Now someone has to sit on a computer and align all of these scans and that's a big matter labor.
01:14:30
Speaker
In our case, you just walk. This technology is called SLAM, not invented by us. It's already there. But our AI essentially allowed us to do it better and faster. What is the full form of SLAM? Is that an acronym? Yeah, simultaneous localization and movement.
01:14:46
Speaker
Okay, so as you're moving, it is stitching together to create a CD map in real time. Yes. I think today, something as small as a vacuum cleaner also comes with this, like, you know, the Robo vacuum cleaner. Exactly. But if you've seen the images, you'll see those dots, small small dots, it's filled with small dots, right? That's the output of a lidar.
01:15:09
Speaker
What we do is that at the same point, the RGB camera is also looking, so I know the color. The thermal camera is also looking, so I know the temperature. And a spectral camera is also looking, so I know the spectral wavelength of that particular point. So what we do is, I can't give you a 500 gigabyte file. The end use case is not to generate that file, but that's what the competition does. We take that file, and then I will work on top to compress this into a 3D model, which is 20 MB.
01:15:36
Speaker
Now the 20mbf file can be opened on a browser with the color texture of how the scene looks like and the temperature texture. So that 3D model is like a
01:15:45
Speaker
Like a metaverse kind of a thing. Yeah, hyper-realistic metaverse where you are seeing exactly how things are. So now for every floor we scan twice a month and you get continuous updates, we are able to identify concrete effects, some deviations, the columns are not correct, the plumb issues, plumb is basically the column not being exactly flat.
01:16:07
Speaker
and exactly at 90 degree. Now, the solution has also started entering interior use case because your walls in your kitchen are not 90 degree, they are 89 point something. Now, when you cut a marble at 90 degree, it is not going to fit. Around 10 to 15 percent of the interior budget is just wastage. So, they have to account for that while they are actually coding for it.
01:16:33
Speaker
okay interesting and you can send a person to measure the wall he's going to use a laser stuff but how many points can you take in a row but now you have an exact 3D model which you can take back to your office the interior designer doesn't have to go at the site use that to understand how big the cabinet should be the floor is not flat in fact one of the examples which I saw myself the wooden flooring was done by the wooden flooring guy
01:16:57
Speaker
The library unit was designed by the library unit guy. He installed it there. And now the false ceiling guy comes in and realizes that the floor was one inch down. So when he's making false ceiling, he's making it straight. So at the start of the library unit, you have one inch gap. But at the end, you have two inch. And that irritates you. Right. OK. Interesting.
01:17:19
Speaker
I guess today there is a possibility to really make this very cheap for more mass market users.
01:17:28
Speaker
That is exactly what we have done. In fact, I assume it's going to be on the website also. You can call Incas for something like 2,500, 3,000 rupees, and it's going to scan your house and give you the 3D model, which you can play around at your own base on our website. Do not need anything you want. And in fact, we're extending this for other customers also where you can go at, let's say, 1,000 rupees subscription, and we'll keep scanning it every month. So you know what is the interior development happening or how your house is actually getting built.
01:17:58
Speaker
So you're now doing B2C. But the fact that you have to scan kind of increases your cost, right? No, anyone can scan. It's like the next generation devices that we're making. You're not selling the device, you're still selling the scanning service. Would you like to get into selling the device?
01:18:18
Speaker
No, so there are two models. There are two services. One is build on a mobile phone. So you can take your own mobile phone and do it. The second is in a high precision. In each high precision, cameras are not capable of. Even the lidar in an iPhone is not capable of doing what a really good lidar can do. And now all I have to do is to get someone at Denzo, take my device, scan it, give it back to me. That costs 100 bucks. OK. OK. OK. But you don't want to sell the device. How much would a device cost if you had to?
01:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, so the first device we made was around 25 lakh. From there, I think today we are somewhere around 3 lakh. But the point is that if I sell the device, then the device certification, manufacturing, warranty, all of that will come. So everything is going to come back. There's better debt. And only if there's a large market, does it make sense to sell the device. Yes. And if you are going to use the device 10 times a year, then probably you might not invest. Yeah, at 3 lakhs. I mean, 3 lakhs is your BOM, the bill of material I'm assuming.
