Valentine's Day Special: Building Human Connections, one pair at a time; S. Anil Kumar, Jodi365

S. Anil Kumar 0:00 Can I curse? People are caught up with their own shit. When you're twenty-nine and stressing about, "Oh, I'm going to be thirty, I might be seen as an old maid," I would rather that you are thirty-one and still discerning and single, rather than get hastily hitched at thirty. And in one quadrant you have the Tinders, and then a Bumble trying to be an alternative to the Tinder. Interestingly, Sundar Pichai and I took, um, physics lessons in the same classroom.

Amrut 0:23 Is it? The way you are describing your own journey feels a lot more human-

S. Anil Kumar 0:30 Yeah

Amrut 0:30 ... and it feels like this is a story that's happening all around us.

S. Anil Kumar 0:34 In, uh, a pitch deck, I don't need a pitch deck anymore because I can tell someone, tell VCs, and say, "Screw you."

Amrut 0:40 Hi, this is Amrut. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build Podcast.

Amrut 1:16 Today, we are sitting with Anil. Anil Kumar is a very different kind of founder. He runs a service called Jodi365. It's a personalized matchmaking service, and he's been running it for fifteen plus years. He was a student here from nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety-four. Uh, yeah, welcome to the podcast, Anil.

S. Anil Kumar 1:33 Thanks, Amrutash. Yeah, pleasure to be here-

Amrut 1:35 Uh-

S. Anil Kumar 1:35 ... especially here at IITM.

Amrut 1:37 Yes. Um, by the way, today is reunion day, so a lot of alumni are there.

S. Anil Kumar 1:41 I know this. I know this. Class of two thousand, there are at least a couple of people in my network from there. I meant to check with them, but I might just still do that.

Amrut 1:51 Okay. So Anil, um, tell us about your startup, and what is... Uh, do you call it a startup still?

S. Anil Kumar 1:56 No, not after all of these years. Uh, I founded this in two thousand and nine in Chicago, in the home stretch of my MBA program at the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business. And, uh, it's for many years now that I've been describing myself as not an entrepreneur, but as a businessman. I say that I run a growing business. Still a small business, a small, growing business. Jodi365 is a matchmaking platform and service. It began as a platform, with personalized service being an option. We pivoted into a fully personalized service, so we spare people the searching, the screening, and the curating. We do the heavy lifting, and we present these pre-screened, curated matches to people on a regular basis. We help people find their life partner at a pace that's right for them. Some people may be ready for marriage in the near term. Some people may be comfortable with the idea of, um, getting married, but not rushing into some- ru- rushing into the formal process. They may prefer to get to know somebody over time. They may be okay with an engagement. Some others may say, "Back off, no pressure. I'd like to get to know someone as friends first." So wherever they are on their readiness, on the readiness spectrum, we help them find the right partner.

Amrut 3:12 Nice. Um, I got married many, many years ago, so [chuckles] I have no idea what the problems or the anxieties of younger people are. I can see that people are quite worried in general about finding a partner, but can you describe the problem to us? Like, how is the... What are you solving for?

S. Anil Kumar 3:29 Yeah. So I'd say that it's not, uh, a search problem. Uh, there are enough singles out there. It's more of, um, figuring out who's right for you, and it's hard when people are well-educated, accomplished, they have some aspirations, and they may not have the bandwidth to put themselves out there, and it takes putting oneself out there. Uh, and if you are to put yourself out there, you're not sure of multiple things. What, are you to go scanning people's fingers to see whether there's a ring on it? Someone may not have a ring and still be taken. Someone may not have a ring and, uh, just not be open to the idea. So how is one to go about figuring out, um, who may be a potential partner? And before that, I'll even rewind one step. I've had the good fortune of running a business that I've not had to evangelize, as in, "Oh, please think about edtech. We are offering education solutions online." For as long as humans have existed, humans have sought to get into relationships. We are wired to pass the genes on to the next species, uh, to the next generation. We are wired for companionship, so I've not had to sell the case that this is a problem worth solving. It's just a question of how effectively you solve the problem. Online options are convenient. They are like watering holes where you know that singles congregate, but not necessarily only singles congregate. So when you get into these watering holes, you're not sure who's genuine, who is fake. Even if somebody is genuine, how serious they are. Even if they are serious, what their intent is. Is it for the long term? Is it for short term that may evolve into the long term, or is it because they are bored or horny on a weekend? How do you figure this out? So in a way, we are like a concierge. We are many things, but one of the things is we are a concierge. You can order your meals, and it comes to your door. You can order your groceries and even get things couriered to you within the same city, across neighborhoods. In a way, we bring present- we bring pre-screened matches to somebody who may be busy. We tell them: "Live your life, best life better. Let us do the heavy lifting, and spare you the effort of even figuring out all those unknowns. Are they genuine? Are they real? Are they serious? Do they have intent? Do they have interest?" People underestimate the value of having someone to be a trusted intermediary, to ask the hard questions that you may be too polite to ask. Okay, so-... he seems to be sorted, but yeah, he's an entrepreneur. How is he doing financially? You'd want-- a woman would want to know if a guy is sorted. Even if it's, uh, a young man, he'd want to know how is she doing professionally, or what's her personal background like? How many skeletons in her closet? She may wonder, what's his life story like? Personal questions that we wouldn't even feel comfortable asking, but somebody who does this professionally can take it as their responsibility to ask the difficult questions, spare you the awkwardness of asking the difficult questions, uncomfortable questions, spare you the misery of fielding sensitive questions or outright insensitive questions. Beyond bringing matches to you, getting this additional information, facilitating the exchange of sensitive information. Beyond that, making personal introductions. Beyond that, remaining in the background to make sure that there's no communication snafu, there's no communication mix-up, there's no communication breakdown, so that people are talking and getting to know each other. And if there isn't that much enthusiasm on one side or both sides, being able to call it and say, "Look, you're better off focusing on the one who may be right for you. You go on and focus on someone who may be right for you."

Amrut 7:19 Right.

S. Anil Kumar 7:20 We are... And with all the gray hair, for me to be able to come in and play the role of a guide, a counselor, help people navigate the emotional rollercoaster. So I say the best word is matchmaker.

Amrut 7:32 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 7:33 It's what I do, connecting people.

Amrut 7:35 Very interesting. We have this, uh, notion of a meet cute kind of story from movies where everything just-

S. Anil Kumar 7:43 Yeah

Amrut 7:43 ... happens in a flash.

S. Anil Kumar 7:44 Yeah.

Amrut 7:44 But you're saying that it's a long process, and-

S. Anil Kumar 7:47 Yeah, yeah

Amrut 7:48 ... um, it would really help to have somebody on your side.

S. Anil Kumar 7:50 Yeah, yeah. And see,

S. Anil Kumar 7:52 generations ago, you had the tribe doing this. You had not just the immediate family. In our culture, people are incentivized to help the next generation find somebody who may be right for them. Uh, and today's twenties and thirties, uh, twenty, thirty... The twenties, thirties generation is not averse to the idea of um, an arranged marriage or a semi-arranged marriage-

Amrut 8:16 Mm

S. Anil Kumar 8:16 ... but they like to have the sense of agency, understandably. Earlier, you had not just the nuclear family, but even the extended family who would think that, "Oh, okay, "... to use a Hindi expression. Woman's, young woman's coming of age, young man's also settling down professionally. Shall he start getting the word out? So they get dragged to these weddings and all dolled up, and-

Amrut 8:39 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 8:39 ... announcements are made subtly: "Hey-

Amrut 8:41 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 8:42 ... he's grown up. He's doing well. She's doing well." Yeah, we-

Amrut 8:46 All the Navratris and the Diwali festivals.

S. Anil Kumar 8:49 Yeah.

Amrut 8:50 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 8:50 So much value for these kinds of functions. I attended a client's, uh, eightieth birthday celebration in the family just last night. These are great occasions to bring the folks out and to let the word get out in subtle manners. These days, everybody's caught up with their own... Can I curse? People are caught up with their own shit.

Amrut 9:10 [chuckles]

S. Anil Kumar 9:11 And they're also wary that, look, if we make some introductions and it goes south, we don't want all the grief, uh-

Amrut 9:18 To come to me

S. Anil Kumar 9:19 ... to come to us. Yeah, "So we wish you well. Good luck." "Yeah, we'll think about it. We'll let you know if there's somebody." And even families, they are a little concerned, as in, "Look, I'm not sure. I don't get it these days. I don't know what you Gen Z, what you millennials want. Sure, if you find somebody, let us know. We'd, uh, if they pass our sniff test, we'd be all supportive." I'd like to put it this way, that people say that there's, uh, an India shining, but there's also an India drowning. There's a case of two Indias. I say, no, it's a case of who knows, hundreds and thousands of Indias. And people at, um, different socioeconomic strata, different sociocultural backgrounds, different, different levels of, uh... Whether they are conservative or liberal, there are so many pendulums swinging in this maddeningly fascinating society at different, uh, time lengths, different scales, bouncing about, clashing, and not quite connecting. Wheels of change keep progressing, so it's no surprise that there's been room for somebody like me to come in, to draw on all my lessons learned, all of my pain and suffering that motivated me to start a different kind of solution.

Amrut 10:31 Very interesting. I want to ask you about the different kind of solution. Uh, Anit, you're saying that this is an old problem. Society anyway is incentivized to couple young people up. Um, maybe it's changed over the years on how the process of coupling happens and how people find each other and-

S. Anil Kumar 10:47 Yeah

Amrut 10:47 ... at least in the last fifteen, twenty years, technology has had a huge impact, right?

S. Anil Kumar 10:52 Sure.

Amrut 10:52 So it's-- is it a technology-driven solution? Uh, I mean, I, have I heard of AI-based matchmaking now? I don't know how that works.

S. Anil Kumar 11:02 Yeah.

Amrut 11:02 Like, would love to hear how that has moved in the last ten, fifteen years-

S. Anil Kumar 11:05 Sure

Amrut 11:06 ... with sort of technology falling in.

S. Anil Kumar 11:08 Yeah.

Amrut 11:09 And of course, like, uh, in our country, Shaadi.com and BharatMatrimony are the largest, right?

