Rajesh Jain

I had posted yesterday about my Times of India CxO Connect podcast. I decided to use CharGPT to create a transcript so its easier to consume. I have not reviewed the text so there could be typos/errors.

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From IndiaWorld to AI

On entrepreneurship, the Proficorn philosophy, the future of marketing, affordable software, AI, and building institutions of prosperity.

IN CONVERSATION WITH  PRASAD SANYAL

A cleaned, topic-organised transcript of a CXO Connect interview. The complete main interview is reproduced below with speaker identification and light readability edits.

A CENTRAL IDEA

“I love solving big problems.”

EDITORIAL NOTE

The supplied text appears to be automatically generated speech-to-text. Hesitations, repeated words, stage cues and incidental backchannels have been reduced; questions and answers remain in their original sequence. The opening teaser (a montage of excerpts repeated in the interview) is omitted to avoid duplication. Selected quotes have been lightly punctuated for readability; [brackets] identify editorial insertions. Speaker attribution is inferred from the dialogue. Names, numbers, historical claims and corporate transactions have not been independently fact-checked.

SELECTED PASSAGES

12 quotes worth keeping

These are excerpts from Rajesh Jain’s responses, curated for their ideas and clarity. Punctuation and minor disfluencies are lightly edited; a bracketed word signals an insertion.

“When I started, I was just trying to solve a problem. In fact, more importantly, I was trying to get one successful venture.” 03 · INDIAWORLD	“Because I’ve never had investors in my life, half my time is free to spend with customers.” 05 · LISTENING TO CUSTOMERS
“You have got to change people’s minds before politicians’ minds change.” 16 · INSTITUTIONS OF PROSPERITY	“Funded by customers rather than investors.” 08 · PROFICORN PHILOSOPHY
“Never lose customers. Never pay twice for acquiring the same customer. And never pay fixed.” 09 · THREE NEVERS	“What China did with manufacturing, with products, I think India can do with software products.” 10 · SOFTWARE AFFORDABILITY
“Automation shifts to autonomous marketing, but with human in the loop.” 11 · AUTONOMOUS MARKETING	“Our work does not stop with the shipping the software. We work in tandem.” 11 · OUTCOME OWNERSHIP
“Even as agents read your inbox, eventually a lot of decisions we make [are] based on emotion.” 12 · WHAT REMAINS HUMAN	“Go out there, find the big problems, go solve them.” 14 · THE BIG-PROBLEM MINDSET
“In every red ocean, there is a blue ocean. You have to find that.” 18 · FINDING THE GAP	“You’re creating a vision for the future, for tomorrow’s world … What you have to do is to make your vision come true.” 19 · COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE

 

TOPIC GUIDE

20 themes in conversation

The discussion is presented chronologically and split at natural changes of topic. Each section below follows the original interview sequence.

01   The return to India   /   An early decision to come home—and an entrepreneurial ambition.

02   Learning from the non-starters   /   Software products, difficult first years and the discipline of bootstrapping.

03   IndiaWorld: solving a real need   /   The diaspora, content partnerships, early traction and the power of organic growth.

04   The $115 million exit—and the next morning   /   Satyam Infoway, the dot-com boom and the advice that prompted a new beginning.

05   Building Netcore by listening   /   From Linux mail servers to marketing technology and customer-led product design.

06   Technology, data and the 2014 election   /   Project 275, political campaigning and the role of entrepreneurial execution.

07   From poverty to prosperity   /   Free a Billion, Nayi Disha, Dhan Vapasi and an argument for economic freedom.

08   The Proficorn philosophy   /   Why customer-funded profitability and sustainable unit economics matter.

09   The reacquisition tax and the three nevers   /   Retention, repeat purchases and outcome-aligned marketing economics.

10   India’s affordable-software opportunity   /   A software-products foundry for the AI era—and a new global price point.

11   Netcore.ai and autonomous marketing   /   AI-assisted execution, micro-segmentation and sharing in the upside.

12   AI: jobs, discovery and what remains human   /   Exponential change, employment transitions, emotion, judgment and values.

13   Marketing’s next frontier: retention   /   Reducing wasted reacquisition spend and growing lifetime relationships.

14   Success means taking on big problems   /   A reframing of ambition after decades of entrepreneurship.

15   Netcore’s IPO and the long game   /   Why the listing is deferred—and the aspiration to build an enduring company.

16   A legacy of institutions of prosperity   /   Faculty entrepreneurship, education, think tanks and a culture of prosperity.

17   Rapid fire: decisions, talent and execution   /   Early mornings, gut instinct, blue oceans and entrepreneurial hiring.

18   Rapid fire: role models, horizons and profits   /   Warren Buffett, Anthropic, long-term planning and ProfitPoly.

19   Rapid fire: technology, books and life   /   AI tools, enduring advice, Shivaji, admired companies, travel and reading.

20   Advice to the next generation   /   Learn to build, read deeply and experience entrepreneurship firsthand.

PART 01  /  THE CONVERSATION

The return to India

An early decision to come home—and an entrepreneurial ambition.

PRASAD  Hello and welcome to CXO Connect. I’m Prasad Sanyal. At today, we have with us Rajesh Jain, the founder of Netcore and one of India’s earliest internet entrepreneurs. He was a case study back in 2000 for me when I started journalism school. In 1995, when most Indians had perhaps barely heard of the internet, he launched IndiaWorld, which he sold 4 years later for nearly 500 crores. In 1999, it was a lot of money. It still is. And today, I’m very pleased to have with me Rajesh. Rajesh, welcome to CXO Connect.

RAJESH  Thank you very much, Prasad, for having me here.

PRASAD  Let me sort of get started with your early career. You started engineering in IIT Bombay and went off to Columbia and began your career in 9X in the US. What prompted you to return to India in 1992 when most Indians were actually going to the US?

RAJESH  My father. When I went to the US, he told me I have to do exactly what he had done in the ’60s. Finish master’s in 9 months, work 2 years, and then come back. So, when I finished my 2 years at 9X, he said, “It’s time to come back.” And that decision so was made for me in a way before I left India shores. I was also very clear that I want to come back as an entrepreneur. So, in a way, both those decisions were connected. But I was very clear I didn’t I didn’t want to stay back in the US at all.

PRASAD  But, this is 1992 when entrepreneurship in India is difficult. Kind of not unheard of. We are just starting to open up as an economy. What were your some of your earliest challenges? And there must have been days when you thought you made a capital

PART 02  /  THE CONVERSATION

Learning from the non-starters

Software products, difficult first years and the discipline of bootstrapping.

RAJESH  100%. So, when I came back there were two of us, me and a friend. We wanted to actually build software products out of India. So, that is the year of software services. We had many number of companies working out of India already had started at that time. Software products from India was an unheard of thing in that sense. For the first two and a half years, I tried various things, multimedia databases, image processing solutions.

PRASAD  Some of your early non-starters.

RAJESH  Complete non-starters.

PRASAD  I wouldn’t call them failures because look what it has got you to build now, but non-starters in

RAJESH  You’re right, Prasad. I sometimes reminisce saying that if any of those ventures had worked I would not have done IndiaWorld later on. So, in a way, you’re absolutely right. It’s good that they failed. But, when you’re actually going through the failure, you don’t think like that. You wonder what’s happening. Everything around you is collapsing in that sense.

PRASAD  But, how did some of those experiences shape your understanding business and large and doing your entrepreneur in helping you in your entrepreneurial journey?

RAJESH  So, if you were to go back to that ’95 ’98 period there was of course no venture capital available. There was no mentoring available. I mean, there was very few sort of first generation entrepreneurs really at that time. And India had just sort of opened up in ’91. In fact, in ’95 when I started, we didn’t even have internet access commercially available in India. So, that period really there was only one way to build a company. You had maybe some startup capital. So, my friend and I had Sanjay Jain and I we had put our savings from the US here. And you had to make the venture profitable. There was no other way. So, you had to keep your costs under control.

You have to make sure you got your revenues going very quickly and be profitable.

PART 03  /  THE CONVERSATION

IndiaWorld: solving a real need

The diaspora, content partnerships, early traction and the power of organic growth.

“When I started, I was just trying to solve a problem. In fact, more importantly, I was trying to get one successful venture.”

PRASAD  And then in ’95 when most Indians had barely heard of the internet, you launched IndiaWorld. What made you think of that idea? What made you recognize that gap area of potential?

