How AI and Deepfakes are changing Content Creation for Modern Businesses? Varun Mayya | Shantanu

Okay I'm going to ask you and the audience a question who do you think is bigger today Mr Beast or Tom Holland the next TCS from India is going to be in in content I think beer biceps is definitely on the route to become a celebrity I don't I don't think people like failure in this nation I an idiot don't take anything I say seriously if you build out great content for your brand of your business in a way it is Always doing the selling for you people don't realize how always on content actually is

content creators are going to be bigger than Bollywood in India when I came into this office I had I had limited idea of what you were doing because I had read up a lot about you I had seen a bunch of stuff about you not only because of the podcast or because we started talking about even before you're you're kind of all over the Internet and When I spoke to orob and mul ke where does all this kind of tie in and uh just to give you a sense right we had tanai we spoke about

him right now we had him on uh the Pod a couple of weeks back so Barber Shop is a Bombay shaving company kind of Ip yeah and we built barber shop because we felt that our in Bombay shaving company are used personally and there there's no Word of Mouth men don't go and talk to each other about grooming stuff it's unlike Beauty or appal or sports or food or you know if we have we always have like a cold drink together or whatever right so it's used individually it's used inside the bathroom and they don't

talk about it so it's there's zero Word of Mouth for my category and I'm up against someone who has insane media budgets so like how do we make our brand Center of of culture uh for our audiences for our consumer consumers young men who are choosing to take hair off their face Trimmers razors Etc but without advertising it because advertising is expensive so that's how the podcast started the podcast started as we are a young Indian Challenger brand so what is young Indian challenger all about so it's entrepreneurship my LinkedIn had gotten some some kind

of traction a few thousand followers we said can we convert shantan new's LinkedIn into like a conversation which is on video and audio this is 2022 and that's how we Started calling in entrepreneurs uh we spoke to them we converted that into like short form long form YouTube Instagram Spotify and quickly we kind of started growing um and it was all organic and we named it the barber shop we integrated you know elements of Bombay shaving company in the conversation without it being obvious yeah uh and it really became an amazing place to Market bomb

shaving company we can't obviously do it very out there Because people will feel like they're being sold to and people hate that but it's now become a place where entrepreneurship is celebrated and that's the context of having you on the P also right which is you're doing something amazing here especially in the context of razur 2.0 so every year we take one entrepreneurial skill which we believe any entrepreneur should have independent of which business they run how what stage of the business is ETC What geography nothing matters so the first year we picked up the

ultimate entrepreneurial skill which is sales yeah so last year we said we're going to go all out on sales and we will get people to sell our razors we had a 99 rup sensy smart 3 I go on the streets we got Founders we got investors we got the CEO of God to go into a store in uh you know in rohini to sell a razor to a shopkeeper right so we did all of that put it on content made It big and we had like an amazing raise up in our 1.0 this time we've

taken the skill which I think probably you're you're a master of which is pure play content and we believe that today if you want to run a business you need to learn how to tell a story not just to people who are going to invest in you but to your consumers and you need to learn how to tell that story across platforms across languages across formats and that's how it's going to keep that that That's what is going to create the wave of business for you and this time Raz 2.0 is about content creation so

vun um I'm so excited to have you and you given long chat we had I now kind of understand how all of that fits in for you but thank you for for for being patient and uh you know for for spending time with us it's my pleasure to be here man uh I've I've seen a lot of your content it keeps puring my feed and I feel like the coolest part about being In content is you see all these cool people in your feed and then the next week they're in your office or you're in

their office right so I feel it's to me the real value of this is It's brought the it's made the world smaller yeah and itally grateful for the idiot in me 5 years ago or 6 years or seven whatever however long ago who decided to go out and press the record button and just say whatever came to his mouth right so the ripple effect of that is this Conversation no I'm so glad but uh do like I know that now you know you started a you started a couple of companies you like to be in

you were a you're a tech guy but loves consumer that's great right that I mean dinder for example is exactly like this right Tech guy who loves consumer uh became a Creator uh along with uh your wife who was running like a video editing school and all of that has now come into what you do today which is fascinating but Tell our audiences or this whole universe which kind of is now so interconnected which is your businesses and and how content is foundational we should talk about that yeah I think it looks a little bit

distracted from the outside but I think everything flows in pretty nicely um I'll tell you the abridge version the abridge version was she built the video school so video school is basically where you train editors to editors and you're now doing 2,000 editors cohort so probably biggest in the world at this point but most people would have scaled that as a net Tech right and we learned I mean one cool thing about having been an entrepreneur for 10 years is you learn from everybody else's mistakes so like should we scale that we decided no let's

not scale that let us have because you can't place so many people like you can't go from 2,000 to 50,000 then Place 50,000 people so like let's do the right Thing for students and then she she really focused on that and she really focused on the content on the channel right what's her name Sor her name is Aina ainaa yeah that's a i n it's a weird name but uh you know is is she ethnically Indian or she's ethnically Indian yeah she's uh so she decided to to to to create content like I don't know

why we decided to start this channel to be very honest we were just like we were bored and our first video Was actually a romance video romance isn't like we were doing a podcast about how we met and all that we realized there was one piece of content if you were talking about a relationship story then you got to do drama like if you want to keep it running and I was like I'm I'm I don't have the time for this so um we decided uh let's not do that and let's do business case studies

instead because that was something that she was interested in I said fine let's Do that so I would shoot on the weekends she was handling the entire Channel um I would come do like a one minute skit or like a you know like it was just really fun for me and the school she built um so this is also a channel and a school both first the channel happened uh then the school happened much much later because she really wanted to monetize it and I was like cool do it but I wanted to start something

in Tech right for me it was like if I do another company it Has to be a technology company but one lesson I've learned over the last 10 years is you can't sell raw technology in India yeah you can't go out I mean it just sounds so silly to me now that you know now that I'm saying this but like you can't go to somebody and be like here's technology it'll improve your employee productivity by 10% or here's technology it's a community platform it'll you know you will be able to run a community on it

the actual real skill That thing that people want is people are busy and they want somebody to do it for them there's a reason India is a really good Services country right um so it took me a long time to realize that so I said look I want to do something in Tech but eventually this has to be valuable to the end person and it has to be something that aligns with my passion a lot of constraints right so the funny thing was eventually we decided um I was running a bunch of experiments I didn't

Know what I wanted to do so I we ran you know an experiment with agents with AI agents we ran an experiment with AI in thumbnails we ran an experiment with AI in you know chats uh on WhatsApp and I really like the AI plus thumbnail experiment because what was that it was basically we we were um so we use something called stable diffusion we find tune the model on thumbnails and we said if I put up a picture of me can I swap my face into that thumbnail and Make it look like a good

thumbnail that takes time right for YouTube or for YouTube mostly for YouTube right because if a person is sitting down like an actual graphic designer making the thumbnail it takes him maybe 6 seven hours correct thought maybe we can we can make that quicker and maybe charge you know $10 a month for it and then very quickly we realized that the models are getting better right so we got our ass handed to us 6 months later with mid Journey's next update correct so we said is this a game we want to play is this is

this so so we were bootstrapped so like this is the constraint we had to play with which was do we want to get our asses whooped by the next model and live with the unpredictability of models eventually becoming commoditized the AI models and that was what was happening and many people in India that time like oh we have to build a foundational model this that it was an ego thing right but We're like how long back was this 2020 this is last year March last year March okay yeah last year March pretty 23 yeah yeah

23 March April something like that so we were experimenting and we were like the one the first Insight I had was models are getting commoditized right they use chat gbd CLA Gemini eventually it won't matter so much because they will all build they'll get to feature parity that was one number one number two was that AI actually really disrupts Creativity and content right I got hammered for this for I went I went publicly and I said two years ago when I tried D that AI is going to disrupt content AI is going to disrupt thumbnail

making and the comments were like brutal they like you don't understand creativity this that but I had tried D too it just like it's as simple as I tried the preview and I was like this is crazy it's like you know the first moment to use mid Journey or CH like this is great and we've just gotten used to it but at that time it was still a very fresh thing in my head right so I wanted to talk about it I went on a podcast spoke about it and then what ended up happening was

um you know we realized that it really like it really disrupts content creation everything from a scripting to this to that and then one of those days I tried this one open source model called wave to lip it was actually made by a tri it Team and they just put it out on GitHub and I tried it and what it did was it reach stitches your lips okay so I shot this video of me and then I restitched the lips to say something else so you can sync it to any audio you want the output

isn't great but I was like if this works I can dub my content in any language possible and I put a tweet about this in February 2023 I was like I was just experimenting right I was thinking about what to do Next and it worked and it just wasn't great enough it wasn't great for production because people would be able to tell so we said if we draw a trend line on this and then if we also draw a trend line on the thumbnail thing and we say this is going to get better in a