S. Anil Kumar 11:15 Yeah.

Amrut 11:15 There's, uh... And they are tech businesses, so.

S. Anil Kumar 11:17 Sure, sure.

Amrut 11:18 Um, and they're old now. Like what? Each of them is twenty years old, um-

S. Anil Kumar 11:21 Yeah, late nineties is when they came on the scene. Maybe early noughts, they sort of started scaling.

Amrut 11:27 Yeah. So how has it changed from then to now, and-

S. Anil Kumar 11:29 Yeah, yeah

Amrut 11:29 ... what is the impact of technology, and what is your opinion of AI in this space?

S. Anil Kumar 11:32 Yeah, yeah. So I see three questions over there. Technology I see as an enabler, and I don't see it as new. People forget, and when you study something, you think about how there was a time when the automobile was technology. People think about, oh, in India, there's been this concept of arranged marriage. Now you have these messaging apps which take away the stigma of, "Oh, I like this neighbor. I like somebody I cross paths with, but, uh, there'd be too much at-attention if I go and approach. Even if I had the courage to go and approach a woman and shoot my shot," there are these, there are these challenges and-... the offline world, whereas you have the anonymity of messaging apps or, or these dating apps, even Instagram as a proxy for dating apps these days. This is not new. People forget that you had the concept of arranged marriage even in the US. You-- How many people are aware of it? In the nineteenth century, you would have these suitors from out of town would be invited, would be boarded at home, and the good ones would even be allowed to share a bed with the-

Amrut 12:40 Bride-to-be.

S. Anil Kumar 12:40 -with the bride-to-be. And there would be a plank placed in between the two. Origins of the term boarding. People don't realize that. And what are the technology enabler there? When the automobile came on the scene, you were no longer limited to picking from among the best clown in town, right? You could go beyond your village, beyond your community. And when you had phones, you had the means of long-distance communication. So here, um, it's just a sign of the times that you're able to cast a wider net because of the convenience of technology. It's a double-edged sword, though, because you-- with technology, with these online watering holes, and I like to describe these matchmaking sites and apps as watering holes. At a minimum, it lets you know that whoever else, whoever else is at this watering hole is also single and wants to drink from the pond. The danger is, could they be a wolf in sheep's clothing? And all kinds of wolves and vultures and snakes and frogs, I like to say. It's a jungle out there. Is it a safe space? Are there some guardrails to make sure that you don't have these wolves coming to the watering hole?

Amrut 13:50 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 13:50 Are they genuinely single? Where do I even begin to talk about some of the challenges with technology? There's also... Even if people may come with good intent, there is this paradox of choice. You think that options are, are aplenty and people are hesitant to commit. People are hesitant to invest in somebody, thinking that, "Well, what are the next person, the next profile that I might get to swipe might be better than option A?" There are so many lessons that need to be repeated for each generation, that it's not enough to find the right partner. There are-- And there's-- And I-- Even though it's in my best interest to paint this notion of a soulmate and all that BS, I don't believe that there is one single person who is our soulmate. We can gel with a lot of people because it's not about just finding the right partner, but being the right person for each other.

Amrut 14:45 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 14:46 You've been in a marriage of, what? Maybe a decade now.

Amrut 14:49 Mm-hmm.

S. Anil Kumar 14:50 You can reflect on how you grow together-

Amrut 14:52 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 14:53 -and if you had paired up with another person, pair bonded with another person, you might be a different person. Because-

Amrut 14:57 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 14:58 ... it's about being the right person for her, and her adapting to being the right person for you. Let me be careful over here so that it-- I don't make it a winded philosophical reflection on technology. And I will, I will park here, though, because you also talked about AI. I see a second wave of AI in matchmaking these days, thanks to all the progress in recent years with LLMs. If you'd asked me some years earlier, I would have been outright dismissive of AI. Or at least AI, the way it was being painted. Oh, AI matchmaking. I would say that there's a lot of BS in the name of AI.

Amrut 15:45 Uh, can I just ask you here? I, uh, in the previous wave-

S. Anil Kumar 15:49 Yeah.

Amrut 15:50 um, you would look at this sort of like this list of parameters.

S. Anil Kumar 15:56 Yeah.

Amrut 15:56 And you would do, like, parameter, parameter checking, right?

S. Anil Kumar 15:59 Sure.

Amrut 15:59 That, that was the last wave of-

S. Anil Kumar 16:00 Sure, sure.

Amrut 16:01 Like, like how-

S. Anil Kumar 16:02 Yeah

Amrut 16:02 ... like used cars kind of approach.

S. Anil Kumar 16:05 Yeah. And I've had, uh, investors, I've had, uh, hardcore, uh, tech evangelists in my tribe who challenge me: Why am I not, uh, why am I not hyping up all the deep tech inside, uh, our platform under the hood? I'm proud of the tech that we built, but then I tell people that it's-- and I remind my teammates, that we are not a technology company. We are a human-centered, uh, services company because we are offering solutions. They don't come because we have the sexiest website or the coolest tech. They come because of, "Hey, can I find-- Can you solve my problem?"

Amrut 16:43 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 16:43 I remind them that we are a solutions company, not a technology company. And yet, um, um, I say that we swim in so much data, there's so much gold in it. The matching engine, while we're a personalized, uh, service in our recent avatar, Jodi365, and it's only the flagship platform, it's not the only brand, it's not the only platform that we have. We have a portfolio of, uh, products and brands. At its core, um, it's powered by a robust matching engine-

Amrut 17:18 Mm

S. Anil Kumar 17:18 ... a graph database-powered matching engine.

Amrut 17:20 Matching engine, right.

S. Anil Kumar 17:21 So we can comb through millions of possibilities-

Amrut 17:24 Mm

S. Anil Kumar 17:24 ... in a blink of a second. I didn't see any sense in hyping it up, because that's not what people come for. Today, we, uh-- the right way to say it is that we are an app-enabled, personalized matchmaking service. But with the advent of, uh, these LLMs, I see value in human intervention along the lines of what I do in the real world as Mr. Matchmaker. People, Anil uncle to many, as a confidant, as a sounding board, as somebody with patient ears, as somebody who holds a mirror to young singles and older singles, whether they are never married, divorced, dealing with custody battles, dealing with the loss of a spouse, dealing with difficult parents or family members. I see-- When I get challenged on, "Okay, this is..."... uh, value that you're offering as a personalized service, it's high touch. How do you scale it? I see value in cloning myself. I see value in enabling a digital twin inside Jodi365. Because there's a lot of counseling that I do. I had to be use-- careful about using the word counseling, because I'm not a mental health professional, I'm not a licensed counselor. But there's a lot of counsel that I provide that is much appreciated. And to the extent that in this new wave of AI apps, people are talking about an AI matchmaker, I see value in it. Otherwise, you're just combing through what is like a- an online catalog of profiles, swiping right, swiping left-

Amrut 18:50 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 18:51 ... endlessly. You are not conditioned to loin- look beyond these two-dimensional screens and profiles.

Amrut 18:57 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 18:57 And no wonder you have this backlash against these casual dating apps, or even the serious apps, which, um, don't let... don't encourage you to look beyond a two-dimensional profile. You have swiping fatigue. So to the extent that there is investment made into understanding who you are as a person, what makes you tick, what your values are, what your interests are, what your aspirations are, what your partner preferences are, what your must-haves are versus what your nice-to-haves are. The kind of investment that we make-

Amrut 19:27 Mm

S. Anil Kumar 19:27 ... upfront and through the process, because nothing is baked in stone. Preferences are fungible. Uh, you may want something else tomorrow, you may have to-

Amrut 19:35 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 19:35 ... course-correct. To the extent that you have a smart machine that can do it with artificial intelligence, there's value in it, and I might take us there, too.

Amrut 19:45 That's very interesting. I'm also thinking that on the platforms which don't offer a personalized service, which are, um, which are, which are chiefly on scale, AI may have a significant ne- negative impact because it allows people to change their picture, pretend to be-

S. Anil Kumar 20:01 Yeah

Amrut 20:01 ... better articulated than they are.

S. Anil Kumar 20:02 Yeah.

Amrut 20:03 Uh, hype themselves up-

S. Anil Kumar 20:04 Yeah

Amrut 20:05 ... using ChatGPT or-

S. Anil Kumar 20:06 Yeah. Yeah.

Amrut 20:07 So you, you can't even trust somebody's picture now.

S. Anil Kumar 20:10 Yeah, yeah. And, um, which is why, um, again, um, if you want to productize something, you can put garbage out there, and you have scale. There'll be a lot of, uh, collateral damage, but the needle may still be moving for your company, for your investors, and as an industry, we might get a bad rap. It might work for a lot of people, but I have consciously chosen to operate differently-

Amrut 20:34 I-

S. Anil Kumar 20:34 ... recognizing that this is a human problem that we are solving, and we should-- need to come in with empathy. And it's not just in matchmaking, the problem. Even it's recruiting. At my company, we are constantly recruiting, and I'm still hands-on. We don't trust the written applications anymore-

Amrut 20:48 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 20:50 ... because-

Amrut 20:50 Because you don't know whether it's AI or-

S. Anil Kumar 20:53 Yeah

Amrut 20:53 ... human.

S. Anil Kumar 20:54 Yeah. We, we have a sniff test, and we don't even feel the need to plug into these AI detectors. But we are very clear about this: if you use ChatGPT, that's ground for instant disqualification. People have to be careful. And partly why within Jodi365, from an early stage, before... There are a lot of things that we took the lead in. Before the likes of Uber came along with masked phone calls, so that you can call the driver without compromising your phone number, within Jodi365, we enabled calling between potential matches without compromising your phone number.

Amrut 21:27 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 21:27 We're talking a decade-and-a-half ago. Before the likes of these, uh, online dating apps came up with means to verify profiles with a selfie, we baked in video verification that is recorded from through the app. So it's not that you can upload a picture, you can upload a photo ID. Anything can be photoshopped. And with AI... But good luck having a camera record you in real time, having the AI morphing. No. So we would ask people to take a five-second selfie that stays hidden, but allows us to vet that this profile is genuine, this person is real.

