Kunal Shah on Delta 4, the Dharma of Founders, and Building CRED

KUNAL SHAH

A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the “dharma” of the founders quite well.

KUNAL SHAH

“These are the principles that were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger.”

KUNAL SHAH

No Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life.

KUNAL SHAH

The concept of time is not the same.

KUNAL SHAH

India is changing because now, for the first time, we are seeing founders being respected and unicorns being celebrated.

KUNAL SHAH

We have a National Startup Day, and probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies.

KUNAL SHAH

I wouldn't want to be anywhere else building.

KUNAL SHAH

Lenny, thank you so much for having me, and a huge fan of everything that you do.

KUNAL SHAH

And like I said before, India is a huge beneficiary of what you do.

KUNAL SHAH

We are all people who have learned the art of product by just figuring it out, and watching some content here and there and reading some stuff.

KUNAL SHAH

So kudos to everything that you do.

KUNAL SHAH

And like I said earlier, you do a fabulous job of taking the information asymmetry of the art of product and making it accessible to many of us across the world.

KUNAL SHAH

So thank you.

KUNAL SHAH

Yeah, it's called the Delta 4 framework, but I think it's actually quite simple.

KUNAL SHAH

If you think about it, a lot of people say that your product has to be 10x better and it's not very measurable.

KUNAL SHAH

You don't know if you are 10x better or not unless you're delusional.

KUNAL SHAH

And the trigger for me was actually, I'm the unusual tech founder in India.

KUNAL SHAH

I'm the only humanities/philosophy major founder in India who's got into tech.

KUNAL SHAH

And I often wondered if most people who were my peers, or people who were ahead of me, were significantly smarter academically or otherwise.

KUNAL SHAH

And why did I become successful with my first startup, Freecharge, which I exited in 2015 for nearly $450 million?

KUNAL SHAH

And I was like, “What would make this happen?”

KUNAL SHAH

Because I would not qualify into this super league of really top IIT rankers that exist in India.

KUNAL SHAH

And that got me onto this philosophical quest to find out what makes things successful.

KUNAL SHAH

So the simple framework is, an example I give often is that, imagine the old way of taking a cab ride and an Uber. And if I asked you to give me the score of efficiency on Uber and let's say getting the old cab, what would you say, Lenny?

KUNAL SHAH

I'm curious.

KUNAL SHAH

Out of 10?

KUNAL SHAH

So every time you see that the product efficiency delta is greater than or equal to four, three things happen.

KUNAL SHAH

It is irreversible.

KUNAL SHAH

Second is that you have a very high tolerance for it to fail.

KUNAL SHAH

If Uber fails a little bit, will you say, “Oh my God, I'm going to really stop using it?”

KUNAL SHAH

No.

KUNAL SHAH

And the third thing is what I call the UBP, ‘Unique Brag-worthy Proposition.’

KUNAL SHAH

Every time humans unlock a Delta 4 product or service, they cannot stop talking or sharing about it.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore all Delta 4 products will naturally have lower CAC or sometimes zero CAC because people, humans.. and think about it, Lenny, how you discovered Google, definitely not through an ad, definitely not through some performance marketing here and there.

KUNAL SHAH

Somebody showed you the demo and you were like, “Oh my God, this is crazy.”

KUNAL SHAH

And that's what I'm seeing right now, what's happening with everything on OpenAI and everything that is happening around LLM feels like magic and it's Delta 4 because the efficiency of doing things before and after is now showing that.

KUNAL SHAH

But failure is the real problem.

KUNAL SHAH

And making everything tech does not make things more efficient.

KUNAL SHAH

Let's take an example.

KUNAL SHAH

Buying a suit for yourself online versus offline, all tech, cool stuff, all the features built in.

KUNAL SHAH

What would you say the efficiency of buying a suit online is versus, let's say, buying a suit offline?

KUNAL SHAH

Overall efficiency score, what would you give?

KUNAL SHAH

Yeah, versus offline.

KUNAL SHAH

That's crazy because you've broken the principle, this is a tech product, but the efficiency is better offline.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore when the delta is less than four, what you will discover is that it is reversible.

KUNAL SHAH

You will not see people bragging about it and you have zero tolerance for it.

KUNAL SHAH

So you're never going to buy a suit online. I can tell you that right now.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think it's a simple framework.

KUNAL SHAH

I believe that if many companies applied.. I know now many VCs in the US use this as part of the training program for analysts.

KUNAL SHAH

omebody in Sequoia mentioned this to me that they have this as part of the thing, but in India we are not still applying many of these things.

KUNAL SHAH

I think it's a simple framework to at least know. You can apply this to features, you can apply this to products, you can apply that to business.

KUNAL SHAH

And oftentimes this is a longer concept.

KUNAL SHAH

We can talk about it in many ways because it's derived out of some study around entropy and evolutionary biology, which is the root of how I discovered and thought about Delta 4, that “When does a species get disrupted ” or “what is entropy and why does low entropy require growth of high entropy?”

KUNAL SHAH

It's a day long podcast on its own.

KUNAL SHAH

So some other time.

KUNAL SHAH

Absolutely.

KUNAL SHAH

It's a great question.

KUNAL SHAH

I often wonder about it and I have had the good fortune to meet a fair bunch of these individuals, and had a chance to really explore with them what really went on.

KUNAL SHAH

So there are a few things that pop out.

KUNAL SHAH

And again, these are all conjectures, which I can't prove in any way, but it's a thought experiment to talk about these things.

KUNAL SHAH

First is in general, immigrants that get out of the country usually have a chip on their shoulder in a very different way. And the struggle that they have to go through to just get out and be successful, and that hunger that got them there. There was no privilege.

KUNAL SHAH

They came from very, very humble backgrounds and literally no money to start with.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think that this force is real.

KUNAL SHAH

You can say that for many immigrants in general as well. But appreciation for math in general, or logic which came to society in a big way, kind of gave. Let's say for example, lots of engineering graduates come from only a few countries because society was bent towards early exposure to mathematics.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think that kind of helps create status that will get appreciated.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, being an engineer, a doctor... As a philosophy major, I was a write-off for society.

KUNAL SHAH

So the reason I'm the rare commodity over here, because you are not considered to be very bright unless you break into these very hard exams and do very, very hard things.

KUNAL SHAH

So the filtering criteria on its own is big.

KUNAL SHAH

But there's another interesting framework altogether, which I have actually learned from this gentleman, Devdutt Patnaik. He applies Indian mythology and management principles together.

