Balaji Srinivasan 0:00
All right. Hemanth, welcome to the never seen podcast. So you introduce yourself. You’re at lightspeed. We worked here at a 68

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 0:06
Go ahead. Yeah, thank you for having me. Been looking forward to this for a long time. Balaji, yeah. So for the folks that don’t know me, I’m amanpathra and all the partners at lightspeed. Lightspeed is a global venture capital firm. They invest across different regions. Basically, we are

Balaji Srinivasan 0:20
wherever entrepreneurship is, and India is like 1.8 bill, something like that. India, you manage

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 0:25
about 1.5 to 1.8 bill, in the capital, very early stage focus. He also goes from there, presence in China, presence in Europe, presence in the US and Pavel, we don’t have an office or team. We certainly have investments later in America, African victims, yeah. And then before light speed, I was at CNC, would I make you? And then I was like, Yeah, known you for maybe seven, eight years before that even, Oh, absolutely, which is a fun story that I don’t think you would remember. So before he succeeds, he held at Google, yes. And I was part of this small team of people, led by a guy named David Glaser, genius. Little guy was trying to, kind of saw the wave of his thesis was added in 10 years from then, the next Nobel Laureate in biome, PA, bio statistician, perfect, not yeah at Merricks, not a

Balaji Srinivasan 1:12
not a better, which is happened with domestics. Yeah. This happened originally, two years

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:17
back So, and what was Google is all going to be there. You’re going to be the computer. The computer providers for that. So you pull together a small group of people, and they call it Google Genomics, and one of the people you want to work with was a company called console. That’s right, my friend, yes, yeah. So you were there. So I remember getting on a bunch of phone calls, trying very hard to get in touch with you, and then getting on a phone call with you, trying to convince AWS, Google Cloud to do all the

Balaji Srinivasan 1:42
analysis. I may remember this, that’s right. And I think we were, I think we were using AWS at the time, or something like that, probably. And I was just like, I mean, Google was great, but I was, I remember, actually, was that time of App Engine? App Engine was popular there? Yeah. And the problem was, App Engine, before Google Cloud, was something that, if you’re just doing exactly what Google wanted you to do, it works. And, but then, if it was almost like a blog, where, like, if you if you want to do just a blog, it was fine, but if you want to do something outside of it, it wasn’t right.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 2:12
It was just like Java. And I think about Java is it’ll let you not do anything stupid, but won’t let you do anything smart either. Yeah, that’s right.

Balaji Srinivasan 2:20
That’s right, that’s right. And, and I think, I mean, Cloud has obviously evolved a lot since then. And, you know, with the whole genomics thing, by the way, what’s funny about, sorry, we’re gonna say something more. Yeah, so with the whole genomics thing, that is a space which should be much bigger, and it’s kind of been quietly growing, like, I mean, 23 me recently went bankrupt, unfortunately, but with 2023 me answer.com like, sequencing has really radically increased, right? But it hasn’t increased as much as it should. Like, everybody should have a personal genome on their computer, and so it should be an important file. It should be an app that’s top of mind. And part of the reason it hasn’t is that FDA attacked the whole space and basically said that you can’t offer interpretations of genetic tests and results and so on and so forth. And we’re now very fortunate that it’s gotten beaten back, because with AI, you can now interpret genetic tests diagnostic software can do that, it comes up better than a doctor can, right? The entire concept of, oh, you can’t use AI to interpret your own test results was the kind of thing that that FDA would have blocked AI from doing and said it’s an unregulated medical device. All those things have to be censored. It has to be bottleneck through a doctor, right? So we may be able to take a crack at that now that the regulatory state can’t block that anymore, right? Yeah, or at least much less powerful than it was. And so AI enabled medicine is going to be a big thing, but it required so much infrastructure to sort of break past the regulatory state, the American regulatory state, in order to do that on and I don’t know if you guys, was that on your radar at that time? No, not the not the regulatory

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 3:59
part, probably the regular part we did not care about. They try a lot to get to what you would call the baseline study of human populations. So at least have a baseline genome kind of right already. And then, you know, because Google, being Google, they tried it in a way that people did not like, yeah, very sussed, right? Very couldn’t trust a big conglomerate like Google. So nobody would upload their genomic data. This

Balaji Srinivasan 4:21
is a Google Health and they tried

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 4:22
to, yeah, exactly right. So my team learned a lot of that, and then didn’t work out. And we want to build a federated data set that Roche could use at some time, or if Pfizer could use, or they, or clinic could use for germline studies or specific, you know, like rare diseases. And their data really matters a lot, and we just couldn’t get there. That’s the context of that we met very briefly. And I remember, I’ve tracked your journey for many, many years, and, you know, plugged in touch, and finally,

Balaji Srinivasan 4:48
yeah, it’s good. And I think in e6, ns, z1, of the reasons I got into BTC was the cause and crypto, in terms of is I only when I started company, and. Understand how big a deal the regulatory state was, and it was only it was DNA that, in a sense, made me get into BTC, right? Because as as an academic, the government is basically friendly to some of the.ed address. Once you go to.com they think of you as like an evil for profit company, especially in a regulated industry, the regulators are like the police, right? And if you understand how there can be sometimes bad police, you understand how there can be bad regulators, right? And so this was something where I realized actually, you know, do you go and try and reform this? Do you make this or that edit around the process? And certainly people have tried that. But ultimately, I realize it’s actually easier, just like, it’s easier to start Bitcoin than reform the Fed, it’s actually, like, actually easier to do that, right? It’s easier to get a new jurisdiction than to perform the FDA, right? It’s easier to start a new city than reform San Francisco. That’s fundamentally the premise, right? And there’s a lot of people who are working on reform. And you know, reform, there’s power of it’s 99 to one, something like that. More than that, 99.9 99.99 but we do need to be able to opt out the existing system and build something else. Rail, and it’s funny, there’s all kinds of verbal tricks that people will use, like to keep you within the existing system and say, Oh my God, you’re a trader. Why are you leaving your you know, right? Or, you know, your coward, why don’t you stay and fight, or something like that, right? Or, you know, you need to be part of the process. You can’t just, you know, leave, you know, this kind of thing. And I understand where that comes from. And sometimes, obviously, you don’t leave in a precipitate way, you know, you try to fix it and so forth, but, but at a certain point and everybody’s points is different, you realize that system cannot be fixed, right? And further capital, further time for their energy going after it doesn’t work. That’s what Elon just realized. Yeah. He literally tweeted out, did my best, yeah, right. So you know what comes next, right? Anyway, go ahead. Yeah.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 6:59
It’s interesting, because reminded me of and we should talk about your Bitcoin journey a little bit. Are you curious about that too? So it’s what you’re saying about it is sometimes easier to create a new system versus change an existing only system. It seems to be true as long as mathia as almost as far back as Indian mythology has been around, and even then, it was easier to build a new heaven versus to elevate yourselves into the old heaven. So it makes sense that you’re trying to do what you’re trying to do. Yeah. Admire you for

Balaji Srinivasan 7:30
us. Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I think, well, you know, one thing I want to do is actually, So, speaking of India, let’s maybe, why don’t we talk about India, for people who don’t know anything about India, and then India for people who know something about India, especially Indian tech, right? So, you know, the thing about India is for people who are Anglophones, right? Like basically English speakers, they could essentially, especially Americans, not the British, of course, because they had a long history with India. But most Americans, many Anglophones, could ignore India until pretty recently. Right until last, the Indians were more and more prominent in tech, starting with vanilla Khosla and so on and so forth, and more and more in the 2000s but really, India has kind of only popped on the radar in the last few years. For example, Ukraine is the first international issue where I can recall Americans, Europeans and so on, being concerned as to where India’s position was. Nobody cared where India’s position was on Iraq that I can remember. Nobody care what its position was on the financial crisis that I can remember, nor on Syria that, at least that I can remember right like but it has now become enough of a global player that people did care about tradition on Ukraine and so. So because that, people need to know something about India, right? So obviously, the basics, 1.4 billion people, it’s, you know, this multi 1000 year old civilization. One thing most people don’t know is India is actually a union like the European Union, like the United States, right? Why don’t you talk about that, all these different cultures and so on there? Yeah.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 9:07
So I’ll go very far back when, very quickly, come to the present day, and tell you what’s been going on. Very old piece of land, lots of complicated history. It used, it used to be a union, more around different religious practices that ended up becoming tribes, and tribes ended up becoming states, and states ended up coming together to build a nation. But from the very beginning, it was always five or 10 tribes that were kind of dominating in India. There were southern tribes, there were Northeastern tribes, there were, you know, northern tribes and so on, eastern tribes, and we expanded in all the way out to Iran, Afghanistan for the longest time. So the first and already 4000 years ago, 2000 BC, 3000 BC. This was, you know, what Indian diaspora looked like in Am I getting off a variety of cultures and and so on, spreading, you know, all the way to Afghanistan, Iran. Left, and then, you know, to the right. And at that point, and for the longest time of India, India’s history, we were almost a quarter to a third of the global economy. That’s that chart that shows, yeah, if it goes from 30% and then it kind of, very quickly shrinks. The last 500 years, left 2% with the rulers that have come from pretty much everywhere around to occupy India. But so longest time, China and India were the dominant, you know, players in the global economy. And the global economy was part manufacturing, whatever manufacturing meant back then, far trade and so on. And in country, obviously, was a big part. And then that probably stayed till that, you know, for about two to 3000 years, that kind of stayed very stable. It doesn’t really change that much. There’s a bit of up and down here, but doesn’t change much. And that’s been the history of India, I also, to a certain extent, China, four or 500 years ago, of course. And we’ll talk more about that. The bigger you get, the more attention you grab. And India build roads to the world, the roads also come to you. It becomes easier for people to come to you. And that’s what started to happen a peaceful land, uh, peaceful people when you know, not so peaceful people coming right, especially around the Northwest, yeah, and probably more ambition. It’s fine. And if they’re fair to say, they may have had more ambition to occupy. They may have had more ambition to start with Alex, we’re going even further back. Yeah, correct. So, cultural differences and then

Balaji Srinivasan 11:35
northeast that much because it’s impassable to the Himalayas, yes, yeah,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 11:39
yeah. So majority of it came from the left and off, yeah. And then the once a state like that, which is anyway loosely put together, a group of people that are somewhat cooperating versus collaborating, when it starts to crack. The cracks, don’t, you know, disappear very quickly. So we had, you know, one crack appear with the Islamic State coming in and occupying and then that crack continued reserve, you know, extend from there. And then, of course, the Britishers came, and at one point, I remember the math, but then they took out about $40 trillion of, you know, some give very large number in today’s dollars, back to, you know, eight dominions. And then India, basically shrine from being a hyper capital, GB, country with manufacturing, trade and agriculture to basically, uh, success level, uh, GDP, and primarily a resource state for other countries. And then that was, this is fast forward to maybe, you know, maybe 100 years ago, right? Uh, 50 said, 70 years ago, roughly. And then we got independent, from independence to now, and I had the story of how states change shape and philosophy, I feel like, and maybe this has happened with other companies, and we should talk more about that. You have this period of shape. Country goes through a period of shape, and a country goes through a period of regret, a period of realization, a period of hard work, and then a period of a sentence, yeah, and these things can take 7080, 100 years. Sometimes it depends on a lot of factors.