Amrut 22:03 I get what you're saying. You're saying it's, uh, the, the service is inherently human, the problem is really old, the solution is really critical. Um, but you're at, y- there's a lot of technology that goes under the hood.

S. Anil Kumar 22:15 Yeah.

Amrut 22:15 And, uh, there is a place-

S. Anil Kumar 22:16 Okay

Amrut 22:16 ... for AI. And I think earlier you said you could use it in a good way-

S. Anil Kumar 22:21 Yeah

Amrut 22:21 ... in a thoughtful way, but you could also use it in a sort of a mass market, get it out of the door.

S. Anil Kumar 22:26 Reckless way.

Amrut 22:27 Reckless way, right.

S. Anil Kumar 22:28 Yeah.

Amrut 22:28 Okay, thank you so much. Um, I've known you for so many years. We were together in some alumni forums, and I think we met again in Sangam this year, which was the big alumni party.

S. Anil Kumar 22:40 Yeah.

Amrut 22:40 Uh, batch of '94 was there. Over-represented, I felt.

S. Anil Kumar 22:43 '95, also. Yeah.

Amrut 22:44 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 22:45 And for good reason, yeah.

Amrut 22:47 Yeah. I mean, what a batch, right?

S. Anil Kumar 22:49 Yeah.

Amrut 22:49 Um, let's, uh, dial back a bit. Can

Amrut 22:53 you tell me about your schooling, your, uh, your IIT days? Uh, it's, it's, uh... For me also, it's nice to hear how the ni- early '90s were.

S. Anil Kumar 23:02 Yeah, yeah. Thanks for asking, and I, I say that, that we are our stories, and the older that I've gotten, the more appreciation that I've got for my story. I grew up in Chennai. Um, Chennai boy, out and out. Even though I was born in Hyderabad, my parents moved here from the time that I was a baby. And I'd like to share this because it's so much about, um, also what is Chennai? The perception of Chennai. It's a lot different than the Chennai, the Madras, in which I grew up. I grew up. I'm fifty-three, right? So you could say I'm a kid of the '80s, early '80s, when from the time that I have my earliest memories. I come from a multicultural home. My father passed away a couple of, few years ago, a South Indian Brahmin from Kerala. My mother, a Sindhi from pre-partition Karachi, and came over safely on a steamer from Karachi, uh, to Mumbai, and her family made Calcutta their home. And my parents met and fell in love at the workplace in the Calcutta of the '60s. My eldest brother was born there. Family then moved to Kanpur, Lucknow.... and then Hyderabad, where they lived for several years. My other brother and I were born there. And my father got another opportunity in Chennai, and I would feel for my poor mom, for whom English was a second language. She didn't know English before she was fifteen, sixteen in Mumbai. And, uh, Tamil, a third language at best, and to relocate to the Madras of the s- mid-'70s was tough for her. Different food, different, uh, language, different customs, but such a cosmopolitan city. I used to get grief from my cooler cousins in Kolkata, "Oh, you sleepy city, Madras."

Amrut 24:59 [chuckles]

S. Anil Kumar 24:59 "Look at Calcutta." And I think about-

Amrut 25:03 Fixed it out now.

S. Anil Kumar 25:04 No, but even otherwise... Oh, sad. I feel for Calcutta.

Amrut 25:06 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 25:06 What a glorious city that has just decayed over the last three, four decades. But I may be biased, and I'd still say that Chennai probably has the best quality of life for a big city in the country.

Amrut 25:21 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 25:21 Hyderabad may come close. I don't know, Pune may have some backers, but there are so many things that are not so good about Delhi. I challenge my friends: Why would you want to live in a gas chamber?

Amrut 25:33 Yeah, it's terrible.

S. Anil Kumar 25:34 There's so much that, uh, Chennai has to offer. No surprise that it's ranked in, uh, New York Times' top fifty cities to see twice for the culture on, uh, maybe a Nat Geo list of top ten foodie cities in the country, in the world.

Amrut 25:52 I know it's... People give Chennai a lot of flak, but my time in Chennai was lovely. I really loved it.

S. Anil Kumar 25:56 Yeah.

Amrut 25:56 I've now moved out. I spent twenty years here.

S. Anil Kumar 25:59 Mm-hmm.

Amrut 26:00 Yeah, great weather-

S. Anil Kumar 26:01 It's like-

Amrut 26:01 -great roads.

S. Anil Kumar 26:02 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, education, uh, culture.

Amrut 26:05 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 26:06 Um, and-

Amrut 26:06 And we are in the middle of Margazhi season, so.

S. Anil Kumar 26:08 Yeah, yeah. I attended school here at one of the good schools in town, and growing up, uh, this was a time when if somebody was bright in s- at school, doing well at school, oh, either engineering or medicine, the two tracks with blinders. And if you were not bright, the third part, the good-for-nothings would study commerce. Yeah. What a pity, and there are so many smart, whip-smart folks who-

Amrut 26:37 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 26:38 ... have a flair for numbers, and they go into accounting and pursue B.Com and beyond, CA and banking, and who knows whatever else opens up for them. I had, uh, this affinity for engineering, maybe the influence of a bright cousin who was a decade older, who studied at what is now one of the NITs. He attended what is in one of the RVCs, Regional College of Engineering, RECs,

S. Anil Kumar 27:05 and, uh, didn't know much about the IITs. I remember vaguely noticing these classified ads for one of the coaching factories. There was a brilliant tutorials in the, uh, late '80s, not knowing what the JEE was, these fancy acronyms. It was an eye-opener for me when I may have been in class eleven or twelve and was very much into the inter-school cultural competition scene, participating in quizzes, general quizzes, uh, general knowledge quizzes, science quizzes, even cultural competitions, um, damsharas. And there was an event at IIT Madras campus on the occasion of what is called the Day of five Billion. May have been a United Nations-promoted event when the population was about to hit five billion. Their way of raising awareness that, oh, probably too many people around.

Amrut 27:57 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 27:58 I'm not a fan of these doomsday prophets. Uh, I remember, uh, in the mid-'80s, oh, oil is going to run out by '20 or 2005, and it seemed way out there, but I'm more of an optimist. Um, but I'm glad that there was this, that occasion that brought me to campus, and I remember a jeep being, feeling as if I was in Wonderland, and I thought that, "Wow, this, this is the IIT that they speak of, one of the IITs that they speak of." It became my dream to walk through the portals of this institution. And-

Amrut 28:34 But that, that first-

S. Anil Kumar 28:36 Yeah

Amrut 28:37 ... visit to campus-

S. Anil Kumar 28:38 Yeah

Amrut 28:39 -because you walk through the trees, and you, or you take a bus or whatever.

S. Anil Kumar 28:42 Yeah.

Amrut 28:43 Go through the trees, and you see the wildlife.

S. Anil Kumar 28:44 Yeah.

Amrut 28:44 It's just hits you in a different way, right?

S. Anil Kumar 28:47 Yeah, yeah. Neither of my parents attended college.

Amrut 28:50 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 28:50 Imagine that. And here I've gone on to earn a bachelor's BTech from IIT Madras, and-

Amrut 28:56 And then to Chicago Booth.

S. Anil Kumar 28:58 Uh-huh, but that came much later. So I'll sort of compress my journey. I... And I posted just last night, I have an alphabet soup of credentials: BTech, MS, PhD, a Professional Engineer license in the US, and then an MBA.

Amrut 29:12 Oh, you're a professional engineer, licensed engineer?

S. Anil Kumar 29:14 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amrut 29:14 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 29:15 So I had the Professional Engineer license, which meant that I had to demonstrate that I had competence in my discipline and was also practicing under the apprenticeship of, um, trained professionals. So, uh, my journey was, yes, setting sights on this, plodding my way through it, not wanting to go through the tutorial model or these pre-internet postal-

Amrut 29:39 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 29:40 ... classes, where booklets would be sent by mail.

Amrut 29:42 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 29:42 You'd have to te- send in your answers.

Amrut 29:44 Test papers.

S. Anil Kumar 29:45 Test prep-

Amrut 29:45 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 29:45 ... kind of service. I took lessons from, uh, college professors who offered math coaching, physics coaching, chemistry coaching. I didn't... Imagine, I thought that I could get by without chemistry tuition the first time, and I needed two attempts at JEE to get through.

Amrut 30:03 You had two attempts?

S. Anil Kumar 30:04 I had, I had two attempts.

Amrut 30:05 Back in '90?

S. Anil Kumar 30:06 My first attempt was, uh, in 1989, when I finished high school, uh, and, um, was bummed out that I didn't get through.... but in reality, I was underprepared, and it was tough for me, tough for many of us then. I didn't care about school. It was- and for me, it was either IIT or nothing. Some of it may be my personality, all or nothing.

Amrut 30:28 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 30:28 It's either this or nothing else. My parents, loving, invested parents, were horrified when I said that, "No, I'm not going to attend any other college. It's either IIT or nothing for me." And I remember my father especially getting grief from some of his siblings, "Hey, this is the padips in the family." Tamil slang for-

Amrut 30:49 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 30:50 ... the, um-

Amrut 30:50 Padips. How do you-

S. Anil Kumar 30:52 Studious

Amrut 30:52 -translate padips?

S. Anil Kumar 30:53 Studious.

Amrut 30:54 Is it?

S. Anil Kumar 30:54 Studious.

Amrut 30:55 I feel it has more like-

S. Anil Kumar 30:56 Well, it has study.

Amrut 30:56 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 30:56 It has, it has a negative, pejorative, right? "Oh, padips." There are enough ways in which I can demonstrate that I'm more than padips, so I wear it as a badge.

Amrut 31:04 Nerdy.

