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Unlocking Human Potential | Shobhit Banga @ Josh Talks
134 Plays4 years ago
"My loyalty is not to Josh but to unlocking human potential" - Shobhit Banga
A school drop out, a state level Tennis player, India’s youngest qualifier of the elite “Paris - Brest - Paris” International cycling event, founder of two NGO’s - Sach & Half Glass Full, a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur and the Co-Founder of Josh Talks - Shobhit Banga can be described in many ways. But what defines him best is his quest for unlocking human potential.
In this episode of Founder Thesis we sit down for a chat with Shobhit to learn about his fascinating off beat journey right from his small town life of Kullu, to pursuing sports as a career goal - cycling 600kms non stop, his experience at the Harvard Summer School, starting Josh Talks, losing focus & finally re-connecting with his mission of inspiring young minds.
An incredible journey with lots to learn from. Here are key takeaways from our conversation with Shobhit:
- How growing up in a small town is advantageous to entrepreneurship.
- How quitting is harder than it seems.
- Starting and running an NGO.
- How Josh Talks was monetized.
- Chasing your purpose or mission through your startup.
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Transcript
Introduction to HD Smartcast
00:00:02
Speaker
HD Smartcast You are listening to an HD Smartcast original
00:00:24
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob, and you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast.
What is Josh Talks?
00:00:30
Speaker
We meet some of the most celebrated charter founders in the country, and we want to learn how to build a unicorn. I'm sure you've heard about Josh Talks, the popular video platform featuring motivational talks by some of the most inspiring people in India.
Founders' Journey
00:00:52
Speaker
The really amazing thing about the Joe Stocks platform is its two very young founders, Shobhit Banga and Supriya Bohm. They co-founded Joe Stocks when they were still in the second year of graduation. And today, it's an honor for us to feature a conversation with Shobhit about his journey from being one of the youngest elite cyclists in the country to founding Joe Stocks and discovering his true calling.
Shobhit's Early Life in Himachal
00:01:22
Speaker
So Shobit, I believe you are a Himachali. What was that whole experience like growing up in Himachal? And your father has played a big role in your life, so tell me about that.
00:01:32
Speaker
So I think growing up in a small town is a massive advantage to anyone trying to start up because you get this insight into a world that most people in a big city have not seen. Because the majority of the country is here, this is what in some ways reality is. And growing up in Mandia Kulu was absolutely a phenomenal experience. Going to a small school, you know, we actually used to sit on the floor and study. There were so many students in class that some had to sit outside the door. So, you know, it's this slightly different from the rest of the country.
Educational Journey to Bangalore
00:02:00
Speaker
Never speaking in English.
00:02:01
Speaker
almost it being like a foreign language like French is right now to anyone I think growing up in a small town is a massive advantage because of this insight that you get then the other very big thing that happened in my childhood was my parents and their role in sort of pushing me to do insanely well and this my dad was it's almost like a rebel that you know he would push us to do things that were different that were not stereotypical so he also demanded excellence but it was not in
00:02:28
Speaker
marks per se, so he was least bothered about KITNANAMBARA RE and this and that he was very bothered about KIMPAD KITNARA RE but very less bothered about KITNANAMBARA RE you know how many exams then he would almost take us on a holiday before the exam so because we are very close to MANALI
00:02:42
Speaker
we'll drive down to Manali one day before the exam and the next morning come back directly go to school from Manali so you know there's no studying happening on the last day those kind of things not because he didn't believe in education but because he was a rebel like subconsciously I don't think he consciously accept ever that he's a rebel but I think subconsciously he is because he's always challenging the norms there was this day that happened where I think I was in the eighth standard my brother was in the fourth standard my mom was teaching my brother
00:03:05
Speaker
in the drawing room on the ground floor and my dad was teaching me physics i think sitting on the first floor in my house in kulu and i think my brother was crying because he was not able to study and i was frustrated my dad was trying to teach me and you know we just talked he closed my dad closed the books he's sitting on the bed and teaching him i'm walking around he said show it you're going to Bangalore and literally just like that the next day i went to school my brother went to school we gave our exams we came back our parents had come to pick us up
00:03:32
Speaker
sat in the car in our same school clothes we drove to Delhi, stayed at my grandparents that night, took a flight the next morning, went to Bangalore. I took admission in a school and we did not come back. So what happened in Bangalore then?
Pursuing Tennis and Cycling
00:03:45
Speaker
One of the reasons that justified this very aggressive move, which was to get up from a city all of a sudden and just move, which is completely unheard of generally, is generally a very planned move. What made this justifiable even in our heads was that, so I used to play tennis in Kulu itself. Kulu has a lot of foreigners.
00:04:02
Speaker
and I should play tennis in Kullu. It's sort of a make-do code. There's no academy, there's no coach, nothing. The balls are three months old balls. But I used to wake up every single day at 4.30 in the morning and go to play by five. And my dad saw that, you know, I was quite driven to do this. And he said, okay, why don't you go to Bangalore and do this? We had also gone to Bangalore for a summer vacation a few months ago because my dad has very, very close friends. So we had seen that
00:04:28
Speaker
beautiful corporate environment that was sort of as compared to a very small town that sleeps by 8 p.m. every single night and there's nothing to do apart from education. This was this massive city and we had seen some of it. We had done some kind of swami classes. You know that kind of culture was there. So Bangalore was the choice. So going to Bangalore we immediately started looking for tennis academies where I could play. I took an admission in a school like I said and I started going to school and playing tennis alongside.
00:04:56
Speaker
about just a few months going to school my dad said that you know you're playing a lot you're playing much better than what you were playing why don't we just leave school completely and just do tennis full-time and just like that dad joined that school mid-year i left that school mid-year and started playing tennis full-time even my tennis coach was surprised and sort of i think he wanted to say sure but you're not that good also but he never said it by no means was that move logical you know i wasn't that good at all in fact that was the case and i started
00:05:25
Speaker
playing very very aggressively 6 am in the morning till 6 pm in the evening and also it was a pretty expensive sport so I knew that my parents had this pressure because living in Bangalore is very very expensive earning in a marginal living in Bangalore not so fair on the books and on top of playing tennis like all of a sudden you almost spend no money in a month to
00:05:45
Speaker
Running expenses are going away from saving. So I can imagine and I could see and I could sense there was a lot of pressure on my parents. So there was this, tennis was an incredibly hard phase. People say that quitting is easy. I think quitting is underrated. Absolutely underrated because quitting is very tough. It's very easy to continue. So I could just continue at school. And similarly, when I left tennis, I could just continue tennis. But to do something that is not the norm is much harder. So I tried very hard, gave it my life and everything.
