“My loyalty is not to Josh but to unlocking human potential” – Shobhit Banga
A school drop out, a state level Tennis player, India’s youngest qualifier of the elite “Paris – Brest – Paris” International cycling event, founder of two NGO’s – Sach & Half Glass Full, a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur and the Co-Founder of Josh Talks – Shobhit Banga can be described in many ways. But what defines him best is his quest for unlocking human potential.
In this episode of Founder Thesis we sit down for a chat with Shobhit to learn about his fascinating off beat journey right from his small town life of Kullu, to pursuing sports as a career goal – cycling 600kms non stop, his experience at the Harvard Summer School, starting Josh Talks, losing focus & finally re-connecting with his mission of inspiring young minds.
An incredible journey with lots to learn from. Here are key takeaways from our conversation with Shobhit:
• How growing up in a small town is advantageous to entrepreneurship.
• How quitting is harder than it seems.
• Starting and running an NGO.
• How Josh Talks was monetized.
• Chasing your purpose or mission through your startup.
[Applause] H you are listening to an HD smartcast Original this could be a great intro hi I’m a hi this is s and you are listening to the founder thesis podcast we meet some of the most celebrated startup Founders in the country and we want to learn how to build a Unicorn I’m sure you’ve heard about Joe STS the popular video platform featuring motivational Talks by some of the most inspiring people in India the really amazing thing about the Jo talks platform is its two very young Founders banga and supria Paul they co-founded Joe talks when they were
Still in the second year of graduation and today it’s an honor for us to feature a conversation with ship about his journey from being one of the youngest Elite cyclist in the country to founding Joe STS and discovering his true calling so I believe you are a himachali so what was that whole
Experience like growing up in Himachal and your father has played a big role in your life so tell me about that so I think growing up in a small town is a massive advantage to anyone trying to start up because you get this insight into a world that most people in a big
City have not seen because the majority of the country is here this is what in some ways reality is and growing up in Mundy and Kulu was absolutely a phenomenal experience going to a small school you know we actually used to sit on the floor and study there were so
Many students in class that some had to sit outside the door so you know it’s just slightly different from the rest of the country never speaking in English almost it being like a foreign language like French is right now to anyone I think growing up in a small town is a
Massive Advantage because of this Insight that you get then uh the other very big thing that happened in my childhood was my parents and their role in sort of pushing me to do insanely well in this and that was it’s almost like a rebel that he would push us to do
Things that were different that were not stereotypical so he also demanded Excellence but it was not in Marx per se so he was least bothered about that he was very bothered about but very less bothered about he would almost take us on a holiday before the exam so because we
Are very close to Manali we’ll drive down to Manali one day before the exam and the next morning come back directly go to school from Manali so you know there’s no studying happening on the last year those kind of things not because he didn’t believe in education
But because he was a rebel like subconsciously I don’t think he consciously accept ever that he’s a rebel but I think subconsciously he is because he’s always challenging the the norms there was this day that happened where I think I was in the eth standard and my brother was in the fourth
Standard my mom was teaching my brother in the drawing room on the ground floor and my dad was teaching me physics I think sitting on the first floor in my house in Kulu and I I think my brother was crying because he was not able to
Study and I was frustrated my dad was trying to teach me and you know we just sted he closed my Dad closed the books he was sitting on the bed and teaching I’m walking around and he said we’re going to Bangalore like and literally just like that the next day I
Went to school my brother went to school we gave up exams we came back our parents had come to pick us up sat in the car in our same school clothes we drove to Delhi stayed at my grandparents that night took a flight the next morning went to Bangalore I took
Admission in a school and we did not come back so uh what happened in Bangalore then one of the reasons that justified this very aggressive move which was to get up from a city all of a sudden and just move which is completely unheard of generally is generally very
Planned move what made this justifiable Even in our heads was that so I used to play 10 tennis in Kulu itself Kulu has a lot of foreigners and I play tennis in Kulu I it’s sort of a make do Court there’s no Academy there’s no coach nothing the balls are three months old
Balls so but I used to wake up every single day at 4:30 in the morning and go to play by 5 and my dad saw that you know I was quite driven to do this and he said okay why don’t we go to Bangalore and do
This we had also gone to Bangalore for a summer vacation few months ago because my dad has very very close friends there so we had seen that beautiful corporate environment that was sort of as compared to a very small town that sleeps by 8:00 pm every single night and there’s
Nothing to do apart from education um this was this massive City and we had seen some of it we had done some kind of you know that kind of culture was there so Bangalore was the choice so so going to Bangalore we immediately started looking for tennis academies
Where I could play I took an admission in a school like I said and I started going to school and playing tennis alongside about few just a few months going to school my dad said that you know know you’re playing a lot you’re playing much better than what you were
Playing why don’t we just leave school completely and just do tennis fulltime and just like that I joined that school mid year I left that school mid year and started playing tennis fulltime even my tennis coach was surprised and sort of I think he wanted to say sh you’re not
That good also but he never said it by no means was that move logical you know I wasn’t that good at all in fact that was the case and I started playing very very aggressively 6:00 a.m. in the morning till 600 p.m. in the evening and also it was tennis relatively pretty
Expensive sport so I knew that my parents had this pressure because living in Bangalore is very very expensive earning an IM Marin living in Bangalore not so fair on the pockets and on top of playing tennis like all of a sudden you almost spend no money in a month to
Running expenses are going away from savings so I can imagine and I could see and I could sense there was a lot of pressure on my parents so there was this tennis was an incredibly hard phase people say that quitting is easy I think quitting is underrated absolutely underrated because quitting is very
Tough it’s very easy to continue uh so I could just continued school and similarly when I left tennis I could have just continued tennis but to do something that is not the normal is much harder so I tried very hard gave it my life and everything luckily I got
Injured and I was very happy that this happened because I don’t think I would have made a very good tennis player actually we decided that we had to give up tennis this about 22 and a half years into playing tennis and my parents decided that since I’m not playing
Tennis bangal is insanely expend anyway and for my dad it was becoming very hard because he used to stay in Himel come come down to Bangalore for a few days every month so he said why don’t you come back closer to home but still in the closest city to my hometown is
