(00:00) welcome Umesh for Career Journey podcast I started this couple of years ago I’ve done about 40 episodes and my goal behind this is to bring the career Journey from different people to inspire people in it whether they are in the early career or settled with that I wanted to to hand over mic to you to share what you’re doing right now and then what do your typical day look like first of all thank you it’s it’s an honor actually to be on your podcast very interesting we have got to know each other very well now and we have
(00:35) become good friends I believe at least from my side so I’m really happy with that and uh those who are listening for the first time wherever you are have good morning good afternoon good evening I’m based in London Bas three but I’m from India and I’ve been in Europe for 25 30 years now so you said like how do my day progress a difficult day of progress a journey in a startup is quite different from traditional jobs in the morning I may be an HR Manager by the lunchtime I’m probably a project manager
(01:08) and a programmer and by 4:00 I may be an accountant and by evening I might become a researcher so that’s the kind of life that I have right now as I’m running this startup I currently have a team of 15 people spread across the world 16 now sorry I should say 16 because we just recruited being 16th person but we also have quite a few agents or automated systems that work for us so my typical day usually begins around 6:00 in the morning and the first thing I do is go for a walk actually I wake up in the
(01:44) morning and just go for 4 minutes of walking and during that walking I visualize how my day is going to actually progress so I visualize literally as to where am I going to sit who am I going to talk today what things I want to do today I also refer to the things that I have done yesterday so that’s my 40 minutes of let’s say a self uh actualizing meditation that happens while I walk in the nature and I leave it near a wooded area so that kind of gives me a a nice kind of connection to the nature R and
(02:18) one said come home uh have shower and everything and then have a breakfast and immediately I jumped into calls with my team because most of my team is east of my location so I’m based in London and most of my team is located starting from Asia to Eastern Europe so they already are well in their day so if they are in Asia they are almost at half or post afternoon in the day and if they are in Europe they are between two to three hours ahead of me so that means that they are well on their way to do the work and I immediately have an instant
(02:57) team call with people who have specific issues that they need to address on an urgent basis so I immediately tackle the urgency of the day right at the beginning when I have the energy and once we have addressed the Urgent issues is where I sit down and start writing the things that I have captured in the morning during my morning walk as to things that needs to be done if there are any ideas that needs to be implemented in everything and I have a huge kind of a board in my office so that becomes my kind of let’s say a
(03:31) thought repository so high level thoughts I put there so that they guide me even during the day week month and all that and this basically takes me to almost lunchtime to cover all these aspects once that is done I have lunch around noon and I also take a break actually and this is very important for me I take half an hour nap after lunch which I couldn’t do when I was working for somebody else so this is the luxury I get when when I’m running my own comping because nobody can tell me why are you taking a map during the day but
(04:04) I have seen that has changed my productivity to a great extent actually it’s like almost I’m resetting my day I’m resetting my body to have the same energy that I had at 6:00 in the morning that takes me to around 1:00 London time and once I’m past 1:00 and I’ve taken my half an hour nap then I spent one hour very focused on reviewing the work that my team has done because by that time the Asian team has finished the day so then I review the entire work that has been done so far if there are any
(04:39) points that needs to be communicated to the team I start making notes and everything and I make I make it ready and I work with a very focused attention during that time so I turn off my phone I turn off I don’t have anything on the screen except the work that my team is doing that one hour for me is my driving course because that’s where I decide how my team is progressing I decide how my team is going to progress tomorrow what kind of work they are going to do tomorrow and all those things I review
(05:12) during that one hour once that review is finished I take another break and I go for a run so that’s 2:00 in the afternoon every day 2:00 in the afternoon I go for 90 minutes of run I run between 14 to 20 kilomet on an average in miles it will turn out to something like let’s say 8 mil to around 15 miles so to say and at varying PES and again I go to woods and I run there really that much yeah every day so once I have so when I’m running I either listen to some of the podcasts that I or I join spaces actually I like X spaces
(05:55) that’s where we met actually and and I find I have some ways of identifying spaces which are very interesting either from AI that is my area of work and interest or even art and sometimes I even go to mindfulness kind of spaces or even some of the scientific spaces that I go to and most of the time I would remain listener because I would like to listen more than talk because I’m running some of the spaces I also join as a speaker and I keep running when I’m speaking so people who might listen to
(06:28) this podcast and if they have been to one of the spaces where I I have spoken they would probably relate to that that sometimes I’m out of breath because I’m going up the hill or something so that’s what I do I come back to my office or home office because I have set up an office in the out house in my house and once I come back to my office around 3:30 I take a small break for 1015 minutes just let’s say what do you call it the cooling down of the body I already do cool down when I’m coming
(06:59) back but then I cool down my body and right now it is winter you don’t perspire so much so that’s okay but if it is summer then obviously you need to take a shower so that kind of is a part of my routine so I adjust accordingly but I make sure that I’m back by 3:30 once I’m back at 3:30 I schedule my client calls so all my client calls usually are scheduled uh after 3:30 so this 2 to 3:30 time is very strictly sector where I I have to go for this run because if I don’t go for a run on a particular day that really builds up uh
(07:36) a lot of stress in my body in a way right I’m I’m tuned to that so that has become a very necessary routine it’s like breathing for me and uh once that is I get my client calls between 3:30 and 5:30 usually most of my clients are based in Europe or us so that means that it it is either L later part of the day or morning part of of the day and it’s very convenient for them as well then I have my client calls till around 5:30 that could be existing clients where we are talking about how the project is
