S3 E07 | Revolutionizing Make in India: ft. Akash Gupta of GreyOrange & Mohit Kumar of Ultrahuman

[00:00:00] Akash Gupta: If I remember the early days of the hardware journey, 2012 – 2014, I think India didn’t have any kind of ecosystem with hardware. Also, I think, even from a talent perspective, people who have built hardcore hardware from scratch were very less, and even fewer who would come and join a startup was trying to do something in this space.

[00:00:30] Mohit Kumar: That from a consumer perspective, there are probably three core learnings. One would be what is missing. What is a misconception? And what is essential, right? These three buckets are from a consumer manufacturing perspective. Missing is quite obvious. I think the vendor ecosystem, even for CNC, for example, something as basic as CNC technology, the vendor ecosystem is not really evolved.

If you think about injection molding that still takes 8 to 12 weeks, prototyping, talent does not really exist. ID talent is very hard to find, industrial design, talent, etc. and most of them wouldn’t have worked on electronics, hardware, form factors. So, all of that is the missing bucket.

[00:01:32] Karthik Reddy: So, here we are at the beginning of the first episode and it feels like decades since I’ve actually had my founders back on the Blume podcast. So, welcome to a new episode of the Blume podcast. Mohit Kumar from Ultrahuman, Akash Gupta from GreyOrange. Lovely to have both of you here.

Just for the guests, I know it’s taken a long time to get you onto the show. As I was telling you, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten Blumeers on the show. We’ve had lots of luminaries and we’re waiting for the right opportunities to get, some amazing founders and this theme and what you guys are building at GreyOrange and Ultrahuman just made it like a perfect situation.

So, today, I’m thrilled and privileged to welcome two extraordinary Blumeers who fundamentally redefined what it means to build hardware companies from India. So, joining me are Akash, CEO and co-founder of GreyOrange, all the way from Blume Fund I, we’ve been partners in crime for over 12, 13 years now.

Mohit Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Ultrahuman, Fund III company, but we’ve known Mohit as well as a Fund II Alum. He quickly came back with a new idea. And, of course, we had to back him. So, more of all of that later. What makes their stories particularly compelling is how they achieve something that most people thought India just couldn’t achieve, which is like building world-class cutting-edge hardware product-lead companies in India that now command global respect and market leadership. As someone in the team said, they’ve not just crossed boundaries that just erased them. So, Akash through GreyOrange has revolutionized warehouse automation, building very sophisticated robotic solutions. But as the maxim goes, he’s become a bigger believer in software eating the world, and the solutioning obviously is built around the original hardware.

But now we’re becoming a software giant as well in the warehouse automation space and no less than giants like Walmart, H&M, Nike, they’re all customers of, GreyOrange in the United States of North America. And from writing the first lines of code in India to deploying thousands, I wish I could say hundreds of thousands, we’ll get to that point, hopefully sometime soon.

Those robots are running around in warehouses globally, and it’s been an inspiration for a lot of founders in robotics to aspire to what GreyOrange has shown and paved the way for.

Mohit on the other hand has surprised everybody by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in personal health monitoring. So, by combining, cutting-edge biosensors with sophisticated software, Ultrahuman has brought like laboratory grade, health insights into daily lives, and they have people who love them all the way from Silicon Valley to Tokyo. And we hope to see many more people supporting Ultrahuman like I do.

What’s particularly meaningful for us at Blume, is that we’ve had the privilege of partnering with them when most people, thought this was not possible. They just had an idea. The grand visions were a vision at that point, more skepticism than support. Carbon clean who also we’ve had on the show in the first season and GreyOrange as examples of how these companies, Mohit you don’t know this, but these companies have never raised a dollar from Indian shows after Blume. So, that’s been the level of confidence in our ability to build globally, right?

And we’ve watched them navigate these unique challenges, hardware development, global supply chains, reorienting supply chains, building global distribution networks, All while maintaining their engineering roots in India. So, let’s dive deep into their journeys, understand the philosophy of how to build these phenomenal businesses. And uncover some of the lessons that hopefully inspire generations of deep tech founders in this country. So, welcome again, Mohit and Akash. 

[00:05:34] Akash Gupta: Thanks, Karthik. Thanks for having us here. 

[00:05:36] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. We started with Akash, only because of he’s probably younger than you, Mohit, but from seniority in the portfolio, we’ve known him for even longer than you have straight. He was still in college, I think, when we met him, at BITS Pilani.

[00:05:50] Karthik Reddy: So you developed, Akash, an interest in 3D animation, coding, a very young age. You were a part of the AcYut team in BITS Pilani which was quite legendary. However, became the foundation of building this hardware club in BITS Pilani which legacy continued 15 years later.

How did these influence your journey? And, I know, Samay and you started it. He was a senior in college. But like what got into you that you thought you could actually convert like this little robotics project out of college into entrepreneurship and a world-class company? Just walk us through?

I think this set of companies will come more from college campuses. So, speak to the young kids who are 17, 18 like you were And walk us through that journey 

[00:06:36] Akash Gupta: For sure. I think I would say in the very early days it was just, at least for me, a lot of fascination on what you were learning.

I think pretty much till your JEE and then coming to the college, the whole concept was you read books you learn from books and then you write exams and you get marks and that’s it. That’s pretty much what the learning process, that kind of validation process looked like.

And I think I hadn’t tinkered with hardware in my school days, but the day I first tinkered with hardware, I think it felt so good that you could physically look at things. And I remember thinking about this pretty much in early days of AcYut was that this whole DC motor that I used to draw in my books now I can play with and I can really understand what does that really mean.

I think, at least early days were all that fascination and I was lucky enough to get my hands on BITS Pilani CNC machine, which was only I would say kept for demos to student and we were able to get that to manufacture things. I could work on PCBs.

I could work on making hardware move and things like that. So, I think the kind of satisfaction of, building something, putting some electronics on it and coding something on it and then getting it working, I think that was very fascinating, for me and the amount of learning you would have while going through that journey. I think so early days were all about that.

And I think, as we build AcYut for a couple of years and spend a lot of time in participating so many competitions all around the world, there’s a lot of hunger around how do we now use this for a particular application for solving a particular problem? 

And this is 2009 – 2010. So I know humanoids are again back in the game. But 2009 – 2010, we were building humanoids. They were almost a meter tall and I think while the initial thought was can we really do something commercial with that and it was like no, I think technology is way too early in the game to do that So I think post then both me and Samay were thinking, how do we bring this whole software hardware, the passion that we had in kind of bringing and solving a real-world problem.

And I think that’s all, and again, we were doing this from almost the end of my second year, third year in college. So getting and applying robotics and software to the supply chain was almost like, I think, a third or fourth gig. 

The first one was robotics education. The second one was online robotics e‑commerce and likes of that and the third one was Robotics for oil and gas agency, which we figured out in India is extremely regulated. So you can’t just run a startup on it and then fourth was supply chain and kind of that excited us enough to say, okay. Yes. This is my industry that is ready for disruption. 

Also, again supply chain in 2012 was not as sexy as it is today. It was still a very back end function. But I think we got a good feel of that there’s a lot to disrupt using software and robotics in this industry and kind of that got us there. 

[00:10:14] Karthik Reddy: So Mohit, just to give you context, AcYut was this humanoid robot I remember one of them, Samay or Akash, showed us their passport and it had more stamps than most of us would have in their 30s.

And these were like two teenagers. And so they had gone and won a whole bunch of global competitions. And then somebody like, they got referred in and actually built a haunted house with all these gadgetries in the U.S., which is quite a legendary story of theirs as well.

And when we first met them literally in the basement, there was this clunky look like a whole bunch of wires sitting on a couple of metal plates. And that was the first-floor robots of this by housing idea that we saw. We have never seen a haunted house in the U.S. but supposedly it still lives.