Balaji Srinivasan 13:15
Of course, it’s usually say of regret, right? Because I would not so the realization. I’d say 1991 when India liberalized, hard work may last 30 years. And now a sentence, right? Why would you characterize regret as or is that not the right word? I call it socialism. Yeah, right.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 13:34
Socialism, yeah. I don’t know if the population regrets it. I certainly think people who could have taken decisions differently. Might regret it. Limit of say that we were, yeah, we were that right? And look at our history and all that, and you carry the video, but then you look at the president like, oh my god, like, I’m a two person, BDP, country, right? World, and where was I in my own memory, you would say 100 years ago, you probably were in powerful state back then. So that regret leads to, you know, hard work and eventually, eventually, hard

Balaji Srinivasan 14:08
work once there’s acceptance of we’re not great anymore, and we mark down and we’re at zero, and kind of people keep quit thrashing and screaming, they’re like, Okay, we have to build our way back up. Nothing but for it, right? Yeah. And, you know, it’s funny, like, Argentina seems to have maybe bottomed out, and may finally be there, el salva maybe bottomed out, and now it’s, like, on its way up. China bottomed out. It’s on its way up, you know? Well, it sounds really improving. I think I don’t know if it’s bottomed out, yeah, like, but they definitely have crashed, right? Um, Vietnam bottom down as long as the way up. Um, so, yes, okay, so basics India has, so one thing, it’s a union, right? So a lot of people don’t know that India has like, in a sense, the difference in a like, a 2 million or telugu person and a Gujarati is like difference between a Italian and a. Fan, right? Because, like, you know, the North and South, like these are pretty different cultures. There is certainly now an Indian Union. And people travel from one part another to India, trade across India. And nobody really thinks about it, the there’s a cards Union or the repeat, there’s transit links. You know, English and Hindi have become nationalizing languages. People marry across various religions, and, you know, regions and some sort of, actually, pretty, pretty frequently. And so all of that, it actually the union has actually become a real thing. In a sense, it is more unified than any point it’s ever been in this history. I think, yes, would you say, you know,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 15:35
I feel like it’s a little bit having lived in Europe for a while. I feel like it feels like the European Union, yeah, with the more nationalism than Europe. Yeah, more nationalism. So, so European Union, with more fluid and weak memory of individual cultures that don’t go as far back. Interesting, because I’m from Orissa, but I know there is a culture like from Kalinga days, like 1000s of years ago and Ashoka was borrowed by and all that. I would have such a strong memory that attaches me to Kalinga, interesting, but a German would probably go by 1000s of years and remember what you’re

Balaji Srinivasan 16:10
in Italian as Rome and stuff like this, right? So there’s less cultural memories, less cultural memory,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 16:16
even though it’s loosely put together, union state, unit opinion of states, it has less cultural memories specific to the state. I guess language is the main one. Language is the main Gujarati, moly Ali, correct? I know, right. And there is the literature that is more specific. And I would say maybe even the last 50 years, that memory has faded. 50, 6070, years ago, Bengal used to be the literary hub of the country. Abhinav Tagore was part of that, and Satyajit Ray was part of that. And today, I don’t know if, I mean, there’s a south that has a Bollywood type industry called Tollywood, and there’s whatever, but then I still, personally don’t feel like there is that much dense cultural memory that used to exist, probably ended 200 years

Balaji Srinivasan 16:58
ago. Why is that? Do the British and then the moves before? Yeah,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 17:01
English has played a big part. It’s becomes a common time thread. And you know, over the last 3040, 50 years, like you said, trade has become a little bit more easier between states. And, you know, travel, you know, it’s you don’t require a fast boat to travel anywhere in India. Currency is the same, and you are you basically still Hawking back to a single citizenship, so you have that, you know, right? That kind of thing that ties it together. So it feels like a a more tightly put together European Union with less cultural memory of individual states that create that

Balaji Srinivasan 17:37
union that’s compare it to, it’s closer in some ways, I would never have believed this in the 1980s 1990s when you know we were growing up, but I assume you’re like, also roughly, yeah. So I’ve never have believed this. But in many ways, India is now more similar to the America the 1950s where it has like a unifying national ideology, and many like, just like you have poles and Italians and, you know, English and Germans and all these different European ethnicities in America, but there’s like, a common creed, common culture, common currency. That’s kind of what India is, yeah, um, to an extent that I wouldn’t have actually believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. And one of the consequences is, even though sometimes it’s like, two steps forward, one step back. Like, the public infrastructure is radically improved, radically to an, like, an unbelievable level. Like, you know, Bangalore airport, the airports are basically like, world class, yeah, yeah, they’re world class. There’s, they’re clean, they’re they’re beautiful. And you step outside and there’s paved roads, and they’re new and and they’re stoplight. I mean, this kind of stuff sounds so basic, but the basics are actually hard, because you have to coordinate a lot of people. You have to get permissions to build, yeah, you know, the government can’t be corrupt and so, so sometimes it feels two steps forward, one step back. But for anybody who’s like part of the Indian diaspora who hasn’t visited India in the last five or 10 years. You definitely have to visit India and just see how much it’s improved. It’s radically, radically, radically, radically better than the 80s in the 90s and 1000s, absolutely.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 19:11
And I remember growing up and I mean, there are things. So coming back to your question about what is this, where did you grow? I grew up all over India. My father was in the military, so we kept holding a signal, you have military jaw. I don’t know that existed. Okay, the Chad. The Chad, thank you. I appreciate it. But yeah, I grew up in the 80s, and I, frankly, grew up without, you know, I grew up in a small village called Joshua mark, which is, you know, like as a crow flies, maybe 60 kilometers from the border somewhere. Where is that we know at least called. It was to be called Ultra con show. Obviously, this was part of up earlier, okay, yeah, and it’s not northeast. It’s more like closer to young, crispy and, oh, okay, north, north, right? Yeah, north, not and here, if you know bad enough that that religious place is the last stop before you got to start walking or take a meal, okay, to get to that place where your roles don’t really show, take cars. I didn’t used to at the time, yeah, at the time. So group there, you know, we would have basically no hot water and gonna boil it. We didn’t have heaters. So we would have wood in a thing called buchara. But you put wood in and out of chinny, it goes out

Balaji Srinivasan 20:25
of the house like twice a day, just literally growing up no hot water that was

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 20:29
low in a very cold place, and no electricity. Because we remember, used to use this thing called petromax to study at nine stuff, which a beautiful part of my life. I remember, I’m in a heartbeat retire in the Himalayas.

Balaji Srinivasan 20:43
The thing I’ve said, like, because of that, because so many Indians have an upbringing that’s like that they are in general, like, I’m there’s a daily setback or something like that. But in general, the trajectory has just been, yeah,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 20:56
yeah, you’re absolutely right. Two steps forward, one step back, sometimes two steps back. But there is absolutely a crediting ferocity that’s happening in India. And like gradually you are ferociously moving up and up and up, yes.

Balaji Srinivasan 21:07
And from, know how, broader to finding out startups,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 21:11
yeah, finding out startup, yeah. So now let’s fast forward a little bit from the 80s 90s, which was, I would say, maybe the transition created for India when in London, 90s, man, one thing kind of opened up the economy, and then, you know, foreign companies could come and, you know, create competition in the local economy before what was called right license Raj. Like to get a license to do a business, you have to get a license from the government. I was kind of ridiculous, but glad I’m not. I was not a VC back then. I don’t think you could ever do anything like that, but risk taking was essentially not allowed. Likely, a lot more socialistic 90s, we opened up, and then, I think, since then, you know, we were, I don’t know, maybe 500 $600 million GDP country, and now we are sitting at roughly 4 trillion. A lot of the that growth has happened in the last, you know, 10 to 15 years, and we’ve gone through multiple regime changes, and demographics have changed, and now I feel like now it’s coming together in a way where society is hungry. There is a government that is not a group of politicians who are politicking. It feels like in good pockets, good number of pockets. It’s a government that is interested in industry. Because for India, one of the that’s that’s

Balaji Srinivasan 22:30
a big thing, like, the government is actually now interested in building the platform that Indians can build on, right as opposed to just taking the money or we have, like they’ve come in a positive direction, which is, it’s way easier to have a government that goes corrupt than to one have one that actually ascends and becomes, you know, better,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 22:48
yeah, and it’s, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s been a journey, I can tell you very openly, as corruption is still a problem in India, and maybe the low level stock is still hard to do. But again, the whole point of being, you know, stepping forward, or slowly we’re stepping forward, but not moving back. I think that feels like it’s in monotonically increasing pace that India is at. And I was in the US. I grew up in India. I was in the US from all three till 2018 and I moved back in 2018 and I remember writing about it online, a piece that if you Google return for India, this still shows up in the first page. And I was quite shocked that it shows up, because I was getting so many people thinking on LinkedIn like, Oh, you’re filing space. I remembering it all. This is actually become a popular piece. And I remember talking about it that when I moved back from us to India in 2018 I had to change very little about my life. I replaced Hulu with all star. Netflix worked in the US the same way in India, Amazon worked the same way it worked in India. I had to replace Lyft with Ola and Uber works exactly the same. And I still have my US credit card and my Uber, yeah, because there’s no ODP right? Stuff going on, it just goes through and what else like, you know, I WhatsApp as payments, said, all those things just worked out completely fine for me. That’s

Balaji Srinivasan 24:09
because I think internet first is actually the way I think about the world versus country first, right?

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 24:17
Yeah, it’s a great point. I was living in it. I didn’t realize it. I was not living as much in the physical infrastructure as I was living in the vigil infrastructure, yes, in the US. And all I had to do was I literally moved back at two bags. It’s two bags of 15 years of life, two big bags. I had to buy it

Balaji Srinivasan 24:33
or known it. It was offline stuff, the Fiat stuff that took longer, the cloud stuff. You could just log in and get back to work,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 24:39
right? I had no house and no car, no scooter, no motorcycle, nothing. Yeah,

Balaji Srinivasan 24:44
the only thing you have to change, like, maybe you have to get residency. You have OCI

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 24:49
or, yeah, I was an H 1b for 15 years in the US, oh, god, yeah. And I just didn’t have a green card, okay, but I just ships it. So that was easy. That was easy, yeah, sorry, yeah. I. But even if I were a green card holder, OCI now is easy to get, so you basically have a digital passport of sorts, and you live in two countries. Yeah, overseas says, yeah, it was a very smooth move. Now, again, I’ll talk more about the India move if you’re interested. But yeah, it felt like a pretty straightforward move to me. And then yeah, there was a bit of this. You know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you would feel this culture shock. I didn’t feel any culture shock. You would 20 years ago, you would feel an infrastructure shock. I felt a lot less of the infrastructure shock. Sure, there’s pollution in India, and Delhi is much worse than Bangalore and Goa is much better than many cities here in the US, and there is traffic, of course, but I remember being stuck on 101, NSF for many hours. So it’s not that better or than different, except somebody drives you, but cheaply in India versus in the US and politics is, is nowhere in the world is, is good and great. So India is basically no better or worse than any other country

Balaji Srinivasan 26:01
I you know, the thing is, I disagree. I actually think India will be, India is going to be, I think a dark horse in terms of, it’s surprisingly well run. What’s one example, the votes for the recent election, they were counted in a day, right for a billion person country. And so while the US, it took like weeks, months to get it done right. And that just shows that steep capacities on some axes actually flipped right. UPI is very, very good. Other is very good, if you have criticisms of these systems. But an identity system that works for a billion people, a payment system that works for a billion people, a voting system that works for a billion people, that’s pretty good. Yeah, right. I mean, ISRO is Lando probe on the Dark Side of the Moon? Yeah. We have these new, you know, trains. We have these new, you know, highways and stuff in India, all this kind of stuff that, you know, the airports, right? And and yet, it’s still, it’s still at the J curve, it’s still at the bottom of the of the upward trajectory. And the way I think about that, and I’d love to know your thoughts on it, is, now that it’s over Lance Geo, we have cheapest, you know, the cheapest 5g internet service in the world, right? And all of these things we observe in India, and that’s actually quite new. Yeah. You know, what else am I missing? Those are pretty there’s a whole tech ecosystem there, right? Yeah,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 27:28
yeah. So absolutely right. You’re not missing anything big. Maybe what I would add to that is India a bit the geo thing that happened nine years ago. Now, I think India has one of the most digitally awake population in the world in terms of volume in a time this past

Balaji Srinivasan 27:47
period of Appalachia. Yeah. So. So in 2015

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 27:52
vocash Ambani was, you know, the main guys at one of the biggest conglomerates in India called Lions, basically took this generational he said that I’m gonna spend 1015, $20 billion and literally put it in blue ground. He dug up places because, you know, you can’t when you’re that big. You can take anything you want, and the government will let you to it. But he did it in a way that actually was quite strategic and really has changed the nation’s trajectory. He essentially provided, literally free, and that to the entire country, Indian in India, for those folks that don’t know, the price of 4g and L, 5g is, let me tell you what I pay. I pay about 170 rupees per month. And that about two and a half, $2 odd, roughly, for 5g internet, for 5g internet. And I have a three GD per day limit, so I could donate that piece. I never hit that. Yeah, and if I don’t hit it, it sometimes, there are some plans that actually rolls over to the next one signal and watch TV on Netflix on it’s like, basically 100x that amount in the US. Yeah, yeah. So it was crazy for me and GX, I don’t exactly something like that, yeah. And Netflix in India is 699, or whatever it is in the US. I mean, so on and so forth. Sure. So digital infrastructure has become so cheap, and cell phones cost maybe less than $100 and

Balaji Srinivasan 29:20
like 79 in the sense of sooner and rupees, rupees,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 29:23
yes, rupees, that’s about less than $10 Yeah. So when Jio essentially digitized the entire country, they became the rails on which everything else kind of got built out, quasi public, quasi private infrastructure, quasi public, or the private. They had the spectrum and kind of all that good stuff. And now, now we’ve got world’s cheapest phones, and then most people have several phones. Like, you know, I know people that are in the up and coming part of society that actually have two phones. You drive in a Orisha in India, you’ll have two phones, one for all our one for Uber, and you can take rides on both and be. Are both phones that probably cost less than $10 rupees. So that’s been very interesting to see. And on top of that, you could then, you know, when you get distribution, mass distribution, you can build interesting companies. It can experiment more quickly and learn what you know, what works for a consumer versus not. So we start to see is venture ecosystem come up and take more bets and founders coming up, and, you know, going on building riskier, riskier things. And then, you know, then we saw, you know, essentially, this massive amount of entrepreneurial energy, sort of just really coming out, and just like bursting at the seams. So last 10 years in India, I’ve just been there six years now, I think it’s been a remarkable shift in terms of the risk appetite the nation is going to take, in terms of the infrastructure built out the country is doing. We spent more in infrastructure built out in the last five to six years than we spent in the last 70 years since independence, and we are spending more than what we spend in last seven years, the next five years.