(08:10) progressing some kind of reportings some kind of clarifications and I also have prospective client calls where we are talking about what kind of project we would like to go for and what things can be done so all those things happen during that time and then 5:30 I take a break have a cup of tea with my wife spend 15 20 minutes just talking about various things and everything and 6:00 I have my dinner in my home on the dinner table or lunch all electronic devices are not allowed so I don’t have access to phone I don’t have access to any kind
(08:43) of devices it’s pure human contact with my family and having food and enjoying whatever little food we eat in the evening very light food that we eting and after dinner I come back usually I would find some interesting space that I can either listen to or participate and I will then start working on my kind of fantasy projects as I’m into AI research as well so a lot of research paper reading and all those things happen during that time summarization organizing my knowledge and everything and that goes on till
(09:23) around 8:30 9:00 and 9:00 I wind up my day so this is a kind of a typical day of course every day is a different day sometimes I have to make presentations to plant which can go on for a few hours so that I adjust the day of bring well such an amazing structure that you have I was I wanted to ask you question about that no phone poy yeah who decided that you your wife or how do you come up with it so actually the thing is that the motivation behind that policy is my daughter so she really dislike when I was having phone with me all the time
(10:02) and everything and she said why don’t we do this and it struck a cord with my wife and me as well so it’s not that I’m forced into that but sometimes I feel like oh my God this is important I need to respond to this person and something it is always the urge but over a period of time I realized that nothing is important nothing is as important as spending time that little precious time with your family so I always make sure now that it doesn’t matter how urgent the things are you can always delay it
(10:33) by half an hour but you can spend that half an hour peacefully with your family whether you’re married whether you’re living with your parents with even with your friends like if you’re living in let’s say a shared apartment have that kind of a culture of spending time human contact so it’s very vital I I feel that it has enriched me a lot in way yeah and I have observed multiple time that we would be in space and then you will take uh 30 minute 40 minute break and you will tell everybody that we come back
(11:05) after dinner and things like that yeah you’ve been following it which is amazing people people talk a lot about work life balance or not even that just how to avoid burnout and how to re-energize yourself and everybody knows about these small breaks or Pomodoro techniques or daily and weekly and monthly breaks but it’s really hard to actually Implement these small ideas and follow it on a regular basis yeah it’s extremely important and what I’ve seen is that I have spent my specifically my corporate life and
(11:49) Professional Care career molding myself into that oh I’ll take every three or four months I’ll go on a break for a few days and I’ll unwind myself and decompress myself and reach re charge myself and then come back and and attend and every time it it used to be the same cycle like three months you work really hard you burn yourself out and then basically what is happening is that you’re just repairing yourself basically whether it is mentally emotionally physically spiritually you are just trying to repair yourself so basically
(12:19) we are damaging ourselves and then we are repairing ourselves and then that damaging again without realizing that we first need to stop the damage and that’s where my life changed when I understood that part is that you don’t need to damage yourself and if you take these small breaks hod technique or two or three very consciously decided breaks during the day it makes a lot of difference and I’ve seen visible difference on all four aspects of my life spiritually emotionally physically and mentally or
(12:52) intellectually and what I see that throughout the day you are you’re you have that intentional plan whether or not you’re able to follow every day it seems like you are but I will ask one question there I always have a temptation to do one more thing or do or utilize that one add another thing in whatever I’m doing how do you prevent that Temptation that let’s say 3:30 or 5:30 or even before and after the nap time right there is always a temptation to do one more thing so how do you control that Temptation so I am
(13:36) as you would say in Hindi you would say so to right so I have done all the sins and now I’m preaching okay that kind of a situation I have been in that I have been where I would tell my wife from my office saying oh I’m back in 10 minutes at 9:00 in the night M and at 12 she would message me and say this is midnight like you said you will be back in 10 minutes and I would say oh there was some urgent thing and I was working on that but now I just need another 15 minutes and before I realize it will be
(14:11) 3:00 in the morning and then what what happened is that started impacting my other next day and that piled up the work and I got into that kind of cycle so I have experience that and it has come through experience of burning out that I realized that if I continue on this path not only I’ll not achieve the objectives that I have set in front of me in terms of what I want to do in my life but I’ll make life of everyone around me miserable and not achieving those objectives and micro objectives or or mini objectives of weekly targets or
(14:47) monthly targets that you set in front of yourself if you’re not being able to achieve that is basically you are in a negative feedbook feedback loop and you will start undervaluing yourself and you start doubting yourself whether you have capability of achieving things so basically the thing is that so overall like in summary I would say that after learning from that experience what I in in short I would say is that I found that journey is as important as destination so to basically so for me the work is a journey and if I’m not
(15:20) enjoying my journey what is the chance that I’m going to enjoy my destination this realization basically changed everything so I want to make every day enjoyable rather than stressful so I always look at how do I reduce my stress what is the way in which I can reduce my stress and one of the best way is to is self-care if you don’t care for yourself there’s nothing else that you can do that would make your day better that’s my take yep 100% thank you thank you for highlighting the detail I I wanted to go
(15:54) deeper and ask you those questions because from the knowledge perspective I think most people already know this yeah but I hope they see that implementing those is setting your intention and things will be much more easier than the tactics or techn techniques for it because the idea is well known and you just have to set the intention that what’s the outcome if you don’t do this or what’s the outcome if you do this both both both side of it yeah I’m I’m a strong proponent of 1% method so make 1% Improvement in the
(16:37) time that you’re spending in your day so 1% of 24 hours basically is what you’re looking at improving that’s it so if you can spend 15 minutes in the day and if you do it for one week just 15 minutes doing something that you really enjoy not going through social media media feeds not going through something that does not involve screen in our world basically and but you really enjoy if you do it for 15 minutes every day that’s 1% and then next week you go for another percent and say okay I found this 15