00:06:14
Speaker
Luckily, I got injured and I was very happy that this happened because I didn't think I would have made a very good tennis player. Actually, we decided that we had to give up tennis. This is about two, two and a half years into playing tennis. And my parents decided that since I'm not playing tennis, Bangalore is insanely expensive anyway. And for my dad, it is becoming very hard because he used to say in Himachal,
00:06:33
Speaker
come down to Bangalore for a few days every month. So he said, why don't you come back closer to home, but still in the city, closest city to my hometown is Chandigarh and my parents shifted to Chandigarh. I also shifted with them. So this is after 10th had completed. So I had given my board exams through National Open School. The result had not come out yet, I still remember. And this was about two and a half years into playing tennis. Then what next? So you decide to go to Chandigarh.
00:07:01
Speaker
Right, so coming to Chandigarh was also a pretty big decision, right? Because you had just shifted to Bangalore about two and a half, three years ago and all of a sudden now...
00:07:09
Speaker
you're shifting again so you know I somewhere always felt that it was somewhere because of me that so many changes were happening and that wasn't really really really the case so anyway so we came to Chandigarh and I still wasn't going to school so even Chandigarh I had started doing tennis training with this coach here because very tough to just give up something you know and to mentally accept that you've given it up so I joined a coach in Chandigarh who said that you know there's a DAB school here
00:07:31
Speaker
you have to give your 11th and 12th somehow instead of NOS why don't you give it through DAV school so he said you can take admission through tennis quota and you only need to go once a week and see how that goes so I took admission in DAV but of course then tennis wasn't going so well
00:07:46
Speaker
As a part of my fitness training for tennis in Bangalore, one of the things I used to do was cycling and my cycling coach called me up and said, there should be this race happening in Bangalore. It is the longest cycling race that has ever happened in the country. It is 300 kilometers. You ride from Bangalore beyond Mysore.
00:08:06
Speaker
to Chamundi Hills and all the way back. And that's one race. It's over 300 kilometers. He basically said that, Shobita, I think you're made for it. And you know, I was sitting here frustrated and I was still young. So, you know, I was just looking for an escape to get rid of wherever I was stuck. And this was that escape. So I thought, you know what, another mission. I can go mad after this and forget about all the terrible things that I was thinking about. So I came to Himachal with the bike that I had. The race was about a month and a half, two months in.
00:08:36
Speaker
I had never trained for a race, never done anything like it. Came to Himachal and just climbed mountains on my bike every single day like a madman. So we went to Bangalore for the race. My dad came along with me as always. I don't remember what position I came. I think under six-ish, I think, but I'm not sure. I ended up doing extremely well. I was the youngest finisher of the race and it went really, really well. And I rode over 300 kilometers when I had done a maximum of probably 60 in training.
00:09:04
Speaker
So it is an absolute mind-being experience. And my dad and I stayed at my fitness trainer's house itself, the cycling coach. And he sort of said that he showed that there are more races, and this is another sport. Do you want to stay back and do this? I said, yes, definitely. I want to stay back and do this. And just like that, I switched from tennis to cycling, tennis to confusion to cycling. OK. And this was, again, which class when you shifted to cycling? Somewhere around 11th-ish.
00:09:34
Speaker
Then what next? How did you pursue that cycling dream?
00:09:39
Speaker
So in cycling, there's two types of cycling. One is mountain bike and one is road cycling. And I was a road cyclist. Now within road cyclists, you could do something called endurance cycling, which is basically long distance cycling. And that's what I started doing because I had already started with that. And my cycling coach was also an endurance cyclist. So one of the most respected cycling events in the world is called the Paris-Brist-Paris. It happens once every four years. It's a 1,200 kilometer race that
00:10:07
Speaker
goes from Paris to Brest and back to Paris. And I started training for that. And that's one of the toughest things to do in cycling. Of course, there is one tougher than that also, which is called the race across America. And these are the two things that I had in my mind. This is what I had to do. Tour de France is not endurance cycling. Tour de France is about 150 to 200 kilometers per day. So that doesn't qualify as endurance cycling. So that was not the objective at this time.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I got into it very, very aggressively from day one I started. The qualifiers happen in India almost every year or every few years for people to qualify for that race that happened once every four years. So as I start qualifying, to qualify you have to do these four races. You have to do a 200 kilometer within a certain time, a 300 kilometer within a certain time, a 400 kilometer within a certain time, and then a 600 kilometer within a certain time. So you have to do four races to qualify for the main race in Paris.
00:11:02
Speaker
In every single of these, I was obviously the youngest person doing them because nobody at 17 or 16 does endurance cycling. It's just like not something that's recommended because
00:11:14
Speaker
Your body is just not ready for it, but I did it anyway and in India the rules were not so strict. I actually won the 400 kilometer race, which was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life. The 600 happened about one year into my cycling and you know, nobody really, like nobody cycled 600 kilometers for fun. Even Lance Armstrong has given this interview on, when he tried to ride 600 kilometers, what happened? I think at 400 he left. So you know, that was another monster.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I completed 600 kilometers in about 31 hours and a few minutes. And it was non-stop riding apart from a seven minute sleep break I took in the middle. Wow. Okay. How do you sleep just for seven minutes? I mean, how do you wake up after seven minutes when you're... So I think the first thing is so adrenaline is so high that it's very tough to sleep.
00:12:05
Speaker
but one of the trainings that we always did so my cycling coach made us do was just sit at home and just stay awake you are not allowed to sleep and he would make us do this for 18 hours at a time at least and a couple of times we even did
00:12:19
Speaker
24 hours and 30 hours. And that is much tougher than to be on the road and not sleep. So, you know, you already had this training of not sleeping. The tougher part is to get to sleep fast enough, which is what you need to sort of train your mind for. And the toughest time is five o'clock in the morning when the sun is just rising and your body's telling you to just shut down. And by that time, you've already written for you started the previous day at 9 a.m., right? So it's almost going to be 24 hours already. So at 5 a.m., we knew my dad was again in the car behind me.
00:12:48
Speaker
and we knew that we have to take this break and I think that day changed me a lot because so much happened like a swarm of bees stung me in the middle while coming down from a flyover like some 30 bees was stuck in my jersey and you couldn't stop because if you stop to take them out you lose 30-40 minutes this happened just a few minutes after starting my tire got punctured
00:13:08
Speaker
very very early on and everybody went ahead and I was the last one left and again very very early on. In this reach you're not allowed to take any support from your car. So you have to do everything yourself. So you have to put the cordon pantry yourself, you have to fill the tire again yourself. So it takes a long long time. In most races your support car can actually support you. In this the car can be there for medical emergencies but cannot support you. And I remember that you know when you're doing 600 kilometers you don't even want to do one extra kilometer and I remember I actually did 618 kilometers.
