The One Percent Project- Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Resilience

About Sandeep Jethwani:"It's not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for." -Robert KiyosakiToday on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Sandeep Jethwani. Sandeep is the co-founder of dezerv. dezerv. is an expert-led wealth creation platform that aims to deliver sustainable returns to its clients through its unique Integrated Portfolio Approach (IPA). dezerv. was founded in 2021 and today it has 1,000 crores under management.In this engrossing conversation, Sandeep talks about his dezerv. journey, the role of patience in creating long-term wealth, building a brand that consumers trust, the role of mentors and much more.Some Key Highlights:We assume building wealth is a lot about the returns we generate but the true trick to growing meaningful wealth is not to lose it. Some of the folks who have made a significant amount of capital have not lost a meaningful amount of money in the worst of times.The interesting dichotomy of investing today is it’s easier to figure out where to invest but harder to make money.Before you trust a brand, you trust the people behind the brand.In this conversation, he talks about:00:00 Intro01:44 His counterintuitive insight about wealth management? 02:56 How did he come up with the name? 04:56 How does one build long-term wealth? 07:15 Where is India in its wealth creation journey, and how is dezerv. adding value to it? 12:55 What is the importance of patience in building wealth? 17:48 How does he think about building a brand? 25:00 The secret sauce of Zerodha.28:28 The role of mentors.Links:Sandeep: LinkedIn

About Shreyaa Kapoor:Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Shreyaa Kapoor. Shreyaa kicked off her career at Bain consulting, went on to become a content strategist and influencer with 650K+ Instagram followers and was recognised by LinkedIn as a Top Voice for 2022.This is a fascinating conversation with a young content influencer about why and how she chose to leave consulting and join the creator economy. Among all the insights and anecdotes that Shreyaa shares, the one that stood out was her father's advice "If your content and work can easily be copy pasted then you are not creating good enough content." Some Key Highlights:You need to have patience and the courage to experiment. There will be content pieces that will not work out while you're experimenting but that's the price you pay to stand out and be original.If your content and work can easily be copy pasted, then you are not creating good enough content.Content quality is more important than content frequency. In this conversation, she talks about:Her journey from college to becoming a content creator.Her LinkedIn Vs Instagram content strategy.Her relationship with money, given her Instagram content, is about personal finance.How did she kick off her financial journey?As a content creator, how do you create a legacy?Her lessons as a content influencer?How is Gary Vee different from Ali Abdaal?Links:Shreeya’s Instagram | LinkedIn

Thomas Edison once said that Genius is prolonged patience. I am patient enough to be sure. Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Anand Jain. He is the Co-founder of CleverTap. CleverTap is the world's leading customer engagement and retention platform, valued at USD 775M and backed by Sequoia India, Tiger Global and others. In this fascinating conversation, Anand talks about how curiosity and constant tinkering of an average student from a humble background have led him to build multiple successful businesses, the value of thinking in first principles, how understanding the customer is selling, and much more.Some Key Highlights:Learning Framework: There is a certain joy in figuring out things on your own from first principles. A learning framework is- Do it as long as it doesn't kill you, then come back and look at what you've learned and can you have a compounding effect on what you've learnt?Founders: Technical founders typically start from the problem statement as opposed to non-technical founders, who start from the market opportunity or the competitors in the space.Teams: Your competitors will change, markets will change, and products will evolve. It's the people who will decide whether you win or lose.In this conversation, he talks about:00:00 Intro01:52 Early life: One bedroom rented house, an average student to co-founder of Clevertap. How do you reflect on it?12:52 How is understanding the customer- selling?16:18 What is your learning framework- How do you indulge in learning something new?19:03 Technical founders - how has the experience been?22:54 How do you differentiate yourself?28:25 Being a product-first company- what does that mean?32:58 Building for a niche/ focus group Vs for everyone?36:02 What do you think about building a team?39:16 Key learnings from Moments of Truth?41:29 Views on Elon Musk?Links:Anand JainMoments of Truth

