DASAR

DASAR Podcast | Chief Investment Officer to FinTech Founder | Ashish Goyal | Early Salary | Consumer Lending | Millennials | Money | FitnessTranscript Welcome to DASAR Podcast. My name is Darshan Doshi and DASAR is about insights and taking action. We are a community of people who take that first step towards their goals – whether it’s a startup or investments or fitness! It’s an amazing time to be alive — especially if you’re operating in the FinTech space in India. A lot is happening in this space and I have an amazing guest with me today – Ashish Goyal, Co-founder & CFO at Early Salary, one of the top venture-funded FinTech startups in India providing personal loans to consumers. Prior to Early Salary, Ashish was heading portfolio management at Bajaj Allianz and managed about $4 Billion. He’s a TiE Charter Member and supports entrepreneurs through mentorship. Darshan Doshi: Ashish I gave a quick introduction of you, but when someone comes up to you and asks you who you are what do you typically say?Ashish Goyal: It’s my pleasure to be here. The day you asked me, I said that DASAR Podcast is something that I must do.Darshan Doshi: Excellent. Thanks for your support!Ashish Goyal: So my reply to that question has changed over a period of time. When I was in charge at Bajaj Allianz, it was more about being the Chief Investment Officer and managing this much money, etc. and less about Ashish. It was more about the position which I was holding at the company. When we started Early Salary, people didn’t know about Early Salary. So again, it was about what we bring to the table. What is our idea or vision? Our typical pitch would go like we are starting a FinTech startup to disrupt the consumer lending space in India. It’s evolved today and my pitch will be more about Ashish and less about extending the Early Salary brand as it is now established. Darshan Doshi: The Indian FinTech space is one of the best sectors to be operating in. From 2013-14, the kind of push the Indian startup ecosystem has got, the amount of venture capital funding, the policies, the digital infrastructure, UPI, the upcoming Account Aggregator Framework, etc. There’s so much happening in India right now, and this is the place to be, but it’s also changing drastically. So maybe you can just share some thoughts about this space.I also read in a report that there is a credit gap of roughly $500 billion in the consumer and SME space in India. Out of that $500 billion, roughly $300 billion credit gap is in the consumer lending space. Now that is a huge amount of money, which Indians need either for survival or for growth. So how do you look at it? Having spent so many years in the sector, what are your views on this credit gap and what’s going to happen in the next few years?Ashish Goyal: Like you rightly said, the FinTech space in India is booming but so are the other industries like EdTech. If you look at the requirement of credit, it is going up worldwide and so people need money. People also need instant gratification and that brings a lot of opportunities. Some of the opportunities are also just about the nature of the transaction. Let’s go back 10 years – if I wanted to buy something, I need to carry a wallet with me or I need to carry cash. Today FinTech has changed this game entirely. And to large extent, I think the government itself is the largest FinTech gamechanger. UPI, as you said, has changed the game of making this model of payments today. I don’t carry a purse. I don’t worry if I don’t have cash; my mobile is a purse/wallet that allows me to do any transaction across India. So the way technology and finance have come together in the last five years has changed the game.When I started Early Salary, it was very clear in our mind that there is a need. And I think the $500 billion credit gap is a conservative number. I think it should be much more than that purely because of

DASAR Podcast | Designing Tech vs. Physical Products | Ashwini & Ashish Deshpande | Elephant Design | Branding | FrameworksTranscript Welcome back to DASAR Podcast. My name is Darshan Doshi and DASAR is about insights and taking action. We intend to build a community of people who want to take that first step towards their goals – whether it’s a startup or investments or fitness! I have two amazing guests with me today – Ashwini Deshpande and Ashish Deshpande. They are the co-founders of Elephant Design and ADI, amongst other initiatives. Darshan Doshi: I gave a quick introduction of you both, but when someone comes up to you and asks you who you are, what do you typically say?Ashwini Deshpande: You know in this world of Twitter, people have fancy introductions. But I’m Ashwini. I am a communications designer. I know branding. And I’m the co-founder of Elephant Design. And that’s that I don’t do trout fishing.Ashish Deshpande: When I became an industrial designer and I started this professional journey, in those days I used to travel in buses, trains, and people would ask what do you do. And they just wouldn’t get it. It was an embarrassing moment for me at that point of time, so much so, that after a few years I stopped telling people that I’m an industrial designer. I would say architect or engineer or an artist – doesn’t matter. But if you’ve mentioned the general public about industrial design, it starts off a chain of questions, which are not very comfortable. But that was then, and I think that kind of gave me that little insight, that industrial design is not understood and it’s important to make people understand industrial design. So I stick to it — I’m an industrial designer by heart, by soul, by profession, by practice, and of course a co-founder at Elephant Design. What Elephant Design does is it helps transform businesses.Darshan Doshi: Great. That reminded me of a story. When I try to explain my family what I do – which is work with early stage startups and founders and help them really try to build a product or a business that is sustainable and is growing. It’s still a tough time for me to explain what I really do. And it kind of concludes with I’m a consultant.My first question to you — in the last three decades, you’ve designed and created brands for a lot of digital and physical products. And that’s not just in India, but around the world and some very big names. So when you think about design, how does your approach change when you are branding or designing a digital product versus a physical product? Maybe some thoughts, some checklists, or some processes that you follow.Ashwini Deshpande: What is a brand really?Brand is the sum total of what the brand sees, what is perceived, what is the smell, sound, vision, tactile, oral, all of that. And they also say that brand is what people speak about you when you’re not in the room. So when you are actually branding a product, physical product or a digital one, or a service or an experience, what really matters is what is the story and is that story relevant to the intended audience?And I think that is the biggest crux of branding. So you have to begin with what is the authentic story. And then of course you have to give a physical manifestation to it and you make it reach across various media. Also the big difference now, as you asked about digital and physical products. So earlier on, if we were working on an FMCG brand, we would always first think about how would it come across on the shelf or on a label, or if it’s a corporate branding exercise, we would say, how would the visiting card look. That was how it used to be. But today, if you’re doing a brand for anything, whether it’s a physical product or digital one, it is going to reach its audience first through mobile screen, no matter what you’re making. So we would always

