YouSaid · the spoken record

Kunal Shah

lines on the record: 160
first: 2022-06-28
most recent: 2022-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Form some of these leagues, and we are happy just beating those leagues versus saying that, hey, I just need to keep moving up and maybe benchmark myself to a slightly different level. And I think a lot of people self-limit themselves because they never ask the process that what is the process to beat Elon Musk? You may not beat it, but you know the process. When they have achieved nothing in their life, or a lot of people try to behave like Steve Jobs when they have not been through the journey of being Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. And I think that's where the disconnect comes, that we love to copy end states and never copy journeys.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think in the game of leaderboard and whatever the leaderboard is of, we are constantly playing in our local zone of people who are just below us and just above us and we are constantly trying to beat that. And therefore, let's say I have, I don't know, some hundred thousand followers on Twitter, I will not compare myself to somebody who's, I don't know, 100 million followers. Like it seems unachievable. Or I'm not going to compare myself in a sport. Let's say I'm decent at swimming. I'm not comparing myself to Phelps who's won like, I don't know, 25 gold medals hypothetically, right? I'm looking at within my group of people, am I beating them or not? And I'm constantly moving up in the rank. So I think the need for this hyperlocal thing comes from that, oh, I'm going to beat my batch of college mates or my neighbors or my family members. I'm the best cousin who did well. And I think that's where we...”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You really change your Wi Fi network all the time to people with better ambitions, better goals, you will not feel that need to win within that local league of yours.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In their success in life. I'm like, but there was 20 years ago, why are you still in this race to compare just with your batch? And I've seen that, therefore, envy is hyperlocal. It's like Wi-Fi. It works only in a local radius, right? I don't feel envious with Elon Musk. It's not even in my network. So humans have this unique thing of having envy in a hyperlocal network. We don't feel envious of people who we don't belong in. And therefore, it's good to constantly change who your network is to really do well in life because we are all going to be driven by the Wi-Fi network range of our envy or our comparison. And therefore, and people like, I think Nawal Twitter today and I had also responded back to that, that we outgrow the price of growth is outgrowing people is this because”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think when we create any mechanism of scoring people outside IQ test, EQ test, whatever that is, we are removing Dimensions that we could be better at. And I think, but if we constantly think about, am I better than what I was six months ago and constantly improving that, it doesn't matter what you define as better than what you were at. And I think you can make wealth by being better on something which is solving problems, but you can be healthier or whatever, but not by comparing, but by looking at, am I better than the previous metric? And I think most people are not keen in looking at that because it feels boring. They want to compare and the need to compare is acute. And I think I've not seen people come out of that trap. For example, many people who are very smart in India, who are in the 40s are still comparing to other people in their college batch in the union if they are better or not.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people genuinely are benchmarking externally because the scores are built externally. I think that academics, for example, I have a unique curse of not being able to memorize things. An Indian education system expects you to memorize very long answers and say them as it is without understanding one bit of it. So as a kid, I always thought that I was a poor student because I would not be able to score marks compared to Indian students who were able to remember more. And therefore, memory test is what Indian education is all about versus understanding which I was doing well on. So I would score very high marks in practicals, projects, presentations, but very less in theoretical writing exams. So I always thought I was dumb compared to many students. And it took me after my first exit of my startup, I started believing that I'm not so dumb.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have an acute need to show that they're happy and then they hope that showing that will make them really happy. But the real people don't feel the need to show it to anybody else. I think that's where the locus of control matters, right? Is the locus of control external or internal, right? Like what controls your happiness and what controls your joy or pride. And a lot of times when people put it in other people's hands that if you like it, if you like, you appreciate it. I need your applause, they build less and less substance within themselves because they're optimizing for somebody else's metric, not realizing that nobody gives a damn about anybody else except themselves.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and I think a lot of people, when they are trying to say, I'm this proud, this proud alum of this. Easiest to offend in life. I think being fan or having favorites is telling the world that you're extremely easy to offend.