Ep781: Vivek Raina – Nobody Can Beat You at What You’re Good At

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risks but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen I am on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives and I want to thank all my listeners from New Delhi for joining today. Fellow risk takers this is your words podcast host Andrew Stotz from East Arts Academy, and I'm here with featured guest Vivek Raina. Vivek, are you ready to join the mission?

Vivek Raina 00:36
Yeah, yeah, I'm enjoying taking risks. I can assure you and your listeners that if you don't take risks, you're not going to reach anywhere. Yeah. For example, what I am trying to do or help and do is give Internet access to underprivileged Indians. And you know, in India 70% of people living in urban India, live in places which are not properly structured, live in places which don't have proper designs or proper plans. So structured, proper telecoms, telcos cannot bring internet there. They don't know how to pull wires in such areas, because the cluttered areas, no plans, no designs, and the big companies, they don't know how to do cabling in such areas, because we're talking about bringing physical wire engineering household. Yeah. And that's where I come in, this was my risk. And then these people need to be connected to internet highway, they need to be provided world class broadband service, and we need to unlock their potential to the economy. You see, these people don't have same school for the children as people in other areas. You don't have same clubs in LA same sports facilities. But guess what internet is saying? Broadband is saying, once you connect them to internet, they are at par with the rest of the world, and they can unleash your talent on the world. And today, I'm happy to say because of this risks that I took, we have 1 million households connected in such areas with our internet service. And, and yeah, they are unleashing themselves to the world as they say, that's incredible.

Andrew Stotz 02:13
I mean, I'm on a mission to help a million people reduce risk in their life, but you already have helped a million people. So well done. And that's the beauty of capitalism. Let me introduce you to the audience just for those that haven't met or heard of Vivec. He's a seasoned veteran with over two decades of experience in the broadband industry. As a CEO and co founder of excite tell he leads the mission to connect Bharat propelling the company to the top three ISPs in India. A remarkable feat in just eight years, with a million subscribers spanning 55 cities. Vivex leadership has revolutionized lives through pioneering unlimited internet, broadband VBAC. Take a minute and tell us about the unique value that you are bringing to this wonderful world.

Vivek Raina 03:00
In your description of what I'm doing, you use the word Bharat and your audience would not be knowing what that means Bharat Okay. Bharat is that unstructured India for us? You know, when you say India, it is the India that is reasonable structure done properly planned and executed a finance bar is something which nobody looks at it is the back alley, nobody looks at. It's the back alley, you know, everybody forgot about is the back end is evolving on its own. Yeah. And yet 70% of urban Indians live there. And our mission, as I said, in my introduction, is to connect these Indians who have been left behind in this development train, to bring them on par with the world to bring them on par with the rest of the Indians and unleash the talent as I said, Yeah. So how do we do that? We use local resources. So you do local partnerships. From the community, we bring in a partner who invests in the network, local last mile network in the area, and then maintains it for us while as we do all the backend, we'll do all the technical stuff, we create packages, we bring fiber up to their premises. And the last mile is done by this partner. You know, it's like an oversized version of broadband. For example, in the Daly City alone, we have seven research partners, investing in last mile cable in their area and maintaining last mile cable in their area for us. How do

Andrew Stotz 04:33
you how do you compensate them?

Vivek Raina 04:35
Your revenue share clear revenue share.

Andrew Stotz 04:39
They have ongoing so they haven't they have an incentive to keep that network running to keep everything going, that somebody's got a problem, get out there and fix it.

Vivek Raina 04:48
Exactly. Now, it's easier said than done in groups when we talk about 700 partners with seven different backgrounds and I said this is Barack, these are not really highly educated people, you know, so A lot of trainings need to be done and not straining, a lot of processes need to be created. But hey, we're humans, we like to wind it processes off and on, then a lot of it has to be put in a lot of systems and software's have to be put in to bind these partners to the mothership of excited, and to create a flawless seamless experience of customers, because you cannot have seven the types of experiences haven't replaces Yeah, because even they have one uniform experience. And that's the title experience we want to create for that a lot of it has gone into the system. And and and these partners are bound to cycle through these IT systems for the customer doesn't matter. He customer buys stuff from excitable, you know, buys in Excel package. All the customer touch points are managed by Scytl, customer service payment, everything that makes sense. Well, as far as the backend, investing in the costliest part of the network 70% of all capex that goes through business is in the last mile, for which we have partners. So that's how we have done it. We are a small company, we have invested, let's say in total 20 million in this business till now, the company's worth 200 million. Yeah. Just different scale to one to 20 20 million, 1 million users. Yeah. It's unimaginable in traditional sense. And you're talking about Bill bringing physical wire, it's not it's not mobile. Just mind you, when you just put a tower lights up, you bring a physical fiber to each and every house will put a box around them inside the homes, and yet 20 million, we have been able to do it because we leveraged expertise of this person, this businessman who is embedded in the ecosystem of urban India. It's not disturbing actually, he's everywhere. This cable operator, these cable operators have been everywhere around the globe. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 06:55
Is that different from the way it was done before and the way your competitors did it? In the past? They tried to do it all themselves, or did they were partners?