KUNAL SHAH

And it's an interesting thing. There are three major Indian Gods.

KUNAL SHAH

One is Brahma, the God of creation, Shiva the God of destruction.

KUNAL SHAH

I'm generalizing here, but that's the classification.

KUNAL SHAH

And the third is Vishnu, the God of sustenance.

KUNAL SHAH

And their avatars-the word “avatar” comes from Vishnu who keeps changing avatars.

KUNAL SHAH

So we have Rama, Krishna, all these Gods are avatars of his.

KUNAL SHAH

So what you notice is that if you take a two by two of people who are high on values and low on values, are high on obedience and low on obedience, you make an interesting two by two.

KUNAL SHAH

Now, Lord Krishna, who is one of the very popular avatars, which suits the entrepreneurial category, is high on values but very low on obedience. He was known to be the naughty God and he could actually create lots of things.

KUNAL SHAH

And there is Rama, who is known to be the one who follows principles and is obedient.

KUNAL SHAH

So they will follow ‘dharma’ and scale on that.

KUNAL SHAH

And then there are these notorious characters, there is Ravana who is low on values, low on obedience, and there is Duryodhana which he says that he is high on obedience but low on values.

KUNAL SHAH

So these are the people that you don't want to be.

KUNAL SHAH

And what you notice is that a lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the ‘dharma’ of the founders quite well.

KUNAL SHAH

They have not diluted the dharma of the founders who have started these companies, and managed to sustain that.

KUNAL SHAH

And a lot of CEOs have this need to say, "Oh, I'm going to change the company forever and it'll be my identity and I will change the logo and I'll change the name and I will do all sorts of things."

KUNAL SHAH

But maintaining ‘dharma’, where I will say that “These principles were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger," comes from the humility of saying that there is something that was built with some pure form factor, and I think therefore that character stays on.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore we have the characters of Brahma and Shiva, the founder and destroyer.

KUNAL SHAH

That's the thing.

KUNAL SHAH

But sustenance is the harder one.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore our avatars keep happening over time and different hurdles come and then different levels come.

KUNAL SHAH

But when you think about the archetype of, at least the Indian CEOs, I've seen that they are fabulous at moving between Krishna and Rama all the time.

KUNAL SHAH

They can play this consistently, and therefore they keep evolving and keep making these companies bigger and bigger.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think we'll see a lot more of this in years to come, because now they have the role models of these individuals who have done well.

KUNAL SHAH

But the key principle is that if you ask the founders, they will love these CEOs if they're around because they maintain the dharma.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, what Tim is doing is maintaining the dharma of Steve Jobs because if he had tried to change the dharma of Steve Jobs and the values of the company, it's very hard to imagine it sustaining itself forever.

KUNAL SHAH

And I feel it is very hard if you believe that your identity needs to have its own position and legacy, and therefore a lot of time chasing status causes disruption because you will say that “Oh, this doesn't have my signature in it.”

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore accepting the religion and trying to be the Pope of it or the father of it is better than trying to say, "Oh, I need to have my variant of religion."

KUNAL SHAH

And that's where the creative destruction starts happening.

KUNAL SHAH

Rama is high on values and high on obedience, and Krishna is high on values and low on obedience, but they both are high on values, which means they'll follow dharma, and they'll change sides.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, let's say Satya during the OpenAI crisis played Krishna and got things out, but he'll switch back to being Rama and continue to keep scaling it up.

KUNAL SHAH

It's a great question.

KUNAL SHAH

I don't think they consciously think about it, but I think if they ever heard this, they would agree with it, because that's what they grew up with and value systems are much more long-term.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, I believe all bad behavior in humans comes from being short-term, and being long-term is a big choice to make.

KUNAL SHAH

And a lot of times a lot of people argue that we have a 95% arranged marriages and less than 1% divorce rate, comes from this whole long-term thinking that people are married through values versus attraction or lust and all of that stuff. They’re more long-term oriented and about building a family, building values.

KUNAL SHAH

Or low divorce rate is about “we'll fix along the way” versus trying to say “I need to evolve” and “I need to move forward.”

KUNAL SHAH

So I think being long-term about that mindset, and that's why some cultures last for thousands of years, because of this need for everybody to be more long-term versus short.

KUNAL SHAH

I think long-term societies are naturally more risk-averse. And not all great CEOs can become great founders for the same reason.

KUNAL SHAH

In fact, I would say that it actually makes it very hard to be a founder if you've been a great CEO because you've turned into this sustainer versus destroyer or creator.

KUNAL SHAH

The nuance I'm talking about is when you are thinking about risk appetite, India is changing, but now for the first time we are seeing founders being respected and talked about and these unicorns being celebrated and our Prime Minister talks about startups quite openly.

KUNAL SHAH

We have a National Startup Day and so on and so forth.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think there is a thing that has changed this, but let's understand the core human behavior.

KUNAL SHAH

India still has a large number of arranged marriages.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you are a founder and a failed founder, your chances of getting a person to marry is still hard to achieve.

KUNAL SHAH

So if this is all true, then the appetite to take risk will be curtailed.

KUNAL SHAH

Somebody gave me an interesting example that there's a very large, let's say CPG company in India, and let's say you do a zero to one over there and the CEO changes in four or five years and your zero to one fails, but you were the best person, that's why you were given the zero to one.

KUNAL SHAH

The next CEO is like, “So what have you done in the last five years?”

KUNAL SHAH

He's like, "Nothing.

KUNAL SHAH

I just tried to launch it but failed."

KUNAL SHAH

And you are neither given a promotion in the company, nor a new company will say, "Oh my God, I'm going to hire this talent."

KUNAL SHAH

So the guy who stayed on this stable brand within the CPG company kept growing, but that has natural tailwinds.

KUNAL SHAH

All he has to do is nothing in that brand.

KUNAL SHAH

And then suddenly what you see is that he or she's managed to do well and this guy has done a zero to one has not done well.

KUNAL SHAH

So we do not celebrate risk-takers as a country yet.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think we'll change that.

KUNAL SHAH

I think it's changing already, but we have a long way to go.

KUNAL SHAH

One of the beautiful things I often talk about is that when I was in Portugal once and I saw, I don't know if you've ever been and seen this, but in the church normallyonly the Royalty are allowed to be buried or cremated. There is only one more category that is allowed- the explorers.

KUNAL SHAH

Vasco da Gama, all of these guys who explored the world and took risks and took the country forward, were given the same position as the royalty.