00:13:36
Speaker
The 18 extra was because I went 9 km into the wrong way. So after reaching the point, I took some wrong turn when 9 km went wrong. And you know, when you're doing 600 km and you do even 100 m wrong, you want to stab someone. We had gone wrong. Then the car started honking from behind. I realized that, you know, the pit stop should have come 9 km ago. It's not coming. You're getting frustrated.
00:13:58
Speaker
You're waiting for that halfway mark, right? So desperately. And it just wasn't coming. So we took a U-turn, we finally reached the right spot. I got down from a bike and the support car can meet you there. I started shouting and I'm screaming and I'm telling my dad that I'm not doing this. So he just slapped me across my face, gave me a tight one.
00:14:19
Speaker
You know, I'm 318 kilometers into ride a bike non-stop and he gets away, slaps me across my face. I just become quiet. I still have gone on my bike. And you know, the second 300 were much easier than the first, you know, because all of a sudden you've calmed down, you realized that. So I don't know, I don't know what happened, but I think, I think that was monumental. How many people do a 600 kilometers endurance cycling in India? Like how many would have done this?
00:14:44
Speaker
So I think about 40 people started in that race. I think about 20 would have finished. Well, this is like super elite level, like maybe 0.001 percentage of cyclists would have ever actually completed something like this, I'm guessing in general. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You need to be a very different mental frame of mind.
00:15:07
Speaker
You know because it's like it's almost you don't even want to drive to Chennai Let alone drive to Chennai and come back and let alone cycle to Chennai and come back I think I realized so many things that like for example The mind is completely a lie, you know, its job is to keep you alive not to make you achieve things So you so as soon as you're conscious of that, you know You don't like it anymore and you're always saying whatever the mind tells you is a goddamn lie because it its agenda is not your agenda Its agenda is to keep your life your agenda is to win
00:15:34
Speaker
it's a gender issue in your life. So it's telling you don't do this. So I think one of the things that is a very significant learning is don't listen to the mind. It's not your best friend because it has its own agenda. It's like a political party. You never know what's the reality. So that thought just stayed with that. You can completely manipulate your mind and make it do anything and make anything achievable. And actually 600 people, it is not tough at all as soon as you get through the mental block. Because physically, can you ride a cycle nonstop for, let's say,
00:16:03
Speaker
So you don't need to do it in 30 hours, right? You can aim to do it in 40 hours. So can you ride a bike for 40 hours? Oh, absolutely you can. Can you walk nonstop for 40 hours? Of course you can. I think that was one of the incredible learnings from that day and from that time. So how old were you when you finished this 600? I was 17.
00:16:23
Speaker
I remember this very, very clearly because I was 17 and this was the fourth and the final race to qualify for the Paris British Paris, which was sort of like the Hall of Fame, the gold since Mania. And, and the terrible thing that happened was that, so when I wrote to Paris British Paris, so Paris British Paris may, I sort of had qualified, right? So, but Paris British Paris got in touch saying that you are under 18 and you can't participate because you are under 18 and the race was happening that year.
00:16:52
Speaker
And it was true, I was underrated. But in India, they allowed me to participate in the qualifiers anyway. But these comparisons are super strict, and I was not allowed to compete in the race. And I think that was one of the biggest, like, even more than leaving tennis and to give up on tennis. This was the toughest hit. That, you know, it was all meaningless. At that time, at least it felt that it's not good to qualify here. And you know, when you get underage, and that's like a terrible thing to sort of think. And I had to wait four years then to participate.
00:17:20
Speaker
writing to some of the best endurance cyclists in the world. Marco Bolo was one of the guys I still remember and he said absolutely not, absolutely not. He absolutely rejected the idea of me doing an endurance 1200 kilometer race and I had to wait for the race across America which is even tougher which is which I think there was a sports magazine that called it. The toughest sporting event in the world is the race across America for which I also tried to qualify for but I wasn't able to qualify for that.
00:17:49
Speaker
That was another crazy experience. So basically when I qualified for the 600 kilometers, the next day I got a call from Vivek Radhikrishnan, who was building India's first professional cycling team. Now this was an endurance cycling, but this was more like the tour de France kind of cycling, which is short, relatively short. So not 600, more like 150-ish kilometers, 120-ish kilometers, but super fast, much faster than what I was doing and what any cycling was.
00:18:17
Speaker
And he sort of called me and said, hey, do you want to be a part of this team that we're building? And I was like, you know, I was like, of course. That sounds crazy.
00:18:25
Speaker
If there's anything happening in cycling in India, I would credit it to Vivek and his obsessive madness with anything he sort of chooses to pick up to do. And I think he became sort of like my revenue for sort of the next few months only actually, sadly, about a year and a half ish. And I started writing for what was then called King Kinney Cycling Team, eventually the sponsor, Specialized King Kinney Cycling Team. And yeah, with that team, I went I think to Thailand and Singapore,
00:18:54
Speaker
and raced across India and it was a fantastic, fantastic time. As I was sort of also growing up right that that very significant like 15 to 18 was happening where I was realizing that like what is meaningful? Where does my sense of purpose really like? Where do I get a sense of purpose from? And you know, obviously, the answers are not clear. But like, for example, a lot of the things that are in the back of my mind was one of one of my teammates used to work at a cycle shop.
00:19:19
Speaker
He would ride with me in the morning, most elite cycling teams that India had seen yet. And then right after training, he would go back to his shop to work there for $7,500 to be selfie or something like that. You know, and I just saw that, you know, this guy has potential. He could go out there and be anyone, do anything. And somehow.
00:19:40
Speaker
because the VR world currently functions, there is no way for him to unlock that talent and potential that he has within him. So it should sort of be the government's job or let's say the system's job to build an efficient system to unlock somebody's potential. Like it's not petroleum's job to make a damn good efficient car to go very, very high speed. It's a huge job to make a car.
00:20:04
Speaker
that is very efficient at utilizing petroleum to move from place A to place B. And similarly for a person who's let's say raw material, basically, it should be the ecosystem job to create an environment which is very conducive to efficiency of utilization of human potential has to be higher. Like it is absolutely disgustingly terrible right now. And that sort of connected to me being from a small town and everything else that I had seen here. So all my friends, what were they doing?
00:20:31
Speaker
because now you're 18, you're connected on Facebook with some of them and you see that, you know, I came to Bangalore in the world and life changed for me and I've sort of seen things and I know where I want to go and I have these dreams and ambitions. But a lot of my friends were running Kirana stores. That made absolutely no sense that how could a guy who was much better in education, much better in studies than me, is doing relatively nothing as compared to the potential that he had. And even not my choice. If somebody by choice was doing that, fantastic, no problem, you know,
00:21:01
Speaker
But not by choice. So there's a very, very high degree of frustration. So even in Bangalore, I had actually started this NGO with two of my very, very close friends called Satch, the Hindiwala Satch. There was this lie that I basically felt there was in the way we all lived our life. There's this massive lie. And therefore, we just call that NGO Satch, like the reality, the truth. And we just went to orphanages across Bangalore.