S. Anil Kumar 31:05 Nerdy, yeah.

Amrut 31:06 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 31:06 Good equivalent. And he's the one... My middle brother flunked out of school. My eldest brother's college education was disrupted. He was five years older, went to the US and, uh, w- on an invitation from an elder uncle, and who suggested, "Hey, why don't you stay on here? We can get you on a student visa." And he began college in New York, but then he fell ill and, uh, didn't quite make the visa transition, so he came back and was bedridden for months. Jaundice, got a relapse, so he lost a year after beginning, after a year of college. And my-- but then to his credit, he went back and finished his degree in Accounts and Economics from Queens College in New York. And my middle brother got so much grief, and I talk about how he went on to attain once-in-a-generation success. So to my parents' credit, they allowed us to blossom, grow in whichever direction we saw fit. Uh, and this was my chosen path, and they trusted that, "Yeah, ziddi hai, he's a stubborn ass, stubborn as a mule," but that same quality gets manifested as determination, as perseverance. So I persevered, uh, got a rank, uh, the next year in JEE, and still feeling, feeling bummed out because, uh, the most that I could... The, the only option that I could get at IIT Madras was naval architecture, and I didn't even know, what is this thing, naval architecture? Yeah, sure, it's an engineering discipline, but ships have been made for as long as civilization has existed, which, to talk about, uh, Chennai and Chennai culture, the Cholas are renowned for-

Amrut 32:59 Their ships

S. Anil Kumar 33:00 ... their-

Amrut 33:00 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 33:00 Yeah, expertise with shipbuilding.

Amrut 33:02 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 33:02 And that's what allowed them to go and conquer so many kingdoms-

Amrut 33:05 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 33:06 ... and lands in Southeast Asia. How did this Angkor Wat, uh, show up in this euphoria?

Amrut 33:12 That is true. India was the leading shipbuilding nation till the British came and systematically destroyed our, uh, ports and our ability to build ships, and basically fined the hell out of us if we built any ships ourselves.

S. Anil Kumar 33:23 Among other-

Amrut 33:23 We had to use-

S. Anil Kumar 33:24 -industries.

Amrut 33:25 Oh, for sure. [chuckles]

S. Anil Kumar 33:26 Yeah. Yeah.

Amrut 33:27 You're right.

S. Anil Kumar 33:28 Yeah.

Amrut 33:28 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 33:28 Oh, but, but they built the railway tracks for us. Yeah.

Amrut 33:31 And we are supposed to be grateful. [chuckles]

S. Anil Kumar 33:33 Yeah. Oh, I, I told you that I would come, I would not hesitate to unleash-

Amrut 33:37 Mm

S. Anil Kumar 33:37 ... but I don't have a bone to pick against, uh, any one species. There's the good, the bad, the ugly in every tribe.

Amrut 33:43 Yeah, I also feel like since Britain is not doing great as a nation now, it feels a little weird to pick on them.

S. Anil Kumar 33:50 Mm. Mm, and to be fair, the tribal instinct is in all of us.

Amrut 33:55 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 33:55 Now, if we could, we would have gone out and conquered as well. So-

Amrut 34:00 Mm, alternative

S. Anil Kumar 34:00 ... somebody had the better guns and steel, so they conquered. Good for them. Um, back to my journey.

Amrut 34:11 So you were, uh, naval-

S. Anil Kumar 34:13 Naval architecture.

Amrut 34:13 You, you joined the naval architecture?

S. Anil Kumar 34:15 Architecture, and thinking that, "Oh, my goodness, what will I do beyond this?" Oddly enough, I was one of the only two folks maybe in my graduating class who persevered, who stayed on in the, um, industry. I went on to get a PhD, so an additional six years, and I went on to work at a marine consulting firm for another seven years in that.

Amrut 34:36 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 34:37 So I gave two decades of my life to this discipline, while coming in with the intent that I will work hard to get in the top, uh, ten percent of my class at the end of the first year, so that I could qualify for what is, and is still known as, a branch change, to get out of naval architecture. And the extents to which we go, uh, I so loved campus life, so loved campus life, but found it so distracting, and didn't do very well in my first, uh, semester. And I thought that there's so much fun on campus, and the clean fun, so many activities, sports and games. I was long and, uh, physically fit, and, um, into sports. Cricket was a boyhood passion, and just the camaraderie on campus. So while retaining my hostel room in the se- in the second semester, I chose to be a day scholar. I had that privilege. I had a meal plan at the hostel mess at the time. Every hostel had a cafeteria, unlike the centralized cafeterias these days. I had an uptick in my GPA, but not enough to get a branch change, so I thought, "Okay, so this is where it turned. All right." One of the, one of the strange, um, pieces of advice that I got from somebody who tutored me for chemistry for JEE stuck with me, which is that, "You know, more important than what you do is being the best in whatever you do."

Amrut 35:56 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 35:58 So that was his way of comforting me, "Beta, so what is the naval architecture? Be the best that you can be." And I thought, "Yeah, I'll be the best that I could be." So I worked hard to be among the top of my peers in naval architecture. It was a small cohort. There were fifteen people who were admitted, the class size then. I was shocked to learn that the incoming cohort size is seventy-five today.... so good for the country that there is this investment in infrastructure, there's this-

Amrut 36:23 Yeah, there's a resurgence.

S. Anil Kumar 36:24 Vibrant shipbuilding and space tech.

Amrut 36:26 I want to say, though, that I know we give grief to civil architecture as a branch compared to other branches-

S. Anil Kumar 36:31 Yeah.

Amrut 36:31 -but the minute you walk into a shipyard or you walk into a dock, and you see all these gigantic structures being built and-

S. Anil Kumar 36:40 Yeah

Amrut 36:40 ... or, uh, you know, an aircraft carrier or something, there's just something like, something magnificent about it, right?

S. Anil Kumar 36:46 Yeah.

Amrut 36:46 Just-

S. Anil Kumar 36:46 Yeah

Amrut 36:47 ... overwhelming size of engineering and achievement of engineering.

S. Anil Kumar 36:50 Yeah, yeah. I'm not the best ambassador for this, if I am to be true to myself. I can tell you that while I was in marine consulting, I was a little dispirited. That's the right word. Because I felt that my ambitions were greater, and my desired footprint was far broader than could be realized within my narrow domain of expertise, and I wanted to broaden my footprint, all as part of this foolish desire to leave a legacy, make my own little dent in the universe, and have it be beyond this narrow footprint. There's a recurring theme over here, uh, which has to do with my transition away from academia into consulting, away from consulting into matchmaking. And it dates to how, um... I was in my third year, and that's when you had to give thought to what next in life. And I remember giving grief to some of my classmates who were taking a crack at just about everything, wanting to hold on to optionality. When I love to amplify a lovely commencement speech and a companion essay by a professor at Harvard, Mihir Desai, A Case Against Optionality, and he says that you're better off pursuing alpha, the investment terminology, better at pursuing alpha than retaining multiple options. Not different from the advice from medieval days, which is when you're going out to conquer a land and you reach there, you, yeah, you hit a beachhead, burn the boats, no going back. Pursue alpha. There's so much merit to it.

Amrut 38:31 That's very interesting. And I want to tie it back to what you said when we were talking about your service-

S. Anil Kumar 38:35 Yeah

Amrut 38:36 ... about how young people sometimes meet one person-

S. Anil Kumar 38:39 Yeah

Amrut 38:39 ... and they're getting along.

S. Anil Kumar 38:40 Yeah, yeah.

Amrut 38:40 But they still have this feeling-

S. Anil Kumar 38:41 You gotta invest

Amrut 38:41 ... what if there's somebody-

S. Anil Kumar 38:43 Yeah

Amrut 38:43 ... better for me?

S. Anil Kumar 38:44 You got to, you got to invest.

Amrut 38:46 Land your boats.

S. Anil Kumar 38:47 Yeah.

Amrut 38:47 Burn your boats.

S. Anil Kumar 38:47 Burn your boats. Um, but careful not to burn your bridges, that's a not--

S. Anil Kumar 38:52 different expression.

Amrut 38:53 Fair enough.

S. Anil Kumar 38:53 Yeah, be good. A-allow me to dwell on this. So you had, um, people taking the GATE to get into M.Tech at IIT. You had people taking the GMAT to pursue an MBA right out of undergrad. I saw advice against doing an MBA right out of college. An MBA is something that is enriched by experience, uh, work experience. Otherwise, it will be all theory, so go out, work for at least a few years. And then there were people who were applying for, um, grad school in the US in engineering and the sciences. That is what motivated me the most, because I thought about what's the best thing that I could do with my life, which is to make some contributions, advance humanity in some chosen field, in my field. By then, I'd taken an interest in hydrodynamics. So I thought, let me pursue that for a career. Let me write the... That's what I aspired to, write the next Bible in marine hydrodynamics. So, uh, worked hard to get into the best programs in my field. I say this with pride. Got admits into MIT, Berkeley, Michigan. Applied to ten programs, got admitted into all. But it was important for me to have my studies fully funded, not just tuition be waived, but also get an assistantship. Had just four, three and a half offers. Berkeley offered me a fellowship, but it wasn't going to cover all expenses. Uh, I was headed to the University of Maryland for a straight PhD, but got jitters, as in, here I'm committing to a path. You do a PhD, and that's your terminal degree that decides what beyond. I'm not even sure what's the expertise-

Amrut 40:37 Wow!

S. Anil Kumar 40:37 ... of this professor that I've been picked to train under. I felt more comfortable taking a two, two-step path to a PhD and beyond, getting a master's along the way.

Amrut 40:47 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 40:48 So I got a master's from the University of Iowa, specializing in computational ship hydrodynamics.

Amrut 40:53 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 40:54 Essentially coming up with computational models to simulate fluid flows, in this case, around ships, to predict waves generated by ships, so that you can help to minimize the signatures of ships, so that these signatures are not spotted by satellites. A lot of the funding in the US would be from the-

Amrut 41:13 Navy

S. Anil Kumar 41:13 ... Office of Naval Research.

Amrut 41:14 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 41:15 Yeah, the equivalent. The Department of Navy had an Office of Naval Research, which would pump in as much as they need to. And just as you had stealth bombers, you also have stealth, um, uh, ships. Naval combatants minimize their signatures. And not just to minimize wave signatures, also to predict the powering requirements of ship. By how- ships are essentially wave makers. As you, as you press forward, you're generating these waves. So if you, um, have, um, better, sleeker hull forms, you have, uh, lower powering requirements. And traditionally, how would this be done? How would you come up with fairer, sleeker designs? You have, um, wind tunnels in which you test F1 cars. Look at F1, right? How many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by racing teams to improve their technology every year? You have aircraft also that are tested in wind tunnels. The equivalent for, uh, ships are towing tanks. These tanks that are maybe a hundred meters long, in which you have these scaled wooden models, wax models, that would be towed, and you would measure the resistance required to, uh-... through the, through water. And then you think about, oh, let's chamfer it a little bit over here. Let's pare it a little bit over here to improve the design. How laborious! Computers are what? Glorified, uh, workhorses.