(17:18) minute in the morning what other 15 minute I can do in the afternoon and then you find the third 15 minute basically you need four 15 minutes in the day for self once you have those four 15 minutes in your working day if you let’s say if you’re like me and requiring 78 hours of sleep I hope you do but if you require eight hours of sleep to recharge yourself then you have 16 hours if you deduct everything else we all know about this right there are thousands of books written and hundreds of thousands of
(17:50) videos about this it’s about the practice and I wanted to do something that is practical to me that fits my sh rather than some a guy on internet like me to talking on a podcast and saying oh you should be doing this I wanted to do something for that fits myself but the basic principles of spending 15 minutes with yourself are powerful that’s the most basic thing what do you do when you do it how do you do it is entirely up to you because that’s the beauty of those 15 minutes that you are free to do what
(18:21) you want right so we’ll keep moving from here what did you touch upon uh your company what you building and then from there we will go to a slight flashback want to to hear more about your company what business you’re doing what company you building okay my company currently is in a still mode because it’s a startup and we doing some fundamental research so that’s why we don’t disclose too much information about it yeah yeah only only information that you get yeah but the still mode name for my company
(18:54) is ason data so that’s the still mode name we will disclose the name once we cross a certain threshold so there are two parts of my company one part is where we are developing Solutions so my company is entirely bootstrap so I had and we’ll talk about it hopefully if we have time so I had three other startups in my past and uh based on the learning of my three startups in the past this particular startup because of the type of technology and excitement I had around this technology of AI the objective was to boot strap so that I
(19:27) can do whatever I want I didn’t want any anybody else breathing down my neck telling me I have given you million dollars I don’t want I don’t want you to do this I want you to do this so that was the idea so I bootstrap my company from bootstrap your company what that mean means I invested my own money I haven’t taken money from anyone else so nobody else can tell me how do I what do I do with my money and how do I spend money that’s the part when I started this company there’s a little bit of a
(19:55) backstory about the company but we’ll go into that later on the first thing was that because I’m bootstrapping and I have limited resources is to make this company profitable from let’s literally day one so I started scouting for projects and I started doing some Consulting work on the site and started funding the company then through Consulting work I started getting projects because AI became a buzzword at the beginning of 2023 and I had a lot of corporate contacts because of my previous background and I started
(20:27) getting projects where we were to implement anywhere from traditional machine learning solution regression models all the way to llms building applications on open source L llms and close source apis and stuff like that and we started building those projects while doing that one of the background I had was in finance and we’ll probably touch upon that but one of the key thing that I found out in the llms the large language models and other models as well well like even if you take any of the video models or or Audio model one of
(21:04) the key is temporality those models don’t have understanding of time as we understand it and we experience it so the idea was to do research on that area because I knew that if I’m able to crack that particular part of the puzzle that can have a profound impact and I wanted to do something that would have a profound impact so we started doing research in that area then we joined hands with a few un universities in Europe and also some of the outfits of so we took some advisory from Google as well and we are currently working on
(21:37) that particular area as to how we can have understanding of time as we experience it on three aspects linearity of the time the Simplicity of the time linearity is the straight line time as we experience me a straight line right so that’s one thing then there is a cyclicity so every second is repeated every minute is repeated every hour so on and so forth and then there is a cyclicity of the time so acyclicity is when you employ time so that means if you go from point A to point B you are consuming time to go from point A to
(22:09) point B but that consumption of time depends on multiple factors so if you’re going let’s say in a car from point A to point B it will depend on if there’s a traffic if you’re driving fast driving slow so you’re traveling from this the same distance in space you’re consuming the same time that every everybody has 1 minute 1 second 1 hour but the length will be different for different people so that is basically so it’s not repeating in the same way and if we are able to encode this into model and if
(22:40) model is able to understand this particular aspect then that would open up a whole new world of employing these AI models into real world so that’s basically the research area that we have where we are doing some very deep research and we have crossed some thresholds and we are trying to cross some other thresholds before we can come out with some kind of reliable Pap and a lot of people have come out in last one year and almost all of them have failed basically so we have learned our lesson from other failes saying that we
(23:07) shouldn’t be too fast and get into rat race of publishing papers which has now become a thing basically everybody wants to publish their half big research and we are just holding back and we said we will continue so that’s the research part of my company and there are some couple of other areas also where we are doing some research but that’s not mature enough to talk about yet I will be honest that I really enjoy your description about three time model and everything and I probably have understood 30 40% of everything that you
(23:39) said yeah I was trying if you understood 30% trust me you are more intelligent than I am because I Tred to compress not just one and a half years of work that we have done in that area but everything that I know about the temporality and everything from my previous work I compress that into that two minute three minute or I don’t know four minute explanation right so if you captur 25 30% of that that means you are really smart s fascinating for sure no it’s a fact it’s a very interesting area and yeah it has very
(24:16) profound impact on how AI is going to have an impact on all life so that’s my research area that that’s the part of the company your company that does devel M of the solution for other people and this research is for other people that part no the research is our own so basically we are generating because we knew that we will not be able to continue to do research without support from outside Financial so the machine learning and all AI solution you’re developing for other people but this research is for you exactly so we are