KUNAL SHAH

So when we give the highest status to risk-takers, the country appreciates it because ultimately we're all looking for markers of social validation.

KUNAL SHAH

I think ARPU is a function of per capita income of a country.

KUNAL SHAH

You cannot make $100 per user from a country for a product when their income is let's say $2,500 per year as an average for the whole country.

KUNAL SHAH

So what happens is many global companies love to come to India because we have the cheapest data, and very high smartphone penetration.

KUNAL SHAH

So if you look at a lot of global giants, they'll have 500 million users from India, sometimes a billion users coming from Asia and they don't have huge ARPUs, but they help you show the user growth which helps you in your public market and therefore improves your valuations.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, my guess is that, I don't know if this data is public or not to talk about, my guess is that Meta would not have more than $3 or $4 per user per year monetization in India.

KUNAL SHAH

But if you look at the user growth in India, it is huge.

KUNAL SHAH

So a lot of times for global companies, India becomes a great MAU farm but very low on ARPU. Therefore a lot of Indian founders who tried to copy the Western market saying, “I'm going to have a few hundred million users” make a terrible mistake because they will need to then go abroad to find their ARPUs to balance the act.

KUNAL SHAH

Yeah.

KUNAL SHAH

Because forusers to find relevant content, pay for content, when we have tons of free data, tons of free content all over the place, like short videos that are competing with time, so much going on over here, people actually paying for that by design is going to be less.

KUNAL SHAH

And I'm not saying that it'll not change in 10, 20 years, but the expectation that many global companies come over here saying that, “I'm going to have these tens of millions of users who start paying me as soon as I come”, for Spotify, for Netflix, or Amazon Prime for that matter has not panned out.

KUNAL SHAH

Absolutely.

KUNAL SHAH

One more thing is the value of time as a concept.

KUNAL SHAH

So one of the things you'll notice, Lenny, is that no Indian has ever been paid an hourly salary in their entire life.

KUNAL SHAH

But let me ask you a question.

KUNAL SHAH

What was your first ever job and how were you paid?

KUNAL SHAH

Now most likely you'll remember what the hour rate income was.

KUNAL SHAH

And even though you've started making a lot more, you still have the concept of what the value of your one hour is.

KUNAL SHAH

But if you ask most Indians, and if you ever come to India and do this exercise when you meet them, ask them “What's your income per day or income per hour?”

KUNAL SHAH

Nobody will be able to answer, no matter what their job is.

KUNAL SHAH

They could be staff, at the restaurant, to somebody who's doing really basic work, to anybody in any fancy job, because we've never ever been paid an hourly salary.

KUNAL SHAH

So when you're not paid an hourly salary, the concept of time is not the same.

KUNAL SHAH

And when the concept of time is not the same, paying for time is hard to do.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore you'll see a lot of Indians who make, let's say, I don't know, maybe $100 an hour, but still spend an hour to spend $10 on a flight ticket because that's what it is.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you discuss that with many of the Indians in the West also you'll realize that this is a common joke that they will still fight for the $10 because the value of time is something that is harder to get used to unless from your childhood the unit of time was moved smaller and smaller.

KUNAL SHAH

The concept of valuing time.

KUNAL SHAH

Many Indian languages do not have a word for “efficiency.”

KUNAL SHAH

And that's true for many Asian languages, the word for “efficiency” does not exist.

KUNAL SHAH

So then how do you value it if it's not in the vocabulary?

KUNAL SHAH

Yeah.

KUNAL SHAH

I think one is you make very little per user, so you have to do many things.

KUNAL SHAH

But also all low trust markets, and let me define low trust markets as where consumers are a lot more wary of trying new things because there are no institutions that protect you against bad behavior done by a company.

KUNAL SHAH

So for example, if I ever had a fall in a coffee shop in the US, I can think about suing them and making money off it.

KUNAL SHAH

In India, you're only worried about “I'm going to pay for my thing.”

KUNAL SHAH

You don't even think about suing the coffee shop or even hoping that you'll get any money for that.

KUNAL SHAH

So what happens is in a low trust country, and all developing nations are low trust by design, because the institutions are not strong enough to really, really take care of many things.

KUNAL SHAH

What happens is there is concentration of trust.

KUNAL SHAH

So you will see that super apps, superstars, super companies all exist in low trust markets because the lack of trust creates concentration of trust, and therefore you will see one app can do 400 things.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, we have a company like Tata that can do salt to car to jewelry to anything and people will buy it because it's a Tata brand, because it comes from a low trust society trusting the brand and not being, “Oh, I'm going to prefer this new brand.”

KUNAL SHAH

The joy of trying new things is not so high in low trust nations.

KUNAL SHAH

It's funny, but the oldest brand in the world is a brand called Chyavanprash.

KUNAL SHAH

It's a guy named Chavan who built a “prash” which is a sort of paste that you can have for good health, and it was built in India many, many, many, many centuries ago.

KUNAL SHAH

And lots of Indian businesses still have the name of the person behind it.

KUNAL SHAH

Even the US is like that.

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JP Morgan, all these guys are not some fancy name.

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They're the names of people.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore in India, trust still comes from a lot of names of people who had a lot of trust behind them and reputation behind them.

KUNAL SHAH

Sometimes I wonder if the challenges and the opportunities are exactly the same.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, one of the biggest challenges we have is, we have very low female participation of labor compared to many markets.

KUNAL SHAH

But I also believe it's an opportunity because you can, let's say, use AI and create many new types of business and opportunities because now work from home is not an alien concept anymore.

KUNAL SHAH

You can actually create very interesting businesses for that.

KUNAL SHAH

Number two is we are low on per capita income.

KUNAL SHAH

So what AI can do instead of taking our jobs away, is just make us brighter.

KUNAL SHAH

Satya talks about how expertise is now available in the air. So you can actually just ride on that and really make the world very equal in many many ways.

KUNAL SHAH

So that's a massive opportunity and also a challenge, because I often make this joke that the largest employer of the world is ‘inefficiency’, and if you take that away too quickly, we'll have a very, very jobless world.

KUNAL SHAH

So the thing is that it can be an opportunity for a country like India and also potentially a threat because if we don't start becoming great at AI.

KUNAL SHAH

I was actually just telling somebody today that maybe all of our interviews should be about giving a task that they can only perform if they are very good at AI.

KUNAL SHAH

And no matter what the job is, you make that the minimum criteria that if they cannot use that, leverage that, they'll become a liability in 5 years anyways.