RAJESH  So, there were two things. First was my own experience in the US. When I wanted to return back to India, it was almost impossible to find any information on India. Newspapers were there in libraries and universities to take 10 12 days to come. there was the only sort of two publications which were there were printed print publications, India Abroad, a weekly newspaper in the US, and India Today. Which again would take would be a few days late. So, it was very difficult to get any sort of news about India at that time. And then ’94, ’95, the internet had started picking up. It started becoming more accessible to people at least in the US at that time.

And then I realized that if I combined these two, there are there were NRIs, non-resident Indians, for whom they wanted to have a connect with India. So, the internet could be a great connector, a bridge, to connect Indians to useful content. So, I combined in a way two ideas. There was a problem statement and the solution coming from the

PRASAD  the delivery mechanism.

RAJESH  delivery mechanism. Absolutely right.

PRASAD  IndiaWorld eventually grows into this ecosystem of platforms. And I just want to get this right. Samachar, Khel, Khoj, Bawarchi. So, basically

RAJESH  Yes.

PRASAD  all the things that we at Times Internet do, you were doing many moons ago, right? And looking back, did you anticipate just how dramatically this consumption would evolve? I mean, you of course built on that layer of information on in various fields, specifically targeting the non-resident Indians, right? Or the South Asian community, expatriate community. But did you ever envisage that this will completely blow up like this when IndiaWorld started doing as well as that?

RAJESH  Not at all. In fact, when I started I was just trying to solve a problem. In fact, more importantly, I was trying to get one successful venture.

RAJESH  I’d failed for the last 2 and 1/2 3 years and I said I’m going to make something work in life.

PRASAD  So, you wanted a successful venture.

RAJESH  I wanted a successful venture. I was not looking for anything big.

PRASAD  For scale or

RAJESH  For scale, nothing. But, what happened was that once I started it and I just sent out a sort of press release and I put on some of the news groups at that time. I started getting a lot of access. People started coming in. Many people at that time we were trying to charge money also, $20 a year. They were starting to pay. Also at that time and then I said maybe we hit a chord. That this is genuinely a need in people’s lives that we are fulfilling, a problem that we are solving. And I think the two things which worked very well for us when I started off were R.K. Laxman cartoons which we had wow and India Today digital edition available probably have

PRASAD  The R.K. Laxman’s cartoons you had must have had some Times of India.

RAJESH  Times of India.

PRASAD  Right. So, all right.

RAJESH  Absolutely. So, I in fact I keep saying now that there were two I sent out about 100 letters. Okay, no emails at that time. 100 letters out to media people and entities at that time. I only got two replies back. One was from Mr. Laxman and the other one was from Mr. Puri, Arun Puri of India Today. And I went and met both of them and think about it. Here’s Mr. Laxman who’s an icon. And I’m going into the Times of India office in Bombay and I get a chance to meet with him. Which was phenomenal, I think.

I mean He said, “Show me how it will look.” So, I then took a computer lap laptop to his office and I showed him Sir, this is how your cartoons will now be accessible to Indians globally.

PRASAD  Absolutely. So, Indians worldwide

RAJESH  This is how the website looks. This is how it will look.

PRASAD  All

RAJESH  so, I think in times sometimes you

PRASAD  He agreed to it.

RAJESH  He agreed to it. He didn’t charge me anything for it.

PRASAD  Wow.

RAJESH  Absolutely. I mean, this is the remark

PRASAD  You had content free of cost.

RAJESH  I had content free of cost.

PART 04  /  THE CONVERSATION

The $115 million exit—and the next morning

Satyam Infoway, the dot-com boom and the advice that prompted a new beginning.

PRASAD  Brilliant. And so, then in 1999, you sold IndiaWorld to Satyam Infoway for a fantastic sum of 500 crores, right? I mean, it’s still a lot of money, but I keep saying it must have been such a huge high at that point in time. Talk us through how that deal came about. And we were discussing right before recording this that if you’d been about 3 months late, then you would have lost two zeros from that deal.

RAJESH  If you could have got now, if you flat fast forward to ’99,

RAJESH  a lot of portals in India started launching. There was money coming into India. And I realized that if we had to grow, we could not just be remain bootstrapped. We were profitable, otherwise we would have been dead by then. So, we had, of course, not only the properties that you mentioned, we also used to do websites for lots of Indian companies. So, we had cash flows coming in. Ads had started coming in, also.

RAJESH  But to grow, I realized I needed money.

RAJESH  And for that, we were trying to raise capital. I talked with multiple VCs which had started which were there in India at that time. But somehow, none of those deals materialized. But late ’99, Satyam Infoway had become the first Indian company to list on Nasdaq.

PRASAD  Yes.

RAJESH  So, they were an internet service provider. They had some amount of content. But they were connecting Indians in India. I mean, VSNL was the other one which was there at that time. And Sat Sify Satyam Infoway at that time, they wanted a AOL style play having connectivity America Online, which was the big one at that time. Connectivity plus content.

RAJESH  So, after their IPO on Nasdaq, but the stock price was going up in anticipation that they would use the money to do a deal. They were looking for a acqui- for an acquisition. And we were the leading website from India. There was us and Rediff. They were the only two primary entities. And I guess we were

PRASAD  By this time, what kind of numbers are you doing on the website if you can

RAJESH  So, we had about I think about 13 million page views. See, Samachar had become the de facto homepage for Indians outside of India. It was news aggregated news links aggregated on a single page.

PRASAD  I remember.

RAJESH  khel.com would do live cricket coverage. Khoj was the Indian search engine. So, all these properties had a had a very good sort of brand branding for themselves. Recall. And therefore, we never had to spend any money on advertising. See, this is a remarkable thing. Everyone else was raising money to be able to spend on advertising and we were just getting it through word of mouth.

PRASAD  And you were bootstrapped completely.

RAJESH  Completely bootstrapped. So, our valuation probably went up maybe 30x in about 3 months at that time. Because those were the heady days of the internet. in fact, after Sify paid us $115 million 500 crores at that time, their stock price in the days for on the day the deal was announced, their stock price went up some $600 million. The market valuing what they had just bought. And I think the stock price went up from probably a billion dollars to almost seven or eight billion dollars in

PRASAD  So, the market valued it at 4x of what they paid.

RAJESH  And 4x that paid in the first few hours of the deal being announced.

PRASAD  And then and 3 months later the three or four months later the dot com bubble starts bursting. Yeah. So, then the crash starts. You were very timely in selling.

RAJESH  Yes.

PRASAD  In India.

RAJESH  Hemendra Bhai Kothari, I mean, DSP Merrill Lynch had done my deal. They were advisors to me. He said to me at that time that more important than knowing when to enter a business is knowing when to exit.

PRASAD  So, you exit at the right time.

RAJESH  Yes.

PRASAD  And then you start building businesses again when you’ve already achieved that level of financial independence.

RAJESH  Yeah. So, the day after the deal happens, I’m there on the front pages of all the newspapers.

PRASAD  Sure.

RAJESH  my wife Bhavna, I mean, we have been working together for the last 30 years plus, so she’s an equal partner in all that I’ve done. She looks at me and says, “If you think about the money you have in the bank and the deal that you have done, you will never do anything again in life. What’s done is over.” And then the morning after, she says, “You are an entrepreneur. You like solving problems. Forget about the past. Figure out new problems to solve.” And that’s the next journey that starts.

PART 05  /  THE CONVERSATION

Building Netcore by listening

From Linux mail servers to marketing technology and customer-led product design.

“Because I’ve never had investors in my life, half my time is free to spend with customers.”

PRASAD  So, then Netcore began as a business of providing affordable email infrastructure, and it eventually grows into this global marketing technology company. how did that transformation happen? Walk us through some of the challenges of scaling this business, this avatar of yours.

RAJESH  I had so, the early version of Netcore, even before I’d sold IndiaWorld. But, when you would go to talk to investors, they would get confused. “Oh, so you have this portals business, which is a consumer-facing business, and you have this small Linux open-source sort of mail servers business. We don’t understand this.” So, I decided to separate out

PRASAD  so that mail servers business was in its in its very formative state there with you.

RAJESH  Yes. And when I sold, because no one wanted that business, so I just spun that off into a separate entity, rather than mix it up with what we had. In a way, that was good, because

PRASAD  You had the entity.