(24:51) funding our research from the revenue that we generating from from that so that’s what I meant that my company has to be profit from day one because if you are able to have profit and positive cash flow then that means that we can Finance research without relying on other people and also if we advance our research will not be losed into finding more resources and everything so that was the idea so from here let’s talk about so you building the company but you said you have build three other companies and prior to that you was in
(25:26) corporate so I I want to understand and I don’t know should we talk about the corporate world first but what I wanted to understand that there are many people including myself who are in the corporate world I spent like 24 years of my life there and corporate world give you a purpose so you they give you project they give you opportunity to work in some excellent opportunity that you probably will not able to do if you’re just doing freelancing work right the size of the project size of the mission and size of the V Vision that
(26:00) sometime these projects bring and then from there to building your own company it’s a completely different ball game absolutely and uh it require some kind of idea like where you can do hundreds of different type of thing which one you choose and then if you chose that then there are at least 10 other thing that you have to work on which is completely different than what you was excellent at in your corporate world so I wanted to touch upon what was that Journey what was the decision how did you come up with this idea that not corporate but
(26:47) building the company and then the journey for those three companies and here so should we start from what was the emotion what was you doing in the corporate world and at what time what point what emotion that help you start those companies yeah I’ll give you a quick rundown because both the career are inter so it’s not like I left my corporate life and then I had three startup in a successive Manner and then this is my fault it didn’t happen that way so they are interwoven so I was in finance before I started my career in a
(27:28) very small marketing job to tell you honestly and then switched to finance very quickly because I always wanted to get into Finance I always like numbers I always like data and I don’t know whether but there used to be a program like Foxpro I learn Fox Pro I learned Cobalt I learned Fortran I even tried my hands at Pascal in in those days but the funniest part is that I never had a formal education in computer science I took one diploma which was a long diploma two-year diploma with niit in India as a part on on a side while doing
(28:06) the job I was doing the job and studying computer science as a part of that but I never went to University to do computer science so that’s my background so my learning in computer science or programming or Tech world or anything that you say is entirely practical entirely driven by practical Solutions so when when I was in finance financial analysis Finance Pro probably consumes the highest amount of tech in the world anywhere from Trading to banking to everything there is St and you can’t just today’s Financial system cannot
(28:43) function without software space and when you was in finance you was not building software you using you was doing the analysis you was doing whatever right yeah I was on non-tech or business side sort of say in in software development field you have the business side and you have the development side I was on the business side I was a consumer of services basically so I used to interact with Department of the company and trying to get the solution when they would delay the solution or wouldn’t deliver the kind of solution that I’m
(29:14) looking for I started building my own solution fortunately I got bosses who were who appreciated this particular Talent OR skill I had H because they didn’t have that skill and none of the people around me had any skill or motivation even to get into that area so that kind of it was a chance factor I realized that oh my God I can’t compete with my colleague to get promotion uh because they have some other skill sets that I don’t for example right or they may have got part of the business where they are able to perform better and I’ve
(29:50) have got some constraints because of which I’m not been able to perform so I was always looking for a way to show that I have more value so that’s where this happened by chance and I said oh they don’t know programming but I know programming so what if I start structuring something and I started doing things and that kind of snowball into bigger and bigger things because then people started coming to me asking for oh we have this uh problem with this particular analysis department is not being able to support us can you help us
(30:22) and I would say yeah okay let me look at that and I would spend hours and hours going through Visual Basic code because it was the models were built on Excel and VB and everything going through the code and learning by reading the code literally and that’s how I I started developing Solutions those Solutions actually pass the uh stringent requirement that Finance industry has so that gave me confidence that yeah I can do something about it so I started studying more and more into that area things like value at risk for Financial
(30:52) Security so I was on the fix fixed income security side I wasn’t on the trading of let’s say stocks and all those things right I was on the fixed income so bonds government securities and stuff like that which requires a lot of valuation models and everything so I started building those models and from that I came to an idea as to what if I actually start my own company and start offering this as a solution so that was the Genesis of my first company so I started my own company I started building value at risk models for
(31:25) various funds some of the UK based compan compies became my client my biggest client was a fund called Franklin templon is one of the largest kind of a investment Fund in the world in India they are known as mutual funds so they were one of my biggest client unit Trust of India one of the largest Fund in India was my one of my clients so in those days so this company running while you was working at the job or you left the job so I started the company while I was working at the job okay and then we developed the first few models with a
(32:01) couple of people I hired basically and and I went to companies to make presentation by taking literally taking a SLI from my Jog and I made presentations I had some really weird looking business cards and everything with my name even not properly printed I would use some pseudo name so that nobody can find out that I was working for some company you was in India at that time yeah so I was traveling between Singapore and India in those dayses okay so that’s when this thing actually rolled out and and then I like
(32:35) looking back it wasn’t the best way but I didn’t have any support I didn’t know about funding and this and that and and yeah the most important part is that there was some some idea some desire and you acted upon it and that’s for me that’s the most important thing versus delaying it and overthinking it and not taking any action yes but I have my own quirks where I sometimes went beyond just taking a simple action and making things happen so I sometimes literally like overshot my target right and running a business