KUNAL SHAH

And the last one is, we have a very young demographic, very well positioned with access to technology, access to smartphones and so on and so forth, a lot of hunger.

KUNAL SHAH

But our challenge is that it's also the first generation that is truly learning what entrepreneurship is, what risk is, and we'll make all sorts of mistakes to get there.

KUNAL SHAH

And I hope we don't go into a shell after having these large scale failures that we have not seen before.

KUNAL SHAH

India is not used to layoffs.

KUNAL SHAH

Like the startup world is used to layoffs, but in India, if startups do layoffs, it becomes the national news and all sorts of discussions happen over here.

KUNAL SHAH

So we are not there yet.

KUNAL SHAH

So we are stuck between being somewhat of a collectivist or somewhat of an individualistic society.

KUNAL SHAH

We are somewhere.

KUNAL SHAH

India is a great remix of everything.

KUNAL SHAH

I think CRED's insight was actually quite simple.

KUNAL SHAH

We realized that unfortunately the value of time and per capita income is concentrated with 25 million families and therefore focusing on them is important.

KUNAL SHAH

And they are a lot more global in their approach versus the rest of India.

KUNAL SHAH

So you have to build for them very differently.

KUNAL SHAH

And I realized that the ability to focus on a customer set, which is not historically possible to do because every investor expected us to be the next China, and the only similarity of India and China was the population and nothing else was similar.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think having that conviction that, “I'm going to build only for these folks and this large enough market.”

KUNAL SHAH

Thankfully I had one success for somebody to bet.

KUNAL SHAH

So our series A was $25 million.

KUNAL SHAH

I would've not had that luxury if I had no success in the past because I had no product with any monetization to prove that I'm doing the right thing.

KUNAL SHAH

It turned out okay, but I think I could get a lot of people to take a risk behind my insight or my thesis because I focused on the right customer category and built on it.

KUNAL SHAH

But I think the few things I've learned differently is that companies that are very, very good at zero to one will not naturally become great at 10 to 100.

KUNAL SHAH

There are lots of different lessons to learn.

KUNAL SHAH

The founder has to evolve.

KUNAL SHAH

That’s the biggest thing that has to happen.

KUNAL SHAH

Most people at CRED are people who have not seen a bigger business than CRED, which comes with its benefits and costs.

KUNAL SHAH

So you have to gentrify the org every now and then to make people understand the value of many of these reliable things.

KUNAL SHAH

And I often tell people that entrepreneurs are uncertainty absorbers for everybody- for employees, for investors, for customers- and therefore they get rewarded for being those people who remove uncertainty from people's lives.

KUNAL SHAH

But the kind of expectations keep changing at companies of scale.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, if you have, let's say a seed stage investor, they are very used to very high uncertainty and they're happy with some absorption.

KUNAL SHAH

But as you get a growth investor, and let's say you have sovereigns on your cap table, the amount of stability you need to provide is significantly more, and therefore you need to evolve very, very differently.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think those are the few lessons that I've learned.

KUNAL SHAH

Talent, you start realizing that not everybody can scale into everything.

KUNAL SHAH

And you cannot expect that you can give up the 0 to 1 DNA just because you're building 10 to 100.

KUNAL SHAH

So how do you kind of coexist with those things?

KUNAL SHAH

How do you react to big changes in the market and not become this slow company?

KUNAL SHAH

And every company goes through that.

KUNAL SHAH

I mean if you look at what Zuck went through in the last three or four years was that.

KUNAL SHAH

I often say that he had to play the Shiva, come and do a lot of destruction to become big again.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think that's what founders can do, and it's not easy to do.

KUNAL SHAH

One of the things I've learned is that profit pools of a country tell you a lot about what the country values.

KUNAL SHAH

And trying to copy somebody else's profit pool to your country will not be a wise idea because the country's values are demonstrated in what profit pools exist.

KUNAL SHAH

Let's take an example.

KUNAL SHAH

In the thousand most profitable companies in India, the number of retailers would be probably two or three.

KUNAL SHAH

But if you look at the Western market, you'll see a bunch of them because it's a consumption market, plus a very high divorce rate which means you're always peacocking again in the market, you're trying to be fit and be cool and all of that.

KUNAL SHAH

India has a very low divorce rate, less than 1%, are arranged marriages.

KUNAL SHAH

Fashion spends, and because we have a lower female participation of labor, India is probably the only market where female fashion spends is less than men's fashion spends.

KUNAL SHAH

Everywhere else, it's probably five, 6x more for them.

KUNAL SHAH

So what happens is you start appreciating what the country values.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, I have noticed that many patriarchal societies have a very significant market cap in financial services versus consumption.

KUNAL SHAH

And these broad patterns, you start thinking about very, very differently.

KUNAL SHAH

Yeah, but that's the universe.

KUNAL SHAH

The universe goes through the exact same phases.

KUNAL SHAH

So if you study Indian mythology, you'll see that there's a Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh cycles and every yugg As it’s called, goes through these three phases all the time.

KUNAL SHAH

It's fascinating.

KUNAL SHAH

It's fascinating.

KUNAL SHAH

As a country, most businesses were of trading, you buy something at low cost, sell at a higher price and you make profit.

KUNAL SHAH

Most of our businesses, most of our family businesses were trading.

KUNAL SHAH

But building a CapEx heavy distribution, monetizing it later on, focusing on high revenue growth rate versus trying to get profitability first, is not known to us.

KUNAL SHAH

So when they see these large numbers of losses, there's a shock. “Why would somebody give you this kind of money?”

KUNAL SHAH

And by the way, my own dad wouldn't respect me till I was building a profitable company.

KUNAL SHAH

So it's not surprising that people in India have these comments, but it also comes from not understanding how businesses are built in the internet world, where VCs are giving you the capital to build distribution, unique product edge, brand, all of that stuff, and then monetize later on and monetize big and then have very large profit pools to go after.

KUNAL SHAH

But a lot of times this comes from not understanding this business, and I feel it'll change because many internet companies are now getting very profitable and public listed.

KUNAL SHAH

So we'll have a decade.

KUNAL SHAH

Let's understand one thing.

KUNAL SHAH

In the US, maybe 27-30% of the US market cap is now tech companies.

KUNAL SHAH

In India tech companies would probably make less than 2- 3% of the market cap.

KUNAL SHAH

So we are mostly, and I'm not saying India has this fabulous history of building very, very profitable tech companies.