Balaji Srinivasan 31:04
Well, the nuclear reactors are coming online. That’s a really big one. Brands will be a thing of the past. Hopefully, if that, if those come India is actually either number two after China, or it’s either there’s a graph of nuclear reactors we can put on screen, but plain nuclear reactors, I think India is number two actually on lots of graphs. On lots of graphs. For example, steel production, China’s far away number one. But then when you delete China from the graph, India is the real distant, but real number two. So that’s on steel, that’s on nuclear, so solar, so the number of unicorns, for example, it’s us China. Then India is like distant China, but it is number three, solid, right? So it is actually really rising, and really, I think, underpriced in the sense and on the world stage, right? And, of course, it’s possible to over hype it, it’s possible, but it’s also to under hype it, right? And, you know, in a sense, I’m, I think I said to you, I’m moderately bullish in India, but extremely bullish in Indians, right? So India as a system is getting good enough to be a launch pad for the world, yeah, and, um, you know, one of the things I think a lot about is this a very and maybe you have semester, so there’s about 7 million or so Indian Americans, right? I think that’s a rough, rough number, and they’re doing pretty well, right, like they are, you know, producing now, now that the second gen has kind of, you know, started to grow up a bit, you’ve got, you know, people in politics, like, you know, Vic, or events or or cash Patel. You have people in in media, like lots of, you know, like M Night shuttle loves on the first but lots of other folks, obviously, tech, very, very very gas based, finance and so on and so forth. But, but there’s, like, way and, of course, medicine, lots of other professions, engineering, blah, blah. But there’s an interesting the diaspora is done pretty well in other countries, and it’s certainly in Dubai and the UAE, like, that’s like, about 80% Indian, and that’s a country that’s doing extremely, extremely well, right at the UAE and but the question is, how much potential is still in India, right? Because there’s degree of selective migration, right? There’s, you know, not many people are coming to the US or a place if they have an engineering degree or there’s some qualification. So many back in India are at that talent bubble. And even if it’s 5% I don’t know the exact number, right? If it’s 5% that’s like 70 million people out of 1.4 billion, right? That’s like 10x what the Indian American population is. So that’s a massive new economic disruptive force on the global stage. That’s like a new Germany coming on, yeah, right, a New Japan kind of thing, you know, like at that scale, coming online. And, you know, maybe you have some thoughts on that,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 33:48
yeah. I think, look, I mean, we obviously are very bullish for India, maybe has continued to double down over the last 10 to 15 years in India, we feel like this is where, you know, the maximum alpha is right now, and you’re right. I think India feels underpriced, even at this point in time for Indians. Indians underpriced.

Balaji Srinivasan 34:09
Yes, where the finish was saying, I’ll say something. What do

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 34:13
I think about the potential of India? What of it is starting to get realized? What of it is is is still latent and will be realized. Oddly enough, I have been a lifetime skeptic of governments, and in the context of India, I came in skeptical. And one interesting thing that I realized is do there are two things. One is, if you are a government who is not proud of your country, you’re not gonna improve the country, right? If you are a human who’s not proud of your body, you’re not gonna improve the body. If you’re somebody in a relationship, you’re not proud of your relationship, for partner, you know, improve your relationship. So the longest time, I think, India. Suffered. They didn’t have a sense of national self and pride. Never had a sense of national self. And there are shades of gray in there. Sure, there’s a lot of you know, places you can slip and fall and but I think it is an important thing that ties India and Indians together, wherever they are. And I think that sense of national self was not there for the longest time. When I was growing up, people just woke up and complained about India all the time, right? Or in 80s and 80s, yeah, 80s and 90s, not. I was working as took two years to get a telephone in your house and for a TV or I was hanging lines blah, blah, blah. No, I think there is a sense of rising optimism. There are pockets of pessimism, for sure, but a sense of rising optimism as a whole and so for So, where am I going with this? I think, for a country as large as in the eye, 1.4 billion population, you have a challenge that requires a platform level change to happen. Jio may have been a platform level change policies and other platform level change, the kind of governance and

Balaji Srinivasan 36:01
administration 91 liberalization Nigerian. So AC, that was a moment for people who don’t know from Independence till roughly 91 India was they actually wrote socialism into the Constitution, any like the socialist state of India, or something like that. And so, of course, Fabian socialism, arguably, was the second colonialism, right? Because Fabian socialism came from Britain, and so it was something that kept India poor. And it was, you know, all these NGOs were handing out ons. Like, the whole Mother Teresa thing is meant for country that’s prostrate, right? And, like, basically, you know, it’s not actually meant. It’s investment is more. Investment is a real charity, in a sense, because charity keeps somebody dependent, and investment makes them independent, right? Yeah. So charity, you know, like I said, if you give a man a fish, you keep them independent, but if you invest in their fish company, they might actually do something, right? So until basically, the late 80s, early 90s, Europe or India was essentially socialist. India, the license Raj, it was impossible to do anything. And talented NS were just either, like cat poor, or they left right. And then 1991 because of the crisis, you know, the Soviet Union fell, and so on. And socialism was clearly not the way to go. India made the right turn. Now, by the way, that wasn’t guaranteed. Like Cuba remain communist, North Korea being communist, right? So the right leadership, we saw the right opportunity at the right time and took the right door, and India went at least somewhat capitalist, yeah, and there’s still a million. Chris is you can have, like, air conditioning is taxed, and it’s, by the way, if there’s one thing we should get all Indian VCs founders and so on. Basically repeal the tags, the luxury like the Indian Air Conditioning tax, of all the things, that’s a very simple line item, thing to repeal will completely transform India, right? Yeah. Jonathan attacks

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 37:54
this, yeah, the dog, you have a new thing where you could not, cannot put your air conditioning to 19 degrees

Balaji Srinivasan 37:59
Celsius. There’s something stupid like this, right? But at least that one is a little hard to enforce, or whatever, right? The AC tax, though, is just, you know, Lee Kuan Yew knew air conditioning was necessary, right? It wasn’t like an option in that, like a sub, you know, like a, like a tropical kind of environment, right? But why’d I get on that? Right? So? Oh yeah. So after 91 capitalism hit India and started to grow, right for China, it was 1978 so China’s in some metrics, roughly about 10 years, 13 years ahead of India, roughly. Other metrics, it’s way ahead. Other metrics, you’d argue it’s even behind in some metrics. But like China’s diaspora, doesn’t do as well as India’s diaspora, China plays a better hug game and India plays a better way game, and vice versa, I’d say, right. But so that was the moment that India turned capitalist. That’s why India is actually rising now, and I think over the years to come. You know, China was always the number two communism, after the Soviet Union for, you know, what, decades. But then the Soviet Union made a bunch of bad decisions, and basically tried to ideologically reform for economically reform, and then it just blew apart in the late 80s, early 90s. And then China, in a sense, became, quote, the leading brand of communism, right? Even if it doesn’t export communism, even if doesn’t think its system is the ideal system, it became the leading brand of communism. And Vietnam and others, you know, like, basically all look to China, are happy. And now I think we’re on the verge of something similar happening in the Western world, where the US and of the Western countries, like what they call democracy, is going to financially, socially, politically, physically melt down. Right? The sovereign debt crisis is going to hit and I think that if India can weather that, that it actually will keep, in a sense, the flame of democracy, of life, it’ll be a. So like, like China was the number two that then became effectively the most pragmatically run country, whether it’s actually quote communist or not, it preserved the name of Congress, right? So India becomes, I think, the world’s leading democracy by the late 2030s early 2040s or the thereabouts. I think really the internet is also big part of that, because Internet allows us to do cryptographically verifiable voting it allows us to do, you know, like votes, where you cannot just, you know, your vote counts. We can count all the votes. So the internet also is a big part in kind of guarding, quote, democracy, because Communism will be very strong. Chinese communism, think will be a lot of people will think that’s the way to do things after the sovereign debt crisis. And I think it’s going to overcorrect in that direction, and we’ll have to have a counter. Have a counterbalance to it. I don’t know if you have any thoughts that just, just the fact that India can count all the votes in a day, for example, not a small thing. It’s like a detail, though, that shows that operationally, it’s actually able to do that, and somehow, on net, it’s working within India.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 40:56
Yeah, yeah. I think so. I mean, coming back to your point, and I’m going to merge the two about the potential that India has been to realize and the potential that’s latent. I do think some of these big shifts happen when big bets are taken, and some of these, some of these big bets can be taken by large conglomerates and governments and policies and all of that. And I think that’s what’s begin to show some promise and results in India. And the kind of stuff you see in India, different from 20 years ago, is this is over the eye, and because the government and the conglomerates have done well, it is creating a sense of optimism and is becoming a Petri dish where ambition and risk taking can survive and try 20 years ago, When I was in college, if we were to start a company and on a parole or the other, you would not get married. Now, if you’re on Tinder, I think if you’re a founder, you get a lot of dates, is what I hear. So that cultural shift, I think, allows ambition, and it doesn’t tamp it down that he says, Yeah, you could do this. And, you know, go on that journey, and there are people who back you, and if you come back fail, you’re not only a joke, you know, right? Simply get patted on the back in a bar. So

Balaji Srinivasan 42:08
again, that the failure tolerance a cultural shift is important, yeah, as opposed to only taking the safe job of engineer doctor. I mean, of course, being an entrepreneur is a kind

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 42:16
of engineer, but Yes, correct? So now I think that that petri dish is somewhat ready. I still take a decade, plus multiple decades, perhaps, to get it ready to level where we need but now I think we are starting to see ambition and risk taking happen, get back in and get results. And we probably in the first cycle of that. And you could argue the first cycle was 2013 2014 and now it’s sort of showing up in public markets in India, where good companies

Balaji Srinivasan 42:41
just hung out with beanie bond, sold foot cart, right? And so we put up a clip. He was from, you know, friend of both of ours. He’s on the pod before. And basically the, you know, he was the first large exit in India, right? $18 billion for Flipkart. And kind of showed it was possible, right? And you know, now, you know one thought, you have a thesis. Why don’t we get to Indian tech for a second? You have a thesis on Indian tech? I have a thesis. I’d like to hear yours.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 43:09
I’ll give you mine. Yeah, it’s thesis on India tech. Wow. It’s a broad question, yes, thesis on India tech,

Balaji Srinivasan 43:18
should I give you my in the artist? Yeah, yeah. So my view is that India itself is a market, yes, but it’s I’m actually more interested in India for the producer side than the consumer side that say I’m more interested in India as a source of talent, for engineering, for finance, for media, for basically internet first, basically all of the, you know, AI is amazing, but AI needs prompting and it needs verifying. That’s actually the new bottleneck, right? Because the prompting is actually writing programs in a higher language. You have to be verbal enough, you know, to be able to do that. So I’ll say Indians winning spelling bees as a So you heard, yeah, right? You have to, you have to be able to know all kinds of crazy vocabulary terms, actually, like, for example, art history is now an applied subject. You know why? Because if you can say season or Picasso or something like that, then you can invoke that as a library call when you’re using, using AI, right? And so every subject more vocabulary, and not just vocabulary, the more terms concepts, because using them correctly, you can prompt it better, you get a better result, and then verifying it is if you have expertise in there. So yeah, it doesn’t take things away, but take jobs away, but it does do is it shifts them to people who will have time to do prompting and verifying.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 44:36
Sorry to reject you. But I don’t know if you saw that recent video by karpathy where he kind of does analysis of GitHub code, yeah, and more and more. Now the GitHub repositories have English embedded in the code, because now the code itself is becoming natural language, or more, yes, so no more dense. So yeah, back to your point about, yeah, that’s right.

