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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So the framework was very simple that every time the delta of efficiency score is greater than equal to four, three things happen. It's an irreversible behavior. Once you experience a delta 4 product or service, you cannot go back.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I've asked you this question, which product or service was more efficient 20 years ago than it is today, it's really impossible to find an answer. All the efficiency exists in the future. So humans are constantly moving from inefficiency to efficiency in one direction and like almost like arrow of time. And therefore any product or service that changes you from state A, which is inefficient to state B should unlock something that is called as wealth. So I built a simple framework which sounds simple but most people still don't use it is let's say I asked you that what do you think is the efficiency score of booking a cap through Uber on 10 or versus the old method that existed of booking caps, whatever that method was? Most people would say maybe this is seven, eight or ten that is maybe two on ten one on ten, three on”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“evolution of startups was very similar to biological evolution and nobody was thinking like that. So I'll give you a sneak preview of that framework. It's easier to understand. But I'll tell you, for example, if I asked you, Fran, that Which product or service? Was more efficient twenty years ago than it is today.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are popular in New York. But in India, we had maids coming at home. Why do we need a laundry startup? But there were 10 companies that got funded. So there were so many investors who were clueless, so many founders who were living in India who are clueless. So during that period, I started working on a framework, I call it the Delta IV framework, on predicting startup success because my curiosity was that how am I able to be successful more often when I'm not even one-tenth the academic smarts that some of these guys have demonstrated in the past? But why am I able to do it more successfully? So I built a framework and because I was between two startups, I had a time to read up on physics and biology and evolutionary biology and trust. So I was going all over the place. Obviously, I was on your blog and like I'm connecting all these dots in my head. And I found that”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every penny all the time, but we'll splurge on weddings, we'll splurge on medical events, we'll splurge on education of our kids. Every Indian family right now who have just got new kids are going to spend probably 100 to 200 times more than what their parents spend for their education because that's what we spend money on. The consumption is just not there. So I think when you study these patterns What I realize that these patterns were not understood by Indian founders they were just building Western copies. And therefore at one point of time I saw there were 10 startups that were funded for doing laundry startups.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no clue about these things. I met another founder who's building an interesting biohacking kind of a startup and there's a non-treatment which improves the mitochondria growth rate in your thing. It's an expensive treatment, which is done usually for cancer patients or somebody with diabetic situation or whatever. And this guy goes there that I want to try this for biohacking. And the guy's like, oh, you're here for cancer. He says, no, are you here for diabetes? I was like, no. The third question was, are you here for because it's your wedding? And he's like, why is wedding important over here? Because that treatment makes your skin lighter for six months. So a lot of people are doing that treatment, which is so expensive, usually done by cancer patient or severe diabetic patients to improve their skin tone for their wedding. And that is the fascinating thing about India that so much of the economy is running through that because in India, we are saving.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unicorn startups solving wedding problems. But that's the scary thing about the market. I met a founder who runs us a luggage company, a suitcases they build, one of the public listed companies, and they wanted me to join their board. And I'm like, okay, I'm happy to meet, but I'm not joining a traditional business board, but I'm happy to have a conversation. And I was just giving them some suggestions to do something branding on the airport. And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, yeah, you are a suitcase company. You should be at the airports. Like, what am I not saying correct over here? He's like, Kunal, 80 to 83% of all suitcases in India are bought for weddings. The bride takes new suitcases.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But how many products are built in India which are used in the US, made by US product managers, maybe hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them? How many co-founders of many unicorns in the US are Indians? Probably a lot of them. And this is where I found this to be a thing that Indians were very good at cracking an exam that existed versus creating an exam that does not exist. Like everybody knows Indian spends a lot on weddings. Like it's a known thing. People love to go to the Indian weddings and they keep hearing this. I'll give you an interesting data point. I checked in my office. Most people spent close to six times their annual salary for their wedding. But zero”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody else is STEM. And another thing in India is that we never had dating culture. So we never learned human motivation through the game of dating as well. So, we have extraordinary builders, but we don't know what to build for. And therefore, how many Indian products are used in the West right now? Very few.