Outliers

Why are there hardly any women in top roles in Indian newspapers and magazines? The answer is the same for most business sectors and organizations. These companies have sexual predators lurking around at the workplaces who make sure the bright women don’t rise up the ranks, especially if they don’t succumb to their demands. Yes. It’s that bad. And if you feel this is an exaggeration, please read the stories shared by top women journalists on social media over the past few weeks.

This week’s Outliers Podcast is with Sandhya Menon who triggered a revolution on Twitter and elsewhere by sharing her own story of harassment. And while it reinvigorated the #MeToo movement, she stays away from using that hashtag.

This will be among a series of such conversations we will do over the next few weeks to ensure that we all wake up and become sensitive enough to realize the value of shaping a healthy workplace for everyone.

Why are there hardly any women in top roles in Indian newspapers and magazines? The answer is the same for most business sectors and organizations. These companies have sexual predators lurking around at the workplaces who make sure the bright women don’t rise up the ranks, especially if they don’t succumb to their demands. Yes. It’s that bad. And if you feel this is an exaggeration, please read the stories shared by top women journalists on social media over the past few weeks.

This week’s Outliers Podcast is with Sandhya Menon who triggered a revolution on Twitter and elsewhere by sharing her own story of harassment. And while it reinvigorated the #MeToo movement, she stays away from using that hashtag.

This will be among a series of such conversations we will do over the next few weeks to ensure that we all wake up and become sensitive enough to realize the value of shaping a healthy workplace for everyone.

I first learned about IIT Madras professor Balaraman Ravindran when my colleague wrote this profile story titled “Wizard of AI: Meet India’s foremost reinforcement learning expert.”

Since then, I’ve met him a few times. It’s fascinating how conversations with AI researchers go beyond technologies and tools shaping AI. It quickly becomes philosophical and even ideological while discussing the ills of machine learning systems making decisions impacting humans and society.

And this is where professor Balaraman starts making sense in the over-hyped and often “skin deep AI” ecosystem in India. AI is the new buzzword for policymakers, startups, VCs and individual job seekers.

So what questions to ask while trying to make sense of AI in our lives and work? Here are some pointers from my recent chat with him.

“The right answer to any question is, it depends. What you’re learning throughout your life is what it depends on,” he says. I know it’s a very philosophical answer. But knowledge is evolving.”

“India is the destination where most of the repetitive jobs are outsourced. And AI is mostly applied wherever there’s repetition.”

“It’s not like we aren’t going to need programmers. But we might need more app developers, those writing codes for the cloud and so on. “

There are problems to be solved within AI too.

“By and large, the biggest problem in AI is performance tuning. Many of my students are calling it “the performance tuning hell.”

Listen in to this podcast to make sense of AI in India.

I first learned about IIT Madras professor Balaraman Ravindran when my colleague wrote this profile story titled “Wizard of AI: Meet India’s foremost reinforcement learning expert.”

Since then, I’ve met him a few times. It’s fascinating how conversations with AI researchers go beyond technologies and tools shaping AI. It quickly becomes philosophical and even ideological while discussing the ills of machine learning systems making decisions impacting humans and society.

And this is where professor Balaraman starts making sense in the over-hyped and often “skin deep AI” ecosystem in India. AI is the new buzzword for policymakers, startups, VCs and individual job seekers.

So what questions to ask while trying to make sense of AI in our lives and work? Here are some pointers from my recent chat with him.

“The right answer to any question is, it depends. What you’re learning throughout your life is what it depends on,” he says. I know it’s a very philosophical answer. But knowledge is evolving.”

“India is the destination where most of the repetitive jobs are outsourced. And AI is mostly applied wherever there’s repetition.”

“It’s not like we aren’t going to need programmers. But we might need more app developers, those writing codes for the cloud and so on. “

There are problems to be solved within AI too.

“By and large, the biggest problem in AI is performance tuning. Many of my students are calling it “the performance tuning hell.”

Listen in to this podcast to make sense of AI in India.

I first learned about IIT Madras professor Balaraman Ravindran when my colleague wrote this profile story titled “Wizard of AI: Meet India’s foremost reinforcement learning expert.”