(33:12) is like Landing a plane you not only want to land the plane at the right point on the runway you also want to stop the plane before Runway runs out because otherwise you overshoot the runway and that’s an accident so running business is like that and I didn’t realize that so I over stretched myself I over stretched myself I started getting clients when I didn’t have the capacity to deliver sometimes I even over promised clients they said oh we want this kind of way to calculate this and I yeah we’ll do it and then come
(33:46) back and say oh holy how am I going to deliver this so those things did happen but then learned the lesson from that and one of the biggest in that particular setup or one of the biggest boost or support or learning that I got was when I got the first investment in that startup the investment came from sunart systems in the UK they invested in company and then came the shock of twin tower attack in the US and that basically changed everything because there was a major crash following that in financial markets most of the
(34:22) companies stopped making investments into new projects and everything so companies like mine which was a small company becomes the first victim of that basically so that’s where we ran into some problems at that time I had a a team of 70 people working with me and I was responsible for their salary and everything so that still gives me Jitters when I think about those days because that was one of the most traumatic experience I ever had when I was responsible for livelihood of 70 families and I myself was
(34:58) a young family and it was too much to carry on my shoulders and if I were to look back I would say having mentors having people around you to support you is one of the most critical thing that scaffolding was missing for me and that was really heavy so at the end what happened is that as it happens I I started running out of money so all the money that I had saved and earned basically in my company and everything I started spending that money on paying salaries and expenses and everything operating expenses while looking for new
(35:33) clients and it was difficult market and I almost was at the breaking point when suard system said oh we can give you some money if you want but we would like the majority stake and I was very emotional young and I said no either I have majority stake or I have no stake in the company so I will sell you the entire company but the only condition is you cannot fire anyone for 5 years if they want to leave the company that’s fine but you cannot fire in so I negotiated a deal where I got much less money than I would have if I
(36:07) had said oh here you go take the company but instead I went into kind of a this kind of a mode because I considered those 70 people as literally my family and it was very emotional way I could have done it much better even securing those 70 people act could have done much so that was a very traumatic experience which basically pushed me into saying I need to take a break from my life and I started looking for opportunity to do MBA because I realized that I need to know how to do business I need to learn how to manage a business
(36:42) so that’s where I decided to go for NBA I didn’t want to go to the US because when I did my research I found that most of the MBA programs in US mostly were for junior people who had two to three years of experience there were two programs so pretty long programs very expensive from Indian Standard so I started looking for programs in Europe which were for shorter duration I applied to multiple business school I got into three business schools and I started then negotiating with those Business Schools saying I’m coming from
(37:15) India I don’t have money but you can see my profile you can see my gat score and everything it’s Top Notch you would not find my kind of a profile so I can add a lot of value to your school if you to bring me in and once I do MBA and I go out and I do a job I’ll be a great alumni KN for your school and it actually worked in France HC is one of the topmost school HC School of Management in Paris and they actually offered me 80% scholarship so 80% of my fees were paid by the school and 20% the fees came from the French
(37:54) government so I not only got Finance for my MBA program but I also got money for my expenses to live in France so at the end of MBA I was actually net positive in my cash balance so that was the situation and after that I decided I don’t go back to finance straightway so I joined management consulting so I joined a consulting firm in Paris it was a French consulting firm and I started Consulting in international business strategies basically sourcing stratey and once you do that you have to deal with lots of data like there’s huge
(38:31) amount of data that is thrown at you to understand how the strategy needs to be developed in terms of sourcing so that’s where my software background came back to me and said oh this is so much data and my I I realized that the other consultants in the company were using traditional Excel files and everything and I said why not to use some kind of database to analyze this data so I started trying with different things and everything and and eventually uh started using python to do the analysis and that was eye opener and then I got introduced
(39:05) to R so started learning R did a lot of analysis in R and anybody who wants to learn R I would say don’t go for it yeah so I I did learn R here are we talking at this point yes when you was learning are what year are we talking so this one I would say we are talking about 2006 2007 I got introduced to r as a part of my when I was doing MBA basically so for I had a really good friend he was Russian he was PhD in mathematics and he also came down for doing MBA and during discussion we got introduced to R and we said oh this is
(39:46) interesting he said so I thought and I had heard about R before but I never gathered enough courage to actually dive into it and that’s where I got introduced to it and uh then I started doing some basic things but never really picked it up and 2006 2007 I realized that wow this is so powerful that I can take any data and analyze in any angle slice data dice data and make sense of and create insights which traditionally people will not be able to make so from that basically the interest came into what if we can do or build something
(40:22) that can do some kind of predictive analysis and that’s where machine learning started uh creeping into my life slowly and steadily and in 2007 2008 I was part of a project where I got introduced to Amazon so I did a project with Amazon a very big project it was on a business side not on AWS side I’m talking about Amazon where from where you buy your stuff so that part of amaz and we started studying their entire network in Europe and how to convert it into kind of a revenue stream and that’s where I realized the value of Big Data
(41:05) because I saw Amazon from inside how they were leveraging big data I realized why they have this AWS service what is AWS I started learning all all those things and that kind of opened up the whole new area for me so with couple of my friends from my consulting firm we decided that what we can do is e-commerce is an emerging area so we can actually set up a platform where we will help French Brands which are very well regarded all over the world because of their designs and everything we can bring them a platform where they can go