Amrut 42:41 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 42:41 Uh, if you come up with a way... You think of the equations that model fluid flows, think of a way to discretize these equations that can be fed into a computer, come up with a model to solve those, uh, equations, you're essentially simulating the flow of these, these natural processes.

Amrut 43:01 It's very interesting to hear you speak with such clarity and passion, even after so many years about your... I guess this was your master's thesis?

S. Anil Kumar 43:09 And subsequently, my PhD also.

Amrut 43:11 Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 43:11 I went into marine consulting as a way to broaden my footprint, so it helped that I was set a full service naval architecture, and, uh, marine engineering, and, uh, transportation consulting firm. Uh, boutique firm, stayed consciously small. To their credit, they didn't want to grow through boom times and then mass layoffs. To this day, I've been so positively influenced by my, uh, early youth in the US, and coming across such kind folks, good-hearted folks in the Midwest, known for its, uh, good nature. As much as people know that, yeah, the US can be a cutthroat place where money talks, uh, even at the firm that I worked with, good people. But I, um, also think that, um, they put it well, I was too ambitious for my own good in many ways. I was restless, wanted to go beyond this. But I wasn't like the typical they see in the US who thinks that, "Hey, green card. When do I get a green card, and how do I go about this?" Yeah, I loved my life in Seattle, where I was putting my roots down, working at this consulting firm. They are still a consciously forty, fifty percent firm, even though they've been around for five decades then. Had, um, uh, my heart in the right place, had causes that I felt dearly about, so I took on volunteer and then leadership roles at an NGO. Served on its international board, so became active in the community. And I thought, "Oh, what better way to make an impact by building on that?" Maybe starting a business, building an organization, leaving a legacy. And then I paid the price for not having cared about permanent residency, even though my- I could have filed within week one of finishing my, uh, doctorate. And three years later, the wait for a green card was non-linear. But I bided my time, and while biding my time, I thought that as part of my own continued professional growth, may be good to get these broader skills in management and entrepreneurship. Today, I would tell folks, "If you want to be an entrepreneur, the best thing that you could do is to join a startup." Join a growing startup. Join a well-funded startup, probably after S- Series B-

Amrut 45:32 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 45:32 ... where there is not, uh, there's still a lot of growth, and you're not another cog in the wheel, but you have a lot of responsibility that you can take on, a lot of visibility among investors also, for that- so that when you're ready to go and launch your own thing, you'd have some people who've seen what you can do, and you'd learn so much.

Amrut 45:52 Yeah, um, starting up is the university of hard knocks.

S. Anil Kumar 45:56 Yeah. Yeah.

Amrut 45:57 Uh, you learn faster-

S. Anil Kumar 45:59 Yeah

Amrut 45:59 ... than anything else.

S. Anil Kumar 46:00 Yeah, and ask me about all the-

Amrut 46:01 Hard knocks

S. Anil Kumar 46:02 ... things that I've learned the hard way, by my own mistakes. Fast forward, um, I decided while I was waiting for permanent resi- residency to come through and all the career mobility that would come through with that, I attended a weekend program, MBA... weekend MBA program at the Chicago Booth School of Business, and, uh, found it very enriching. Uh, very enriching. Uh, yeah, it was a highlight of my program to get to apprentice at what is now one of the leading angel investment networks in the US, Hyde Park, in the Midwest, at least. Hyde Park Angels, that was supported by the schools, founded by alumni of the program. And I got to be on the other side of the table, helping to screen startups that were applying for funding, helping to curate and present select startups on a quarterly basis, on a weekly basis, and culminating in a quarterly presentation before the angels in the network. And going beyond that, I was so into it, also getting to, uh, getting the opportunity to invest in a startup that I saw promise in,

S. Anil Kumar 47:10 getting to be on the deal team, and getting to work with a startup post-funding because it was a portfolio company. With all the goodwill that I learned, and I did outstanding work at HBA, I had doors being graciously opened into venture capital for me. Uh, a lot of goodwill bank.

Amrut 47:30 This is what? 2008, 2007.

S. Anil Kumar 47:33 Going into 2009. I had mentors who were graciously opening doors. I could well have joined a fund, but no, <i which I couldn't startup karna tha.</i I wanted to do a startup of my own. And the problem that most excited me, the opportunity that most, uh, excited me was related to the problem that I'd personally known for the previous decade. I was thirty-six then in early 2009, in the homestretch of my Booth MBA. By then, I'd got my green card, so I had the mobility to... It came in during the midway point of my program, conveniently between quarters in the second half of December. So I quit my job, locked the door, switched the lights off, packed what ultimately were thirteen suitcases, and I moved to within two blocks of campus and finished the second half of my program, effectively full time.... and, uh, I said before that it was very enriching to get that experiential learning opportunity while going for my Booth MBA. And yeah, being in my thirties, mid-thirties already, taking stock of how there was this problem that is unsolved for me. I was doing well professionally, but personally, I had not found my wife yet. Mm. I had been still single, even though I was not only open to the idea of finding a life partner from my mid-twenties, but was proactive about it. I wasn't one of those folks who would think, "Ah, outsource it to- delegate it to mom and dad." They'd find somebody, I'd fly to India and return with a bride. Mm. My parents chose each other for themselves, uh, a generation earlier, so we always had that agency that we'd find somebody on our own. And I thought that I did in my mid-twenties. Fell in love with a sweetheart from the American South, found her online. We found each other online. And I'm glad that there were online options already in the first wave of the web, Web 1.0, Web 1.2, as we refer to them these days. Uh, because the kind of person that I was looking for would be tough to find in the course of everyday life. Very discerning preferences. I'll not dwell on it. Don't mean to digress. But what do you do? No surprise that I had to deal with a breakup, allowed hair. I took my time licking my wounds and making peace with the breakup, and being comfortable with giving my heart again, risking giving my heart again, because it comes with the risk of heartbreak. I found somebody I thought at thirty, again, conveniently online. And this time I had more means that I could invest in coming up with a lovely ring and a surprise wedding proposal, and then going on to think of what kind of wedding. She was German Canadian, uh, another long-distance relationship for a while. Even ideating on baby names that would sit well with her culture and mine, and drafting a wedding guest list. But again, I came to know heartbreak. And I would do what the typical consumer would do, which is if you get tired of the food at this restaurant, "Oh, never again going there." Maybe trying another platform or thinking that, "Oh, I'm not eating outside. Maybe the best way is to cook your own meals at home." I'm talking of the analogy. Let me just find somebody organically. How? I was not into the bar, club, bar hopping or night clubbing routine, the partying lifestyle. Where's the time and bandwidth for that? So focused on my- Career ... professional growth. Yeah. So how at least make time to socialize with friends twice a month, or make time for activities that I would enjoy, whether it's hiking through the Sierra Club, or a running group, or a vegetarian potluck- Yeah ... or a reading group. So you find somebody with similar interests and worldviews. It's tough. And, uh, coming to realize that, yeah, it's a jungle out there, but then thinking that if this is not working, this shit isn't working, let me try something else. This is not working, let me try something else. While-- or taking a backseat altogether and I need to detox from all of this. I see that happening. It's just in every generation, let me focus on something else. Let me come back some months later. I had at least the good fortune of not having family breathing down my neck. Also, I remember giving what I'd describe as the speech of my life then, when I was thirty-one maybe, and my mom asking me while on a long-distance call, I was in Seattle. I still remember where I was in my house then, my lovely new house that I had custom-built. And, "Oh, beta, what about you? When will you get settled?" My older brothers were married by then. And I made a case that, "Hey, look, it's not as if I don't, uh, have any ideas of getting married." You've known-- She even sent token, uh, gold earrings to my first American- Mm ... girlfriend, who was called out, not called out for it. A coworker would say, "You must have an Indian boyfriend because you're wearing these shiny twenty-two karat yellow earrings." Yeah. Indians go for twenty-two karat yellow. Americans, maybe eighteen karat at most, fourteen karat that sells better with their- Skin ... Caucasians with their lighter complexion. Uh, so you know that I've had not just intent, but even, uh, demonstrated intent to find a life partner, having chosen not just once, but twice. What will be, will be. Uh, and you may worry that I'm not giving it due time and attention, but I also have my aspirations, 说 话 的 艺 术 , life में कुछ बना, want to be something, want to do something with my life meaningful. And I told her that my wish was that I would not get so caught up with what is going on, that I would not be like a horse with blinders. Or even if I were, I would at least notice this pari that might cross my scene- Mm ... that I might notice some fun. Wow! Yeah. Where was this woman all along? That my eyes were open. And I said that, "Of course, um, I, I would let you know when I would find that person. I would hope that I would find her sooner rather than later. But please don't keep bringing it up, because it only reminds me of the thing that is missing in life." Your heartbreak. No, not, not so much heartbreak, but don't remind me that life would be more fulfilling with the right person. Mm. But today, I counsel folks, younger folks, that I would rather wish that you were... When you're twenty-nine and stressing about, "Oh, I'm going to be thirty, I might be seen as an old maid." I would rather that you're thirty-one and still discerning and single, rather than get hastily hitched at thirty. Because- Correct ... look at the irony. I got married late in life. I found, uh, the person that I eventually married at thirty-eight, just shy of my thirty-ninth birthday.... after a whirlwind coach trip, this was a couple of years into building Jodi365. So I founded the parent company in Chicago in the spring of two thousand and nine, and it was clear for me at the very beginning that I have to be in India. This has to have a presence in India, too, for a combination of reasons. I saw that, first of all, um, my mindset had shift. I was no longer like the average consumer of these platforms. I thought that here I am going through this top-tier MBA program. I'm investing in-- screening and investing in startups. I'm recognizing this unsolved problem, which is affecting not just me, but so many in my peer group. This, uh, underserved segment could use a better solution. Let me go and do a better job than these bozos out there, the prevailing matrimonial sites.