Balaji Srinivasan 44:55
And exactly like prompting programming assembly, like, you know, right? You. And um, and India is good at English, or at least a lot of Indians from English. And it’s in some ways, depending on the numbers. You can argue, India has already actually become the number one source of English speakers on the internet, right over the US, which used to be the default, right? And I think as more and more Indians acculturate English, that will become completely true by 2035, or 2040, or thereabouts, right? Because they can learn languages quickly around. So my view is, like, if we’re sitting on this chair, this chair doesn’t feel like a Chinese chair, right? It may be made in China, um, but it doesn’t feel like a Chinese chair in the same way, I think, like, what is a thesis for Indian internet entrepreneurs, they’ll build software that’s just globally competitive, software that happens to be made by an Indian or even in India, but it is internet first. It’s not India first, per se, it’s internet first. It’s almost a little bit like Europeans, who, if they’re in a small country in Europe, they have to actually think internet first, if they’re an entrepreneur, because the whole market is just not, not big enough. And so, like, the translation has to be there from the beginning. And, you know, they have to be internet first. That’s kind of problems, because that’s a tax if compliance and stuff you have to do. But it’s got its benefits, because you have a holistic view on the world, right? And so like, you know, build in India, or build by Indian sell to the internet. That’s the kind of business I’m interested in investing in, which is an internet first business that happens to be founded by Indians. Now, of course, sometimes it may turn out that something like olaw, for example, has necessarily got a very local and geographical component, right? Some businesses will be built, which are, you know, necessarily going to be domain or geo locked, and you have to start there. And I’m not saying India is a pretty big market. You can definitely get to a pretty large market over there, but I do think internet first is the way to go. I think crypto is going to help with that a lot, because it means global rule of code, right? So an Indian may be a second class citizen in America where, you know, h1, Bs and so sort of becoming much more attacked and so on in the US. And they’re basically, they haven’t eliminated them, but they made them so much more of a pain in terms of forcing people to go back every year, rather than every few years, and making the renewals more longer and uncertain. That’s not a small issue. That’s a big issue because it means you can’t, first of all, just the fact people may not know this, but as an H 1b you have to periodically go back to India, wait for a constant point and then come back. Now, if you’re just working at a job, this is like, Okay, I need to pause. I need to take an international flight. I need to wait for an uncertain duration, and then come back and that that is a pain, even if it’s like a day on both sides. If it is an uncertain multiple month thing over here, you can easily just lose your job in the US, it makes hiring an H, 1b something where the bureaucratic overhead means you wouldn’t do it right. So their Point is to make it their goal is to make it disadvantaged enough, or the program still exists in Neem, but not in substance, right? So as that door closes, and I don’t think that Indians should go to American I think if you’re you, it just like a big not welcome sign is being put there. If you’re a CEO, the much of the American Left hates you, and if you’re an Indian immigrant, a good chunk of American right hits you so just listen, you know, to the signals there, right? And just don’t go to America anymore. And it’s true for many other countries as well, like even German tourists are getting strip searched and would have you, right? America does not want immigrant entrepreneurs to come there anymore. It just doesn’t right. So where do they go and sit somewhere else, right? And so we have network school, you know, we’ve opened that. There’s Dubai, there’s tons of other countries that have digital nomad programs. And, of course, there’s India itself. And finally, there’s the internet, right, which you can be on from anywhere you can be a digital nomad, right? And I think that shift, I’m starting to see that shift. Somebody posted the other day that, like, there’s two really great engine entrepreneurs that just chose to, you know, not take their US offers, just, you know, stay in India instead. And I’d love to hear your or go to Dubai, or go to Singapore, go go to something like NS and so on and so forth. I’d love to hear your, your thoughts on that,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 49:12
yeah, I, first of all, I drew agree. How hard you get back. I came

Balaji Srinivasan 49:16
back. Yeah, you’re an early adopter, or, yeah, that’s, right,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 49:19
yeah. I came back before it was, I mean, yeah, there were a couple of waves in India that people have returned to India. One was in 2010 I think only 920, 10, so 1910 and the next one probably began around the time I moved back for Bell. But mine was normally invade. They just moved back to them or to move back. But I do remember how hard it was to get my 1b stand, but I got stuck in Mexico, in a place called Matamoros for six days to get my visa appointment, and it just kept getting delayed. And that place was literally bombed out a week before, because people had stayed and hidden there, drug even, and hidden there. So the Mexican police had literally had to bomb them out. So the farther hotel was actually a big circular hole in there. So we were living there. Yeah. Anyway, it was an interesting time. But, yeah, it is getting harder and harder to stay in the US or enter the US,

Balaji Srinivasan 50:08
and we’re all about thinking about the five and 10 year and 15 year horizon, right? So you make an investment, say you’re thinking about where the world is going to be in 10 years. Correct? Is America, you’d be more or less welcoming to immigrant entrepreneurs in 10 years, I think it’s going to be much less welcoming, much less what. That’s what I hear. I have friends where you mean worse than today. Yeah, worse, right? Yeah. So if it just is getting worse, you never want to bet on a curve that’s going like this. You want to bet on curves going like this.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 50:33
Yeah, it is. It is much harder now. My friends that are living in the US 1015, years are afraid to come back to near to see family, because they feel like when they go back to the US, or legitimately stand bench, for me, they will be stuck at the border, and, you know, in that end. So I think it is getting I was surprisingly back. I was quite shocked to hear that just a couple of months back that was in the US.

Balaji Srinivasan 50:52
It’s also the thing is just the randomness of it deters a trip. Yeah, right, right. Because if you have a 10% like you’re spending money on this plane, flight, on this hotel, all this kind of stuff, and then you can be just randomly shopped at the border. Why? It’s almost like an investment. Why did you make an investment? Or can randomly go to zero, right? Why’d you have a conference in America, like a tech conference, if you can have international guests, right? Tech is international thing. You invase it there, right? Yeah. So it has lots of knock on effects.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 51:21
Yeah. I mean, the the debasing of the institutionalization our institutional powerhouses of the US, is quite and it’s quite sad to see, because I kind of really benefited from it. It was probably one of the things that made a superpower to begin with. So yeah, I think it’s sad to see. And I don’t know if the trend line is ever going to reverse, but it seems to be accelerating and going somewhere. Yes, yeah. Now coming back to your question on India and tech thesis on India, again, it’s a hard question for me to answer, because like at the end of the day, we are in the people business, and a lot of the business of predicting what future needs to exist, I will the business of just understanding the motivations and intentions of a founder that’s trying to create a future of certain kind. And you know, as any a you know, as well as anybody else, they are primarily the people business. So my intention is to keep the best people in India, stay in India, and build in India, or even the best people from around the world, to move them back to India somehow. That’s why primary interest, interesting, okay, yeah. So now, what’s interesting about India? Do you only fund entrepreneurs in India itself? There has to be some connection for the India fund. We the we have the back entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia and India. Okay, got it from a global fund. Different regions are different. So what is interesting about India? I think it was you mentioned this earlier, Balaji, in India, actually lives in the cloud a lot more because it’s much cheaper for us to go live in the cloud than any other country. Everybody literally lives in the cloud. And India has all free time. And they watch the same movies as the Americans do, and they play the same games as, you know, up around the world. And you know, they are all sitting on Reddit and shit, posting everywhere. They’re on Twitter and all that stuff is happening. So the more unplugged you become from the physical infrastructure, the more plugged in you are the digital infrastructure, that is a very fungible thing that you can move people around with. So they are much more at home. It doesn’t speak English. They are culturally easy to assimilate in any other culture, and they can move around. So what you might be seeing, and I would love to hear how you’re seeing in that school, I think you began with the idea that you can literally put together a set of people that believe in a similar vision, that have similar culture, and the culture is not regional related. It’s more about a digital culture that exists in the clouds and sorts. You can institutionalize that and create a movement around it. And I think Indians are actually a really strong and a great perfect fit for this new world that is emerging, which is going to be this network state of sorts, where the other native citizens already Yes, and they will have the least friction to get a passport and get citizenship in this new world that you are creating.

Balaji Srinivasan 54:10
And what I mean by that, by the way, is it’s a little bit like people understand fiat currency and cryptocurrency now that there’s like an internet native version, there’s a land needed version. I think the next step, which we’ve kind of already in the middle of, is Fiat identity and crypto identity, because, for example, your Google login, right, is in a sense of digital identity, right, a very important one, in fact, right? Your your crypto wallet is another one, your pass card to your, you know, hotel room, your Tesla, you know, digital lock that opens it with a use of phone out and your two FA right? All of these kinds of things are pieces of digital identity that eventually, I think, will get consolidated into, like, effectively, a crypto passport, digital passport that gets you into ALL. Online and offline property seamlessly, right? And India

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 55:05
is part of the way there with other and other things, right, like that. Actually can log into online services, but it also gets you offline, right? Yeah? And they have, what’s the thing at airports, where it’s just like face recognition you get about Digi outro, yeah. Digi outro, does that work? Yeah, that works beautifully. Yeah. I don’t have to carry my talking about it. So did you authorize this digital entity that, you know, it essentially scans your face at the airports, and then now you are, you know, you are in the system. And then you don’t have to carry your passport for international travel. You still have to, but domestic travel, you know, to carry any entity for proof. So what you do is you just stand in front of the screen, and then it takes your it scans your face, and your the door opens, and you you get into the airport. And used to be, you know, few years back, and still is there for majority of the Air Force in India. You’re for sure, until you take your wallet out and you carry, if you forget, your annual car, then you got to go back home and pick it up. And today, I don’t really carry anything to be carved with me. I actually don’t really carry my what I do really remember to carry my wallet when I’m in Singapore right now or us, and I tend to forget. You don’t need a credit card, debit card. You saw digital UPI and QR code base. You don’t need to carry on duty card. I have this thing called Digital Locker, which keeps my duty, and it said legal as a legal way to show your duty to people. You cannot be denied entry, if you show that, and so on and so forth. So now, when you combine this digitally native, cloud native population of you know, very, very young people, really hungry, really ambitious, and you combine that with the infrastructure the government is providing, combine them with a venture money that is then to take risks with very young and unproven

Balaji Srinivasan 56:45
founders, and also pretty capital efficient. There very capital efficient. Yes,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 56:49
right? Then you get this. That’s where the future of India is. And on top of that, you have this fast growing middle class with higher and higher disposable income. And frankly, India has obviously multiple parts. There is a really, really rich part of India has very high per capita GDP. There is this middle part that creates differently, and there is a bottom. The bottom is really quickly coming out of poverty, and below poverty line, it’s coming out of poverty, some disposable income, and then they are very, you know, we are aspiring to be somewhere the one or the middle. What does that mean? What it means is they want to go take, you know, take their girlfriends and boyfriends to a movie once in a month, once in six months, great. Take them out to a lunch or dinner in a small restaurant. Consumption is starting to increase, yeah, yeah. If you look at the number of iPhones India buys every year, it’s quite massive surprise India state. That’s

Balaji Srinivasan 57:50
another important stat that I was surprised at seeing. Recently, India has risen from 1% to 20% of iPhone manufacturing, yeah, which is, again, it’s like, it’s rare that something keeps surprising me to the upside. Yeah, you know, like, as you said, like governments things tend to, you know, somebody said something like, India disappoints both the pessimist and optimist and

