Outliers

Outliers

By FactorDailyTechnology
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Outliers episodes

  • Ep 72: Indus Khaitan on the curse and joy of entrepreneurship
    “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.”
    44 min
  • Ep 71: Arpita Kapoor of Mech Mocha on making “India play games”
    “If I wasn’t running a startup, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”
    If there’s one thing most of the entrepreneurs will agree as the biggest influence while building their startups, it’s the personal transformation they go through.
    For Arpita, who comes from a small village called Pihani near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, growing up was all about watching how generations of Indians were relying on mobile screens for everything from entertainment to business.
    At 27, she now runs Mech Mocha, backed by both Accel Partners and Blume Ventures. (Both are among FactorDaily’s backers, too.) Mech Mocha builds mobile games for Indian users.
    She met her cofounder Mohit Rangaraju while still in college. Together, they attempted an online food startup in the campus (IIT Guwahati), which didn’t work out. Now, Mohit helps her balance “excessive entrepreneurial optimism” with the realities of running a startup.
    “We balance each other out.”
    36 min
  • Ep 71: Arpita Kapoor of Mech Mocha on making “India play games”
    “If I wasn’t running a startup, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”
    If there’s one thing most of the entrepreneurs will agree as the biggest influence while building their startups, it’s the personal transformation they go through.
    For Arpita, who comes from a small village called Pihani near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, growing up was all about watching how generations of Indians were relying on mobile screens for everything from entertainment to business.
    At 27, she now runs Mech Mocha, backed by both Accel Partners and Blume Ventures. (Both are among FactorDaily’s backers, too.) Mech Mocha builds mobile games for Indian users.
    She met her cofounder Mohit Rangaraju while still in college. Together, they attempted an online food startup in the campus (IIT Guwahati), which didn’t work out. Now, Mohit helps her balance “excessive entrepreneurial optimism” with the realities of running a startup.
    “We balance each other out.”
    36 min
  • Ep 71: Arpita Kapoor of Mech Mocha on making “India play games”
    “If I wasn’t running a startup, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”
    If there’s one thing most of the entrepreneurs will agree as the biggest influence while building their startups, it’s the personal transformation they go through.
    For Arpita, who comes from a small village called Pihani near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, growing up was all about watching how generations of Indians were relying on mobile screens for everything from entertainment to business.
    At 27, she now runs Mech Mocha, backed by both Accel Partners and Blume Ventures. (Both are among FactorDaily’s backers, too.) Mech Mocha builds mobile games for Indian users.
    She met her cofounder Mohit Rangaraju while still in college. Together, they attempted an online food startup in the campus (IIT Guwahati), which didn’t work out. Now, Mohit helps her balance “excessive entrepreneurial optimism” with the realities of running a startup.
    “We balance each other out.”
    36 min
  • Ep 70: Sunit Singh on designing Cleartrip
    Amid India’s smartphone boom and the rise of large consumer internet companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and several others, profitability and funding rounds have dominated the narratives.
    Designing these consumer products, creating engaging user interfaces hasn’t really made any big headlines, though.
    Cleartrip, with its simple, uncluttered mobile web interface, has been an outlier on the design front. When most rival travel websites were busy packing their sites with innumerable features and deals, Cleartrip chose to doggedly keep its focus on a simple user interface when it launched in 2006.
    “We said, 'Who is on mobile, and who are we designing for?’,” recalls Sunit Singh, design head of Cleartrip until August 2015.
    “That helped us with a razor-focused design approach. In terms of the complexity of the interface, we cut it down to quite a extent.”
    Singh adds: “That’s where I first learned the value of being razor-focused.”
    So, how does a product balance ease of use and user convenience with this quenchless urge to pack more features than your rivals?
    “You have to pick your battles. You can’t fight all of them. Designers have to pick their battles.”
    Is Cleartrip indeed a greatly designed product or is it just that most of its rivals have shabbily designed products? How and why does Cleartrip continue to live on?
    “I think about this question a lot myself. I would always tell my team that get to a level where there’s no other way to do it. There’s no better way to do it. I think that’s the secret,” says Singh.
    37 min
  • Ep 70: Sunit Singh on designing Cleartrip
    Amid India’s smartphone boom and the rise of large consumer internet companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and several others, profitability and funding rounds have dominated the narratives.
    Designing these consumer products, creating engaging user interfaces hasn’t really made any big headlines, though.
    Cleartrip, with its simple, uncluttered mobile web interface, has been an outlier on the design front. When most rival travel websites were busy packing their sites with innumerable features and deals, Cleartrip chose to doggedly keep its focus on a simple user interface when it launched in 2006.
    “We said, 'Who is on mobile, and who are we designing for?’,” recalls Sunit Singh, design head of Cleartrip until August 2015.
    “That helped us with a razor-focused design approach. In terms of the complexity of the interface, we cut it down to quite a extent.”
    Singh adds: “That’s where I first learned the value of being razor-focused.”
    So, how does a product balance ease of use and user convenience with this quenchless urge to pack more features than your rivals?
    “You have to pick your battles. You can’t fight all of them. Designers have to pick their battles.”
    Is Cleartrip indeed a greatly designed product or is it just that most of its rivals have shabbily designed products? How and why does Cleartrip continue to live on?
    “I think about this question a lot myself. I would always tell my team that get to a level where there’s no other way to do it. There’s no better way to do it. I think that’s the secret,” says Singh.
    37 min
  • Ep 70: Sunit Singh on designing Cleartrip
    Amid India’s smartphone boom and the rise of large consumer internet companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and several others, profitability and funding rounds have dominated the narratives.
    Designing these consumer products, creating engaging user interfaces hasn’t really made any big headlines, though.
    Cleartrip, with its simple, uncluttered mobile web interface, has been an outlier on the design front. When most rival travel websites were busy packing their sites with innumerable features and deals, Cleartrip chose to doggedly keep its focus on a simple user interface when it launched in 2006.
    “We said, 'Who is on mobile, and who are we designing for?’,” recalls Sunit Singh, design head of Cleartrip until August 2015.
    “That helped us with a razor-focused design approach. In terms of the complexity of the interface, we cut it down to quite a extent.”
    Singh adds: “That’s where I first learned the value of being razor-focused.”
    So, how does a product balance ease of use and user convenience with this quenchless urge to pack more features than your rivals?
    “You have to pick your battles. You can’t fight all of them. Designers have to pick their battles.”
    Is Cleartrip indeed a greatly designed product or is it just that most of its rivals have shabbily designed products? How and why does Cleartrip continue to live on?
    “I think about this question a lot myself. I would always tell my team that get to a level where there’s no other way to do it. There’s no better way to do it. I think that’s the secret,” says Singh.
    37 min
  • Ep 69: Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao on shaping eye care with compassion, disruptive tech
    “Always remember the poor who gave their bodies for you to learn medicine. You owe it to them.”
    Every time a new batch of ophthalmologists joins LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, its founder Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao tries to instill a sense of empathy for India’s poor. “The rich didn’t even let you touch their bodies for research. It’s the poor...”
    Dr Rao has been able to combine world class healthcare with compassion in his career. In three decades, his institute has treated over 20 million patients, with nearly half of them availing the services for free. (The institute is named after filmmaker and producer Lakshmi Vara Prasad Rao, who contributed money and land for it.)
    The institute came on my radar when I read recent announcements about an “eye hackathon”. What’s an eye hospital looking to achieve from hackathon -- a contest among coders typically known to be organized by startups and large companies to hunt down the next big idea?
    “We’re now trying to build an institute in Amravati for the future, looking at how eyecare can be delivered in 20, 50 years from now,” Dr Rao tells me.
    29 min
  • Ep 69: Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao on shaping eye care with compassion, disruptive tech
    “Always remember the poor who gave their bodies for you to learn medicine. You owe it to them.”
    Every time a new batch of ophthalmologists joins LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, its founder Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao tries to instill a sense of empathy for India’s poor. “The rich didn’t even let you touch their bodies for research. It’s the poor...”
    Dr Rao has been able to combine world class healthcare with compassion in his career. In three decades, his institute has treated over 20 million patients, with nearly half of them availing the services for free. (The institute is named after filmmaker and producer Lakshmi Vara Prasad Rao, who contributed money and land for it.)
    The institute came on my radar when I read recent announcements about an “eye hackathon”. What’s an eye hospital looking to achieve from hackathon -- a contest among coders typically known to be organized by startups and large companies to hunt down the next big idea?
    “We’re now trying to build an institute in Amravati for the future, looking at how eyecare can be delivered in 20, 50 years from now,” Dr Rao tells me.
    29 min
  • Ep 69: Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao on shaping eye care with compassion, disruptive tech
    “Always remember the poor who gave their bodies for you to learn medicine. You owe it to them.”
    Every time a new batch of ophthalmologists joins LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, its founder Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao tries to instill a sense of empathy for India’s poor. “The rich didn’t even let you touch their bodies for research. It’s the poor...”
    Dr Rao has been able to combine world class healthcare with compassion in his career. In three decades, his institute has treated over 20 million patients, with nearly half of them availing the services for free. (The institute is named after filmmaker and producer Lakshmi Vara Prasad Rao, who contributed money and land for it.)
    The institute came on my radar when I read recent announcements about an “eye hackathon”. What’s an eye hospital looking to achieve from hackathon -- a contest among coders typically known to be organized by startups and large companies to hunt down the next big idea?
    “We’re now trying to build an institute in Amravati for the future, looking at how eyecare can be delivered in 20, 50 years from now,” Dr Rao tells me.
    29 min

About Outliers

From the publisher's feed

A podcast about the ones who chose to take the road not taken often. It’s about the crazy and the curious. Those that dared to stand out, and stand alone. It’s about their journey through hope and disillusionment, failures and pitfalls, joy and success, pain and bliss. It’s a candid exploration of experiences and ideas that have driven some of the shining stars, told as is.