Royal Enfield:When Vikram Lal, CEO & Founder of The Eicher Group, bought the Royal Enfield brand in 1994, the company was already losing money and market share. Product, operations, management, marketing and sales were facing issues. Many Eicher CEOs tried to revive the brand but failed to get Enfield back to its glorious old days. The company was about to shut Enfield when Siddhartha Lal, Vikram's 26-year-old son, put his hand up to revive Enfield. This is a mini-episode on how Siddhartha took Royal Enfield from the brink of bankruptcy to becoming a lifestyle brand and India's first global consumer brand. Royal Enfield is The Oldest Motorcycle Brand in Continuous Production. It found its origin in a British needle-making factory in the late 1800s. In 1901, the first Royal Enfield motorcycle was unveiled. The company made its way to the Indian market in 1949 and later set up a JV with Madras motors. The British arm of the company over the years was unable to sustain itself and eventually shut down, but the Indian JV business chugged along.In India, Royal Enfield is a cult, not just a motorcycle company. It is as urban a brand as rural. It was brought to India by the Brits, adopted by the Indian army and police, got popular among the socially powerful Zamindars- landlords in the 1960s. Today it is a social icon among millennials. When Siddhartha signed up for the job, he faced the Harley Davidson dilemma if you innovate, you upset the fans, and if you don't, your brand dies. So he positioned Royal Enfield as a lifestyle brand and kept its classic design and iconic engine thump. The new Royal Enfield was about independence, passion and freedom. This attracted the youth. They cared less about performance and mileage and more about being a part of a 100- year old nostalgia. They bought the new Royal Enfield because of the old one. He went on to take serval other counterintuitive decisions. For example, he built a new engine for Enfield, which was not a popular decision among Enfield fans. He chose to shut down the newly inaugurated Jaipur plant and kept the 50-year-old Chennai plant running. Siddartha pushed for international penetration into the U.S., Australia, Thailand and the U.K.As of June 2022, Royal Enfield's domestic sales increased by 40% YoY. There is a long way to go for Enfield, but Siddhathra has been able to revive and re-position Enfield as India's first global lifestyle brand. If you found this interesting, head on to reading Amrit Raj's book, Indian Icon: A Cult Called Royal Enfield.

About Peter Wang:"Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence." — Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 1975. Simple put, all it means is once you build software and keep making changes to it. Its quality will degrade and eventually degrade to a point where it becomes unusable. Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Peter Wang. Peter is the Chief Technology Officer at Buzzfeed, overseeing Product Management, Engineering, Design, and Data teams across all portfolio brands. Peter has built both consumer and enterprise products and fundraised from a diverse range of investors across industries—health (The Mighty, backed by GGVC, Upfront, and WPP Health), SaaS (Buddy Media, backed by Greylock, acquired by Salesforce), media & e-commerce (Refinery29, backed by Stripes, WPP, Scripps).Peter, in this conversation, talks about his journey as a CTO, leadership vs management, and his delegation mechanism, which Keith Rabois outlined in his essay How to be an effective executive and what has been learnt as an angel investor. Some Key Highlights:Buddy Media was acquired by Salesforce. I remember being there after it was acquired by Salesforce. And I realized that what we have built wasn't particularly the most technologically robust advanced futuristic version of it. but it was a combination of the right set of capabilities slash features that the clients need combined with the right marketing.Emotion has so much more decision-making power than we even understand.Culture is based on identity. Culture is based on values. Culture is embedded into our decision-making, even though we cannot articulate or quantify it when we talk to people.In this conversation, she talks about:00:00 Intro02:13 How does one know the role they play beyond their title?04:56 Leadership Vs Management is there a difference?06:30 As a CTO, how do you build an intelligent and practical system without being too futuristic?10:32 Delegation: Your views?13:56 Is there a difference between a CTO and a VP of engineering?17:24 90-day plan, when you kick start in a new role. The 3 Ps- Double-click on that.21:42 Is technology the secret sauce of Buzz Feed's success?24:58 What can data not do?29:38 What have you learnt as an angel investor?Links:The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software EngineeringKeith Rabois Essay 3: How to be an Effective Executive

Generalist Vs Specialist:This mini-episode stemmed from my discussion with Sidu Ponnappa. Sidu is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He says the generalist Vs specialist discussion is misleading. It is better to analyse someone as objective-oriented or activity oriented. One can choose either not both at the same time. These days there is a debate, especially among the younger talent pool, about being a generalist or a specialist. There is a popular book on this topic by David Epstein called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Epstein argues against specialisation early on in one's life and makes a case for "Range" to gather as many skills and experiences as you can and later to specialise based on your strengths.What got me thinking is, does the brain have a generalist vs specialist evolution, and do Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Michael Angelo, and other achievers have a generalist or a specialist mindset? It turns out that the brain goes through a generalist and specialist evolution cycle between early childhood and adulthood.  A child is born with 100 billion neurons. These neurons communicate with each other through a structure called synapse. During infancy, the brain experiences a large amount of growth. As a result, there is an explosion of synapse formation between neurons during early brain development. This is called synaptogenesis.Synapse growth is critical in learning, memory formation, and adaptation early in life. Around 2 to 3 years of age, the number of synapses hits a peak. Just after this peak, the brain starts to remove synapses that it no longer needs. A synapse can either be strengthened or weakened based on its use. Synapses that are frequently used grow and strengthen and the ones which are not used are removed by the brain. The process of removing synapses is called Synaptic pruning.Going back to our business world, the brain begins its journey as a generalist, adds as many synapses as it can early on and then switches to a specialist mode where it starts pruning, killing, synapses that show low or no use. If you consider the journeys of Warren Buffet, who made his first investment at the age of 11, Bill Gates, by the age of 19, had more than 10,000 hours of coding under his belt, Michael Angelo became an artist by the age of 13 and there a numerous such examples of high achievers who started honing their crafts in their teens. David Epstein talks about Roger Freder as a generalist because he dabbled into skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer at school. It was closer to his teens that Roger picked up tennis. Maybe this is an example of synaptic pruning where the brain kills the less used synapses. Now can you and I pick up tennis in our twenties or thirties? Sure we can! But it will potentially be 5 times harder than someone who has worked on their serve and backhand since early childhood. Our schooling system pushes us to be a generalist when it should provide us with the environment in our teens to be a specialist and focus on activities and subjects we enjoy. We can't say for sure if synaptogenesis is a generalist function or synapse pruning is a specialist function of the brain. Still, it does indicate that the brain's development has a generalist to specialist evolution cycle.I found the topic valuable not only to get a better understanding of my strengths and weakness but also the formative process that my little one is going through.If you like this mini-episode, share it with someone who would find it valuable. You can drop me a line at pritish@onepercent.live. Until next time. 

Sidu Ponnappa, serial entrepreneur and angel investor, discusses decision-making, startup dynamics, and angel investing. He shares insights on activity-oriented vs objective-oriented individuals, sustainable vs unsustainable businesses, and challenges in transitioning to entrepreneurship. The conversation also explores partnering with Sequoia, hyper-growth strategies, code degradation, business reinvention, branding, and personal growth through reading.

About Haldiram’s:Hello everyone, I am kicking off a mini-series based on the research I do for The One Percent Project conversations.Prep for every guest conversation leads me into some fascinating rabbit holes about people, companies and industries. So, I plan to share some of these stories and insights through this mini-series. I hope you enjoy them. Here is the first one. While doing my research on Ahana Gautam and Open Secret, which is on a mission to un-junk the Indian snack industry, I stumbled upon the Namkeen Industry of India. Namkeen in Hindi means snack. It is a $ 15 billion industry in India. No conversation on namkeens would be complete without mentioning, Haldiram's, India's No.1 Namkeen brand. Haldiram's 85+ years of history is an MBA in itself. It is fascinating to learn how Gangabhishenji Agarwal, fondly known as Haldiram, in 1918 kicked off the making of a Rs 5000 Cr, USD ~600M, brand, which is now a household name in India.Haldiram was a school dropout who started working at his father's bhujia shop early in his life and eventually became an outlier among ~300 other bhujia sellers in Bikaner through product innovation, branding, marketing, pricing and opportunistic expansion.Production InnovationHaldiram started his journey from his family snack stall in Bhujiya Bazar in Bikaner. He reinvented his aunt's bhujia recipe to what we know as Haldiram's bhujia. He made it with moth beans, a type of lentil. This changed the taste and made the bhujia more crispy. The new bhujia was an instant hit among consumers.Branding/ Marketing:He named the bhujia "Dungar Sev" after the name of then popular Maharaja Dungar Singha. Here is a great example of Influencer Marketing from the 1930s.Pricing:Bhujia was a commodity. But given the popularity of "Dungar Sev", Haldiram raised the price from 2 paise/kg to 5 paise/kg. It made Haldiram's bhujia a premium product, and sales kept growing.Expansion:From 1937 to 2000, Haldiram's had grown to 4 cities Bikaner,  Calculta, Nagpur and Delhi. Expansion into Nagpur was a challenge and an opportunity. Nagpur or the whole of Maharashtra, a state in India, in the 1960s, was not interested in bhujia and was not exposed to many snacks.In the 2000s, they diversified into sweets, which brought the next age of growth for Haldiram's. They went on to add 400+ products which include snacks, sweets, cookies, pickles and much more. They also went international and set up a base in the US, Canada, UK, UAE, Sri Lanka and Thailand.Today, Haldiram's valuation has crossed $3 Billion, and the business has now spread to 80+ countries. Haldiram's present-day success is not only the outcome of Gangabhisenji's courage to break out and try something new but also the vision his sons and grandsons have had in this 85-year journey. I will stop there; let you ponder how a bhujia wala from Bikaner landed up, creating a Namkeen empire. However, the journey of building the empire has not been a straight line. If you found this interesting, refer to Ajuniorvc.com's blog on Haldiram's and the book Bhujia Barons. If you liked this mini-episode, share it with someone who would find it valuable. You can drop me a line at pritish@onepercent.live and tell me how else will be interesting to look into. Until next time. 

About Ahana Gautam:Indians love their snacks. We have grown up having our samosas, chaats, namkeens and mithais. There are hundreds of local and national snack brands in India. The Indian snacking industry crossed an annual sales of $14 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow by $2.88 billion from 2022 to 2026. While snacks do magic for our tastebuds, they dont always work wonders for our health. Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Ahana Gautam. She is the CEO & Co-Founder of Open Secret, a Harvard Business School and IIT Bombay alum. Open Secret is on a mission to un-junk the Indian snack industry. Some Key Highlights:We take creating a meaningful difference in the world as a responsibility, not a choice.Every business's biggest moat is its customer.Culture is the thread which helps companies scale. So without that thread, products won't exist.In this conversation, she talks about:00:00 Intro01:45 What makes Ahana a unique founder? 03:45 How has moving away from instant gratification helped her find her space in the world?05:15 How has attending Harvard and IIT impacted her thinking?08:11 How mothers are the north star for Open Secret?10:34 How does a business create moats? 13:39 How has Open Secret been able to penetrate beyond tier 1 cities in India?25:18 How does Ahana assess talent?27:10 How is Open Secret creating impact? Is it through culture or its products?

About James Keyes:My next guest on the One Percent Project is James W Keyes. James served as the Chief Executive Officer of 7-Eleven and chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. James graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the College of the Holy Cross. He also obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1980. James is the founder of the 'Education is Freedom' foundationJoin our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, he talks about:How curiosity and adversity have helped him lead organisations such as 7-Eleven and Blockbuster?The need for entrepreneurial thinking within a corporation.The art of negotiation and its tenets. How has 7-Eleven been able to keep itself ahead of the curve, and why others have not been able to replicate its growth model. Why did he choose to join Blockbuster?Would Blockbuster be a different company if it had accepted to buy Netflix?Are the principles of leadership being disrupted by the new generation of leaders?Some Key Highlights:When you are hit by adversity, you can respond in two ways: You can have your head down and become the victim, or keep your head up and say I'll get through this and get to the other side. Most of the time, there's hidden learning, and there's a strength that comes from knowing that you were able to make it through to the other side. This gives you the quiet advantage over someone who hasn't had to endure the adversity.The idea of a corporate entrepreneur is almost an oxymoron. Unfortunately, many corporate cultures believe in conformity and force people into a norm, discouraging the outliers. The very definition of an entrepreneur is someone who sets out on their own as an individual and breaks the norms. In contrast, the definition of a corporation is coming together as one; it's a body, not an individual.Leadership is about adapting to change, and change happens every day. So whatever you learned about leadership last week, you might have to change it next week based on a new set of facts, people or circumstances.