Chandigar and my parents shifted to chandigar I also shifted with them so this is after 10th had completed uh so I had given my board exams through National open school the result had not come out yet I still remember and this was about 2 and a half years into
Playing tennis then what next so you decide to go to chandigar for right so uh coming to chandik was also a pretty big decision right because you you just shifted to Bangalore about 2 and a half 3 years ago and all of a sudden now you’re shifting again so you
Know I somewhere always felt that it was somewhere because of me that so many changes were happening and that wasn’t really really really the case so anyway so we came to chandigar and I still wasn’t going to school uh so even chandigar I had started doing tennis training with this coach here because
Very tough to just give up something you know and to mentally accept that you’ve given it up so I I joined a coach in ch ch who said that you know there’s a DAV school here you’re in your you have to give you 11th and 12th somehow instead
Of n v you give it through DAV school so he said you can take admission through tennis Kota and you only need to go once a week and see how that goes so I took admission in D but of course tennis wasn’t going so well as a part of my
Fitness training for tennis in Bangalore one of the things I used to do was cycling and uh my cycling coach called me up and said that sh there’s this race happening in Bangalore it is the longest cycling race that has ever happened in the country it is 300 kilm you ride from
Bangalore Beyond myour to chamundi Hills and all the way back and that’s one race it’s over 300 kilm he basically said that I think you’re made for it and you know I was sitting here frustrated and I was still young so you know I was
Just looking for an escape to get out of wherever I was stuck and this was that escape so I thought you know what another mission I can go mad after this and forget about all the terrible things that I was thinking about so I I came to
Himel with the bike that I had the race was about a month and a half two months in I had never trained for a race never done anything like it came to imach and just climbed mountains on my bike every single day like a mad man so we we went
To Bangalore for the race my dad came along with me as always I I don’t remember what position I came I think under sixish I think but I’m not sure I ended up doing extremely well I was the youngest finisher of the race and it went really really well and I rode over
300 kilomet when I had done a maximum of pro probably 60 in training so it was an absolute mind-blowing experience and and um my dad and I stayed at my fitness trainer’s house itself the the cycling coach and he sort of said that he show with you know there there are more races
And this is another sport do you want to stay back and do this I said yes definitely I want to stay back and do and just like that I switched from tennis to cycling tennis to confusion to cycling okay so and this was again which class when you shifted to
Cycling somewhere around 11th is then what next how did you pursue that cycling dream so in cycling there’s two types of cycling uh one is mountain bike and one is Road cycling and I was a road cyclist now within Road cyclist you could do something called endurance cycling which is basically longdistance
Cycling and that’s what I started doing because I had already started with that and my cycling coach was was also an endurance cyclist so one of the most expected cycling events in the world is called the Paris breast Paris it happens once every four years it’s a 1,200 kilm
Race that goes from Paris to breast and back to Paris and I started training for that and and that’s that’s one of one of the toughest things to do in cycling of course there is one tougher than that also which is called the Race Across America and these are the two things
That I had in my mind this is what I had to do two France is not endurance cycling two France is about 150 to 200 km per day so that doesn’t qualify for the endurance so that was not the objective at this time and I got into it
Very very aggressively uh from day one I started the qualifiers happen in India almost every year or every few years for people to qualify for that race that happen once every four years so I I start qualifying to qualify you have to do these four races you have to do a 200
Kilometer within a certain time a 300 kilomet within a certain time a 400 km within a certain time and then a 600 kilometer within a certain time so so you have to do four races to qualify for the main race in Paris in every single of these I was obviously the youngest
Person doing them because nobody at 17 or 16 does endurance cycling it’s just like not something that’s recommended because your body is just not ready for it but uh but I did it anyway and in and in India the rules were not so strict I actually won the 400 km race which was
One of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life the six happened about one year into into my cycling and you know nobody really like nobody Cycles 6 600 km for fun even Lans Armstrong has given this interview on when he tried to ride 600 km what happened I think at 400 he
Left so you know that was another monster and I completed 600 kmers in about 31 hours and a few minutes and it was nonstop riding apart from a 7 minute sleep break I took in the middle wow okay how do you sleep just for 7
Minutes I mean how do you wake up after 7 minutes when you’re so I think I think I think the firstly is so adrenaline is so high that it’s very tough to sleep but one of the trainings that we always did so my cycling coach made us do was
Just sit at home and just stay awake you’re not allowed to sleep and he would make us do this for 18 hours at a time at least and a couple of times we even did 24 hours and 30 hours and and that is much tougher than to be on the road
And not sleep so you know you already had this training of not sleeping the tougher part is to get to sleep fast enough which is what uh you need to sort of train your mind for and and the toughest time is 5:00 in the morning when the sun is just rising and your
Body is telling you to just shut down and and by that time you’ve already ridden for you started the previous day at 9:00 a.m. right so it’s almost going to be 24 hours already so at 5:00 a.m. we knew my dad was again in the car
Behind me and we knew that we have to take this break and it I think I think that day changed me a lot because so much happened like a swarm of bees stung me in the middle while coming down from a fly over like some 30 bees was stuck
In my jersey and you couldn’t stop because if you stop to take them out you lose 30 40 minutes this happened just a few minutes after starting my tire got punchered very very early on and everybody went ahead and I was the last one left and again very very early on in
This R you’re not allowed to take any support from your car so you have to do everything yourself so you have to put the godamn punch yourself you have to fill the tire again yourself so it takes a long long time in most races your support car can actually support you in
This the car can be there for medical emergencies but cannot support you and I remember that you know when you’re doing 600 kilm you don’t even want to do one extra kilometer and I remember I actually did 618 kilm the 18 extra was because I went 9 kilomet into into the
Wrong way so after reaching the point I took some Wrong Turn and went 9 km the wrong and you know when you’re doing 600 kilometers and you do even 100 meters wrong you want to stab someone we had gone wrong then the car started honking from behind I realized that you know the
The pit stop should have come 9 km ago it’s not coming you’re getting frustrated you you’re waiting for that halfway mark right so desperately and it just wasn’t coming so so we took a U-turn we finally reached the right spot I got I I got on from a bike and the
Support car can meet you there m and I started shouting and you know I’m I’m screaming and and telling my dad I’m not doing this so he just slapped me across my face gave me a tight one you know I’m 318 kilometers into ride a bike nonstop