KUNAL SHAH

We are probably the first generation that will have to prove ourselves to be very large profitable companies.

KUNAL SHAH

But we are still figuring out what this means.

KUNAL SHAH

And the fact that this question, by the way, I can tell you one thing that, I have been asked this question by people on Twitter way more than any of my investors have ever asked me this question. This also creates an arbitrage for entrepreneurs who can actually build businesses and have the ability to raise capital and prove their business model with very high revenue growth rate and build large brands and so on and so forth.

KUNAL SHAH

But I find it fascinating as well.

KUNAL SHAH

Also, one thing we see fascinating in India is that there is an immense amount of trolling and doubt that will come in your comments no matter what you do.

KUNAL SHAH

So if you see any founder in India, they'll post something about the thing, the comments will rarely have appreciation.

KUNAL SHAH

So it feels sad because, when you see global companies do stuff, Indians will lose their shit on Apple Vision Pro and all this stuff and Twitter will go gaga over it.

KUNAL SHAH

But I think when it comes to...and I believe envy is hyperlocal.

KUNAL SHAH

We do not envy Elon Musk for all the stuff he does because he's so far away.

KUNAL SHAH

But we envy our own because they were just like us not many years ago.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore envy is like wifi.

KUNAL SHAH

It's like a hyperlocal service.

KUNAL SHAH

It's funny the number of calls I've got from founders who start getting hate. I’m the go-to person to get these call because they've seen me get it for many more years.

KUNAL SHAH

And I tell people that we couldn't have made it this far if we cared about criticism of everybody versus people who've done better than us.

KUNAL SHAH

If somebody who's done anything better than me gives me any amount of criticism, I will absolutely flip and make all the changes and evolve.

KUNAL SHAH

And I seek feedback all the time from people.

KUNAL SHAH

But if I start taking feedback from everybody who does not understand the nuance and empathize with what I'm doing, I'm not saying that we should not take customer feedback, that's very different.

KUNAL SHAH

But let's say somebody commenting about your business, who does not understand the nuance of it, you can't be reacting to everything.

KUNAL SHAH

And I often tell people that there's a reason elements with lower valencies are called noble gases because they're hardest to get reactions from.

KUNAL SHAH

For all the challenges, India remains the most promising market that one can be building for right now because everything is going our way.

KUNAL SHAH

We have all sorts of digital public infrastructure, government support, all these great people doing extraordinary things, apart from the Twitter noise.

KUNAL SHAH

And Twitter is designed for outrage getting likes.

KUNAL SHAH

So I wouldn't read too much into it.

KUNAL SHAH

But I think all of us are doing well because we have an audience set, an evolved ecosystem that is fully supporting us and really taking it forward.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in building because of this extremely vibrant, crazy opportunity that one can learn from.

KUNAL SHAH

However, I often wish that I could get a one month internship with Brian and learn how to do things.

KUNAL SHAH

And I've never had the luxury.

KUNAL SHAH

I can only watch his podcast with you to learn a few things, but what if I got a chance to be there?

KUNAL SHAH

And I miss that part where I've never been really trained by these extraordinary product brains or even observed them make decisions.

KUNAL SHAH

So I recently posted one thing that the word ‘operation theater’ comes because operating used to be a public process and people used to pay money to watch surgeries and see all the bloody gory stuff and even before anesthesia was born.

KUNAL SHAH

And there's so much joy in seeing somebody do their action.

KUNAL SHAH

And I wish there was a theater for Brian taking a product decision, Zuck taking a hard call on killing a product or seeing Tim rejecting all the ideas that they have before the GTM of a product.

KUNAL SHAH

I think we could benefit so much from that.

KUNAL SHAH

And unfortunately it remains in very small circles.

KUNAL SHAH

And like I said, the reason I said you do a fabulous job of removing some of the information asymmetry and kind of making it more democratic.

KUNAL SHAH

But there is so much more that we all could learn.

KUNAL SHAH

And I feel extremely envious of many people who have the opportunity to work with the best of the best because, many of us from India never had the luxury. We had to figure out everything on our own.

KUNAL SHAH

I think a curious person is somebody who is constantly demonstrating that they are not proud of their expertise, and they will demonstrate extraordinary amounts of excitement when they face a problem which they have no clue how to solve.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore a lot of people stop growing because they want to constantly demonstrate their expertise versus demonstrating their curiosity.

KUNAL SHAH

Because, curiosity should come from security because imagine- I'm the founder, CEO of this company and this group of 60 people on WhatsApp, somebody posts something and asks a dumb question, “What does this word mean?”

KUNAL SHAH

You need to have the security to feel okay with it, but a lot of people out off insecurity try to demonstrate expertise and do it or Google to not ask these people.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think that slows down the compounding growth and I think it keeps you from being very good at adapting.

KUNAL SHAH

So it's funny, I was recently. GPT is my favorite thing to keep asking random questions because now I don't need to really worry about Google having those questions answered around because I can ask the GPT.

KUNAL SHAH

So I recently asked the question: which species or animals have survived for more than 100 million years without changing too much and what is common in all of them?

KUNAL SHAH

So GPT came up with an interesting answer which says that sharks, horseshoe crabs, crocodiles, and all of these animals have survived to do this thing.

KUNAL SHAH

So three distinct traits were, one, ability to reduce metabolism at will.

KUNAL SHAH

It's fascinating.

KUNAL SHAH

I can bring down my metabolism by 1:20 or a crazy, crazy scale that they can bring the metabolism down.

KUNAL SHAH

By the way, ancient yogis have demonstrated this as well.

KUNAL SHAH

It comes from the same yogic practice.

KUNAL SHAH

The second thing is about, and if you think about companies, the context is the same.

KUNAL SHAH

If COVID came, you could slow down your metabolism and survive, right?

KUNAL SHAH

Or you burned your way out and disappeared.

KUNAL SHAH

The second thing that was interesting was the very high conversion rate on every attempt to secure food.

KUNAL SHAH

They don't go around chasing randomly and doing things.

KUNAL SHAH

They have a very high conversion rate, which means high judgment and the deadliest bite.

KUNAL SHAH

So they'll not chase many options, but if they chase something, they will have the biggest bite and they'll convert it.

KUNAL SHAH

And the third thing that was more interesting was that they have survived all sorts of crazy environmental changes, just adapting. And adaptation comes from curiosity.

KUNAL SHAH

And you could see those people.

KUNAL SHAH

In COVID, there were two sets of people, who were completely gone into a shell and there were those who were curious.