(41:43) to International markets that was the start of my second startup and in this particular startup I actually did it the right way in a way is I continued with my job and I also built my son but while doing that I also got another exposure I got a project with Airbus and Airbus in those days was looking for engineering resources engineering design resources and they actually invited the consulting firm I was working for to evaluate if they can Outsource Engineering Services to India when you’re saying engineering you’re not
(42:19) talking about Computer Engineering you’re talking about the mechanical engineering right okay so it’s engineering designing services so let’s say for example if you have an aircraft so you have more than 30,000 different parts every part requires different kind of design different kind of things so let’s say for example if you’re talking about designing the wings you not only have to design the wings you have to carry out material or metal fatigue analysis and all those big models that you have to employ and those are
(42:52) Autocare type things exactly exactly so all those services so so India already had a kind of a good ecosystem in automobile sector because a lot of Japanese and US Farms are already Outsourcing Engineering Services to India many other equipment manufacturers also outsourced those services but Aerospace was not almost non-existent in India no Aerospace industry was interested in sourcing Engineering Services from India for various reasons so I came to India with the with really high level management I brought the
(43:26) entire high level manage management of Airbus in those days Airbus was a group of companies it was known as Eads European Aerospace and defense organization so I brought people from which was manufacturing helicopters Airbus which was manufacturing air Airbus aircrafts that we travel in they were military part of that particular Consortium so I brought all of them to India we met many companies we met like aim premgi and Naran morti and everyone in India including defense minister and then finally I could convince them that
(43:58) India is the right place to start Engineering Services Center because they were also looking at Latin European Latin American companies and also Chinese companies to outour and some Eastern European companies but I could convince them to bring that to India and then Airbus opened what is known as engineering center of excellence in Bangalore so that was a start of Aerospace designing services in India that was a moment when I felt really proud of myself of what I’ve done and that was a very interesting day I even
(44:29) appeared on one of the so nascom in those days was extremely powerful and they had annual conference so I even appeared on their Engineering Services panel in the nascom conference that took place in in in Delhi in those day yeah Delhi in those days yeah so it was a phenomenal uh experience that I had and I work with Europe I got a chance to work with organizations like this at cxo level companies like Louis Von risho which owns all the major watch brands like Kier and and everything so I had a very wide exposure but one common theme across all
(45:12) these things was that I was dealing with data and data always excited so when we started this company this startup on the side with my friends colleagues so to say I also started building a team because this was supposed to be a platform and being very interested in software I was given the opportunity to set up the team and everything so I set up a team in India to develop this platform so that was basically my first fora from Europe into software that’s the first phase so that was your second company though right so this was my second
(45:48) company okay and then did you do another company there yes so then after that I did before before we go there I’m just amazed by the type of people that you have worked with type of project that you have worked with and type of initiative that you have led yeah I go to I to an extent yes the hard work paid off and I also in a way I would say yeah probably good karma favored me who knows right so I happen to be at the right place at the right time with the right kind of people with the right kind of attitude and hopefully
(46:28) right kind of skills and it just worked well there is other aspect too right uh these all the situation was asking you to step up and if you was not able to step up then all these would not have happened right every situation whether it is uh the big project whether this is the MBA and and this management consultancy all these probably you probably have experienced 10 20 30 50 I don’t know how many a situation where you was thinking that whether or not you will be able to deliver how did you step up in those
(47:10) occasions it’s not easy I know it was very tough it was very tough and for multiple reasons so if you go to Paris nowadays it’s much more hospitable environment somebody who doesn’t speak French okay in early 2000 hardly anybody spoke English most of people spoke French obviously most not all of them spoke French because this is a French but I’m a vegetarian French love their meat they don’t even understand what is vegetarian so I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language I didn’t know
(47:48) the culture I couldn’t eat the food that they were in and I was trying to make my lives while trying to perform on the job and making sure that they they see value in whatever I do I probably lost five years of my life probably with the stress that I went through if I given a chance if I would do the same or if I would advise anyone to do the same maybe not I wouldn’t do that seriously I’m here and I’m at this stage I have to say luck had something to do with it yes I did my hard work and everything but luck had something to do
(48:27) with otherwise this entire Journey looks like this cannot happen kind of thing so every step of the way it’s something like that so I didn’t learn French for almost five years and I lived in France so I got by not speaking literally a word of French then I was thrown into a project by a friendly boss like he was friendly and but he was my boss and he said oh we are taking up this project with the naval systems in France so the company called dcns which manufactures submarines nuclear submarines and nuclear plants and stuff like that and
(49:08) he said oh we have got this fantastic project where we are going to help them in understanding the landscape in Brazil and Chile and Poland and India and I know you have experience in Aerospace and defense in India but you will get much more exposure because you’ll be working with Poland and Brazil and Chile and all the all those places do you would you like to join the project and obviously this is so exciting so I was like yes of course but I said that’s a French company and I know that it’s a
(49:37) French government company but I don’t speak a word of French and he said no we have spoken to the client and they are fine with it and we go for the first meeting the kickoff meeting and I was supposed to lead a small team I was manager of the team and I was part of the global organization that was basically going there and we are outside the meeting room and my boss tells me that by the way they said that they will not accept English and I was entering the meeting room knowing that I have to speak in French