year right then maybe we have a shot at making the unit economics of doing content at scale profitable yeah okay and then I of course my wife had the video school as well and I was like we We tried to automate it editing and it really didn't work because editing is this thing like you can't go to chat gbd and be like here's the here's the video footage edit it with this style it does it can't do that and there's no tool that does that right the runway MLS of the world are focusing on you

put on an image and then the image gets animated in a way so we couldn't find a tool that did what we wanted so we said we'll have to depend on real editors and then you Know as as luck would have it uh you know the models got better and the first thing we soled was the AI Avatar we actually had a pretty good AI Avatar this was eight or 9 months ago wow and it was good and I was like let me just put this on mute so uh so the AI avatars got good

right there was this company called haen they put out their you know their first version we find you in the we actually made and discard a lot of avatars and it Turns out the video the lip rest stitching got better much faster than uh the audio okay so we had this really good video Avatar but it spoke like like an Anglo American Indian so like okay we got to get the voice model down and again this was this process of just trial and error so we did something we discarded it tried it discarded it so

what we did was eventually we learned the best format is and I learned this from a video where I said the word Devote we did made an a generated video with the word devote and it said the word devote wrong how do how did it say it was it how you say devote or something like that something in a way where I wouldn't say it so what I did that weekend was like I was like guys tell me every video that I did which words sounded off I'll record them we'll put them back in the

training data we'll retrain the model I will give you coverage and eventually we just went to Chat G like what are the top 100 spoken words in the English language right what are the top 100 spoken words in on YouTube and I just read it out and the goal was let's get to as much coverage of most commonly used words as possible nobody spoken about the this on the internet as far as I know right we had to figure this out ourselves so we hate calling ourselves a research company I don't think that's what we

do but that's kind of what what we do right we're just Screwing around things and like nobody's everyone was thinking about the models was thinking about the use cases so we just went and hammered around and tried figure out use cases and we tried everything at that period H by the way was experimenting on what to do next we built a game called overpower the card game okay we uh we we built these three tools uh man we did so much right because I was also trying to figure out where the next opportunity like where

Does AI really disrupt things is it content is it Game Dev the the places where I was interested so I wouldn't really go and solve it solve something in CRM right because it's not my cup of tea so then eventually what happened I think where the magic really took place was um we started making this content and it started pulling the same number of views as normal content but we were cleverly editing on top of it because we had the Edit you needed like human intervention yeah you needed human intervention so we show the avatar

for 5 seconds we show the avatar for 3 seconds we slip it in and but it wasn't really AI generated cont only the Avatar and the voice were AI generated the editing was very manual yeah human yeah right and that started doing so well at some point that I think last month we did like 50 million views on just one on just my Instagram account Instagram plus YouTube on short form we Something like 70 million views wow how much how much are you turning out how much content are you turning out 30 30 reals a

month that's a one a day on yeah on that channel and the funny thing is at that point I stop grading content so this is all like yeah this is all your editors plus AI kind of putting plus I have this like you know it's it's one person who's just willing to step up and say one editor who's willing to step up and say I I'll handle this right and all I was doing in the morning was I was giving my insights I'd wake up I'd send a voice note to the group and i' be

like guys I think we should make a real on this and here are my insights here's what I think is going to happen with whatever this Microsoft this deal whatever I give my insight they plug that into Claude Claude will pack and Claude now writes like me Claude is one of the models we we use something called Cloud projects today where uh We've fed It every video I've ever made the transcripts of every video I've ever made the book I've WR I've written a book called pajama profit a long long long time ago it packed

all that context in and now it kind of writes like me for example basically has your voice like it'll say it'll structure sentences the way you do yeah so you know it's like I use the word here's the kicker a lot I use the words here's the kicker a lot it replicates that right in fact it's still A little bit poor in the sense that it will replicate multiple times but if you're doing a 60-second reel it's it's superb right people can't tell and then we also and your objective is for people to not be

able to make out the difference so then now you can then kind actually you know what that wasn't even our objective the objective was just like I don't want to sit and sit in front of the camera every day and do it people think oh you're just shooting one Minute a day what's the big deal no no it's a thing is it's context switch right you'll be traveling somewhere and you know once this thing works you get more opportunities to traveling all the time so you don't have time to like plug in any you you

don't have time to be in the studio all the time so when we started doing this it started doing so well that uh you know we realized oh my God this is an Arbitrage this is an opportunity so then we uh kind of did More of it so we started actually we started 10 different channels right and people don't know about the rest of the channels they probably know about my channel they probably know about my wife's Channel and not all of them were generated we're just like we'll do as many you know now it's

creating leverage you can do more yeah we like if this works we should spam it right so we did overpowered with me and tme but that was real that was a podcast then we did uh This we did this one more Channel called full disclosure around careers so everything was done slightly differently we like everything needs to have its own distinct style it can't just be someone on in stagram using AI generated content right we were we weren to we still don't know about the longevity of this right eventually if I have to come back

and shoot I'm happy to come back and shoot but it'll be less flow of content but whatever during that window of Opportunity we really grew last month we had like 110,000 followers or something like that right so while the window of opportunity exists you should exploit it but at some point everyone's going to know about it these arbitrages are shortterm today right because information travels so fast so 3 months later everyone's going to know what they're going to do by which time we need to be two steps ahead correct so as this two steps ahead

I said I'm going to set up an entity here that only does the research part of things research as tries the models for research for use cases not research on the models themselves we called it AOS Labs we said we will still try to make this thing profitable so what we'll do is whatever whatever we learned we'll also sell it to companies for example we learned how to deep fake ourselves into actual videos so we started selling that to Amazon Prime right where we said hey You want to do a certain campaign we're happy to

you know deep fake the person into the campaign into the trailer where your next to the actor and that was great for them we said this is good can we do more right so we did more such campaigns we did campaigns with um you know with today CH speech to speech right right and the two people that work with me Hasan and Tas on that entity they were very open to like trying stuff they were like we'll try something will Work right we worst case we'll make it a services company and that's exactly what happened

and when people know that you've done so much AI stuff behind the scenes and it's working use cases of the models because models that diamond doesn't yeah actual use cases where it's actually pulling views or it's actually working for the people doing the campaigns then more people come to you right and when you're able to tell stories about that through the same Medium people come to you then we realized we should fuse the two we had editors yeah we were able to uh sort of figure out the AI presenter and the presenter is the hardest

part of a channel because when the channel does well the presenter decides I'm King pay me more or I'll leave or on the other end the Chanel presenter for our viewers are basically the face of the face of the channel right especially in the kind of channels we make uh which is face to Camera we realized we can actually just get the presenters to do content if the presenter's AI you don't have the nras of a regular presenter yeah right so we started being able to give the power of the presenter in the editor's hands

right and then upskill the editors to do more than just editing yeah and that worked really well and then businesses came to us businesses said can you do the content plus AI can you do both can you do what the AI arm does and the Content arm does for us and we never had to prove ourselves because we done so many channels they were like you've already run these channels we just want one like that and one of our first CLS was actually Zoho right we did it well for Zoho then zeroa came along and

then so on and so forth clear trip came along so like a bunch of different customers came along and today we're at a point where we can't keep up with Demand right because every almost every channel and We still have like maybe a 20% 30% failure rate because you can't you can never predict these platforms uh almost all these channels work for them and the ROI is pretty clear is like either I spend on ads or I spend on this thing where 3 months it's it's worse economics than ads but fourth month onwards I have

an asset actually have an asset which is like I have this channel that works and all the benefits and all the benefits of a channel are intangible yeah they're Tangible but it's hard to put on down on a sheet like like you get recognized outside if someone's choosing between two razors they've seen your pod subtly it influences them to buy that right abely so we didn't have to sell that anymore because Brands just businesses just understood that's why I keep saying a lot of what worked at the YouTube as a service business that we had

was just right place right time right because uh Brands understood the value of content You started doing a pod n started doing a pod lots of other people started doing podcasts and content you you saw the ROI right and then you realized oh this is great so the businesses saw it and they said okay we should go to the best and at that point I mean even now it's just we had so many challenges for ourselves that were working we never had to prove it yeah so that really scaled and then it got to a

point where suddenly I went from this guy who was sitting and Hacking around trying different experiments trying to see what would which of the AI models use cases would make money uh to suddenly now managing people in pnl yeah right like managing office maning office space right so it became a totally different life no but but just to pause on that right just think about all the things that have actually had to happen right you your wife Aina had to be building out a a video editing School you had to be a Tech person to

be a head of the curve on AI and like tin like you were tinkering around with AI models a lot you had to be a content creator Yourself by the way otherwise I think that instinct would not have been built out you started creating the content with your wife you started doing it on your own you were understood Tech and this whole AI Revolution was starting out yeah both the content and the AI Revolution happened at the same time if it didn't We wouldn't have feeds each other in a way right and so now now