And he gets slaps me across my face I just become quiet I sit back on my bike and you know the second 3 were much easier than the first you know because all of a sudden you’ve calmed down you realized that so I don’t know I don’t
Know what happened but I think I think that was Monumental how many people do a 600 kilomet endurance cycling in India like how many would have done this so I think about 40 people started that race I think about 20 would have finished this is like super Elite level like maybe
Point 001 percentage of cyclists would have ever actually completed something like this I’m guessing in general oh yeah yeah absolutely absolutely you need to be in a very different mental frame of mind uh you know because like it’s almost you don’t even want to drive to Chennai let alone drive to Chennai and
Come back and let alone cycle to Chennai and come back I think I realized so many things that like for example the mind is completely a lie you know its job is to keep you alive not to make you achieve things so you so as soon as you’re
Conscious of that you know you don’t like it anymore and you’re always saying whatever the mind tells you godamn lie because it its agenda is not your agenda its agenda is to keep your life your agenda is to win its agenda is to keep your life so it’s telling you don’t do
This so so I think I think one of the things that is a very significant learning is don’t don’t listen to the mind it’s uh it’s it’s not your best friend because it has its own agenda it’s like a political party you know you never know what’s the reality so that
Thought just stayed with that you know you can completely manipulate your mind uh and make it do anything and make anything achievable and actually 600 K is not tough at all as soon as you get through the mental block because physically can you ride a cycle non-stop
For let’s say so you don’t need to do it in 30 hours right you can aim to do it in 40 hours so can you ride a bike nonstop for 40 hours oh absolutely you can can you walk nonstop for 40 hours of course you can I think that was one of
The incredible learnings from that day and from that time so how old were you when you finished this 600 so I was 17 I remember this very very clearly because I was 17 and this was the fourth and the final race to qualify for the Paris PR Paris which was
Sort of like the Hall of Fame the whole since one year and and the terrible thing that happened was that so when I wrote to Paris BR Paris so Paris Paris may I sort of had qualified right so but Paris Paris got in touch saying that you are under 18 and you can’t
Participate because you are under 18 and the race was happening that year and it was true I was under but in India they allowed me to participate in the qualifiers anyway but these par super strict and I was not allowed to compete in the race and I think that was one of
The biggest like even more than leaving tennis uh and to give up on tennis this was the toughest hit that you know it was all meaningless at that time at least it felt became underage and that’s like a terrible thing to sort of think and I had to wait four years then to
Participate I ended up WR writing to some of the best endurance cyclist in the world Marco bolo was one of the guys I still remember and he said absolutely not absolutely not uh he absolutely rejected the idea of me doing an endurance 1200 kilomet race and I had
For the Race Across America which is even tougher which is which uh I think there was a Sports magazine that called it the the toughest sporting event in the world is the Race Across America for which I also tried to qualify for but I wasn’t able to qualify for that that was
Another crazy experience so basically when I qualified for the 600 kilometers the next day I got a call from VI radak Krishna who who was building India’s first professional cycling team now this wasn’t endurance cycling uh but this was more like the two France kind of cycling which is
Short relatively short so not 6 600 more like 150ish kilm 120 kilometers but super fast much faster than what I was used to doing and what cycling was and he called me and said hey do you want to be a part of the team that we’re
Building and I was like you know of course like that sounds crazy if there’s anything happening in cycling in India I would credit to VI and his obsessive Madness with uh anything he sort of chooses to pick up to do and I think he became sort of like my for
For sort of the next few months only actually sadly about a year and a halfish and I started writing for what was then called King K cycling team eventually the sponsor specialized King KY cycling team um and yeah with with that team I went I think to Thailand
Singapore and raced across India and it was a fantastic fantastic time as I was sort of also growing up right that that very signif of like 15 to 18 was happening uh where I was realizing that like like what is Meaningful where does my sense of purpose really like where do
I get a sense of purpose from and you know obviously those answers are not clear but like for example a lot of the things that troubled me the back of my mind was one of one of my teammates used to work at a cycle shop he would ride
With me in the morning uh most elite cycling teams that India had seen yet and then right after training he would go back to his shop to work there for 7,500 rupe salary or something like that you know and I just saw that you know this guy has potential he could go out
There and be anyone do do anything and somehow because the way our world currently functions there is no way for him to unlock that talent and potential that he has within him so it should sort of be the government’s job or let’s say the ecosystems job to build an efficient
System to unlock somebody’s potential like it’s not petroleum’s job to make a d good efficient car to go very very high speed uh it’s a human’s job to make a car that is very efficient at utilizing petroleum to move from place a to place B and and similarly for a
Person who let’s say raw material basically it should be the ecosystem job to create an environment which is very conducive to so efficiency of utilization of human potential has to be higher like it is absolutely disgustingly terrible right now and that’s sort of connected to me being
From a small town and everything else that I seen here so all my friends what were they doing because now you’re 18 you’re connected on Facebook with some of them and you see that you know I came to Bangalore and the world and life changed for me and I’ve sort of seen
Things and I know where I want to go and I have these dreams and Ambitions but a lot of my friends were running kirana stores like that made absolutely no sense that that how could a guy who was much better in education much better in studies than me is doing relatively
Nothing as compared to the potential that he had in him and not by choice if somebody by choice was doing that fantastic no problem you know but not by choice so so this there was a very very high degree of frustration so even in Bangalore I had actually started this
NGO uh with two of my very very close friends uh called such such the Hindi such you know there was this lie that I basically felt there was in the way we all lived Our Lives you know there’s this massive lie and therefore we just call that NGO such like the reality the
Truth and we just went to offen ages across Bangalore and I believe the early building days of Jo where we went to offes across Bangalore and we basically uh exposed people to various different things by showing them movies and things like that so so different movies that had fantastic messages we showed them
Those movies I also had this Uncle in Bangalore my Dad’s friend who I really looked up to and learned a lot from whose basically Outlook towards life was also something that got ingrained in my personality which was to if you have potential you must strive to achieve