Vivek Raina 07:02
You got it right? The competitors were usually big, massive 10 goals. And when I say massive these are really massive guys we're talking about Mukesh Ambani reliance, reliance, third, fourth richest in the world, Matthew. So he has a arm, which does telco business, then there is yet another master group. But these guys really focused on structured part of India, because it's easy to do there because they were doing everything directly. For example, DHL started wildland urban business in Delhi, in 2004. And when we started in 2015, they covered just 25% of dairy. They didn't go beyond it, because why It's just unimaginable to go to such areas and provide broadband. They say, hey, yeah, how would we maintain the wire? And is there really a market for this thing? In such areas? Yeah. At my past life, I was working with such a telco. And the first thing you wanted to do when you went to such areas is to see laptop penetration in the area before you rolled over network. But hey, it has changed. You don't need a laptop to thumbs up to let your mobile phone is enough. And everybody in the city has a mobile phone. It doesn't there's no there's no human being without a mobile phone in any part of India now. Yeah. So so so so you consume content. And also what has changed is what you do on internet. You see a decade back or two decades back, all you did was productivity enhancement on internet because the speeds were too low is like one Mbps What will you do on Mbps? will check your mail, reply, some actual work, do some surfing on the web, probably go to Yahoo Messenger or something and do some chatting. But that's it. There's no real value for masses in it. But now it's primary driver of entertainment in the household. You know, you watch your videos, Ott, YouTube, anything all in telemetry driven by wireline broadband. And that's what has changed. And you know what, everybody needs entertainment, whether they're rich or poor or middle class, everybody wants to be entertainment entertained after coming from my hard day of work. Yeah. And therefore everybody is a buyer of wireless broadband and this has changed drastically which they didn't get initially. Yeah. So so so and we took it on to sort of 14 when we started to do when we started. We said we are going to push it as a primary driver entertainment. We started with 20 mbps speed when delivered one Mbps. Why? Because we want to drive content weaving on internet. And in the first year so we are understanding users in the city.

Andrew Stotz 09:43
It's amazing. I remember back in 2012 when I was an analyst in the stock market, I was looking at companies that one was a broadband company in Thailand that had the that was focusing on the upcountry area, the rural area and they were just knocking it out of the park there and they were expanding fantastically well. And then they came to Bangkok. And I asked the owner, you know, how did you expand so quickly, he said, knock doors. He said, We just had our people out knocking on doors everywhere in every village, every place we could get. And then as soon as they came to Bangkok, I immediately use them. And I've used them and they've been pretty flawless. And so I can, and I, you know, see the value, I feel the value. And like you said, once you get the strong broadband internet, there's all kinds of things that you can do like this podcast.

Vivek Raina 10:32
Exactly. Exactly. And going by that knocking doors, we have around two and a half 1000 people knocking doors around the country right now. And selling broadband. That's how we sell. But knocking doors. Yeah, fantastic.

Andrew Stotz 10:45
Well, it's a great, it's great to learn a little bit about what you're doing. And now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thing you will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it and then tell us your story.