Since then, I’ve met him a few times. It’s fascinating how conversations with AI researchers go beyond technologies and tools shaping AI. It quickly becomes philosophical and even ideological while discussing the ills of machine learning systems making decisions impacting humans and society.

And this is where professor Balaraman starts making sense in the over-hyped and often “skin deep AI” ecosystem in India. AI is the new buzzword for policymakers, startups, VCs and individual job seekers.

So what questions to ask while trying to make sense of AI in our lives and work? Here are some pointers from my recent chat with him.

“The right answer to any question is, it depends. What you’re learning throughout your life is what it depends on,” he says. I know it’s a very philosophical answer. But knowledge is evolving.”

“India is the destination where most of the repetitive jobs are outsourced. And AI is mostly applied wherever there’s repetition.”

“It’s not like we aren’t going to need programmers. But we might need more app developers, those writing codes for the cloud and so on. “

There are problems to be solved within AI too.

“By and large, the biggest problem in AI is performance tuning. Many of my students are calling it “the performance tuning hell.”

Listen in to this podcast to make sense of AI in India.

“The biggest investment you make in a startup is your time; it’s not capital or anything else.” The first big lesson for Kabeer Biswas, from his first startup Hoppr is that entrepreneurship is more about the time than anything else.

Biswas, who co-founded Dunzo, is potentially building the next unicorn, or the startup with over billion dollar valuation. But that’s not what makes him and Dunzo outliers.

“Our mission is to go ahead and say we’re going to make cities more convenient and we’re going to make sure that every store in the city can be transacted with,” he says.

“That’s a massive business. It’s not the business of hyper-convenience, time—this is the business of buying and shopping. This is the business of local commerce.”

“And nobody wants to give you money because logistics as business lost a lot of money in 2015-2016.”

So why go on building it when none of the investors were ready to write the big cheques?

“Because the users wanted it,” he says.

And it continues to be frustrating for Kabeer and his co-founders to explain why Dunzo deserves bigger rounds of funding to fulfil its mission.

By September of 2017, Dunzo actually became profitable. But it was also the year when Kabeer and his team faced a near death experience.

“We ran out of money in June. And by that time we had got 85 people (potential investors) to say “no” to us.”

Dunzo has been an outlier from the time it was born on a WhatsApp group in 2014 and kept battling it’s near death experiences despite a growing community of users who loved the app.

Much before Google invested in Dunzo earlier this year and it became a popular startup, FactorDaily wrote this story in August 2016. “Dunzo! How a hyperlocal concierge app is killing it in Bengaluru”

“The biggest investment you make in a startup is your time; it’s not capital or anything else.” The first big lesson for Kabeer Biswas, from his first startup Hoppr is that entrepreneurship is more about the time than anything else.

Biswas, who co-founded Dunzo, is potentially building the next unicorn, or the startup with over billion dollar valuation. But that’s not what makes him and Dunzo outliers.

“Our mission is to go ahead and say we’re going to make cities more convenient and we’re going to make sure that every store in the city can be transacted with,” he says.

“That’s a massive business. It’s not the business of hyper-convenience, time—this is the business of buying and shopping. This is the business of local commerce.”

“And nobody wants to give you money because logistics as business lost a lot of money in 2015-2016.”

So why go on building it when none of the investors were ready to write the big cheques?

“Because the users wanted it,” he says.

And it continues to be frustrating for Kabeer and his co-founders to explain why Dunzo deserves bigger rounds of funding to fulfil its mission.

By September of 2017, Dunzo actually became profitable. But it was also the year when Kabeer and his team faced a near death experience.

“We ran out of money in June. And by that time we had got 85 people (potential investors) to say “no” to us.”

Dunzo has been an outlier from the time it was born on a WhatsApp group in 2014 and kept battling it’s near death experiences despite a growing community of users who loved the app.

Much before Google invested in Dunzo earlier this year and it became a popular startup, FactorDaily wrote this story in August 2016. “Dunzo! How a hyperlocal concierge app is killing it in Bengaluru”

“The biggest investment you make in a startup is your time; it’s not capital or anything else.” The first big lesson for Kabeer Biswas, from his first startup Hoppr is that entrepreneurship is more about the time than anything else.