01:19:18
Speaker
Until and unless it reaches like a sub 1 lakh, it probably will not be a mass-adopted device. Yeah, I think by the time that will happen, iPhones will become much better at lidar capture. So that's why we are not made out of the device. Amazing, okay, interesting. And how much revenue does Incas do? We broke even this January.
01:19:43
Speaker
think we'll cross one million ARR this year. Okay. Got it. Okay. It's pure SaaS and this is without taking B2C into account. Right. Okay. And this is, you're doing this full-time or how much is your involvement here? Yes. So this is what I did full-time from 2016 to 2022. Okay.
01:20:05
Speaker
going to 2022. So the Inca solution is built. I worked with the whole tech team to build a stack and now the devices are ready. We are scanning and the business now is in the scaling mode where the sales have to happen. And that's where my partners are helping me to scale that business up.
01:20:20
Speaker
And the friend I was talking about with whom we were making the motor. So I introduced him to one of the investors I knew. And my friend said that if I have enough money and capital, I can finish this motor. And actually, we can make an automotive company out of it. So I caught them together, invested in the company, and they started
Electric Vehicle Prototyping and Cooling Systems
01:20:37
Speaker
working. And after two years, we realized that nothing had still happened. One and a half year. So 18 months have gone. A lot of money is just spent. Where was the investment made?
01:20:52
Speaker
2021-22. And then we were discussing internally what exactly should happen because it's not scaling up. And July of last year, 2022, yeah, July of last year, then I entered scene and I saw exactly what's happening. And we figured that just with the research mindset, you can't scale it up.
01:21:13
Speaker
It has to change. And the original agreement was that we want to become an automotive company. I was not involved in interest at that time. I was outside. I just connected them. And then we decided, no, it's not going to work. I spoke to the person. We figured out that he has to move on. And I then came in. And from July last year, we worked on the motor design from scratch. We're not using any of the design that we were working on earlier. We figured out there were some big issues there.
01:21:36
Speaker
We worked on that on the design got a really good team very small team but a really good team started working in a motor within two months the motor was ready along with some of the controller output that we're looking at build around six prototypes on the motor then we electrified Mercedes Benz S-Class
01:21:53
Speaker
connected our motor to get a nice load in Bangalore. That's 120 kilometer with that particular motor. Then got a truck GC, built the first electric truck GC prototype for ourselves. Went to some of the campuses here in Bangalore, tested that out. This is December last year, December 2022. By April, we finished the one full truck, which is a model V0 with our motor running inside with the overall truck, also made from scratch here in our office with laser cuts and all.
01:22:23
Speaker
Then by September we made the Model V2 which is an improvement of the last design with a better motor and better battery packs. So a lot of effort has gone last 18 months itself where the engine team has literally come together really very well. A lot of innovation on the motor side, on the battery tech side. The whole battery is submerged inside liquid.
01:22:40
Speaker
it's not getting cooled by a metal contact. Now, because there's a much inside liquid, if I want to charge faster, I can cool the liquid before the battery gets charged and I can pump more current and we're drawing more current also. And the liquid also is lithium-fire retardant. So in case there's an accident, you have to fire it around the liquid to close the fire off also. What liquid are you using? This is a lithium-fire retardant dielectric. Okay.
01:23:05
Speaker
dielectric basically means does not conduct electricity. Lithium fire retardant would mean that it is good in so you cannot pour water on lithium fire by the way. It requires 30 to 40 more times of water to do the offer electric vehicle fire compared to a diesel or a petrol.
01:23:21
Speaker
That's why it's very dangerous. Water, in fact, breaks into hydrogen and hydrogen burns. So it's very, very dangerous unless you know that you have 40 times more water to break the fire. But this oil itself is a lithium-fired carbon. So if a lithium was to burn inside this oil, it won't. This is a type of an oil, basically. It's a type of oil, yeah. And the oil is taken out of the battery, cool and sent back in. OK. And this is like a...