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it never happens, I think. And it's a great idea to build in Western markets where there are so many rivers and there is such a big economy that even some accidental river flowing through you will make a lot of money. In India, there are no accidental. It's like you're building in dessert, right? So you have to make sure you have a dessert, like you have to really build the rivers, the right, dams in the right place because there's no unlimited rivers flowing. Nobody was thinking about human motivation because all of our education system in India was not teaching humanities. I accidentally learned humanities because of philosophy. But every single tech founder, India has 100 unicorns, I would go on to say that I am the only founder in the 100 unicorns which has a humanities background.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entrepreneurs, right? And I found that as an interesting pattern that I referred to as an analogy that I see a lot of dam builders with no idea where rivers exist. So I see them building dams in hope that river will show up, but river never shows up. River exists. Every time they discover that, hey, river is not coming to my dam instead of moving the dam to river, they make the dams even more funkier and cooler and with AI and all of that stuff, but the water never comes. And I saw that some people were natural at finding where the rivers of motivation were flowing and even the mediocre dams were making profits over there versus these fancy dams which nobody ever used.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Months till somebody told me, hey, they are really big deal, you need to check them out. And I'm like, okay, I went there. And I remember asking that, so Kunal, what's your CAC? And I had no clue what that word meant. And I think it's a superpower. I think vocabulary is a unique curse that we suffer every word we know. If you don't know these words, we'll probably not suffer them. And I think what I learned from that experience was that you need to focus on the right market because you can be the greatest founder if you meet the bad market, you will die. But if you find a market that has huge tailwinds to it, even a mediocre founder will do really, really well, right? So I think market is like laws of physics. And I saw a very interesting pattern in India was that a lot of smart people were building great companies that wouldn't go nowhere. And I saw some people who were not so smart who do really, really well consistently.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After I exited the first company, I spent a bunch of time I was advising multiple companies, joining the advisory board or board. So one of them is a media company. One of them was Sequoia Capital. I spent a bunch of time understanding investments. And I was also Angel Investing in left, right, and center. I was probably Angel invested in maybe 200 plus companies now in India. What I learned was that everybody was building these businesses by copying Western models. Free charge was one of the few original ideas. The reason I built an original company because I had no engineering background, I had no friends who had built tech startups. In fact, I didn't even think I was building a tech startup. I thought I was building a marketing company, which turned out to be one of the largest payments company in India because I had never read TechCrunch in my life. In fact, when Sequoy reached out to me, I'm like, who are these guys? Why wasting my time? I had no clue who they were. I ignored their emails for.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my first startup I built from 2010 to 2015, probably the largest exit at that point of time in India. And that startup did the following. It allowed people to recharge their mobile phones in India, 99% of connections are prepaid, which means they are not on any plan. People refuel their, this is again a lot of society, nobody giving credit to each other. So people just top up money and use it and then top up again. But none of that top-up was done online. So I built that platform. But what I did is I allowed people to get some vouchers of retailers for recharging on our platform. It was called free charge. And it took off in a very big way because, again, value of time, or I'm getting some incentive. People actually chose our platform versus going to somewhere else. And because it was more efficient, people just shifted in that direction. What I realized that I was going for the mass market through that, but it was impossible to monetize. They just did not have any money.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just scary if you think about it, how large our economy is and how many businesses we have and how internet savvy we are. We are probably more savvy in using smartphones and digital payments. In fact, one of the things that is talked about is India's digital payments have overtaken China and we have taken off. Most people don't tell you that it took off after government made it free. Money transfer is instant, but nobody makes any money. That's when it took off. When we had charge 1%, 2% MDR for do that, it never took off. So the thing is that this value of time understanding credit, value of time and this math of thinking of time, energy, money in one equation is extremely hard.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not, it's funny. You're saying that, but India is after the US, maybe in the top three markets of SaaS providers, SaaS business software providers. But none of them have any revenue from the local market. Because no business pays for software. They're like, oh, I'm just going to hire three more people and they'll just work because they don't understand that software could make them so much more efficient. And I wouldn't be able to find one company that makes more than $10 million annual revenue by selling software to Indian businesses.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but they never worked in a society. They did not grow up in a society where value of time was a concept, right? So I think it's more phenomena coming from those world and Western society like, oh, we have to be efficient, industrialization, value per hour, productivity. If I ask 10 people in India what productivity means, I don't think I'll get a good answer.