DASAR Podcast | Building a Global SaaS Unicorn from India | Monish Darda | ICERTIS | Platforms | Contract Management | BikesTranscript Welcome back to DASAR Podcast. My name is Dashan Doshi and DASAR is about insights and taking action. We intend to build a community of people who want to take that first step towards their goals – whether it’s a startup or investments or fitness! I have an amazing guest with me today – Monish Darda. I’ve known him for a while. I’ve seen him do things that really have blown my mind and I’ve invited him to the DASAR Podcast to learn and break down contract management and really get into how he thinks and makes decisions. Darshan Doshi: Monish Darda has been a part of three acquisitions. He is a serial entrepreneur and one of the best technology product creators. He’s been a founder of Websym Technologies way back in 1998 and has led R&D divisions at Storability and BladeLogic that have gone on to get acquired by Sun Microsystems (later acquired by Oracle) and BMC Software respectively. Today he’s the co-founder and CTO at ICERTIS that is one of the three unicorns – that is a billion-dollar valuation startup, right here from Pune in India.Darshan Doshi: I gave a quick introduction of you, but when someone comes up to you and asks you who is Monish Darda what do you typically say?Monish Darda: I’m the kind of person who likes to do different things. I love motorcycles. And that gives me the feeling of speed and balance. I love that in my life. So that’s, those are the two things I really focus on.Darshan Doshi: You’ve built so many enterprise-grade software applications that are being used worldwide. Not an easy task, given the fact that there’s so much competition out there. When you think about enterprise-grade software, what have you seen change over the last 20 years? And with SaaS picking up so much in the last year or so, maybe your views on building enterprise-grade software and the evolution of SaaS.Monish Darda: I think the underlying philosophy of software development has never changed. The underlying philosophy of software distribution also hasn’t changed. When I was doing my masters in Florida 30 years ago, all these big supercomputers and mainframes that you worked on, had these terminals going on across. And they were all connecting to the mothership. The Cloud is like that if you think about it. So we used to dream about daily computing in the seventies and the constraints were the hardware. Not really software constraints because there was really good software. Think about it, you know, building an enterprise software application in 64 megabytes of memory.Now, what has happened, I think the big change in the last six or seven years has been that the hardware is now available to anyone. Someone who doesn’t have a lot of money or has money with a credit card. You can spend a thousand dollars a month to actually run a thousand virtual machines – not for the whole month, but at least for four or five days. This means that the power of the cloud, the compute has now moved to a much lower cost when you come to the startup development cycle. I think that is the movement that we’re seeing as people kind of say, ‘Hey, I want to build a company that really wants to target 5 million people’.Startup founders don’t have to think about a $15 million fundraise. They can do it with a small fund and they can do it as they need it and the cloud expense can grow with them. I think that has fundamentally changed things. The second movement I’ve seen is in the space that we are in — Contract Management — is that people are tired of thinking about enterprise software and consumer software differently.We’ve really thought about this and asked how can the enterprise customer/user actually get the same experience on Monday morning in the office as I have on a Sunday evening. I want to see the same maps, the