So, Mohit, I know we started off on a very different note. Here you are building this Roadrunnr was our first name for what we backed. So Akash, you should know, the first investment in Fund II, Roadrunnr. So, Adit finds these young folks from Ola and Flipkart and they’re all putting together a team which is around what today is Zomato’s online delivery.

So, I’m not simulating this. It was actually the truth. Roadrunnr became Runnr because of copyright issues. And then Runnr became our first exit. And Zomato’s acquisition to compete with Swiggy. So today, what are the two mega Decacorn fighting it out and slugging it out? There were probably 10,000 deliveries a day and Mohit and team land up and re-shaped and re-tooled Zomato’s online delivery to, I think when they left, it was what a million deliveries a day?

[00:11:56.17] Mohit Kumar: 2 mil at peak.

[00:11:57.26] Karthik Reddy: Crazy. So, that was the kind of scale 200x growth in 3 years. And we used to keep in touch with Mohit and Mohit used to say, someday, I think I need to go and pursue my passion.

And the next thing you know, he says, I’m taking a break. I’m going to go off this island, off Thailand. And why don’t you tell the story from there Mohit? So, what happened there, and what prompted Ultrahuman? I know you were obsessed about health But from there to get to Ultrahuman was a little bit of a journey.

[00:12:24] Mohit Kumar: Yeah. No, I think the Roadrunnr/​Runnr journey was very different and intense, very lucky to be a part of it but then I think long-term goal and passion was to go back to health and to actually as a big fan of, Bruce Lee and the mysticism associated with Shaolin Temple and all those things. And grew up reading those books and basically, always thought that I think there’s a lot more to discover when you actually have an inverse journey and all that basically is Eastern mysticism kind of stuff. 

So, I took a break, traveled to this place called Tiger Muay Thai, trained for a few months, practice Jujutsu. I think back then that was the beginning of what should I do next? And I think initially, the view that I had was, ​“Oh, I am from a supply chain/​delivery domain. So, let’s do something in that.” But just couldn’t really, get interested again to do something again in that space, wouldn’t wake me up again in the morning.

And then the second one was, Vatsal is my co-founder and we kept chatting about what should we do next. And the next idea was surprisingly like a video chat tool, which we started working on and then, on that video chat tool, which we coded first, we kept talking about health and fitness basically because I was at a martial arts camp and we were trying to figure out patterns.

And we said look, we’re using the tool to chat about something that we’re not pursuing. So, maybe it makes sense to pursue that instead of this. I think the first product name was Cosmos. I think the first tool we built. We never told the world about it because it’s a shitty idea, bad idea overall.

[00:14:29] Karthik Reddy: This is pre-pandemic, so who knows Cosmos might have been a mini Zoom, but. 

[00:14:35] Mohit Kumar: But yeah, gladly we started, Ultrahuman, back in 2020, and just before pandemic and the world has been different since then. We’ve been getting surprised every year.

[00:14:50] Karthik Reddy: And so, just an extension of both those questions. I know you’ve stuck around with hardware. You folks have become loyal to hardware. I know Mohit even in the health journey, hardware came a little later. From the outside, it feels very daunting. And most people say, how can India be like a champion and hardware technology of any kind. Do we have manufacturing shops? Do we have the electronic shops to build the best PCB boards?

And it’s not about building the PCB board, right? It’s about power consumption. It’s about battery usage. It’s all the complexity that comes with hardware and you have different levels of sophistication, different use cases. But why don’t you walk us through a little bit of, A, the journey, both of you committed to it, but what kind of challenges did you not foresee? Which did you think immensly possible to solve from an Indian context? And what did you have to iterate to get out of the Indian context? If at all. Akash, maybe you can go for it.

[00:15:51] Akash Gupta: Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, if I remember the early days of the hardware journey, I think, 2012 – 2014, I think India didn’t have any kind of ecosystem with hardware. And also, I think even from a talent perspective, I think people who have built hardcore hardware from scratch were very less, and even fewer who would come and join a startup were trying to do something in this space.

So I think, from talent to figuring out how do you do the prototyping, large power prototyping for even, our first version of bots were done in-house through our own CNC machines and through our own machines. I remember this was a big decision that we were, and this was before Karthik you guys invested. This is the angel funding from Vulcan, which was, and it would sound funny now, but it would that point of time was 40 – 50 lakhs. I think something like that.

[00:17:00] Karthik Reddy: Even our round was 2.4 Crores, so very little money. 

[00:17:02] Akash Gupta: Exactly. So the first was Vulcan 40 – 50 lakhs and a decision that I remember starkly with Samay and Me saying, okay, are we gonna put 25 lakh of this in a CNC machine? Gonna take half of your funding and you want to put in a CNC machine so that you can do prototyping and things like that. So, I think Gurgaon or Manesar had an ecosystem, but that was only built for car manufacturing.

So nobody was, entertaining a bunch of kids coming and saying can you make three parts of this for me. So I think in early days, a lot of this was done in house for us and slowly we got exposed to different kind of ecosystems not in India, but in China, I think later in 2015 – 16 is when we started building more and more ecosystem for manufacturing in India where we started developing vendors in different parts of India to do that. So, I think the initial part was literally just trying to get the first few versions up by building them or prototyping them yourself. And I remember two 2013 – 14, we have done three sortation systems till then right and we are really trying to figure out is this something that we should have done or not?

And comes 2014, we get from three sortation systems order 247 or something like that and this was all the second big billion day. So, it was like, everybody prepping for the second big billion day. So, everybody wants a sortation system. And I think we had six months literally to scale up from being able to produce three sortation systems to 47 sortation systems.

And that’s what the first time we thought of okay, let’s put a kind of assembly line ourselves and things like that. So, it was, I would say, a lot of hands-on work that was done at that point of time and of course later when we started scaling a lot more on robotics perspective. We had more vendors. We still do assemble our own robotic technology, whatever we do.

We do a lot of third party as well, but things that we do ourselves, we do still assemble a lot in our Gurgaon plant. So, yeah, I think it was a lot of hands-in work, both from manufacturing perspective, but mostly for talent as well, we were, instead of, being like 20-year experience folks, I think we hired smart folks from college who are just figuring out with us.

[00:19:49] Karthik Reddy: Fascinating. So, I’m going to touch upon a little bit about, the complexity of the supply chain, talent, and also the gradual evolution from being known for hardware to almost making hardware redundant as you advance and why that’s important in the evolution of a hardware company.

You don’t want to be seen as dumb nuts and bolts and smart engineering alone, but also what does software do to be able to change the trajectory of that hardware? And I think, GreyOrange’s evolution has been that, and I’ll save that for a little later. Mohit, in your case, I know there was a little bit of a step function to get to what is today the ring which you’re most known for.

But it wasn’t your first product. This is not going to be your last product, I’m sure. So I know you’re on the verge of announcing one. But when you think about hardware and you think about the challenges, what daunted you back then, how have you overcome them today? And what gives you the confidence that you can go ahead on against a whole bunch of players out there, all different form factors, right?

There are watches. There are bands. Now, there are other things that you compete with. There are CGMs that you compete with. So, how does that trajectory, how it has evolved so far and how does it look going forward? 

[00:21:10] Mohit Kumar: Sure. So, our journey was very much around looking at, like, how do we get more of health data from the ecosystem first?

Then, I think around 2021, we felt that’ll be really hard to do because all ecosystems in health are extremely tight and closed and nobody wants to give you raw data access in case of health. Because once you have the raw data, you can actually train your own algorithms and you can probably build a better model of health and access to raw data was emerging to be, in some ways, a comparative advantage.

So somewhere around end of 2022, we decided, or mid-2022, actually, that we need to own the full stack. We need to actually verticalize heavily and control the entire end-chain experience. And this was actually weird timing for us because we’re right in the middle of COVID, supply chain was completely choked. Whichever supplier they were speaking to of components, manufacturers, some basically vendors and most of them would actually tell us that the lead times would could vary from six months to one year to probably forever depending on how the market shapes.