if you think about it these two things are beautiful because now you're able to you're able to monetize the business so beautifully because you are actually creating content for people in ways that they would never have been able to understand on like the moment I spoke to you I'm like hey how can Bombay shaving company work with you how can you do this a barber shop because honestly everyone Comes to office ask us that because I I can't do this like I I am constrained by time and you know and honestly it's it's not I

realized one thing in running a business if there's someone else who's better at than you at doing something just work with them and the magic of removing yourself as the keyman risk yeah through AI just scaling yourself is so huge huge people also don't realize with content which is something that we want to build out the awareness of Is if you build out great content for your brand of your business in a way it is always doing the selling for you people don't realize how always on content actually is yeah it's not just you're doing

it like let's say a couple of episodes a month or a few reels a month or whatever it is someone or the other is constantly seeing it so you're constantly selling your machine is constantly burning I can tell you why a lot of people in Tech don't believe that Cuz they're used to a very Roi way way of thinking Nike had this very famous some incident recently where they were purely making decisions on data and the revenue dropped okay they're like we need to start doing the creative stuff again cuz the thing is a lot

of this doesn't show up in the data like as a Founder if you have two options I do this content thing with we have no idea if it'll work 3 months later we could just realize we've lost our money what I Do this ad thing where I spend one rupe and I make 3 rupes I get the math here yeah this is not math is not mathing absolutely so let me do the safer math related thing that I understand better because I'm an engineer yeah the thing about content is I never started content to make

money yeah right I didn't even think at the time I started creating content nobody was making money in content right so you you you started because you're like you want to express Yourself it's the same reason I tweet like I tweet because I'm just like I have this thought I want to tell people right it was the same with making video and I I can't tell you how many people were just too lazy to press the record button great people who could tweet very well who just didn't press the record button and therefore lost the

entire like so much opportunity right because they're like oh I'm shy on video I don't know how to do video I'm like do three And then the fourth one you become a natural nobody's good on video in the first shot right so I felt like yeah you're right in the sense that it was very right time right place but ALS also if you look at the actual path of how we've grown it's very messy we've tried like a 100 things these are the four things that work and and fit and we also had to decline

or delete a lot of things that didn't like the card game that we made what was that we just made a random Card game overpowered the card game we like let's make India in a bunch of things with a card game online which you can play with other people and honestly it didn't work and we like this doesn't work so let's just throw it out so I became okay with the idea of trying 10 things and then failing at eight right which is very hard in a nation that shames you for failing yeah yeah like

I don't think this is a nation where failure is Taken I don't I don't think people like failure in this nation yeah right so it it for me it is like just being able to be okay with shipping something and then not having it work yeah I think I got comfortable with that because I've done it for 10 years and some things have worked some things have not work I'm like it let me just you know Embrace that narrative also I don't think this would have work VC back I think it had to be bootstrap

because if It was VC backed they' be like why you running the AI Labs part yeah it doesn't make sense in the content thing but I was pretty sure that the AI and content thing would work and the Avatar just so you know when we started speaking about the Avatar thing people laughed at us they're like no way people watch a generated content people don't realize how recent this damn thing is yeah they don't realize how recent it is like the fact that you get your lips right or you Get your eyes right or you

get the hand gestes are very difficult right they and it's happening at an insane Pace yeah it's only going to get better like the model is only going to get this is the worst it'll ever be right so if the worst it'll ever be still is this then imagine where it's going to get good on short form it's crazy good we've also done it on long form I did a video and people can check it out it's called why India can't build a AAA game okay and It's about Wukong the Chinese game right entire video

is AI like the entire presentation this that it's got so what part of that do you is AI and what part of that is scripted and you know insight is script is I'll tell you how I do it I send like a voice note to my team so usually this will 20 minut 5 minutes it be like it'll be like 3 4 minutes okay but it's only inside pack like I don't I don't I'm not telling a story I'm just like listen this happened and this Happened then you know the Nvidia deal they they CRA

to deal with Nvidia then this happened blah blah blah whatever I can find on the internet I actually spend time doing that research right I like doing that because it's just reading okay it's fun stuff I compress that down it's almost like tweeting okay I'm tweeting I'm sending a yeah I'm sending out a tweet thread with all my thoughts on a specific topic send it to CLA and the CLA project writes Like me so it's like a unzip mechanism okay for the insights that I have because clot can't come up with new insights it's very

hard so I will send it insights it it writes like me so it'll unzip it into a 10minute video or 5 minute video that's exactly how the Wukong video was done there'll be a human here who also goes through it once to make sure it's not there parts we we we QA all our videos we like fact QA all our videos right so we're like if you Say something wrong people make decisions based on it so we shouldn't do that so we we try to tell the truth across the entire video so the truth check

and then eventually uh that goes into the voice model The Voice model spits out the output from The Voice model goes into the video model that spits out the lips and the hands and the eyes and whatnot spits it out so now you you have an avar of you and you have the voice and it's saying everything which Is 10 minutes across 10 minutes then there is a human being that goes in like a surgery and decides which parts of this look fake ah right this part looks fake let's head it on top of it

this part looks fake let's head it on top of it so it's when people say the entire content is a generated that's not true that's not true there is insane amount of human effort going on to make sure the the fakery doesn't look that fake although the effort is getting lesser as The models get better yeah so think about it right it's first of all the Genesis of this is your four minute voice note which is a lot of research up front yeah and then there is the you know the training of the model which

which has happened before and then there's a massive amount of editing that happened afterwards yeah like the model wouldn't speak like me if I didn't spend 30 years sharpening my English right the model wouldn't move like me if I didn't Have a specific personality that's that the world has shaped on me right like I don't think we shape our own personalties I think world shapes our personalities that wouldn't have happened uh I don't think that without figuring out a lot of the training parts we would have you know we would have had a model that

looks or feels so good right like that doesn't feel uncanny um and then of course the insights I still give it my insights right my thoughts my Opinions blah blah blah and then the CLA the unzipper if I didn't write a book I don't think we'd have enough context there for it to write like me correct right and I don't think if IID made videos for so long I don't think it would have been able to write like me it's 4,000 Pages worth of content in CLA context that we have right now wow right so

it's if I would to do it for me I I've never written a book it's pretty easy like just take all your old videos Segment out the parts that are other people that are uh shantanu voice right Clump that together then do transcripting can I take my LinkedIn posts all of them put together yeah yeah yeah but I'll tell you one more thing okay the models today are moving towards Chain of Thought okay right so they want to see how you think over a longer period of time with tweets and and Linkedin posts it's like

you're writing something but you're not you're not your Evolution of thought is not changing correct like for example what I've spoken to you right now is our evolution of thought we tried these five things then we dropped this then we're okay with killing things what that's my Chain of Thought correct I think that is very necessary and that only comes from really long form writing or long form cont content so if I hadn't done long form like all the people starting with shorts I don't think it'll work I also Don't think you can start with

a generated content I think your channel needs to have real people for a while and we we make a practice of that first 6 months we don't use AI generated content on any new channel it has to be a real person they have to have some love and loyalty from the audience first and then we do the other channels and then we sort of replace it with the eye plus when when we actually work with companies we use our existing Distribution Network to boot strap their distribution which is something no other company can give you

you go to any agency fine tomorrow they might the they might be able to figure out this or that but can they push millions of people to you in the early days and that's baked into pricing unlikely right so it's just a lot of advantages correct right the school this that it's just everything put together it feels like it's and then we got it sort of became like a kind of Like a you know a lot of deal Flow came in and then like I said you know it became a uh you know p&l problem

pnl in the sense like a good problem but I'm not very good with math right in terms of p&l math right I'm good with math otherwise in school I was good with math but pnl math is you know does this you know the X number of salaries and then should you hire this person should you fire this person which I've done like when we ran a Services Company 2016 2017 We had 50 employees but I wasn't prepared for this scale there's a difference between 50 employees this is about 200 plus now yeah at this point

and we're hiring like 50 and you wanted to do like a 10% yeah I want to do like a 10 man compan you know it's ironic uh you know I keep I keep saying that AI really is going to disrupt jobs at some point right like we like hiring like in the hundreds yeah we're hiring in like 50 60 people a Month right so it becomes it's it's it's it just become weird and that's a good thing I think it's a good thing by the way yeah it's a good thing and they're also very like

it's like it's like a Archimedes right like it's a lever where because they're using AI yeah and on the other side yeah they are heavy they are like high in the air so they're able to do a lot more correct right so it's see humans have have become the dominant species on the planet because of tool Use right we use tools that's the big difference between us and animals and animals can rudimentary use tools but we can like send Rockets to space and back right so we just said everyone here needs to be armed with

tools what is the latest tools Labs will tell you we have an entity whose only job is to try the newest tools figure it out do it for companies stay profitable and if you didn't have that and every weekend those guys tell the rest of the team here's The new stuff that came because it's changing every week so we will always be ahead of everybody else and that's because I create content around it it's so much fun I get to try all the newest models I get to fine tune models and I get to say

this sucks this works this doesn't suck like an actual reviewer it's funny that a reviewer if they're willing to monetize their review ability for the new models can monetize all of them because Everything is like a week old 2 weeks old 3 weeks old like there's a new model now called Meshi okay which is for uh text to 3D it is very good what does that mean what is text for 3D so you put in a prompt and it'll generate a 3D model for you okay like a full 3d model let's say I type in