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Twitter, as things that I'm proud of, like people's intros and descriptions are the trigger points put in public. For example, if you write, I don't know, proud father, proud American, fastest way to manipulate you is the things that I have shown in public what I'm proud of because I'm demonstrating my social identity in public and I'm like giving myself exposed. And I do believe that humans create these identities to belong and fit in because it's very uncomfortable to say I have no identity. So I removed everything from my Twitter. I have nothing written on my Twitter as my identity and I believe that one day we should give up your name also and profile picture also and get into that zone because that's when you become impossible to manipulate or impossible to trigger because you are nothing, nobody and you just exist in the background.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example, the path from shame to normalcy is through pride, which has obviously used and misused in different ways. So gay pride and you are a man if you have tobacco and you are a classy person if you have this whiskey. So every vice becomes normal or every shameful behavior becomes normal when you convert this into pride. And I think you can make humans do anything bad by just making it a matter of pride. And it's an interesting hack if you think about it on how you can make people not feel ashamed about certain things. You can say you have to be very proud of this, right? And I think, by the way, I also know that everything that we are proud of are the handles that we give to other humans to manipulate us. So everything that I write.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is there are more ways for them to bond with other elements, are called reactive elements. And maybe people who also have more valencies are the ones who are more reactive and they form bonds easily and they are likely to be more thing. And therefore, people who have lesser valencies. Are noble. And that's what is also called noble gases in the elementary table. And I will make this conjecture in public. And people are like, how can you connect human behavior to elements? And I'm like, why not? Not trying to write in a scientific journal. I'm just trying to make a conjecture and what if this leads to something else. And I think shame plays a huge role. In fact, double click on shame, I found an interesting Hypothesis that the fastest way to make somebody feel okay about what they're ashamed of is to make them feel proud about it.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just put that conjecture out there, and people just bashed me saying that you are making a medical statement, whatever, whatever. But I realized that actually this is damn good. This applies to startups that spread faster are usually have a very light Trojan that spreads versus a very heavy thing. And therefore, if you really want to be on a high distribution startup, you have to build which very light spreads like a virus. And therefore, the word viral is born from virus, which talks about how a light content. Therefore, TikTok becoming what it is is because it's the lightest possible virus that you can create that spreads like a wildfire. So I don't fear judgment of how you're making a medical term connecting into viral videos to this. And I think Shame plays a huge role. I'll give you another example. I made a comment once saying that in elementary table, elements that have a lot of valence.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Therefore, they can spread faster, but they are less fatal because viruses seem to have a correlation of weight with how potent they can be. Like, for example, HIV is a much heavier virus than common cold, and therefore it spreads through blood transfusion or sexual transmission, but it is a lot more potent versus common cold, which can spread through air.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In ability to connect dots. Go deeper on that. Shameless people make more conjectures without any fear of judgment. So what I do on my Twitter hypothetically is that I will make a conjecture randomly and write as if it's some law of physics And people bash me and correct me and sharpen my insight or connect even further dots for me. And then I'm like, wow, I have a new insight on top of that. Because I just put a conjecture out there without giving a damn of people thinking that how the hell can he say like this? How can he, for example, I put a conjecture out. During COVID, that maybe the new variants are lighter in weight.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Governing people, when you say that I will only be helping you in courts if you signed on my stamp paper or paid my stamp duty to give you justice. So I think I find these things super fascinating. And sometimes I believe that I do businesses only to hunt more insights in life. Looks like my core purpose of life is to hunt insights. And sometimes I have to build things to find insights. Sometimes I have to talk to people and find insights. Sometimes I read people and find insights. But I can do this all day long nonstop and I'm constantly trying to meet people. I write to professors all the time. I will write to authors all the time to get them to respond to me on some hypothesis I have or some question that I have. I think being shameless is most important ingredient”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Hong Kong was born out of the settlement of opium war. And many of the banks that we know today from Hong Kong are actually the banks made by the opium traders. And I'm like blown away by all of these things because nobody has any interest in going to the history and origin stories. We just accept things to be that way. But when you go to the first principal origin stories, building blocks, things connect and they just see patterns again and again repeating. For example, the Boston Tea Party in the US which triggered the Civil War or whatever was not just tea, they were also taxing tobacco. They were also taxing stamp papers and you like realize that how it was a beautiful