Vivek Raina 11:00
Yeah, okay. So two to three years into working. I mean, after doing my MBA, I started working in broadband company, my first job somehow I stumbled upon was broadband company called Hathaway. And within two years, I understood, it's stupid to work for somebody. It's totally stupid, if you're smart. So why you can penalized for stuff you don't. You've not done, you know, for example, you're part of a team and team makes the mistake, somebody in the team has mistakes, the whole team gets penalized. Your boss makes a mistake, you get penalized, the board makes wrong decisions, you still get penalized. You're not in control of your destiny, and you don't know what to do. And then obviously, you will be always in this cycle of slow upgrades, because you get a hike every year, when you slowly upgrade to next year of motorcycle, then a small car and a big. You want to get over with it this upgrade and do stuff that you want to do that you like to do that you're passionate about doing. And not not the slow upgrades that a job gives you. And yeah, so within two years, I decided that there's no way I'm going to work for these corporations. And I'll do something on my own. But I'm talking about 2001. When I started working, and to the four, I realized I need to change. But at the time, there's no ecosystem of the angel investors didn't exist. I mean, Silicon Valley was just coming up in India, there was no such concept of startups. And obviously they would just, you know, honor your experience, you should have been experienced 20 years experience and then they would miss money on us, which we just do. Whatever. Yeah. You don't Zepto guys, there's a company in India called Zepto, which was founded by two dropouts, college dropouts. They're like 20 and 21. Now 21, and two, now they're both worth 3 billion each company is worth 9 billion. This was never imaginable. In my time, you didn't do that. Yeah. So this hippie, I tried running around, trying to show my ideas to people, okay, they some of them were really bad, just okay, fine, we'll give you some salary to work on are some incentives. It's stupid, leaving my job in a corporation for a salary. So somehow it didn't work out. It took me 10 years, 10 years to convince somebody to invest money on me to start this. Yeah. And again, these were not from Indian. So Europeans, we were from Bulgaria. I met them in 2009 10. And we met we exchanged notes. And then they had already done this, they had already started a company in Bulgaria and sold off the device and they were in India scouting for opportunities. And somehow we met because I was meeting everybody I could, while working in the corporation, all the time and wasting my time. So and that's how I met them. But again, after meeting them, it took me three years three, four years to convince them to start somewhere to start this company. And finally we started into some 14 is when we decided we were going and first investment came. So I consider these 1020 years that I spent in you know, making this foundation as my worst punishment as the end pessimist but also it's worse because I could have done this 10 years back and I would have been a billionaire by now. And, and best also because had I not gone through gone through that game grind and learned what I learned, you know, the life it teaches you from these failures, that who you are ultimately and then perhaps this also would have not been possible. Yeah. So so so so this is my worst and best wisdom at the same time. The other thing that your listeners might like to understand is the fact that no one job working for somebody is fragile. You know what's fragile, fragile is something breaks when you put stress on it. Yeah, it's simple pleasure. Yeah. There's no bigger corporations are not so fragile. If you work for a big corporation or government, it's not so fragile, fine, understood, given, it becomes robust, it becomes more robust. But robust is not opposed to fragile. Yeah. Something when you put stress on it, it breaks that fragile, then there should be a word for something when you put stress on it, and it improves. Yeah, and that's anti fragile. I'm not I'm not coining the term Nicholas Taleb is already calling just, for example, your muscles, you put stress on them, what happens? The muscles grow, they don't break the grow. The human body human beings are biologically anti fragile. But when a child is born, you put vaccines now what are the next vaccines are infection, small doses of infection, body reacts? and the EU developed immunity. Yeah, yeah, human beings by design are anti fragile. They react to environment stressors. Therefore, this 12 years of stress on my body probably improved me to such an extent that I can now do what I'm doing. Yeah. Entrepreneurship, by design is anti fragile. Every failure teaches you something every failure, by every failure, you learn something and you become a better version of yourself. Yep, in a job, if you fail, you go down, you're dead. In entrepreneurship, every failure teaches you something and makes you stronger, makes you better in doing what you're doing. So therefore, if you're still working for somebody, take my word for it. It's not worth it. Do something you're passionate about. Nobody can beat you at what you're good at. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 16:47
You know, V back, I was just You made me think of a conversation I had with my mother this morning. She lives with me here in Bangkok. She's 85 years old. And she was pretty tough when I was young, and she made me you know, suffer the consequences of my bad behavior. And I was telling my story to someone in front of her and she listened to it. And then this morning, she said to me, may I feel bad that maybe I was too tough on you? And I said, there's two things that you need to think about in this case, mom, the first one is, you did the best that you could with what you knew at the time. That's number one. Number two, is, look at me now. I'm stronger, because you were tougher. And it made me think about the anti fragile thing that you're talking about, which I think and it also made me think that, you know, one of the challenges when you're young, and you're going through this, you know, excitement is that. It's hard to, it's hard to get that momentum, it's hard to find the right people to invest. It's hard to articulate the idea. It's hard to see the idea sometimes. So when we look back, we say I wish I could have figured it out faster. But that's where I'm kind of curious. Like, what would be your advice or your idea for a young person that was in your that's currently in your situation? They have energy, they have excitement they want to get out? But you know, how does how, what advice would you give them to make sure that they don't have to suffer for 10 years or so in the wilderness?