Ram from ramayan and it actually generates that oh really yeah like it'll generate it and it'll be fairly good it's broken in some parts the texture is broken in some parts but It's very easy for a person to fix it versus making the models again so the cost of AAA game development is mostly in the asset generation correct right and then the Game Dev side The Game Dev side has gotten easier because of Unreal Engine and because Unreal Engine the the marketplace now has a lot of different what do you call plugins you can put

those plugins in right on the asset side people still have to go manually make it two changes have happened one is Something called gsan splatting where I can go take a camera just record some City some part in Bangalore and I can get a full 3D model of it in game I can convert that goshan Splat back into you know polygons and then the actual with something like mchi to actually have characters there so the cost of Game Dev dropped the unit economics of Game Dev dropped exactly the same as what it dropped for Content

two years ago and I see the opportunity again so I'm like yo If you're a Content company maybe we should move into game da now cuz otherwise content is one way somebody speaking somebody listening Game Dev is two way people can interact with each other and it'll look really cool if you ever I don't know how that's actually going to pan out because it's still very very early days we just you know committed a certain amount of capital to it um but again you know like I back to my point about I don't think this

would Have worked wec back because at every stage of the way it looked distracted yeah right but all we were trying to do is drop the cost of content and take advantage of any new you know Arbitrage we could find uh wouldn't have done that if there was like a singular singular Vision which would have kind of and what vision would I have sold to a VC I I don't know what I was doing like I was trying I was like imagine going to VC and say look I I create content and I'm Just like

checking out all these tools and fine tuning some of them and you know making videos school there's a lab thing there's my own channel and then by the way there this whole yeah I agree it was very confusing uh but did you know yeah like after three four years back did you know that this is what you're going going towards I saw it I I knew after wave to lip after I saw the model 2023 that's the day I tweeted um I knew at that point if this gets Better I can replace myself I was

very B that was the that was the aha moment yeah that was the aha moment um and I also learned to kind of trust my gut because people were laughing at us when we said the people watch Avatar content and I also then learned that the mes can be wrong because I got hammered on the internet for saying that creativity yeah I will like take away creative because I did a video on that like be Del before the Del preview this is before chat gbt Okay and like people were really upset like you don't know

anything about creativity this that we make thousand videos a month now so and not all of it is like AI generated right now you said something very interesting in when we met in your office uh you said that the next DCS from India is going to be in in content it's like do you think content could be for India I it got me thinking over the last half an hour a little bit that India can Have a serious advantage in content because we can serve the world's content needs not as consumers but also as creators

yeah which China took away the manufacturing game from us a little bit we took the services in it and I think a big Advantage there was because we knew English yeah I think on content that Advantage will be like probably 10x more so if people like you are actually going to build out the next TCS for Content out of India I think that's a global Change that's a global change that that that I think has economic ramifications that I don't think I understand fully I don't know whether you thought about that so this is the

the pessimistic view here is that eventually all content will get automated eventually you will watch a box that generates the kind of content you want to watch at any given time how far from there 5 six years right where there's a box that generates content for You it tells the best stories it puts you in the story you can already do all of it like you can already do a very rude like our wave to lip version of our first avatar you can already do a very very simple version of this where I can put

you and we do this right at Labs we put you in a trailer we did from map yeah right so uh you can have a very rudimentary version where you are in a movie and the movie scripted by AI it'll be very Shitty but if you can project the future you know at some point whether that some point is 3 years 5 years 20 years at some point it's going to get there right and I think um and I think uh again like the cool thing about the weird thing about a is we said all

this we got hammered in the comments and then when it actually played out people are just like oh yeah right right they just switch quickly but when I say this that oh scripting is Going to get even better with AI right uh uh you know you'll eventually watch a person a box that generates personalized content for you Tik Tok is going to be completely synthetic and just so you know many of the top creators in India today are already using AI generated content it's like a very recent phenomenon maybe month we've been doing it for

8 nine months these guys have been doing it for month month and a half people can't tell like some people can Tell but that's not stopping the it's not changing the views yeah right people are still pulling views you think you you think platforms will will start censoring them or you think platform will start saying okay if this AI generated I will like not show it to too many people no I don't think so like from what we've spoken with the platforms because we spoke to Google in the early days because when it was working

we we had a session with them And even I didn't know where it was going to go nobody had any idea and I was like actually guys I'm a little clueless about this but here's what I think will happen and then eventually when Google launched dream screen and now meta is doing AI Avatar that you can talk to real time they're going to embrace it right it it it helps retention it helps retention right it doesn't require the Creator it doesn't burn out creators but I still think It'll be based on real creators like I

don't think it's going to be a completely virtual synthetic Avatar people still want to see you in the real world right and I think there are the ramifications part of what you were talking about the TCS part of what you were talking about I think this it's a little more than that I don't know if this is going to play out exactly like TCS yes of course we'll have an element like TCS but eventually I find that as We make more free cash flow I am more attracted to building more IP by ourselves yeah right

and the reason for this is I don't think creatives and even Engineers to some extent want to just scale like I think that's an Excel sheet guy who just wants to scale companies like I don't care how much money my company makes to be very honest as long as it's profitable as long as I'm having fun and as long as I keep trying to do new Things I don't really care and I know Indian for example Indian media I always talking about how much money this company made how much money that company made right I

don't know if it matters like I don't know I know many of these Founders once they become profitable I don't think they care so much about it they're like I want to do good work does it matter to you in your life whether you have 5 crores in your bank of 500 crores and I knew from day one I'm happy Being Frugal right I drive an IT 10 today right so I'm very happy being Frugal the money is not for me the money is to do all the things that I wanted to do as a

child yeah and I'm just replicating that now when in our fora in building games uh just one sec so with 4 into games also so just me doing what I want to do when I was a child right even this content thing it's so cool I'll tell you a cool thing okay I think content creators are going to be bigger Than Bollywood in India is it not already happening not yet no I'm just looking at the US and mirroring it the okay I'm going to ask you and the audience a question who do you think

is bigger today Mr Beast or Tom Holland both are actors both sort of Target the same audience I think Mr Beast is way is bigger and the way to tell this is who can sell out a stadium if you saw if you said if you heard Tom Holland is coming to speak at certain Event and you have to pay whatever $10 versus Mr Beast how which person would pull more I think Mr Beast and I think order of magnitude by the order of magnitude it's not going not even going to be closed and Tom Holland

is Spider-Man he's Spider-Man right it was Spider-Man is like for us yeah it was up there so if you look at India a similar and and remember in this conversation Brad bit is not even there we're not even talking About Brad bit so Mr Beast is clearly the symbol of a lot of of things and of course I think he's going to become a billionaire right because he's building a lot of businesses on his back in India look at this map okay there's a first generation of Shadow Salman actually a generation before that but let's

not talk about it shuk Salman Etc the only reason you know so much about shuk and Salman is because you saw them on TV all the time cuz the they always out there Yeah yeah they were always out there and the only way you could communicate you could get information is through that box this is pre phone era they were they were popular pre phone era then from shuk and Salman it went to the ranir kapor and the ranir sings of the world who still have some popularity but it's not as much as shuk and

Salman you can tell then now there's a completely new generation right of a bunch of people I do not think they're that popular and I Think today uh there are a lot of creators in India who are certainly reaching the scale where I think they would sell out stadiums more than an eight a grade but third gen or fourth gen Bollywood actor or actress for sure so also the audience is getting a lot smarter yeah audien is like audience is getting a lot smarter like and they're not going to theaters multidimens and they're not going

to Theaters they're scrolling on their feeds and to be honest shantanu and everybody else like all the other creators that I know you're on their feeds yeah right so we ended up sort of building this this weird Multiverse where now collabs are happening it's shuk X Salman right on on screen for them I don't think we're that popular yet but I think 5 or 10 years later it's eventually going to happen uh I think I lose out on that race personally because I don't speak Hindi like I'm I'm not very good with Hindi right of

course I can use an AI Avatar to speak Hindi but I think my route is more International because of the language barrier for me in India I can speak Hindi I studyed for 14 years it's just not proficient so I know a truck driver would never relate to my content and I know this and therefore I know I will never become as popular as some of the top creators in India who can speak multilingual and Really go to the masses right it's the same it's like politician like you can't be a politician if you can

only speak English you would never be a successful politician maybe you you you'll get somewhere but you will never be the PM right so I feel like a lot of people who can do multilingual will end up being there and at some point we'll see a content creator prime minister as well you could argue we kind of already have a Content creation prime minister right It's not a bad thing I think it's good and it's also improved the brand image of India outside so if that's the opportunity why would you build a TCS the only

reason you'd build a TCS and I'm just thinking incentives right it's free cash yeah services and free cash free cash right and I think we will also scale it to a certain extent at which point we'll be like it's better to build our own IPS it's better to own things on our own terms instead of being client Dependent and we'll still work with a bunch of clients I'm very confident we'll continue to work with zeroa for example right so I think we'll continue to do that um but it is not going to be an unbounded

you know unchecked 60,000 cror a year because I don't think any of the bootstrap I don't have shareholders I don't have stakeholders I don't have anyone El driving this so I feel like we care less about other people's stuff so I'm and it another reason why it's a bad Company is to invest in ever is I'm insane like in the sense I don't mind taking all the free cash flow and trying some crazy okay we'll do games right which is so scary for somebody to have invested in right and I know I'm like that and

