Umang Bedi, Co-Founder, VerSe Innovation (Dailyhunt & Josh Apps), On ‘Building A Unicorn Start-Up And Transformation Of Personal And Professional Journeys.’
The way I thought about this conversation was around the theme of transformation, and for me this one word is probably my favourite word in the English vocabulary because it stands for so many things. I don’t know how many of you can guess what this picture is [on ppt – sun shining on Mt Everest- Shernaz responds] yes, it is exactly that. Amit and I as part of the forum ventured to the base camp. At 3 in the morning we started walking to the final frontier and about dawn which is 5.30 in the morning, the first rays of sunlight hit the mountain and what was very dark and gloomy, totally transformed. I think that is the best way of digging the session on.
I am going to share three quick snippets of my personal journey, transformation around the business and what we have been doing over the last couple of years and some of my key learning along the journey.
The first is my journey, I have put visuals but I was an accidental CEO. I started my career with Sun Microsystems Inc. and spent seven years as an engineer, grading products. At 27, by mistake, I became the CEO of a company called Intuit. Most of you may not have heard it but if you have friends and family in the US, you may have heard of it – it was a household name, and I led its business around the globe. I spent four years doing that and another six running Adobe. Then I spent two years with Facebook as their CEO in India and South Asia regions. But I didn’t like the person I had become, I probably had the best tech job in the country and when I looked at myself, I realised what was truly important in relationships and family was being there for important occasions, spending time and doing things I loved. But I resigned the day after I turned 40. I spent the next three months handing over and focussed my entire attention on my entrepreneurial journey. It was hard. A lot of great entrepreneurs are in the room right now from the Bombay chapter. But if you have been a corporate junky all your life, and you have all that stock and none of the tensions of worrying about how you are going to pay your bills or your employees because you are working in such large establishments, it is hard to walk away. But I decided to go through this journey of transforming myself.
Getting healthy, sleeping well, eating healthy, exercising, coming down to the 77 kilos that I am on now, focussing on spending time with the people I love which is my family and my wife, friends and doing my annual trek to Mt. Everest base camp. Along the way, self-discipline kicks in as you get on to the entrepreneurial journey. It is just such a relief to be away from corporate bureaucracy, corporate BS if I can call it that because when you are CEO of a multi-national in a region, you aren’t innovating and creating the products; that happens back in at headquarters. Instead, you are dealing with the market and speaking to the government which is not fun. So, I think I was bold enough to just kill things from my past which I felt had a lot of dikhava (show) from the outside but was not giving me inner happiness. And I feel like a different person, I think I look like a different person and hopefully you will see that transformation from 140 to the 77-odd kilos where I am today.
My family is a priority, and we are a happier and more integrated unit with me spending time with things that I love, doing my annual trips with my wife and buddies. In terms of the business, here is our story. The internet was really made for privileged folks like you and me who can communicate in English and who have been on the internet from way back in 1996-’97 and you probably had a hotmail or yahoo account. We know what happened post-Jio where the basic necessities of humanity – roti, kapda, and makaan were transformed to roti, kapda, makaan aur mobile. Everybody has a mobile and it is a great way of democratising access because once you give people access to healthcare, education, and financial services, you can potentially transform education and a lot of lives.
In that, what we saw is that the internet consists of haves and have-nots. You will be surprised that local language users (have-nots) have aspirations and needs very similar to us. So, we said, let’s go out and create the third front. Our belief is that the internet will reach all billion people and 800 million of them will be local language users eventually. They are going to consume content whether it is news, entertainment, local information in local languages. So, our belief was to own the mind share, the time share and the revenue share of the local language audiences across a family of applications that serve very distinct usages across a large audience. So, today for instance, internet is 600 million people and at least 400 million of them consume news, at least 500 million consume local entertainment. Another large number consume hyper local content of what’s happening in their jurisdiction or their mohalla. So, with that, we started off this journey of this family of apps – Daily Hunt is India’s largest local news aggregation platform which today serves over 300 million users in 14 local languages. Josh was launched after the ban of TikTok, and it is the largest short video app, you can call it clone of TikTok, I will take it as a compliment. We serve over 100 million users and we have just launched our third app which is the Publicvibe which is currently in Beta. It is in 100 districts in India but scaling to 700 districts. You can imagine the information of your local districts and places, so, the goal is to serve all of these audiences and build an AI company where you can drive personalisation but keeping user privacy intact.
Often, when you are having conversation offline, you get messages on Facebook or WhatsApp targeted at you because someone is listening. I don’t want to scare you, but we don’t do that. In fact, we don’t even ask you to sign in. We look at what you are consuming, how you are consuming, how much time you are consuming, what genre, across what source, across what time of the day and we create a very unique feed for you.