01:23:48
Speaker
So there's like a big box which has oil inside it and then within the oil there is a battery pack? And how is the battery pack stable? How is it not sloshing around? Yeah, so the sloshing happens if you have air inside. Okay. These are nearly incompressible fluid. So it's not going to become denser in location and less dense. So the whole thing is just filled with oil. Oil is taken out and sent back in.
01:24:14
Speaker
And there is a cooling mechanism to cool the oil. There's a cooling mechanism. Oil comes out, it goes through the radiator, gets cool and it goes back into the battery pack. Okay. And for a truck you'd necessarily need to do this because a truck needs a vast amount of electricity as opposed to a car which does not need so much. More than vast is the amount of electricity it needs per unit time.
01:24:39
Speaker
Because you can have a big battery bank, which you are using slowly. In that case, the discharge is not high. But if you are drawing a large amount of currents, our currents can go up to 350 amps. So if you're talking performance, for example, our motor is 250 kilowatt. Let's say we are 96% efficient and 4% inefficient. We are, again, talking about a huge power.
01:25:01
Speaker
So 10% is 25 kilowatt, let's say 5% loss is going to be 12.5 kilowatt of power, your AC is run at 1 kilowatt, 2 kilowatt. Now that power has to be dissipated somehow, so cooling is required for that. The scale is different. Ascuta uses a 3 kilowatt battery pack, our truck uses 300 kilowatts of battery pack, it's 100 times bigger. So when you say 96% efficiency, it means
01:25:28
Speaker
The remaining 4% is essentially wasted as heat. It is generated as heat, that is correct. And the 96% is getting converted into motion. 96% is converting into motion. We today are at 90% and that's the engine target we have from taking our asset from 90% to 96%.
01:25:48
Speaker
And what is the most Indian EVs are at what kind of percentage? 65, 75, 70. Like all these Ola and Ether? No, scooters will be efficient. Scooters, Ola, Ether, they probably would be around 88, 90%. Why is that?
01:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, low power, low current requirement and literally everything is bought out of China or companies like Bosch, right? So they're not making the companies in house and when you buy something from Bosch, it's going to be good. And batteries are also, cells are also coming from, so there's less happening there. So it can be as efficient as 90% if driven properly. But when you talk about large OEMs who are running this 200 or 300 kilowatt hour. Next one is still 30 kilowatt. Next one is still 30 kilowatt.
01:26:38
Speaker
So what is the example of a vehicle which has a large? Let's say Electra, or let's say you have Electra for trucks, then you have switch mobility for buses, and they're also coming in with trucks also. Tata Motors are also coming in with electric vehicles, all OEMs are coming in with electric vehicles. Okay, so the bus truck is heavy vehicle category, currently the average efficiency is about 60%. Currently in the country, not 60, around 65, 70-ish.
01:27:08
Speaker
So the Indian way has a lot of heat. How do they deal with heat? No, so the proper radiator where the coolant comes in and cools and then stick out. So the coolant hits the battery or the, the motor. What does it hit to cool? Like, yeah. So, uh, the,
01:27:31
Speaker
So battery cells, battery is made of metal. There are two ways of cooling it if you are not doing submersive. One is Tesla way in which you have a sneak like aluminum coil between the batteries.
01:27:43
Speaker
And this snake-like aluminum coil has small capillary tubes inside through which you can send liquid and you can take it back. This is what is happening in Nexon and probably Ola also earlier, Ether is using something else. So, and then you can cool these element tubes to dissipate the heat. And second method is Lucid. In case of Lucid, the battery cells are kept on a metal plate. And in the metal plate, you have this coolant pipe running and they can cool the bottom of the plate and through the overall conduction, you can cool the battery cell.
01:28:12
Speaker
So these are two ways. The third way is what we are doing. We put the sand inside the liquid itself and take liquid out, cool it and bring it back again. This is lighter and yeah. Is there some inspiration because of which you decided to do it this way or how did you discover that this is what you want to do? Yes, I heard about this tech being used in some of the companies. There's a German company,
01:28:38
Speaker
I'm not sure if it's German or not. But Malay is one company from which I saw the image that this kind of thing is possible. Because we are thinking of cooling very, very seriously. Because in our case, the heat generated efficiency, even if it's 96%, 2% runs into tens of kilowatts. And that's really bad for us. So thinking of cooling very seriously, and we figured this is one way. But of course, you can't beat someone else's patent. So we had to come up with our own structure of how do we do this. You can't ban the idea of a mobile phone. You can ban the idea of how you make it.