model of inventing stamp paper which is justice API that if you use my stamp paper I will give you justice which was a great scalable way for”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go to origin stories of many, many things, there are so many first principles that connect. And then you say, oh, Indian traders used to make these kind of trips and all of that. For example, I was studying, I'm like, let's study all the, so Premton Reuten was a rich guy like, okay, who are the other rich people of India? And I found this guy called David Sasson, who was an Afghan trader who made it big in Bombay. And I'm like, how did he make it big? Then I found out that he was The region, and British made the entire rail network to support his opium business, which grew opium across the world, India, and shipped it through Bombay to guess where, China. And David Sassan had a huge role to play in the opium war that happened, where British attacked China because they stopped David's supply to go to China because of banning opium.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And things just then start connecting with each other, right? And therefore, one of the things that I do a lot is constantly look for origin stories of why certain things exist. I was curious about shampoo as a product. I'm like, who the hell came up with this name? And then I found that the original story of shampoo is an Indian trader who went to Europe to sell a shikakai which has a different product in India and sold it as a chumpy chumpies like head massage which creates foam and that was called shampoo by European guys and it became the heat product and no Indian who uses shampoo knows that the word shampoo comes from Chumpy which we use as a word for head massage. And then I see these things, and I'm like.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at, I mean, the reason I'm envious of you because you have made the most efficient machine of connecting dots. Like you are talking to people from such diverse backgrounds and the amount of things that are connecting in your head from different things is. Something I really envy. And when you ping me, I said, I wish I had what you do in life. I'm so envious of you. Because what you're able to do is get such, and I've seen that things connect when you go really deep or you go really wide.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the surface level, they look like very, very different businesses, right? For example, I can't tell you how similar education and gambling businesses are at the crux of it And why people do what they do, and why the gross margins seem to be high, and why luxury goods businesses is similar to education businesses because the crux of it, the principles are remaining the same. And only when you ask and go deeper into some of these things, they connect. I've seen a pattern where people from these industries don't talk to each other. Usually the luxury guys are talking to other luxury guys and other luxury guys.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So insights are usually connected from random dots getting connected, right? But the process of collecting dots. To be efficient for the process of connecting dots to be more efficient. And then collecting dots is easier if your friends are also collecting dots to connect dots. So what happens is that compounding naturally works better when you have a lot of people from different domains of life who are constantly collecting dots. For example, I spend a lot of time with a lot of different people from different fields to see how these words connect. For example, I will sometimes speak to an influencer, to a stand-up comedian, to a music director, to an entrepreneur in a completely different space because when you distill insight, things connect.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Versus the rivers that exist, and therefore very few SaaS companies making millions of dollars of revenue, but there are enough wedding photographers I know who make more than $10 million of revenue.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just absurd to the point that they want to believe that maybe I'm not really affluent. These choices just don't make sense to them, right? And I'm not saying that the West does these differently, but it is a lot more for the people. It's a lot more living room than bedroom, even in the affluent households, right? And I think therefore you see extraordinary effort and money spent on weddings. It doesn't make sense that you I don't know, spend 5x or 10x of your annual salary on two days event. Just flurge it on people who you mostly don't even know And therefore, it's not surprising when you go to weddings, there are thousands of people who come for a wedding How can you know them It's all about demonstrating to them that I've made it in life And that's the Asian mass law. Therefore, the startups, the rivers are different”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a two wheeler scooter that I move around with and people with some affluence doing this kind of behavior are mostly considered to be weird or eccentric. I don't see any joy in having fancy things. I just managed to get a car for myself for long distances, but I still use my scooter all the time. And for most people, this is absurd. Because I am not falling the Asian Maslow, that you have to get a luxury car and you can get so many more cars. And why aren't you having this fancy house for yourself and why are you staying in a rented apartment?”