We had heard of horror stories where everything was ready and the factory just shut down. So, people can’t really take the goods away from like a Chinese factory. So because of all of these things, as a forcing function, we decided that if we have to control our future, evolve the product for the Launch of new products in the future. We have to do it ourselves. 

There’s no other answer. Maybe it’s the harder answer. But we have to learn the laws of physics and understand how does it really works. So also got incredibly lucky back then because there was a company in this space available, actually a two-member company, and both the founders are available.

They’re also pre-product and we thought that maybe two pre-product companies can combine and make a post-product company. Yeah, not a great plan. But then I think spent like a few months, figuring out what’s possible in India. And I think I would define this from a consumer perspective that from a consumer perspective, there are probably three core learnings.

One would be what is missing, what is a misconception, and what is essential. These three buckets from a consumer manufacturing perspective. Missing is quite obvious. I think the vendor ecosystem, even for CNC, for example, something as basic as CNC technology, the vendor ecosystem is not really evolved.

If you think about injection molding, that still takes 8 to 12 weeks. Prototyping, talent does not really exist. ID talent is very hard to find, industry design talent, etc. and most of them wouldn’t have worked on electronics, hardware, form factors. So all of that is the missing bucket.

From a consumer perspective, I think one key difference would be that the chase for finesse is also missing. Like for example, the common example that I keep giving is that, when we started making rings with mirror finish, most of the vendors would be perplexed that why would you need such a robust surface, which is made of tungsten carbide and still be like a mirror-finished device.

Like what is the use case? Because most of them in their lifetime and actually only made drill bits for such a hard surface. And, we had to show them the file product to make them understand that this is what we are trying to make. And then it got easier, obviously, once they understood the vision. This is the missing part.

The misconception, and to some extent, you can say that, this is very commonly said that, ​“oh, you can pick a product from China and you can modify it and label it in India and actually sell it.” tTo some extent, that’s true. 

[00:25:32] Karthik Reddy: Which a lot of copycats are doing today with your product, right?

[00:25:35] Mohit Kumar: Yes, I think it’s possible across any category. I think the way to understand this would be that in our category when people are paying $300 and above, or in any category where people are paying for not just the product, paying for the software, the hardware, the integration, the upgrades over time, they’re not just buying that one product and that one price, they’re buying a journey with the company.

And, if a Chinese company or a manufacturer was able to make a journey for the customer, they don’t need you, they would actually replace you, which is also happening in a lot of categories now. In our category, at least today, what’s happening is that a lot of these companies are incredibly efficient at really making that one device 70% cheaper with that one set of features. 

But the moment you add upgrades, iterations, software changes, product changes, design changes, new version launches, then the cost structure is actually higher than or is less efficient than yours. And that’s the last part, which is essential that I think in manufacturing if you’re really looking for, at least from our perspective, that 5, 10, 15 year journey where you really want to evolve the product, having control over the destiny of evolution is really the key, in some ways, because unless you’re able to solve the problem, people would not pay you a certain premium for your product or for the journey with the customer. And you will be commoditized in this category. That would be a, you could say, like an evolving learning in this category. 

[00:27:21] Karthik Reddy: Just before I cut back to Akash, there are a lot of parallels in the GreyOrange. I’ve been witness to both of your journeys. So, I want him to weave like the B2B proxy for your journey.

But before I go there, like today, when you started off what is the mix of like your supply chain/​manufacturing dependency outside of India/​outside of Ultrahuman. And today, how much of that is inside of the company? 

[00:27:48] Mohit Kumar: I think in our case, it started with somewhere around 40% and now somewhere close to like 23 – 24%.

[00:27:57] Karthik Reddy: Is outside or inside? 

[00:27:58] Mohit Kumar: Outside India. 

[00:28:00] Karthik Reddy: Is Outside. If you had to like, and this is the other interesting aspect of what both of you have done, as the hardware evolution happens, the product gets into some sort of, I might be wrong, you have to correct me if I’m feeling the wrong thing, but it feels like there is a semi-autonomous kind of cycle of hardware evolution whereas suddenly you start seeing the power of how many of these devices are out there and the power of what software does as a layer on top.

So Mohit, if you had to think about how much both R&D work, development work/​delight to the customer is happening through software, how do you think that has changed from the first ring to today?

And I’m sure it’ll keep changing. We’re talking about late 24, just for people’s context. That’s when we’re recording this. But yeah.

[00:28:56] Mohit Kumar: Yeah. No, I think the way to look at this would be that the complexity in terms of hardware iteration, has I think over time, some of these systems have become machines.

For example, like polishing a few months ago for us, a few quarters ago, actually, was like a huge manual effort to both, you can say manually do it and then there’s a QC effort and now, a large part of that is automated completely. And that does not mean that we don’t need people. It just means that we need less people on the ground to actually ship out the same end product.

I think the reality is that, of course, like with manufacturing complexity increases, one example that I can give outside our use cases that for a 6 billion revenue profile, Garmin spends a billion dollars in R&D every year. And this is extremely anti Warren Buffett, in terms of his way of valuing the company.

I just read a book written by, Warren Buffett’s daughter-in-law where he talks about that this is like a bad business model and a bad idea to have a company which invests in R&D so heavily every year. But then the reality is that it’s always a trade-off. Garmin has a lot of control with their own destiny.

A 35-year-old company. So they’ve survived all the cycles. Wearables are 80% of their business now. Still fighting Apple, proving manufacturing at their competitive advantage. It has the ability to evolve the product. So, I think those are the strings that we are also tying in our business that as we control, the business and if we can get to the ability of making hardware at the pace of software, iterating hardware at the pace of software, then that is true autonomy, in terms of being able to control your destiny in some ways.

Because then you’re playing in some ways like, you’re playing tennis and someone else is playing paddle, in their own software zone. that probably helps. 

[00:31:03] Karthik Reddy: Great analogy. I love the vision. I know. When you’re using Garmin as a backdrop, I know Mohit well enough to think that he’s thinking what makes me survive till year 35.

And I know you haven’t crossed year 5 yet. So, I love that ambition. And I know Akash has been crazy enough, maybe younger, I think it was eight years, six years younger, when he said this, he said, we’ll show how we can build a hundred billion dollar company. I’ve always loved that ambition. And, bizarrely, I’m still. But both of you have always been a long-term hold. So I’ve always held everything the stock for as long as I need to. And we’ll continue to do.

But, I guess cutting over to you, we’ve seen a very similar proxy, right? A lot of folks said, how can you go compete in the rest of the world when, a Geek+ from China and other guys can build far more efficiently, yes, you might be in control of your own manufacturing and supply chain, but can you compete with the might of this mass production that China can bring in. 

And there are a lot of parallels in industrial automation robotics that, what Mohit was talking about in terms of personal rings and wearables, I would love to hear that in your words, like how is that evolution for GreyOrange been since, that 2015 – 16 where you left us off last? 

[00:32:21] Akash Gupta: Yeah, no, I think, as we started working with some of these global retailers, I think we very quickly recognize that, at least in B2B space, nobody was really looking for robotics, right?

They were all looking for how do we get fulfillment outcomes, right? And, for different people, fulfillment outcomes are defined differently. For some, it is just reducing cost per unit. For some, it’s just increasing storage per square feet. For some, it is just going to 30 minute SLAs and things like that.

But I think we realized that nobody really cared about robotics or hardware or how fast a bot moved or how quickly can you manufacture and likes of that, right? So of course, I think, you get oriented pretty quickly that, at the end of the day, and I think I remember, spending some time in one of our town halls, about this topic that we are not a robotics company in a supply chain.

We are a supply chain tech company using robotics as an enabler, right? And I think that pivot was very important or that thinking was very important because most of our customers, even today, honestly, do not care about how do you give them that fulfillment outcomes? that you can reliably give them.