00:21:26
Speaker
I believe the early building days of George, where we went to orphanages across Bangalore and we basically exposed people to various different things by showing them movies and things like that. So different movies that had fantastic messages, we showed them those movies. I also had this uncle in Bangalore, my dad's friend, who I really looked up to and learned a lot from, who's basically outlook towards life was also something that got ingrained in my personality, which was to
00:21:52
Speaker
If you have potential, you must strive to achieve more and more and more until you find the limitation of your own abilities. You just have to go that far. You have to touch that mark. You have to push and push and push. And that sort of built the early days of Josh.
From Cycling to Entrepreneurship
00:22:13
Speaker
When these issues started happening and I started feeling this very strong itch in me to do something more
00:22:18
Speaker
more than cycling. And none of it was a very strong thought at that time. It wasn't something I could look back and say, I drew a line. It was just some kind of an itch that I was asking for something different. That I basically got up one morning at four in the morning, but I got ready, almost packed my bags, went to the airport and took a flight to Delhi. So yeah, that's what happened. So you decided to go back to Delhi and do what?
00:22:46
Speaker
So at that time it wasn't really clear. One thing was clear that 12th had ended.
00:22:51
Speaker
and everybody was joining colleges. So that sort of seemed like the thing to do when I was sort of roaming around endlessly. So when I came back to Delhi, the one thing I knew how to do was run an NGO, you know, and not really an NGO in the sense that raise money and all that, but do things. First thing I did was come here and start another NGO called Half Classful, where again, the goal was go to orphanages and talk to the kids there about the world and the possibilities through content and through activities. And apart from that, I started writing into colleges.
00:23:19
Speaker
to sort of study there. So I tried to get into the conventional Delhi University colleges but none of them accepted cycling as a sport. So I was like, you know, screw that. And there was a Lancaster University had recently started an offshore campus in India in partnership with GD Goinca. So I went there, I had a bunch of operators, etc. I walked into college, I went to the dean's office, to the admissions head's office, I showed them the office of operators. He offered me a fantastic scholarship.
00:23:47
Speaker
For the first year and sort of that was it and I started going to TD going back I knew I wouldn't go to college So I told him that pretty early on that I'm I I don't think I'm gonna be coming much If that's okay with you and join and that's what happened as I joined college here and I was running half-glass full on this Like I was running half glass full fully and gonna call it on the side actually that's how it was
00:24:12
Speaker
So did you also like understand how to raise funds for an NGO and all that at that time? So, you know, I think I think another thing that I learned sort of from my parents was that and especially from a dad about how he managed money was that, you know, money is really like meaningless. I think I truly understood what it means to suffer something to be just to mean to an end, you know, not the thing in itself.
00:24:35
Speaker
So money was never ever at all a question in my mind that did I want to well I was very clear I needed to do very very well in life But it wasn't that you don't have to run after money or anything like that So even when we were running half less well, I was very focused on kim kamkya karane nisa output kaiga
00:24:51
Speaker
then where do I get the money to do this sort of this belief was there that if I'm doing something meaningful, I'll find the money and that's what have plus full force, but I always knew he have plus full because of an NGO structure because of various things like that may not be the answer to everything, but I but I was learning a lot. I was facing a lot of my insecurities like
00:25:09
Speaker
talking to people I used to stammer a lot in my childhood all of that was getting sorted so I was like okay this is a fantastic use of my time and college was a great distraction also because I had joined some fun courses like statistics etc that I really liked
00:25:24
Speaker
And I'd gone to a college where only a 4% didn't get admission in any college in Delhi University. They joined that college. So what ended up happening is that even academically, I ended up being one of the best in that college. And that gave me insane confidence. You know, I'd never been the best till now. In my academics, in my school, I was never the best. In tennis, I was never the best. In cycling, I was never the best. In cycling was great, but I was definitely not the best in that team that I was in.
00:25:48
Speaker
That's probably the last in the team that I was in, in the professional team where I joined. So this, it is a fantastic feeling to be winning for a change. And when did you meet Supriya? Was it during college or after that? Yeah, so I met Supriya in the second year of my college. I met her through a mutual friend who had joined my college in the second year. So he became an attachment. He had transferred from University of Toronto and he came to my university.
00:26:15
Speaker
And it was his birthday and Supre was his school friend who was also part of that birthday party. Supre and I, so I was like this weird kid who didn't know anybody at the party and Supre was the only one nice enough to come and talk to me and we started talking and I found out that Supre was this genius kid who was a topper throughout. Anything she did, she had to win. Peek spot getting that from her dad and her mom also.
00:26:40
Speaker
about her nurturing and we spoke about that on the very first day of our meeting. You know, it is probably the most awkward first conversation ever. But we were talking about families and how that led to us being who we are and our ability
00:26:54
Speaker
And our own relative unlocking of potential, the unlocking of our potential to relate to others was higher because nurturing be received and you know, nurturing be received by chance.
How Did Josh Talks Start?
00:27:04
Speaker
And that is disgusting because you can now do that by design because the internet and because the mobile from the person has, and this is the conversation and this led to Josh. So after my first year in the summer vacations, I had joined the Harvard summer school. So I took admission to the Harvard summer school and went to Howard.
00:27:19
Speaker
which is the first time I was really traveling abroad. I had gone to some place in Southeast Asia, but that's not really like going to the US. That was my first trip to the US, first trip to a place like Howard. And I think that was another thing like the 600 kilometer race, which totally, totally, you know, redefined some, some of the things in my life. Like, for example, the, what is the benchmark of excellence? Like, what does it mean, excellent? You know, it's where I learned, what it's like to be in a room where there's no need to be in a room.
00:27:48
Speaker
But I couldn't hold a one minute conversation with some people who actually studied in Nahuatl. You know, it was just like I was having breakfast with the guy who went on to swim for the US Olympic team and was training at that time for it. And you know, so I met those kind of people and it was just this... And none of these guys were special.
00:28:06
Speaker
You know, they were not very much different from that guy who I used to cycle with in terms of, you know, let's say raw potential. But the nurturing of the potential that this group in Harvard is received was probably one of the best. Of course, you have to work hard and things like that, right? And not discounting any of the things that people have done to actually get there.
00:28:23
Speaker
But I think a lot of the things that happened to them were by luck. A lot of the things that happened to you were by luck. Like being born into a certain kind of family. I did nothing to earn this. Again, my belief got stronger and stronger that you shouldn't have to be lucky to do well. You know, it's like, it's if we had petrol and we were wasting it, that's a goddamn loss. So why don't we think of human capital like that? If we want to be so wise about spending our money.