(50:09) while knowing that I can’t speak French and I was a team leader I was the manager of the team so I cannot even ask anyone else to say oh no you go and present because the client will say if you’re manager then why are you putting subordinate to present so I got up and I started speaking in French I don’t know how I still can’t figure out and this is real story I’m not making this out I was so changed that day in the evening I met my friends who were French obviously and they whenever we met we always spoke in
(50:46) English because they knew I couldn’t speak French and that evening I had so much courage that I the moment I met them I started speaking in French and they were actually shock and they said you are really playing with us you’re doing something it’s not possible that you can speak French but what I realized is that by spending those seven years in France and listening to French all the time and I did make something very different I when I was at home I always listen to French radio I like music so I
(51:18) would always put on radio I never like TV so I never watch TV so I always put radio on and the radio will always be in French so there was speaking French and my brain was actually picking up French so that’s how it happened so all these little anecdotes tells you that oh my God this journey had so many chance factors that even one of those chance Factor had not worked in my favor the life would have taken a completely different turn and I think I’m not unique in that I think it it happens with everyone it’s a question of
(51:50) whether you realize that or not and in my case probably I’ve realized the points that I probably could see but there may be some other points also that I not realized yet maybe I’ll discover five years down the line and say oh hang on a minute that thing that happened that day while talking to V on podcasts was that trigger that changed something yeah it’s profound things that happen in our life and we sometimes don’t realize and when you look back you realize that wow that point in that time and space
(52:21) was the point where your life actually changed I’m glad that I asked that question and life gives opportunities and occasions where you have to step up and sometime we do sometime we couldn’t but that’s how we keep growing yes that’s how we keep growing how about we take like next five minute to talk about that the other company and then how bringing it all together okay yeah certainly when I started my so during my second startup the Genesis for the third company was already there basically uh
(53:00) what I realize is that I can leverage all these data that exists there and much more than that to do something that is very unique is to build an e-commerce brand of my own so my wife always wanted to do something in that area so my wife and I actually started together and ecomerce company and we decided to launch a range of Leisure wear apperals which are made from 100% organic cotton and are died in natural colors natural dieses basically not using any kind of chemicals because we are very health conscious I grow my own
(53:42) food in my my garden and all those things so we w we were really unhappy with all the chemicals that go into clothing and everything and I’ll tell you how I know because I did one of the Consulting project one of the biggest thing that has helped my life is all these Consulting projects where on one fine day I was working in Aerospace on another fine day I was flying to Geneva to meet risho to talk about watches and high value watches and everything and on the other day I was uh traveling to China on behalf of Louis Vuitton to find
(54:16) out if there is a way they we can Source some of the things that go into those bags that cost $30,000 and I don’t know why they cost $30,000 but yeah I know but so I got that exposure which was very varied had no connection with each other but it was a lateral knowledge that I was gaining so from that we decided okay I have this experience I have these things and the one thing that we didn’t talk about was as a part of my work I got introduced to psychic learn in 2010 2011 so psychic learn psychic learn is
(54:54) the machine learning framework that you use for traditional models and it just happened that one of the parties I got introduced to somebody who was working in indria and indria is the institute in France that basically wrote psychic learn so like it’s going to the source kind of thing and that person introduced me to some other people and then I did a course on the side to learn Psy learn properly so that is one of the biggest let’s say computer science training that I got so far and I learned psychic learn
(55:24) really well and that helped me a lot in building lot of things actually so that was my real initiation into machine learning basically so that happened 14 years ago from today and from then that I never look back because everything that I built afterwards had some of the other component whether it was Inventory management I I am I built my own model to forecast inventory based on how many orders we are receiving and what is the weather because we were selling ails jackets and stuff like that so it was linked to the weather so I even
(55:57) Incorporated those factors into inventory forecasting so all those models that I built for my own business actually kept on boosting my knowledge every day because I had to do things which would affect my own pocket I wasn’t doing it for a client so that’s how basically happened and then as a part of the so that e-commerce company went very well and we took an exit from that company because we got a very good offer and we are mostly selling in the US so it was uh us-based uh approach so imagine that I was sourcing garments
(56:29) from India from kuu in India I was sitting in UK and I was selling in the US so I had to figure out all the things that happens around that Logistics this that client returns how to sell to customers how to run Google ads all those things basically and everywhere every small part I was writing different types of models that would do that for me because I always likeed automation so that’s basically was my start as far as machine learning is concerned and then it was part of everything that I did so every project
(57:03) that I did I always made sure that I get into the data side of it of the project and then I work on the solutions bage and I got introduced to dialog flow Google dialog flow for customer service because then you can automate customer service Pipeline and I was like wow you can have a chatbot that you don’t have to monitor and can talk to customers like you would do also although it was very crap compared to what we have today but in those days it was like eye open kind of and then I got introduced to models like B and gpd2
(57:37) and then everything so basically I got initiated into NLP so to say so that is a precursor of our llms today natural language processing and that’s where I spotted the opportunity and I told myself that the day a computer talks back to me and it becomes different ult for me to decipher whether it’s a computer talking or human talking I would start my own e so that was the day that that was my decision so I had a small poster computer talks back to you you make that computer and on 30th of November 2022 birth of chat
(58:17) gbd I was already part of open’s different model testing and everything before because of gb2 and diali and all those things and and I get this email from openi saying we are launching this I immediately go and sign up and I didn’t sleep for three days all the schedule and everything was out of the window I didn’t go to my job I didn’t sleep for three days and I was constantly chatting with chat GPD trying different things everything from programming to maths to reasoning to everything that I did before with other