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I actually Googled and I found there should be any separate Asian mascula, but in fact there is a concept, somebody's proposed an Asian maslow and they have drawn a very different chart. But one of the interesting thing about the chart was it's all about status, belonging, respect, and in the community. It's not about self-actualization and having that kind of a individual path to enlightenment is all about affiliation, respect status and that. And therefore you see that a lot in India, that people are constantly craving status and appreciate that a lot more. And these societies have like so many awards and so many of these things and face matters a lot and giving back and being valued in the community and so on and so forth. You will not see and therefore like a funny story like I”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they will tell you that I invested so much money in hopes that you will take care of me later on. So there's a whole societal... Structure or social contract that exists in Asian societies of taking care of parents and taking care of them even after you don't have any obligation to do that, but people do it till they die and really take care of them. Asians will not even flinch one bit to sometimes even wipe out 50% or 100% of the networks to take care of their parents. Which is hard to imagine concept for many people in the West.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would not buy an extra shirt for themselves. Those are the interesting motivations. So in Asian societies, we treat our kids like assets. So we are making investments on them because a lot of times we expect the kids to take care of our family. So I don't know if you know about it, but India is the largest market which sends money back to India amongst all markets that does remittance. Indians remit the highest amount of money back to their family than it comes to Mexico and others. And that's the sign that the kids were raised as assets. You invested in them in hopes that when you make it back big, you will give it back to the family and take care of us in our later life. So kids in these societies are treated like assets versus, oh, you're on your own now. That is not in our culture”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For example, the Asian society has unlocked that oh, education is everything, so they disproportionately optimize for that. But they save pennies. Like you said, like your parents talked about traveling miles for saving cents. Maybe they were also the parents who would be okay to spend more on your education. And if you told them I'm going to cost, it's going to cost 2x more they would probably suffer and give you that money.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would people spend most of their income on that or not? And let's not go into ethical debate of is Designer Babies a good thing or not? If it was possible that you can tweak their IQ, their looks, their health, their chances of terminal diseases to be lower and all of that, or let me put it this way, let's say I could really invent a pill that could make you younger or healthier wouldn't you give me 50% of your net worth? And I think that's where the core motivations are like what would you give half of your net worth for? Those are the core human motivations. And they don't change from society to society. They remain the same. They manifest differently.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The core human game is to constantly improve our social status so that we improve our mating success or our success of our progeny. The easiest way to answer this question is that if we could really create designer babies,”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Individualism versus collectivism, which is how Asian societies are. And therefore, you don't deserve things to be special, but you have to show it. And therefore, weddings are really big and very high gross margins for others”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason is in a society we care more about showing to others so all the products which are showing demonstrating status were put in the living room, our bedrooms are terrible in India because nobody comes to them. And therefore, it was not surprising that bed sheets were not bought expensive in India and bathroom products did not sell a lot. We don't have a lot of bathtubs in India because it's not about me. It's about showing social status to others who come to my living room. And therefore, you apply that insight now. And I told this insight to a home renovation company. I told them don't keep staying home renovation. Launch a product line which is living room renovation. And today 70-80% of that revenue for them is living room renovation. Because that's the insight and that's the motivation button that you can press in people.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nobody had ever analyzed data like that in retail ever. Because it's like kitchen and sofa and furniture and all of that. Nobody thought living room and bedroom as two separate concepts. But I said, can you please make somebody crunch it? And turns out the gross margin was 3x more.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shane, you've been doing this for a while, how many more blogs will it take to get close to the truth? You will probably not find it, but the joy of seeking truth for it's the sake of it is not natural and therefore a lot of people do not appreciate it enough. But insights become this nice building block through which you can create great businesses, unlock great success because that is something that is not commonly available. Everybody seems to be seeing some pattern, but you see something else. For example, I had this view that, oh, India cares about status so much more than the Western society. Let me do a thought experiment. I reached out to my friend who used to be a buyer of a top retail chain in India. I asked her to check, can you check if the gross margin on all products sold for living room is lot more than the gross margin on all products sold for the bedroom?”