Vivek Raina 18:22
Yep. So there's one there luckier than me, because there is an ecosystem already out there. We know what it knows what startups are. There is a whole network of startups and investors, angel investors, investors is the holy customers ready? So first and foremost, they want to be where startups are. They want to be in places where there this ecosystem exists. If they are at wrong places, the first thing if they're living in a village, still, it's not going to happen there. Yeah, believe me, it's not going to happen there. They're gonna waste the time that they need to be where, where the action is, that's first thing. Second, the most important thing is to decide what you want to do. That's very important for everything in life. It's important for who you want to be, who's going to be your life partner, who is going to be your business partner, choosing what you want to do, choosing who you want to be, should be taken more seriously. And you should spend most time there. Why? Because this is like once in a lifetime shot. If you got it wrong. You lose many, many, many years in it. Yeah. So choose very carefully, and you want to choose stuff what you're good at naturally. Why? Because nobody can beat Andrew at doing this podcast. There's nobody like him. He's a unique person. Yeah. So you cannot change him challenge Andrew in being Andrew. So that's not possible. So you want to be doing what you're naturally good at because if you're doing something which can be taught in a university, they'll reduce hundreds and 1000s more like you and you will be beat in that game. Yeah, no use doing that stuff, do what you're naturally good at. Because if somebody tries to compete with you, they will be working, you will be enjoying. Yeah, because that's what you do. That's who you are. So that's very important. Choose what you like doing. And the other thing is failures. Again, what you were saying and you initially there will be failures, there will be naysayers, people, more often than not, will put you down. They'll say, Ah, it's not doable. Come on this is just don't listen, listen to your own inner self. If you're good at it, you see a problem that you can solve, you have a solution for the problem. And the problem can be made with the business model. Go for it, go for it, steal, beg, borrow, steal, and start a use case. Once you have a pilot, then there'll be people out there, there are millions, hundreds and hundreds of people out there who can find it. If it's a Bible thing. So yeah, two, three advices. As I said, First be where the action is. Don't waste your time. In places where there's no action. Second, do what you're naturally good at doing what you enjoy doing. And third, create a case. Beware of naysayers. Yeah, we are such advisors. For example, when the Henry Ford started his automobile company, somebody people asked him, did you take advice from the people from the Congress? Zoomers say, yeah, the advice I was taking? When I went to people, what do you want to transportation? And asked this question, they said faster horses. Yeah. And I will looking at our in taking advisors, I would still be riding the horses will be no cars. Yeah. So so. So if you're passionate about something, and you know, you're, you're you're there you have an idea, go for it. Don't wait.

Andrew Stotz 21:51
fantastic advice. I was just talking with a young guy who's graduating from university in the US coming back to Thailand. And he was asking me some advice on things. And I just said, You got to be careful asking me because I don't listen to people. And I don't listen, and I don't follow the rules. I believe that I can. Because he asked me, why did you go to Thailand in 1992? And why did you stay and I said, you know, I found a job as a financial analyst in the stock market in Thailand. And every day I went home, I was so happy about what I was doing. I was also teaching and I set up my own business with my best friend, I had so much going on that I was so happy. And I thought, why would I change anything? If I'm doing everything I said, I had one rule in my life. And that was all I asked for is to have a happy day every day. Oh, yeah. And so I want to ask you now for someone that's empowered and excited about what you've shared, what's a resource, or you know, a method or anything that you can help provide them a book or any type of resource to help them do these things to become, you know, successful?

Vivek Raina 23:01
Yeah, I'm okay. It depends on who I'm talking to. If it's somebody who's interested in startups and wants to be successful in business, there are certain foundational texts that they should be reading. Nicholas Taleb is one author they need to read for sure. You know, there is this whole incognito series. It starts with Fooled By Randomness. There's one book or two renders one is anti fragile. The other one is black swan. Yeah, there are there, book parentheses, there are four or five books. If not read them. Drop everything else from your list and read this guy. read these books this year, this is enough for you to start with. That's one thing. It will change your perspective. Completely, completely smile you for business at least. Secondly, if you need to be cognizant of your own biases, how your own mind plays with you and gentlemen, was my favorite and he died, unfortunately, two days back. I mean, last week, I think, and I'm talking about Danny Kahneman. And his thinking fast thinking slow, you need to read. And at the same time, there's gentleman in Silicon Valley, and he's called navall, Ravi Kant, and you need to I mean, he's not in the book called Almanack have already can't go and read that. And once you have read all three people, you will be a much changed person, and you'll be a much better person, not just in business as a human being also you will have we would have improved a lot. I would say start with that. And rest will follow.

Andrew Stotz 24:48
Ladies and gentlemen, there's your homework. We've got to leave. And that's Fooled By Randomness. That's Black Swan and that's anti fragile. We got Dan Daniel Kahneman. And that is Thinking Fast and Slow. And then the final one is the almanac of what his name again? I forgot. No, no, no vol. Rev. Yukon? Yes. That's the only one I haven't read. So I think I got some homework from you. But that's a great list. I'll have a link to all those in the show notes. Last question for you. What? This is my most interesting question for you because you're so full of energy and passion for what you do. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Vivek Raina 25:31
We have to double the user base. It may not happen in 12 months, but 12 months is okay to be hack all that we have taken internally. Let's hope we're able to do it. I

Andrew Stotz 25:43
can't wait to hear from you in a year from now. And we'll celebrate if you're not doubled. You'll be close I'm sure Yeah. Yeah. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And we just got some tips today. As we conclude, be back I want to thank you again for joining our mission and on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Vivek Raina 26:14
My words would be focused on your goal. Look at the leverage inherent in the ecosystem and make your mark in the world. Boom. That's

Andrew Stotz 26:24
a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.