01:29:07
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Okay. And, uh, so currently, uh, you are still at prototype stage. Uh, we are at the, okay. So, uh, if you talk about the engineering cycles, you first have a concept or you first have a vision that you convert into a concept, then you go to a prototype stage, then you start entering into the engineering phase and ending phase. Also you'll have a T1 build, T2 build, T3 build and mass production. So we are right now at a T1 build.
01:29:36
Speaker
Where the prototype stage is done, we are now working with the aggregate manufacturers, getting their designs and incorporating our design. And one model will soon be ready properly in the next couple of months. We'll hear about that in the media also. That's our first T1 build for us, where it is actually designed with the engineering concepts with proper simulations done. And as we move forward, more simulations happen, tells us your old design is bad, do some changes, and that cycle revision happens. So plan for us is very simple. We are going to design until April.
01:30:03
Speaker
And from April to end of the next year, we're going to do around a million kilometers of trials on the road. And in these trials, we're going to understand how good our battery device is. Because trucks, as I said, 300 kilowatt hour of battery is massive. It can bring a building down. So before we send it to a consumer, we want to test it for eight months, nine months on the ground to make sure that everything is perfect. And then the device, the product goes out.
01:30:29
Speaker
okay how much funds have you raised for this sounds like it would need a lot of capital.
01:30:36
Speaker
Yeah, extremely frugal. So I can't share on the dresser side because there are other people also involved and keeping the names and other things also integral because there's a lot of OEM heating up in this particular space. Everyone tries to understand what the other person is doing. So I can't share that much, but I can tell you. Are you invested by like a financial investor or a strategic investor? We are invested by strategic investors. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
01:31:05
Speaker
Indian or foreign? Indian okay okay interesting and so what you are saying right now is that
01:31:14
Speaker
The prototype you made is all made through complete in-house design, every part of it, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if you need to go into production, so you need to now get, let's say, a headlight from a headlight manufacturing company, like all the auto ancillaries, who each of them have mass production of the various components. Like for a door, you will go to somebody. For a steering wheel, you'll go to somebody. So you will get those components and then design the truck again in such a way that it is
01:31:40
Speaker
easier to mass manufacture because you're using the components which are currently mass manufactured. That's the journey which you're currently doing. Correct. Correct. So what happens in automotive is already on a mobile phone, for example, right? The glass is not made by Apple. The glass is made by.
01:31:59
Speaker
Gorilla glass. The camera sensor is not made by Apple, but it's made by Sony. So the same thing is in the automotive also. The steering wheel or the steering column is not made, but customized for us. Headlights are customized for us. What we are making in-house is the motor, the motor controller, the battery pack, the battery cooling system, and the electrical system that we have, including DC, DC, and PDUs.
01:32:21
Speaker
But if I want to not use a processor for animation and graphics in the display, that will again come from, let's say, Continental or Infineon or something similar. Those components we have to purchase. Okay.
B2B Market Focus and Trials
01:32:34
Speaker
And what is the audience for whom you're building this truck? Yes. So if you think about it, a 300 kilowatt hour of truck, a 50 kilowatt charger for a car is a fast charger. It's a slow charger for a truck.
01:32:47
Speaker
And the charges are not available everywhere. So initially, the market is going to be B2B, where you have someone running a fleet, where you're not buying one, but 10 or 15 trucks, where the investment in the charging makes sense for him. And the reason he will invest is because if you take the energy from solar, then it comes to you at around 1.5 or 2.5 rupees.
01:33:08
Speaker
compared to a grid which can go up to 11 rupees. 2.5 rupees per kilometre run or per unit? Per unit of electricity. Okay. What is it translated into your cost per kilometre? 18, 6 and 1.2 rupees. That's the correct for diesel electricity from grid and electricity from solar. Now, what happens in truck industry also people don't buy trucks upfront. They're buying on loan because that's what makes sense on the financial sheet. So, you're going to be going to pay a 10% deposit for a diesel truck or electric truck.