RAJESH  I had the entity, fair. So, after the deal got hap- deal got done, I had something to also go back to. For I spent a couple of years with Sify working with them, Satyam Infoway. Now, how Netcore has evolved through the years besides this, we never had a grand strategy. But, what we’ve always done through these now nearly 30 years is listen to customers for problems that they had. So, if I go back to the first problem, it is that companies would put their websites. They would then start getting emails from the banks and the stock broking companies. They would start getting emails, but they had no way to easily reply to all the mails which were coming in.

So, they wanted an internal routing system. Microsoft Exchange was there, but it was very expensive. So, what we started was with a was with an open-source Linux-based solution for mails for everyone in the in the organization. A few years later, SMS started coming up. in India, SMS was growing. Enterprises wanted to send SMS. Companies also started wanting to send emails to their customers. So, in 2007 and 8, we started building out the SMS enterprise SMS and the enterprise email businesses.

RAJESH  for marketing. And then 2014-15 was the year when marketing automation started getting discussed. And all these campaigns having done manually, now how do we automate it?

RAJESH  So, every few years, we’ve sort of evolved. And now of course it’s the era of agentic and agents coming up. So, that’s how sort of I think it My learning really through the years has been talk to customers, listen and see the problems that they have, and work to solve those. More than just coming out sitting and trying to come up with a grand business plan, spend time with customers. Because I’ve never had investors in my life, half my time is free to spend with customers.

PRASAD  So, what others spend in raising money, you spend in listening to your customers.

RAJESH  listening to customers.

PRASAD  I love that. That’s absolutely You still do Yes, you still do that?

RAJESH  Absolutely.

PRASAD  You still go out and interact with the customer?

RAJESH  with customers. Absolutely. I think when we create products, you know, we are sort of a tech company. Many tech companies, we are creating products. But when you go and put them in front of customers, a listening to their problems, looking at how they are using it, and the language that they use to describe the problems that they are facing, that’s where the ideas come from, rather than just sitting and making a show

PRASAD  Sure. What’s the difference? Like could you give us an example of the language that they use? I’m very curious that you made that semantic distinction.

RAJESH  See, what we are building are solutions. Okay, so I’m building an email campaign solution. That’s how we would look at it. The customer is basically saying, “Look, I have all of these customers out there globally. I want to interact with them. I want to engage with them. I want to send them messages on a regular basis. I want to be able to then segment them, customize the message. I don’t want to send out the same message to every person because otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Now, technically we would call it differently. We would call it journeys and segmentation and broadcast. But the way they describe it, they are looking for a problem to solve rather than a solution to buy.

We are selling a solution, but they’ve got this job to be done. Problem to solve. And the more I think we talk their language, the more successful entrepreneurs basically become.

PART 06  /  THE CONVERSATION

Technology, data and the 2014 election

Project 275, political campaigning and the role of entrepreneurial execution.

PRASAD  Since you mentioned 2014 13 14 is when you were sort of pivoting your Netcore business. It’s also a fascinating time because like I said when we started this interview, I first heard of you as a case study when I was in journalism school. The next time this name pops up and I connect the dots is around the 2014 general elections. Slightly before that. Maybe 2009-10 11. That phase when you were key to running Friends of the BJP Facebook page and also Niti Central.

How did your experience as a technology entrepreneur, and by that time you were a rather successful entrepreneur at that, how does that experience lead you to sort of venture into political campaigning and this walk us through the why and why not of that?

RAJESH  So, I have no background in politics. 2000 and 8-9, we were still a very small company at that time. We were growing, but we were small. At the same time, when I when you read the papers at that time you read a lot of challenges in India also, economic challenges etc. As a family we had always voted BJP, Janata Party before that, my family. So I when I started thinking about what can be done for India. I mean that’s what it always is there in some of us, you know, what more can we do? beyond just the money part and

PRASAD  For you it was a social venture.

RAJESH  It was a social venture. Someone introduced me to the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi at that time. And but then I realized that if I just try to work as a volunteer or something, we are just sort of two hands, two legs and a brain. I said I’ve got to do something different. So I when I when I met him in 2009-10, I said, “Look, here is a plan for the BJP to get a majority on its own.” Now, if you look at that period since ’89 after ’89 there was no majority government.

PRASAD  Correct.

RAJESH  All coalition governments.

PRASAD  governments.

RAJESH  And I analyzed data. I looked at the election results of the of many elections, all available on the Election Commission site. And I said what India really had was a summation of state elections. So every state voted sort of independently. And then when I looked at BJP’s numbers

PRASAD  ’84 is the last time you have a majority government and then 2014.

RAJESH  I never looked at it that way but you’re right.

PRASAD  Yeah. So you had a summation of state elections, sir.

RAJESH  Now, I said and then when I looked at BJP’s own numbers

RAJESH  we and this is all publicly available data I’m analyzing. Out of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, BJP had won 299 seats at least once between their formation and 1980 and 2009. And the mathematical sort of an analytics told me simple that if

PRASAD  They probably can do 300.

RAJESH  They had a 90% repeat. Which means it cannot be a summation of state elections. It’s got to be a wave election. Which is what then I went and told Modi at that time that look, you got to look at the elections very differently. I mean, I’m sure he had his own ideas, of course. It’s not that he listened necessarily to me. But what I did at that time was said that look, I will work to help you from the outside. I will invest my own money. I will build an entrepreneurial venture with a 100 % team, a media, data, analytics volunteering doing what I do best. From the outside to help in the next elections. And that’s how it began. It started

PRASAD  became a four-five year journey.

RAJESH  Yeah, it became a yeah, four-year journey till 2014.

PRASAD  2014.

RAJESH  I in fact wrote a public blog post in 2011 Project 275 for 2014 laying out these thoughts on how the BJP could win a majority on its own and not having not have to rely on coalition governments. Everyone laughed at that time because that never happened like you said.

PRASAD  In most people’s living memory it hadn’t happened.

RAJESH  for a generation, yeah.

PRASAD  Correct.

RAJESH  But as it turned out, that’s exactly what happened in 2014.

PART 07  /  THE CONVERSATION

From poverty to prosperity

Free a Billion, Nayi Disha, Dhan Vapasi and an argument for economic freedom.

PRASAD  It did happen. After 2014, you’ve not been that active in this sphere. but you’ve subsequently pursued some economic reform thoughts through Free a Billion or Nayi Disha. What prompted the shift and if you could share your thoughts on some of these economic ideas that you’ve had for reform in India?

RAJESH  So, what I realized is that in India we think poverty rather than prosperity. So, this is at that time. I am I don’t have an economics background. I sort of taught myself economics after 2014 through attending events, conferences, reading. But the simple question at that time was why is India poor? And why are some countries like Singapore, US, even South Korea at that time rich? So, the sort of core thesis around that is that poverty is the default state of nature. Countries or leaders have to do something specific.

A set of specific policies which are called in a way the classical liberal policies, you know, freedom of markets, freedom of individuals, property rights and so on, which help pull people out from poverty and create prosperity, create wealth. sort of the Adam Smith ideas at that time. So, then what I did was I tried to I said what I can do is try to educate people in India on these new ideas. So, that’s what I called first Free a Billion and then Nayi Disha closer to the 20 19 elections. I was saying that can people basically vote for parties and candidates which effectively promise something like this.

Of course, that was a utopian idea at that time. but the key things in Nayi Disha, one of the big ideas that we had come up with was called Dhan Vapasi. The belief that there’s a lot of wealth inside the country, but it’s under government control. So, you look at sort of defense land. You look at minerals. You look at

PRASAD  Look at the railways has been doing something like that where they’ve been monetizing the land they hold.

RAJESH  But if you think about it, look Lutyens’ Delhi, for example, or you look at Navy Nagar.

PRASAD  The government is trying to acquire the Delhi Gymkhana.

RAJESH  So, but the key thought process was that there is enough wealth in the country that if these assets were brought into commercial utilization, every Indian family could get 1 lakh rupees every year for a long time.

PRASAD  Do you believe that?

RAJESH  Yes. Because see, today we do handouts. You know, whatever we call it, revdi, etc., the welfare schemes which are there. They are all sort of targeted, etc. There’s leakages happen at some points of time. And my belief was that Dhan Vapasi, and it was coined a phrase which was coined by a friend of mine, Atanu Dey, at that time. This is actually the wealth of the people. Return it to them and let them decide what is it that they want to spend on. So, whether it’s education for some or a two-wheeler for someone, it’s their wealth. It’s their right.