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go to ancient Hindu mythology and you study the Sanskrit scripts, and Sanskrit was a very condensed language, right? Because it was invented before paper was invented. So knowledge was transmitted from human to human through memory. So they had to distill the wisdom in the smallish unit possible that could be memorized and transmitted from human to human. And in the earliest scriptures were also tight. You'll read in Sanskrit yoga line and like in one line they'll condense like really a lot of wisdom in it. So, I think the concept of boiling something to the core units of it, then you cannot divide it further, becomes a powerful unit that is also the building blocks or what we call as first principles. That can help build businesses. And I think a lot of times it's a painful process. Seeking truth is painful.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another thing is that why would somebody pay for this? And it's surprising how most people do not understand that nobody's going to pay for that. Like, will your dad pay for this? Will your mom pay for this? Will your CFO pay for this? Your kid pay for this, like they are just off on that. The last one is do they have an insight that Is not obvious, but when you see them talk about you, you're like, uh-huh, that makes sense.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That consumers are confused when they talk to them because they don't have a foot in the door strategy that, okay, let me sell a knife and then eventually become a Swiss knife in their life. They start with the idea of Swiss knife and you're like, hold on, I can't even process what you guys are doing. And Swiss Knife becomes cool, nobody uses it. Everybody seems to have a Swiss knife at never being used. So I think that's another pattern I've seen. I've never really thought about this from a human framework problem.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep going to the functional utility and not the emotional benefit of the product. And that's another framework I've seen that good founders always know functional in the emotional benefit of their product or service. Market sizing. Most founders cannot imagine how will they start from here and go on to big very large thing from here. They get stuck in a This is what I do, but they can't imagine how well this becomes a large company ever. They just don't think, they don't even think, they cancel their own idea. And I've seen the opposite type, which is, I call it the Swiss knife problem. They believe that they have to build a Swiss knife when the consumer only is looking for a knife because they love building. So a lot of them are usually with engineers.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You cannot distill your idea to a transmissible conversation at dinner. Not going to spread Things that don't spread will have a huge cak because nobody really understands what the hell are you doing? That's one framework that has worked. The other one is asking them, what is the real motivation people will use it? A lot of times the real motivation is different than what people say is the real motivation. For example, buying expensive headphones, they are not really to make you hear better. You want to signal to the world that you are affluent and you have good status and good taste. Most founders cannot distill that that is the real reason people will buy it”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've seen that people are really good, you change language, you change medium, you tell them, I don't want to read your presentation, they'll still be okay. Some people tell them, I'm not going to look at your PPT and they'll be like, how do I explain this to you? The other framework that has worked for me is I tell them I don't understand anything what you're saying. Imagine I'm a user of this product and I have to tell a friend over dinner to try this. What do I say? Only rule I cannot use any jargon because I don't speak to my friends in jargon. So tell me what do I say? And I tell them to take 10 minutes break before telling me the answer. I would say 90% of founders fail at this. because they can't really distill it to that simple transmissible message called From a friend to friend”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it was more of a motivational lens, but applying human motivation as a core loop, but there are other things that make it easy to detect startup success. For example, a lot of founders who pitch to me are usually well prepared and make a presentation and come to me. And so I tell them that, hey, I don't understand English very well. Can you explain this to me in Hindi? Does it do Founders who really get what they're doing can switch language without a problem because they really get it. And language doesn't change anything for them. Many people who have just prepared their presentation and not really understand this very clearly. They struggle with the language change and their pitch goes for a toss.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The joy I unlock by building is coming much higher by building my own companies versus just being predicting and being right a lot in predicting future trends, which can generate the highest ROI of time. It doesn't generate any joy. So I found no joy in investing. It's just like, oh, I told you so. I was right and I was right. And guess what? It gets boring because you're right. In the market like this, when you can predict Delta 4 frameworks and you can apply all the human insights you've learned, it's not a big deal that you'd be more right. The problem is I felt really empty.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think I realized that the only way you can differentiate is by service and all of that is just create a separate layer to build for them. And that was the genesis of the second startup. The reason I also did a startup is also because I realized that while I was doing well as an investor and I'm still doing decently well in my investments as a part-time gig, I loved building way too much. And I think I've been working since I was 14, 15. I do not know how to live a non-intense life while I can predict patterns and see things and I could technically generate better ROI of my time through investing.