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have a concept of monthly salary. We're not even paid weekly, so we are paid every month. And everybody thinks in month. It's a flawed concept because they never solve being efficient in life unless you know your salary and hourly basis you will never really know what the value of time is. One fascinating thing I've seen in India is that you fly in the US and many people are reading books or doing something else. In India nobody is really reading books and many of them I've seen a very peculiar behavior in India is they are going to WhatsApp and deleting old pictures so that it can clear up the memory instead of buying a $1 pack it'll give you a cloud access like that's the value of time. And these are by the most affluent people in India fly. So there is no way they can spend two hours deleting pictures on WhatsApp, but they do because the value of time is not understood intuitively. And I've seen this all the time in people around me, people who are multimillionaires will work so hard to save $50.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Netflix made the mistake of coming to India and saying, We'll charge you for it. Nobody is going to pay that. And therefore, the projections did not meet because India is a country where you give them freebies and you get all your DAUs you want, you do not get your ARPU. And I think that's the lesson they learned. And I think they are saying now we'll launch market with advertising. India is perfect for that because value of time is not a concept for us. So we'll watch in India when a series plays on TV of 30 minutes approximately nine minutes is ads.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Foreign companies love to come to India because India is the DAU farm of the world. All the big internet giants will say, oh, I have 500 million users in India. Look at the ARPU and peel the ARPU. It'll be less than a dollar or two. But it's great. Like, for example, if you got a lot of Indian followers on Twitter, your Twitter account will go like crazy. Your monetization question might go down. And I think many companies like Snapchat, Twitter have worked very hard to grow user base in India. Facebook is a classic example. YouTube, my bet would be that it would be probably making less than $2RPU annually in India with probably more than 500, 600 million active users in India alone. But they don't mind that because the global ARPU compensates for the ARPU mix, but the user mix cannot come from anywhere else. And therefore, the market will reward.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Credit cards, car loans, home loans, all investments. India has now nearly $2,000 per capita income annually. But if you remove the top 30 million families or 30 million individuals, the per capita income would drop to maybe $600. And therefore, a lot of Western markets love to come to India and say that, oh, India is the next China. It's not because our per capita income is never going to beat and grow like China because before China started becoming affluent 96% of Chinese urban women were working because of the one-child policy which forced it to become a general neutral society and got them all on the labor force, which never happened in India. Internet is going down. That's a scary trend across the region. India has the lowest female participation of labor. Now, the per capita income is not going to grow and therefore a lot of”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The market is not deep enough to focus on one market and create a large company. The per capita income, the total economy and all of that. So you have to do cross-sell more things to the same set of customers. I'll give you some interesting stats about India, which should be mostly not known by most people outside India. Less than 6% of urban Indian women have financial income of their own. 94% of them are currently taking care of kids or taking care of the family and not contributing to the labor force, but they're all educated. They are probably undergrad or grads or even higher, but not contributing to the labor force. Another interesting thing is 95% of all financial products in India are bought by men.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's such a fascinating concept in India because It just works. And my company, I've seen that, and we are in a fintech business. We launched an e-commerce platform and it just becomes so big in a month's time. Much to most people's surprise, including our investors who are mostly from the Western market, they're like focus. Focus is almost a curse in Asian markets.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it's a good summary. There's one more nuance. If it becomes too similar, innovation dies. Becomes too dissimilar trust dies. So it seems to be in an interesting spectrum that you can only have a certain mix that keeps driving things to move forward versus become stagnant and boring and too chaotic. I think there is this healthy mix that needs to keep happening. And I don't know what the number is, but it sounds like a scary concept because you're trying to say that, hey, you have to cleanse the society to reorganize itself, to have 80-20 on ethnicities, which is a problematic concept to start with.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, it seems to be true that trust is biological. And we seem to trust people with common belief systems and ethnicity plays a huge role. So you'll notice an interesting pattern that I think there's a study by some Stanford professor which showed that almost an opposite connection or correlation to number of ethnicities and high trust of a society. It's not surprising that most societies were not multi ethnic as they're becoming more multiethnic, the trust is declining. And you see Be much more frequent because all low trust societies always want somebody who with strong backbone to create peace. And that's also the concentration of trust point, which seeps in from that, which is constantly repeating itself in many, many themes.