KUNAL SHAH

“Okay, so what do I do with this?”

KUNAL SHAH

“What happens now?”

KUNAL SHAH

“Do I need to change something?”

KUNAL SHAH

“Do I need to tweak something?”

KUNAL SHAH

So the ability to change very quickly.

KUNAL SHAH

I often feel that curiosity is that demonstration of the ability to adapt and learn, and you only create more information asymmetry.

KUNAL SHAH

To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry.

KUNAL SHAH

All the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry.

KUNAL SHAH

And that comes from curiosity. Because you're constantly collecting dots, connecting dots, collecting dots, connecting dots, and end up creating this unique edge for yourself and information asymmetry for yourself.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you assume that “I have collected enough,” no human life is going to be enough to connect and connect all the dots.

KUNAL SHAH

We'll never be able to get..

KUNAL SHAH

And sometimes I envy the stuff that you do because you are efficiently connecting and collecting dots by having the luxury of all these people to talk to, and you are making more dots getting connected.

KUNAL SHAH

So your information asymmetry is growing.

KUNAL SHAH

I often tell people that I hate the word ‘favorite’ because it tells me to become limited in my mind.

KUNAL SHAH

So I stay away from ‘favorite’, but I learn all the time from everybody.

KUNAL SHAH

And there are so many people to learn from across the world and in history, in the recent past and every time you'll discover fascinating, extraordinary things about them.

KUNAL SHAH

So I don't think I have a person.

KUNAL SHAH

I am this person who thinks about about: ”How did they solve this hard problem.”

KUNAL SHAH

So one of the things that we started doing recently and not very ritualistic about it so far is, I ask myself and my key reportees every month, we go around the table and ask ourselves, ”What are the hardest problems we solved last month?”

KUNAL SHAH

And it's very hard to come up with an answer.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you do this to the product leaders, just go around and ask, “What are the hard problems you solved last month?”

KUNAL SHAH

You'll realize that we all stay very busy and displacement is hard.

KUNAL SHAH

But if you notice extraordinarily successful people, they'll have a lot more content to talk about every month, every quarter because they're obsessed with making that big displacement and it does not come by being busy.

KUNAL SHAH

And that's another thing that you cannot chase the big thing.

KUNAL SHAH

You don't see a crocodile being busy.

KUNAL SHAH

You see a crocodile just waiting patiently at the watering hole for that best meal and have the deadliest bite for that.

KUNAL SHAH

So the beautiful definition of predators I read was “one who burns the least amount of calories to earn the most amount of calories.”

KUNAL SHAH

So how do you become that?

KUNAL SHAH

And I think when I meet people who are extraordinary at that, and it comes in all shapes and forms, I learn something from them.

KUNAL SHAH

Because if you're a senior, what is the role of a senior person?

KUNAL SHAH

You have to be the chief problem solver.

KUNAL SHAH

I wish I could think of an answer.

KUNAL SHAH

My method of collecting information is mostly about, I come up with conjectures in my head and then I go all over the place to find out if there is proof if what I'm saying is true or not.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, I recently came up with a conjecture that everybody who has been successful in the history of business of vices, historically has done a lot of philanthropy to create a good image for themselves, and therefore is being treated as a respected citizen versus being treated as a person who did vices to make wealth.

KUNAL SHAH

And then I asked GPT to come up with 50 people who did that and what were their vices?

KUNAL SHAH

How did they change the reputation by doing lots of philanthropy and all of that stuff?

KUNAL SHAH

Then a thing happens.

KUNAL SHAH

And then I research in all sorts of directions. And I have no boundaries if I go to chemistry or physics or human behavior to discover some universal principles.

KUNAL SHAH

So my method of learning is to constantly come up with conjectures from the dots that you have connected and then absolutely work hard to find proof of it and then use that to connect to the next dot.

KUNAL SHAH

So I often tell people that every book you read makes your brain poorer to read the next book.

KUNAL SHAH

That's the purpose of books, but that's true for every single thing we learn.

KUNAL SHAH

It makes our brain poorerfor the next thing that we are supposed to learn.

KUNAL SHAH

Well, it's my daily life.

KUNAL SHAH

I get sucked into topics every now and then.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, I've been thinking about second order effects of AI and what happens to countries and jobs and how to expect some of these things to change, not change, rate of change, rate of skill change.

KUNAL SHAH

I got recently obsessed with what happens to lab grown diamonds if they become big?

KUNAL SHAH

Does it kill diamonds?

KUNAL SHAH

Does it make diamonds bigger?

KUNAL SHAH

And then I looked at parallels.

KUNAL SHAH

So, the pearl industry was very big before culture.

KUNAL SHAH

Cultured pearls came and the high status of pearls disappeared because everybody could have pearls.

KUNAL SHAH

But not too long ago, pearls were a very royal thing . Every prince and princess used to have pearls around them, but as soon as it was easy to manufacture in a lab, it lost its value.

KUNAL SHAH

So then I think should I be shorting or going long on diamonds thinking about what happens?

KUNAL SHAH

But there'll be a temporary period of making a lot of money on lab grown diamonds, which will kill... it'll become parasitic on the status of diamonds and destroy all of the profit pools.

KUNAL SHAH

I often wonder, Lenny, that if you took the most serious people and made their GPT searches public, a lot of people will learn because the problem of GPT is now it'll make the people with great questions do well, versus people who are looking for basic answers.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think the world is going to be unfair to people who will ask great questions.

KUNAL SHAH

Whenever somebody has many choices and they make the right choice in whatever domain they have.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, let's say you could hire anybody but you hired great people, or let's say you could have married anybody, but you married a great person and so on and so forth. Everybody has many choices to make.

KUNAL SHAH

How do they make choices for that domain of expertise?

KUNAL SHAH

And I think that is the most, and many times they're not going to be able to explain how they make great choices.

KUNAL SHAH

They'll have to really go into that because they don't really have their mental models figured out.

KUNAL SHAH

They cannot articulate, they cannot coach, they cannot explain.

KUNAL SHAH

But if you can figure out how they make great decisions in general, in whatever domain of work they're doing, you'll find many interesting insights coming over there.

KUNAL SHAH

The other good question to ask is about second order thinking.

KUNAL SHAH

What do they think will happen to the world and why did they come to that conclusion?

KUNAL SHAH

And you see that full chain of thoughts is very powerful.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, second order thinking is known to be the most powerful trait to predict the success of somebody.