And I think that was an important kind of point for us to start figuring out, okay, of course, always constrained on, resources, where are you investing your dollars? Are you investing your dollars to ensure fulfillment outcomes or just to ensure robotic uptime, right?

And I think that understanding and that focus has helped us compete all across. In fact, even today, some of our largest competitors sell robotic uptime and be self-fulfilling outcome and where it really matters. We beat them all day long because, at the end of the day, that’s what customer is looking for.

And of course, I would say this journey is harder and this journey is, I would say more time taking. But, at the end of the day, at least we believe that there is gonna be a lot more long-lasting because, at the end of the day, if you’re really creating that kind of value with your customers that’s what gonna keep us for the long haul.

So, I think that’s how at least we have evolved from the thinking of 2014 – 2015. 

[00:34:59] Karthik Reddy: No, I think it’s been amazing to watch. And as you said, it’s a tougher job. I wish, investors understood that you’re making these tougher decisions for long-term trade-offs, but it’s a cruel world out there.

Everybody wants instant outcomes. And we lived through a bull cycle where everyone was more, driven by what happens next year and the year after, not fundamentally seeing that you’re actually trying to shift, a, conventional thinking and the way you think about it. As you rightly said, no CEO of, H&M or a big retail in the US really cares about how the bots look or how sexy they are or what color they are. They’re interested in all the metrics that you said, and that’s the only way to measure the success of your product.

In that vein, I think it’s a nice time to switch tracks. We know fundamentally that when we say, Winning Beyond Boundaries, which is the theme for today, the reason you’re getting champion and the reason we are talking about you proudly today is that the moolah comes from overseas, which means you are not selling only to Indian customers. You’re selling to global customers. 

So there are two aspects to it. One is, for good or for bad, the Indian market is not deep enough or rich enough or where this makes enough of a dent, for you to be India only company. But yet, both of you, that was your testing ground, right? whether you started with sortation systems, Mohit, whether you started with selling the first rings or the first apps or the first CGMs in India.

Versus Today, probably 90% plus coming from global markets. So we’ve always joked at one level that if you make a product for India, you’re probably going down the wrong path and you will fail on the global product. And so from your learnings, A, maybe, Akash, you can go first, and what prompted you to make the full cutover? It was a bold decision.

And maybe, I know of the GXO deal, but maybe everybody doesn’t, maybe that was the pivotal point, maybe it was something else. when do you make the call to say, I love my country, but it has to wait for me to conquer the world, and it’s more important to take this kind of cool engineering and technology to win the world markets rather than India?

[00:37:23] Akash Gupta: Yeah, I think at least for us it happened in two switches I would say and I think we could have done it differently and better as always. The first switch just taking from the sortation journey we did these 47 – 50 sortation systems and that’s it.

We had sold a sortation system to anybody and everybody who could buy sortation system in India literally from every e‑commerce company to every logistics company, literally there was nobody left to sell sortation systems in India. 

And I think that was the first point of realization that that is literally the market which can adopt automation. And for us, that was the least automated product, right? We were thinking about goods-to-person systems and the likes of that, which were far more kind of complex and, expensive automation. While sortation system was literally the most basic automation product that we were thinking about. So I think that was one realization that we got to get outside, India, but also I think there was this passion to serve Fortuen 100 brands.

I think we were very passionate about what does it look like to really work with these world class brands who are defining the industry and, likes of that. So there’s a lot of, I would say, fascination around, this whole thought process.

And I remember, having these discussions with the team and Samay that I think the best way of conquering retail is to go and get top three brands in each vertical and you’re good. Like that’s pretty much what the entry should look like.

[00:39:15] Akash Gupta: So, I think there’s also, a lot of passion and fascination around how does the best look like and what does it mean really to work with, best in the world and likes of that. And I think, we were fortunate enough to get to the point where we did start getting that kind of exposure.

But yeah, I think that decision was fairly clear after, a couple of years, from 2015 to 2018, we have wandered around pretty much across the globe, starting from Japan, which was like, I would say one of the toughest call that was taken that okay, let’s target Japan as a country and that was one of the most, I would say, learning years that we’ve had in our early days of 2016 – 2017 because the expectation for quality the process the attention to detail all was like at level 11 from where we were so very hard 18 months. But I think pushed maturity of organization thinking a lot in those 18 months and I think that was a good milestone for us to say, okay, what does the next stage looks like?

And I think, the first time we got an understanding of US market, I think there was a lot of clarity that the best returns we could get on dollars invested is in US. 

So I think, for us, it was a pretty, I would say, hard pivot. It was not a slow pivot. if you look at till 2019, 0% of the revenue came out of US. And today there’s no revenue coming out of India. It was a fairly hard pivot. So you’re pretty much building from scratch in a region, but it grew like 10 times in three years than what India grew in or India and Asia grew in seven years. 

[00:41:20] Karthik Reddy: I think, Mohit, thanks to folks like GreyOrange and many other companies which were targeting globally, you guys were much wiser by the time you reached there in 2020, right?

You knew that you wanted to build like a sort of a world-class, health company from day one India was more like a playground to test. But you also knew, in every space that you were getting into, you were up against existing competition, and yet you went and said, we can beat them.

So what gave you that courage? And was it like a foregone conclusion or did you guys plan about like how to go to these overseas markets? I know you tried one or two markets more extensively, including your current base of UAE, but what are the challenges been putting a consumer product globally?

I think Akash did or GreyOrange did something very interesting and just pivoted almost 100% of the Western Hemisphere because they have to focus all the resources on one market. And here you are shipping rings to 150 countries, right? It feels day and night when you think about the same idea.

So I’d love for the audiences to hear what goes into that kind of thinking as well. 

[00:42:39] Mohit Kumar: No, I think, even though we started with the aspiration that we want to build a global product, I think it did not hit us till 2022 when we were growing at a, maybe like early 2022, like a slowish single digit annualized a few million dollar run rate.

And we were like, I think, I and with my team, we were just looking at some projections and looking like, in the next six years, this is where we will reach. And this is what the category will be. And I think one of our team members just said look, I should turn pretty old by the time we’ll do a billion dollars in revenue.

That doesn’t sound like a good plan. and it’s like how will you live life? If you like basically just spend all of your like best years of your life, just solving this problem. So how do we accelerate this journey? And, that day, I think one realization that came was that we were uptight and overthinking on two levels.

One was on people and the second was on distribution. We are like, oh, this playbook, that playbook. This is this company’s learning that company’s learning. This is how the conversion funnel should work. All that marketing gyaan and this is how performance marketing works, etc And somewhere around 2022, we just said, look, let’s try something different. 

That different would be let’s go all out on distribution with one guardrail, which would be no performance marketing and every transaction we should make money. That’s the only thing and now with that constraint, let’s do whatever we can, whatever geography, whatever retailer, whatever distribution channel we can go for, whatever languages we need to ship the product in, let’s do that. And let’s see what happens, right? 

And then what we said was with that the bar on people should be higher. Because while distribution will go up, we could lose sight of people and then basically both the things going off control does not really make sense. So we lifted the bar on people, but actually in some ways stopped thinking about distribution as a planning exercise, but more as an action-biased thing.

And we went after retailers, Walmart, Costco, Best Buy, Verizon, shipped them the products, got them to test the products, launched countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia. Basically, there were a few countries, which we did not really know our countries, as well, when we started shipping parts of them, don’t understand the regulations, shipped the product in 23 languages.

And I think the thinking then was that every $5,000 increment in revenue actually matters because it’s just another language, but then it’s monthly $5,000. and it’s coming at a decently good margin. So that was a lens that we took and we kept reminding ourselves that we decided that we will take up this mess of rent distribution and then building backwards from there. So let’s see what happens.

So, I think that you can say in some ways, less uptight thinking about distribution that it should be a global product sold everywhere. If it’s a good product every country, every consumer should want it and there’s no reason why we should not be selling in every cycling store, every software store, every like electronics retailer, every premium goods store, everyone who buys an Apple product should actually buy our product.