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody has studied that. I would love to fund a research which shows this, but I do believe that market cap of top companies would be different than what you will observe, at least in each category, like tech may be an exception, but any other category you'll see huge concentration, revenue from the Bollywood industry, revenue from anything else. It just becomes more and more and more concentrated. And I think that is it. The reason I think increasing trust in a society and I've been obviously obsessed with what creates trust, for example, the most simplest answer I've found is trust is natural in societies that have very low diversity of ethnicity. And that is a scary thought because all sorts of bad behavior have happened in human history because we try to attack the minority and always try to make society one.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And therefore, super apps also emerge a lot more over here. I'm like, oh, credit is offering this. Oh, they're launching this new service. Boom. Start using it. But you might be doing completely different business in the past, but people just say, oh, I know these guys. The familiarity creates huge amount of trust over here. And therefore, you see concentration of market caps in fewer and fewer companies. And therefore, I believe Pareto might be extremely skewed in Asia versus West.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's also true for superstars and super companies and conglomerates. So every low trust society, which is usually non-Western society, a lot of them are low trust, there is always concentration of trust. Every low trust society will have concentration of trust. And when that high trust entity launches 25 things, people just use it. For example, in India, Tata Group is this concentration of trust and they can launch a car to a refrigerator to salt, to furniture and people like, oh, Tata Group, we'll just buy it. I would say 80-85% of Bollywood's revenue comes from like 10, 15 people, again, concentration of trust. And therefore, by the way, we even watch their kids movie. So nepotism is very rampant in India because you're like, oh, is this guy's son? I trust him to do a good job because I'm not risking my money on this new actor.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, we'll charge you and cross sell you some lending, some loan, some technology, some value added services, which could disrupt a lot of uterity creating businesses by design. So I think cost to provide utility is dropping and therefore the revenue expectation from that is dropping. And we're going through a very interesting cycle of how business models will evolve. And they all will have to be more skin in the game in nature versus rent-seeking that they used to be because nobody could easily compete because the world is getting more and more like APIs and businesses when they become APIs, it's much easier to plug them into larger ecosystems. Shane, one of the interesting things I always wonder about is that it's very easy to find super apps in Asia, but rarely you find super apps in Western societies.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think this is where I see a lot of the utility providing businesses getting constantly disrupted by somebody, at least in the technology businesses, because you don't need a license to provide utility. You can just offer it. It's not like an electricity company that can keep charging you forever because nobody can compete with electricity companies for the networks that they buy, but internet businesses can simply offer utility for free. And Google has mastered this. Many companies have mastered this. I believe the future of SaaS companies is going to be that where the next SaaS company will just say, oh, just use our tool for free.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Losing gross margins to the point of becoming zero because many companies that offer vanity or social status or a chance of dealing with the CMO are making those businesses almost free because you get a chance to make a cross-sell a high gross margin services, right? If you look at Amazon, a bulk of their revenue is to be marketplace. But if you see all the avatars of Amazon in different countries, the marketplace revenue was made to be zero. Alibaba chose to not charge the merchants to sell, but they made money on advertising and fintech, which are skin in the game businesses, but do not charge you rent per se because it was easier to disrupt eBay and Amazon and China by saying, oh, it doesn't, you know, commissions if you have to sell on our store.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And accelerates eventualities because we go through that. But coming back to what I was saying is that value, therefore, is utility and vanity and chance of increasing social status, which is constantly sucking all the gross margins. And world is seeing a very interesting pattern. All the businesses that are providing utility.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hijack moment where they thought, Oh my god, I have to really survive and I need to take more risky behavior because I think the amygdala probably flared up during this time and therefore risky behavior seems to happen right after crisis because people just go all in. 90-95% of all coins that were traded on all crypto exchanges were not in the top five, not even the top ten. Because who wants the normal returns? I just want a chance to just play that and therefore I think the world is getting more risky and then obviously there's a huge correction that will happen which will kind of flow in the next stage because like the Spanish flu, we went through Spanish flu and then the roaring 20s and the Great Depression we're going to go through those cycles faster now because we have fast forwarding everything. In fact crisis is a almost like a fast forward button to future.