S. Anil Kumar 55:28 While also recognizing that people in my peer group were not quite ready for a chatmangi patbiya kind of solution, who would, as in, get chatmangi patbiya engagement, quick engagement, quick, uh, wedding. Who would want to get to know somebody over time-

Amrut 55:46 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 55:46 ... at least organically. If not organically, semi-arranged.

Amrut 55:50 The way you are describing your own journey feels a lot more human, and it-

S. Anil Kumar 55:56 Yeah

Amrut 55:56 ... feels like this is a story that's happening all around us, and-

S. Anil Kumar 56:01 Yeah

Amrut 56:01 ... everybody is navigating through these intertwining-

S. Anil Kumar 56:04 Yeah

Amrut 56:04 ... career aspiration, pressure to sort of make something of yourself, leave some legacy. At the same time, you have to spend time finding a partner-

S. Anil Kumar 56:12 Yeah

Amrut 56:12 ... and deal with the setbacks in that journey.

S. Anil Kumar 56:16 Yeah.

Amrut 56:16 And, uh, how that ties up with things like: "Oh, but I have to wait for three years for my green card," and, "Oh, but I have to wait for this other thing to finish," and-

S. Anil Kumar 56:25 Yeah

Amrut 56:25 ... uh-

S. Anil Kumar 56:26 Yeah

Amrut 56:26 ... the constraints that, uh, you know, life offers-

S. Anil Kumar 56:28 Yeah

Amrut 56:28 ... at various stages.

S. Anil Kumar 56:29 No, it's a useful summary because, uh, I take storytelling quite seriously, and there may have been a couple of unfinished thoughts over there, but true, um, it's a real problem. I remember being on H-One V- Visa, and while going on dates with potential, um, girlfriend or people who may be wife material, understandably, being seen as a flight risk. "Oh, what if he loses his job? What if he decides to head back to India?" And that problem is even more, and not just... Even if somebody were in India. So I was saying that I counsel people to take their time. So my solution was not to introduce an alternative that took the form of a dating platform, because I would remind myself that this is still India, where on Valentine's Day, to this day, you have the politically motivated outfits-

Amrut 57:23 Mm

S. Anil Kumar 57:23 ... the Pakks and the Sanghis, who would want to make a point of harassing people who may be walking hand in hand and getting them forcibly married. Either call her your sister or make her your wife, to make a show out of it. Who would go and smash-

Amrut 57:39 Some glass

S. Anil Kumar 57:39 ... store windows of Hallmark.

Amrut 57:40 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 57:40 "Oh, Valentine's Day, you're poisoning the Indian youth." Chase men and women out of these cafes in Kerala, because what's this? It's a meetup place for dates. What is this? And chase women wearing jeans out of pubs in Bangalore. A smart alternative would be a hybrid between the prevailing matrimonial sites and emerging dating sites. So that was my- that was the genesis of Jodi365.

Amrut 58:08 Nice.

S. Anil Kumar 58:08 With the tagline, to this day, "Find the right partner," even while we make it, uh, we made it a personalized service. "Find the right partner at your own pace." Um, it was important for me to have a presence in India, because the times were changing so much in India, and young people were getting so much more agency to decide where they studied, where they worked, living away from home, not having a curfew as in, "Hey, you've been out until past ten pm. Where were you? With whom? Doing what?" When you have the kind of independence that comes with being on your own economically, you also have social independence, whom you choose to hang out with, whom you choose to get to know potentially romantically, whom you choose to date, and whom you choose to marry, and on what timeframe. And with all this flux that are happening, I thought that there was need for a smart, sensible alternative without leading people to get drowned in the swamp of emerging dating apps. And I stayed true to that positioning, even as I saw... And I look back, it's a dozen years ago, no, more than a-- two thousand and twelve, uh, when, uh, to their credit, there was a top-tier VC firm globally that had an outpost in, in India already. To their credit, they recognized that the so-called matrimonial space was ripe for disruption.

Amrut 59:31 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 59:32 Their words. And they had wanted to back something in this space. Look at it, huh? There are still investors making bets on newer apps to this day. We're talking generation later, because this is a problem that is not going away. It's evergreen. Uh, I say this, if you're in education, if you're in health, if you're in matrimony, these are fundamental areas where there'll always be demand.

Amrut 1:00:02 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:00:02 It's just that the solution will need to adapt with the, with the times.

Amrut 1:00:05 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:00:07 And people may have thought that matrimonial sites had solved the problem.

Amrut 1:00:11 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:00:11 No, those are ice I unleash on them. They're just glorified databases.

Amrut 1:00:18 Actually, uh, in, in just in addition to what-- how, how you chose to phrase it, I feel like anybody who comes and says, "This is a solved problem," I want to tell them: "Look, it is solved for now."

S. Anil Kumar 1:00:30 Yeah. Yeah.

Amrut 1:00:31 In two years, it's going to be a new problem.

S. Anil Kumar 1:00:33 Yeah. Yeah.

Amrut 1:00:34 There's nothing as a solved problem.

S. Anil Kumar 1:00:35 So well put, because-... in, in, uh, a pitch deck. I don't need a pitch deck anymore because I can tell someone, tell VCs and say, "Screw you, I control my own destiny." I- I'm running a profitable, successful business, and have enough growth that I can fund through profits. Inshallah, or Takastu. So, um, to their credit, they said that they'd been looking at emerging players in this space. I'm not sure how they came to know about Jodi365, because we are not trying to be everything for everybody. You end up being nothing for nobody. To budding entrepreneurs, one of these, uh, learned lessons, which is pick a beachhead. Don't try to be everything for everybody, you'll get lost in the flood. So the, uh, beachhead that I picked was catering to this underserved segment of well-educated, accomplished single professionals. There have-- there has been a segment with high intent that has appreciated Jodi365, and I wanted to stay true to this because I could relate to it. People who are too busy to put themselves out there, so we tell them that, "We'd be your concierge, we'd be your facilitator, we'd be your trusted intermediary. We'd do the heavy lifting. We'd do the searching, the screening, the curating," not just in our curated database, because I keep it real, man. One of the ways in which I earn people's... You earn people's trust, is by being transparent, keeping it real, being straight. I don't claim to have a monopoly on all the good singles out there. And I say also, in ways that make sense, "Don't see me as a shopkeeper peddling with an inventory of finite profiles that may be gathering dust." Somebody may have come on the platform twelve weeks earlier, and may have already gotten to know somebody, begun getting to know somebody, to the extent that they say, "Hey, no, I'm not open to new applicants."

Amrut 1:02:22 Yeah. The better analogy is like a librarian who can find-- help you find a nice book.

S. Anil Kumar 1:02:27 I say... I ask people to think of me as a headhunter, in much the same way that an executive search firm operates.

Amrut 1:02:34 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:02:34 I like the librarian analogy, too. If I have to fetch you a book, I would... But I wouldn't work with other libraries. I refuse to work with marriage bureaus. I refuse to work with other personalized services, because I don't know how careful they would be-

Amrut 1:02:49 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:02:49 -in keeping-

Amrut 1:02:50 What is their internal process?

S. Anil Kumar 1:02:51 Yeah.

Amrut 1:02:52 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:02:52 And, and people come to us with all kinds of grievances about other players. I don't need to-

Amrut 1:02:59 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:02:59 ... broadcast any of them. They're the usual suspects. And it's been both-- I'll go back to something that you said earlier, "No solution is permanent." Uh, the related thing is, there are so many flavors out there, even among the personalized services. When you see all the garbage, harsh word, when you see all the garbage out there, there are stereotypes about how this industry also operates. It's both a challenge and an opportunity. An opportunity because if you're only a half-decent human being, half-competent business, you're so much at a higher bar than these idiots out there.

Amrut 1:03:40 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:03:41 But the challenge is that you think you're also in the same industry. Would I have to deal with what I've d- had to deal, deal with with other players? And it's okay.

Amrut 1:03:51 Over the last, uh, fifteen, sixteen years, have you had to reinvent your own solutions?

S. Anil Kumar 1:03:56 Constantly. Constantly, because the space has also evolved. Starting with realizing that, uh... Oh, how can I not keep going back to humbling lessons? I recognized that the matrimonial sites were operating as, uh, catalogues of profiles.

Amrut 1:04:15 Mm. Yeah, I think people also have sort of a checklist-

S. Anil Kumar 1:04:19 Mindset, mindset.

Amrut 1:04:20 -checklist mindset.

S. Anil Kumar 1:04:21 Yeah. And then I thought that, "Hey, uh, you're just going by these criteria, these biodata-based matches." And I said that, "I'm going to match people, not biodata." And I'm so grateful... I think about-- I must have come across as a, as an honest young man, because I reached out to a professor at an Ivy League, uh, uh... Not Ivy League, Penn State. He was a researcher in the field of, uh, personality, and he had a code base for, uh, what is a well-established model for, uh, understanding personality, that is known as the Big Five model or the OCEAN model. OCEAN is-

Amrut 1:05:08 Yeah, O-C-E-A-N

S. Anil Kumar 1:05:10 ... OCEAN. For those who don't know it, uh, there are these five-

Amrut 1:05:13 Conscientiousness.

S. Anil Kumar 1:05:15 Yeah. OCEAN for openness-

Amrut 1:05:16 Openness

S. Anil Kumar 1:05:17 ... C for conscientiousness-

Amrut 1:05:18 Conscientiousness

S. Anil Kumar 1:05:18 ... E for extraversion, A for agreeableness, N for neuroticism. And within each of these dimensions, six facets. So thirty different facets to one's personality. Uh, empirical. So there is a database of-- a huge database of people who've taken it. And I say, taken it, taken this personality inventory. It's not a personality test, and I appreciated the distinction. It's not a test about your personality, it's an inventory of where you rank, how agreeable are you compared to the population base? How neurotic are you compared to this population base? And I remember, uh, taking that myself, that inventory myself, and feeling pleased that, uh, on dimension of anger, so one of the facets, I forget on the which dimension it may have come, and I may be butchering facet versus dimension. I was in the eighteenth percentile. I thought, "Okay, not bad for somebody who aspires to a stoic, ideal Zen state."