PRASAD  See in the experience of a lot of countries, for example, in the American experience, wealth concentration has led to the growth of that country eventually and it has led to prosperity though slightly disparate prosperity across the states, across the economic sphere. If you look at the European experience, especially countries like even France or Germany, which in the European sense aren’t prosperous. Or if you look at the Scandinavian countries, which are extremely prosperous in all social economic indicators. They’re effectively countries where you have a where you have supremely high taxation rates, but a cradle-to-grave sort of protection system from the state, where you’re looked after by the state for every any and everything that you use.

So, Europe is perhaps an example where you have many millionaires, but much fewer billionaires, while America is you have billionaires who then sort of employ people and it leads to prosperity. Have you ever thought of how the Indian experience could work even if you were to free up some of this wealth?

RAJESH  So, if you think about the problem here, it’s not what the rich people have. It’s how well off are the poor people. Yes, I mean in a country

PRASAD  I mean, improving the baseline.

RAJESH  Correct. Now, America, Europe can do whatever they want because they have created enormous wealth. I mean, the poorest people the poorest in America will have a much better life than the richest in some of the less developed countries on the on the middle class in the like. So, the key thing in this is what has made countries rich. That’s the key question to ask. And a lot of this, it’s really economic freedom which drives wealth creation. The challenge in India historically, and that’s where the 1991 reforms are so important, is that we had put constraints on entrepreneurs in India, on industries in India. You needed permission, license raj, and all of that. So, I think you are always going to have inequality of wealth.

I mean, you’ll have a the richest people on one level, but what is the life of the

PRASAD  poorest person

RAJESH  poorest person. That is, I think, what is the most important question. What is the quality of life that one can deliver there? And that’s where, I think, countries like India, which are where on the per capita income stage we not level, we are not, of course, we are still low relatively low.

PRASAD  Sure.

RAJESH  That’s where the efforts need to be made. You are going to have See, entrepreneurs finally create wealth. It’s not government that creates wealth. So, you have to encourage entrepreneurship. You have to get your smaller companies to grow bigger. and in India, there are still some of these constraints which are still there. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last 25 years. But, I think if you just unshackle entrepreneurs, I think you will find that this is going to be the best route to prosperity for India going forward.

PART 08  /  THE CONVERSATION

The Proficorn philosophy

Why customer-funded profitability and sustainable unit economics matter.

“Funded by customers rather than investors.”

PRASAD  You’ve popularized the idea of building a proficorn, a profitable, sustainable company that does not depend heavily on venture capital. Unicorn term has now exploded to unicorns and sunicorns and decacorns and decacorns and I like the idea of a proficorn. I have I have not seen many proficorns,

PRASAD  but from your experience, and you’re somebody who’s done pro- multiple profitable ventures. when we even when we were discussing before this interview, you said, you know, one of the reasons to be in business is to make money. And businesses are sustainable if they are making money. what would your advice be to entrepreneurs about balancing growth and profitability in this day and age and some lessons from your businesses that you’ve done.

RAJESH  So, both my successful ventures and I’ve had a lot of failures non-starters as you put it, Prasad. IndiaWorld and Netcore and both of these ventures have not raised external capital. Now, the key thing in about a Proficorn is it’s of course bootstrapped but it also scaled and of course it’s profitable. See, for a business to grow where is the money going to come from? The money can either come from investors or it can come from profits and for profits it basically means customers are paying you.

PRASAD  Right. That’s the key That’s the You’re funded by customers.

RAJESH  Funded by customers rather than investors. Investors, yeah. Now, what I find the mistake that I think many entrepreneurs make is that when they begin they do not think about the route or a path to profitability. They think a lot about fundraising but they don’t think about how will their venture be sustainable going forward? And as a result it becomes a treadmill of raising one round after another round. Some ventures some in some industries you have to raise some capital. You’re building a factory, you will need capital. Sure. But I keep telling entrepreneurs whom I meet that you raise money but after a certain point of time you have to make your venture sustainable.

After 10 years if your venture is not making money, there is something seriously and fundamentally wrong with the business model. So, what is your path to profitability? What are the unit economics of what you’re selling? And many times there’s not enough

PRASAD  The math is not adding up.

RAJESH  The math doesn’t add up. Now, even when I did IndiaWorld

RAJESH  I did not at that time know about where how where the advertising would pick up or not pick up. All This was early days of the internet. But we kept our costs low, number Second is that we built a product which did not need money. Which got its own traffic through word of mouth. Money was the easy thing to do. I basically ran just two ads in my entire 5 years. Growing organic traffic. Organic. See, you can pay money to bring a person to a website once. But the next time the person is going to come again is if they like the product. I focused on the product. Even today when I see businesses especially D2C ventures, they raise a lot of money.

You can easily spend money on ad-tech platforms to basically get people to buy once, give discounts, people will buy. Are they buying the second time? Are they coming on their own to buy the third time? Unless you cut that what I call the root tax or the ad waste, you are not going to build a sustainable profitable venture.

PART 09  /  THE CONVERSATION

The reacquisition tax and the three nevers

Retention, repeat purchases and outcome-aligned marketing economics.

“Never lose customers. Never pay twice for acquiring the same customer. And never pay fixed.”

PRASAD  And we were discussing about 70% of the ad spends are done to reacquire the same consumer. Same consumer.

RAJESH  Absolutely. So, what’s happening is that brands are acquiring a customer once and that’s a legitimate acquisition. Okay, first time. But then they’re not building those deep relationships or the product experience, customer experience, whatever is there is not good enough.

RAJESH  Where they have to keep giving discounts, keep advertising to bring that same person back again. You have to build relationships. In D2C businesses, 60 to 65% customers are one and what they call one and done. They buy once, they never come again to buy. There’s something wrong with that fundamental model. You have to build lifetime relationships. I call it the three nevers. Never lose customers.

RAJESH  Never pay twice for acquiring the same customer. And never pay fixed. Never pay fixed means the vendors that you work with give them a make them have skin in the game in your success rather than buying at fixed prices for software, etc. The three nevers are very critical.

PRASAD  You follow those in your businesses all the time?

RAJESH  So, third one is now what we are starting to follow. the first two are more for the brand.

PRASAD  More for the brand.

RAJESH  What we are selling now are agentic marketing solutions. We are saying we will have skin in the game. We will take up ownership on outcomes, not just sell you messages.

PRASAD  Not just sell you a software as a service, but also

RAJESH  accountability. Outcomes.

PRASAD  Outcomes.

RAJESH  Absolutely.

PART 10  /  THE CONVERSATION

India’s affordable-software opportunity

A software-products foundry for the AI era—and a new global price point.

“What China did with manufacturing, with products, I think India can do with software products.”

PRASAD  I was just thinking that India has produced several successful technology companies over the years. but it’s the Silicon Valley that continues to dominate the global technology industry. What will it take for India to build the next generation of globally dominant technology businesses?

RAJESH  It’s a great question, Prasad. I think we have a amazing opportunity now in the era of AI. What China did with manufacturing, with products, I think India can do with software products. See, in the all software written in the last 20 years is now going to get rewritten by agents, by AI coding agents, etc. So, there’s a great opportunity to start with a clean slate. Now, if we can basically say that, “Look, we’ll think of a software foundry in India, a products foundry, which delivers software at 90% off of prevailing prices.”

RAJESH  China did pretty much that in manufacturing. Maybe the numbers won’t be won’t be 90, but the significant reduction in cost is what they did. With the with the China manufacturing model. We have to think of a similar model which is not built on services, but built on software products. Software products are not going to go away in the world. And just because AI is available, companies are not going to create their own software products. But we can actually build for the new era a foundry which drives the affordability revolution in software. So, in a way, if you think about it, China products from China were one affordability. IT services did that for services. We brought down maybe a 60-70% reduction in bespoke software development.

Let’s now look at software products. The world always will need software products. We have AI, but don’t have to worry about foundational models. Apply AI. understand problems in every industry, and can we have AI write it? But, understand what is to be written, and then sell it.

PRASAD  Human understand it, AI write it.

RAJESH  Human Absolutely right. And we have to also build the go-to-market globally. That’s where the

PRASAD  I mean, where would you sell the product?

RAJESH  Sell the products. But, this is an opportunity for India because the legacy companies cannot change their models easily. If you’re selling software for $100 per seat, for example, as a lot of software SaaS companies, software as a service companies do, you can’t automatically shift it to a $10, $20 a seat model. But, a new company

PRASAD  can start with a $20

RAJESH  can start with a $20.

PRASAD  A lot of the softwares that even we buy are $20 in that space. I think that is that seems to be the new sweet spot, $20.