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the CMO of your brain is saying that, oh my God, if I crack HBS and I will be able to jump the social status and my income will multifold and therefore it is okay to spend years, time, money to get a chance to get into IV League. And therefore Ivy League can keep increasing the gross margin with no trouble because they promise or even if they give you hope, let's give example of Vegas right now. Vegas does not assure you you'll become rich. But the hope lottery, which is a chance of being level 30, jump into level 200, I'm okay to go all in once in a while, especially poor people get sucked into that a lot more because imagine it's like being on a poker table with the smallest stack. The best strategy you feel to be on the table is to go all in all the time. So when we went through pandemic, I believe that the whole world had this.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And gross margins disappear when you do not help them increase their social status. For example, I will keep moving to a utility provider as long as they keep offering me lower price, as long as the time required and the effort required. The department of your brain that deals with that is the CFO of the brain who's only looking for cost cuts.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People pay or people give you time or money where their core motivations are mostly met or there is a hope for their motivations to be met. Let's take this example of like just imagine this. Let's say all of us are on some level of social status in life. Let's say Shane, you are at level 90, I'm at level 60, somebody is at level 200 and so on and so forth. And let's believe this is true. Now product and services are also at some levels in life. For example, I would say Louis Von is at level 160 HBS education is at level 200. Let's imagine these things and let's say fueling your car is at level 30 and so on and so forth. By design gross margins exist when you allow human beings to jump their social status.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think a lot of things that are non-scalable, let's say movie making, some directors who are really known to make successful movies back to back, really don't care about timelines. You can't tell, I don't know, the best director said, oh, we need to ship two movies every two years. They will not do that, right? And I'm not saying that the others who ship one movie a year do not create value, they do. But they will never create something that is memorable and will create an experience that you will never forget. So I think that's where I would disagree with the idea of value creation happens in both. But the question is that what do you enjoy and what creates a memorable experience? What creates an emotional arousal is rarely through efficient methods. For example, trips to inefficient places will be more memorable than efficient places by design.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you think about a hard to scale businesses, let's say this great restaurant, you can't make a chain out of it. It's just impossible, right? Because the guy can't teach all the skills to build five chefs, ten chefs, right? But they're also hard to destroy because if it really works, there are so many restaurants that works for hundreds of years because they have just perfected that. But they can't build branches, they can't do, but there is a McDonald's which has managed to scale the version, right? which is very easy to attack and say, hey, it's unhealthy. And guys, we need to move away from this and break that whole concept or the sugary drinks, which have scaled so much. And we can all agree and say that, hey, it may not be healthy for you and we need to move away from that. But something that is built inefficiently is harder to destroy because what do you destroy? And how do you destroy? There is nothing to attack. There is no aid.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would disagree with that because once you have figured out what is called as PMF, you need to scale it by standardizing it to a great extent, right? And that happens all the time. However, standardized things are easier to disrupt than non-standardized things. Just the way a standardized religion is easier to disrupt than a non-standardized religion, right? One is hard to scale, one is hard to destroy.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But not through scaling to other societies because it was not designed. But it is something that you feel more spiritual about and other things. And I think that's where the nuance comes in, that it is impossible to imagine scaling in life without standardizing and standardizing is the enemy of soulfulness.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not a DNA you see in Asia, but a flip side I have noticed is that everything that feels soulful in life Is inefficient. All the vacations that we find very soulful are inefficient places. The food that we really, really like and find soulful are inefficient to cook. So I always find these interesting things that maybe soulfulness is a function of chaos and inefficiency, which Western societies figured out how to scale. And let's compare this to our religion now. Hinduism is, I would say, not as scalable as, let's say, many other religions because it's not standardized. There is no one book, no 10 rules, no one God. So what do you really scale? It's an open source religion which people make and build on some principles and tenets which are constantly evolving and people are allowed to tweak it on their own terms. So it's like evolving very, very differently. And therefore Hinduism is mostly spread through birth.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of that, they take poor decisions with their time and they don't understand the value of time. So products that sell convenience and save you your time rarely monetize, which monetize a lot in the Western society because everybody understands the value of our because their first job was, I don't know, $10 an hour and then now they are doing well in life, but they can still do a math on approximate basis now my salary seems to be $500 an hour and they just get it and therefore they take very interesting decisions. They will not try to optimize for a $50 discount on their flight tickets when they are making $500 because they'll say that's not worth my time. No Indian will ever say it's not worth my time. And that's true for many Asian societies because value of time as a concept was never taught. Efficiency”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now there's a dangerous thing that happens because of that. Nobody understands what's their value per hour. You ask any Indian, if you ever come to India and go to any store, any hotel, any restaurant, ask the guy what's your salary per hour, cannot answer that question.