00:28:45
Speaker
The most valuable resource the world has is human resource, is human capital. So why are we not using this efficiently? And who's taking accountability and responsibility in this world for efficiency of utilization of human capital? You know, at the end of the day, forget about personal victories. What about the victory of the human race as a whole? Who's sort of taking accountability of that? And with that thought, I sort of came back to India and started talking to people about this obsession that I had of why are people not doing enough?
00:29:13
Speaker
I met Subriya who came from a completely different background from mine but was also talking about the same thing and she didn't like the idea and another friend of mine as well and we started Josh very soon after that. So tell me about that journey like how did you start Josh and what was the initial plan and how did it evolve?
00:29:37
Speaker
So 13 end is when we started talking about Josh. 14 is when we had unofficially started Josh. I was in my second year. Supriya was in the third year of her college. And after that conversation, I think three months in, Josh had started. At least in officially, you know, the conversations were there. We had started working towards it. Like as soon as you start your company, you become an entrepreneur, right? You're not a successful entrepreneur, but nobody knows that yet. You know, you're an entrepreneur and all of a sudden you become cool.
00:30:04
Speaker
start getting invited to speak at startup events and this and that. So we started off with organizing a conference where we called some of the people who have done fantastically well in their lives and we called youth.
00:30:19
Speaker
who wanted to do well, who had just wanted to make the most of their potential. We sort of connected the two over that conference and people shared their stories. And that's what happened in the first JOSH, JOSH Talks. And that was what JOSH Talks was supposed to be.
Initial Focus on Conferences
00:30:31
Speaker
The first conference went insanely well. Somebody from SRCC got in touch with us and said that, hey, we do a conference every single year. Why don't you take one day off that and let's do a JOSH Talks. So that was the second conference that led to the third and the fourth. We quickly started to go into Bangalore and Bombay.
00:30:46
Speaker
and sort of all across the country and doing your stocks across. And we started releasing some of these stocks online. Now they were not doing well online, but we anyway continue to release them. Until now, Josh was basically making no money, but was insanely loved. So we clearly had something working in the product, but just zero monetization. A few questions here before you. So you thought of it as like a TED Talks, like an Indian version of TED Talks when you started.
00:31:17
Speaker
So we definitely love TED. There's no doubt about that. But you know, I saw in India, there's this perception that TED is doing well in India. Whereas if you look at it, TED is not doing well in India at all, because the majority of the country cannot understand a TED talk. As simple as that, an American guy talking about why the education system is bad.
00:31:38
Speaker
You know, our happiness is so far away from the realities of my friend who was working a 7,500 rupee job after cycling. It's just nowhere close. But that format of Ted was working. Let's say three years of American totally transformed our country. But you cannot meet three years 25 times a year. And we need to do that. We need to constantly redefine the narrative. And you could not do that through
00:32:02
Speaker
making three digits kind of movies because we were very actually open to looking at cinema as the way to create an narrative. So George could have very well. We actually had even registered a company called Joe Stories, which was supposed to just make movies. But that was that was obscenely expensive.
00:32:17
Speaker
And we still have these kids in college who don't have money and have no experience. And at a startup, however lenient your parents are, you will probably get one shot to finally screw up your life. So we had to make it work. And that's why we went out to the conference and YouTube, which was super low cost. So at least we didn't burn money. Still, a conference would have still costed you some money. You might have had to pay for a venue or whatever. But the cost would still be there.
00:32:46
Speaker
So Supriya had some money saved up because she used to teach students something like tuitions and I had, I sold my bike to actually pay for that first conference. And then we even took some money from our parents because we eventually did run out of our own money, which the first time we got pretty easily. Luckily, because of the privilege.
00:33:04
Speaker
that we came from asking for one like was like you know let's trust them give them one chance it's better than doing nothing and it's sort of paid for us and also I had got a scholarship from my college so I didn't end up paying my college as well so I think my dad was more than happy to sort of let me fly in some ways I think is how he saw it at that time and similarly for Supriya her dad was very very concerned doesn't make any sense this is never going to work
00:33:32
Speaker
was kind of the vibe but of course you know they they would have had that vibe because what we were doing at that time did not work actually you know it was it was something else that worked and it was never supposed to become a company so we are not set that we are going to start a startup so this is just is one conference that we did we did that conference it went insanely well both your parents were not going to come we hosted this at the airport auditorium and there's free admission no ticket
00:33:56
Speaker
No, they got tickets. They were tickets. We were selling student tickets for 300 and adult tickets for 1200. I think it's fair to say we basically sold almost no tickets and we had to let everybody in for free. I think we did a total of some 20,000 rupees revenue and we spent 4 lakhs. So it was pretty crazy. But our parents attended it. And that was the crazy thing that Supere's father said that he'll come for an hour or so. And my dad was not even showing up. He's thinking, this is going to make a fool out of himself.
00:34:23
Speaker
in front of so many people and you know you're doing the start-up for the first time ever so you invite your family and your extended family and this and that you know so all your cousins are going to be there so my dad was like showbiz is going to make a fool out of myself about his family and everything and nobody anyway does this Banga Pariva to do anything because they are obviously crazy people who shift cities and take their kids out of school so my dad was like I'm not coming but I somehow forced him to come and I remember our parents had not really met yet
00:34:50
Speaker
but they were talking during the conference and they were like, God damn, this is something else and stayed throughout the entire time. Just one of the next SRCC reached out to say that, okay, do a conference here, we'll cover the entire cost of the conference apart from the shooting that you covered. So we spent only 30,000. So we saw another way to do another conference for almost zero money. And yeah, so that's what the first conference was like. And how did you get the guests? Who were the guests there? Like, and how did you get them to agree? Because you were like two college kids with no credibility.
00:35:20
Speaker
right so that's a pretty crazy story as well so basically we made pamphlets and we stood in markets and we tried to convince anybody that would talk to us and you know it would be really weird because so Supriya would go to Hoskha's village generally and I would go to Kaliria Market in Kurdamistan with pamphlets I was a little bit awkward also to talk to anybody else right but somehow we would explain that you know we're gonna share stories of people that have done incredibly well in their lives and you know they're gonna
00:35:49
Speaker
they're gonna help you define your own aspirations and sort of help redefine what you think you can achieve and well obviously 90% people did not even care 10% who hurt did not really understand there was this always you know one or two people every day that would say okay fantastic this is great i'll come and then they would never reach back to you and you know pamphlet me of course there was a website to buy tickets but we would go to flyrai every single day and nobody would have bought tickets and i think at that time it was doattend.com or something
00:36:17
Speaker
and nobody would have bought tickets, so it was pretty crazy. But eventually, you know, we started reaching out. We started going to every single startup conference that was happening. And we started talking about Joe Stocks there very, very aggressively. And then I also met this amazing guy, Yogendra, who runs one of Pernod's two entrepreneurs.