Amrut 1:06:15 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:06:16 I thought that, "Wow, this would be so helpful to include in the product," because if you are to find somebody who may be right for you, how can you even know who's right for you if you don't know yourself first?

Amrut 1:06:26 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:06:26 So let me help you know yourself first.

Amrut 1:06:28 And-

S. Anil Kumar 1:06:29 At the same time, sounds great, I've-- I'm coming-- there's a but coming, which is how humble I was. I reached out to him. I said that, "Hey, I would love to, uh, uh, incorporate... This is what I'm heading back to India to build out of India." And I'd already founded the company-... again, I must have reached out with, with respect, uh, with a personal connection, and I said, "Hey, I would love to build something like this." He handed me the code.

Amrut 1:07:02 Oh, wow!

S. Anil Kumar 1:07:03 So that-

Amrut 1:07:03 That went directly into your product?

S. Anil Kumar 1:07:05 Yeah. India didn't care. That's my... Maybe harsh to say that, but yeah, India didn't effing care. So Akasam two, why did a approach? So we- while it is still an option, we deprecated it. But the early idea was some people care about horoscope matching, because it's sort of a black box in which you say that, "Okay, based on your nakshatra, based on your rashi, you may be of this personality, quite likely to be a match with somebody of this personality." In the Vedic horoscope, equivalent of Western zodiac sun signs.

Amrut 1:07:41 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:07:41 Oh, you're a Libra, you may be a good match for this sign.

Amrut 1:07:43 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:07:43 You may be a Leo, you may be a match with another sign. And we thought that, okay, while respecting people, what the market wants, without evangelizing horoscope matching, I take a neutral view of it. Um, you can choose the personality-based model, or you can base a horoscope-based model. I even had a handshake deal with the largest provider of horoscope, uh, software to the established matrimonial sites. In my competitive landscape deck, I talked about how there have been so many pivots among so many players. You have the dating apps on one end, you have the matrimonial apps on one end, and on the other axis, I have serious versus casual. And in one quadrant, you have the Tinders, and then a Bumble trying to be an alternative to the Tinder, and then you have a Hinge that tore itself apart.

Amrut 1:08:32 This is the same as the sedans wanting to be the SUVs, and the SUVs wanting to be the sedans.

S. Anil Kumar 1:08:36 And some trying to have everything under their-

Amrut 1:08:38 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:08:38 ... umbrella. So you have a Honda, that-

Amrut 1:08:41 Mini SUV sedan. [chuckles]

S. Anil Kumar 1:08:43 Uh, and then... No, they came out with the Lexus. And, uh, uh, Honda, you have the Accord, and then Toyota has a Camry for people who want to go beyond the Civics and the Corollas. And then you have the Acura and the Lexus competing against the Mercedes. Whereas it's easier for a Mercedes or a BMW, because they are-

Amrut 1:09:02 They are just-

S. Anil Kumar 1:09:03 ... pure play.

Amrut 1:09:03 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:09:04 Right on the band for the string. But BMW, they got up the Mini Cooper.

Amrut 1:09:07 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:09:08 Get the young ones early.

Amrut 1:09:10 Beautiful.

S. Anil Kumar 1:09:11 Oh, where do we-- where all one can take this? But staying focused as best as I can, the space has evolved so much. Most of those players crashed and burned, and the survivors, somebody thought that they could raise a war chest and outcompete the emerging Tinder clones. I for- It may have been Helion that invested five point six million dollars into what was, uh, Vee. No, no, uh, Vee took a lot of money, TrulyMadly. They started off as, um, uh, this is a cringy, um, tagline, "Such much love." I'm surprised that I still remember. But why would it not be back? To his credit, one of the co-founders was also a co-founder of MakeMyTrip, right? Tried and tested, been there, done that. As against some of these other, um, glorified entrepreneurs who will never raise money from VCs again, and they go on becoming influencers because they have a brand. So the space has been constantly evolving, and we've had to keep up with the times, not be seen as these dating apps, be differentiated from these traditional matrimonial sites, but while building a scalable platform, so freaking difficult.

Amrut 1:10:26 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:10:27 Unlike traditional marketplaces, where you can not worry about cost of acquiring a customer, because once you get somebody to your e-commerce platform, you can monetize them for their life. You get them to... Why is the eighteen to thirty-four segment most valued by advertisers? You get them to buy your brand of toothpaste or shaving gel. You have them as a customer for life. Get the younger men, even as they become mothers who control the shopping budgets in their household, they will be loyal to your brand. In, in this case, there's no net- true network effect in matchmaking. You look at the data from public companies, the average shelf life of a user is five and a half months. These days, your retention rate at the end of one month is twenty-five percent if you're doing well. So people come, if they don't find a match, if they don't like the matches they see, you lose them right away. Even-- And if they find a match, you lose them, not just eventually-

Amrut 1:11:28 Ah, yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:11:29 ... you lose them sooner rather than later. So the better you are as a-

Amrut 1:11:32 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:11:32 ... platform that helps them find a match, the better you lose a paying customer. So there are these moral hazards, there are these ingrained disincentives-

Amrut 1:11:40 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:11:40 ... not unlike the misaligned interest between entrepreneurs and VCs. VCs want exits; entrepreneurs, they want to build for the long term.

Amrut 1:11:47 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:11:48 So-

Amrut 1:11:48 The, the right way to build that business is you use the service and hopefully never-- hopefully leave us and quickly and never come back.

S. Anil Kumar 1:11:57 But then, uh, it's not great for the business. So why investors got excited about dating apps is that it's not a one-shot model-

Amrut 1:12:06 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:12:06 ... recurring revenues. And, uh, unlike matrimony, where typically it's a one-shot deal. But it was-- And here, it's not just that you're not getting somebody for the long term, you've got to keep replenishing into supply. You've got to keep advertising. Marketing expenses can be thirty to forty percent of, um, revenues. Right? It's, it's high. You've got to keep replenishing supply to get new users into the system. I struggled with building a scalable platform. I'm not ashamed to admit it. It is brutal. It's brutal.

Amrut 1:12:38 We've spoken about your business a little too much, and, uh, we'll come back to the rest. Um, I want to-- I mean, we glossed over it a little bit, uh, about your family, about your brothers.

S. Anil Kumar 1:12:50 Yeah.

Amrut 1:12:51 This year, your brother got a national award, right?

S. Anil Kumar 1:12:53 One of my two brothers.

Amrut 1:12:54 One, one... I'm sorry, one of your two brothers.

S. Anil Kumar 1:12:57 Yeah.

Amrut 1:12:57 Uh, do you want to talk about that moment? It must have been a very special moment.

S. Anil Kumar 1:13:00 It was a beautiful moment.

Amrut 1:13:02 ... and I realized as you're speaking, that, I mean, he's- it, it must not have come naturally to him either, right? All of you must have, all the three brothers must have struggled quite a bit-

S. Anil Kumar 1:13:14 Yeah.

Amrut 1:13:14 -in your careers.

S. Anil Kumar 1:13:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and, uh, as did my parents, and interesting to be having this discussion today because I'm fresh from a high school reunion. There were thirty of us who showed up, out of maybe one hundred and twenty, thirty in the class. Everybody's had their struggles, man, personal, professional. Everybody's been fighting a battle. In my

S. Anil Kumar 1:13:40 family, uh, one of the first things that comes up is, oh, privileged family. Yeah, also-

Amrut 1:13:48 It didn't sound like it at all.

S. Anil Kumar 1:13:51 Thank you to the government.

Amrut 1:13:52 I mean, from the history that you've narrated.

S. Anil Kumar 1:13:54 Yeah, yeah. Reality is, uh, if I could, I could go about living life in the bubble that I'm, that I'm in. Despite, uh, also keeping it real and say that I have given up a lot to build this business, to go on this journey. At thirty, I built a lovely home for myself, a custom home for myself. I had a comfortable life, and I felt unfulfilled, and I didn't want to end up going through my full career and being sent home, "Here's a gold watch. Thank you for your service for the last few decades."

Amrut 1:14:32 Mm-hmm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:14:33 Uh, my father was kickass in this res- this respect, um, go-getter. Yeah, what better way than to pay tribute to him than by talking about how I probably take after him in this, in this regard? Dynamic personality. Would have been sweet if he were around to witness a son get such a national, huge national honour, without any lobbying, without taking sides and currying favour with whatever the prevailing administration may be. Going about one's life, following one's passion, being a good human being, that is what I'm proud of, of Ajit, because I see it as more an acknowledgement of his innate goodness and even his success. Oh, you know, unlikely actor, accidental actor, but he's good at his craft.

Amrut 1:15:27 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:15:27 Uh, but it's his Q factor. There's this term in marketing in the US among advertisers, big brand ambassadors who have these high Q quotient. Uh, Ray Romano, he was supposed to have a lovable personality, the stand-up comedian and-

Amrut 1:15:43 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:15:43 ... behind The Romano Show.

Amrut 1:15:46 Everybody Loves.