I'm like that's a weakness so I mean it could also be strength because you do more Innovative stuff but in the short term you always look like an idiot and I don't want to spend my entire life justifying why I'm doing This distracted thing that is such a Val that it's such a cultural shift right vun because think about this way TCS grew in the' 60s '70s 80s '90s and they took a service they took a let me put this in the world of computing they took a slightly more risk of service oriented view yeah

right so they built in the' 607s 80s '90s a service business in Computing for the world while Microsoft app Apple IBM Intel Nvidia Google meta over a period of time We're building product businesses yeah and you're saying in the world of content I actually don't want to go the service rout I actually want to do what Microsoft and Apple did which is to build out products or in this case IP it's an incentive thing man I think if when you're bootstrapped and you reach a certain stage you're like do I use this free cash flow

to try new or do I do the old and do more of it and I don't know why I'm just not attracted to that much money like I it's it doesn't change my life and also stuff has gotten cheaper the net wealth of the world has gotten more right I have the best phone I have the best food the best food and I get the best food for cheap right it's not it's it's not like you know in the era of Kings only the Kings could have access to it now all of us can have

access to what a king would have had 100 200 years ago you can get it on you'll Have a guy coming and giving it to you which even Kings didn't have someone told me this very recently I think Shashank from the whole truth I think he I don't know who told me this but there's a calories you can buy per rupee wow over the last 300 years and today apparently you can get like 500 calories for 20 bucks yeah I think today diabetes and obesity is a bigger problem than than not having enough AB right

so that's kind of gotten easier a Television today is not that expensive you can rent it for like dirt cheap the only thing and I disagree with all the finance influences I think eventually you need to buy a house right because it gives you the psychological Comfort it's not about money it gives you psychological comfort of being able like this is my base of operations so the only real purchase I made was home well done congratulations and and apart from that I have my personal opinion is I Don't have too many other expenses so and

I'm not really playing for the status of being a you know millionaire trillionaire it's all made up so now we're like what is crazy that we can spend this money on that doesn't make sense but if it works would make for a cool story and also prove that it's possible in the country right and this doesn't mean you do a job of anything right this being non attracted to money or you know when We take money from somebody we do a good job for them right that's our rule like it's like and here's the cool

thing right if someone's got a bad experience with us we just like take the money back it's so cool we don't have targets to hit yeah right all the Targets in all the teams are are made up and this score team that I have has been working with me for a very long time through failure through success they've been working with me for a very long time right and I Had a bunch of other people as well I got family involved Ro's actually my brother-in-law Lavina is my sister uh in-law it's my wife now we

got Karan who's Ro's brother then we got my own brother to to to be in the game side so it's like we just got family in one like it's okay because you never feel bad if family makes money yeah because I've seen with other Founders one person gets more famous one person makes more money and that becomes a conflict later but Like if it's family nobody cares right and as long as it's got good leadership good rules and we use content internally as well like we have a bunch of stories internally about you know like

for example we have the story of chopwood carry water okay which I'm very bad at right but chopwood carry water is this one guy who was a lumberjack who used to carry water from a place to the market and come back and he decided all the I hate doing the same thing Over and over again I now want to meditate and be a monk so he becomes a monk okay he meditates under a people tree for X number of years then he decides you know I'm back now and people come to him like now what

do you do now that you're enlightened he like my chop would carry water before Enlightenment chop would carry water after chop would carry water so we have bunch of stories like this some for other people but some also for me to remind me of what's Important and we live the company on a bunch of stories where storytellers outside we create cool IP we never want to be in the bracket of these guys are doing this for money or these guys it's not even a thing that we think about here right because then it becomes all

about that nobody cares about the Innovation that you're doing they'll be like oh you did this new project you wasted this much it happens right with a bunch of other Elon must launched this And he blew up this rocket made we don't even care we're not even playing that race right so we will never be Money Motivated which is why at some point maybe there'll be another company that's more money motivated that really wants to scale services that will get better I know is very weird to hear right because a lot of people who are

like number one who like I don't want to lose or whatever but I feel like paradoxically being Innovative and trying the new Stuff it it's actually helping us yeah not just mindlessly scaling is helping us yeah um that's amazing man that's am I want you to tell me like there are two kinds of people who I think will gain tremendously if you give them advice side and I'm going to break them down into two parts people like me for example entrepreneurs who run consumer brands or fintech businesses or what any business actually which might have

some consumer element to it who want to get Into the content game and have no idea where to start these could be large companies these could be startups it could be Founders it could be anyone right but businesses that want to get into the world of creation and how to think about it and what's your advice to that and people who are obviously consumers of content because they're on social a lot have a ton of stuff to tell the world my mother for example my mother is one of the most learned yogis I know she

is a classical music singer she's an extremely good-look person in real life like if you see her she's magnetic I have been wanting her to start putting stuff out there but then she gets so overed by camera becoming conscious this that and the other plus then there's this overlay of Technology Etc which with AI this that which someone like her will be will struggle with right and most people would right so for people who have stories to tell The world which are valuable for the world how do they get out there and how do businesses

get out there like like talk about these two maybe one after the other well to answer your question of how businesses do it uh how much budget do you have give me a give me a rough give me maybe not your number but let's say okay let's say let's say uh let's say we can invest 25 lakhs a month okay so that's about that's about 3C okay here's what I Would do sounds insane but this is what's what's necessary right now I would create a show called beef okay okay that's b e f okay probably

an expansion of the word beef where F stands for Federation okay okay I would take two content creators who are Waring online and then be like you come and give them a stage like a WWE wrestling ring they will never fight for too F two to fight but make them Trash Talk each other when times comes To actually fighting you either you get them robots which will happen like 3 4 years later or today you get them to get a wrestler okay from their hometowns it has to be a wrestler representing your hometown and you

make those two wrestlers fight okay yeah I think thiss any business yeah it will work for your business your consum ours right and then eventually you know the stage will have your you know like Logan Paul did This with Prime on the WWE stage right it'll have a logo of the razor or whatnot because you're getting content creators content creators will come do this for free okay right because they want to you know be a spe I in front of other people and do cools see there's two ways to get a content creator to do

stuff with you pay them money or do something so outlandish that they would it would it it feels like an honor to be there right so tell them okay vun versus Shantanu on stage we have a disagreement or something you take the fight to Twitter then you eventually take the fight to the stage then you bring somebody from your hometown from guro you know Big Bly guy I bring a Big Bly guy from Karnataka somewhere we make them fight and if they other person loses cool right and then the story ends there and you do

that week on week season on season it would work well in India really yeah it would work really Really really well India has cardinal cardinal desire to see people fight right yeah it's it's it's Primal like every idea I give will be a primal human desire okay give me one more like another idea I had was I mean this is something we eventually want to do right like we thinking in terms of Tam like I know for a fact I will never be a Shah ruk Khan level famous because I speak English the the truck

driver will never relate to me so I'm like if I want to Expand Tam what's an IP do then you have to tap into what India really cares about what India has seen growing up the Mahabharat replicate the Mahabharat replicate ramayana right and do that season on season that's expensive but the ROI on that is so unclear for a regular business they wouldn't do it right but I telling you the soft Roi on it is huge right and I soft is a madeup word by the way right I don't even know what It means but

you know what I mean you know what I'm talking about it's like eventually people will know you for it they will assign a value to the production value of that show they'll be like this is a serious company doing it yeah and I can trust this razor it translates exactly like that yeah um you know I still like when I buy a shirt today if it's Dragon Ball branded because I grew up watching Dragon Ball I'm I'm okay with paying a premium for That shirt right and I know a lot of Dragon Ball fans they

will spend like so much money on Dragon Ball IP and it's churning again and again and again and again and again so I think in content eventually the goal is to build recognizable IP over the long run aib is that yeah even today people are like a yeah right can we get you guys back together for one show so I think building long-term recognizable IP is really hard and today you really need to Invest money in it right make a Black Mirror India if you really want like a Indian version of Black Mirror what what