More and more and more until you find the limitation of your own abilities you just have to go that far you have to touch that Mark and you have to push and push and push and um and that was and that sort of uh built the early days of
Jos uh when these issues start started happening and I started feeling this very strong itch in me to do something more more than more than cycling and and none of it was a very strong thought at that time right it wasn’t something I could look back and say I drew a line it
Was just some kind of a niche I was asking for something different uh that I basically got up one morning at 4: in the morning but I got ready almost packed my bags went to the airport and took a flight to Da uh so yeah that’s
What happened so you decided to go back to Delhi and do what so at that time it wasn’t really clear one thing was clear that uh 12th had ended and everybody was joining colleges so that sort of seemed like the thing to do and I was sort of roaming
Around aimlessly so when I came back to delh one thing I knew how to do was run an NGO you know and not really an NGO in the sense that raise money and all that but do things first thing I did was come here and start another NG called half
Glass full where again the goal was go to offen ages and talk to the kids there about the world and the possibilities through content and through activities and apart that I started uh writing into colleges to to sort of study there so I so I tried to get into the conventional
Delhi University colleges but none of them accepted cycling as a sport so I was like you know screw that and there was a Lancaster University had recently started an offshore campus in India in partnership with G GD ginka so went there I had a bunch of offer letters Etc
I walked into college I went to the Dean’s office to to the admissions head’s office I showed them the off offer letters uh he he offered me a fantastic scholarship uh for the first year and sort of that was it and I started going to GD Gua I knew I
Wouldn’t go to college so I told him that pretty early on that I’m I I don’t think I’m going to be coming much uh if that’s okay with you I’ll join and that’s what happened I I joined College here and I I was running half class full on the
Side like I was running half glass full fully and going to college on the side actually that’s how it was so uh did you also uh like understand how to raise funds for an NGO and all that at that time so you know I think I think another
Thing that I learned s of from my parents was that and especially from my dad about how he managed money was that you know money is really like meaningless I think I truly understood what it means to for something to be just a mean to an it you know not the
Thing in itself uh so money was never ever at all a question in my mind did did I want to do well I was very clear I needed to do very very well in life uh but it wasn’t that you don’t have to run after money or anything like that so
Even when we were running half was very focused then where do I get the money to do this sort of this belief was there that if I’m doing something meaningful I’ll find the money and that’s what half class full for us but I always knew he half class full because of an NG
Structure because of various things like that may not be the answer to to everything but I but I was learning a lot I was facing a lot of my insecurities like talking to people I used to stammer a lot in my childhood all of that was uh getting sorted so I
Was like okay this is a fantastic use of my time and college was a great distraction also because um I had joined some fun courses like statistics Etc that I really liked and I had gone to a college where only a a person didn’t get admission in any in any college in Delhi
University they joined that college so what ended up happening is that even academically I ended up being one of the best in that college and that gave me insane confidence you know I’d never been the best till now in myuc academics in my school I was never the best in
Tennis I was never the best in in cycling I was never the best in cycling was great but I was definitely not the best in that team that I was in um I was probably the last in the team that I was in in the professional team where I
Joined uh so this it it was a fantastic feeling to be winning for a change and when did you meet supria was it during college or uh after that yeah so I met supria in the second year of my college I met her through a mutual friend who had joined my college
In the second year so he became a batchmate he had transferred from uh University of Toronto and he came to my university and it was his birthday and supria was his school friend who was also part of that birthday party supr and I so I was like this weird kid who
Didn’t know anybody at the party and Supra was the only one nice enough to come and talk to me and and we talking and I found out that Supra was this genius kid who was a Topper throughout anything she did she had to win speaks about getting that from her dad and her
Mom also um about her nurturing and we spoke about that on the very first day of our meeting uh you know it is probably the most awkward first conversation ever uh but we both talking about our families and how that led to us being who we are and our ability and
Our own relative unlocking of potential the unlocking of our potential relative to others was higher because of nurturing we received and you know nurturing we received by chance and that is disgusting because you can now do that by Design because of the internet and because the mobile phone that every
Person has and this is the conversation and this led to J so after my first year in the summer vacations I had joined the Harvard summer school so I took admission to the Harvard summer school and went to Harvard which is the first time I was really traveling abroad I I
Had gone to some place in Southeast Asia but that’s not really like going to the US that was my first trip to the US first trip to a place like Howard and I think that was another thing like the 600 kilm race which totally totally you know redefined some some of the things
In my life like for example the what is the Benchmark of Excellence like what does it mean excellent you know it’s where I learned uh what it’s like to be in a room where I couldn’t hold a one minute conversation with some people who actually started in har you know it was
Just like I was having breakfast with with a guy who went on to swim for the US Olympic to and was training at that time for it and you know so I met those kind of people and it was just this none of these guys were special you
Know they were not very much different from that guy who I used to cycle with in terms of you know let’s say raw potential but the nurturing of the potential that this group in Howard received was probably one of the best of course you have to work hard and things
Like that right and and not not discounting any of the things that people had done to actually get there but I think a lot of the things that happened to them were by a lot of the things happened by luck like being born into a certain kind of family I did
Nothing to earn this again my belief got stronger and stronger that you shouldn’t have to be lucky to do well you know it’s like it’s if we had Petro we were wasting it that’s a godamn law so why don’t we think of human capital like
That if we want to be so wise about spending our money the most valuable resource the world has is human resource is human capital so why are we not using this efficiently and who’s taking accountability and responsibility in this world for efficiency of utilization of human capital you know at the end of
The day forget about personal victories what about the victory of the human race as a whole who’s sort of taking accountability of that and with that thought I sort of came back to India and started talking to people about this Obsession that I had of why are people
Not doing enough and I met Supra who came from a completely different background from mine but was also talking about the same thing and she she liked the idea and and and another friend of mine as well and um and yeah we started J very soon after that