00:36:33
Speaker
which is a startup community who said that okay let me also help you try and get some audience and yeah we started finding some audience here and there and I think a total of about 150-200 people would have attended that first conference in a hall of 670 people or so. So one day before the conference we anyway have no money but Supri and I take this call to hire a tentavala.
00:36:52
Speaker
to hide the rest of the seats, you know, so that we were able to create a fantastic experience and make the hall smaller, basically. It was a pretty gutsy call. We basically had no money to pay that guy. But we anyway did it. And it turned out fantastic. Nobody found out the hall was so big. And everybody thought he had packed hall lights, sold out show, insane stuff. And we had been able to convince Appa CJ to pick up that conference. I'll never forget it. And you know, I'll sort of owe him forever.
00:37:31
Speaker
How did you get all the speakers?
00:37:34
Speaker
Uh, reached out to people one by one on email, sometimes on after them at conferences. Uh, papa CGA was a fantastic story. We reached out to, so we knew we had to get someone famous and someone with a fantastic story. And papa CGA was totally fit that bill. We had seen him on YouTube a few times and Supri and I absolutely loved him. So what we did is that we started going to the shows where he would speak. We didn't have so much money. So we didn't buy the tickets to the shows where he was performing, but we would wait outside the auditoriums.
00:38:04
Speaker
and there was this one time he was in Kudgano itself at cyber hub at the amphitheatre there and he did a show and by chance that his helper had not come with him and what we did is that so he had to pick up the stuff and take that to the parking himself so Sabrina took that chance I ran to him picked up his stuff and said hey papa siji I'll carry this for you till the car and it was the car was about five five hundred meters away at the parking of cyber hub which is a little bit further during that walk sort of convinced him to speak at josh
00:38:33
Speaker
Wow. And then once you had one kind of like a flagship speaker, then that would have helped you get the other speakers. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that was the game changer. But also apart from that, you know, I remember going to some startup conferences, convincing some other speakers and people looked at this list and said, you know what, this one guy actually said this. I'm a pretty well-read person and I don't know anybody on this list. So it was something, you know.
00:38:59
Speaker
I'm not going to speak air or show up here. You know, something like that can really demotivate you. So it is obviously a fantastic experience to do all of these things. So next two years, then you do a bunch of more conferences without yet forming a company. So how did it become from like a volunteer run conference thing to a business? So I think that took insanely long. And I think one of the reasons it took, which I was going to share in the beginning,
00:39:27
Speaker
I don't think I did a good job of sharing is that you know, there's this high of becoming an entrepreneur and of being in a startup and it's not entrepreneurs fault what happens that ecosystem makes it to be like colleges will invite you and they don't care whether you've run a company for one month or for 10 years.
00:39:41
Speaker
they put you on the same sort of pedestrian and I get that it's sort of the responsibility of the entrepreneur to sort of look at that and say this is noise this is not reality this is completely noise like you know you can lie to PR you can lie to invest you can lie to everybody you can't lie to users and you can't lie to a model that works if it works it works if it doesn't work it doesn't work no model PR will save it but it takes a lot of time to understand that and sort of that is what happened with us you know we sort of forgot about the mission and there was this high of doing these conferences
00:40:10
Speaker
We just did them one after the other one after the other. We kept uploading the talks. And the talks were not doing well online. Like I remember posting everything on Quora. I was just recently on Quora and I saw that I posted these talks in 2014.
00:40:25
Speaker
try and do all those things but continuing to do the talks that were not working you know why didn't we see that it's not working why did it take us two years to figure that out and it sort of blinded us from the mission which was to unlock human potential which was the conversation which was true which was the conversation that Supri and I had had had first time we met which was to try and use what happened to her and me by chance to do that by design for the rest of the world we forgot that we got lost in the high of running a startup and being an entrepreneur and you know doing conferences
00:40:53
Speaker
Two years in, we sort of had to answer a lot of those tough questions. And we said that, okay, we're gonna do this one mega show and we're gonna see after that what happens. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Screw it. And if it works, we'll sort of continue. And it wasn't really said in words, but there was this feeling of it not working. But somehow you've got this momentum and you don't want it to stop. So we went to our parents and we asked for money again and we said, okay, this is the last time. If it doesn't work now, we'll do what the hell you say.
00:41:19
Speaker
Both parents loved Josh simply because the value it added to the world. It wasn't doing well, but the conferences, people were crying. Like, you know, there was this time in Bombay, we did the conference, I should remember, I recall on the old school and inside there were 500 people sitting and listening to these stories that India had not heard yet. And there was this girl, Sheetal, who was sharing a story about how a mom put her under the bed while she attended to customers and slept with men. And the torture she went through in that and
00:41:49
Speaker
from that to becoming one of the best drummers in India. She went to the US drum school, got a scholarship there, started and came back and one of the best drummers in India, like to hear those kind of stories and so her parents had complete faith. They did give us the money and this time it was a lot of money. I think it was a total of 30 lakhs that we had and we literally put it into just one show. We spent 26 lakhs, 80,000 rupees on one event.
00:42:14
Speaker
which had 2,000,000 rupees of revenue. It's called Joe Stock's Leap. We were able to super over convince Anurag Kashyap to speak at that conference. By this time, we had a lot of supporters. One of our biggest supporters was Ritesh Malik, who had also invested in us. In the very early days, he gave us 9 lakhs. He and a friend of his together invested 9 lakhs in the ocean. At that time, it was a lot of money. And that was the money that really took us through all this time when we were basically doing no revenue, trying really hard to do revenue, doing 50,000, 60,000 here and there in sponsorships.
00:42:44
Speaker
another friend of ours from youth care was supported us and give us a couple of likes, you know, so at that time it's it means a lot and But still all of that was over and it wasn't working and he said we're gonna do this one last show I don't know why you know right now I'm speaking much be thinking like what an idiot like this is not working and I'm gonna spend 30 likes doing it and But that it didn't seem so, you know, we spent 30 likes on one conference and
00:43:07
Speaker
I think it was the biggest conference that has happened in India ever until that
Financial Challenges and Pivot
00:43:11
Speaker
time. We hired the Thiagra Stadium for it which was built for the Commonwealth Games.
00:43:23
Speaker
where we could cover 300. So yeah, so we did that conference. It was a mind-blowing success, again, audience-wise, but not in any other way. So financially, it was a blunder. We were a team of nine people by then. After that conference, we sort of got everybody together and we said, we have no money to pay salaries anymore. Anybody wants, they can stay.