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even if it's sold in extremely affluent neighborhood or the most poor neighborhood, the price is 10 rupees. Because the government thought this is the greatest idea ever, that we'll have the same price for everybody. But I could easily pay 30 rupees for that and somebody else could pay 5 rupees for that and increase the market overall. But we enforced an artificial concept of MRP, which is stopping the core tenants of free market and capitalism to grow And it's a very unique thing about India where you come with these things that, oh, I'm going to have the 7-Eleven will charge 30 rupees and this one will charge 5 rupees and the Costco will charge this. Guess what? All of them have to charge the same price.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there is no way for you to differentiate yourself, which is very similar to a lot of stuff that is done digitally in India for any service you encounter. And we said we will make their life better by allowing them to have an identity that at least makes their life slightly more frictionless. Now, this sounds like a controversial idea. Hey, you're trying to kill a society which is more friction. But the thing is that that's what capitalism is. I'll give you a small example. India has this unique concept called MRP. I don't know if you know about this, but let's say this bottle over here. It says that maximum retail price of this bottle is 10 rupees.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To win the holy war, but the market is not big enough. After being here for like maybe seven, eight years that they have spent over here because the people who can spend just do not exist. And I think that was the genesis of focusing on startup to build for the top more thing. And what we said is that we'll focus on those customers because nobody is really building for them because everybody's building for this lowest common denominator that does not exist. And I will focus on these customers. And we said that we will focus on more trustworthy individuals to increase the trust of the system. We said that for these group of people, I'll give you a small example. India, even if you are in the top 0.01% of affluence, your passport is ranked maybe 150 in the world. And therefore, every country is extremely hard for you to get a visa to.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building my second company, I realized how to make things more successful, also look at more high motivation categories and so on and so forth. I had the luxury to take the content in bet and say that I told my investor that I'm building a startup that only focuses on the top 25 million customers of India because only they can value time or will buy and rather focus on them versus acquiring hundreds of millions of customers which cannot be monetized because they can barely have money to even eat right now. We are a poor nation. And it's a controversial idea because India is always this country which sold this dream of hundreds of millions of customers like China. But nothing between India and China is common except our population. That's where the similarity ends. But global companies love to win India because they lost on China. So public markets will bash them if they lose India again. So a lot of them are in India.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that framework, I talked about it in India. Funny enough, I was told by Sequoia in the US they've actually introduced this framework in the onboarding of analysts in the Sequoia US team, which was interesting because in India, even if I've spoken about this framework, still startups don't apply that. And I see 90% of them fail all the time back to the analogy of building a dam where rivers don't exist. And rivers are nothing but motivations, right? Like at the core of it, all humans have the same core motivations. And then it goes into streams and creates more rivers from that stream constantly, right? But at the core of it, it's the same thing you want to increase your social status. You want to improve your mating success. You want to have success for your progeny and so on and so forth. It all boils down to the same motivation things. And then you can put them into so many different rivers that flow. So when I started.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To think where it doesn't work. Let's talk about buying shirts online versus offline. It's not Delta 4 if you have, let's say, odd sizes and you have the challenge. And therefore shirts have not moved completely online because just by adding tech, it doesn't become delta 4, right? It has to improve the efficiency score of the desired behavior.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is obviously very, very high tolerance. That's the second thing that you will hate Uber, but you're not going to like, damn it, I'm going to delete this app and I'm going to move to a more inefficient behavior. The third thing is, which I call as UBP, unique brag worthy proposition. Humans, when they discover something delta 4, they can't stop bragging about it everywhere. Almost like a secret code that all humans have with each other that every time you discover delta 4, brag about it and tell everybody about it and move the entire humanity from state A to state B, which is more efficient, which reduces their local entropy and moves them forward to a more efficient medium, which burns less energy than in any form, time, money, or wealth to move forward to more efficient methods. And I realized that most startups were not looking at this. I'll give you a simple framework.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT