[CTQ Smartcast] Applying a Founder's Mindset to Learning New Skills, with Roshan Cariappa
Roshan Cariappa is a founder, marketer, and podcaster; he's passionate about all things India and startups. Roshan has two active podcasts, Bharatvaarta and the Startup Operator, which are just over a year old.
In this Smartcast conversation with CTQ co-founder J Ramanand, we discuss how Roshan approached picking up a new skill like podcasting, how to go about it yourself, and what's in his curiosity diet.
Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.
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Some of the things we spoke about
Interesting anecdotes of Roshan’s first few times in the limelight?
Practices or systems to ensure a good podcast
Preparing for recording a podcast
What Roshan loves to read/listen/watch
Timeless marketing principles he swears by
What B2B marketing can learn from the world of B2C
PLUS
Books that have deeply influenced Roshan, and key lessons from them
Links to Books, Articles, sites mentioned in the Smartcast
Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More by Chris Bailey
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
[If you like this Smartcast, also check out this conversation with Samanth Subramanian on Journalism and Writing in a Changing World. ]
Transcript of the episOde
Ramanand (On Timeline: 00:12)
This is the CTQ Smartcast where we have conversations about uplevelling, deliberate practice and getting future relevant.
Our guest on the CTQ Smartcast today is Roshan Cariappa. Roshan is a founder, a marketer, and a podcaster and he is passionate about all things India and all things startups. So it’s no surprise that two of his active podcasts right now are based on these themes. One is called Bharatvaarta, one is called The Startup Operator, and both of them have just crossed the one-year mark. So, in this Smartcast we will get Roshan’s views on how he started podcasting, how to build a new skill from scratch, what his curiosity diet is like. We will touch a little bit about marketing as well. So, Roshan, welcome to the Smartcast.
Roshan 00:53
Hey, thank you so much Ramanand, Harish as well for hosting me. I guess, it’s a nice change for me to be on the other end of the questions. I’m pretty excited and also a little bit anxious. I don’t know what wisdom I have to offer but I’ve had a whole bunch of experiences and mistakes, and hopefully that’ll be useful and perhaps even entertaining for your listeners.
Ramanand 1:14
Yeah and for people watching this for the first time, Roshan has had us on his show, and it’s our pleasure to do the honours ourselves. So Roshan, you’ve been podcasting for a while, but I actually wanted to turn the clock a little bit and ask you, have you always been the kind of person who enjoys the spotlight, is on stage or was that something you taught yourself to do.
Roshan 1:42
So, I discovered this term called ambivert, which is like sometimes introvert, sometimes extrovert, and that probably classifies me right. So, with the people I know and understand very well, I’m extremely extroverted, am the center of attention, and life of the party so to speak, but otherwise I’m a fairly introverted person. I’ve also always been on the creative side of things so I’ve always been the one who wrote things, who sang, who played the guitar and so on and so forth. So, I guess in some sense the spotlight was thrust on me from an early age itself right, so you can imagine quite often you know your uncles or aunts come over and your dad and mom pushes you to sing or recite a poem or whatever except that in my case, it has continued for 34 years of my life.
Typically that’s what has happened. Never been completely comfortable with the performing aspect of things because I don't know if I want to call it artistry but I’m always comfortable with the creation aspect of things. Creating something new out of nothing, not really comfortable with showing it off or taking a stage and so on and so forth. I’ve always struggled with that because I always feel like my creativity is deeply personal and I don’t really want any validation from anyone else in that sense. But, my earliest memories of this are sort of nightmarish. We used to go to this Kodava Samaj functions right, I had to sing in front of this whole bunch of uncles and aunties right after lunch, right after they’ve probably polished off half a bottle of whiskey or gin or whatever it is and I had to sing the latest Hindi songs that were there. I remember singing Jackie Shroff’s ‘Amma Dekh’, a cappella.
These were really like crazy memories and it’s revolting even when I think about it now. Of course, for most of your listeners, I did perform in common inter-school and inter-college competitions and so on and so forth. Was part of a fairly successful mad ads team, which was interesting. And podcasting was sort of an organic extension of whatever I was doing. So, I used to have a fair number of debates with my friends over politics, policy, all of the current affairs and I thought we needed a better medium to hash these things out because these are complex issues and you don’t want to talk about these things on WhatsApp where it devolves into hopeless one upmanship. So, that was Bharatvaarta. I transitioned into being an employee about 4 years back and I kind of always was morbidly afraid about turning into Stanley from The Office and really clock out at 5pm no matter what, and used to keep in touch with a lot of my founder friends and operators and so on. And COVID happened and I couldn’t really meet these people in person so again Startup Operator is an extension of that. I would have these conversations offline in the good old days but COVID happened and I had to shift this online and I thought “hey, a whole bunch of people can benefit from this.” So that’s really how podcasting started for me actually, very organically.
Ramanand 5:10
Interesting, there are a couple of things I kind of want to get into. You mentioned the fact that you are an ambivert or even the fact that there are possible creative outlets, being on the stage doesn’t always have to be the actor, or a lead guitarist. It can mean several other things. And someone I know once told me about how he got into blogging. He said that it was a perfect kind of outlet for someone like him. He may have described himself in similar terms like you. Just that, that was the right medium for him for whatever reason and I think the good thing is that we have lots of different channels to explore right now and find the one that fits our personality depending on where we are at that given point in time. So, you know clearly, you had some kind of exposure. You didn’t mind occasionally making a fool of yourself, you’ve kind of done that so there was no more inhibition holding you back. So, I actually wanted to ask, are you the reflective types, do you look at your episodes and say I could’ve done this better, look at like something you’ve to get better at, or you just thrust yourself and say let me just do it, and come back to it in 3 months, 6 months. So, what kind of person are you from a reflection point of view?
Roshan 6:33
I am a reflective person but I want to touch upon something you mentioned which is that I’ve been comfortable with this but I actually haven’t been comfortable with this. I‘ve had horrible stage fright. I've had to think of all the nightmarish situations you can think of like being socially awkward, too many nightmares right, that happened to me. Forgetting lyrics, forgetting to play, forgetting what words to say and so on and so forth. Those have happened to me and they are at the back of my head. So the important thing I did was going further and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Quite often, in our heads, our fears are larger than they are. Once you know your fears and you befriend them, it becomes understandable. That ambiguity is not there.
I’ll split it into two parts. One is the technical stuff. Understanding how your voice carries on a mic for example or what are the first few sentences you’ve to say when you get on a stage, those kinds of things you can learn through rote practice. You do it often enough, you’ll learn it but if you don’t get on a stage and don’t do it often enough, you don’t get to learn. And it becomes the vicious cycle of you being afraid of something and never getting to do it. That is one thing. Also, look at the deeper level of things. What it is that is scaring you. And for me it was validation. Perhaps I’m not good enough. If you think about it enough you can always do the root cause analysis and you will find its way to something somebody said or something you experienced when you were 4 or 5 or 10. That’s a solvable problem, that’s not an unsolvable problem or that’s not an invisible problem.
I’m not saying these things will make you comfortable instantly or you’ll perhaps attain this magic state where you’ll be comfortable overnight. It’s a process and for people who are listening I would say whatever you are afraid of, understand these problems and try to get comfortable with it, maybe you will make progress on that front at the very least. So, given the mediums that we have, if you are not the kind of person who doesn’t want to go up on stage physically and present, virtual is a fantastic medium right. So, I’m not with Ramanand right now. I am with Ramanand projected as pixels in front of me. And that’s the difference and I guess you could call it hacks or whatever but you have to do these things to get comfortable with yourselves, with those fears and so on. With the reflective part of things, I know people who put out content and reflect about it ad nauseum, what did I do, what did I say and everything. I’m not one of those, I just don’t like listening to my own voice and I have this awkward feeling. I’m trying to get used to it.
In general, I do reflect on a lot of experiences, things I could have said, I could have done and those are the things that I could do better essentially, right and I guess that is part of everyone’s psyche in some sense. So, with the two podcasts, Bharatvaarta and Startup Operator, they are different in themselves, in the quality that evokes within me. So with Bharatvaarta, it is very complex. Something like economics. You do an episode on economics with Harsh Gupta, there will be 400 things that will be coming from that episode which you want to know more about, like what was this and to me when I relisten to it, 2, 3, 4 times it fits in my head and sets me off on a rabbit hole in terms of what more I want to understand. With Startup Operator, it’s slightly different. I’ve done products, I’ve done marketing, I’ve done sales. I’ve been fairly cross-functional over the last 13 years. And I have certain principles and I’ve had certain experiences and when I listen to Startup Operator episodes, it’s more about validating some of the things I had assumed for instance. Marketing works this way, so you might want to revisit those things and that’s a good opportunity for me to do that.
Ramanand [11:43]
It did. I actually almost thought of it as learning in real time. That’s what you seem to be doing in these episodes. I think you mentioned Harsh. I recently listened to one of your episodes with him and yes, there’s a broad set of things that’s coming at listeners. But I have the luxury of maybe pausing it a little bit and going and looking at something but you are, you’ve got to deal with this real-time and you are learning in real-time which is very interesting. It almost feels like it’s another form of entrepreneurship, it’s the same attitudes in some sense or entrepreneurial attitudes that you start, you know that you don’t know a lot that doesn’t hold you back. Take the risks that come along, you do some quick adjustments sometimes real-time, sometimes later and slowly things get better and also there’s a part of you that’s going to show up tomorrow even though you know there’s so much to improve. So, is this a fair way to look at it that ultimately, Roshan, the entrepreneur, is also coming in through Roshan, the podcaster?
Roshan [12:59]
That’s a very nice way of describing it. I’ve always said that it’s a founder mindset. I pick up certain things when you run a company and when you really have to put food on the table based on whatever you do. This imputes some skin in the game that there’s no hiding from. And I would highly recommend everyone to go through that journey at some point in their lives because it’s life-changing, that comes as close as the top one or top five percent of human experiences. But I mean that’s true, it’s about having a founder’s mindset, knowing that you may not know everything but you’ll put the first foot forward. You may have to take a step back or whatever it is but you’ll put the first foot forward and then maybe move an inch and then an inch after that. And that’s perfectly fine.
See with regards to things that I know and don’t know, I’m fairly certain about like, there are somethings I don’t know and I’m very very open about that. I have no qualms in admitting that I don’t know as much economics as Harsh, I mean the guy has spent the last 15-20 years learning that. And my point is also that I don’t have to know that much. My average listener is not an economist. My average listener is an average person like you or me who’s trying to learn the nuances of what’s really happening around the world and that, I call it the Joe Rogan mindset. The kind of people he interviews, whether it’s quantum physicist or UFC fighters, some crazy startup founders or so on and so forth and he doesn’t know everything about everything but he knows some small things about the world in general. And that is his frame of reference for any conversation and he’s happy to come across as a novice or even as a naive person. He’ll even ask questions like how does that work, how does the money work. What is Bitcoin? He’s not trying to learn those 3 or 4 wiki answers and trying to superimpose those in the conversations because the thing you realise that, quite nothing like an expert trying to explain something to you.
In fact I think you judge the level of expert-ness with how well they are able to explain this to the novice people. So, it’s a founder’s mindset and there’s a lot of hustle involved. Podcasts are not all about what kind of technology you use on the production side and you know all of those things, there’s a lot of hustle. So, I’ll give you an instance. I do roughly about 4 podcasts every week. How does it happen? If you do the rough math, 4 or 5 people I’ve to schedule with on a weekly basis, which means that I have to perhaps reach out to twice the number of people and so on and so forth and I’ve been able to do this on a weekly basis. We've put out about 250-300 podcasts now and so you need to have that hustler mindset. Also you need to marry that hustle with some sort of a vision. I guess that’s what really separates the good founders from people who are just hustlers. I know that they are able to marry this hustle to some sort of a vision and that's a mistake I made when I was an entrepreneur, I did not have a vision. I did not have a path that I wanted to take, I knew approximately which way I wanted to go but I didn’t define it, I didn’t define it for myself or my team. So I was a very bad entrepreneur in that sense. And that’s something I’m learning now that Startup operator has done 100+episodes, Bharatvaarta has done 120, 130 episodes, you know we have all these positive attributes and so on, we can roughly be moving in this direction but where do we want to be in a year from now. Where do we want to be 3 years, or 5 years from now? You may not get there but having that signpost there acts as your moral compass and that I feel is very important.
Ramanand 17:24
Fascinating, because once you have learnt that mindset and I would include Harish, me, the rest of Choose to Thinq as similarly minded in the sense that we’ve learnt to do this by doing. It’s not something that we’ve had academic training you know, not a lot of people in the family, typical kind of first generation entrepreneurs that a lot of us seem to be from. So i think a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurial can start off something like a podcast and kind of take it forward and grapple with all these things
Roshan 17:59
See, actually you just think about it as taking your hobby or passion project into its logical extension right. I like talking to people, I like learning from people - what can I do that can extend it further, what can I do that is a logical extension of it. Maybe podcasting, if you like technology, if you like certain other things, I mean like, take it to its logical extension and in the process of doing so you’ll build these attributes. You have to.
Ramanand 18:27
So, you briefly talked about managing so many guests and you know getting out. You now have a cadence and your audience is being trained by you to expect. So tell me a little bit about, what does it take to put it in place now, in terms of systems and again we are not talking about the tools, just the general framework. What do you look at so that you know that you are going to hit these little numbers because it’s a treadmill of it’s own that you have set in motion. So talk to me about that.
Roshan 18:58
I hate to sound like an MBA sort of schmuck but, I don’t have an MBA, that’s the truth.
Ramanand 19:06
Neither do I, so you are safe
Roshan 19:10
Good. In good company I would say. So, it’s this whole build, master and scale approach right which is that on day zero you don’t know anything. You are in this discovery mode, you dip your toes and figure out what the water is like and you understand certain things and certain attributes that you want. For us, we discovered that look this is the format that typically works for us and it happened through alterations. I’ve talked about this earlier, our first episode on Bharatvaarta was 28 mins long and we were happy that we limited it to 30 mins. 30 became 40, 40 became 45 and today it is very difficult for us to end a podcast ahead of an hour. It’s always an hour or so. And people like it. Our engagement has gone up proportionately because the thing that we try to understand is why do people like this? People like this because they are not the people who want to read the headlines or listen to the sound bytes. They are the kind of people who want to really understand the complex nuances of what is happening around us.
And similarly with Startup Operator, there are five minute clips abound right on 3 ways to do this, 5 ways to do that, 10 ways to do something else. My audience is not that. My audience wants to really understand how the founder did this and go to the market in Southeast Asia for example. How did he/she hire the first salesperson, what are the campaigns they ran, how did that go? And that’s not a 5 minute conversation you can have. That’s a 45 minute conversation you can have. I feel like you have to do that zero to 1 and very quickly understand what are the positive attributes that you want to retain and build the process on that. That is the whole master aspect of it. So once we understood what kind of guests the audience wanted to listen to, this is the typical format and now I want to put out two episodes a week, what does that need? Just build a process and work backwards to it. If I want to put out 2 episodes a week then I probably need to have a lead time of about 2 weeks just in case, especially given the time set we are in where things are all topsy-turvy. And it will be really helpful to have a two-week lead time and we have it right now. We’re on May 22nd right now, I’m comfortable maybe till June 1st week, I’ve episodes covered maybe even if I don’t do a single episode now. And that is the sort of cover you need to have right because once you hold yourself to that, then it becomes a self-fulfilling and a virtuous cycle. You want to be in that place. So once you build a process for that then the other aspect is what are the other small things you can stack on it.
So, I’ll give you an example, sometime back, we started something called The Weekly, which is a short 30-min round up of what happened in a week. 4-5 important things that happened in a week that you should know because if you just read the news or watch the TV everyday there are a thousand things that jump out of the screen to you. How much of it is important? I would say 99% of it is not important. Our hypothesis was that, here are 4-5 things, like we cover infrastructure development for example. There’s a dam that is getting built, there’s a power plant that is being built. I mean these are typically things that don’t occupy first page or second page news but it is really important.
It’s important for you to understand that last year even despite the pandemic, our per day capacity in terms of the roads that were built was the highest ever. And those are the kind of positive things that we are trying to highlight. Vitalik Buterin donated one billion dollars for example, what does that mean and how will that money flow through, what is the significance of it and all of that. This is what we try to do in our 30 minute weeklys and I started a similar thing with the Startup Operator called the Round Up. Those are things we added and we saw some positive effects. I think Weekly has 40 such episodes and Round Up, we’ve done about 25 round ups. Now that is part of the cadence again. And on the Round Up, I’ve started something called bytes which is like 4-5 minute snippets. Like the last byte that I put out for the process of a meme. It was actually a monologue on why a process should be a meme, if it has to be adopted, if it has to make sense basically. And it has to be effective essentially. And these are things that you just add, add, and add, you stack and it becomes part of your cadence then. So that’s what I tell my team as well and of course if you need to amplify your efforts then you need to have a team, at least that is relevant for me.
I’ve always tried to be the person who attracts the right people to collaborate with and that is super important. I don’t want to be doing all of them, I don’t want to be doing all of the 360 degree attributes of a particular skill or a project. I want to double down on what I like to do. I like talking, I like learning about people and I want to double down on that. Instead of one conversation a week, I want to have 5 or 6. But that won’t be possible if others are not off-setting my or complimenting my skills. So I do have a great team for both the podcasts who complement on the production side of things, the distribution side of things, research side of things and so on and so forth. And that is again super important because people often kind of limit themselves by not working with others. You have to have the mindset of 1+1 is not 2, 1+1 is equal to 4 or 5 or 10 perhaps. There’s no way I would have been able to put out 4 or 5 episodes a week if I didn’t have a couple of people helping me out. So, I guess marry all of this into a framework you can work with, and there you have it.
Ramanand 25:48
Right, so the thing is that it’s a fairly simple set of ideas but you need to execute it really well. I think it is the basics of any kind of successful activity if you want to kind of move it from being a kind of one off spark to something that keeps showing everyday.
Roshan 26:05
Absolutely, you have to think about it systematically. See, the thing is that a lot of hobbies just go to waste because people don’t put systems to it. People don’t put milestones to it, people don’t take it seriously. I know musicians who should be musicians but they aren’t because they just never gave a damn about it. They never put it in a process or a framework.
Ramanand 26:37
Right, it’s also fashionable to kind of say that I’m a creative person and this sounds like something I shouldn’t be doing.
Roshan 26:44
Yeah, so here's the thing. The secret about the most creative personalities in the world and I’m not talking about the top 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the kind of people who wake up and have symphonies flowing in their head, no not those kinds of people nor the one who is stoned, wakes up at 12:30 in the afternoon and has another drink kind of a person. A working musician, believe me, is the hardest working person you can find. And unlike you or me he does not have a salary. He’s only as good as what he’s done just last night, last evening that’s it. And you know what, age no bar. There could be a Korean 12 or 13 year old who could blow him away tomorrow. It’s really about having that discipline. That discipline is super essential for the stuff that you really care about. People are disciplined about their work, like logging in at a particular hour, replying to emails within two hours. They are super disciplined about that but they are not disciplined about the things they really care about, about their hobbies and passions and that’s super unfortunate.
Ramanand 28:06
Yeah, I think the very good example of what you just said is someone like Jerry Seinfeld, who’s spoken about the systems that enable him to be creative. I’m happy that he doesn’t position it like jokes just come to me when I wake up, which is really good.
Roshan 28:25
Just to deliver that point. The Jerry Seinfeld podcast with Tim Ferriss is something that I’ll probably be 60 and still be listening to.
Ramanand 28:39
Yeah, the one about training your dogs.
Roshan 28:41
It’s about training your mind. So, he says your brain is a dog, your mind is infinite. And a lot of it is programming your brain, that’s it. That’s all there is and Jerry Seinfield after 30 or 35 years of writing everyday, it’s no surprise that he wakes up tomorrow and there are three jokes in his head. It’s absolutely no surprise at all. And who knows, maybe you know the likes of Mozart or someone, was like that. They couldn’t do anything else. And we see genius but it’s actually perseverance. Of course there are leaps of genius that no one can explain but again for the 99.999% of the people around, there’s hope. There’s hope that you can program yourself into near-genius at least.
Ramanand 29:41
You reminded me of a joke that I think is usually attributed to Pandit Ravi Shankar. He was asked why he practices everyday, he says if I don’t practice today I’ll know, if I don’t practice tomorrow my audience will get to know.
So Roshan, I want to move onto something we were talking before we started recording, which is that when people come to you and want to talk about podcasting, they’ll probably talk about the apps, the equipment though you said, your main forte here is to speak to people, learn along with them. So there needs to be a lot of preparation that has to go into making that conversation. So if you say your conversation is becoming longer that means it’s also going deeper. So with so many episodes and so many different guests, two different podcasts, tell me a little bit about the information prep, the content prep and whether you get overwhelmed, what do you do with it. You have a team, again different people have, some of your other presenters have their own strengths. So how do you look at the preparation part for these podcasting episodes?
Roshan 30:54
Okay, see this is an amazing question that I could perhaps spend an entire podcast talking about because it is something I’m learning as well, I'm constantly learning how to be better on this front. Again the approach is slightly different for both the podcasts that I do, Bharatvaarta and Startup Operator. Let me talk about certain common things. Common things for both of them is the guest defines the content. So a lot more in the case of Startup Operator where it’s from the person’s journeys, experiences. But even for something which is technical like Bharatvaarta where you have someone talk about let’s say a telecom policy, some infrastructure development, even then the guest defines the content right. It is very important to understand who to have on your podcasts. Over time for both the podcasts we have a sense of who would make a good guest. And we have some markers to figure if this is possible or not and to a reasonable extent we are able to get that right. 99% of the time we are right about it. That’s a common thing.
Second, you need to understand the context. That is super important because you are at least starting at the same place then so with both these things it’s slightly different. So if I have a SaaS founder on the Startup Operator, I need to understand some basis about, I mean I do work in SaaS so I do have a sense of relatability to that so I have some context. On Bharatvaarta, if we are going to interview some scientists who have found some way to detect cancer which is an episode we are going to put out shortly, obviously we have to understand some basics, whatever there is about stem cell research or some things like that. It absolutely is a basis point for our conversation. Understanding the context is super important.
And then I always like a podcaster to be like a director and not like an actor, and that’s a subtle but very important difference. Recently, a close friend of mine asked me, you seem to have interesting views, why don’t you talk more on your podcast? And my answer was, I may have certain interesting views but this podcast is not about me. It is very clear from all of the promos, all of the graphics and all of the stuff that the person who is coming to listen to the podcast is going to listen to that particular person and not me. So my job is to literally curate the content, to direct and to choreograph the content in a way that is palatable, in a way that is useful to the listener and that is what I need to spend time on. So once I’ve chosen my guest, once I have a certain context, the next challenge is to really choreograph this conversation. I’m not saying you know okay 5 mins this person will talk this, 15 mins the person will talk about this and so on and so forth. I mean I have an outline in terms of what themes and questions to ask them. In my head I know that it’s going to progress from A to B to C but oftentimes what happens is 50% or more of the podcast is improvised. Because you are also responding to something someone said to you just now. So it’s not a Google form, one question after another.
You also have to be responding to the person in terms of what they are saying. So that is really how I look at the conversation as such. Now when you have the guest on your podcast, it is extremely important to establish a certain vibe. You need to have that certain sense of vibe in terms of relating to that person. Even very briefly for about 4 or 5 mins. COVID happened and it’s kind of solved the small talk problem for us right. No matter who you are calling and talking to someone in California or someone in Pune, you’ve something to talk about, hey how are things at your end? It’s important to have that vibe and establish it.
The other important thing I realised is that a great conversation is not great content. You have to be super mindful of your audience. I’m not saying you’ve to be a slave to your audience. But having a great conversation is not a sufficient condition. You always have to be mindful of the fact that someone else listening to this may want to learn or be entertained about something. So what are you offering to them? So I really have to hold back when I ask these questions to people because I know that this is something I would like to know but perhaps be of no interest to the audience. And the flipside of it is in the informal bit, I slip in my podcast questions once in a while now. So my wife catches me doing this quite often. What do you think about this or something like that? I mean it’s perfectly fine. So those are a few things that I would say are good prep for podcasts in general.
Ramanand 36:45
So that part of your life is leaking into everything is what I’m taking away. Okay, I think some interesting analogies. The founder’s mindset, being a director, seeing yourself as an orchestrator but also participating in the dance that’s going on because you are leading it in a certain direction your audience wants to see. So, I actually wanted to ask that in terms of your information consumption, is it all revolving around the next episode. You find yourself having to read, watch, listen and everything. Is it the magnetic pull of the episode that drives your curiosity in some sense now?
Roshan 37:33
Yes and no, right. So sometime back, actually a long while back now that I think about it. I’ve not had a TV in the house for about 10 years now. I mean I do have a TV but cable news basically, I haven’t had for 10 years now.
Ramanand 37:57
You cut the cord a long while ago.
Roshan 37:59
Exactly. I cut that and that has been really really useful for me because it frees up my time to deliberately consume things that I want. As opposed to you know, you walk into some households and the TV is just on. It’s the case in my parents’ house also where the TV is just on no matter what’s running on it, it could be the weather, it could be some television soap or news or whatever it is. It’s on. Just like a zombie, you are consuming all of this. So to me being really deliberate about what you consume is an integral thing to preserving your sanity. Because 99.99% of the things out there are crap, that doesn’t impact you one bit. So just do this simple exercise in your head right, what are three really good articles you remember from the last week, or perhaps the last month, last 6 months or last year. I really struggle to remember 2-3 really really good ones. I won’t even remember the headlines actually. And then ask how many of these really made a difference in your life? So I’m in this enviable situation of being dilettante and I take it very seriously. I can learn a little bit about policy, a little bit about politics, a little bit about religion, a little bit about culture. There are very few things I want to get in the weeds with. SaaS for example. I first discovered SaaS, software as a service, for people unbeknownst to the SaaS world.
Ramanand 39:46
It’s not like the SaaS of your parents’ TV soap…
Roshan 39:49
Exactly, so I discovered SaaS in 2012-13 and since then I’ve just wanted to know everything about it. And that is something I really don’t mind going deep on reading all damn things I might have to read. Whether it's the hellblock, or the SaaStr or Mark Lester's blogs or whatever it is. I want to read, I want to learn, I want to consume everything about that. I feel it augments my place in the ecosystem in some sense. That’s something we can develop later on, which is you are not just yourself but you are a collection of everything around you. So having a fair understanding of the larger picture is super effective to how important you can be at your workplace.
I don’t want to learn too much about certain things. So, my consumption revolves around going deep on somethings and barely knowing some other things. And that’s how I kind of like to think about it and so after the podcast, I started listening to a lot of the other podcasts. And for me it's kind of like homework and like entertainment. Think of it as infotainment. I listen to Tim Ferris, Brown Pundits, How I Built This, Art of Manliness. There are quite a few Indian podcasts also that are really good, there's a kid who runs, there’s this friend who’s called Jivraj who runs the Indian Silicon Valley Podcast where he talks to some of the best founders and investors around. Some really nice conversations and plenty to learn from. Also the thing I like about podcasts is that, it’s a parallel activity, you don’t have to be fixated to a screen. You can be doing household chores, cooking or cleaning or whatever and have this in your head right. I feel like it gives you the gift of time and if you are able to practice listening at 1.5x that again adds to some time in your life. I mean you can’t do all of that all the time. I was listening to Vitalik Buterin and I really had to tone it down. I had to listen to it real-time because he has a really fast cadence and also some of the stuff that he was saying imposed a lot of cognitive load on me. I had to really think about what he’s talking about. So these are literally what I consume in terms of infotainment and stuff. In terms of pure entertainment, I’m trying to reduce this scroll behaviour.
We’ve replaced the television running 24/7 with the social media scrolling which is that you have 5 minutes and you don’t care what’s bombarding your head and so on. That’s the other thing. Be ruthless about how you curate your social feed. Mute, block, follow only the right things. Just be ruthless about it because that’s occupying mindspace even if you don’t want to. Also I’ve these 5 or 10 minute clips that I insert instead of the scrolling. These could be clips from The Office or The Impractical Jokers. So let’s say I finish a meeting 5 or 10 mins before and instead of scrolling, instead of sending another damn email, I watch these videos that are just pure entertainment and take your mind off. I’ve never been a Netflix person. It’s just, I find it hard to not be doing something and just be consuming but I’m practicing that to a certain extent just so that I can switch off and not end up all weary and tired even after a weekend which kind of happens to me as well. Also I have this tendency to want to do things. I’ve realised regional content is very good in that sense, it opens up a different part of your head. I feel like we are living in an Englishman’s world. It’s that paradigm you are operating in most of the time but listening to or watching regional content opens to this part of the brain which is really nice. So on the weekends, I’m watching Kannada or Malayalam or Tamil movies. So that is in essence to what I consume.
Ramanand 44:45
I love what I heard because on one hand, just to come back to the India thing, Bharat is definitely cool and we need to help make it more cooler. Not everyone can lend a hand in doing that. But just going back, I love the fact that you’ve been thoughtful and deliberate, we call it and I think we discussed it when we were on your show that you look at the curiosity diet as a thaali and you say that there is a place for that sweet, fun, entertaining thing. You don’t have to look down upon it, it’s a proportion you want to get right and the amount that you consume and the rate at which you consume.
Roshan 45:27
So, just to add on to that, most people schedule stuff that they have to do, they schedule the work that they have to do. I mean again my wife thinks I’m nuts for doing this but I actually schedule stuff that's outside of work but is equally important for me, like my workout for example. My workout is scheduled on my calendar. And chill time, chill time is scheduled on my calendar because I can do those things without any regrets otherwise you always think of this as in-between work that I have to finish this and get somewhere. But you don’t have to. See all of these things and especially in these post-COVID world that we are living in where your calendar bleeds, things bleed into each other and it’s very important for you, just to maintain your sanity and kind of siphon of blocks of your time into specific things that would otherwise get left behind. Because otherwise your work just pretty much submerges everything. So schedule is everything. I’ve time on my calendar to talk to my wife which again is pretty nuts but at 9 o'clock I know something goes off. Maybe I want to talk at 9 o'clock, I’ll talk at 9:30 or something of that sort.
Ramanand 46:56
It’ll get done.
Roshan 46:57
It’ll get done, it’ll slip otherwise. And you won’t realise, on a daily basis nothing will change but when you look back a year, how many quality conversations have you had, how many workouts have you gotten or how many movies have you watched for example if that’s something that you like. So if it has to get done, it has to be on the calendar.
Ramanand 47:19
So, we spoke about reading, remembering the great articles that you might have read recently. I can’t help but briefly talk about things are the compound that we have, the daily reader compound that we have where the idea is to offer people, reduce that friction, that read this article, take my word for it we’ve done the hard work, or watch this, I think the curation plays a big role in it. If you can find a trusted source and they can help you fill the right gaps then you can spend your time so much better than just mindlessly wandering around and then there's a place for your fun, absolutely guilt-free consumption or whatever you want to do. So, all that you just said is music to our ears. So Roshan, I also wanted to ask you, is there a place for something like a book in this calendered life of yours? Do you still get through books and tell me a couple of recent interesting books, because we promised the last time we spoke to talk about books the next time so let’s bring that in as well.
Roshan 48:25
Sure, so I’ll be honest. I’ve slipped on the books front. Till last year I would go to bed with a book in my hand, turn off my screens and what not, keep my mobile a fair distance away and read something, maybe get through 15 pages and fall asleep. That’s the best way to fall asleep with a book by my bedside. But I’ve slipped on that front. I’m trying to get back into it. And something I’ve learnt is to consciously abandon books. I’ll give you an example, my reading behaviour slipped off because of one book I picked up called Hyperfocus . It’s a fantastic book suggested by a good friend of mine, but I got the idea of what it wanted to say. It’s one of those books in the first 100 pages, you know what the gist is. It’s about being deliberate about your time. It’s a book I would 100% advise to people, at least to get the bare concepts of the book and what not. But the prospect of reading that book seemed so dull to me that I just slipped. Days became weeks, and weeks have become few months now where I haven’t really got back to reading. And I was thinking to myself last week, why don’t I make a conscious decision to abandon this book, since I have got everything I need from it. It’s okay even if I miss the 20%, 30% or even 50% of what I had to get from this. Let me just abandon it for now and pick up something else. Because there’s no point depleting your energy and trying to get through things. You have to save that in the tank for things you really have to do that you don’t like. Maybe you know talking to some distant relative who you perhaps don’t know or care about but you have to, things where you have a choice of not doing that. But otherwise I pick up mainly non-fiction stuff which is again something I want to change.
I do want to pick up fiction and read the Murakamis of the world and what not. My wife is a big fan of such books. But otherwise favorite authors or the books that I really like have had a significant impact on my life. I mean these are people that literally changed my life and we are blessed to have these authors who condense their life’s learning into 250-300 pages. And give it to you almost free of cost. What is 250-300 or even 1000 bucks for a book that will change your life right? I mean two or three people stand out, one is Nassim Taleb who I’m sure all of you are a fan of as well. I just adored him. I don’t know what is the right word to describe but it’s one thing that’s had a profound impact in my life which is The Skin In The Game. and later Fooled By Randomness. These are just one of those books, especially Fooled By Randomness that leaves you gobsmacked, of how little you know and how wrong you’ve been about everything. And once you read it, it’s like getting red-billed, you can’t go back to a world before that. So Nassim Taleb for sure.
The other person who’s had a significant impact on was Jordan Peterson. I also believe that these books have a certain way of jumping out of the shelves at certain points in your life. I found Jordan Peterson in 2016-17 when I was going through a very difficult time, my startup wasn’t going anywhere. I had to make the difficult choice of winding up my startup and looking for employment. I had to get married very soon and I had zero in my back account and all of that. It was a terrible time and I picked up this book, and I started listening to his lectures and, he has this Maps of Meaning series as well, Jordan on YouTube which is just amazing. And it really empowered me in the sense that I started taking responsibility for things. And I always feel like old wine and a new bottle right, it’s always the case but that new bottle is something that fits in your context today. And that is very important because everything that’s to be said has already been said before. If you look at the last 3 or 4 or 10 books of non-fiction that you’ve read, there’s nothing new that someone is saying but they are saying it in a way that applies in your context today. And which is why it makes it so important.
Otherwise, I liked our friend Rory Sutherland's book the Alchemy, again a fantastic book for anyone in marketing or advertising. I think Rory is a must-listen. He is someone who changes your mind profoundly, otherwise there are books that come into my life at certain points like Scott Adams for example, he had this book called How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
Ramanand 53:57
Absolutely.
Roshan 53:58
Yeah, which talks about stacking skills. Which talks about I think we all have this FOMO of being not as good as whatever but this guy actually gives a hack to be great without having to be the Michael Jordan of whatever you are doing, which is to stack skills meaningfully and be the top 1%of the the people at the intersection of all these skills and then Atomic Habits by James Clear was very simple and effective as well. But yeah, otherwise I would love to go back to reading fiction. I used to read a fair bit of Wodehouse back in the day and that gave me a lot of joy.
Ramanand 54:38
Great, those were a lot of familiar names. And I think, I would like to say that it’s a great time in history to be a learner right. If you want to learn nothing can stop you, it’s cheap, it’s democratised, it’s out there. All you need to do is say, you put your hand up and turn on the tap.
Roshan 54:58
But there is also the flipside. It is to be really mindful of the kind of stuff that you pick up. The kind of programmes that you guys are running is amazing because coming back to Taleb’s principle of we are negativer, which is to subtract more than what you want to add. If you don’t do dumb stuff in life, you’ll autoatically end up doing the right stuff. Or atleast rather you’ll converge on doing the right stuff. Similarly, if you don’t consume all the really, absolutely useless utter crap kind of things out there, you’ll somehow find your way to the good stuff.
Ramanand 55:38
Just be less stupid everyday, is a simple thing to follow
Roshan 55:42
I think that’s a very noble goal to have.
Ramanand 55:46
So Roshan we have about 5 mins left. I wanted to ask you a question about marketing. We can’t do justice to that whole topic today, especially modern B2B, SaaS related topics but I wanted to ask you, there’s a lot of consumerization. We are all exposed to a lot of B2C marketing that is shaping our B2B products, the way we look at them as well. So I wanted to ask you if you put on your B2B marketer hat, how is this new landscape of media, podcasting, consumer experience. Me as an individual being swayed by content. How is that playing out? Do you see in the B2B world, do you see more podcasts, more internal podcasts for individuals to build a brand, do you see all that really becoming the next big wave?
Roshan 56:39
I think the more things change, the more things remain the same. And oftentimes people get blinded by the shiny things whether it’s newer channels, or newer methods or campaigns and so on and so forth. But really you have to stay truthful to the core of marketing which is that ultimately you are solving a problem for somebody. Now, this somebody may be taking and applying it for themselves or they are part of an organisation where they are trying to solve that with seven other people. And it might impact a 1000 member or a 10000 member organisation. People often confuse those nuances which are like secondary nuances with the primary job of marketing itself. The primary job of marketing is to move someone to act, into some emotion or action. B2B especially, people are oftentimes confused by these things. B2B has a lot to learn from B2C. Look at software the way it is being commoditised. If there’s even a 50 million dollar or a 100 million dollar market for anything. There are 10 companies in Koramangala and somewhere else which will do that. Software is getting commoditized at a fierce rate.
So what is it that differentiates a drift from some other company that built a website chatbot. Those are things you’ve to kind of reflect upon right. We may smirk about these things in the valley who say things like workspace for remote or conversations on marketing or whatever but there’s an absolute meaning to that. I mean there’s a genuine sincere point to that which we are sincerely missing as Indians. The narrative and the storytelling aspect of things which is to paint a picture for the users for things that may not be essential for them at this point in time. See if you ask me 10 or 15 years back and I was one of the early users of Slack. Was Slack integral for us at that point of time? No. Is it integral today, 100% yes. Why because it would multiply my email 100 folds today if I didn’t have Slack. Now how did that come to be? You can frown up Slack as a glorified company chat or whatever it is. But I mean look at the value that they’ve built. Look at the ARR that they are doing at this point of time. I might be mistaken but they might be doing 3 or 4 billion dollars of revenue. I mean which is quite remarkable if you ask me. So that is one key difference especially for Indian marketers and I have been guilty of this as well, is to basically absorb the big picture and have a focus on the narrative and so on and so forth.
The other thing about B2C is that about being the tip of the sphere which again B2B we safely cushion ourselves against the sales people. And we almost become like servient of the sales people because like “okay, what do you want? You want a deck or a campaign, I’ll give that to you.” and now you go and fight that battle. Why? You don’t really have to do that. And then there’s the other extreme of being completely siloed by what sales is doing. I feel like there’s a healthy overlap of what’s going on. Somebody told me sometime back that think like a marketer and execute like a salesperson. Especially in the day and age that we are living in today, there has to be a healthy overlap between marketing and sales. As a B2B person, get on the demo, pitch to a prospect, do all those things, it’ll give you so much more understanding. It’ll define the way you write copy. These days half my job goes into catching BS that my team writes in terms of emails or copy, guys we don’t do this, this is not what a prospect wants or this particular thing that you’ve said that’s not what they call them. This will not be visible to you if you don’t act like a salesperson and at the end of the day you don’t get in front of a prospect yourself. Don’t deny yourself that chance and get second hand information from someone and filter and all of that stuff. Yeah, so those are the two aspects I would say especially for B2B marketers. But you know the larger point is also to stay away from vanity metrics. I think we severely overestimate the quantifiable stuff and underestimate the qualitative stuff you know. People just figure a way to do dumb things faster and essentially at the heart if you need to move the needle and find the best proxy for that. Forget about your clicks and views. Figure what is the best proxy for you to aim, for that should be a north star to move the needle essentially.
Ramanand 1:01:46
Right again, it’s back to basics. You just keep the fundamentals and keep a string anchor on the fundamentals and things will keep changing around. Because what I realised you said that you alluded to a few things that have happened several years ago but they are playing out today. Because you got into SaaS and got onto Slack, you didn’t say I’m not going to bother about doing it. That’s why you are in a position to make, or place your bets in fashion today. It’s always, you can look backwards and do the connection as the great man said. So actually I just wanted to end by, therefore, asking you, what is it that you are teaching yourself to do that we will hear about in 5 years time? What is cooking in the background, maybe it’s just a 15 min thing that you are,you’ve just seen something, you are saying that okay I’m just going to look at it a little bit while I’m running the podcast, doing work. What is that that we probably expect to talk to you about in 5 years time?
Roshan 1:02:50
So this is an important thing. And Art of Manliness has a kickass blog I remember reading about what kind of hobbies a person should acquire. I’m not sure. Let me see if I can find it and probably link it to you guys. So find a hobby that uses your body, has a physical element to it. Find a hobby that exercises your mind. Or find a hobby that you can do with your better half and so on and so forth. I think they've really thought through that and it’s really important. See, when I look at my life in terms of what I want to do now, one of the defining things over the last 5-6 years has been caring for some of the older people in my life. Observing them and really coming to that understanding how I want to be when I come to that age when I’m 65, 70, 75 whatever it is. And that has impacted me a great deal in terms of what I consume, or what I do. It changed my perspective on fitness itself in some sense. Peter Attia is a great person that people should follow. He has this thing called the centenarian olympics. What is the core body strength you need to be healthy 100 year old or to be a functional 100 year old? Those are the things I like. All of these new skills and learnings too. What will keep you entertained, happy and content at 65 years old and those are things that you need to pick. I think when I look at some of the happiest 65, 75 or you know the older ones around, those are people who can keep themselves entertained either through books, through music, through arts or whatever. They don’t need anyone in their life and at the same time they have those 4 or 5 very close relationships that they can talk to, to have that 1 or 2 uninterrupted hours of conversation. And they are sufficiently interesting, I mean they’ve travelled or they perhaps have a skill that is out of the ordinary or whatever. So last year I tried to learn Japanese and must say I failed horribly. But it is a fascinating language and I have since paused on that but I hope to get back to that. Right now I’m trying to learn ethereum, basically understand, I feel like it’ll play a very big part in our lives going forward so I want to, at least try to understand the basics of ethereum, how it’ll impact and so on and so forth. And yeah I mean that’s it I would say, perhaps learn cooking also, around this time.
Ramanand 1:05:48
Great, one thing is for sure I know when I speak to you whenever the next time, maybe in hopefully less than 5 years you’ll be doing something else, that I think I can take a safe bet on. So on that note Roshan thanks so much for this conversation. I learnt a lot of interesting things. I’m going to chase up on some of these posts, books, people that you mentioned and I look forward to having you soon so thank you so much
Roshan 1:06:16
Hey this was a pleasure. I really liked talking to you Ramanand. Thanks so much Harish as well for this. It was a great idea to get together and talk and hopefully we’ll do this more often.