Notes and Observations from Kunal Shah's Podcast with Shane Parrish
I recently heard this fantastic podcast between podcaster Shane Parrish and Kunal Shah. The latter is well known for being a “thought leader” in the Indian startup space and has a large number of followers on Twitter and Linkedin.
For my own benefit and reference than for anything else, I distilled some key notes from the podcast which addressed everything from consumer behaviour and motivations, how the Indian market is different from the West and China, how to look at your decision making and many other topics including a dash of philosophy.
1. Willing to lose some reputation: You cannot build true wealth etc unless you're willing to lose some of your reputation. Indians are shamed against failure since childhood (bad marks etc) and hence are wired like that and can be risk averse
2. Standardization in necessary for scaling one you've found your product market fit. Hinduism probably hasn't scalled globally since it has such a non standardization and so many interpretations
3. Value for time in India. Unlike the West, there is no concept of hourly pay in India - if you ask anyone what is their hourly pay then will not be able to given an immediate answer. Hence people don't know the value of their time and this is especially true of the older generations. And time saving tools don't really monetize
4. The world has become riskier and boom and bust cycles are much faster now
5. India is a status driven society - a. Indians spend 6x their annual salary on weddings and this is a HUGE target market for entrepreneurs with potential high gross margin services b. Similarly, the products in the average living room in Indian houses are more lavish/high gross margin than the products in our bedroom
Both are ways to show people that “you have made it in life”
6. What is the best target market for suitcases in India? What would be your guess? Malls? Airports? No - the answer is (by a huge margin) - weddings. Brides, parents etc load up on luggage+shift houses and hence suitcases are bought inevitably
7. People pay for solutions where their core motivations are met or where there hope for it to be met. This is universally true. Example is of how parents pay disproportionately for their kid’s education in India
8. Trust is getting more and more concentrated in fewer companies/people. Trust is strong in societies that have lower diversity (alarmingly) because people probably trust people similar to them. Co-incidentally, in diverse societies, where there is a trust deficit, there are more chances of strong men leaders to be elected.
9. Startups founders, especially in India, need to find where the river (basically human motivation) flows and build a dam there rather than build a dam and hope for rivers to flow to it
10. Business communities in India are shameless when it comes to discussing unit economics of everything
11. Gujarati community - good at spotting trends (“what is the new trend” is a common question when folks meet and greet). They are also good at finding businesses that are avoiding competition (this reminds me of Peter Thiel as well - who said its better to target monopolistic behaviour and avoid competition)
12. Be shameless in putting your thoughts out there. Get it refined. You'll rarely meet successful people who are not insightful. Insights are a currency to success
14. Mentorship - has to be tactical, immediate and hence the best mentors are ideally ones who are not too senior to you. The journey matter more than the position/goal. Autobiographies maybe an little overrated for your immediate careers jumps and are probably good for mainly for asking broaders Qs such as “what would Bezos/Musk etc do if they were in such a situation”
15. Most people are in the story business and not really seeking the truth/reality. Seeking truth/realities is where you have the insights you need to build sucessfully
16. People are intolerant because of limitation on processing power rather than intolerance itself. There is too much information in this modern world but we still decipher limited information. Media and social media amplifies that and ignores nuances. That's why we tilt towards authoritative leaders -who takes decisions via thiz maze of too many complexities for us
17. When we keep looking for new patterns, we also get bored quickly. The brain keeps looking for surprises. That's why Tiktok and short form social media is so addictive
18. Bad behaviour is rooted in short term thinking
19. Emotions are good for identifying symptoms but not for problem solving
20. Scammy behaviour can be found around tourist places because there no repeat customer behaviour. Long term thinking isn't required
21. We will move towards hiring people with more experiences in a year rather than years of experience. Basically high slope people if you want to think in terms of (dy/dx). A start up becomes a large organization when this slope reduces