RAJESH  Yeah, I think but in if you really want to scale in the world of AI, you need at probably $2 a month.

PRASAD  Yeah, probably in the Indian experience, you could even do a $1 a month

RAJESH  $1, exactly. So, the you still have the top maybe 400, 500 million people will pay can afford to pay the $20. But, for the rest of the world, it’s what C.K. Prahalad has always said, the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. But, India’s expertise in software and understanding, especially now with the GCCs here in India, I think we have a phenomenal opportunity for product creation.

PRASAD  it’s it’s also some something of what the Jio experience has been with the affordable internet, affordable broadband.

RAJESH  Absolutely.

PRASAD  So, if you can make it really affordable, then you can expand your footprint to the level that it automatically becomes profitable.

RAJESH  So, India should lead in the affordable software revolution going forward.

PART 11  /  THE CONVERSATION

Netcore.ai and autonomous marketing

AI-assisted execution, micro-segmentation and sharing in the upside.

“Automation shifts to autonomous marketing, but with human in the loop.”

PRASAD  Interestingly, I saw that Netcore Cloud has just become netcore.ai. Yeah. So, there’s major focus on, let’s say, autonomous marketing agents and using AI in a very big way in all your products. I won’t ask you what prompted this shift because we’re all going through that shift, right? The prompt is natural here. How do you see AI changing the way your business is engaging with your consumers.

RAJESH  So, I think at three levels. First is how we create the products. Okay, now I think that there’s an acceleration in and in shipping products faster, shipping new features faster. So, that’s number one. So, that’s an internal thing. The second is the fact that when we are building products we can now So, the way while there is the human in the loop, the human drives the outcomes, takes up responsibility for the goals. There are AI agents now which can do the grunt work, which can do the execution. So, if I just take marketing for example, let’s say I take a typical example of a brand which has say 10 million customers.

The marketing teams would basically bunch those 10 million into maybe 10 segments because for every segment you want to create content, analyze what happened, run campaigns every day. very difficult to basically do that for too many segments. But now with AI agents, you can create micro cohorts, micro segments of 500 of the of a thousand. You can create more personalized content for each one of these thousands of segments on a daily basis. You can run the analytics and insights on a daily basis. So, that’s the second change which is happening. With agents, what you said autonomous marketing. So, automation shifts to autonomous marketing but with human in the loop.

But the third and more important shift is what we just spoke about earlier, which is that now companies like Netcore have to take up ownership on outcomes. We have to have skin in the game, not just sell based on per seat or per agent interaction, but say that look, we will help you grow your revenue by I say 20%, 30%. Almost like a hedge fund model. And then you give us a percentage of the upside. So, we are aligned. Our work does not stop with the shipping the software. We work in tandem.

PRASAD  You’re working as a wealth manager for your consumers, right?

RAJESH  Yes, wealth creation. You’re creating the wealth and saying that I will do it for a percentage. So, I call it alpha, beta, carry. Beta is the baseline returns. Alpha is what we have to deliver. Carry, like a hedge fund, that’s what we take.

PRASAD  is what you take.

PART 12  /  THE CONVERSATION

AI: jobs, discovery and what remains human

Exponential change, employment transitions, emotion, judgment and values.

“Even as agents read your inbox, eventually a lot of decisions we make [are] based on emotion.”

RAJESH  Absolutely.

PRASAD  I see this considerable excitement around AI and all the agentic tools that people can build and there’s of course efficiency, but there is great concern about reliability, accountability, and I think more importantly at every AI forum recently that I’ve been to there’s been a discussion about the future of jobs. Yes. How do you think on those lines? Not just for your organization, but at large.

RAJESH  So, I think first, I think what we have to recognize is this is probably the biggest revolution we are living through after the industrial revolution. It’s probably bigger than electricity, bigger than even the internet. It’s fundamentally going to change every individual, every business, every country, every profession. This is a given. We are already seeing this in the four years since the launch of ChatGPT. So, whether we like it or not, change is coming. What is different this time is the exponential nature of the change. So, if I just give an analogy, we’ve had five generations of telecom, 5G, in about 30 odd years. We are already at five or six in Claude and OpenAI in three to four years or five years.

So, this is very fast change. We humans are not used to we are used to linear change, incremental change.

PRASAD  Exponential change

RAJESH  is very different.

PRASAD  for those you human beings.

RAJESH  Yeah, absolutely. But, at the same time, I think we are all very resilient people. We have survived through thousands of years of

PRASAD  So, what sort of change?

RAJESH  war, wherever. Everything is there. So, the jobs which were there are going to change. New jobs are going to get created. Okay, there are obviously going to be challenges in the interim. When we were children, banks were adopting computers in India and there was a huge pushback from the PSU banks in the early ’90s. Half of those banks were on strikes and up in arms to say computerization was will cause us to lose jobs, etc. But I think banking jobs have gone up. Yes, the banks are doing better. Transactions have become huge. So this is this is going to happen. It’s just that some of the jobs will actually disappear. Like for example, right now new ones will new ones will get created.

Like right now, many firms now are not hiring fresh people or interns or the fresh people because AI can do a much better job doing grunt work.

PRASAD  Grunt work, absolutely.

RAJESH  So the change for the person who’s just graduated, say as a lawyer, now there’s a lot of tension. When am I going to get a job? Because there’s an AI agent doing the work of that person. So there will always be this sort of dichotomy as it were. Now it’s not easy for being the person who’s just graduated. That’s a challenge. But the good news I think is that what we’re going to see is the pace of discovery, the pace of new innovations which is going to happen and therefore prosperity I think it’s going to go up dramatically. But the transition periods are always the tough ones.

PRASAD  This is the rate of basically you’re saying that AI will aid the rate of wealth creation.

RAJESH  Yes. See, if you just think about it in the last four years in the US, this close to 10 trillion dollars of new wealth creation. You look at SpaceX, Anthropic, Nvidia. Look at the market caps of these companies. Apple, Microsoft, Google. All of these companies that this is all compare their valuations or the market caps in 2022 just before ChatGPT was announced, compare them to now. And OpenAI did not was barely there. Anthropic is new. Nvidia’s grown and how. Nvidia has grown to 5 trillion plus in valuation. So, it’s So, this is all new wealth creation. Now, the question is how can there be broader participation? Okay. but there’ll be more innovations happening. The jobs are going to change, absolutely.

So, another interesting question to ask also for people is what will not change in the world of AI?

PRASAD  Or what AI won’t change?

RAJESH  Yeah, you still need a haircut. You’ll need to have a yeah, actually what AI will not change. We were talking about attention.

PRASAD  Attention.

RAJESH  So, even as agents read your inbox, eventually a lot of decisions we make based on emotion. And we’ll feel the emotions, not that AI agent. So, as a brand if I want my message to be read, I’ve got to have emotion in there. A comic strip

PRASAD  Emotionally emotionally connecting with your consumers won’t change.

RAJESH  I still like even in AI way, I love reopening the Times of India editorial page every day because there’s that 15 seconds of joy with the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in the middle of the paper page.

PRASAD  And I’m sure human beings will still want to interact with other human beings.

RAJESH  Absolutely. That

PRASAD  I mean, how far could you could you keep interacting with an agentic tool, right?

RAJESH  Right. And human judgment will still be very important. How much ever you have

PRASAD  And analyzing values then become important.

RAJESH  Correct. Values because all things held equal, a lot of our decisions are based on the values we hold.

PRASAD  Correct. For example, during this conversation, one of the most interesting things you said was that before I went to the U Best, that decision was made for me.

RAJESH  Made for me.

PRASAD  That I need to complete my master’s, work for 2 years, and then come back to India. And start an entrepreneurial journey. So, I think that kind of a thing an AI can’t do. That is a decision that an AI can’t take for you.

RAJESH  See, I think every generation and here in a way one generation is a few months, and especially in AI, you know, you look at how fast things are changing. But I think it’s also very exciting times. See, in all this discussion about Yeah, there are challenges. Even I’m sure when cars were first put out on the road you know, were brake failures and whatever else used to happen at that time before regulations started coming in.

PRASAD  In fact, you’d be surprised that the steering wheel came into the cars in the 1920s. The cars used to be a bunch of levers and pedals.

RAJESH  I didn’t know that.

PRASAD  There were no steering wheels. The kind of construction of the wheel that you see now with a clutch pedal and whatever came into existence maybe 20 25 years after the car.