(58:55) models I did everything with chat GB and I realized that this is it we have crossed what is known as Event Horizon we are entering a new world and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity so on 5th of December I sent my resignation and that was the birth of my current company you was working in this management consultancy just two years ago ago yeah I did not connect the dot on that I thought you’ve been for some time no no so this current company was born literally on 6th of December okay 2022 2022 I got my first client I remember on
(59:40) 14th of Jan on Mak sankranti day I got a confirmation email from the company that I already knew I knew the Senior Management and everything is a Swiss company in appliances and everything and I had submitted a proposal to them saying this is what we can do for you this this is the new model I had done some demonstrations and everything already by that time really crappy python based chat catb that we had built but we showed them by strapping the data from their website and their catalog and everything and showed them everything I
(1:00:11) already had one person working with me at that time because I had somebody in my mind for a long time that person was based in Serbia we were already in touch I had used his Services before so I said I’m starting my company do you want to join and he said oh yeah hell let’s go and let’s build something and that was the start and uh on 14th I got my first client and then there was no looking back because everybody wanted to get into AI every company wanted to implement something in their in their
(1:00:41) Pipeline and we found wonderful opportunities and that was the start the biggest thing that I saw in your story is your ability to be able to think High large I don’t know how to to say that and then act on it and up to whatever equasion it is many people including me have this mindset of some kind of believe some kind of limit to the to whatever ceiling it is right but seems like you don’t have that ceiling so I want to ask is it the upbringing is it some kind of affirmation it is some kind of whatever system that you have
(1:01:22) used how did you build yourself like that where you was able to do such humongous thing or your ability to think big and actually work on those and take actions one of the thing was PL no PL so I am I lost my dad when I was very young and I don’t have any brother so I had nobody to guide me what to do so nobody to tell me that if you get bullied in school what do you do uh nobody could tell me what is the best way to talk to people to make friends everything that you learned from your elder brother or your father or
(1:02:09) your uncle that support system did not exist I grew up without that support system and that means that I faced a lot of things where there was nobody there to show me the way out whether it is on Cricket field getting harassed by couple of people who didn’t like because I was playing well or I was not playing well right or in a football team getting pushed around by people because they knew that there’s no elder brother protecting me so I had to find my way out so whenever I was in adverse situation the only thing was I knew that
(1:02:51) there’s no plan B there’s nobody is coming there to save me nobody is coming there to help me out and it worked both ways like it it also push pushes a lot it puts a lot of stress and pushes you beyond your limits but it also breaks you way I’m not saying it was the best situation but the only thing that I can see is that I had no plan B ever I had nobody to fall back on so I knew that if I fall back I’d fall and if I fall I’m the one who will get hurt so I was always afraid of that that kept pushing me to just keep
(1:03:27) going so that’s what I do just keep going it was powerful what you just said it was powerful so thank you for sharing that I know we are close to finish so I’m going to ask you this question is there anything that I have not asked you but you want to share oh you have asked you asked almost everything I think we have covered wide range okay is there any question for me question for you yeah I have many questions for you probably going to do another part but it has to be it has to be the reverse podcast actually I have
(1:04:06) to be the interviewer and you have to answer the questions right because I’m always intrigued by people like you who take actions I’ve seen you already like in last one week itself you have taken some action I don’t know whether you want to talk about that or not but you took the action and created accountability Channel and that’s what I like that’s what I love about people like people taking actions the only question I have for you is how do you drive yourself every day because I’m here to learn as
(1:04:39) well I’m learning every day from every person that I meet and talk to and one question that I always ask everyone whether I’m getting interviewed or I’m interviewing someone or talking to someone is what drives you what is that one thing that you can put about everything else that you would say this is what drives me I think what drives me is doing something above and beyond that I could think of and there was a time like 3 4 years ago where I was almost in the direction that what’s my purpose and I didn’t find my purpose but
(1:05:17) I was able to find this signal that whatever giving you energy and whatever is draining your energy just listen to that and that will drive you that will guide you to a purpose and prior to that I think my drive was there was a time when I was really low during my engineering and after my engineering and once I got into software and people started respecting me for what I was doing I think that made me more like a workolic to produce more of it like I was was after that attention and after that recognization and at some point in
(1:06:01) last four five years I realized that I have to change all that direction and now I’m mostly driven by the exploration driven by the idea and implementing those ideas and one last thing is whenever there is a situation where if we are in office or even if I’m hiking and I’m like 80% there or 70% there and last leg or if you’re working on a project where if there is a sense that we don’t know whether or not we will reach the end Finish Line somehow that gives me so much energy where people start making
(1:06:45) like excuses that oh this may have happened it was not my fault I put all of myself saying let’s do it if if doesn’t work it’s my fault right I take the entire ownership for whatever so I think those type of things are what drives me like that extreme ownership or that extreme sense of reaching to the finish line and Last Mile yeah excellent excellent wow okay taking ownership that’s great that’s what makes you who you are right that’s what makes you reach where you are so really great
(1:07:26) I’m glad I asked you that question yeah thank you something new that I learned about I know we are over time and you have to go so thank you so much for coming to this podcast and sharing your journey with me we have to come back I I think there are more meat in this story that we can talk about so thank you so much thank you thank you thank you you know and it was a pleasure so thank you so much really appreciate all right bye for now