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of Asian society is completely different to the Western society. But unfortunately, all the marketing textbooks are made in the West and then they come to the Indian market and they get shocked on what people really pay for in these markets. And I think, therefore, a lot of Western companies struggle to make monetize from these markets. They can get a lot of DAUs and MAUs from this market, but rarely ARPU from this market because they don't understand what people pay for over here. So I think that was the big lesson I learned. So one of the biggest shocking thing for me when I'm during my first trip to the US was I figured that almost everybody's first job paid them an hourly salary. In India, nobody has ever earned an hourly salary in their entire life.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Skills given to their kids which were not available easily in the market. So they were looking for tuition teacher who would say, oh, can you teach this particular skill? Can you teach that particular skill? And I would learn that. And I realized that I learned the best when I had to teach. So I started doing that a lot. And it was the fastest way to make money. It was a negative CAC way of learning in life, right? So I think a lot of these concepts made me realize that the Indian society was a lot different. And in my career, I did a lot of other businesses which were sold to the US and Western market and Indian market. And I think most Western companies do not understand.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a superior status. So that's another thing I learned that people love to personalize and put a signature and give more value. People love to have higher status than others and pay more value. And they didn't even care about the price because what I did is I said this is short supply. So what I did, I said that I can only supply you two a day. It's complex process to make it. It wasn't complex process. I just artificially create scarcity in the market and I had to learn all of this because I could really not make enough because I was having a full-time job and doing other things. I also started doing some private tuitions for kids to teach multiple subjects, whatever people would send. And I realized that people love teaching their kids exotic subjects. So I would like teach them Excel. And I would not know these subjects. I would ask them, what do you really want to learn? I would learn that previous night and teach them because people love the idea of having special.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can charge whatever you want, and they would make 5x more profit selling my mixtapes than the music labeling. I understand that business was not really legal, but as a 15-year-old, I did not know better. I had to survive. Then I built another business, which was I realized that people put Henath to really differentiate themselves in Indian weddings, to really look better than I have the better design on my hands. Like it's almost like a temporary tattoo that people put. And I realized that the biggest need people had was design was not enough. The color of Henna had to change. So I figured out a way to build black henna, which I learned from some Arabic culture was possible, and sold that in the retail stores under a brand that I made when I was 16, 17. And that sold at 10x more price than the regular Henna because it allowed people to differentiate themselves.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll talk about three, four businesses that I did as a kid. And this is all before I had legal age to do anything at all. One was I built mixed tapes which are downloaded music from the internet and made mixed tapes for people on a CD and burnt it and gave it to them. And I used somebody else's computer, somebody else's internet because I had no access to any of these things and I would give them take rate. But I realized that people love the idea of being making something personalized versus buying something from the store which is mixtape of somebody else. And the idea of gifting, they were okay to pay three to four X more than the normal mixtape that they would get from the market because this is made by me, right? And I was very happily this guy. So what I did is I started going to all the music stores and I said, I will make the mixtapes for your clients. This is my price to you.”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They will say, I can't even risk 1% of my reputation. Again, going back to the Gujarati communities, I know so many families go bankrupt all the time because going all in is not scary for them. In fact, I'll tell you an interesting stat. India has India has a very large country, but the total number of people who have invested in any kind of asset, stock mutual funds, any of that is around 30 million, 30, 35 million. I would go to the extent of saying that 80% of people who are having more than $200 of investment in any of these assets are people from this community. That's how risk covers the rest of the society is. Compared to these guys”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problem is that it remains as a long term bug in them, that they constantly think about other people's point of view about how they are and they constantly think their social status cannot be taken risk. But according to me, you cannot develop substance networks, wealth experience unless you're constantly willing to risk your reputation. People who can feel extremely okay to risk up to 30, 40% of their reputation, wealth, health are the ones who propel further, but a lot of people don't do that because in their head”
2022-06-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT