Varun Mayya

What happens when you sell a company? What do you get? What do your investors get?

Uploaded 08-12-18

And...how exactly do you value your company? How does the Discounted Cash Flow method work? Does it apply to small startups?



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Have you ever wondered what the secret to Adobe’s longevity is? Why Photoshop still dominates even though dozens of tech trends have come and go? Or maybe if you’ve ever been interested in knowing how CEOs manage their time?

Uploaded 23-05-25

In this video, I sit with Adobe Global Chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen to discover it all. We talk about Adobe’s longevity, how they’ve built tools that stay relevant across generations, and how generative AI might not replace creativity but amplify it.

We also dig into Shantanu’s unconventional career path—from wanting to be a journalist to leading one of the world’s most iconic creative software companies. He shares how early setbacks shaped his leadership, how focusing on product (not politics) ultimately made the difference, and what he focuses on now as CEO.

And finally, we look at the future: why India’s next big opportunity might not be IT, but creativity. And what it’ll take to unlock it at scale.

If you care about design, product-strategies, leadership, or the future of creativity, this video is meant for you.

00:00 – Highlights
01:12 – Introduction
01:32 – Adobe Longevity and Photoshop’s Success
03:21 – Product Strategy: Desktop, Cloud and Mobile
05:05 – Shantanu Narayen’s Career Path to CEO
09:45 – Generative AI and Creativity in India
13:14 – Education and Creative Opportunity in India
15:54 – Balancing AI and Intellectual Property Rights
21:54 – CEO Time Management and Leadership
27:14 – Adobe India Team and Innovation
28:59 – Accessibility and Educational Outreach



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In this episode, Peyush Bansal sits down to talk about Lenskart’s IPO, the debate around its valuation, and why he believes the company has been priced fairly despite market chatter. He explains how Lenskart’s profitability, strong unit economics, and sustained growth make it stand apart from most consumer tech listings that were still loss-making when they went public.

Uploaded 02-11-25

We then get into how the company grew from a small tech-led eyewear startup into a global brand through vertical integration, manufacturing, and customer obsession. Peyush also discusses the next frontier, smart glasses, built in partnership with Qualcomm, and how India could lead this new form factor by developing full-stack hardware and software locally.

The conversation then goes beyond business metrics to explore his Shark Tank experience, lessons in scaling culture, counterintuitive insights on Indian consumers, and how he stays grounded amid success, criticism, and the chaos of IPO day.

00:00 - Intro
00:52 - IPO Launch Day Experience
02:18 - The Valuation Debate
08:22 - Shark Tank Impact
09:48 - Lenskart Origin Story
13:49 - Evolution from Startup to Global Company
16:38 - Smart Glasses and Future of Computing
25:29 - The Road to Profitability
29:05 - Post-IPO Team Motivation
32:37 - Counter-Intuitive Consumer Insights
38:04 - Dealing with Success and Criticism



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What will India look like in 2030?

Uploaded 26-01-25

Join me on a fascinating journey into the future where I show you a day in my life - from AI-powered smart homes and personalized bathrooms to telerobotic avatars and next-gen entertainment systems. The best part? Everything you see in this video already exists somewhere in the world today - it's just unevenly distributed. Watch as we explore how entrepreneurship and technology will make these innovations accessible to everyone in India.

Now, in the second half of the video, we break down exactly how we created these futuristic scenes using various AI tools and CGI techniques. From storyboarding with Stable Diffusion to creating photorealistic avatars with Flux and implementing precise camera tracking in Blender - learn how we brought this vision to life.

And finally, a BIG SHOUTOUT to NVIDIA RTX AI PC for making this video possible! Experience breakthrough AI performance with RTX GPUs, featuring TensorRT acceleration for up to 20% faster AI tasks and 30% faster rendering in tools like After Effects. Whether you're a content creator or an artist pushing creative boundaries, RTX AI PCs revolutionize workflows by enabling real-time ray tracing and AI-powered tools right on your desktop. Check out the links below to learn more about NVIDIA RTX AI PCs and level up your creative potential.

Resources and Useful Links from the Tutorial:-

Concept and Pre-Production:

Running Flux locally for Storyboard image generation - https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-decoded-flux-one

Digital Human Creation:

NVIDIA ACE - https://developer.nvidia.com/ace
Audio2Face for expressions - https://build.nvidia.com/nvidia/audio2face-3d
Flux for photorealistic avatars - https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-decoded-flux-one
Learn more about ACE and AI innovations - https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-decoded-gamescom-ace-nemotron-instruct/

Advanced AI Features:

Real-time ray tracing and Tensor RT acceleration - https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/ray-tracing
https://developer.nvidia.com/tensorrt-getting-started
Local AI processing with RTX - https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/ai-on-rtx/chatrtx/
Checkout NVIDIA's AI Decoded blog series to stay updated on the latest AI innovations - https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/tag/ai-decoded/

Finally, If you want to create content like this? Check out NVIDIA RTX AI PCs:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/ai-on-rtx/


0:00 - The vision behind this video
1:14 - Day in 2030 India begins
1:34 - Smart bedroom and fitness tech
2:01 - Future bathroom tour
3:35 - Smart wardrobe showcase
4:08 - Meeting the AI assistant
4:54 - Future of TVs
5:55 - What hasn't changed: Food
6:12 - What hasn't changed: Laptops
7:16 - Why buildings look the same
7:55 - Future grocery shopping
8:19 - Robot rental services
9:15 - EVs of 2030
9:38 - Face wearables replace phones
9:53 - Paying for Dosa In The Future
10:13 - Indian Restaurants In The Future
10:52 - Back To Varun's Apartment
11:35 - Insight: Futuristic tech exists but is unevenly distributed
12:25 - Entrepreneurship’s role in tech adoption
13:28 - Tutorial: Making the video with Nvidia RTX AI PCs



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In this episode, Naveen Tewari opens up about the near-collapse of InMobi (when the company lost 40% of its revenue overnight and was weeks away from shutting down). He breaks down what it’s like to lose everything you’ve built, and how in just 45 days, he rebuilt the company from scratch.

Uploaded 16-10-25

He then talks about the moment he realised no one was coming to save him, how survival forces real clarity, and why the best founders think “heaven” even when they’re in hell.

From getting rejected by 40+ VCs, to raising $200 million from Masa Son, to building Glance AI… this episode is a raw, unfiltered look into what it takes to stay alive when everything’s falling apart.

Tune in to listen to Naveen’s timeless principles that enables him to create companies like Glance and InMobi… in today’s episode.

0:00 - Introduction
0:50 - Building two unicorns and raising $800M across InMobi and Glance
3:00 - Four failures before InMobi when startups meant "unemployable"
5:00 - Pivoting from SMS search to mobile internet in 2008
8:48 - Every VC rejected mobile internet as the future
11:26 - Raised $7.1M with only ₹20,000 in bank account
22:55 - Decision to build globally, not just India
30:00 - Lost 40% business, burned $20M per quarter
41:47 - The legendary Masa story
52:27 - Mukesh Ambani wanted 10 paisa calls vs McKinsey's ₹1.50
58:03 - Reliance Jio invested $200M in Glance
1:00:30 - InMobi today: global ads and Glance AI platform
1:12:00 - Build global AI software, not just local solutions
1:21:44 - At ₹10-20 crores wealth, play the biggest game



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Ed McLaughlin, CTO of Mastercard discusses the fascinating evolution from paper money to digital neural networks that now protect trillions in global transactions. Ed opens up about Mastercard’s AI system that uses over 1.6 trillion parameters, processes decisions in 50 milliseconds, runs in 210 countries and prevented $20 billion in fraud this year. We explore the deep lessons from his startup days - from operating with zero revenue to transforming how billions of people pay today. From unbreakable payment networks to the future of digital transactions, Ed shares invaluable insights about building technology that powers economies. He breaks down why learning to learn matters more than specific skills, and why the best products don't make markets - they unlock existing demand. An insider's perspective on how payments has evolved and where the next breakthrough might come from.

Uploaded 29-10-24

00:00 - Intro
0:54 - Varun's early experience with cashless transactions
2:41 - Difference between money and wealth
4:13 - State of the financial system in 2005 when Ed joined MasterCard
10:12 - Ed's predictions from 20 years ago that came true
17:23 - Ed's early career and path to becoming CTO of MasterCard
21:55 - Where Ed sees payments and financial technology heading in the next 5 years
28:10 - Discussion of MasterCard's work with crypto and blockchain technology
28:12 - Explanation of tokenization and its applications
33:26 - MasterCard's AI-powered decision management platform for fraud prevention
41:32 - future of contextual commerce and embedded payments
44:18 - How AI can enable greater financial inclusion
46:08 - Predictions for the next big consumer fintech innovations in India
49:22 - Career advice for young people interested in fintech and payments
53:56 - Conclusion



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Welcome to the fourth session of the 16-Kata series, where the focus shifts from building systems to reading people. This episode introduces a practical way to evaluate competence, both in yourself and in others, using the idea of “power levels” borrowed from Dragon Ball. The core question is simple: who can actually get things done when real risk is involved, and who only talks about it.

Uploaded 10-01-26

The session explains how real competence is built through a specific pattern: believing in something, taking a visible high-risk swing, facing skepticism, and either failing cleanly or pulling it off. These attempts permanently change how the world values you. It also shows why prediction, opinion, or confidence without personal risk produces very little real status, and why one true execution, even after many failures, upgrades your access to money, talent, and opportunity.