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 58:12
optimist. Yes, it’s true. It’s true for it’s been true for India for the longest time. It probably will be true forever. But that’s what’s interesting about India now? Why is that happening? Look, 1020, years ago, my parents really saved up their entire savings to buy a house or for somebody’s marriage, or they would buy gold, or they’ll buy a vehicle. India, the new India doesn’t care about that. Nobody wants to buy housing. Kids don’t want to buy a house. Interesting, basically, don’t they don’t care. They don’t want to have possessions. They want to rent. Yeah, now to wear gold in public is tacky for the young people. So they don’t want to buy gold and keep it in their locker. So where the money go? They don’t want to buy a vehicle because they want to just take

Balaji Srinivasan 59:02
Ubers everywhere, like, ooh. So they are internet first. They leave project to them.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 59:06
They might really, yeah, they want to have, they want to plug in, plug out of infrastructures, banking infrastructure, you know, vehicle

Balaji Srinivasan 59:13
infrastructure. So lifestyle of, sort of the San Francisco tech guy is actually the default lifestyle. I’ll be at a much lower price point, but actually comparable quality. Honestly, it’s like maybe 10 or 100x in some cases cheaper than California, but it’s comparable or better quality in many cases, like food delivery, like Uber all that, all that stuff exists, right? You know, you can, you could be completely productive with great coffee, MacBook, air conditioning, everything there and, and it’s not like, like, super expensive or anything. It’s, like, accessible to a very large number of people, yeah.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 59:48
And you can get all of this stuff in 10 minutes in the big cities, yeah, and pretty soon in the k2 30 cities in 10 minutes, yeah, because economics doesn’t work

Balaji Srinivasan 59:56
out. Now, the one thing I will say is, when people go to India, they’ll find places. And there are plenty of places that are still, you know, filthy, or, you know, those, like terrible streets and something like that. And that’s absolutely true. And I believe I’ve actually started to express it is India is like California in reverse. And what I mean by that is California is fractally getting worse, right? So everything that’s old is, like, beautiful, and it’s got, like, amazing, you know, Spanish roof architecture or its speeches, but everything new is like, in California, it’s like a homeless encampment. It’s like a burned down town. It’s like a Waymo set on fire or something like that. It’s like, the new stuff is bad. Most the buildings that are new are bad because they’re not buildings they’re destroyings really right? And in India, it’s opposite the older it is, with some exceptions, like the Taj Mahal, which are really, really old, right? But in general, the older stuff is like, it’s like a slum, or it’s like a, you know, bad Street, though, poverty is radically reduced in India, like the rate of extreme poverty is dropped off a lot, right? So it’s like, you know, it’s like a messy street or something. But the new stuff, it’s like a shiny new Apple Store, or it’s a, it’s a new restaurant or something like that. And And importantly, a lot of the people are very, especially English speakers. And of course, not everybody speaks English, and so sort of, but a lot of people do. Are very ouch with internet memes. You know, they’re like, they’re extremely conversant with everything that’s added on the English internet, right? And so that’s surprising to people. If they haven’t had, you know, time, though, they may, you know, they because people type without an accent. Yeah, right, you type with an accent, and so complete conversant in written English. And there’s like, a slight accent in within India. But even then, like, you know, because Indians learn languages reasonably fast, so it’s fractally getting better. That’s kind of how I think about it. Let me know, yeah, yeah, because you’ve also lived in California and India for Absolutely.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:01:46
I think in India you can, you can visit three to four countries in a day, if you wanted to go to Mumbai, tier

Balaji Srinivasan 1:01:54
one, tier two, tier three, yeah, talk about that

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:01:56
pretty much, right? So you go to Zion all Shaws, I think premonition, yeah. I think he mentioned that perhaps. And then our friends at bloom ventures doing such as I mentioned that in his recent I think it was last year, a couple of years back in his publication. He does a really good job of that that’s called Indus Valley files. And I think he’s got this really, really interesting observation that, you know, in a single day, I don’t know whether you said this or not, but it’s in my reputation already. In a single day, you can, if you go to Mumbai or Bangalore, you can land in a in an airport that looks like a seven star hotel, uh, drive on a highway that looks like absolutely brand new and flowers and trees on both sides, and feels like you’ve come to Singapore. So you land in Singapore, you can then reach a city that feels like Mexico in the middle of a sweaty afternoon. And then you could, you could pass by something that looks like a Brazilian Fauci, I probably think in multiple countries in a single statement, possess interesting in India, this is what, you know, there is a pocket of massive improvement, and there is middle, the messy middle, and there is the Yeah, but

Balaji Srinivasan 1:03:04
if we look at the graph over time and like, so there was a tweet on Indian infrastructure that I put up that actually Prime Minister Modi retweeted that showed the like, um, you know, for example, illumination, like lights or highways or, You know, plumbing, all this stuff, just

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:03:21
radically improved. 10 year cycle. It’s completely different. Yes, a 10 year cycle, the connectivity, the electricity, you know, consumption. If you look at those graph, you look at the road network that you put this up, I remember seeing that a train network, the flight networks, the airport infrastructure. We’re looking at 10 to 15 year graph. It looks like it’s erratic in different countries. Country, yes, and you can still go, you can find whatever you want to find. In India, the optimists will go find the Singapore in India, the pessimists are going to go find something else. Yes, well,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:03:52
yeah. But the pessimists have, if you look at the graph over time, it is, it is very hard to be pessimistic on it, right? And that, that, I think, is, unless you’re calibrated on the trend line, right? It’s kind of like people can take a beautiful photo. There’s still beautiful areas in California. But the trend line from, you know, because I was there almost 25 years, right? From 1997 to 2020, 2019, for 22 years, something like that, right? The trend line was just definitely like it hadn’t yet hit zero. But and how, when were you there? You were there from 50 years, 15 years, so 2003 2018, right? So you definitely saw it towards the end. It was like much, much, much filthier, different world, right? So it’s funny, because we’re in a time where, I think previously, these sort of civilizational level changes happened over decades, but now they’re happening over years, yeah, or they’re they happen over centuries. Now they’re happening over decades. You know, the rate of change is so ridiculously fast, yeah? And we can quantify that actually, like, have you seen the graph of for example, i. Um, I think it was whether it’s internet adoption or, actually, no, it’s E commerce. E commerce spend had been growing as percentage of total spend X percent a year until COVID, and then it actually, literally increased 10x in a year, right? So that’s like, the the Lennon thing, like, there’s years where decades happen. That actually was a year where a decade happened, where the rate of change just went like that, right? Things that people had known were happening just went vertical like this. Now, COVID in India, actually interesting, macro thing. COVID in America after that, like, the society has just felt worse off, like people say, people often post about this, like maintenance quality has dropped off. You know, polarization is increasing even further. Service Quality, like, you know, it’s like, everything in terms of maintenance, all that stuff is kind of broken down. And whereas in China, for example, somebody went there and they said, post COVID, and, you know, China was really ruthless during COVID. They locked coupon rooms and so on. But they also a lot of the things that people used to do in China, like, you know, spitting on the street and stuff like that. Like, a lot of that is actually dramatically being curtailed, and China feels more Japanese, like there’s a greater degree of public, you know, cleanliness and some sort of, perhaps, as the system got pushed into a new state as a function of COVID. And I actually think India, on balance because of the internetification On balance, it actually feels stronger after COVID, like the site has come together more and so forth. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:06:31
that, yeah, as a funny tweet, somebody put out a few days back that the world has not been the same since somebody had a bat.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:06:38
So it actually appears to have come out of the wet lab, or the, you know, more than what, okay, because there’s enough data on the NIH funding of on the COVID, you know, like the COVID-19 Labs, that it’s more than incidental. There’s too many different connections for it to be, I think, too constructive. Yeah, I could go through all the genetics of it, but it looks positive.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:07:01
So, yeah, I think, look India, COVID was brutal time, and it’s very hard to compare which country had the worst of it. India certainly didn’t do well. And the first wave was fine, the second wave was brutal. Yes, people did come together quite nicely, the society, which was really great to see many of us. And I remember, like being part of a lot of this COVID drives in the line, we would call off hospital and figure out depends. And I think, yeah, it was a tough time. It does feel like it did not change society in a way that you could pinpoint pre and post and say, We are a different world now, like what you’re saying could China, or perhaps, you know, the US. It doesn’t feel like it’s very different. So I think we did come away not getting too deeply impacted culturally or economically or COVID. It could be because India, by itself, is a little bit conservative across, you know, pistol policy and policies. So because soon do the big quick print in the same way, do the same thing that we did, and and the healthcare infrastructure, you know, it’s not as massive as it is in China, but it, you know, it gets the job done. Yeah, India did have its own vaccine. You did have your own vaccine. And I took the Iranian vaccine, not the Pfizer one. And, you know, felt like, you know, we, I think we came out of it, okay? I’m glad, I’m glad to see that it did lead to a lot of like the demonetization wave made sure that people don’t really care about carrying money anymore. I think it did lead to a lot of the digitization of services. You could get people to come your house and clean up, and you could get, you know, quick commerce picked up during that time, and deliveries of all kinds of things that I caught COVID In the US, and it was so hard to get medicines delivered to you. You just couldn’t get medicines delivered to you. COVID, in any he just comes to your doorstep. Even during COVID, he will come to your doorstep. So I think those things start to get adopted. And one of the funny thing that happens during COVID is, you know, even grandparents were were had to learn or order stuff, because many times they were living by themselves, or if their kids were, you know, Ill, sick, then they had to take care of them. They learn how to how to use digital services at 7080, years of age. So it led to this mass coaching of the entire country to learn to take classes online, to transact online, to get services online, and so on and so forth. So I think that led to a behavior that has stuck around a lot more so all the whole feels like it did accelerate our digitization journey, which is already kind of really getting there, but it’s really accelerated.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:09:36
I think the digital part is what really accelerated that. For that, I think if you looked at a few graphs. So society is at least the same, if not better, but really doesn’t seem to be badly curved a digital part radically, and we’re much younger population. So COVID was, like, a big deal. That’s yeah, so that’s important, and it did, frankly, that’s a good point. Actually, the demographic aspect of it is underappreciated. Yeah,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:10:01
yeah. And, and frankly, India doesn’t listen like it is, or listen right? It wasn’t like people are still walking around and getting beaten up by the police like bunch of funny tweets coming out and but people just began to mingle, like in other countries, people protesting against during so part of it was India, are both to sell and don’t listen as a weird combination, tell people to wear a mask and tell you people was as well. So that was good. And then sometimes people just don’t care. Just mingle around anyway. And both of it kind of worked out in a way that the country came out of it. Okay? It was quite weird to see

Balaji Srinivasan 1:10:39
interesting. So Okay, let’s see other things. I mean, you basically, you left in 2018 for India and so. And when you, when did you come? When you come back to India, when I come back to India, you came back in like, January 20 Oh, I came back in August of 2018 Okay, so it’s only a year and a half before COVID, yeah, yeah,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:10:59
yeah. So then, yeah,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:11:01
and so what was the like the venture environment at that time was, I mean, 2021 just talking about that for a second, right? A lot of deals that got done in 2021 in the US had this giant, I mean, like markets are just going like bananas at that time, valuations are out of control, all kinds of stuff. And then, you know, inflation obviously went vertical towards the end. And finally they acknowledged it was doing so. And then they had to hike rates and not had to. I actually think both the printing and the hiking were both disastrous policies, but they felt they had to do fine. How did that like? To what extent was India’s economy also connected to, like the Western gyrations of markets versus how much was it, kind of its own thing? Not

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:11:49
very, not very much. Yeah, so if you look at the if you kind of go back and maybe you can show that in 2020 when the COVID shock happened, the market’s going to go up in the US by what 23% or less. Few months in India was probably more like seven or 8%