S. Anil Kumar 1:15:47 Everybody Loves Raymond, right? Yeah, not Romano show. Ray, Ray Romano. Yeah, Everybody Loves Raymond. So Ajit has, I think, and Rajinikanth, right? Viviod, the kind of love and affection from fans, so it doesn't matter... And he says this himself, he's had more flops than hits. All the love of his fans and people who see him as somebody who sets a good example. So thank our parents for it, for striving to raise us well, do-

Amrut 1:16:17 Did the, did the three of you, while growing up, sort of egg each other on? Like, did you contribute to each other's success by-

S. Anil Kumar 1:16:25 Egg each other on? Uh, in a way, yes, I'll come to that. Contribute to each other's growth, surely. Uh, and here I have to take- get into specifics. Ajit and I were close in age, a year and a half apart, and it's only in my adult years that I reflected on how that may have influenced my personality in a way that, um, may be written in psychology books. I was the youngest one, always trying to show that, hey, I can do this, too. So he would ride a bike, "Oh, I want to show that I can ride this bike, too." So trying to do things that were- I was not quite ready for. And when- when the kind of things that we would do, parents would be horrified if they were to see their kids do this these days. Uh, climbing up, uh, ladders to the second floor, external ladders to a terrace, and hanging off sun shades. Uh, building a ramp, using a wooden stool and a plank to create a ramp, riding one cycle up the ramp and going off it-

Amrut 1:17:30 Seeing how far you can go

S. Anil Kumar 1:17:32 ... and just, yeah, taking off and landing. And I remember falling, taking turns and from our kid bike, and the lam- the ramp gave way just as I got my wheel onto it, and I was sort of mid-air, and, and I, and I, and I crashed, and I got a huge lump on my forehead. My mom was so distraught, and I felt bad because, uh, we had relatives visiting at the time, and they'd made plans to watch a movie. My mom was a fan of this late actor, Sanjeev Kumar. His most famous role may be that of the, uh, jailer, the warden, the inspector in Sholay-

Amrut 1:18:07 Mm-hmm. Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:18:08 ... who had his arms cut off by Gabbar Singh. Movie is fifty years old, huh? Milestone movie in Indian cinema. She had to skip it because she had to tend to this little kid who, her littlest, who got fever immediately. And yeah, we did those things because I was looking, "Oh, I can do that, too. I can do that, too." So it may be part of my personality to show that, hey, I can do it, too. And compound this with the immigrant mindset, going to a new entity, new country, new society.

Amrut 1:18:43 In fact, you must have, uh, you- when you went abroad, Savir Bhatia also hadn't happened. Hotmail hadn't happened.

S. Anil Kumar 1:18:49 Right. Correct. That came in '９６, I think. Yeah. So where you feel the need to prove oneself, that is the immigrant mindset. So I may have been influenced by being the littlest, and not just the littlest, but-... having a brother who is not that far apart that you think that, "Hey, I want to be able to do what he's doing," or, "He's getting to do this already, why not me?" In much the same way that even today, "Oh, my elder brother has a smartphone. I need a smartphone, too," right? So you fight for things before you may be ready for it, so you get pushed and challenged. Uh, although he was the more prodigious, uh, would take to things way ahead of his time. My eldest brother and I would, uh, be at loggerheads, so similar to, uh, like polarities repelling and, um... And he, in ways that he may not have realized, kept me in check. He bore the brunt of parenting mistakes. Every parent makes mistakes.

Amrut 1:19:53 [chuckles]

S. Anil Kumar 1:19:53 And then you realize when the second comes, "Oh, we should have done things a little differently, so maybe let go a little bit over here." And we would- we three boys were a handful. The two younger ones would do some shit, and he would, uh, bear the brunt of, "Oh, you were the older one, you should have reined them in," or, "How could you guys grew up in this way?"

Amrut 1:20:14 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:20:15 We had a strict dad who believed in, uh, not sparing the rod or you end up spoiling the child.

Amrut 1:20:20 Oh, is it? Okay.

S. Anil Kumar 1:20:22 Yeah. But then, uh, I need to balance that with how we had friends from school days who did a double take when they noticed a huge contrast from the time that we were teenagers. "Wait, you guys used to have a terrifying, strict father, and you guys are so chill?" It's- we had a relationship that was like friends. We were very free, and maybe they realized that you got to let go. And they gave us so much freedom in ways that parents would worry about, uh, "Oh, what if they make wrong choices?" In contrast, both my parents would say this: "If you want to drink alcohol, drink in front of us. If you want to smoke, smoke in front of us," because it would hurt us if we were to hear, "Hey, look at what your sons are doing." Right? Own it. So I love this parallel to the Spider-Man line. What is it? With great power comes great responsibility. Something that I didn't realize then was with great trust comes great responsibility.

Amrut 1:21:24 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:21:24 They trusted us so much.

Amrut 1:21:25 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:21:26 Yeah. So-

Amrut 1:21:28 So-

S. Anil Kumar 1:21:29 ... we influenced, um-- at least I, I can speak of how I was influenced by my two brothers.

Amrut 1:21:35 It's a lovely place to stop. Thank you so much for sharing that. A little bit of family history. We have a lot about your, uh, company and your, your journey. Um, any parting thoughts, Anil?

S. Anil Kumar 1:21:45 Well, I wish we didn't have to part because I've so enjoyed this, but then, yeah, there are also, uh, other matters to attend to for you as well. Here are a few parting thoughts: one, for, um, those who are thinking about professional life, maybe even IIT. I will tie it to what you asked me earlier, my first impressions, nineteen eighty-eight, Day of Five Billion event at IIT Madras, and having this dream that I will get into IIT, and I got into IIT after a year of preparing for it, after high school. And, uh, even then, realizing during the, uh, placement window, what do you call it? Between getting a rank and deciding-

Amrut 1:22:27 Yeah

S. Anil Kumar 1:22:27 ... which IIT and which track, which major.

Amrut 1:22:30 Counseling window.

S. Anil Kumar 1:22:30 Counseling window.

Amrut 1:22:31 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:22:32 Thank you. I learned from previous years', um, data of what are the closing rank in which IIT, in which branch, that I could have got a metallurgy at IIT Kharagpur. But no, it, it-- I wanted to go into this campus, IIT Madras. Not wanting to be a local, right? This beautiful campus. And who knows how different my path may have been had I done metallurgy. We have a famous metallurgy graduate from the class of ninety-three, IIT Kharagpur.

Amrut 1:23:04 Mm.

S. Anil Kumar 1:23:04 Uh, interestingly, Sundar Pichai and I took, um, physics lessons in the same classroom.

Amrut 1:23:11 Is it?

S. Anil Kumar 1:23:12 In eighty-nine. And, uh-

Amrut 1:23:15 Oh, yeah, he was from Chennai.

S. Anil Kumar 1:23:16 He was from Chennai, and he and, uh, another classmate of his, who, uh, from school, who, uh, chose IIT Madras. He got a higher rank, and he joined mechanical engineering in, uh, IIT Madras, and he went on to be a professor here. Uh, and he's someone I have had a good rapport with to this day.

Amrut 1:23:38 Oh, if you went to, if you went to coaching with Sundar Pichai, can you settle the question of which school he went to? Because I think it's a big debate on Wikipedia.

S. Anil Kumar 1:23:46 Yeah, actually, you can, you can ask, uh, Shanku. I was talking about his classmate. Uh, maybe Jawahar Vidyalaya.

Amrut 1:23:53 Mm, okay.

S. Anil Kumar 1:23:54 Yeah. Why? What's the debate? I didn't think that there was a debate.

Amrut 1:23:56 Because everybody kept changing his school on Wikipedia.

S. Anil Kumar 1:23:59 They say, right, success has a thousand fathers.

Amrut 1:24:01 [laughing]

S. Anil Kumar 1:24:02 Yeah. I would tell folks what this wise chemistry tutor told me, who was one of the three professors that I went to for JEE coaching. When I was bummed out and reporting to him that, "Hey, I got a rank, but it may be naval architecture. I'm not even sure what naval architecture is." I haven't forgotten what he said, which is that: "Yeah, sure, it is important to, uh... what you do is important, but more important than what you do is being- striving to be the best at what you do." These days, though, I'll challenge him a little bit some more. Pick a field that has so much growth potential, because at that time, uh, I think of the topper in my naval architecture class. He went hardcore into computer science and did well enough to get into the master's program at Carnegie Mellon. Imagine, he would have been competing with the brightest of, uh, IIT CS grads, and, uh, he's gone on to do very well for himself professionally in big tech in the US. Imagine getting into CS when the internet was happening.... mm-hmm, right? So pick areas that are booming, pick areas that are growing, because you'll have outsized contributions. Parting thoughts, there's so much that I could share. I would tell folks, you have no excuse for, in this information age, for making dumb decisions. There's- you can tap the wisdom of the crowds. Anybody is just a DM away, a polite message away. I have to be careful. I have DMs open on Twitter, but I don't have the band... People come asking, yeah, asking,

S. Anil Kumar 1:25:45 um, the kind of questions that I wish I could give bandwidth to, but I have a business to run. My professional responsibilities to my clients, to my teammates. But I say, uh, have a curiosity mindset. Keep learning, keep growing professionally, keep... I don't want to get into a clichéd first principles kind of thinking, but, uh, yeah, think big. I would like to think build- think big and do something with life. Think about building. Because when I was, um, going through my MBA program, this is a nice way to close, there was a professor who was quite popular, the kind who would be featured in Business Week as one of the top business school professors in the US. So he offered courses in entrepreneurship and also, um, uh, venture capital on commercializing innovation. He was, um, someone who earned his stripes as a VC, and he also had this adjunct appointment at the business school. So he would tell folks, one of his signature lines at- towards the end of the course was... And who are the folks? Who are the students who had been doing well in their careers, that they chose to return to school for an MBA to have even more stellar post-MBA career? "Don't settle for an affluent life of quiet aspiration." And that was the freaking life that I chose not to settle for. I was comfortable doing well, but I didn't want a comfortable life.

Amrut 1:27:16 Yeah.

S. Anil Kumar 1:27:17 I chose to-

Amrut 1:27:18 Nice

S. Anil Kumar 1:27:18 ... build and make an impact, add value. So I would encourage folks to look at ways in which you can add value. Thanks for having me.

Amrut 1:27:26 Nice. Thank you for coming.

S. Anil Kumar 1:27:29 Thank you.

Amrut 1:27:29 It's very nice to hear you. You have a quiet sense of self-assured, um, way of- a very storytelling way of speaking.

S. Anil Kumar 1:27:39 Thank you. Gol gol ke ghuma ke leta hun, but thank you.

Amrut 1:27:44 Okay, thank you for watching. Uh, if you like the podcast, uh, leave a comment, share, subscribe, follow, um, Anil on his social media and his company on social media. That's it for today. See you next time.