So how do we place the product next to the Apple product? So those are like you can say, just lose frameworks that we used initially. And I think, the last six months actually gave us the data to narrow down and deeply focus on some of these ones, that here’s what’s really working and then just double down. But everything also helped.

[00:46:49] Karthik Reddy: That’s been amazing. Again, just for everyone’s knowledge at one level, now Mohit your products sell from Costco, which is gold standard membership-based retail in the US to SoftBank launching you in Japan. And I know if Akash had more resources, he would conquer Japan too.

But it’s interesting, my wife, amongst others, when you go abroad, we used to walk into Koss and other stores, the two brands and I landed for a board meeting and I said, Akash and Samay, I still haven’t seen like a GreyOrange, full-blown warehouse in operation.

He said H&M are our best buddies. They’ll show you one, near Princeton in New York. So I went there. And we land up there and every package is Koss and & Other Stories. Those are the two luxury brands of H&M, which I wasn’t aware of. It’s the only North American warehouse. And it hits you.

Everybody who’s touching the package from costs and other stories in all of North America was served by a GreyOrange bot. And it’s a fascinating thought when you walk out of that thing and say, wow, everyone who’s touched this brand is basically touching what their bots touched and that’s when you feel like a sense of immense pride about what Indian engineering is doing globally?

Mohit, similarly, I know we’d like to change that order and make three out of four answers Ultrahuman soon, but we’ll get there. 

No, I think you both brought up people, this culture. I definitely want to touch on that. I know, the BITS mafia in GreyOrange in the early years had like their own hacks on how to build talent. I mean this talent wasn’t available.

So it was almost like GreyOrange was like a GreyOrange academy of robotics internally. That must have changed Akash like it’s 13 years since or 12 years since. But two, three things, how do you get a set of people sitting in Gurgaon to be able to see that vision, understand this level of sophistication that the American customer needs, and be driven to wear this badge on their sleeve lead proudly that we are actually building the best product in the world.

It is not trivial. I mean you can say that you can get inspired and you can put them in lab out here, but how do you guys do it? Are there are any tricks that young founders can learn because without that I don’t think you can build world-class product. 

[00:49:34] Akash Gupta: Yeah, I think at least in the initial days what I always see there are two or three phases of building teams and cultures in the company we’ve gone through back and forth on phases as well, but the first phase where you’re trying to build your first 20, I would say the only magic trick is spending like enormous amount of time with that group of 20 people.

I remember at least 2012 to 2014, 15, I think both me and Samay and some of the first few employees we spent like enormous amount of time together just thinking, dreaming, talking about what’s failing and likes of that, but also forming this whole idea of that what we want to be and how we want to do this and what kind of dreams that we want to conquer. 

And I remember at that point of time, I think it was still smaller than what we should have dreamt, but it was like, okay, how about building a warehouse or running a warehouse in US with 1000 bots. that used to be like this whole North Star for us and today it feels fairly small. 

But yeah, I think the first phase is all about being able to work with this group of 20, 25, 30 people whatever and maybe scale has also changed a little bit between 2012 and now but building that group of first people. I think there’s no magic trick but to spend just founder spending enormous amount of time just talking thinking, dreaming together.

I think there are a bunch of things that we did not do right, but this is something that we did do right. I think we, the first group of 20, 25 people that we had at GreyOrang and the amount of time we spent built a very, strong, foundation for us in terms of the journey we had to see ahead.

Challenges and all kind of still were very possible because this team was very, connected with the vision, with the thought process, and likes of that. So, I think that’s the first phase. I’ll think about.

The second phase is, when you start scaling up, and how do you amalgamate between this new set of people you’re getting in and mostly sometimes more senior and likes of that and the score group that you have built and at least from GreyOrange perspective, this was really, literally bunch of freshers or one or two-year experience people because nobody else really thought that GreyOrange should be the place they should be working at because, firstly, we’re talking about hardware, we’re talking about getting to Walmarts and H&M’s of the world and likes of that. It is like, okay, too risky, too early to think about these things in 2013 – 2014.

So it was literally a bunch of freshers and one, two-year experienced people. That was the core group. So second challenge is always about when you’re bringing that next 100 people. How do you amalgamate that? How do you make sure that everybody in the core team is comfortable and likes that and now not getting worried about, okay, how are they gonna work with this group of people and there’s no right answer there. I think you just need to be very aware of that. There is a dynamics that’s gonna happen and you’re gonna start figuring this out, how do you make sure that everybody feels comfortable? 

And I think third thing, and maybe this is more specific to GreyOrange or even companies who are going through this kind of journey is when you start pivoting to a market and start hiring people there, and then you suddenly you’ll see a dynamics in the company of US versus India.

I remember, and now HQ doesn’t mean a lot because there’s so much remote work happening but I remember when we first formally shifted out HQ from Gurgaon to Singapore and that to Atlanta, there was a lot of this talk about or now will all the decisions be taken out of Atlanta, what does that really mean for folks in India and likes of that?

So when you’re on to these kind of global journeys, these are some interesting things that you would never imagine you know. We putting up an HQ at Atlanta was all about being closer to the customers and likes of that and suddenly everybody’s thinking, okay, now is the whole decision-making changing to folks in Atlanta. 

So, those are like another kind of dynamics or culture you’re going to really be very aware of these are all real things and you’ve got to handle these things and balance these things and even if founders are in other countries how much time you’re spending. I remember between 2018 to 2020 just before pandemic hits, I was religiously doing 15 days India, 15 days US, like religiously doing two weeks in India and two weeks US. Because you still want your team to be very connected in India of what’s happening in US.

And it should not become an island and things like that and vice versa as well You don’t want to get completely disconnected from the team and likes of that. So, I think those are some of the phases that we have gone through and figured those things out.

[00:55:15] Karthik Reddy: No fascinating what you said rings very true. I think it’s a generic beautiful set of advice around carrying the core original team with the mission, not just the two founders or three founders. It’s true of every sort of startup, I guess. What I think you might not have perspective because it’s the only thing you’ve been associated with from college, but from my lens, when I look at a whole multitude of startups, what you said is like 2X true or 3X true when you’re building a category-defining company or you’re building a new way of doing things.

I’ve heard this from Aditya Gosh of Indigo, who was actually also guest along with you this season. And you couldn’t have built this any differently than how a GreyOrange built because you were not building a clone of another airline in India, right? You were building something brand new in India, right?

So when you’re building a category-defining company, you have no choice but to build this like core sort of that trunk has got to be really wide, right? Nothing can shake that tree, culturally. 

Mohit, I know you shifted with a whole bunch of people you would assimilate it in your life, whether it was that Runnr or Vatasal and you had worked there, was it any different from what Akash said?

What are the nuances in your case? I know you’ve also tried like a hybrid of having someone like a Bhuvan run around the world for distribution, but having a base in Abu Dhabi, having one in Bangalore, you’re doing manufacturing before we know it, if I recorded this a year later, you probably have three manufacturing centers across the world. Who knows? 

But like, how do you deal with that complexity? It’s come at you at maybe 2X or 3X the speed as it has come to Akash.

[00:56:58] Mohit Kumar: No, I think at some point in time, this originated from the thought process that again, how do you enjoy your time? Most people want to see work as their second life, which we also saw. How do we make work an enjoyable place for people?

Enjoyable as in essentially, yes, you can do a bunch of things in office but that doesn’t really count. The most important thing probably is work with enjoyable people. Essentially, similar IQ, brainwave, intensity, product obsession, etc.

So, I think two things emerged. One pattern specifically, which was we started liking people overall and those people actually started contributing a lot more who were great at conflict avoidance, basically in life. Essentially, not because they didn’t have contrarian views, but they figured out a way to solve a conflict.