So uh tell me about that Journey like how did you start J and what was the initial plan and how did it evolve so 13 end is when we had started talking about J 14 is when we had unofficially started J I was in my second year Supra was in in the third
Year of her her college and after that conversation I think three months in Jo had started um at least in officially you know the conversations were there we started working towards it like as soon as you start your company you become an entrepreneur right you’re not a successful entrepreneur but nobody knows
That yet you you’re you’re an entrepreneur and all of a sudden you become cool you start getting invited to speak at startup events and this and that that you know so we started off with was organizing a conference where we called some of the people who done
Fantastically well in their lives and we called youth who wanted to do well who had just wanted to make the most of their potential we we sort of connected the two over that conference and people shared their stories and that’s what happened in the first Jo Jo Jo talk and
That was what Jo talk was supposed to be the first conference went insanely well somebody from srcc got in touch with us and said that hey we we do a conference every single year why don’t you take one day of that and let’s do a Jo talk so
That was the second conference that led to the third and the fourth quickly started going to Bangalore and Bombay and sort sort of all across the country and doing Jo talks across and we started releasing some of these stocks online now they were not doing well online but
We anyway continue to release them now until now Jo was basically making no money but was insanely loved so we clearly had something working in the product but just zero monetization a few questions here before you uh so you thought of it as like a TED talks like an Indian version of TED
Talks when you started so we definitely love Ted there’s no doubt about that but you know I saw in India and there’s this perception that Ted is doing well in India whereas if you look at it Ted is not doing well in India at all because then majority of the country cannot
Understand a TED talk as simple as that an american guy talking about why the education system is bad you know or happiness is so far away from the realities of my friend who was working at 7,500 rupe job after cycling it’s just nowhere close but the format of Ted
Was working let’s say three years of Amir Khan totally transformed our country but you cannot make three DS 25 times a year and we need to do that we need to constantly redefine The Narrative and you could not do that through making 3DS kind of movies because we were very actually open to
Looking at uh Cinema as the way to create a narrative so Jo could have very well we actually had even registered a company called Jo stories which was supposed to just make movies but that that was was obscenely expensive uh and we we are still these kids in college
Right who don’t have money and have no experience and at a startup like however lenient your parents are you will probably get one shot to finally screw up your life um so so we had to make it work and that’s why we went out to the conference and YouTube which was super
Low cost so at least we didn’t burn money still a conference would have still costed you some money know you would might have had to pay for a venue or whatever the cost would still be there so so supria had some money saved up because she used to teach students
Something like tutions and I had I I sold my bike uh to actually pay for that first conference and then even took some money from our parents because we eventually did run out of our own money which the first time we got pretty easily luckily because of the privilege
Uh that we came from asking for one lak was like you know let’s trust them give them one chance it’s better than doing nothing uh and sort of paid for us and also I had got a scholarship from my college so I didn’t end up paying for my
College as well so I think my dad was more than happy to sort of let me fly in some ways I think is how he saw it at that time and similarly for supria her dad was very concerned doesn’t make any sense this is never going to work was
Kind of the vibe but of course you know they they would have had that Vibe because what we were doing at that time did not work actually you know it was it was something else that worked and it was never supposed to become a company
So we had not said that we are going to start a startup so this is just this one conference that we did we did that conference it went insanely well both our parents were not going to come we hosted this at the Air Force Auditorium and there’s free admission no ticket no
There were tickets there were tickets we were selling student tickets for 300 and adult tickets for 12200 I think it’s fair to say we basically sold almost no tickets and we had to let everybody in for free I think I think we did a total of some 20,000 rupees revenue and we
Spent four lakhs so it was it was pretty crazy but our parents attended it and and that was a crazy thing that supra’s father said that he’ll come for an hour or so and my my dad was not even showing up he’s saying sh is going to make a
Fool out of himself in front of so many PE people and you know you’re doing the startup for first time ever so you invite your family and your extended family and this and that you know so all your cousins are going to be there so my
Dad was like sh is going to make a fool out of myself about his family and everything and and nobody anywh T this banga parar to do anything because they are obviously crazy people who shift cities and take their kids out of school um so so so dad was like I’m not coming
But I some forced him to come and I remember our parents had not really met yet but they were talking during the conference and they were like God damn this was something else and stayed throughout the entire time just one of the the next srcc reached out to say
That okay do a conference here we’ll cover the entire cost of the conference apart from the shooting that you cover so we spent only 30,000 so so we saw another way to do another conference for almost zero money and yeah so that’s what the first conference was like and
How did you get the guests who were the guests there like and how did you get them to agree because you were like two college kids with no credibility right so that’s pretty crazy story as well so basically we made pamphlets and we stood in markets and we tried to con
Anybody that would talk to us and and you know it would be really weird because so supria would go to hosa’s Village generally and I would go to Galeria Market in good stand there with pamphlets I was a little bit awkward also U to talk to anybody else
Right but somehow we would explain that you know we’re going to share stories of people that have done incredibly well in their lives and you know they’re going to they’re going to help you define your own aspirations and sort of help redefine what you think you can achieve
And well obviously 90% people did not even care 10% who heard did not really understand and there was just always you know one or two people every day that would say Okay fantastic this is great I’ll come and then they would never reach back to you and you know pampl me
Of course there was a website to buy tickets but we would go to fla every single day and nobody would have bought tickets and I think it at that time it was do attend do attend do.com or something and nobody would have bought tickets so it was pretty crazy but
Eventually uh you know we started reaching out we start going to every single startup conference that was happening and we started talking about Joe stocks there very very aggressively and then I also met this amazing guy yogendra who runs wantrepreneurs to entrepreneurs which is a startup