Balaji Srinivasan 1:12:05
so the shock because the first rate wasn’t as bad in India,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:12:08
yeah. Also, we are not as as connected to the US stock market, you know, as perhaps other countries might be so. So the shock was there, but it was it was less and and and then they just continued on. So yeah, on the venture side, there was a massive Gold Rush, even in India, like seed rounds were getting done, you know, 2030, post money. And the six months ago, they were happening at 10 and 15 post money. So really double overnight, CDs were happening, 100 200 posts, money, half a million dollars of revenue, especially in SaaS. So SaaS category kind of really blew up massively India. And majority of deals that happened there were probably SaaS and software canonical deals. And so snap the snap, snap up into COVID frenzy, lots and lots of capital went into different companies, I think at that maybe don’t quote me on this, but about 30 to $40 billion of capital went in to India, across early made and grow.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:13:12
What’s funny is, that’s a large amount for VC, but it’s a small amount in the grand scheme of things, you know, like, because so many hundreds of billions are done. But yes, this is a good jump for VC. A good jump

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:13:23
for VEC good chunk of money, and for why you were the second largest pool of venture capital going into the market, and China was sort of fourth at the time. So I think now we’ve kind of stabilized in the snap back out of COVID. Was also very brutal. Many companies, you know, going into COVID, especially if they were offline, right? Really struggle. And then they use the times, the good ones, the good management teams, use the time to really, you know, get leaner and get more hungry and powerful on the way out of COVID. All the companies that were building into the COVID way, what people used to call pandemic market fit, they also lost that and lost a lot of capital. And, you know, kind of lost the thesis, and they eventually died. So that all that happened in India in two years, and I had a few of my companies just blow up to a billion dollar and then blow down to zero again in like, two years time, it was crazy. Same time crypto way was happening, you probably know this, and then tons of tons of companies and the NFT way was picking up. It was a frenzy, feeding frenzy, and defi was picking up, and they said, You’re not very in India. So we saw a lot of that, lots and lots of gold rushes, all happening simultaneously. And it was really hard to keep it straight ahead and figure out what kind of entrepreneur you want to back, and what companies will wage you want to back, and what will sustain, what will knock so best we could, I think most investors around the world struggle with that period, and we’ll see what that vintage looks like in the next 10 years. But it will be challenging if you have been a bit, you know, more indiscriminate in deploying capital during that time, and didn’t care about valuation and resume the you. But there were days of stay, and I think they, you know, lose all our money.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:15:03
Yeah, interesting. I think, I think, in general, the the one thing that is good about those book times is, you know, the carload Perez thing that we talk about, a lot of these things you can talk about that, go ahead. All right, please, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. It’s like, in a sense, the.com bubble was a global search to find Google and Amazon, right? So all the capital that went into it, if it it did more than that, but if it just did those two, you can also add Netscape and a few other things, right? Which, obviously, Netscape is very important. If it just did that, it’s worth it, right? Like all the cap, right? And so if that 3040, Bill, if it generates $1 trillion company, even $100 billion company, you can argue it’s worth it, right? And, um, and it probably will, probably will do, do quite a few, like, you know, even, I think kind of cursor responded in that, but that will probably be there, right? So, and you know, it’s because the thing is that entrepreneurship is hard and rare, and so you kind of need to take the whole thing and, you know, toss it on the table. Another example is, you remember the chat bots boom of the mid 2010s this around the time of Tay in Microsoft and so and so, there’s like 2015 ish,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:16:27
2016 like floor type stuff, like a, like a programmatic do this step, one step, yeah, if else chat does various Yes, that’s right.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:16:35
And and there was Microsoft Tay, which was like an R, like a B, zero, AI, chat bot. And I remember seeing all that, and I remember, I’m not sure if I wrote it as an async memo or something, but I remember writing something like for people to make this work. What they’re actually what they really want, as people are talking about with chatbots, I’m like, what they’re asking for is iterated Google. Like, what they want, in its full generality, is to say something in natural language, get back a response that uses the entire internet to make the response, and then do another query, right? That is iterated Google. So if you can do that, of course, it’s amazing. It’s more valuable than Google, but that’s a scale. The problem we’re talking about is like, beat Google, right? And remember writing that, and that’s actually what happened, that chatgpt is actually iterated Google, and it’s actually better than Google has actually taking share away from Google. But that was the scale of the challenge. And actually, Greg Brockman actually got interested in AI because in part of the chat bot book he’s written about that, right? So in a sense, all the capital that went into that, if all it did was get Brockman interested in chat bots. It paid for itself, yeah, right. So that is, like a really right tail way of thinking about some of these bubbles, or what have,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:17:48
you know, crazy how powerful the power law is, yeah,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:17:51
exactly. Or actually, dock mobile would also do this. Did PayPal, right? So did Netscape. It did PayPal. It did e pinions, which novel, you know, EP is a real company, but you know it, did Google, it did Amazon, right? So PayPal gave teal, and then LinkedIn and everything else from that, right? And YouTube and blah blah, then there’s Google. So just that search for those entrepreneurs was kind of worth it, yes, right? And that’s so funny, because that’s not the way that people normally think about it. They want to score every investment independently. And of course, that’s worth, worth doing, but it’s sort of like no bubble actually goes to waste in the long run. I shouldn’t say no bubble, but you know what I mean, many of these ostensible bubbles actually are search function, which actually pay dividends in five or 10

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:18:32
years. So making me look out. Yeah, I agree. I think if Frankie, if I were to redesign the venture world, I would sort of say it’s gonna become a visual bimodal where the extreme right are these absolute shots. You know, no short and hand are working. But if it does work, it’s like, you know, you cure cancer, yeah, do a lot of stuff on the extreme left is, I don’t know, roll up companies guaranteed performance, but you know, 15% coupon year over year, and everything in the middle may not be as interesting, right? That’s one way to think about that. That’s interesting. I

Balaji Srinivasan 1:19:06
mean, the thing is, um, I think it’s hard to do the left hand side company nowadays, it is very hard. And the reason I think it is hard to do that is like the argument, you know, for example, the the so called Lifestyle Business argument that 37 signals made for a long time. The problem I always have with that is, if you don’t intend to scale a business, then you intend to run the business for the rest of your life. So the lifestyle this is actually the rest of your life, whereas it’s actually easier to build a business, that is a gigantic thing, because then you can sell a piece of it at some point, unless ns, yeah, sometimes it’s a project you do want to run for the rest of your life, right? Yeah. But unless you want to run it for the rest of your life, you want to actually build it as a company that you might be able to sell and then do something else in life. If you want to do something else in life, number two is a lifestyle business. Is not necessarily more competitive in the market than a scale business, because it is attracting almost definitionally less ambitious people, right? That’s the bigger problem. I think that’s right, yeah. And so the ambitious people who want to conquer the world will optimize the heck out of every screen and every flow and so and so forth. And even something we think of as, you know, simple like, like, I don’t know, nowadays people because something is easy to them. They sometimes, unless they’re experienced, they think it’s easy to build, like WhatsApp or discord. You don’t necessarily feel like you’re doing something very sophisticated when you’re using it. You’re just typing in some chat stuff to somebody on their side. It seems basic when you want to implement it can actually make it work at the scale that it works. It’s actually quite challenging, quite hard, like just video uploading from, I don’t know, Brazil and having it viewed in India and America and Japan, all at the same time seamlessly with replies coming back and, you know, deliver at least one semantics and 500 other kinds of things, is hard, right? So um, the the lifestyle business kind of thing isn’t thinking about Polish. I think I was something right. So that’s my my counter argument is, I’m not sure the low risk business exists as much. You know you’re right. Low local capital, though, to edit what you’re saying, to let me, let me, let me take part of what you’re saying, which I do agree with. I think the small business exists. The small business with a few people that with AI and with crypto and with internet distribution can do really well. Like telegram is only 30 people, right? Um, and WhatsApp is only 55 Instagram, this thing was only like sub 20 people. That business definitely exists, and that business will continue. Business will continue to exist. So it’s just an edit on what you’re saying, perhaps not low risk, but low

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:21:47
capital, yeah. And then I guess the thesis that some people have, and I don’t know how it’s gonna play out, but you absolutely right. I think what you’re saying is, quote, unquote, you put 10 B plus people and put them together, they could be 10 companies, less ambition, less finesse, or whatever the combination becomes a c minus, automatically, it doesn’t become 10, B plus. There’s not even stay B plus anymore. Yes, exactly. I totally get that. I think what I think you’re also right, that if the job of a business is to suck in $1 and and, you know, spit out $3 through productivity gains and high margin work or higher value add with AI, maybe you suck in half $1 and come out with five. That may be possible, because all this sprinkle magic of productivity and quality and scalability now finally gets sold with AI. So instead of one coming out before you have half coming up at five, and we’ll see. I think it’s, it’s, it’s showing promise at small scale. The challenge is that, when you add 1020, of these point five, you know, capital suckers, and will 50 come out of the other end, we’ll see that’s

Balaji Srinivasan 1:22:58
good. Yeah. I mean, the big thing about AI is, I mean, there’s a lot of big things, but the fact that it has scalability and consistency and low price, even if it does make errors, is still so insanely valuable because, um, you are just hyper deflating the cost of the legal console from a lot of, you know, from a lot of people. Um, so, yeah, I think I don’t know.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:23:24
And you have a lot more resilient P and L, what happens today, if you’re building these, some of these old school businesses, you are more people having so when, if you don’t control demand, which small businesses don’t have a lot of control on actually, just go ahead and finish everything. I’ll say, sorry. So you have a fixed cost, you have people sitting on the bench, and there’s nothing to do, you know, figuratively speaking, but the AI. And if you have agents doing the job, and what point it’ll be able to do pretty much end to end of a variety of things. Okay, I’ll come back, okay. And then what happens is, you can, then you can just purely focus on scaling demand, because supply can scale infinitely when demand. So you shift your fixed costs into an operating cost. You lose operating leverage, but you are essentially scaling in business with the exact same repeatable, scalable, predictable cash flow profile. You know, the moment you get 10x demand, you can copy paste 10x agents with the same quality of service, and the cost will become variable because you’re paying more for infrastructure for 10 times more agents, but you are essentially in lockstep with demand. The demand goes out, the customer says, You’re not good, I’m gone. You can kill agents, and you’re back to lockstep with the demand, so your revenue and margin profiles stays pretty much in lockstep your but, but you are a lot more resilient through the cycles, and which is important for a small business. Large businesses obviously control all of the stuff. I mean, that’s what we’re starting to see now happen because of our Yeah, please,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:24:57
yeah. So I think the only part I mean. Discreetly on that is the end to end part. I think it depends on the task. So if it’s a robot placing things, that is something where the verifying of whether it’s placed is easy, but many other tasks it’s actually, it’s actually middle to middle. Tim, so you will have to prompt it, and you have to verify, I see, but AI is middle to middle. To middle, and then you take care of the NS you do, then you can’t scale. That is what you say. Yeah. So the not so basically all depending on how much the middle part takes in any process. The part after prompting and before verifying, that now compresses to prompting and verify, but it means, for example, as a coder, you have to specify it, and then you have to review the code at the other end and then integrate it right? And that’s like the job of an engineering manager is actually higher skilled than jobs. Higher skilled than job, and somebody is an engineer. And so I’m not saying it’s not a productivity winner. It is, but it is amplified intelligence in many ways, rather than artificially agentic artificial intelligence, right? So the smarter you are, the smarter it is. But I will give one analogy. Ugar, you say

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:25:56
something I was saying that verify prompt and verify loop. I think it’s a shifting window where things you have verified, prompting verify enough times we get auto verified and auto comfy. So