And they didn’t prioritize a conflict above the actual outcome, essentially. So, they would fight, but they will actually figure out an answer and they’ll prioritize the eventual outcome. And those people actually displayed two clear traits.

One is measurable, one is semi-measurable. The first measurable trait which we started seeing was that these guys were exceptional users of the product. They would use the product every day.

We actually have a chart which talks about our revenue growth and basically our product usage internally. Unprompted product usage in the company. Percentage of Ultrahuman employees who actually use the product and number of app footprints.

And there is this strange and strong correlation between the two. That the months where people actually used a product a lot more, we have seen a much higher revenue lift, interestingly. So, that we started thinking about, could this be an interesting marker?

Because it’s such an intuitive product. It tells you about your health. So if you don’t believe in the product, then…

Or if you believe in the product, then most of the other things become easy. Because if you have a problem with something else happening in the office, something else happening in life, but you believe in the core outcome, you probably solve all the problems and prioritize the outcome. And the second one was basically people who are generally, like you can say, more optimistic in life.

So, in some ways, we would basically… This is not a screening method, but we would ask each other questions around like, you know, if you have a delayed Indigo flight, what would you do about it? And some people would say like, I’ll go to Twitter and I’ll rant about it.

So in some ways, we actually said like, look, things are going to go bad in life and you’ve got to solve it. So every time if you complain on the internet, your Twitter feed is full of such things, you have a cynical view of life. Then, we thought that in our trend circle also, there’s always that cynical person.

There’s always a critic person. You always want to hang out with a good mix of people. But you also want optimism in life because you also want to show up every day and win.

So in some ways, prioritize more optimistic people. I know that that could be a problem sometimes because of delusion and other issues. But then this is a bias that we have. Acknowledging that. Plus, basically, I think the usage of the product. 

[01:00:34] Karthik Reddy: So, we’re almost up on the hour. So, I’m going to touch upon two last questions and then we’ll get to a fun rapid fire. One of them is about, obviously, you guys are pioneers in your own fields.

I’m hoping that this episode ages very well. We’ll be sitting in 2030 and looking at even bigger stars of what we set out to do from the last decade to the middle of this decade. And therefore, I know this, Mohit, I know you’ve begun to angel invest, and I’ve started seeing the spin-outs from UltraHuman. You guys are an inspiration on one theme. 

GreyOrange has been fascinating on the other side. Plenty of hardware companies see them as early role models. We’ve been requested many times to have Akash and Samay as an angel investor, so that it’s a way to give them a call when they need them. So, I think almost every hardware company we did in the last six, seven years, I think they have a small check or one of them has or something of that nature. And I know you folks would love to give more time and more guidance.

But on this journey, specifically, not generic entrepreneur founder journey, but if you were advising a young version of yourself, trying to build the new sort of new cool hardware linked, I would say, these are not about building hardware companies, but taking on these massive global problems and saying, we can do it from India. What advice would you give? And what would you do even earlier than what you both have done? Just one or two points, whoever wants to go first. 

[01:02:13] Akash Gupta: I think the first one I would give and, I think Mohit gave it earlier, stop overthinking. I think it’s not hard as it looks. You can get your hands around it way quicker than what you imagine.

And also, I think building a hardware startup or hardware-inspired startup out of India doesn’t mean that you got to, I would say, source everything from India and things like that. I think you have global aspirations. You’ve got to have global aspirations all around.

Right? If you’re going to manufacture in Mexico, you’ve got to manufacture in Mexico for the US market. You shouldn’t be worrying about that.

So, I think those two things, stop overthinking as soon as you get your first prototype. And in hardware, actually, pretty much opposite to software, iterating faster is even more important because once you put something out there, at least in B2B space, once you put 10,000 bots out in the market and you have to do an ECN or a recall, that’s like… It’s something that you really will have to think about whether you survive that or not.

So iterate very, very fast. And I would throw your product into the market very, very quickly. Telling people that you’re doing this, I think one more thing that people feel very uncertain about is, oh, can I really go with an early-stage product to the customer, to a very established customer?

And I think Mohit can talk about more of consumer journey, but I’m more talking about the B2B journey. The answer is yes, but not telling them very clearly that where are you in this part of the journey. And if they are ready to accept a newer technology and work with it, that is the right customer.

Not everybody will do it. But thinking that you will perfect the product, you can never, ever perfect a product in the lab. There is always so many new learnings that you will get to the customer.

But I think this is a mistake we also did early on. And we always used to thought, oh, how will a customer buy an unfinished product? It’s like, that doesn’t seem right.

But then we realized that, no, there are customers who are ready to innovate with you. You can go to them, be super transparent, and they will build with you because they want to innovate and do something together and likes of that. So I think those are the two things I would think about. 

[01:05:00] Karthik Reddy: Mohit, anything from you? 

[01:05:01] Mohit Kumar: I think all the things that Akash said, especially on the speed to market, make a lot of sense. But two specific things could be, one is, maybe I would have learned to code faster or learned to look at actual code faster in UltraHuman. 

[01:05:22] Karthik Reddy: Meaning like building the software layers even faster. Is that what you say? 

[01:05:25] Mohit Kumar: No. I think you yourself looking and understanding how the code really works. 

[01:05:33] Karthik Reddy: Be with yourself as a founder in this space. 

[01:05:35] Mohit Kumar: Yeah. Yeah, so I think I realized that it’s not like you need to code to ship faster. It’s just that you start making more sense as a team member. And it’s incredibly empowering in many ways.

You just understand the company and the architect. Like we’re in the business of selling technology. But if we don’t understand technology, then we are a businessman selling technology. So, that would have been one learning. 

And I think the second one would be if you can basically just sort out the basics in life, which is health, movement, sleep, nutrition, exercise and I think especially for founders get a decent house.

I know many founders who actually in their house, they don’t have Wi-Fi working and then they feel that frugality is associated with long-termness, but there is some critical threshold to frugality which I think, and I would say that that has been incredibly empowering for me, especially to get to the bare minimum of what productivity looks like.

That would be, I don’t know, maybe like something that I would do much earlier in my life.

[01:06:49] Karthik Reddy: Great advice. One, obviously I haven’t given you guys enough time to quiz each other. Was there a question you were dying to ask each other? And I know I asked all the questions, but any questions that you have for each other? 

[01:07:02] Mohit Kumar: I have one. 

[01:07:02] Karthik Reddy: Go ahead. 

[01:07:03] Akash Gupta: I have a lot, but I’ll stick to one. Okay. Go ahead.

[01:07:07] Mohit Kumar: Yeah, no, I think one would be on the specifically on Walmart sales cycle. How hard or difficult was it to like work with all these giants in the U.S. market? Because I think we keep joking that like the kind of DD that some of these guys do on you is incredible. Like the amount of depth that they have in terms of understanding, not just the company, but you as founders and understanding your financials and going deeper and deeper with the journey.

[01:07:38] Akash Gupta: Yeah, I think any Fortune 100s, and of course, these are some of the Fortune 1s and 2s that we’re talking about. The journey is always harder, needs patience. And I think it needs a good product.

I would say the whole thing is that no good marketing can make the cut. The reason because they all go deeper in is because they really are looking for is the product good? Is the product real? Is the team good? And likes of that. 

At least in B2B space, at some point of time, you also have to decide because the amount of influence they will have on your thinking, on your roadmap, on your bandwidth itself is going to be huge.

So, I think that’s a decision a company needs to take. But once you’ve taken that decision, I think it’s just making sure that the core product, the value proposition you’re giving as a product is good. And you can stop spending a lot in marketing and likes of that.

The DD and detail, I would say, conversations you would have will cut through all the marketing and you will be at pretty much, is the core value of the product really making sense. And they would be thinking long-term. It’s not something, okay, let’s just quickly do something.

Does it really make any difference for them in five years’ time frame is what they’re thinking. They’re not thinking that, okay, let’s do something very quickly. 