Community who said that okay let me also help you try and get some audience and yeah we started finding some audience here and there and I think a total of about 150 200 people would have attended that first conference in a hall of 670 people so one day before the conference
We anyway have no money but supr and I take this call to hire a tent Wala to hide the rest of the seats you know so that we’re able to create a fantastic experience and make the Hall smaller basically it was a pretty gutsy call we
Basically had no money to pay that guy but we anyway did it and it turned out fantastic nobody founded at the hall was so big and every everybody thought he a packed Hall sold out show insane stuff and we had been able to convinc Papa CJ speak at that conference I’ll never
Forget it and you know I’ll sort of owe him forever for that um we just these two young kids and he actually left school reunion in SAR to come and speak at this ge so barely you 200 people were speaking he’s used to doing thousands of
People shows he’s a comedian one of one of India’s greatest comedians how did you get all the speakers uh reached out to people one by one on email sometimes on after them at conferences uh Papa CJ was a fantastic story We reached out to so we knew we had to get someone famous
And someone with a fantastic story and papa CJ was totally fit that bill we had seen him on YouTube a few times and sopr and I absolutely loved him so what we did is that we started going to the shows where he would speak we didn’t
Have so much money so we didn’t buy the tickets to the shows where he was performing but we would wait outside the auditoriums um and there was this one time he was in buo itself at Cyber Hub at the amphitheater there and he did a show and by chance that is helper had
Not come with him and what we did is that so he had to pick up the stuff and take that to the parking himself so Su I took that chance I ran to him picked up his stuff and said hey papa C I’ll carry
This for you till the car and it was the car was about 5 500 met away at the parking of cyberhub which is a little bit further during that walk sort of convinced him to speak at Jos wow and then once you had one kind of like a flagship speaker then that
Would have helped you get the other speakers oh yeah absolutely I think that was the game changer uh but also apart from that you know I remember going to some startup conferences convincing some other speakers and people looked at this list and said you know what this one guy
Actually said this I’m a pretty well read person and I don’t don’t know anybody on this list so it was something like you know I’m not going to speak here or show up here you know something like that can really demotivate you so it was obviously a fantastic experience
To do all of these things so next two years then you do a bunch of more conferences without yet forming a company so how did it become from like a volunteer run conference thing to a business so I think that took insanely long and I think one of the reasons it
Took which I was trying to share in the which I don’t think I did a good job of sharing is that you know there there’s this high of becoming an entrepreneur and of being in a startup and it’s not just entrepreneurs fault what happens that ecosystem makes it to be like
Colleges will invite you and they don’t care whether you’ve run a company for one month or for 10 years they’ll put you on the same sort of pedestrian um and I get that it’s sort of the responsibility of the entrepreneur to sort of look at that and say this is
Noise this is not reality this is completely noise like you know you can lie to PR you can lie to invest you can lie to everybody but you can’t lie to users and you can’t lie to a model that works if it works it works if it doesn’t
Work it doesn’t work no mon PR will will save it but it takes a lot of time to understand that and sort of that is what happened with us you know we sort of forgot forgot about the mission and there was this high of doing these conferences we just did them one after
The other one after the other kept uploading the talks and the talks were not doing well online like I remember posting everything on Kora I was just recently on Kora and I saw that I post these talks in 2014 do all those things but continuing to do the talks that were not working
You know why didn’t we see that is not working why did it take us 2 years to figure that out and it sort of blinded us from the mission which was to unlock human potential which was the conversation which was true which was the conversation supria and I had had
Had first time we met which was to try and use what happened to her and me by chance to do that by design for the rest of the world we forgot that we got lost in the high of running a startup and being an entrepreneur and you know doing
Conferences two years in we sort of had to answer a lot of those tough question question and we said that okay we’re going to do this one Mega show and we’re going to see after that what happens if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work screw it
And if it works we sort of continue and it wasn’t really said in words but there was this feeling of it not working but somehow you’ve got this momentum and you don’t want it to stop uh so we went to our parents and we asked for money again
And we said okay this is the last time if it doesn’t work now uh we’ll do what the hell you say and both parents loved Jos simply because the value it added to the world it wasn’t doing well but the conferences people were crying like you
Know there was this time in in Bombay we did the conference I remember atol pondal World school and inside there were 500 people sitting in listening to these stories that India had not heard yet and there was this girl Shel who was sharing a story who was from kamatipura
About how her mom put her under the bed while she attended to customers uh and slept with men uh you know and the torture she went through in that and from that to becoming one of the best drummers in India she went to the US drum school got a scholarship there
Studied in came back and one of the best drummers in India like to hear those kind of stories and so our parents had complete faith they did give us the money and this time it was a lot of money I think it was a total of 30 lakhs
Uh that we hired and we literally put it into just one show we spent 26 lakhs 80,000 rupees on one event which had 2 lakh rupees of Revenue it’s called Jo stocks leap we were able Su was able to convince anra Kash to speak at that
Conference uh by this time we had a lot of supporters one one of our biggest supporters was rates Malik who had also invested in us um in the very early days he gave us n lakhs he and a friend of his together invested n lakhs in je and
At that time it was a lot of money you know and that’s that was the money that really took us to all this time when we were basically doing no Revenue trying really really hard to do the revenue doing 50 60,000 here and there in sponsorships um another friend of our
From youas supported us and gave us a couple of laaks you know so at that time it’s it it means a lot and um but but still all of that was over and it wasn’t working and he said we’re going to do this one last show I don’t know why you
Know right now I’m speaking must be thinking like what an idiot like this is not working and now you’re going to spend 30 LS doing it and but that it didn’t seem so you know we spent 30 lakhs on one conference I think it was the biggest conference that has happened
In India ever until that time we hired the tag stadium for it which was built for the Commonwealth Games we couldn’t cover 4,000 seats you know unlike in the first conference ever where we could cover 300 so yeah so we did that conference it was a mindblowing
Success again audience wise but not in any other way so financially it was a blunder we were a team of nine people by then after that conference we sort of got everybody together and we said we have no money to pay salaries anymore if anybody wants they can stay and we’re
Going to release these talks online because it’s the job’s not done until we do that and we started releasing these stocks online I remember some people who stayed some for much lesser salaries and we started releasing these stocks online two of my very close friends came in to