RAJESH  So, if you look at banking, you look at pharma how testing happens etc. How drugs get onto the market. There have been regulations which have come. There will be oversight which will come in. But we should not lose sight of the benefits which are there. The pace of new discovery. I mean look at what’s happening in maths for example. Unsolved problems for eternity effectively are now getting solved. Now if you’re a mathematician there’s a bit of a challenge out there. But then you’ll also have to find out new challenges, new mountains to conquer.

PART 13  /  THE CONVERSATION

Marketing’s next frontier: retention

Reducing wasted reacquisition spend and growing lifetime relationships.

PRASAD  Let me sort of bring you back to your leadership journey and what’s next, right? You build companies. you’ve experienced non-starters. You’ve participated in a political discourse shaping in a certain way. You’ve written extensively about entrepreneurship. You’ve written extensively about consumer retention, personalization and the cost of acquiring customers. What continues to motivate you after more than three decades?

RAJESH  I love solving big problems. See, as an entrepreneur it’s all about the big problems and today I believe that the biggest challenge in the world is what we briefly discussed which was brands spending $500 billion a year on reacquiring existing customers. That money that number is just for India.

PRASAD  No, globally you’re saying 500

RAJESH  So, out of the $700 being spent on advertising digital advertising digital advertising, 70% in my estimate is being spent for reacquiring reacquiring existing customers. See, if you take any business which has been in if you’re around for next past for 3 years or more, and you’re still spending a lot of marketing, you’re typically just acquiring your existing customers. It’s not going after any net new customers.

PRASAD  So, if you’re not making money, I heard some someone speak at the recent forum which said you’re basically a business idea with a marketing budget.

RAJESH  Correct. And marketing is the easiest one to spend on anyway because you’re you’re saying I’m going to get new customers. They will give you money at some point of time, but the problem is you’ve got a leaky bucket. Now, I think for the first time my AI in can now help solve this problem in marketing. AI can help personalize messages, can help with data collection, can help with better recommendations at a scale which humans could not do earlier. So, in a in marketing, when I look at the distinction between acquisition and retention, 90% budgets were spent on acquisition. 70 of the 90 was reacquiring existing customers. Retention was just 10.

I think it’s going to be the golden age now of marketing where money will get spent on existing customers and growing their profitability and

PRASAD  average revenue from them.

RAJESH  average revenue from them. And that will help create better and more profitable businesses because the ad waste which used to go out earlier in reacquisition now will flow to the bottom line of the brands of the businesses. So, this is I think a huge opportunity, a huge shift in marketing which I think can get very exciting for businesses because earlier the game was I have to raise a lot of money because I got to outspend my competitor. Now, it will be can I build profitability by building deeper and better relationships with my customers and maximize their lifetime value.

PRASAD  Through this discussion, I’ve realized you clearly don’t like the idea of raising money for marketing spends.

RAJESH  Oh, I think it’s the worst form of capital race.

PART 14  /  THE CONVERSATION

Success means taking on big problems

A reframing of ambition after decades of entrepreneurship.

“Go out there, find the big problems, go solve them.”

PRASAD  Has your definition of success evolved because we used when we started you spoke about how when doing IndiaWorld you wanted just one success to notch up, you know, because you’d had a string of non-starters. Has your definition of success evolved now?

RAJESH  I think I have a little better definition now. It is that see, as an entrepreneur

RAJESH  I think what we all have to do is solve big problems. I read somewhere that you know, every venture takes about 3 years whether it’s you could to get a good sense of whether you’re going to succeed or not. And if you’re going to spend 3 years on an idea, you might as well look at very big problems because the probability of success or failure doesn’t change much. 99.9%

PRASAD  of the problem.

RAJESH  Take big problems. I’ve tried probably 50, 60 things in my life. And when I look at it, probably there are two and a half things which have worked well. IndiaWorld, Netcore and that political work that I did with

PRASAD  Niti Central and Friends of India.

RAJESH  JP at that time. I think a lot of unsolved problems which are there. And I think once you’re an entrepreneur, okay, I think sitting back and I was relaxing is not really what I like. It’s go out there find the big problems, go solve them. Not every venture will succeed. But there are learnings on the way. I think and you that’s how one learns.

PRASAD  And go out and talk to customers. That’s really the best way to get find problems to solve.

PART 15  /  THE CONVERSATION

Netcore’s IPO and the long game

Why the listing is deferred—and the aspiration to build an enduring company.

PRASAD  What are your ambitions now for yourself and for Netcore? And specifically for Netcore is a public listing still part of that plan?

RAJESH  Yes. So, we are now close to we are actually almost a thousand crores, hundred million plus in revenue. we’ve been profitable. we are 25% owned by employees. we have no external capital. I obviously want to take the company to IPO. the reason it’s been a little bit delayed is because of the changes that AI is bringing in number one. And see, listing also means that I need forward visibility for the next 2 years on my revenues and profitability when we go to the market. And I think that is a little bit hard to do at this stage. because there’s so many changes being brought about and very dynamic.

PRASAD  Evolving.

RAJESH  Absolutely. But I also think it’ll open up a lot of new opportunities. Consolidation has already started happening in the MarTech space. Just a few days ago, Salesforce bought Braze. A big one, big deal there. It’s in that sense, I think build I mean, I’m very inspired by Jim Collins and his idea of built to last companies, enduring great companies. I think we’ve survived nearly 30 years and I think our best years are ahead of us now. That’s how I look at it.

PART 16  /  THE CONVERSATION

A legacy of institutions of prosperity

Faculty entrepreneurship, education, think tanks and a culture of prosperity.

“You have got to change people’s minds before politicians’ minds change.”

PRASAD  Have you ever thought of what you want your legacy to be? Out of 60 things, two and a half things work, but those two and a half things work brilliantly.

RAJESH  Every few years I should do this again. Every few years earlier I used to sit and write my obituary. I read it somewhere. and then you sort of live life backwards. So, at some point of time, what I want to do

PRASAD  How long since you’ve last written one?

RAJESH  About 5 years.

PRASAD  Okay.

RAJESH  I think it’s time. but what I’d love to do is I want to also give back. so, while Netcore is remains the primary passion, a friend of mine and I have started at IIT Bombay to help with faculty entrepreneurship.

PRASAD  Wow.

RAJESH  and that’s doing very well. It’s a small start, but that’s something which can be scaled up to hundreds of institutions across the country. create what I call institutions of prosperity in India. For example, the US has an amazing area

PRASAD  I love the term. We have normally centers of excellence and institutions of national importance, but not nothing to do with prosperity.

RAJESH  So, you need think tanks, for example. The US has many of these. See, what happens

PRASAD  We have some.

RAJESH  We have a few, but they’re not as ambitious and big as the US ones. Because you also need ideas. See, for in society, if politicians have to a government has to action things, the ideas have to come from academia, from think tanks, make their way to people through the political class, because they’re the best communicators. But if we can create a richer, happier country, a freer country in that sense of economic freedom. and for that, I think you need to get the messages out to people, because finally politicians respond to what the

PRASAD  Popular demands.

RAJESH  Popular demand. That’s how they are voting

PRASAD  That’s what happens in a democracy, as rightly showed, perhaps.

RAJESH  So, you have got to change people’s minds before politicians’ minds change. And I think that’s where I’d love to close

PRASAD  Culture of prosperity.

RAJESH  Great way to put it, culture of prosperity. Absolutely right.

PRASAD  Culture of prosperity, not accept that poverty is a steady state.

RAJESH  Yeah. And not wait for handouts.

PRASAD  Not wait for somebody else to change

RAJESH  Somebody else. Your destiny is in your hands. And I think this India is happening now. I think in the last 20, 25 years, we’ve seen the shift happen. But this needs to accelerate. Okay. I think there’s a lot to be done on, for example, education in India. because that’s your next generation.

PRASAD  And are those some of the sectors that interest you?

RAJESH  at some point of time, I will want to look at this, these sectors, not right now. but I keep thinking, I mean, these are some of the ideas which I used to think about a lot when I did Nayi Disha. and I’ll get back to it at some point of time. but right now, of course, Netcore is priority number one. make it an institution which will survive, an enduring great company. and I think we need we need that mindset in India on more entrepreneurs, so we are not just sort of building to sell at some point of time. Of course, I’ve sold a company, so that’s also good, but build to last.