So, we have three fly wheels in our business. The first is creators, we have 100,000+ creators over Daily Hunt and over 40,000 creators who generate videos on Josh in 14 languages and we aggregate and ingest that content, understand the context and content. We then understand the user’s behaviour, what he likes to consume from what time of the day. Then the AI really marries the supply and demand to then curate a very personalised experience over time. Our goal as we go about this journey was, can we build a family of apps that we can monetise at over 2-3 dollars a year with users using advertising and commerce. We are now valued at over 3 million dollars.
My learning has been that as entrepreneurs we need to own the outcome and while all these numbers sound fancy, in the last few years we have come close to bankruptcy thrice, for no fault of ours, because we were targeted by the constant influence of society and regulation. But we have hopefully overcome it. It has been a humbling journey and we have to own the outcome. I think what we have done really well is that we hired people smarter than us, better than us and empowered them to a point of discomfort. It is hard for the founder and business heads to do this because we are so passionate about the business that we just can’t let go. But there is no other way. Before pandemic, we were 400 people in the company, post pandemic we are 2000. So, that can only happen when you power and hire great leaders. So, they are second in line to be a CEO anywhere and they are paid like that, compensated like that.
We have innovated fast, experimented, moved quickly, failed often, and failed fast. As leaders our job is to remove the obstacles from the way of the team and get out of the way. We don’t know how to create an app on gaming, how to create a short video. In fact, some of us must be wondering what do people like on TikTok? What is this fascination of a 10-second video and that is because we don’t understand it. There are 25 billion people in this country who have a credit card and I don’t know if you have seen, in the last three months alone, 100 million people have invested in crypto. Now if I go around this room and ask if anyone here has invested in crypto? Most may not raise their hands, a majority won’t. But youngsters know what is going on, they know what is with it so, maybe our job is just to hire the best and get out of the way. Of course, we put the right milestones in terms of checking with them.
One of my favourite entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos, says that he knows that Amazon will be disrupted. He just hopes it is not in his lifetime. So, I think one thing that really helps when we go about these transformation journeys is to have a mission, whether a personal transformation of changing the way I look, change the way I spend time, be a better father, better son, better daughter, or better wife, you just have to have mission. It has to be deeply mission-driven.
For us it has to be connecting a billion Indians with local language users coming online and powering them with local language content and experiences. Second, I think it is about embracing the pivot. For us the pivot was desktop is dead, we don’t even have desktop site. It is all mobile only and third, there are so many distractions on the way – ye bhi karlo, woh bhi karlo, there are too many ideas and you have to ruthlessly prioritise on the two-three things that matter. And there is new power and old power, we come from a world of old power where we were the bosses, we had the knowledge, we guard it. But today’s world is all about new power. New power operates very differently. It is more participatory and driven. We have three entrepreneurs in the company who are in the group of 26 to 28 who created three new apps for us. Viru and I would never be able to do it. So, it is like a current, it is more powerful when it surges, and our job is to channelise it.
Finally, when you think about transformation, there is a model by a very famous professor, B.G Govindrajan: think about your life and business in three boxes. There is the present and this model says you should spend 70% of the time managing the present and optimising for the current business. Now it also says you should spend 10% of your time destroying things from the past because what got you here is not going to get you where you want to go. And about 20-30% of the time and energy needs to be spent in creating a new future.
The model fits beautifully with gods and goddesses. Think of the god of preservation, Vishnu, and he gives you the power to manage the present and when he does that, Laxmi, his wife, rewards you by paying the bills. When you think of the god of destruction, Shiva and the goddess of power, Parvati who gives you the strength to selectively destroy things of the past and when you think of lord of creation, Brahma, who gives you the knowledge to create is his wife Saraswati. So, hopefully this gives a bird-eye view of who I am.
What caused the transformation from being married to your job to yourself? I have assessed Daily Hunt – are there any issues in aggregating news from various newspapers and magazines?
Well, we all inherently know if we enjoy what we are doing or no. Frankly a CEO is half the time not creating any new products, talking to customers. It is just managing spreadsheets and power points and 50% of the time is spent managing the US. Sure, the job looks great on paper, most people get there at 50-55, I got there at 27 and by the time I hit 40, I said am I having fun? No. Two, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I was obese. Three, what is a life worth living if it is a dikhave ki zindagi? So, I don’t have a visiting card anymore, I don’t write CEO, I am just founder or co-founder. I am running away from all those things that I chased for 15 years. So, I think I had the most shallow existence. I kept chasing numbers one after the other, but my life started deviating. I didn’t have time to spend with my family, my wife. So, is it worth it? That was the driver and the moment I shifted that, became comfortable in my own skin and said that I don’t want that dikhava for the external world to judge me. So, the hardest part is being deeply, intellectually honest to yourself. You can lie to your wife and friends but if you lie to yourself, you are not going to sleep right? So, look deep within whatever gives you joy. I think it is about peeling off the masks and being able to look at ourselves.
When you did a pivot from corporate entrepreneurial, did you ensure financial security?