01:33:38
Speaker
Assuming electric trucks are double, that's a target for everyone. And so let's say the first 10% deposit for electric truck is 3.5 lakh. And for our electric truck is 7 lakh. That's the first hit that you have. You have to pay more there. Now comes the EMI, which for electric truck is going to be double than a diesel truck. But the cost of fuel accounts for 96% of the cost of running a diesel truck, not the cost of the truck.
01:34:00
Speaker
Within two years you break even, if you are using grid, if you use solar and probably within a year. See, if you were to see our business slides or our presentations as well, the first thing we talk about is diesel trucks in India cause 60% of the pollution, the particular emission comes from diesel trucks.
01:34:19
Speaker
38% carbon dioxide, 42% carbon nitroxide, numbers are really bad. And they're just 3% of overall vehicle. 14,000 drivers died last year because cabins are also not safe. They're 40% attrition of drivers because the condition is so bad. But environment changes so little every day that we are not concerned about environment at all.
01:34:40
Speaker
Unless the river floods your house or unless the tornado takes your house off, we are not concerned about whether or not today. Unless you are living in Delhi in the winters. Exactly. But the fact that the electric trucks are cheaper is the first thing that hits everyone and that's why the movement is going to happen.
01:35:01
Speaker
Kitna Detti has always been the favorite question of the country. Yeah, I believe for the three-wheeler market, there's like a fairly significant percentage of electrification which has happened there. Like this last mile delivery, what people use, Tata is equivalent three-wheelers. Because again, that total cost of ownership, that metric makes a lot of sense there.
01:35:29
Speaker
Now, we decided not to enter the LCD, the TATA-S is the LCD, like commercial because the Chinese have taken over that sector completely. The motors, the battery packs, the controllers, everything comes from China. You just assemble and sell.
01:35:42
Speaker
and that again becomes the micromatics. So all these like multigreen and a couple of others like Euler. Not altigreen, because I don't have a lot of detail about them, but it seems like the motor is made by them in house. But I can't talk about other companies. I don't have enough information to claim something. Okay. But I know that at least for the ACE, the motors and other things are coming out for Electra also, but probably you can check the website.
01:36:10
Speaker
So it goes, it goes like this. If you're not making the company, you know, you're buying it from China and there are not many OEMs, including the big ones. For example, Mahindra, if you see the ad campaign, it's called a bond electric for the electric vehicles that they'll, not sure. So your bond electric, commercial, all the new XEVs that are electric coming from Mahindra, if you see the ad campaign, it's called bond electric. So your bond, which one else is DNA?
01:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Okay, okay. So you're saying that there's, because everything is so easily available from Sinus, so even the possibility of profit margin will be much lower there, because it's very low. You don't have livers to charge more. Yeah, if you see the proper commercial vehicle OEMs, their gross margins versus the passenger car sector, the commercial vehicles are at a higher gross margin.
01:37:04
Speaker
Because first there are few, only few can make it. You can't buy stuff from China and actually do it. It's very expensive there. China has failed in the petroleum diesel category. There is no car which has competed ever. MG is electric. So that's the term which China also did at right time. They knew that they cannot beat Germans and Japanese in the motor technology, the engine technology. So why not invest in motor? And they've done really good.
01:37:29
Speaker
MG Motors and the Chinese company VYT, they have done phenomenal work in the battery technology and the motor technology. And Indian is being always behind by a decade. We have not started that development yet. Hopefully, Amirajah, Excite, Tata, and Ola also probably will come, start making battery packs, battery sales by 26. But till then, we have to survive on imports. And again, the way the fame policy also works is that we are giving fame policy to OEM, like me. I'll get the fame policy. So I can go to China and pick something.
01:37:58
Speaker
That doesn't solve the problem. The problem is that the OEMs cannot buy products in India. So you should give the fame policy to the component supplier, the guy who ready to make the motor or the pack or the BMS or the motor controller or the headlight or the steering wheel, electric steering wheel or the e-compressors. All that money should be given to the guys who are making it.