Help these stock started doing well the bunk was about to be released babita Kumari had given a talk that was the first talk I think that did well at this conference there was also and then we had did well then we had for first time ever Jo St was doing
Well and this is when the understanding started happening started after this disaster of this conference financially we we started questioning and that is when almost three years after random violence Supra and I reconnected with the reason why we had even started Jo which was to unlock human potential and started like
Connecting the dots and we really said what the hell are we doing we have to be vernacular otherwise this makes no sense and that’s when we first started focusing aggressively on Hindi otherwise English that is not vacular vernacular is when the text is dagar you know and
That’s what we started doing and that’s when Jo really happened so yeah 2018 I would say is when all of that happened which is just two years ago so if I say there were three years of random violence and three years of work at Jos
Until now what do you mean when you say the video was doing well like what how many views and before that how many views were you getting like I actually recently found the screenshot of a website where there were 114 visitors right now how Google analytics shows you
Right now there were 114 on it and I thought that was a massive deal you know I actually took a photo and put it on Facebook but but was doing well so until that time we used to do about 40,000 views a month you know and I used to actually
Tell people you know we do 40,000 views a month you know it’s really big deal but obviously I knew it wasn’t a babita Kumari video did one lakh views in a very very short span of time and that was like fantastically well I remember when we reached 50,000 subscribers on
The channel which was I think in 2018 in 2018 we reached 50,000 sub we actually cut a cake and make a made a big deal out of it uh looking back it must have been so embarrassing sub running something three or four years you’re still celebrating I don’t
Know why somebody didn’t tell us or demotivate US saying that you all are idiots stop doing what you’re doing um a few people did say that but you know you never s s sort of took that into heat yeah that’s what it was so now your videos start doing well on YouTube how
Did that become a business I mean did it become a business through the ad revenue on YouTube or what like you know how did it become monetizable yeah so once we knew that the talks are doing well online we knew that we can build something out of this uh so YouTube
Revenue was never enough it’s still today is not enough also to build a real business out of so if a single person is running a YouTube channel like it’s a single person company or two three people company then you can make money out of YouTube otherwise YouTube will
You cannot even survive on YouTube let don’t make money from it at least in India uh because of the low Revenue Per View what we started doing at that time is finding Partnerships with organizations making partnership organization something like brand partnership it was very very hard to do
This um but when we were raising money for leap we had reached out to Facebook to work with them and Facebook had this agenda of promoting entrepreneurship in the country uh getting people jobs and making us a job make making job creators um and we fit very well into that we
Were also this young start up hustling um and so after leap for for leap they were not able to support but after leap they asked us if we can go across the country and do conferences very much like the Jo talks conferences and promote entrepreneurship in the country
And and we started doing that and that’s how we started doing a first Revenue doing our first brand partnership so Facebook was our first brand partnership and from there it went on to a lot of other work uh the Facebook work increasing and us meeting a lot of other organizations and continuously
Increasing that work so I think that’s when it became a real business give me more examples of brand Partnerships Facebook so I understand they have a certain agenda and so they give you money to achieve that agenda what what was the use case for other brands to work with
You so I think we we worked with Benetton where Benetton also had a similar agenda where they were saying that uh equality uh between genders um and we had a lot of stories that depicted this so they wanted us to do a couple of conferences and share a lot of
Stories we did that benon was also one of the early early ones and at that time your costs are so low right that even just these two Partnerships got us through then uh came ITC where ITC also had women related campaign they wanted to do which was about not compromising
Uh so we had Partnerships with these colleges across the country we probably still have one of the highest distribution within colleges uh in terms of partnership so almost I think about 1,000 to 2,000 colleges now and they wanted to reach colleges and talk about these stories and talk about women
Rights and equality and he started doing that with ITC and then other brands kept coming with similar requirements and we working with them so so so we work a lot with swiigy now we we we work Google now and things like that what is uh the benefit for swiggy like what are they
Getting out of it or what is Google getting out of it what we doing so so one of the toughest things for swiigy is to recruit their their delivery Executives because that is one of the highest cost for them in their operations and our target audience is literally so we started helping sui
Higher this is part of a Jo jobs vertical that we had started and similarly for Google Google is launching Google jobs and we supporting Google to promote that and to build awareness for that so none of this is ADD Revenue we did a lot of work with un as well un
Wanted wanted the youth to talk about poverty and wanted to create a narrative and we did that with un we also work with un women and ILO and a bunch of other un agencies and all of our brand Partnerships is with organizations or departments within those organizations
That have alignment in the work that we are doing or in the mission that we have okay so if I was to summarize your sources of revenue uh one source of revenue for you is YouTube advertising which you said is a small percentage of contribution from there uh the other
Source of Revenue for you is uh like a sponsored event like what you did with beneton for example uh or for Facebook uh the third source of Revenue is where you are uh doing some sort of branded content to generate leads like what you’re doing with swiggy and
Google right or also any kind of data collection so any kind of branded partnership on any kind of program that may be online or offline so it’s not necessarily branded content only uh so all kind of brand Partnerships how do you you collect data then I
Mean so so we we have over um I think about I think we do over about 70 80 million views a month now um so that’s a very large data set to collect any kind of data from how how do those views translate into leads for swiggy and
Google so so in a lot of our campaigns there’s a comment with a link there and people can go on that link fill in the information and that leads to any traditional way that any data is collected similar to that yeah so because Jo is suggesting something it
Comes with a certain degree of trust and reliability of information which is basically what uh for example sui gets from us so in a way this I think is called native advertising right in some ways some ways yes I mean it’s not aggressively like what Native advertising traditionally is but
Something like that a four source of Revenue is your skills which is is uh what the focus of the organization is right now and something we’re building out uh tell me more about your skills so here was the thought right so unlock human potential happens how uh so if you