00:43:40
Speaker
and we're going to release these talks online because the job's not done until we do that. And we started releasing these talks online. I remember some people who stayed, some for much lesser salaries. And we started releasing these talks online. Two of my very close friends came in to help. These talks started doing well. The bump was about to be released and Babita Kumari had given a talk. That was the first talk I think that did well. At this conference, there was also Sono Manchuk, JSP3, DTS, Pichar Maniya. And then we had Anurag Karsha, who's talked, did well. Then we had, you know, so Kaapik Bhadevade Speaker says,
00:44:09
Speaker
This is when the understanding started happening. After this disaster of this conference financially.
00:44:21
Speaker
We started questioning him and that is when almost three years after random violence, Supri and I reconnected with the reason why we had even started Jewish, which was to unlock human potential and started connecting the dots. And we really said, what the hell are we doing? We have to be vernacular. Otherwise, this makes no sense. And that's when we first started focusing aggressively on Hindi in Devanagari. But otherwise,
00:44:45
Speaker
English made title like, Hindi talk Dalru, that is not vernacular vernacular is when the text is Devanagari, you know, and that's what we started doing. And that's when Josh really happened. So yeah, 2018, I would say is when all of that happened, which is just two years ago. So if I say there were three years of random violence and three years of work at Josh until now. What do you mean when you say the video was doing well, like what, how many views and before that, how many views were you getting?
00:45:12
Speaker
I actually recently found this screenshot of a website where there were 114 visitors right now. How Google Analytics shows you right now. There were 114 on it and I thought that was a massive deal. I actually took a photo and put it on Facebook. But what's doing well, so until that time we used to do about 40,000 views a month. I used to tell people, you know, we do 40,000 views a month. It's a really big deal. But obviously I knew it wasn't a big deal. Babita Kumari video did one like views in a very, very short span of time.
00:45:42
Speaker
And that was like, fantastic. I remember when we reached 50,000 subscribers on the channel, which was I think in 2018. In 2018, we reached 50,000 subscribers. We actually cut a cake and made a big deal out of it. Looking back, it must have been so embarrassing to ask our subscribers to kiss you. After running some three or four years, you're still celebrating. I don't know why somebody didn't tell us or demotivate us saying that you all are idiots. Stop doing what you're doing.
00:46:09
Speaker
Few people did say that, but you never sort of took that into heat. So yeah, that's what it was. So now your videos start doing well on YouTube. How did that become a
Business Model and Partnerships
00:46:21
Speaker
business? I mean, did it become a business through the ad revenue on YouTube or what? Like, you know, how did it become monetizable? So once we knew that the talks are doing well online, we knew that we can build something out of this.
00:46:36
Speaker
So YouTube revenue was never enough. It's still today is not enough also to build a real business out of so if a Single person is running a YouTube channel like it's a single person company or two three people company Then you can make money out of YouTube. Otherwise YouTube will you cannot even survive on YouTube? Let alone make money from it at least in India Because of the lower revenue per view what we started doing at that time is finding partnerships with organizations and
00:47:03
Speaker
making parties to the organization something like brand partnership it was very very hard to do this but when we were raising money for leap we had reached out to facebook to work with them in facebook at this agenda of promoting entrepreneurship in the country getting people jobs and making job creators and we fit very well into that we were also this young startup hustling
00:47:27
Speaker
And so after leap, for leap, they were not able to support, but after leap, they asked us if we can go across the country and do conferences very much like the Joe Stokes conferences and promote entrepreneurship in the country. And we started doing that. And that's how we started doing our first revenue, doing our first brand partnerships. So Facebook was our first brand partnership. And from there, it went on to a lot of other work, the Facebook work increasing and us meeting a lot of other organizations and continuously increasing that. So I think that's when it became a real business.
00:47:58
Speaker
Give me more examples of brand partnerships, Facebook, so I understand they have a certain agenda and so they give you money to achieve that agenda. What was the use case for other brands to work with you?
00:48:12
Speaker
So I think we worked with Benetton where Benetton also had a similar agenda where they were saying that equality between genders and we had a lot of stories that depicted this. So they wanted us to do a couple of conferences and share a lot of stories. We did that.
00:48:29
Speaker
Benton was also one of the early ones and at that time your costs are so low right that even just these two partnerships got us through. Then came ITC where ITC also had women-related campaign they want to do which was about not compromising. So we had partnerships with these colleges across the country. We probably still have one of the highest distribution within colleges in terms of partnerships so
00:48:53
Speaker
almost I think about 1000 to 2000 colleges now. And they wanted to reach colleges and talk about these stories and talk about women's rights and equality. And it started doing that with ITC. And then other brands kept on coming with them requirements and being working with them. So it worked a lot with Swiggy. Now we've worked Google now and things like that. What is the benefit for Swiggy? Like what are they getting out of it or what is Google getting out of it?
00:49:20
Speaker
With Swiggy what we are doing is, so one of the toughest things for Swiggy is to recruit their delivery executives because that is one of the highest cost for them in their operations. And our target audience is literally, so we started helping Swiggy higher. This is part of our Joe's jobs vertical that we had started. And similarly for Google, Google is launching Google jobs and we are supporting Google to promote that and to build awareness for that.
00:49:46
Speaker
So none of this is ad revenue. We did a lot of work with UN as well. UN wanted the youth to talk about poverty and wanted to create a narrative and we did that with UNDP. We also worked with UN women and ILO and a bunch of other UN agencies and all of our brand partnerships is with organizations or departments within those organizations that have alignment in the work that we are doing or in the mission that we have.
00:50:10
Speaker
Okay, so if I was to summarize your sources of revenue, one source of revenue for you is YouTube advertising, which you said is a small percentage of contribution from there. The other source of revenue for you is like a sponsored event, like what you did with Benetton, for example, or for Facebook.
00:50:33
Speaker
The third source of revenue is where you are doing some sort of branded content to generate leads, like what you're doing with Swiggy and Google. Right, or also any kind of data collection, so any kind of branded partnership on any kind of program that may be online or offline, so it's not necessarily branded content only, all kind of brand partnerships. How do you collect data then?
00:50:58
Speaker
So we have over, I think we do over about 70-80 million views a month now. So that's a very large dataset to collect any kind of data from. How do those views translate into leads for Swiggy and Google? So in a lot of our campaigns, there's a comment with a link there.
00:51:21
Speaker
and people can go onto that link, fill in the information and that leads to any traditional way that any data is collected similar to that. Yes, because Josh is suggesting something, it comes with a certain degree of trust and reliability of information, which is basically what, for example, Swiggy gets from us. So, in a way, this, I think, is called native advertising. Right, in some ways, some ways, yes.
00:51:47
Speaker
I mean, it's not aggressively like what native advertising traditionally is, but something like that is your skills, which is what the focus of the organization is right now and something you're building out.