KUNAL SHAH

But I often wonder what happened in the childhood of people who became great at second order thinking.

KUNAL SHAH

And that question is not fully discovered or discussed yet.

KUNAL SHAH

And I've found some loose examples such as if you played strategy games or only physical games as a strong correlation to building

KUNAL SHAH

So rigor came from physical games, but second order thinking came from playing strategy games as a kid.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you had both, you could do really well in general because you have discipline and second order thinking together.

KUNAL SHAH

Then did you ever have an exercise of looking at history?

KUNAL SHAH

For example, one of the things I recommend for parents to do with their kids, I call it the ‘Whyfi school’, is ask them one ‘why’ question every meal and let them come back with answers the next day.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, “Why do humans wear jewelry” and ”Why is something a certain way?”

KUNAL SHAH

And let them go into the full depth of history and find out.

KUNAL SHAH

Why is it so expensive to advertise in the Super Bowl?

KUNAL SHAH

And so on and so forth.

KUNAL SHAH

You just take one question.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you train them on why, they evolve at a very different rate because how, what are the questions which do not evolve at a much higher rate, because ‘why’ is the deep question and it breaks a lot of things in your head.

KUNAL SHAH

Or another question about origin stories that “How did elevators come into being?” and "what made your phones happen?”

KUNAL SHAH

“What made microphones happen and why is it called microphone and why is it called a phone?”

KUNAL SHAH

And if you just want to go into this depth, you'll see people build second order thinking automatically because either you go into history and see second order thinking coming along with that, or you play games that train your brain for second order thinking with the spectrum.

KUNAL SHAH

But that's a broad range of things that I think people should be asking.

KUNAL SHAH

I don't have kids so I can run experiments on everybody else's kids.

KUNAL SHAH

So it's a great thing to do.

KUNAL SHAH

Actually it's not bad.

KUNAL SHAH

I think you should encourage it because we have to assume that we are going to be all co-pilots of AI now.

KUNAL SHAH

What you have to do is derive the second order insight that, “Okay, this is true.

KUNAL SHAH

Where is the similarity of this in somewhere else?”

KUNAL SHAH

Give me an example of this found somewhere else, and so on and so forth.

KUNAL SHAH

Our understanding of wealth and what wealth is, is flawed.

KUNAL SHAH

To me, wealth is nothing but storage of energy.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore the reason wealth is not zero sum is because energy is, and we are just finding ways to convert energy to our advantage.

KUNAL SHAH

We are the only species that has managed to convert all forms of energy to our advantage.

KUNAL SHAH

Kinetic energy and fuel and sound and solar.

KUNAL SHAH

No other species has done this.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore, since the industrial revolution, our wealth has gone like this and continues to be like that.

KUNAL SHAH

AI and nuclear fission and all this stuff will kind of take us right there.

KUNAL SHAH

So I have a strong view that we will never, never have equality of wealth.

KUNAL SHAH

In fact, chasing that is actually a bad idea.

KUNAL SHAH

But if you let people do well and chase wealth, they have enough wealth for everybody else and we could help a lot of people out.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think it's complicated because we can have all these democratic arguments that wealth is concentrated and all that, but that's the physics of wealth.

KUNAL SHAH

It'll always be concentrated.

KUNAL SHAH

You change these mediums, companies, countries.

KUNAL SHAH

To me, wealth is nothing but an entropic complexity that'll keep changing its form and shape.

KUNAL SHAH

You can keep fighting it or accept its physics and reap the benefit of that physics.

KUNAL SHAH

No, but the nuance that is important is that you can actually increase the database size infinitely.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore his vision of the sun's energy, if you really convert all the energy to our advantage, the amount of wealth we will create for humans is disproportionate.

KUNAL SHAH

And all the species that are managed to collaborate and cooperate to create wealth, for example, let's define wealth as biomass.

KUNAL SHAH

So let's say ants and bacteria and humans are the only few things that have the largest biomass on this planet because we figured out how to make energy work to our advantage.

KUNAL SHAH

It's a series of failures.

KUNAL SHAH

I think there is no escape for anybody who's done anything in life, not failed a lot, like every day, every thing.

KUNAL SHAH

But I would say that many initiatives, many products, companies that I've built have absolutely failed, hirings that have failed, trust broken, betrayals.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think there is no end to it.

KUNAL SHAH

But I think entrepreneurs have this weird ability to forget about failures and almost turn that into a lesson that you hold, and you forget the story.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, COVID has literally no memory for me.

KUNAL SHAH

I just don't remember what was COVID.

KUNAL SHAH

It's just a blank in my head right now.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think that humans are great at forgetting the memory of failure, but remember the lesson from failure.

KUNAL SHAH

But I think I'm constantly learning, and I often believe that life is too short to make all our mistakes ourselves.

KUNAL SHAH

So we should be learning from other people's failures as well.

KUNAL SHAH

And a lot of times we don't do that because we believe that we are special, nothing like that will happen to us, but as humans, we should be learning.

KUNAL SHAH

I would say that my life started from a failure.

KUNAL SHAH

My family went through a severe financial crisis.

KUNAL SHAH

I had to start working from age 15 and I feel till date, I'm just trying to escape that failure that happened in the family.

KUNAL SHAH

So I think many of us are just fighting that initial large failure that we've had and don't want to be anywhere near that.

KUNAL SHAH

And although we are significantly far away from that, the feeling is exactly that.

KUNAL SHAH

That's interesting.

KUNAL SHAH

No, I mean I've shared that enough, but I used to not talk about it before because I used to think that I would get some sympathy for that.

KUNAL SHAH

And only in the recent past did I speak about it because I want people to realize that I was not some gifted kid who had some rich parents who made me extraordinarily bright and put me in great schools and colleges and I made my way through that.

KUNAL SHAH

I used to not talk about it earlier because there's a lot of tendency to give sympathy to those people who say, "Oh, this guy had struggled."

KUNAL SHAH

And I don't want to be given any credit for playing that poverty card or this card or struggling for food card.

KUNAL SHAH

That's not an excuse.

KUNAL SHAH

There are so many people in the world who've done extraordinarily well because they had the gift of struggle.

KUNAL SHAH

And I often tell people that this is the biggest curse of successful parents, that that's the only gift they'll not be able to give to their kids, the gift of struggle that they had.

KUNAL SHAH

Well, I would love for the listeners from different fields of product to share what you're learning without being fearful of the judgment of your peers, because there are many, many people who are learning only because you share your evolution and your thoughts.