Look at the life of someone let’s say somebody who went to Harvard and somebody with the potential to go to Harvard but could not go to Harvard right ended up becoming so let’s say somebody was born to a security guard when he turned 25 and and and when the
Guy who was born to a different family turn 25 the output was completely different because the nurturing that that happened and start looking at what are the things that made it Different in the first 25 years and one of the massive differences was access to role models which happened through Jo talks which is what Jo talks as a product so for India it wasn’t inspiring talks it was to give rural youth access to role models the second thing that one
Of the other very big differences something that for example I got because of my dad and my mom and my family uh and my ecosystem that for example my friend who was a cyclist who had the same probably much more potential than me but did not get was access to
Learning certain kind of things that put me in a very unfair advantage to do well in life so for example I could speak in English fluently because my mom forced me to read and my dad forced me to meet me to read and to talk in English um and
And because my mom knew English already then I learned how to use the computer because my dad was always very enterprising about the internet or the computer and he showed me the computer when we first bought it and because he was Doctor he had it in his Clinic you
Know because that’s how they made reports so I used to go to his office and use it there uh and somehow you know make the format for his report so I had used probably Microsoft Word before anybody was using Microsoft Word now these are massive unfair advantages that
Are so easy to replicate and even today a security guard son doesn’t know how to use Excel it is disgusting that we have made no progress in 20 years years the objective behind your skills was that what are the things that for example I learned in my life that are intangible
That are not hardcore education they are not trigonometry taught because of education system in a school but they’re intangible that I learned because of my ecosystem those can be replicate and teach to people through the medium of the mobile phone and Jo skills is simply
An app where you can learn a lot of these skills and you can learn them at extremely low prices something around the pr price of a mobile phone recharge so around 2 300 rupees and you can learn all these what are some of the skills so there are some skills platform that are
Hardcore Skilling platforms we don’t want to become that uh we just want to remain to things that are probably even intangible and something that other hardcore large skill platforms may not even consider worthy of getting into simply because very tough to make money from them so some things are obvious
Here like English and computers then comes financial literacy interview tips and things like like that because so much content is available in Internet very tough to make money from it nobody’s aggressively focusing on it the information is all over the place and and doesn’t give high quality information like for example what you
And I probably received because of our ecosystem how to make a CV so Leadership Lessons From the bhagat Gita is something that my grandmother taught me how to talk to anyone right so how to have confidence in speaking and how to how to not be shy and things like that
Very very intangible skills that others may not consider worth doing because you can’t make money from them and we are looking at aggressively growing uh talks the talks business we now in 11 countries eight countries going to 11 countries with the talks product so talks product is essentially sponsored
Events talks is YouTube uh Jo talks the videos that go up online yeah we take we’re taking these two countries across the world mainly there are three sources right one is uh let’s say branded partnership so we don’t do any kind of Hardcore sponsorships so everything is a brand partnership there’s not exactly
Like a sponsorship then is YouTube and then is skills if you leave skills aside uh we do almost 90% from Brand Partnerships and 10% from from YouTube and skills is very very new and what has the traction been for skills so far do you see it becoming like a like you know
A multi-million dollar kind of a business given the low ticket size of it absolutely but I think one of the reasons that others are not doing lower ticket sizes is because it’s very tough to run a business on 300 per transaction you know where the lifetime value is
Let’s say under 1,000 rupees incredibly hard to cover even customer acquisition prices in that the goal is not to become a billion dollar business the goal is to unlock human potential so um we may have to become for that reason uh and it may be something that happens on the path we
See this becoming extremely large yes can this do mult multi-million dollar Revenue yes is it on the path to do so probably I can’t say for sure right now but uh what we’re very very focused on is looking at a person who can do drastically better in his life but is
Not doing because he doesn’t know how to speak in English doesn’t know computers is financially illiterate and has no values and principles that are required to do well okay and how are the roles split between you and supria like what do you look after and what does he look
After so it depends time to time they keep on changing with whatever is the most urgent thing um so if we look at right now supria mostly does all the revenue and I mostly do all the execution of the talks some words of wisdom for our young listeners so here
Is the case right most people start a company and that’s fantastic thing to do but it has to be started according to me because of a mission you have to have a mission a wrong that you want to write Because unless you want that it is incredibly
Hard to win incredibly hard to be successful because it is so tough this path we only hear of the one in 10 stories or actually one in 50 stories that makes it those 49 other stories are just lost opportunities they can also win one of the reason that I believe
It’s 150 or 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 whatever that one out of his is because that one guy worked really really hard and somehow his business made sense for the others they could have also sustained and figur it out over time but to do
That uh this Elon Musk interview and he explains it as you know it’s like you’re eating Nails you put nails into your mouth and now you’re chewing them you’re eating the nails it pains that much so unless you have a mission a right a wrong that you want to write a sense of
Purpose behind what you’re doing you will stop chewing them you need to get through that phase of that extreme pain and continuous pivoting most people will not get through that and money is not at all the reason for failure money is not at all the reason there just wasn’t
Enough reason to continue uh you can’t have have that so do not get up and start up like go explore find a wrong that you have to write uh find a problem with the world that you can’t sleep because of something like find something that you can be loyal to more than your
Own company I actually say this you know that my loyalty is not to Jo my loyalty is to unlocking human potential first to unlocking human potential um and and not not is there’s no long-term there’s no power in that cont it’s just it’s just so loose and lousy
Um so so so so if you have to get through those insanely hard days like like you know like if like people care so much about Elon Musk but they don’t care so much about the fact that all he cares about is to make humans a multiplanetary species that that’s it
Like every way for him to decide what to do is Will speed up my goal or slow down my goal so so where the hell is your mission and find that mission so that was the fascinating journey of from the village of Mundy to the
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