would a company like us for example we do 300 CR a year you can assume we have a marketing budget of let's say 75 CR a year yeah what percentage of that should be on this like just off the top of your head I can't tell you in terms of percentages I tell you in terms of you try experiments like you try something for two episodes you'll know whe in two Episodes this is a dud or not right if you're trying high production stuff that's the thing right can you do high production stuff fast quickly

cheap that's what AI really helps us do right can you try this put it back when you want yeah yeah and put it back when you want so your capex on something is let's say you want to do a shark tank India tomorrow like you want to do a YouTube version of Shar tank is there a way you can run that experiment quickly and Cheaply like over three episodes and then say is this worth betting on or is this worth or should we just kill this yeah if you can make that experiment cheap on yourself

if you spend 50 CR on a set sorry then you you you are tied into doing X number of series episodes and that I feel is like some entrepreneurs will do that and get away with it because it will work and they will make so much money and then they will be loed for taking that Risk but I feel that's the wrong way to do it in content because you can't tell yeah and audience is very like India got India's Got latent yeah right it just worked that's brilliant right yeah it's it's super smart and

everyone's talking about it and I'm like if you were a brand that did that and made it like more PG-13 you would win the internet everyone would know you sponsoring it is cool but it's different from you owning that IP yeah and that IP also becomes Now an asset and how do you value it on your balance sheet I have no idea is all very new but I think it is an asset it is an IP that you now own that you can do any number of Seasons off the only question is are people going

to get bard of it eventually right are people going to get bard of it in 2 years 3 years four years and that's why I feel your CEO needs to be a content creator or someone in your exact team needs to be a hardcore content creator who really Cares about the company cuz you be like this is getting stale yeah like one of the things we're doing now we have 10 channels we own we have a bunch of client channels we don't have we have not spoken to the clients about this yet so we're not

taking their channels in in account for for now but the channels that we own uh what we're trying to do is we're trying to make them sort of overlap or interact like a Multiverse of Madness Between them all right so I'm fighting my wife's Channel now on on Instagram it's not a real fight right but on Instagram we're fighting we're creating camps for each side we are they're the they're the artists they made a documentary on ISRO it took a month to make it like who takes a month to make a video right we make

we make 60 videos in that time 30 videos minimum 60 if you really want to so it's like just different philosophies so we made we Made a beef video on that I'll show you before you leave um and I think stuff like that we just experimenting and I feel if you can replicate that that's better but the long-term play is make as many channels as you can if you made 20 channels and they all interact with each other and you eclipsed sort of a person's feed or at least had 5 10% of a person's feed

uh I think you'll make a lot of money right because you already have a product to sell it's proven pmf It's not like you're experimenting trying to figure out some new product to sell I think it would work um that being said I want to caveat all this by saying I'm an idiot right and uh and you know a lot of what has worked for me has worked because of the sheer ability to just start something try it and then see so all these are ideas which I would have in my head but I would

only know if they work after 3 months after I put it into action it's the expensive painful way to Do things but I feel it is the right way to do things the only problem is when you hire somebody and you tell them Yer because you don't have the time for it and the person gets emotionally attached to the thing yeah and then you know then you're like 3 months later it's going to be gone the person is not going to join you the person I'm going to work at a stable company where you know

this project work is respected where my work is respected you trashed my idea in 2 Months 3 months but we make that an expectation here which is creatives don't get too attached to the specific thing that you're doing you'll do something else creative 3 months later this doesn't work out but don't get so attached to this that your identity becomes this and then you know you you now have a like a crisis sort of being pulled away from it so yeah and to answer the question of you know what should your mom do what kind

of content Should she create I think there's a window now where you can still get views but I think content is very nepotistic like I don't know where I'd be in my career if I didn't do that thing with t like I've gone somewhere I I know if it would have accelerated as fast without T being there yeah and that's because it's like there a bunch of people like pulling views yeah 100 300 400 5K 500k views nobody takes them seriously like a bunch of you know like random channels That that do 400 500k views

nobody takes them seriously I think you need a stamp of somebody that exists in the industry in some way or form either via collaboration either via like something right to really signal to the world that this is this this this person is to be you know is interesting yeah right and I think I'm grateful for for taking that bet on me right back then and I think now that we have the ability to do it for other people we're trying to do our Best to help as many people as we can sort of get there

and we also found a way to monetize it with the brands we're like yo we'll make this channel cool we'll make this other channel cool and I think we also do cool content there right the amount we wrestle with the brands to get creative control where like we want to do this fight between this Channel and this channel can you really allow us to do it and the surprising part is how okay How Okay the brands are with it as long as they're like okay then change the channel name to something else associate with the

brand same colors but so you do all the beef and then one year later we'll change to our brand name so there's smart ways workarounds around this so what I would do if I were you is create as many channels the thing with your mom is or anyone else creating content is somehow you need a weigh in or you need to lead a very interesting Life breaking through the algorithm raw is very very very it's hard today compared to like 10 years back yeah yeah I remember there's this one video byab long time ago where

he said that look one of the First videos I put up got a lot of views today it's not possible right now it's even harder your first video is not going to get 300K views 400k views just by the algorithm unless you put the effort of going and sharing it getting in the right places seing it For which you need an offline Network people think this is all like in the air bre and whatnot no it's like you need an offline Network and I think that's there's still a window where I think it's possible to

break through the algorithm but YouTube now has the new feature where like you can now Al Alert YouTube to this person under this specific size I think under 500k or something is a good Creator there's a new signal they've created it's called It's called something right where you can signal and you can be like this you and you have three a week once a week you can three people you can say I want this person to be recommended to the algorithm it's a new feature on YouTube cuz they're enabling Discovery for new creators because actually

it's very hard to break out as a new Creator because it's becoming very concentrated at the top right it's become very con at the top and all theity just plays out man What inequity just plays out yeah in any in any free market no this is a free market this is a free market of attention and I think um if you capture somebody's attention it is getting worth more and more and more because it's actually very easy to convert attention to money it is not very easy to convert money to attention correct right there are

only few Avenues you'll have to come to us or something like that right and even that like you know at some point You're going to start asking yourself okay I have all this I'm sitting on all this money do I go buy a Dharma yeah like a 50% of Dharma right or do I go start my own ww or something you see this a lot in the US where people try to continue to stay relevant and they're like I make so much money nobody cares about me every billionaire has bought a newspaper like it's crazy

but that's narrative correction this is more like oh I'm bored and I want to entertain Myself and you know I want I want more status how do I do that and I think need for more status and narrative correction are two different things but media historically has always been subsidized the unit economics of media now make sense on video for finally right you can do it if you really wanted to alone if you're a young Creator like years old you can do it alone you can edit by yourself you can make videos by yourself you

have to work harder but you can do It alone if you get some re some proof this that eventually everyone gets a team but that team is never going to be 300 people yeah right uh the team is going to be three people four people five people right and I think that is huge there are people now with 5 10 man teams who are doing more views than the biggest media companies in history like who who are still those media companies still exist and there are kids pulling more views than that who have more these

Kids in India for examp like for example a lot of the gamer kids yeah right the Techno Gamers and all that I think their reach is incredible right technical guruji today will dictate more of phone buying Behavior even though he's it's been a while and a lot of people called him irrelevant I don't think he's that irrelevant look at his Instagram numbers solid still DET takes a lot more of that behavior than uh you know uh some of the media guys in in in phone reviews and Whatnot so I feel like the the order of

power has changed right the hierarchy of power has changed and but I think this is not going to be like traditional media I think this is going to go the route of it's going to split some of us are going to go like traditional media I think we are defin because we do infotainment it's going to be definitely like traditional media like like we won't make the mistakes of traditional media unit economics are better Therefore we won't make the mistakes but somewhat like that the others will go become celebrities right and I think at some

point you'll have to choose am I media am I the dispenser of information in the world which is what my channel does technically you want to stay updated with AI content or AI news or Tech news my chan is actually one of the best places because we we rate by how useful we rate every piece of news as is this Useful for people is this something that's valuable is there Share value on this is this something that will change people we have like a bunch of criteria or they will go become celebrities right I think

beer biceps is definitely on the route to become a celebrity at this point right or already is to some extent so I feel and even T at this point is like he's a celebrity right and us we will create content around news world EV etc etc and I think it's beautiful to Watch that happen what I'm surprised is why the old media houses haven't done video it's a DNA thing I think man yeah but come on I mean the data is pretty obvious people are spending so much time scrolling you look around and someone's on

their phone they're either gaming or scrolling yeah it's like large consumer brand companies like everyone knew the d2c was going to come everyone knows the quick com is going to come but the DNA thing right it just takes a much longer Time for a large organization to change complete the way it thinks they're very risk of yeah I have a theory on that I think you need a lab I think every company needs a lab like a crazy entity that's only job is to stay as crazy bring the fanciest people Etc the issue is like