01:38:16
Speaker
But the fame policy for businesses who don't know is a government policy for encouraging localization and specifically in the electric vehicle space. If you're selling an electric vehicle with a certain percentage of local components, then there is a subsidy.
01:38:35
Speaker
And Indians are the smartest human in the world. You think that people are able to manipulate and show that they are meeting that percentage number without actually meeting it? See, because you can question everything, right? Because you can't write down the assembly process. So if I tell you the motor is made in India, that means I've taken the rotor and the stator and connected them together in India. That's the definition of manufacturing. The stator and rotor can be made in China.
01:39:06
Speaker
Right, right, right. OK, got it. So assembled in India versus made in India, that differentiation is like a gray line. OK, interesting. Having said that, there are a lot of companies which are doing grounds of work of making in India. But the scale is not there, because scale is where the OEM was selling more, who's buying from China.
01:39:24
Speaker
Okay. Okay. And what the components that you are using, they're all going to be made in India. Battery pack, of course, you will need to import. You said 2026 is when India will have capacity. Battery cell. Battery cell. Yeah. Battery cell, we are probably going to take from Korea. You have the top three there, LG, Panasonic, and Samsung.
01:39:44
Speaker
So we have because India, China, chemistry is also weird. We're not sure what may happen. So we are sort of not dependent on them. All the other components we don't want from China. And we are not making that truck which is going to be cheaper than other trucks. Our trucks are going to be more expensive than the competition. And that's that's how we want to play it. So the cost is not a factor for us because my trucks are going to give you the best mileage possible. So first entry barrier is high. But every month you're going to spend so less that you're not going to go out. That's the overall play that we are playing at.
01:40:14
Speaker
Yeah, so you're building like the Mercedes Benz of trucks, basically. Yeah, okay, amazing. And I mean, you're already at 90% efficiency, which is like, you're saying one and a half times what other people are at. Yeah, so there's 90% also, again, every data at this stage should be taken with a pinch of salt. There's 90% with our test. Yes, now, and that's where the April to December next is very, very important.
01:40:41
Speaker
on the ground with the load in Delhi temperature, in Surat temperature, in Chirapunji with a lot of rain, then we have to see. With the traffic, the number of times you press breaks, all of that data has to come in and tell us that, okay. This is the exact number. Okay, okay, okay. Got it. Interesting, interesting, amazing. So, is this it or a decade from now, will you be on your fourth startup?
01:41:06
Speaker
Oh, no. So this is it. So right now I have notion ink, which I will restart one day. Then we have inkers, which are country and dresser. So these are the things. And fourth will be probably a school of AI. So I also teach on Sundays. I've taught more than 4,000 students till now. These are classes that used to happen at 6.30 AM. Now I change the time to 9 AM.
01:41:29
Speaker
and I teach them convolutional networks. So for example, the last assignment was the reinforcement learning. Before that, we covered GPT-4. The next assignment is on reinforcement learning with human feedback for chart GPT. So the school of AI is like, you can say, my way of slowing down every Saturday and giving back also and making sure I can remain at the edge of AI because it's moving so fast that unless you're teaching,
01:41:55
Speaker
And the best way to learn is to teach. Absolutely. The best way to learn is to teach. Absolutely. Yeah, because you have to be prepared for every question and students will ask the question. Yeah, absolutely. And I also tell my students that unless you ask a stupid question, you remain stupid. You have to ask everything. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
Advice and Community Engagement
01:42:17
Speaker
Are you doing this as a for-profit or what for School of Air? What's the goal there?