KUNAL SHAH

And I believe that a lot more could be contributing.

KUNAL SHAH

And a lot of your listeners are really bright people.

KUNAL SHAH

If they all shared, many people from many places in the world would learn and achieve some amount of success.

KUNAL SHAH

Thanks to your sharing.

KUNAL SHAH

Amazing.

KUNAL SHAH

All set.

KUNAL SHAH

It keeps changing a lot, but my books are usually around understanding human behavior.

KUNAL SHAH

And I keep changing based on the person, but I think it's the biggest subject.

KUNAL SHAH

All our customers, all our investors, all our employees, all our relationships are all humans.

KUNAL SHAH

And the subject that we are weakest on is human behavior.

KUNAL SHAH

And how do we live this life?

KUNAL SHAH

We are playing life on extremely hard mode if you don't learn human behavior.

KUNAL SHAH

So I would say that's one thing.

KUNAL SHAH

The second thing, evolutionary biology, teaches a lot about how species evolve and how they make decisions and what are the core motivations that drive everybody.

KUNAL SHAH

So that's another one I would recommend.

KUNAL SHAH

And I don't want to make a recommendation because I can barely finish a book to be honest.

KUNAL SHAH

So I believe in drifting and getting deeper into topics.

KUNAL SHAH

So understanding the topics versus trying to say, give me these three books and I'm going to be good.

KUNAL SHAH

And the last one I would say, is that anything that can make you learn something about their journey versus their success.

KUNAL SHAH

So sometimes autobiographies are too celebratory in some ways, but if you can just kind of understand how… any book that can teach you about how people recover from a setback in great detail is a great book to learn from.

KUNAL SHAH

I absolutely don't believe in reading over and over because I believe that we are evolving.

KUNAL SHAH

You might discover the same stuff coming from different books and you would say, "Oh, I can categorize this in my brain again and again."

KUNAL SHAH

But I think we tend to become believers, and it becomes too religious if you repeat.

KUNAL SHAH

I love Oppenheimer because of the struggles and Nolan's craft of making the movies, but nothing in the recent past that I feel is right up there.

KUNAL SHAH

I like to ask a hypothetical second order thinking question.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, if everybody who has taken a COVID vaccine dies tonight, what happens in 12 months from now?

KUNAL SHAH

Can you explain the world- from what happens to money, what happens to law?

KUNAL SHAH

What happens to countries?

KUNAL SHAH

What happens to the military?

KUNAL SHAH

What happens to the stock market?

KUNAL SHAH

What happens to the order of things?

KUNAL SHAH

And I would say less than 10% of really smart people can have really good answers.

KUNAL SHAH

So it tells you how good they are at second order thinking.

KUNAL SHAH

But the questions can keep changing.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, if you said that, what if arranged marriages were banned in India, and you got capital punishment for doing arranged marriages?

KUNAL SHAH

What happens to the country?

KUNAL SHAH

How do we change from there?

KUNAL SHAH

Like some absurd scenarios, but then what happens after that?

KUNAL SHAH

The range of things that they could go into and think about- if this happens, B happens and then C happens.

KUNAL SHAH

The leaps they could make.

KUNAL SHAH

I think the simplest way to think about this is being able to correctly judge the butterfly effect of an event as close as possible.

KUNAL SHAH

For example, a lot of people in the stock market use that to say how stocks will go up and down.

KUNAL SHAH

There's something that has happened in the market.

KUNAL SHAH

“Oh, there is a war now with Russia, then what happens to the market?”

KUNAL SHAH

Can you be good at predicting that?

KUNAL SHAH

But in everything in life, if this happens, a lot of people hate this because it's very taxing to the brain.

KUNAL SHAH

The brain absolutely hates second order thinking unless you've trained your brain with second order thinking all the time that it looks forward to it.

KUNAL SHAH

So you convert this into a hate versus a reward cycle, and that comes with probably doing it early on in your life.

KUNAL SHAH

Later on, people hate doing second order thinking.

KUNAL SHAH

I'm looking forward to my Vision Pro coming soon.

KUNAL SHAH

The most fascinating thing that I saw was Zuck talking about the utility of Meta being better than Vision Pro and their product.

KUNAL SHAH

And that's exactly going to work well for Apple because when you try to make the product more utilitarian, it loses status.

KUNAL SHAH

And if you study animals, you realize that the one which gets the highest mating success is the one which can demonstrate the ability to waste resources and not be very efficient with resources.

KUNAL SHAH

And therefore people who are known to buy a product that is wasteful will actually own higher status.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think Zuck made it actually quite easy for Apple to demonstrate their superior positioning by saying that, "Oh, we are not as efficient, we are not as cheap.

KUNAL SHAH

We are not for everybody."

KUNAL SHAH

It's not a favorite motto, but I think we truly are transient and we are very lucky to have this life that we have and we have to make the most out of it.

KUNAL SHAH

And all these struggles will mean nothing.

KUNAL SHAH

I often tell people that you should wish for your life to be so great that you have collected the highest amount of content when you are old, and you have no end to the stories that you can talk about.

KUNAL SHAH

I love it.

KUNAL SHAH

I love it.

KUNAL SHAH

I love it.

KUNAL SHAH

I love it.

KUNAL SHAH

I find the internet is filled with all these people trying to give fake motivation and make money off that stuff.

KUNAL SHAH

And it's almost like a drug for people to feel, ”Oh my God, there's motivation, I'm going to do well.”

KUNAL SHAH

I just wanted to remind people that all success comes from an extraordinary amount of pain and struggle and hard work, and there is no shortcut to anything material coming in life.

KUNAL SHAH

And so the Monday motivation post comes as the anti-motivation post because the world is filled with... I believe that the biggest profit making scheme that I've seen in recent times is to tell people to love themselves and they'll pay you money for saying that.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think the best way to love yourself is to keep evolving.

KUNAL SHAH

So my motivation comes from evolution, connecting dots, solving harder problems than I've solved in the past.

KUNAL SHAH

And I think life is ultimately a game where you want to feel that your levels have changed and your skills have changed constantly.

KUNAL SHAH

You can find me on social media.

KUNAL SHAH

Look for Kunal Shah, you'll find me everywhere.

KUNAL SHAH

I usually have a different personality on each social media.

KUNAL SHAH

And in terms of being helpful, keep tagging me on interesting things that you discover that gave you that moment of, ”Oh my God, I did not know this.”

KUNAL SHAH

I would love that.

KUNAL SHAH

Thank you so much for having me.