DASAR Podcast | Scaling Consumer vs. Enterprise Tech Products | Patanjali Somayaji | Capital Float | Walnut App | FinTech | PhotographyTranscriptWelcome to DASAR. My name is Darshan Doshi and DASAR is a community of doers. We aim to build a community of people who want to learn by doing and get inspired by people who actually achieve their goals, and in the process achieved financial independence. I have a fantastic guest with me – Patanjali Somayaji. He’s the CTO at Capital Float, one of the ‘soonicorns’ from India, and has previously founded Walnut App, Codito and Petabyte. Darshan Doshi: You’re a serial entrepreneur, a founder who’s made technology products all your life – both enterprise-grade and consumer tech products. When someone comes to you and asks “Who is Patanjali Somayaji the what do you say?”Patanjali Somayaji: Ideally, I like to be known as the person who does good photography. But from an entrepreneurship perspective, I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. The first company I joined was actually a spin out of a larger company where I’d got a job and then founded my first startup. But after that, the journey has been such and the excitement of building products from scratch has been my calling. So although it was accidental to start off, I don’t see myself doing anything else. The thing that excites me the most is the journey of actually building the things, building your team, and doing it multiple times has just reinforced that joy from doing something.Darshan Doshi: In the Indian fintech space, we have roughly 2174 fintech startups according to a recent report. And Mr. Nandan Nilekani says India is at the cusp of financial inclusion. India, as we know, is going to change in the coming decade and that’s primarily driven by digitization, the digital infrastructure that the government has provided, the policy changes and new initiatives such as UPI and India Stack. So what is your view about the Indian fintech space? What have you seen change in the last few years and what do you see happening in the next few years?Patanjali Somayaji: A lot has been said about financial inclusion in India and the infrastructure build-out. If you look at things from the funding landscape and from the startup lens with the number that you gave, it’s incredible that we are able to observe so much activity in the fintech space. But you have to look at it in the context of how we leapfrogged in the telecom space. So while the rest of the world was doing 1G then 2G, India leapfrogged straight into 3G and data, and that’s just because we started off behind the United States. And I think there are similar things happening in fintech also. In the US, the penetration of branch banking is a long journey that went about and development of credit societies in rural America. And then you look at the way, the number of credit cards with PIN verification came out in India. The US took so long to just get adoption of that. Because we leapfrogged straight to PIN verification with mass adoption in India rather change the whole country and its behavior. A lot of that is happening in the FinTech space. The other cultural change that has actually benefited fintech has been the fact that a normal Indian is very comfortable with the mobile screen. You know the whole data journey with Jio launch in India and the data prices being the cheapest – all that is there but again we have leapfrogged from desktops to mobiles. You don’t see Indian fintech startups saying we are building a desktop app. It’s all about building on Android and not even iPhone to build out on the large scale. Because of the cultural phenomenon that consumers are very comfortable with anything and everything on the phone. An 85 year old grandmother is also comfortable on the phone and the kids have taken to EdTech on phone. The number of people who are schooling on a mobile phone screen is phenomenal. And you look at the companies that are offer

WHY DASAR?DASAR enables people to take the first step towards their goals and help them get things done. We’ve all had great ideas or curiosities but don’t end up taking any further action for whatever reason. If you’ve set your mind on a goal and want to do something about it then at DASAR you will find a group of people learning to push themselves while supporting others. Whether that means creating a new product or startup or getting fit. DASAR is the go-to place for actionable insights and learnings from successful people – people like you and me – who’ve gone on to achieve their goals. My name is Darshan Doshi and over the last decade, I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredible people and companies in India, USA, and New Zealand. I’ve read a lot of books and been fortunate to work on a few interesting things. Most importantly I’ve learnt a lot and DASAR is an effort to enable people to build things while becoming a better version of themselves through actionable insights. You can find any information that you need on the internet or in the millions of books out there. But the context in which you operate is missing. So I plan to bring only the most important thing to you at DASAR. DASAR focuses on startups, investments, people development, wealth and fitness. I bring this to you through podcasts, writings and community space. DASAR PodcastI’ve invited some incredible people on my podcast such as Ashwini Deshpande, Monish Darda, Patanjali Somayaji, Amey Mashelkar, Carl Sanders-Edwards, Kaustubh Radkar, Ashish Deshpande and more. In the podcast, we breakdown and go deep on topics such as Fintech or Personal Finance or Design. I learn about what has worked for them including their routines, motivations and perspectives on money and relationships.In some of my podcasts, I take a concept or a framework and make it actionable.  DASAR NewsletterDASAR Newsletters bring you curated reads from some of the best writers.DASAR Community Community connects you to like-minded people with a space to learn, share, create and grow together to achieve your goals.DASAR ToolsHere you will find a list of tools that can help you get things done. Take a look! Like you, I am curious about many things and I will share as I learn and do. Stay tuned for updates at www.dasar.in and reach out to me at [email protected] to share your thoughts and requests. You can watch the videos on DASAR YouTube channel & listen to the podcast on the most popular podcast platforms such as Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher and Spotify.

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