Balaji Srinivasan 1:26:09
the question, I mean, in the last two and a half years of AI, since chat, the chat shift key moment, I don’t feel that’s true yet, according it’s bidding to be true. I don’t think, I think the verifying part is still hard, because actually, let me be more precise, on the front end for images and for video and for for front end code that you can verify with a different thing, which is you verify with the GPUs from your eye, for your brain, you instantly see something is wrong, because it’s like two hands, or it’s got a messed up button or something like that. So that’s where verifying is cheap. But on the back end for logic, for database code, for crypto code, security code, that is actually where verifying is expensive, maybe we can turn it into something which is visual. And so you can visualize, almost like, for example, an audio file. You can turn into a spectrogram, and you can see if there’s some giant spikes of amplitude and that looks broken. You can quickly see it with your eye, but you can’t quickly listen with your ear, right? So it’s possible, we might be able to, for example, generate some visualization of the code so you can quickly visually verify it. That generation itself has to be deterministic code rather than probabilistic. But that’s why I divide. I’d say the front end stuff, the images, videos, that’s what AI is amazing for, because the verifying is cheap and but, but the back end code verifying is expensive, which is a non obvious division. I think that. I don’t think I tweeted about that, but I don’t think people have made exactly that division. And give another analogy, which is many businesses for a long time, until, you know, basically the 80s, they were doing their accounting with piece of paper, not spreadsheets. So the instruction of spreadsheet compressed that whole middle step of adding up all the numbers. They used to have a mail room at companies rather than email, and then the church of email just basically took that completely away, and it pushed it to other things. And as an example, when running a clinical lab, because we started it in such a way that it actually had a database epic core, I could run a query and it could just give out all kinds of analytics and stuff, like, you know which variants were present with which other variants, and which insurance companies and all this kind of stuff that it cost millions of dollars for a traditional clinical lab to try find those analytics on some process. For example, bottleneck identification worked as follows, because every station in the clinical lab, when you, when you create a record in Postgres, you get a create an at timestamp for free. That meant that later, when we had we wanted to prove turnaround time we could take every station, station one through station, let’s say 20. And these were in a complicated order, because sometimes you have to revert back to station. You can take a sample, and you take it’s created at timestamp at all these stations, and you can make a graph of the sample moving through stations, then every edge between them, you have the time that it took, and you can start making the histogram of like, oh, did this have a long delay at times, right? Or does this have a high variance? So you can make the edges wiggly. If they’re high variance, you can make them red if they’ve got a long delay, and so on and so forth. And this fashion on a big monitor, you can instantly visualize all the delays, and you’re like, oh, right, there is the highest variance and slowest step, and we need to add three more pico greens or something to parallelize. Yeah, right. So that kind of analytics you couldn’t get. And so that’s how I think of pi becoming the brain of many companies, right? Lots of processes that were previously as manual as a mail room, or previously as manual as count again numbers, though, AI just takes care of that middle part. Then you still have to kind of do the end caps. Yeah, yeah.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:29:47
Interesting, yes. Interesting way to look at it. You’ve been thinking about this quite a lot. I think of again is that I’m not diving into AI the courses, yeah, fantastic. You’re familiar with formal theory, right? If. Almost like, like, formal verification, right? So you almost can verify the output within the system itself. So, yeah, it’s actually accurate. And I think it’s an NP hard problem, because you don’t know what other accuracies are there that you’re not covering, because you’re not programmed to to measure it, but, uh, but I think, I think of AI systems, because they’re probabilistic. It is much harder to measure accuracy. And how do you measure accuracy for a poem that you write as Shakespeare, you don’t know what is accurate or not. It’s a feel. It’s a why. But I think we it will be, I think the next revolution of AI will happen when you are able to formally verify output and quality output in a way that is, that is that closes the loop on the prop that begins the production of the tokens that you see as photos, videos, or whatever that may mostly AI systems today are actually open loop systems. In our closed loop systems, take, for example, cater a fantastic company. We, many of our companies, use clearly Ali. It takes inputs from, you know, a CRM May, 6 Sense, sort of zoom info. It’ll do some research. You can figure it out, you know, this person, even there’s a VC here, age, whatever, gender, whatever, living here there, it’ll write me a beautiful, customized email to me. It’ll write million copies for million people and then pushes into a HubSpot enough smart does the programming and has the Camden,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:31:25
yes. But the problem is, now I don’t want to read those emails.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:31:29
That’s another problem to solve, AI to sort of fix that. But where does the loop get open? Is that now there’s these emails have gone rough spot. HubSpot puts a tracker in there. It puts a headline in

Balaji Srinivasan 1:31:40
there. No, I know. I know. But what I’m saying, though, is, when AI increases the generation of stuff to such an extent, it will break that channel that was working, and I don’t even read email anymore. And then, and then I kind of don’t already, basically, someone’s like, oh, I sent you an email, and I’ll go and look or whatever. And so instead, you go to other channels that are high trust, channels that people don’t have the number two or something like that, right? And that’s where, actually, where your true messaging is. Now, AI can’t get in there. The whole point is not AI, right? Yeah. So, so I think that there’s, there’s, there’s a window right now, yes, where generated stuff from AI will overwhelm all kinds of missing channels, and there’ll be a reaction against him. Already seen where people are like but

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:32:23
the reaction is where the loop is close. Okay, go ahead, because when you send this out to hub spawn and you say, I don’t care, I will never open an email that looks by the editor. Email that information is not coming back to clay today. It’s staying in WhatsApp. Because, sure, sure, sure, yes. So they have put the trackers in. They don’t know what kind of subject lines people open and what times when you send it people open, or do you have it in HTML or with Nvidia embedded in it. And HubSpot knows. So click does not know how to improve its AI, how to make it better. So you open it tomorrow, day after one year later. So that loop never gets close. And these are software loops. They’re

Balaji Srinivasan 1:33:02
fair layer fair. That’s true. So one part of that I do agree, which is the closing of the loop in terms of open rates and so on. But the other part is just that systemically, rates will trend down when as people are increasing the number of their AI, you know, like emails getting sent out, and I think you’re going to start so the compliment to that is going to be crypto, because, um, you can charge cryptocurrency for emails, yeah, right. And we could do that.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:33:27
And had a company, and I wanted to use a meal bonded company. How was that?

Balaji Srinivasan 1:33:31
Well, so I want to do the v2 of that, right? Um, basically, because I think tasking is going to become a big thing. But, um, the the reason for that is, I think, and makes everything fake. Crypto makes it real again. Crypto sets up hard digital borders that AI can’t cross. Like AI cannot fake the private keys for a cryptocurrency. Ai cannot pose as something with a crypto identity. Ai cannot manipulate on chain data. For all of that, this is like, it’s like a hard deal border that these AI agents can’t bust, right? So that’s what you can count on. On the internet, are blockchains that are unhackable. And then that, because that’s like a hard surface that actually becomes the verifiable internet, which is web three and or the verifiable web, and then web one and web two. Web one is like, you know, the World Wide Web. Web two is like, let’s say the social web, right? Web two is becoming closed because x and other things need to stop AI scraping. And then web one is coming spam, right? And so you get spam or pay walled, closed, and then you have web three be the open web, the cryptographic, signed web, right? And I think that’s where we’re gonna go.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:34:41
What’s the intersection of AI in Book Three that you’ll see? Like, a use case? Oh, like, it’s gonna Yeah.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:34:47
So there’s a few, well, some that we’re working on, right? But so the one that’s out there in public that everybody knows is AI agents using crypto to pay for things, because crypto is currency of the internet, right? Since it were. Cross borders, and an AI agent can boot up an address pay another AI agent who can receive it, right? So just that alone is like, clearly, a big thing. And AI agents can sign smart contracts with other AI agents. So any kind of automate trading, you know, or transactions, cryptocurrency will be the way that AI is, you know, go and buy things. So an intelligent agent, you know, which people talked about in the late 90s. You needed both AI and crypto to be at scale. You need crypto so that everybody could accept the transactions across borders on internet agents be able to go and swim the web and find find those things. So that’s one piece. A second piece is, and I think this is most interesting for me, is on chain data as the thing that AI can’t falsify, so, like the verification step and so and so forth. So, um, that, to me, is what I call, like the ledger of record, like, rather than the paper of record, which is argument from assertion, you have cryptographic verification. And right now that only works for financial facts, because financial facts are going on chain, but the blockchain is actually the crypto, more generally, is the number four market in the world. You know that, like number one, ns, number two, NASDAQ, number three, Shinzen, number four crypto, right? And it’s quickly gained, it’s going to become number one, like internet capital markets will also be Indian Capital Markets, right? Like the way I look at this, and this is a five or 10 year thing, but it’s not more than that, right? We now finally have the on chain dollar, right? On chain Fiat. That’s going to mean you also have on chain not just currency, but on chain equity and on chain fund interests. So very soon, every internet company will have an internet equity for almost 10 years. This is pathologized because of the SEC and their jihad against crypto and so and so for Gensler and all this guys. And they’ll be like, you said, a security and so on. They’d like, you know, and but the obvious point is, you wanted a legal pathway to put a security on chain da right, and that’s not dishonest or anything like that. It’s like saying, Don’t record your securities in an Excel spreadsheet. You need to do on piece of paper. So you went from, you know, a piece of paper to a cap table, right? Why can’t you go to a coin table? Obviously, you should, because that is kind of like, you know, the intermediate step is like, Carter or angel list, which are great, great things, right? So you go, it’s almost like the scent of man, you know, the caveman is like, actually, the caveman doesn’t have a company at all, right? Then you got piece of paper, or, you know, then you’ve got a cap table in spreadsheet. Then you’ve got Carta, right, arrange a lift, sugary companies, and then you’ve got the on chain coin table. The advantage of this is, you know, something I didn’t actually realize, arguably, until crypto, international law, international trade, did not exist. You know, I say that. So let’s say you’ve got, you’re an Indian company, and there’s a, there’s like a Brazilian company that you want to acquire, right? How many people speak both Portuguese and Hindi? Not that many, right? Okay, many speak English on both sides. But how many people have done Indian Brazilian acquisitions, or Indian Paraguay or something like that? Not too many. Right? So what people end up doing is they use a US company as the adapter between the two, because US did enough business with both them. They use US law and so this way they make it work. So the US actually turned out to be the central hub. They’ve reduced it to a hub and spoke problem, rather than a peer to peer problem. The other country that increasingly you could not one could the Chinese people could use is China, where they can use that because that because that also does enough business with both countries that there’s some bilateral thing. A Chinese company can buy this one and sell this one or some something along those lines, right? But now with crypto, you have global rule of code, so eventually that, just like when you came to India, you had global mail, right? Because your mail just worked, right, and you had global movies and you had global media, your Twitter just worked. Everything else just worked. You will have global

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:38:48
money and global entity and global

Balaji Srinivasan 1:38:51
entities exactly because if you think about what is an entity, first you have Bitcoin, then you have stable coins, and then say you had all the transactions on chain, and then you have all the transactions on chain of a company. Once you have all the transactions, you can generate financial statements. Once you can generate all the transactions, you can also have the cap table there. So the collecting of the cap table, plus all the transaction plus all the smart contracts, that is what a company is, right? So you have an on chain entity, and it actually lives on chain, and that floats above and you can port it between jurisdictions, right? Just like you can port everything else. The reason that’s harder to do than all the other things we’ve done before is it is like a group of people. It’s like law, it’s money, it’s like high stakes stuff, but we’re getting there Right? And I think that’s going to be one of the most important areas for Indians. But actually, anybody who’s not in the US or China to really invest in, actually, frankly, lots of Americans and Chinese will benefit from as well, but especially if you’re not in a quote, in a in a country that is contending for being the global number one, you want crypto because it protects your rights online. You know what I mean? Right? And. And it protects your rights abroad. It gives you like currency that can’t be seized. It gives you contracts that can’t be unilaterally abrogated. You’re like a first class citizen on the internet, even if you’re a second class citizen in America. That’s like a really deep point, like, you know, people can mess with your HMB visa. They can make it hard for you to start a company or something like that in the US, they cannot make it hard for you to move your Bitcoin?