Yeah, I think it’s fascinating to understand what does the talent in India for hardware look like today for you guys, like 2020 – 2024. How have you guys been thinking about the talent? I almost think I need to step back and learn a little bit how India ecosystem has evolved to think about this. 

[01:09:39] Mohit Kumar: I think I’ll divide this into three specific layers. So, one would be firmware, second would be production engineering, and third, I could say more around supply chain, and logistics, all those things, right?

Supply chain logistics. I think we probably have 70 to 80% now, given the fact that India has seen supply chain logistics of some version here and there.

A lot of supply chain logistics guys have moved back to India, start their own companies, are getting into B2B manufacturing. So that talent is now like compared to three years ago, a lot of density now. The next layer is production engineering.

I would say that probably the area where you have people, but basically, they don’t yet understand for a consumer company what is required and what kind of finesse, what kind of speed. Why do you need a yearly release cycle? We get this question on our production floor that, Boss, every year, one version, why?

It hurts your P&L, doesn’t make sense, keeps us busy. Most companies we have worked for release one product, and then they keep selling it forever. So, what does it mean to make a new product every year?

And I think that mindset is different. Because essentially, you’re trying to create an experience and experience cannot only be looked at from a physical product perspective, because a physical product is not the outcome. It’s just an enabler of an outcome.

So I think that talent generally, I would say is there, but needs a lot of coaching. There’s a lot of coaching in terms of speed, in terms of parallel processing, in terms of trying multiple experiments, many of them actually come from a space and defense background.

And again, there’s a lot of overthinking problem in this specifically. But also, I would say that a lot of incredibly talented people are getting paid very, very less in India. Extremely, you can say less in India. But with coaching, they could be truly world-class. That’s the second one. 

Third one, firmware is very, very early. I would say exceptionally early. We are, I would say probably at 1% of where we should be. Most application developers are emerging in Ruby on Rails, Java, many Python guys basically. But C, C++, understanding of actual system design, power-efficient systems, firmware release management, those are the things that we have had to grow in-house in a painful way. So, I would say that one hundredth of where it should be.

[01:12:38] Akash Gupta: Wow. So, I think it hasn’t evolved.

[01:12:41.06] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, because Akash is smiling because he’s saying I went through the same thing.

[01:12:41.14] Akash Gupta: Yeah, actually this whole problem statement of why releasing a version and we were releasing every 18 months and our folks were coming from car industry, which is like a lifecycle of 10 years.

And they were like Sir, teen saal main to prototype hi nahi hogi, app kaya hi baat kar rahe ho. App 18 mahine main release karne ki baat kar rah ho.

So yeah, it’s amazing that things haven’t evolved a lot actually. These were exact same questions that we were answering. We built our own firmware like the bid bucket or for firmware because we built our own releasing mechanisms and OTA mechanisms for firmware and likes of that because we had 5 different firmwares in the bots and there was no real tooling available to quickly synchronize those 5 firmwares and ship them to the bot and do over-the-air firmware upgrades and things like that.

So, I think we have a lot to still do to kind of get this right in India because this is still something that things haven’t evolved.

[01:13:55] Karthik Reddy: Just on that note, one would think like with all these, GCCs, some of this should be getting ported to India today, right?

There’s supposedly a couple of thousand GCCs. There must be some companies that are actually shifting this kind of talent or nurturing this kind of talent in India too, one would think. And on your production cycles, etc. Maybe Foxconn finally setting up monstrous outfits in India might help. They have to be on an Apple timeline from here on, right? Which is also not there in India. Apple almost didn’t do anything.

[01:14:27] Akash Gupta: I don’t think Foxconn will help. Some of these core companies doing core hardware R&D in India will help because I think where we face challenge was the prototyping cycle and getting to alpha, beta phases. I think post that, it was fine.

I think once you get to alpha, beta reliable product, like in India, again, I don’t know how it is today. We almost struggled to do accelerated lifecycle testing. And we were selling a product that we said will last 7 to 10 years.

The company wasn’t 7 to 10 years old when we were selling this. And we wanted to do accelerated lifecycle testing, that how do I test the product that it will last for 7 years? And that was like, it was not known in India how to do accelerated lifecycle testing.

We had to design a method of doing accelerated lifecycle testing. So I think it’s just a lot more hardware R&D happening in India is what is needed.

[01:15:26] Karthik Reddy: So I’m going to do a quick cycle of, maybe rapid fire for fun and then come back to the finale questions. So, given that the theme is hardware and both of you are like dads of hardware, your favorite hardware product founder? If you had to pick one. Who do you like role model or idealize or read about? 

[01:15:47] Akash Gupta: Hardware. I think James Dyson. I think he’s done some really good work on hardware and yeah. 

[01:15:55] Karthik Reddy: We will pitch to his family office, but that’s how good of a business that he means. We haven’t got anybody but I’m just saying. Yeah. Mohit? 

[01:16:09] Mohit Kumar: I have the same answer actually. Spell out James Dyson but yeah. Very hard to find good hardware founders. 

[01:16:12] Karthik Reddy: Any cool product that you guys think should exist, but doesn’t in hardware or in what do you come across, amongst the things you come across and both of you are geeky. You go to hundreds of stores. I know you’re building some, Mohit, because you don’t think they exist, but still.

[01:16:31] Akash Gupta: Yeah, at least for me, I think I’ve been just imagining faster planes. Like, why does it still take 10 hours to go from New York to London? It’s still very challenging for me. 

[01:16:44] Karthik Reddy: I need to fill those passports faster. Yeah, Mohit?

[01:16:49] Mohit Kumar: I have a trivial one. I think just, I know the world doesn’t like printers anymore, but just printers and projectors that work. Someone should just make one system.

[01:16:59] Karthik Reddy: Yeah, work. We used to buy them because they don’t work and we fight about it. But yeah, what’s the one product that you think you can’t live without other than your own product?

[01:17:08] Akash Gupta: I think I would go as simple as actually AirPods. I think that is one product that I’ve used like a hell lot. And I just thought how could it not happen much earlier? Like it made life so, damn simple. So yeah, Airpods. 

[01:17:27] Mohit Kumar: Maybe, smartphone is obvious. But, it’s a software product, but maybe like a combination of payment devices, especially how ApplePay works. It’s incredible.

[01:17:41] Karthik Reddy: Payments and yeah, wireless things. Anything that, you wish you knew before starting up and I know, Mohit, you have lived two journeys already. You’ve been a part of other startups. Akash, you’ve had multiple journeys within the same startup, but yeah, one thing you wish you knew. 

[01:17:58] Akash Gupta: I would say that tech is not the hardest part. I thought the tech would be the hardest part, but I tech is not the hardest part. Like there are way more harder things than tech. 

[01:18:11] Karthik Reddy: Absolutely, right. Building businesses is more about people and organizations and the complexity. Akash is nodding his head, thinking all these investors are so super irritating. But yeah what about you? 

[01:18:24] Mohit Kumar: No, I think the value of discipline. I think it’s incredible how just those boring daily standups, 15-minute catch ups, just keeping an eye on whether you’re making incremental progress that just compounds over time. And whenever we’ve, I think, done it, we’ve almost always like made progress, I think it’s just fascinating how compounding works. 

[01:18:49] Karthik Reddy: Super. And a fun favorite, like Eureka moment in your own sort of product journeys, like for you personally, what did you suddenly discover? I know Akash has been tinkering with the bots for a while. You Akash and then Mohit in the products that you’ve been seeing.

Where have you contributed and felt, wow, this was my Eureka moment that I gave for the product? 

[01:19:10] Akash Gupta: Yeah, I think maybe specific examples around simplifying things where you suddenly, realize that all of this is not really just needed. And I think one thing maybe more generic, a lot of times when you’re problem solving, I see this pattern.