01:42:22
Speaker
It's somewhere between non-profit and for-profit because earlier first a couple of years I did without taking any money and when I did that then our students will come like a bhajan But because now they have to pay a bit which is probably 120th of anyone like a triple IIT or IIT would charge that amount of money is still like we all are Indians Indian right any money going out is some money going out and
01:42:49
Speaker
Then you are addicted and you are committed basically. That commitment I want. That's why the charges are very low. Right. Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. So I want to do like a this or that kind of a rapid fire kind of a thing. Okay. I'll give you two choices. You tell me which one you prefer and why. Okay. So and this is the first time I'm doing this. This is an experiment. The last podcast I recorded by a guest told me
01:43:14
Speaker
add a fun element in it. So this is my attempt at adding a fun element. OK. A million customers or a billion dollars? A million customers. Why? Yeah, because seeing your product in hands of people changing lives builds a value where a billion can be at the end in the future. Friday? A million customers is a big validation. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
01:43:44
Speaker
Okay. Friday or Monday? Monday. Why? I look forward to be in office and do the next few things. Amazing. Okay. Experience or energy? And this could be in terms of people you hire or the team you build or? Energy. Okay.
01:44:08
Speaker
And because you've worked with interns right from notion days, and so you have a lot of faith in the power of you.
01:44:16
Speaker
Yeah, in the last 14 years, I would have hired more than 300 plus interns. And if you see any of those interns, like if you go on LinkedIn and check what those interns are doing, they are the best of the companies, Samsung, Google, Disney, and DreamWorks. And also on top of it, the Indian ecosystem right now with experience is not there at the state of heart.
01:44:39
Speaker
And teaching a learned person is very difficult. It's not that we don't need experienced people for manufacturing, for assembly, for plant layout, for all optimization. We need a lot of experienced people. But even there, we look for energy. Are you ready to learn something new? If I hired a hosting manager, for example, from, let's say, Ashok Leland today, the guy would not have done anything on the electric side. He would have only bought tires and other stuff, mechanical stuff, engine. But now we are looking at 400 other companies which are electric. Are you ready to learn about them?
01:45:07
Speaker
work with a team which is not as experienced as you and still say that, yes, you are interested. OK. Economic Times or Times of India, where would you like to get featured? Economic Times, any event. Why? Featured, like, even if I had to read this kind of economic. No, no. Where would you like to get featured? Where would you like to see your photos?
01:45:28
Speaker
Times of India I used to read, I think 15 years ago, but after that it's all. I mean, think of the readership, right? If you're featured on Times of India, it is like mass market. Your neighborhood auntie will also see you in the, you know, whereas economic times will be a much narrower niche market who will see your photo.
01:45:50
Speaker
No, more than being popular, I want those people to know me who can learn from me and who I can learn from. Just being popular doesn't solve any purpose at all. And that has happened in notioning days. If I go to the airport, people will recognize me. And that's not a really good suggestion to be in. Interesting. Interesting. OK. Interesting. Email or WhatsApp? WhatsApp. And why is that? More immediate.
01:46:18
Speaker
It's not on the immediate side because I also tell everyone that because you have sent me a message, don't expect I'm going to respond immediately. But it's just the way it organizes. In fact, you asked me my fourth startup. If I had some time left, I would actually try and rearrange the mails also. For example, if we both are interacting in the last one year,
01:46:41
Speaker
we would have made thousands of different titles for the email. I will not be able to link anything at all. But at least on WhatsApp, you have this concept of groups and persons want to an interaction and we can do a much better communication. And more than WhatsApp, it's actually Telegram because I can send bigger files. Okay. The organization is easier to do. Interesting. Interesting. Very interesting. Okay.
01:47:06
Speaker
Cool, one last question. So what advice do you have for young aspiring founders? Yeah, so it's the same thing. Like if you're trying to look for something inside you, your inspiration, if your inspiration is going to come from somewhere else, then you probably shouldn't do it. You have everything inside you need forever, whatever you need. So just stop. Don't wait.
01:47:32
Speaker
Amazing. And there's one more line, which I use on WhatsApp, which is how you do something is how you do everything. And meaning of that is very simple. If you are untidy at your house, you're going to be untidy in your business. If you don't take care of your plants, you're not going to take care of your kids or employees. So what you do, how you do anything is how you end up doing everything. Oh, yeah, amazing. There's this very famous story about Steve Jobs, right? Like he cared about how the insides of
01:48:00
Speaker
the Macintosh looked, nobody would actually open a Macintosh and see what it looked like from inside, but he cared about that as well. Yeah, amazing.