I think if we can do that, and then philanthropy in the in a institution-building sense. See, when you look at the US, you know, someone built the great colleges. And this was not government. It was private endowments which built this. I mean, India, I mean, we need a thousand IITs of the quality of that in every vertical, not just engineering. There are another 20 disciplines emerging now. I mean, we have already entrepreneurs already doing that. Look at space. look at robotics. We have some great entrepreneurship happening out of India. But, for every one entrepreneur out there are 10 who probably don’t get adequate opportunities because of not good education. Can that change? I mean, we are a country of 1.3, 1.5 billion people.

I think we should be the most innovative company country in the world. What is the foundations that we need to create out here? In energy, in almost every area. AI is going to transform every aspect of life, and we need to be at the forefront. The next 10, 20 years, I think are some can be some of the best years of India. Leveraging on this AI infrastructure

PRASAD  AI in every domain

RAJESH  Yes.

PRASAD  for wealth creation and prosperity across the country. That’s Very well put.

PART 17  /  THE CONVERSATION

Rapid fire: decisions, talent and execution

Early mornings, gut instinct, blue oceans and entrepreneurial hiring.

PRASAD  That’s your absolute lot of mission. We’re going to sort of wrap this up with what I you know, because of popular television, it’s become a rapid-fire round. But, we’ll give you binaries, and you be as rapid as you want to, and as explanatory as you want to, right? So, that’s your prerogative. Early riser or night owl, when are you most productive?

RAJESH  Early riser. My alarm goes off at 4:24 a.m.

PRASAD  What is your first So, what is your routine in the morning?

RAJESH  So, basically, the 5:00 to 6:00 is the time I like to think.

PRASAD  All right.

RAJESH  So, the darkness around

PRASAD  That’s your Brahmamuhurta.

RAJESH  Yeah, in a way, absolutely. It’s See, there are a lot of things which happened the previous day, for example. You have to connect the dots together. That’s where the best ideas flow. So, that’s for me the most precious time.

PRASAD  Gut instinct or data, what do you do more when you’re making a tough decision.

RAJESH  Look at data, but eventually you have to make a gut call. As an entrepreneur, you have to make decisions.

PRASAD  your gut.

RAJESH  You have to go with your gut.

PRASAD  First-mover advantage or flawless execution, what matters most?

RAJESH  So, you have to start early. You cannot be very late. So, it’s a sort of blend of both. The way I put it this way is be a first mover to find the blue ocean and then execute brilliantly. But, find the blue ocean. The blue ocean in the red ocean. Well, every area is competitive. But, why if you’re in a blue ocean, you don’t have to worry about competition?

PRASAD  Entrepreneur or investor, which would you rather be?

RAJESH  Entrepreneur. I hate investing.

PRASAD  Product or distribution, which is more important for a startup?

RAJESH  Distribution after a good product, because you have to finally do GTM. But, you have to The product has to solve problems. Many times we build products because we like them. and

PRASAD  But, product is the base, distribution is the answer.

RAJESH  Absolutely. You’re right.

PRASAD  Specialists or generalists, who would you rather hire?

RAJESH  Generalists.

PRASAD  Why?

RAJESH  I think if you’re a generalist, you have the ability to pick up new things very fast, especially in today’s world.

RAJESH  I mean, with all the content out there, with all the AI out there, with all the ability So, I would say it’s the curiosity to learn. Because, I mean, you look at When I

PRASAD  Generalists are more flexible is what I

RAJESH  And you look at my career. I’m an electrical engineer. Okay, I’ve done media. I’ve done politics. Okay, I’m doing marketing now in companies which I’ve sort of never learned, but I think I have better marketing ideas than most marketers out there.

PRASAD  Experience or attitude, when hiring, what matters most?

RAJESH  I would say attitude.

PRASAD  So, when you’re building a team, you’re looking for the right attitude. Right attitude.

RAJESH  And I’ll just specify. I like people with an entrepreneurial attitude. They who are willing to think differently, who are not willing to take what is out there as a given. Okay, because and the positive attitude I think can make up for a lot. It’s a positive attitude I think can even go one step further, that passion which has to show up because when you’re building an early business, you don’t have a product, you don’t have enough capital. What you have as an entrepreneur is your passion to sell a dream.

PART 18  /  THE CONVERSATION

Rapid fire: role models, horizons and profits

Warren Buffett, Anthropic, long-term planning and ProfitPoly.

“In every red ocean, there is a blue ocean. You have to find that.”

PRASAD  Is there one entrepreneur you admire most?

RAJESH  Warren Buffett. I mean, an entrepreneur as in a he’s an investor in that sense, but I mean at that level everyone is an entrepreneur with a with an innovative business model. He’s there. From an author perspective, I look at his Jim Collins. Every book of his is phenomenal, including the latest one, What to Make of a Life. it makes you think very differently. but there are lots of good ones out there.

PRASAD  If there was one company that you thought you wished you’d founded, what would that be?

RAJESH  Cloud.

PRASAD  Anthropic.

RAJESH  Anthropic.

RAJESH  But you know I mean, impossible out of India. We just don’t have the talent. I wouldn’t have been able to do it out of here.

PRASAD  One business cliché that you cannot stand.

RAJESH  Red ocean. And what I tell people is that in every red ocean, there is a blue ocean. You have to find that. So, red ocean is basically competition. Competition exists everywhere. But every competitive space, you can find

PRASAD  There are gaps.

RAJESH  There are gaps. That’s what you have to find.

PRASAD  One management practice that you would abolish, and I ask you this because you’ve spoken about getting professional management on board, how important that is. One practice of professional managers that you would want to do away with.

RAJESH  Quarterly plans.

PRASAD  You think they don’t work?

RAJESH  You need them, but I think what happens is you need a longer horizon. See, especially if you’re not listed as if you’re listed, then you have to have quarterly targets and all of this. But you also need a second track which thinks longer.

PRASAD  What is what, a 3-year horizon?

RAJESH  Yeah, 1 2 3 years horizon. In fact, McKinsey has this three horizons thing, and I think many times we just get too caught up in the

PRASAD  quarterly

RAJESH  weekly reviews and the monthly quarter monthly reviews and the quarterly reviews, that sometimes we become sort of risk averse in making decisions with a longer payoff.

PRASAD  One of the most overrated business metrics, which one do you think it would be?

RAJESH  Top line. For me, the only number which matters is profitability. Or I would say multiple on what today we have is what is your multiple on revenues? I mean, that is a stupid metric. Okay, many companies get valued like that. I mean, it’s really the profitability should be the only metric.

PRASAD  Built our pack.

RAJESH  Yeah, basically it’s

PRASAD  Profitability

RAJESH  Profitability, absolutely.

PRASAD  So, what money you’re making matters more than what business you’re generating.

RAJESH  So, the way to think is every entrepreneur should be How do I create a profits monopoly? So, like Proficorn was there, I think of the new word as ProfitPoly. A profits monopoly. Cuz that is the best moat that you can have in your business. If you monopolize the profits, if you look at in search, Google has monopolized the profits. And therefore, there is no entry for any competitor. Microsoft that did that with Windows, Intel once upon a time did that with chips. They made typically 110% of industry profits because anyone else was losing money.

PRASAD  Everyone else is losing money because they want to catch up.

RAJESH  Yeah, because they’re trying to invest to catch up, but there’s no

PRASAD  There’s no space.

RAJESH  There’s no space.

PART 19  /  THE CONVERSATION

Rapid fire: technology, books and life

AI tools, enduring advice, Shivaji, admired companies, travel and reading.

PRASAD  One technology you think is overhyped and why?

RAJESH  I would say the smart watch. I have not worn a watch for like 50 years or probably, yeah.

PRASAD  You’ve not worn a watch since they were not smart.

RAJESH  Yeah, because I as a 7-year-old I happened to go on a picnic. I had a nice watch. It dropped from my pocket into the on the beach. I never found it again and I got very upset. And then I said I stopped wearing watches. But what happens with a smart watch? I know there are very good reasons for it. But you then sort of try to micro optimize every number that is there. You know, it gives you a lot of data metrics and it just becomes a very different ballgame. I mean, like look, life is for living. You got to enjoy the good foods. You got to do the exercise, all of that.

You don’t need a watch to tell you what how good you are.

PRASAD  One app you cannot live without.

RAJESH  Right now, it would be both the AIs, ChatGPT and OpenAI.

PRASAD  OpenAI.

RAJESH  So they it’s like almost co-intelligence now as Ethan Mollick’s book put it. I mean

PRASAD  Yeah.

RAJESH  You can use both of them in tandem.

PRASAD  Yes. One invention you wish you had created.