And now try and get out of it very quickly, you’re trying to solve a problem A and suddenly to solve the problem B you start thinking about B and suddenly you are everybody’s solving B and everybody has forgot about A and I think I see this happening especially when you have a younger set of people who is very passionate about something.

I think just, realizing that, oh, you had to solve problem A and everybody’s spending time on B. And then you realize, oh, this is not the real problem. Problem was A. So, I think those are multiple moments that I’ve had. 

[01:20:06] Karthik Reddy: Nice. Mohit, you?

[01:20:07] Mohit Kumar: I think probably something that I keep doing every day, today and it just fascinates me is that I started pushing people towards ChatGPT towards I think all life’s answers are… it is surprising that whenever I think of a problem, my natural reaction was never ChatGPT and that’s true for a lot of people inside my company. And whenever we have gone with ChatGPT as a first response towards looking for answers, you’ve always found like better answers.

A faster way to think about the framework. So it’s spooky, but it’s incredible. 

[01:20:46] Karthik Reddy: It is spooky. It shows some direction for the future. Favorite books? if you’re getting any time to read off of late, what is sprung out as favorite book for each one of you? 

[01:21:02] Akash Gupta: I think hard things about hard things is still one of my favorites.

[01:21:08] Karthik Reddy: Bizarrely. I think we gave that as a.. somebody like said, Blume are not like kind investors. We gave it as a Diwali gift once to all our founders. Our first book we ever gave for Diwali was a The Hard Thing About Hard Things, but yeah, it’s what kind of investor gives that for Diwali? But anyway. 

[01:21:26] Mohit Kumar: Yeah, mine would be like, I’m enjoying The Emperor of All Maladies like recently, fascinating book on cancer. 

[01:21:35.28] Karthik Reddy: Mukherjee. No, what’s his name? 

[01:21:38.26] Mohit Kumar: Yeah. Mukherjee. 

[01:21:43.05] Karthik Reddy: Yeah. Go ahead. 

[01:21:43.07] Mohit Kumar: Fascinating how, not just the disease, but like thinking about the disease and the evolution and all the mysticism associated with the disease and all that. Yeah. That’s been fascinating.

[01:21:56] Karthik Reddy: Nice and guilty pleasures when you’re not doing what you’re doing at work. What’s your?

[01:22:01] Akash Gupta: For me, it’s driving. Driving in a good sports car, yeah. 

[01:22:07] Karthik Reddy: I think that’s strangely something unique to me. I think I’ve probably driven with almost all my founders behind the wheel. I’ve done so many car meetings. It’s not funny. So the last time was with Akash on the Gurgaon Delhi airport thing. And we were stressed, but then Akash changed his gear. But yeah, what about you, Mohit?

[01:22:29] Mohit Kumar: I think like a big fan of classical music and Hindustani classical music. 

[01:22:36.09] Karthik Reddy: Oh really, I didn’t know that. Awesome. Good guilty pleasure to have. So let’s wrap up. And I meant to ask it before, and then you threw in ChatGPT into the mix Mohit.

Here you are 2024, both of you give or take at the cusp of becoming a $100 million dollar businesses. It’s amazing. Screw the valuations. We know what is blood, sweat, and tears have gone into building a $100 million dollar businesses of this scale, from those humble beginnings. Of course, there’s the dhandha side of it. We see these businesses potentially at billion dollars, say in five years, eight years, 10 years, wherever you get there.

But more importantly, if you had to take like a futuristic stab at where the world is going, apart from what Elon Musk dreams for the rest of us, what would be a fun futuristic description of where you see, all of us in 2030 or 2035? And it could be from your industry lenses, what’s the cool thing about shipping and warehouse efficiency that you see Akash or health that you see Mohit, would be very cool to hear.

It doesn’t need to be in your respective industries, but I would love for you guys who saw the future 10 years ago, 5 years ago, would love to get a view for our listeners today before we go. 

[01:24:01] Akash Gupta: Yeah. I think at least if I think about this more from what we are doing and what we have been imagining, we truly believe that the overall experience for consuming goods is something that’s going to evolve very, very quickly. And this is something that I think while eCommerce changed a little bit of the experience of consuming goods, there are a lot of transactions that happens between a consumer and a manufacturer. The nature of those transactions has remained exact same in 20, 30 years.

I think when I entered a store when I was 8 years old versus what I do today, it’s not changed a lot actually. How I shop on a website and how I consume it has not changed very differently. But I think there is a lot happening and I think this is all going to change.

I think the way we experience things, the way we consume things, the way we try out things or how personalized it is or how relevant it is and how easy it is, is going to evolve quite a bit over the next 10 years. So, I think while we still don’t know the exact shape of it, but I think the technology and GreyOrange has always been a bits and atoms company than just bits company. So the combination of bits and atoms and the technology that we see today is definitely going to change how we consume our day-to-day kind of things.

[01:25:42] Karthik Reddy: Super exciting. I know you are building bunch of stuff, Akash. G store and dozens of other things to follow. So, super excited to see what comes from the GreyOrange table. Mohit?

[01:25:50] Mohit Kumar: I think I could say that the first time ever in my life, I’m seeing this unique pattern of different, like, for example, software engineers learning microbiology, scientists learning about coding, someone who has basically very basic education. In our team, for example, like someone in supply chain logistics, very early in their journey, talking about like, look, this is a firmware issue. I ran GPT on this firmware issue. And this is what I found. And being able to like, hold that conversation are basically some of our developers talking to doctors and talking about like, from a primary diagnostic perspective, this is the kind of protocol we could build.

So, all those conversations just make us think that in the future, like 80% of talent will be democratized, maybe 90%. Everyone will have like some level of talent or thinking power. People who have not higher grade education early will have a second life for education, because of being able to learn again, in a conversational way through the chatbot.

And then just the fact that the next five years could behave like the past 50 years, given the fact that people could just learn things faster. It is incredible to see some of our supply chain guys learn coding by themselves, and write a macro, write a script, write basically different things coming from a no coding, broken English background, and writing perfectly good marketing emails. So, I think that is the future that like sounds really interesting.

[01:27:22] Karthik Reddy: Using cross-functional knowledge will just make, possibilities erupt in a way that we’ve never seen before. And of course, the opportunity sets for these people emerge automatically as well. It’s been fantastic. 

I know, Mohit has also allowed us to generously gift all our guests, the UltraHuman, ring and kits. So Akash maybe there’s one waiting for you when we meet next but more importantly given this is the first time in a long time that we’ve had two guests. I don’t know what you can swap with them, but you guys should barter, you should give him some bots and he should give you some rings for your team.

[01:28:00] Mohit Kumar: I’ll buy a CNC machine.

[01:28:00.29] Karthik Reddy: There you go. Whatever Akash is selling or making. But yeah, go ahead, barter, go to the old economy, keep exchanging notes. Exchange machines. Exchange rings. I know Mohit’s building UltraHuman Homes, that maybe, Akash, that’s the product you want.

But it’s been such a pleasure. I know we overshot. But I think every bit of these, 90 minutes will be a delight for the audiences, especially we haven’t done something as in depth, geeky, hardware, deep tech-oriented in a long time. And, India’s bustling in every corner with founders who want to be at the cutting edge of, the kind of things you guys are making.

So thanks for inspiring, thanks for leading, thanks for being the first of those examples from India. And may many follow and may you guys continue to lead with the beacon into the next decade. Thanks again, Mohit. Thanks, Akash. 

[01:28:58.03] Akash Gupta: Thanks, Karthik. Thanks, Mohit.

[01:28:59] Mohit Kumar: Thank you so much. Thank you, Akash. Thanks for the opportunity, Karthik.

We thank IDFC First Bank for being our annual partner. IDFC First Bank is deeply engaged with the startup community in India. The commitment to fostering innovation and supporting entrepreneurship has made them a valuable partner in the growth journey of numerous startups, including many, many Blume portfolio companies. This partnership helps us in a mission to back the next generation of revolutionary founders in India.