Biswas, who co-founded Dunzo, is potentially building the next unicorn, or the startup with over billion dollar valuation. But that’s not what makes him and Dunzo outliers.

“Our mission is to go ahead and say we’re going to make cities more convenient and we’re going to make sure that every store in the city can be transacted with,” he says.

“That’s a massive business. It’s not the business of hyper-convenience, time—this is the business of buying and shopping. This is the business of local commerce.”

“And nobody wants to give you money because logistics as business lost a lot of money in 2015-2016.”

So why go on building it when none of the investors were ready to write the big cheques?

“Because the users wanted it,” he says.

And it continues to be frustrating for Kabeer and his co-founders to explain why Dunzo deserves bigger rounds of funding to fulfil its mission.

By September of 2017, Dunzo actually became profitable. But it was also the year when Kabeer and his team faced a near death experience.

“We ran out of money in June. And by that time we had got 85 people (potential investors) to say “no” to us.”

Dunzo has been an outlier from the time it was born on a WhatsApp group in 2014 and kept battling it’s near death experiences despite a growing community of users who loved the app.

Much before Google invested in Dunzo earlier this year and it became a popular startup, FactorDaily wrote this story in August 2016. “Dunzo! How a hyperlocal concierge app is killing it in Bengaluru”

“What can I do that I haven’t done in the past, or trained for?”

At 44, Indushekhar Khaitan has been an entrepreneur, a VC and a corporate executive. Khaitan’s journey across these assignments was triggered by the restlessness to do something he had not done before. And that meant long, painful journeys apart from discovering what he’s good at, and what he’s not.

“We had no idea what venture investing was when we started Morpheus. We didn’t even know we had to set aside 2 per cent as the management fee for our salaries etc.,” he says.

“Now that I piece it all back, I was only finding what I’m capable of doing and what I’m not.”

“When I decided Morpheus wasn’t for me, it was because I couldn’t see myself giving gyan to founders without actually doing it,” he says.

After Morpheus, things changed a lot.

“I was now feeling, where’s my power, my army?”

So what really changes when you’re not an entrepreneur?

“In a job, boundaries are laid out for you. As an entrepreneur, you lay out the boundaries. You’re still the same person,” he says.

Why is Indus not an entrepreneur again?

“You do a startup, make half a million, the bar is $50 million for the next one. Now the next one has to be $500 million worth of your time. That bar is actually the bar that doesn’t let you enter entrepreneurship until you have the next 500 million idea,” he says.

For now, Khaitan is training to be a pilot apart from helping the SaaS startup Chargebee hack its next phase of growth.

“In five years, if I’m a pilot, that will be a completely different career.”

“What can I do that I haven’t done in the past, or trained for?”

At 44, Indushekhar Khaitan has been an entrepreneur, a VC and a corporate executive. Khaitan’s journey across these assignments was triggered by the restlessness to do something he had not done before. And that meant long, painful journeys apart from discovering what he’s good at, and what he’s not.

“We had no idea what venture investing was when we started Morpheus. We didn’t even know we had to set aside 2 per cent as the management fee for our salaries etc.,” he says.

“Now that I piece it all back, I was only finding what I’m capable of doing and what I’m not.”

“When I decided Morpheus wasn’t for me, it was because I couldn’t see myself giving gyan to founders without actually doing it,” he says.

After Morpheus, things changed a lot.

“I was now feeling, where’s my power, my army?”

So what really changes when you’re not an entrepreneur?

“In a job, boundaries are laid out for you. As an entrepreneur, you lay out the boundaries. You’re still the same person,” he says.

Why is Indus not an entrepreneur again?

“You do a startup, make half a million, the bar is $50 million for the next one. Now the next one has to be $500 million worth of your time. That bar is actually the bar that doesn’t let you enter entrepreneurship until you have the next 500 million idea,” he says.

For now, Khaitan is training to be a pilot apart from helping the SaaS startup Chargebee hack its next phase of growth.

“In five years, if I’m a pilot, that will be a completely different career.”