If you really reflect what our needs are, and this is where we have compounded our brain saying that I need to have Rs 100 crores or Rs 50 crores in the bank, but frankly I could die tomorrow morning, and I don’t know if I have Rs 100 crores liquidity in the bank. I don’t. But if you ask yourself, all of us have a financial security at home, kids are being taken care of, so, financial security is a very misused or misunderstood term. In fact, my very good friend, Sunil Dalal has written this book called 13 steps to Bloody Good Wealth, I would highly recommend it. I would say I have enough, but my lifestyle is not going to change. I don’t chase brands anymore, I have totally simplified my life. I always wear black or blue t-shirts and jeans. And you don’t even have any of these needs, we are turning 50, we won’t be enjoying that fancy buffet. So, you don’t need that much money. But financial security is a misnomer. The other thing is if you are successful in what you are doing, when I left Facebook, everybody was like were you thrown out? And I ensured that I served my notice period so, that the press doesn’t ask me. Even my parents wondered… Anyway, you need to do it for yourself, nothing else matters. Don’t live for the world, live for your loved ones. So, do what matters for the right reasons and money will come as an outcome.
Are you following any particular spiritual guru or reading any book? About your weight loss, what is it that you did?
I don’t follow any philosophical guru. I think spirituality is an area that I need to get into and discover. I do enjoy reading a lot of poetry, I am very fond of Urdu ghazals, I am very fond of economics and Aristotle’s writings. I am enamoured by the concept of what we consider good society because all have different views. Everyone chases different values, and no one is wrong. It bothers me as to what is our role in the society? I need to go on another journey of spiritualism.
Second question, 144 to 76 kilos, I lost that weight in 14-15 months. 140 to 120 was pure keto and no exercise. 140 to 100 was running 13 kms every day on the road, I do not recommend it, I had my knee replacement surgery at the end of it. Then after that I hit the gym, so, strength training, muscle building and I don’t care about BMI but I care about the fat percentage. Fitness is a journey. So, those are the various stages. I have understood that no matter what age and weight you are, include strength training as a part of your regime to make an impact. Cardio is over-rated, don’t do excessive of it, not more than 20 minutes at any given date. Yoga and swimming are fantastic, but not too much cardio. The secret to weight loss is balance. You may work out and do yoga and all the exercises in the world and sleep for three hours at night but do that for a week. Next week, do half an hour exercise but sleep eight hours and measure the two outcomes within two weeks, you would have lost more weight at the end of week 2. So, the beauty of the human body is to feed yourself to energise your muscle, you exercise to give the muscles and tissues its strength and you sleep to grow your muscles. Human body is the most beautiful body known to mankind, if you do anything for 12 weeks, you will see your transformation. At the end of 4th week, you will feel better, the clothes will fit better. By the end of 6 weeks your spouse will say holy shit, you are looking different and by the end of 12 weeks, everybody in the Rotary Club will notice. You will get compliments and it is the most fulfilling feeling that you will get. You got to eat carefully.
In this fast-changing world, what is the kind of work culture that you have in VerSe today, especially when it comes to keeping millennials motivated?
Talent is so hard, today it is cheaper to outsource something to engineers in San Francisco than in Bangalore. I kid you not, the freshers are getting paid Rs 30 lakh as starting salary. So, one, we do pay well but what we do with pay is we link it with very large scale of ownership with stocks. So, like Narayan Murthy did, even our admin boy who serves tea has stocks of the company. We motivate everyone with wealth creation opportunity. There are different kind of leaders, the actual skill of product making comes from people on the ground, if they are made entrepreneurs. We had a very young talent who wanted to quit, he said he wanted to make his own company, so, we said you create your company here. Why do you want to go outside? You create business, we will invest. One is in gaming and one is education, other in commerce-based engineering. So, I think if you can encourage them and solve really hard problems, they have a different matrix. I am not involved in day-to-day ops. My goal is to make a 100-billion-dollar company. Operating control is ours. The innovation comes from the bottom.
What do you think of NFTs and role of AI in arts?
I am a big believer of the arts, and I believe that at the end of the day what is left of the society is the value in its arts. NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) are hot and real. So, it is like, if Nirav has a piece of art behind him, imagine he takes a digital image of that and I buy the rights of that online. Now if it is a piece of value, other people would want to trade it and ultimately, I buy it for Rs 100, as it gets traded over time to whoever, me being the first owner, I get a cut on every transaction all over the world. It is like crypto. 100 million people have invested in crypto, common people have invested in crypto. NFT has become popular. Take Amitabh Bachchan, if he has to make a commercial, he has to spend 30 days on it. From the time it is made, to the outdoor event. He makes 10 crores on it. He is doing NFT right now, the guy he is working with is a dear friend and he shared with me personally that he spent three hours in making the content and he is going to make three times the amount what Amitabh will make in 30 days, in 3 hours. So, NFT is real. I will encourage everyone to buy crypto.
TO WATCH UMANG BEDI TALK ABOUT THE REST OF HIS JOURNEY, CLICK HERE