RAJESH  Of the transformer, which is the foundation. It’s not an invention technically, but the transformer which is at the bedrock for all the LLMs.

PRASAD  LLMs. One book that has changed your thinking and you would recommend it as a must-read.

RAJESH  So if I leave aside Jim Collins’s books, for me the book which really in a way changed my early life when I was in a down period was C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s Competing for the Future. And specifically there is one paragraph in there which says something along the lines of that as an entrepreneur or as a CEO, what you’re really trying to do is compete for the future.

RAJESH  You’re creating a vision for the future, for tomorrow’s world. There are many competing visions

PRASAD  visions are out there.

RAJESH  What you have to do is to make your vision come true. That is success.

PRASAD  One historical figure you would like to meet and why.

RAJESH  Shivaji.

PRASAD  Why?

RAJESH  See, I think the way he stood up to a very powerful army. He was the underdog in a way if you think about it. So Shivaji had this small territory in the west of the west of India, but how he expanded, how he captured one fort after another fort. In that sense it was a very entrepreneurial outfit.

PRASAD  He made his vision succeed.

RAJESH  He made his vision succeed. I mean in that sense and he was up against an incredibly powerful Mughal army. So he had to innovate at every stage

PRASAD  Yes.

RAJESH  to actually even survive, not just thrive. And I think even today we remember him at least in Maharashtra and probably nationally an amazing figure and probably we don’t know enough about him. in our sort of history books etc. There’s one chapter, but I think there’s probably a lot more to him.

PRASAD  I’m sure. one person you would love to have dinner with.

RAJESH  Dario Amodei. I think in Anthropic I mean I really respect what Anthropic has done. Of course Sam Altman is there at the level but I think Anthropic Claude ChatGPT had the initial sort of great success. But if you actually see what we a lot of us use now in our day-to-day world it is Claude.

PRASAD  Yeah.

RAJESH  And it’s the sort of it’s sort of caught up. It’s caught up and the way it answers I think there’s something almost conscious behind it.

PRASAD  It’s almost like talking to a sentient being.

RAJESH  It feels exactly like that. How did they do it?

PRASAD  One Indian company outside the technology sector that you admire and why.

RAJESH  I think it is for the innovations I think which they’ve actually done in India is Bharti Airtel. I think Airtel’s done a phenomenal job from where they started.

RAJESH  Of course Gopal Vittal who ran it for a few years is also a good friend. And for me I think the sort of turning point was also how they stood up to the competition which came when Jio launched. So it’s I think a great example of both innovation of acceleration of products which they came up with and now the diversifications that they’ve done I think are very good. Another sort of company in the same breath is of course IndiGo. In the Indian aviation space where or the global aviation space very few companies make money to do what they’ve done I mean all of us fly IndiGo. Just the punctuality and everything else is just phenomenal.

And to do it in a market where there are a lot of things are not under their control. About 70-80% of the stuff that they actually have to spend on jet fuel etc. is not in their control and yet to deliver a service-oriented business is just phenomenal in the Indian context.

RAJESH  At times I talk too much. I should be listening more. I just am bubbling with so many ideas that many times in meetings I tend to sort of monopolize the conversation. I think I should be listening a lot more. With customers, I listen a lot. But in internal meetings

PRASAD  Internal meetings, you want to listen, you won’t.

RAJESH  I should I should be listening more.

PRASAD  Should listen more. All right. One piece of advice that you’ve never forgotten.

RAJESH  What my father told me, don’t bar ka paisa nai lena.

PRASAD  Like run businesses on with your own money.

RAJESH  Run businesses with your own money. In fact, the correctly what he put is bar ka paisa leke gumana nai. Means don’t lose other people’s money. I translated that also into don’t raise capital, which is probably a little bit simplification of that, but I think this belief has really been with me through and this

PRASAD  accountability is that if you take money, you can’t lose.

RAJESH  lose it. Absolutely.

PRASAD  So, you make money even if you don’t make money for yourself.

RAJESH  Absolutely.

PRASAD  For your investors.

RAJESH  Investors, absolutely.

PRASAD  That’s that’s remarkable advice. Though I’m sure you’re not taking a year off work. If you could take a year off work, what would you spend that year on?

RAJESH  Two things. Traveling and reading. There are lots of good books in the world. A lot of things I don’t know. I’d love to spend a lot of time reading. Reading many different disciplines. I mean, economics I’ve just taken a small part, but sociology, psychology, I mean, all of these are the foundations of our life and our world. Behavioral sciences, I think that’s number one. And traveling. There are so many good things to see in the world. in India also, of course. like I’m not gone to Kashmir for like almost I would say 50 years. I think it’s time I should go back. I still remember

PRASAD  You know what? I recently went back. It’s still a very beautiful place. I mean, the place, of course, doesn’t change, but I think with normalization, it’s it’s Yeah, it’s become

RAJESH  Yeah, it’s there. I think it’s become very tourist-friendly. Tourist-friendly, yeah. So, there are lots of this combination of travel and reading. I still remember my I took a cross America train journey before I returned to India. Three days in the train going from New York to Oakland in California. this was again ’92.

PRASAD  So good old Amtrak.

RAJESH  Amtrak and the conversations that I had with people there was no mobile phones. So you would spend two three hours talking to complete strangers about their lives because there was no deadline. There was nothing to worry about. I mean sometimes I wish you know you can go back to those days when we are not you know where there’s contiguous time uninterrupted time where you can just talk to a person just sitting like this watch the world go by on a train going you know with the mountains and the rivers and the valleys. I mean today we are just hustling I guess.

PART 20  /  THE CONVERSATION

Advice to the next generation

Learn to build, read deeply and experience entrepreneurship firsthand.

PRASAD  To a person who’s entering the workforce right now to a young 22 23 year old person. What would your two or three pieces of advice be? How should they approach their career? What should they look at and how should they look to grow as professionals and individuals?

RAJESH  So one I would say is learn Claude Code. Not just the Claude chat agent but Claude Code. Very important it’s going to make their lives much simpler in what they’re going to do. That’s number one. Second is learn and read widely. Okay. I think reading is very different from watching Insta and YouTube videos.

PRASAD  Why do you say that?

RAJESH  See when you’re sitting in one place cut off from the world sitting in a chair it’s just your mind your thoughts undistracted and what you’re reading and maybe a small book at the side where you’re making notes in there. I think true learning really happens from that depth of immersion which sometimes gets a little lost in what they’re doing. And third is don’t be afraid of the future. I think generations before have faced challenges new things new inventions new innovations going there with a positive attitude and aspire at some point of time to be an entrepreneur whether it succeeds or not is a separate story.

But the learning that happens when you’re not reporting to someone when you have to make the calls like you said with whether data or gut when you are on the front line. I think it’s a very different experience. So at once in your life I would tell that person build your own company.

PRASAD  On that very hopeful note Rajesh Jain thank you so much for joining us this has been a very in incisive conversation. It’s also been fun at the same time and truly it’s it’s an experience for us because for me personally I think you’re one of the people I admire the most in terms of being an entrepreneur simply because not just because you work in a space which is connected to publishing in a certain way but also for the incredible range of work that you’ve done both in the political field and with now with Netcore. Thank you so much again for doing this and thank you for being on the show today.

RAJESH  Thank you for having me and I have to compliment you on a the research but more importantly the questions that you ask. Answers are only always as good as the questions and you asked beautiful questions. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Here. A fascinating conversation with Prasad Sanyal.

From the intro: “In 1995, before India even had commercial internet access, Rajesh Jain launched IndiaWorld. Four years later, he sold it to Sify for ₹499 crore, roughly three months before the dotcom bubble burst. He had no investors then. Thirty years and one more successful company later, he still has none. On CXO Connect, Rajesh tells Prasad Sanyal about the two and a half years of failed products that came first, the 100 letters that got R.K. Laxman to give him his cartoons for free, the banker who told him that knowing when to exit matters more than knowing when to enter, and how Netcore grew from Linux mail servers into a profitable marketing-tech company that is 25% owned by its employees. He also talks about his political work leading up to 2014 and his “Project 275” blog post, his ideas on economic freedom through Nayi Disha and Dhan Vapasi, why he thinks most digital ad money goes towards winning back customers that brands already have, his “three nevers”, and why he believes India can do for software in the AI era what China did for manufacturing. Then there’s a rapid-fire round: a 4:24 am alarm, a watch he hasn’t worn in 50 years, and his advice for anyone starting work today.”

Transcript.