Introduction to Josh Skills
00:52:00
Speaker
Tell me more about your skills. So here was the thought, right? So, uh, undocumented potential happens. How, uh, so if you look at the life of someone, let's say somebody who went to Harvard and somebody
00:52:11
Speaker
with the potential to go to Harvard, but could not go to Harvard, right? Ended up becoming, so let's say somebody was born to a security guard. When he turned 25, and when the guy who was born to a different family turned 25, the output was completely different because of nurturing that happened. And we started looking at what are the things that made it different. One of the massive differences was access to role models.
00:52:38
Speaker
Which happened through joestox which is what joestox is a product solved for india wasn't inspiring talks it was to give rural youth access to role models the second thing that one of the other very big differences something that for example i got because of my dad and my mom and my family
00:52:54
Speaker
Uh, and my ecosystem that for example, my friend who was a cyclist who had the same problem, much more potential than me, but did not get was access to learning certain kinds of things that put me in a very unfair advantage to do well in life. So for example, I could speak in English fluently because my mom forced me to read and my dad forced me to meet me to read and to talk in English. Um, and, and because my mom knew English community.
00:53:22
Speaker
But then I learned how to use the computer because my dad was always very enterprising about the internet or the computer and he showed me the computer when we first bought it and because he was a doctor, he had it in his clinic.
00:53:34
Speaker
You know, because that's how they made reports. So I put his office and use it there and somehow, you know, make the format for his report. So I had used probably Microsoft Word before anybody was using Microsoft Word. Now these are massive unfair advantages that are so easy to replicate. And even today a security guard doesn't know how to use Excel. It is disgusting that we have made no progress in 20 years. The objective behind your skills was that what are the things that, for example, I learned in my life that are intangible, that are not
00:54:03
Speaker
They are not trigonometry taught because of education system in a school, but they're intangible that I learned because of my ecosystem. Those can be replicated and teach to people through the medium of the mobile phone. And your skills is simply an app where you can learn a lot of these skills and you can learn them at extremely low prices, something around the price of a mobile phone recharge. So around 2-3 hundred rupees and you can learn all these. What are some of the skills?
00:54:32
Speaker
So there are some skills platform that are hardcore scaling platforms. We don't want to become that. We just want to remain to things that are probably even intangible and something that other hardcore large scale platforms may not even consider worthy of getting into simply because very tough to make money from them. So some things are obvious here like English and computers. Then comes financial literacy, interview tips and things like that.
00:54:55
Speaker
because so much content is available in internet very tough to make money from it nobody is aggressively focusing on it the information is all over the place and doesn't give high quality information like for example what you and I probably receive because of our ecosystem how to make a CV so leadership lessons from the Bhagavad Gita is something that my grandmother taught me how to talk to anyone right so how to have confidence in speaking and how to how to not be shy and things like that very very intangible skills that others may not consider worth doing because you can't make money from them
00:55:25
Speaker
and we are looking at aggressively growing talks. The talks business, we are now in 11 countries, eight countries going to 11 countries with the talks product. So talks product is essentially sponsored events. Talks is YouTube, George Talks, the videos that go up online. We're taking these two countries across the world. Mainly there are three sources, right? One is let's say branded partnerships. So we don't do any kind of hardcore sponsorships.
00:55:53
Speaker
So everything is a brand partnership that's not exactly like a sponsorship. Then is YouTube and then is skills. If we leave skills aside, we do almost 90% from brand partnerships and 10% from YouTube. And skill is very, very new. And what has the traction been for skill so far? Do you see it becoming like a like, you know, a multi-million dollar kind of a business given the low ticket size of it?
00:56:18
Speaker
Absolutely. But I think one of the reasons that others are not doing lower ticket sizes is because it's very tough to run a business on 300 rupees per transaction. You know, where the lifetime value is, let's say under 1000 rupees. Incredibly hard to cover even customer acquisition prices in that. The goal is not to become a billion dollar business. The goal is to unlock human potential. So we may have to become for that reason. And it may be something that happens on the path
00:56:43
Speaker
We see this becoming extremely large. Yes. Can this do multi-million dollar revenue? Yes. Is it on the path to do so? Probably. I can't say for sure right now. But what we're very, very focused on is looking at a person who can do drastically better in his life, but is not doing because he doesn't know how to speak in English, doesn't know computers, is financially illiterate and has no values and principles that are required to do well. Okay. And how are the roles split between you and Supriya? Like what do you look after and what does he look after?
00:57:14
Speaker
So it depends time to time, they keep on changing with whatever is the most urgent thing.
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
00:57:19
Speaker
So if you look at right now, Supriya mostly does all the revenue and I mostly do all the execution of the talks. Some words of wisdom for our young listeners. So here is the case, right? Most people start a company and that's fantastic thing to do, but it has to be started according to me because of a mission.
00:57:41
Speaker
you have to have a mission, a wrong that you want to right. Because unless you want that, it is incredibly hard to win, incredibly hard to be successful because it is so tough this path. We only hear of the one in 10 stories or actually one in 50 stories that makes it
00:58:01
Speaker
Those 49 other stories are just lost opportunities. They can also win. One of the reasons that I believe it's 1 in 50 or 1 in 10 or 100 whatever that one out of is, is because that one guy worked really hard and somehow his business made sense. For the others, they could have also sustained and figured it out over time.
00:58:22
Speaker
But to do that, there's an anonymous interview and he explains it as, you know, it's like you're eating nails. You put nails into your mouth and now you're chewing them. You're eating the nails. It pains that much. So unless you have a mission, a right, a wrong that you want to write a sense of purpose behind what you're doing, you will stop chewing them. You need to get through that phase of that extreme pain and continuous pivoting. Most people will not get through that. And money is not at all the reason for failure.
00:58:50
Speaker
Money is not at all the reason. There just wasn't enough reason to continue. You can't have that. So do not get up and start up. Go explore. Find a wrong that you have to right. Find a problem with the world that you can't sleep because of something. Find something that you can be loyal to more than your own company. I actually say this, that my loyalty is not to judge. My loyalty is to unlocking your own potential, for us to unlocking your own potential and not
00:59:20
Speaker
There's no long term, there's no power in that contract. It's just so loose and lousy. So if you have to get through those insanely hard days, like people care so much about Elon Musk, but they don't care so much about the fact that all he cares about is to make humans a multi-planetary species. That's it. Every way for him to decide what to do is, will this speed up my goal or slow down my goal?
00:59:50
Speaker
So where the hell is your admission? And find that admission. So that was the fascinating journey of Shobit from the village of Mandi to the stage of Josh Talks. Do check out some of the most inspiring Indian stories on the Josh Talks YouTube channel or download the Josh Talks Skills app
01:00:13
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit thepodium.in that is t-h-e-p-o-d-i-u-m.in for a complete list of all our shows. This was an HD Smartcast Original.
01:00:40
Speaker
HDSmartCast.