running a successful company and building a disruptive company are two very different things yeah and when you're in the former You're always protecting your success you'll always struggle with new things here you're just breaking as you go and for you for example maybe three four years down the line when you have 3 4,000 people and doing insane stuff it'll be very it might be much harder to for you to Tinker than yeah compared to now no but I already know this and even today I get so much time to Tinker because of how the companies

are structured for example I'm not CEO of Any of the companies I'm CEO of this hold by the way our companies are structured very weirdly we haven't even completed the entire structuring so it's a mess right now um so all these four companies that we have right plus the media let's say that's the fifth one that's owned by the parent original idea was we'll have a holding and then we'll have these four companies below it my wife's company being one you know my brother-in-law's company being one Whatever four companies but I will never be CEO

of any company I'm like my job is to make sure we stay competitive we stay relevant I'm trying new experiments I'm making sure that we're doing enough R&D to be at the Forefront that's what I lead in a way plus I'm doing my own content to stay relevant and to make sure the deal flow keeps coming you know Aina my wife once had a dilemma she's like should I be spending time running my company or should I be spending time Creating content and I had the same dilemma at some point should I spend more time

here or get a CEO and now everything is different CEO run right or should I get or should I spend more time creating content this a funny very low ego answer we came to which is it's higher Roi to create content cuz Co part managing people is hard but it's not impossible yeah but content we are blessed to have something where people watch us and we we you can screw this up And yes you will pay the price but you screw this up you lose all deal flow and we deal flow is what makes a

company Su like a B2B company successful we can never lose this so we have to go out and keep creating content but that's a low ego answer because everyone wants to be CEO yeah and uh when you've been CEO for a long time I've been in startups for like a long time and you've had good years you've had bad years you come to this conclusion it's overrated role yeah Right I mean you know I'm saying this knowing that a lot of people a lot of our seers will watch the but they know my thoughts on

this and they voluntarily chosen to be CEO something like you it's interesting to say that because in our company also um when we started the barber shop the board was like what are you doing what are you doing like is this a Fame hungry thing like you think you think you arrived just because the company is now Getting to a certain scale or we've raised a lot of money you want now you're going out it's not it's it's nearly not enough you have I said no but this is important to the company because content is

important and people didn't get it for a year year and a half people just did not get it and I was spending a lot of time on it it was obviously taking mind space and the running of the company was actually being done by the senior team including my co-founder Deepak who actually is in the weeds every single day kind of figuring it out and I realized man he's so good at that job and I think no one can do what I'm doing with this kind of you know with this kind of intensity so we

just realized that there's a division of labor and it now everyone like yeah absolutely it makes a lot of sense but at that time like thank God being misunderstood is normal when you're doing something that people don't Understand also I feel like one thing we's don't get about content they still don't get it every channel every successful channel is a personal brand name a company Channel that's done really really well like I'm talking about yeah even if they are temporarily successful they have build the Loyalty of a human at scale of a shok or a

actual face AI really allowed gave us the opportunity to make a face at scale Because you can now buy the royalties of a person that's also by the way that's something we have to navigate which is really weird how do you get somebody to license their AI face to you what type of contract do you sign that's we we did it probably for the first time in India I mean I'm sure I'm sure they would have done it but we had to buy their license forever and this is not a celebrity we're doing it from

right from an individual because Channel stops working If you decide 2 years later I don't want my royalties here or my face here that's something we have to navigate that I can speak about that for a while we still haven't fully figured it out the answer is we still haven't fully figured it out but everything works on high Tru right so um at some point regulations around it will come come by and um it'll probably be the first people to accept it blah blah blah of it yeah um are you part of the policy on

this are you like Working with the government on this I know after well AF runs the India AI Mission we speak very often um but I don't I think it'll take some time for India to like really build proper policy or regulation on this I think right now India still St trying to stimulate growth in AI we don't want to lose the race before you go get into Ultra regulation you don't want to lose the race but I do know like Anil Kapur was On the time India uh this thing right for regulation for going

out and you know copyrighting his voice and this and that so I think first India has to make sure we don't lose the race we have a lot more to lose yeah copyrighting can come a little later beyond that but we we do everything the right way in the sense we we will never make a deep fake of anyone anymore like in 2 years ago when we were experimenting like we've done some of this to show people that It's possible right but uh now last one and a half years we've never defect anyone else without

their permission we've never um I'm I'm I'm not saying we've ever done it in a bad way we've done it like for example we' used a celebrity's voice to make a tutorial right to say here's how you you know you can make this person's voice this is when we were just learning about the space and blah blah blah but today it's like we get a person it's like a bunch Of documentation they need to sign before they do an AI Avatar with us right so it's stuff like that that that's new that we're also starting

to figure out the shape of um but yeah I think to answer your questions I think VC don't get that companies are uh channels are personal Brands yeah and anytime you involve a personal brand even if it's got a company name like we we' invested in this one company called 100x Engineers it's portfolio company at this point portfolio at this point HX Engineers um it's called HX Engineers but Sid is on it it's his face and when they see out him out he'll be like hey 100x Engineers still a person that people are relating to

they've just called the person 100x Eng you can really confuse people like that as well so I think um everything is a personal brand I don't think VC are comfortable with Person brand building in a company but it's necessary the best companies ever run in history are personal brand driven yeah so so how do you equate the two yeah it makes a lot of sense well what's your experience with that g like now how is it going now now I think it's played out right now it's very clear now I was in Christ University today

and every time I go into a college because that's where my target audience is the first question is have you heard of bomb Sharing company have you heard of Barber Shop who heard a bomb sharing company before they heard of the barber shop the M the three variables the math becomes very clear in my target audience yeah it's very very clear all right so my CMO and the marketing team always has a good question to answer which is okay it's Char for awareness now how do you build out the remaining marketing fun that's a good

point I I'm not sure how much content can actually do Beyond Just make people as aware of of of of the product offering as possible I think at some point physical distri distribution has to do his job at some point channels have to play their role at some point the team has to do more and I get it but if you're able to create this topper funnel in a very meaningful way where you can create at least create some kind of purchase intent or Intrigue it makes the rest of the funnel super cylindrical and you

can Really scale it like it makes everything easier you want to hire people today you put up a story right you want to and you know what I'm learned something with our culture right cuz now we have so many people if people have watched our content and come in they kind of know what to expect yeah they kind of unofficially they're all similar people because it turns out at scale only a certain kind of like an ICP in a way follows you on YouTube or Instagram so They're meeting their friends here they come in like

you're exactly like me yeah you know what relates you both you you follow me so you're kind of similar because I attract a kind of person to watch do you feel your employees worship you because of that though no like sometimes yeah like I struggle with newer recruits I struggle with newer recruits who come in after they see the barber shop people who have been around for a while and then they seen the Barber shop happen it's okay we filter that out actually very for them to disagree and so on it becomes very hard if

there's too much fanboyism I don't do it plus I'm not CEO so I don't spend too much time with the employees um so they spend a lot of time with their teams and their bosses who are not as famous right so I feel like yes it does change the dynamic but I think it's net better cuz otherwise you have a lot of people Disigned people you know the hardest thing is to just just align five people to do one thing it's really hard right especially if they don't know each other yeah but here if they

already kind of know what the other people are like it's all people who are generally disagreeable but agreeable with each other yeah so they're more productive and they watch my content so they've already seen me talk about these tools they've already seen me you know talk About content they already know the like it's not like a blank slate whereas in 2016 2017 I used to run the services company called Avalon and I used to hire people it's like they knew nothing about me and they were so different and they were like now we need to

install everything that we know about our current business into them so more I talk about the business it makes hiring really easy it makes the pre-training really Easy and the school that Aina does I'm able to say okay you should also teach them this because I need this in this business so it becomes part of the curriculum in a way uh so I think a lot of that stuff has happened so hiring is easier leads are easier you you have a problem you know people right so it's it's a lot of that and like you

said that when you enter a room people knowing who you are that just changes everything fly like now I even even Raising money by the way I I wrote a post on LinkedIn I don't know you saw it no I'm sure you experienced this early stage entrepreneurs get rejected a lot like people stop picking up my calls yeah people stopped giving me meetings people stopped responding to my texts not my friends and all but it's say acquaintances like if I were in McKenzie they would never not respond yeah now they always respond and I I

call up I what mean they Pick up and I can I can hear the palpable disappointment when they realize the call is not about inviting them on the podcast they oh okay okay fine let let me hook you up what are you really expecting and it's it's very real it's very very real so content creates leverage in very soft ways also yeah Fame tricks the brain and it's also I think content is like Visa you can be anywhere you'll always get an invite to Any event you want to now that you're a Creator you'll always