Finally, the episode breaks down why India systematically misreads competence by overvaluing niceness, humility, and conflict avoidance, while undervaluing people who sell, resolve conflict, and push things forward. If you want raises, leverage, better teams, or serious opportunities, this session explains how they are actually earned.

00:00 - Introduction
01:30 - What Are Scouters?
03:16 - How to Read and Gain Competence
05:12 - The Two Startup India's
06:31 - How I Got Into Startup India 1
10:54 - The Importance of Taking Attempts
14:10 - The Gap Between Thinking and Doing
17:42 - Proving It vs Believing It
19:12 - Why Excuses Don't Matter at Higher Levels
20:55 - The Five Scouter Levels Explained
26:30 - The Indian Competence Blindspot
28:47 - The Role of Luck and Attempts
30:38 - Action Produces Information
36:32 - What Successful Founders Actually Do
40:02 - How to Accurately Read Competence
45:22 - The Niceness Trap in Indian Culture
49:15 - Quick Tips to Raise Your Scouter Level
50:41 - Using Scouters in Hiring and Choosing Bosses
52:30 - Co-founders, Friends and Schadenfreude
53:48 - Clustering with High Competence People



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Welcome to the second session of the 16-Kata series, where I continue breaking down what I have learned about building and scaling companies over the past decade.

Uploaded 24-12-25

In this session, we focus on the hardest problem that emerges after early growth: coordination at scale. We examine why quality degrades as teams grow, why most services businesses fail when they scale too fast, and how leadership, incentives, and clear communication reduce coordination costs across large organizations. The session also explains why caring deeply about customers outperforms aggressive expansion, how leaders propagate standards through layers of teams, and why writing, incentives, and mastery matter more than control.

If you are leading teams, scaling an organization, or trying to understand how alignment actually works inside growing companies, this session is designed to give you a practical mental model.

00:00 - Introduction
00:53 - The Challenge of Scaling Quality
08:20 - What Really Drives People?
11:58 - The Coordination Cost Framework
15:36 - Generating Current as a Leader
18:30 - The Power of Stories and Incentives
22:38 - Setting Incentives Effectively
28:20 - The Quest for Mastery
33:34 - The Leader's Toolkit
34:54 - Human-Related Blockages
40:05 - Avoiding Leader Burnout
44:52 - The Secret Weapon
49:13 - Rules and Enforcement
51:08 - The Four Horsemen of Closed Systems
55:09 - Why Coordination Matters
58:04 - The 100% Coordination Myth



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Higgsfield just dropped its Black Friday deal, and you get 65% off on an entire year of unlimited 4K image generations! The sale is live only for 3 days so make sure you check out https://higgsfield.ai/?utm_source=varunytnb

Uploaded 22-11-25

Gemini 3 is finally here, and Google claims it’s the most capable model yet. But the real question is what it can actually do. So in this video, we put it through practical, end-to-end tests: generating complete websites, recreating real landing pages from screen recordings, building functioning apps, assembling PC-builder tools with compatibility logic, and even producing small games with external sprites.

And the results were surprising. Front-end developers, junior engineers, designers, and even no-code SaaS builders are staring at the most rapid compression of their field so far. Tasks that once took days or months now collapse into minutes. Meanwhile, the bottleneck shifts upward: idea selection, synthesis, distribution, and domain expertise become the real differentiators, not writing code line by line.

This video breaks down why implementation is being commodified, why simple SaaS products are racing to zero, and why the advantage now moves to people who can combine domain knowledge with fast iteration instead of writing everything from scratch. We’ll also explore how Gemini handles UI recreation from video, whether it truly fixes the “purple crypto website” problem, how well it reasons about compatibility chains, and why small interactive experiences might become a new marketing format for brands.

Links to the prompts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16rtcG4WCt9i8ftLtPDog4IRq9qaYrIpOrYhHoVoJu9U/edit?usp=sharing

00:00 - Introduction
01:50 - Website Generation
06:26 - Sponsor message (Higgsfield)
07:48 - Building from Reference
12:06 - Cloning Popular Apps
17:33 - Building Complex Tools
23:10 - Interactive Projects
28:25 - More Demos



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In this episode, we're going to learn:

Uploaded 25-11-18

- How to open a bank account and the best strategies (hint: open 2)
- Minimum corporate bank balance
- Learn what fixed deposits are and why you need them
- How to get your first corporate credit card
- Why you need a Chartered Account (here's mine -- only use if you can't find one yourself: [email protected])
- How to set up a virtual office (you need to assign one in your first board meeting)
- Getting a payment gateway: prerequisites

Metastartup is a 100% course that will teach you how to run an Indian startup from scratch to finish. Follow me on Instagram at http://instagram.com/thevarunmayya



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