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:40:21
Yeah, you’re saying, I think at some point in time your wallet is your possible, that’s right, right? And, yeah, I wouldn’t look at it. I think it’s starting to really play out. Uh, what’s exciting you in crypto today? I mean, we keep hearing about stables a lot. We’ll say to be so, you know

Balaji Srinivasan 1:40:34
what? You know, I launched your CC or Coinbase, I will, yeah, can I see something we put up? We’ll put that on screen. Or whatever we’re launching support for a new stable USD coin. We call it a stable coin, because one USD coin can reliably and stably be exchanged for exactly one US dollar. So October, 23 2018 like we put in the 25 mil. We collateralized the consortium. We watched the like, that whole thing doesn’t exist without old Balaji.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:41:04
Wasn’t that the like a massive bull period in 2018 oh, that was a bear

Balaji Srinivasan 1:41:09
period. That was a bear period. 2017 was supposed to, yes, this was extreme bear period. Yes, yes. This is what these are. Encrypted. Fallen Bitcoin fall down to like 5000 or something from 20 is down 75% but, you know, I’m an old weather you know, I believed in this, you know, through multiple bubbles and cycles and so and so forth. And, um, so, yeah. And basically, the the graph on that, that was October 23 2018 and I’ll show you the graph, actually. And

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:41:35
was it called 17,000 or something? Increase, 17. I remember, I was lost. In? Yeah, you’re

Balaji Srinivasan 1:41:41
20,020 I’ve got the price graph is carved in. It’s like a tat. I don’t get any tats, but I do have that as a tat in my brain. So here is like, so you see, see, let’s see if I can show the exact area. October, 23 2018 zero. Wow, right? Is that cool? That’s amazing. And now it’s at $60 billion $10 billion right? Crazy, crazy, right. So mind blowing, mind blowing, right? That’s only seven years ago, and it’s now like a few percent of transactions for the dollar globally, right? It’ll become everything in a few years, right? So why don’t we just wrap up lightning round and so forth. I’ll just go through a bunch of different areas. Get your thoughts on. Just give you a one word, and you can be in a few, yeah, so on. Let’s see. We did a bit of bit of AI. So biotech, have you thought about that all since your Google Cloud is

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:42:38
little bit of it little bit. What is interesting to me in biotech now is, is it a long answer? You want a short answer?

Balaji Srinivasan 1:42:45
Give me the medium I’ve heard. Yeah. Okay,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:42:47
so in the context of India, what I didn’t know is that if you think about imagining new molecules that we cure diseases, to building chemistries for it, to testing it and then deploying and launching and scaling it. If you think about the thinking of new molecules as a head, India has the body. It doesn’t have the legs. Yet the body is turning those ideas into chemistries, trying it out, and then doing animal tests, and then first layer of human tests, and then pushing it back. And they push it back to a Pfizer, or bodena, or whatever the US. And the day they cover legs, they have the brains that tell an Indian company what to build, any other five or 10 trickling chemistries you should build, and then go test out. And then it’s a near, you know, second stage, even trial or the approval stage. And it quite pushed back the US, they finished the process. And for cancer, it will take five years, or something simple, it’ll take few months. And then they go prioritize, package, sell, manufacture and sell with llms. Now if you’re starting to see is, there’s a recent paper that came out of Stanford two months back, is that they tried out 7576 different modalities and figured out, you know, I don’t know, binding efficiencies for each of those who certain diseases and all of that. And then they came up with two chemistries in six weeks, what used to take two to three years. And then they actually had successful lab rat tests. So what’s interesting to me right on biotech is that India did not have a head, but it had the body. It didn’t have the legs. Now we have a head. So you could then build a fully integrated biotech company out of India that does not yet know how to personalize and sell and package it. But what they would do is, you know what used to be called, what, I think more mostly like contract, yeah, CROs Clos, yeah. No, you don’t have, you can take the CRO that you can design your own drugs manufacture as you put it, push it back to the US. This is,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:44:46
this is similar to how China started as, like, just main, you know, just like a low end thing, and then eventually went up the value chain, and actually the CEO around China, and so, correct? That’s right. That’s interesting. Okay, that’s good. Um, so media, so one of my. Thesis is India becomes a media superpower, but in the following sense, not in the sense that Bollywood takes over the world, but rather that Indians are very good at content creation and become a larger and larger and larger percentage of content created online. Let me know your thoughts on

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:45:15
that. Yeah, they’re starting to see it. We actually backed a few companies that are essentially calling creators, young kids creating content and then publicizing it. So India is so digital native that many people are choosing to go to as their primary job. YouTuber is becoming, you know, a control phenomena. I do think, like I said earlier, Indians are the best exports. So we, I’m trying to see Indians show up in movies and TV series. And Never Have I Ever and we’ve applied, and that was not normal 510 years, but now we’re popping up in big movies. So this familiarity with the culture and sustaining face, I think, is quite interesting. And now the content that is getting created in India, it can potentially get vital in the US you’re seeing in gaming as well. They are culturally relevant games about Mahabharata and Ramayana. They are getting popular in India. The question is, can like the way Tanka is popular everywhere in the world and we play games with North Scott themes and so on? Can that ever go expand beyond India and become a popular team in the US or Japan or Korea. I mean, it could be interesting to see same with comic books. India has a really nice, nice comic culture. It’s kind of died out over the last 1015, years, but it’s picking up again that kept tool like companies coming up. And AI is the thing that wave. And then they all very culturally Indian. And then can you find, can you export that to the world, right in your stories? We have a company called Pocket FM. And the guy, essentially, was traveling in Indian railways. And then Indian railways have, you know, these are all seven, 810, hour journeys. He will have these telawas, you know, guys that sell Pocket Books, pocket babelas. They’re spicy stories, romance, horror, love, adult fiction and endemic non fiction. So he was really, you know, realized that Sheila could convert this stuff to audiobooks, and he converted these to short, short form, but long episodic audiobooks. And he just took off company called Pocket FM, and they make 72 50 million revenue now, 70% of it is in the US Indian company building, designing new short form novellas, you know, spicy stories.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:47:25
And it’s basically, though, at global quality, it’s not, it’s not like Indian accent. It’s not Indian only. That’s key thing. It’s YES

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:47:33
for, for, for audio, yep. And now they are waiting on AI because, you know, initially you would have to have humans sitting in a broadcasting room like that, you know, capture their voice and tone. And those 40, 50% gross margin takes a long while. There are contracts that you have to do over time. You just get to 90% gross margin by just using AI to create different synthetic voices in any language. And then the interesting part of that is you can experiment in India, because the population is large. And interestingly, if something spikes in India as a story actually spikes in Germany, except then you convert to Germany, you get to German. But it’s the same, same seven read stories in the world that keep playing out love, loss, grief, you know, ambition,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:48:14
it’s culturally similar enough. See what’s interesting about that is, I do feel China’s a Galapagos Islands, where the, you know, like the animals are different there, you know, the ecosystem is different, right? Like, for example, matuan is like a huge the equivalent of Groupon in the US became a much bigger company in China. So they had a, almost like a different evolutionary tree. Have you ever been to, like, Socotra? No scotra is like this island in the Middle East, yeah, near Yemen, yeah, that has a totally different, like, set of trees and the ball walk trees and all that. Yeah, exactly anywhere else in the world, right? And so it’s like a different uses. So China’s like that, where stories that take off from China or vice versa don’t necessarily happen the rest of world and etc. It’s relatively rare. There’s a story. But the India is connect enough, because it’s English that it does. It is correlated, let’s say Germany, yeah, and that’s a 95 Yeah, that’s another thing that’s happening. India is pretty interesting. Okay, all right, let me do two or three more space ISRO has actually done surprisingly well. Uh, low cost launches are a thing, and so sort of tell me, you know, have you talked about space? Or actually, Nicole me and Sriram and several other people invest in that. If you know

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:49:19
that one like a space Yeah, fantastic company. And Nicole skyrode, we invested in a company called pixel space to raise about 90, 95 million high prospective

Balaji Srinivasan 1:49:28
satellites they can, sorry, I didn’t know if they’re a competitor with all your colors.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:49:32
Oh, no, they’re not. Yeah, they might use Ed Nichols to go launch, because they don’t do the launch stuff. They do the satellite and payload stuff. But yeah, very cutting edge, and we were the first institutional investors in any space company, four or five years ago, in green 19. And now we, I think we have hundreds of companies building space. And again, if you think about hundreds of companies, but hundreds of companies building in space across launch vehicles, reusable launch vehicle, the company called etherek set, also EMA, incredible stuff. There is a propulsion system. Ns, there’s drum station, there’s telematics, there’s satellite building. So this place, this sector, you invest a fair business, or this road, whereas, yeah, we are very much. We are really,

Balaji Srinivasan 1:50:10
I don’t think I rattle off all of those different subsections, like you just said,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:50:13
Yes, yeah. So we, yeah, we have a pretty deep and sophisticated thesis around space tech, because these role talent base is so strong, and then the young entrepreneurs coming out of the work and join hands. And then, you know, you know how much Indian Government base Israel is peanuts. So you know, once they once they’ve done their duty, they learn their lessons, they learn their skills, they are very happy to go work for a private company. Now, interesting. And yes, you know, the Israel as institution is also very supportive. They are offering labs for free to test out, do turbo testing, vibration testing, space weakness testing for satellites. Rocket is quite amazing to see.

Balaji Srinivasan 1:50:46
So, okay, that’s interesting. I learned something, and I knew ISO was doing well. And when I know that hundreds of companies that’s really, really cool,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:50:57
drones, drones, yeah, it’s a very interesting space. The company I should check out is called airbound com. They’re building VTOL blended wing body. So it’s a single, single blended body. There’s no moving parts, and it takes VTOL, it takes off vertically and then gyroscopically navigate itself to a horizontal glide path with things, and it can cover about six to 70 kilometers. This is a company, the ambassador, the preceded this raise from from Bucha, investors in the US large seed round they’re doing. I think drone is an interesting space in India, because, you know, traffic is just such a pain in the ass in India. You if you really want to offer things of different varieties, a quick commerce space. You have to take the aerial route. The road routes are just too slow and too expensive, and regulation has been generally quite positive in India. What doesn’t exist yet is a technology that can scalably reliably go deliver things that are not 500 rounds. You know, you got to get to three to five kgs for you to cover 4050, 60% of the overall volume of deliveries you want to do to zoom. So 40, 50% of consumer deliveries are some three kgs. So this company right now is building a drone, one of the most advanced drones in the world that can that has an LD ratio almost matching the best aircraft in the world. And what he wants to do is to just build the best aircraft in the world and just use it for drone deliveries. So the goal is to build the best aircraft, the best lift and drag ratio, or the best

Balaji Srinivasan 1:52:42
way, like aircraft, aircraft or drone or delivery, drone delivery aircraft.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:52:46
He’s building the best aircraft that is shaped like a drone, the size of a drone, for deliverance, for delivery, so custom, built for a custom output, air rules. But the goal is to build the absolute best, and is

Balaji Srinivasan 1:52:57
drone delivery. I know drone delivery is actually live in China now. Yeah, right. Is it there in India? Yeah. He’s doing,

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:53:02
he’s doing pilots in India right now, over there with a large healthcare system. What is happening India that people don’t know about? Tech wise, India is now coming to a point where people are building real world class, first in the world of tech policies. The drone was an example of that. The satellite company, ns, rocket companies are examples of that, and there are many more that are coming. Semiconductor stuff that we’re looking that seems like it’s very cutting edge. So there is, there is absolutely intent, and there’s capital available, and there’s talent that we believe is going to land India in a place where we are to know what we’re doing, to know what innovation that, if it works, it can actually really reshape industries. That wasn’t true 510, years ago, and I would argue we still are a minuscule, minuscule percentage of what I think the contribution to global ideas that needs to change. And I would love for that to accelerate, and I’m trying to do some things to make that much faster, but there are small pockets of fewer pockets. So they are very deep pockets of innovation that are absolutely mandible but this company that we just talked about, you’re coming with people that are, that are leaders and, you know, senior developers at Tesla, at SpaceX, Google’s wing, which is, let’s try to build exactly this 10 years ago, and couldn’t annual. And it was drone team leaders with us. And this one at, you know, venture. So this stuff is really cutting edge. So I think there are more and more pockets of that with young, first time founders. This kid is in 719, now, when we invested, he was 17. There are more people like that coming out of the woodwork. I think there’s quite people don’t know this, and I would love for that one. Volume of people to be much more and back them more. And I would love for more people to know that there is stuff like this coming out of India. You’re not a software animation. We have a back office anymore. We’re not just a consumer mask, consumer internet and E commerce country, all of that. And that’s also deepening and broadening, but we’re also this

Balaji Srinivasan 1:55:19
now. That’s really awesome. I think, I don’t think people, hey again, I think it’s still under price. I think we that that story, like this kind of stuff is awesome. This is that’s like, world class, right? And I think the world class stuff people kind of knew Indians individually, were doing that kind of stuff, you know? But I don’t think they realize how much of a for lack of a term, not even bench isn’t even the right term, how much in reserve there was within India. Yeah. Okay, awesome. I mean, with that word by me, absolutely great. Cool.

Hemanth Mohapatra (Lightspeed India) 1:55:49
And you Bob, yes, I spoke Yes.