be behind this scen so you'll know what other people are doing six months before they're doing it like to the audience I'm actually showing you the demo of the game we're building right or at least the early right after this so you'll know what other people are up to whether it fails or not or succeed or not you know what other pluged in you're plugged in not getting information from internet Right which is actually the slowest form of information once you know people offline correct I think um all of that is really really really valuable

and I don't know if you can put a number on it and it says personal brand driven it's very against the VC thesis of you know we're investing in a company this is the scalable thing that will run without any headless this thing but it's never like that even if you take quick Commerce it's still very personality to Wi because it's the person that drives the this thing of course there's a scale Beyond which that person doesn't matter but I assume because many of the VCS were talking about our early stage vs human thing do

you watch football I used to like Sir Alex Ferguson I know never never believe in the Superstar Theory you felt anyone should be bigger than the club but man Sports is all about superstars Sports is just like no Superstars it's very difficult with the sport it's a fundamental thing that you only learn as found as a founder and a lot of in VC are not Founders right they they're they're managers nothing against them I think what they do is also incredibly hard and I I have a lot of empathy for them because it's so hard

to tell like I'm sure you've done you've Angel invested so hard to tell what a company would be in the early stages you have no control correct it's like buying A building in some buying an apartment in some shady complex you have no idea what's going to happen later correct I just hope they're doing the best job they can and you don't have full information either so you're making decisions based on or you saw something online so you're like oh maybe this guy's good this guy's bad you don't know yeah so I think it's a

hard job but if you've not been a Founder a Founder as a Founder you know that there's going to Be that one guy in your team who's just changed the game yeah who's who's added 10 crores of new Revenue this quarter right in Venture it's it's hard to believe until you see it you know until you until you see it from far that this one person like so many people Elon M he's insane but there's still people in the comments were like no he's not doing it his team is doing it like yo the team

would wouldn't be there in the first Place if he didn't organize that and just organizing five people is hard so seeing a superstar in action right next to them is is mind-blowing and I feel it's it's hard to see especially in the world of venture because of course you'll have wins but it's not directly attributable you've made the right pick sure that's like a you poker player winning a game right yeah yeah anyways before we let you go and you know I know there's been a much longer conversation That we had kind of uh kind

of all the time in the world uh I actually wanted to tell you a little bit about r uh and this is like this is our tool for Content okay we basically last year we got people to sell these we told them we want to learn sales we will you you take this product we feel it's our most disruptive product it's a three blade razor 99 rupees all of that stuff right so we had people like Von we had people who went into local trains metros Father's factories on the roads Etc right to sell this

product like cool now this time you want to learn how to make content you make it around around the razor like be a razor preneur through by making sellable content with this so we've gotten people students anyone wants to be a Creator cont you have to make it engaging to make it monetizable and to make it monetizable you sell razors to your uh to your community yeah and the person who does the best on this We are giving them like a 10 lakh contract to be with the face of bomb shaving company next year as

a Creator wow uh we are getting them to be a part of our content um you know finale episode on the barber shop as you know to like like give them a chance to show their wayes to the world and we will get we you know we'll get them to start getting mentored by other creators like like you're right it's anistic world and if you don't have an entry Into it you will just take a lot of time sometimes natural Talent is dies unfortunately natural deaths so people who are using this to kind of sharpen

their game and to kind of become Razer what advice would you have so tan had an advice tan was like I start an Instagram page called hairwolf and keep putting I saw that and keep putting content on it and kind of scale it up through like three four things and uh but from your standpoint if if you would like to be a Creator maybe 10 15,000 followers once to get into the game but wants to use this opportunity to sell razors which is a very tactical and you know specific thing how would you do it

or what advice would I'm just thinking on the top of my head because usually I take some time to think about this but uh have you seen pen fight When We Were Young yeah yeah would do something similar you have you have a series of razors right so I would use the series of razors pit them Against each other have like a finale you know involve the audience be like which of the two razors do you think is going to win and I love that idea actually yeah and so Primal yeah everything will will boil

down to the Primal right like have them do pen fight have different you know two different sets of people then make an animated series on it with two different people you know spinning the risers around fighting with each other I would do Stuff like that uh but that's just something I can think of from the top of my head right like if I were to do it with no budgets or very low budgets it would probably be me talking about like it would be very simple shaving tips I think that's like it sounds like a

very easy idea but I think in this one it's it's it's it is something that people will want right like I don't think there's a Channel right now that's just like pure shaving shaving tips Hairstyles different kind of hairstyles um there's another Channel idea that somebody had which was um rating rating other people's looks yeah so you look at another person's look post Barber look and I would call it post Barber Shop okay I love it I would show somebody's look and I'll be like I read this look I'll tell you at the end of

the video but you know this is the problem with this look so you see the you see the two you know uh cuts that he Has here that's badly done they're not aligned I'm just coming up with something right they're not aligned and uh yeah like if they had used these razors they would know that the these Racers don't actually cut like that I'm coming up with something on the fly right but yeah as for the rating I would rate this three on five but people will stay for the rating because they want to know

how it rates very interes want something till the end yeah and it's Easier to get a woman to do it because people want to know want to see women rating men styles so if women rate particular man style five on five people will go get that hairstyle if they rate it three on five then they would rate it slightly poorly that's what I would do awesome so you have basically targeted two Primal desires of men one is to watch other men fight through the pen fight and the and the other one is to be validated

by a woman which is I think Especially from a look stand part food farmer Rand I don't know you met this guy yeah I met him like two weeks ago incredible he picked up the razor and he like I'm going to read the label and see whether you guys are actually being honest and he kicked our ass by the way like he tried to scan the QR code he read every line D did the hairwolf thing there's another couple of creators who use the razor like a mic yeah and like kind of uh said whatever

they had to say To their community so they're like I talk to my community about beauty or about politics whatever I'll continue doing that I don't want to change my to sell a Razer I'm not changing my uh you know line of content a lot but I'm going to use this as a mic which was really cool I felt like you know you're staying true to your audience at the same time you're being very cool with this so I love these ideas uh any final thoughts vun for uh for for people who want to Build

out careers in content other than the fact that they have to get in and you know kind of be at it for a while I mean I think do what you like like you know I written a book called pajama prophet and me and ab the co co-author we were just going through the book uh we were trying to see how our predictions held up six seven years in the future right and one of the things we had written in the book is Passion doesn't really matter so much it's more About discipline both me and

ab looked up and like no it's about passion right cuz when you're young you think it's about discipline because you're in that focused area where you're putting disciplined hard work but dude ultimately I eventually gravitate to who I am and what I'm passionate about and so of as everybody else so if you're passionate about content you will outwork the person who is not passionate about it because you are you are Naturally inclined to do more of it so you will it'll feel like play to you if you're passionate about it and it feel like work

to somebody else they're disciplined about it right if they're disciplined about it so the disciplined guy will lose in the long run that sounds weird but he will just lose to a guy the disciplined guy without passion will lose the disciplined gu with passion will is is like but I'll tell you if passion if you have enough Passion discipline comes by itself if you really love the thing if you really love playing sports and you have you know I have one uncle in my Society who really loves playing bat he's in the court all the

time right he's in the Batman court all the time yeah if you're really passionate you will go there all the time you're like I enjoy doing this I love doing this this is the thing I live for so I feel like a lot of people today because of the content this thing They forc themselves from being content creators and they're not really passionate about it they're doing it like kind of you know because everybody else is doing it I don't think you should half ass it I think you will get out competed by the person

that full asses it and I half content for so long and just so you know in the last except the last 1 and a half years I Grew From 100K subscribers in 2016 to 130k in 6 Years cuz I was half assing it yeah the Minute we went full ass everything changed right because we were like this is something that's very very important to us but I always leave the audience with something right this is something I've learned over the last couple of years I'm an idiot don't take anything I say seriously make your own

life decisions because nobody really knows yeah if you ask people about my decisions a year ago they'll be like it's stupid but it worked if you ask me About Snapchat and Snapchat started I don't like no chance people will send themselves a image that disappears in 10 seconds was a use case didn't expect it to get so big so I've been wrong I am wrong often about the future right and the only way to really tell is to go do the thing yourself and then see does it work out or not and I feel we

have an epidemic of influencers giving life advice like this is the thing to do and if you don't do this you're in trouble And this is the only path and I'm like me and my wife are Polar Opposites in the way we create content and both works both work yeah right um so who am I to give a specific path of advice awesome for you have been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for uh you know for sharing your insights for and thank you for the Shaving blood I assume this is for me you

know we're going to send you a full big hamper we didn't get it on the flight but we we're sending you like A whole Bombay shaving company and Bombay hamper for Rina uh but you know this has been fascinating I absolutely I think you you are at the precipice of of innovation in a world in a in a world that's changing very fast and um I'm just glad I could I could pick your brain on it and I'm I'm hoping our viewers enjoyed as well likewise I mean thank you for having me on it's an

honor thank you so much