Based on the last 12 years, how do you think the next 12 years will be?
The last 12 years have exceeded my expectations. We had not invested in Zomato yet. We were going to do that in 2010. We had just invested in Policybazaar. This was three years after our listing and the world was about to go into a financial crisis. Lehman collapsed and the economy was in serious distress. So I had not anticipated that we would see this kind of boom in the stock market, start-ups, valuations, investment in start-ups and so much entrepreneurship!
Any prediction I make now for the next 12 years could be 100 times better. Will there be a market crash? We do not know but market corrections come and go but entrepreneurs go on forever.
The entrepreneurs have shown great resilience in the last 12 years and may they continue to do so. Do you think today the entrepreneurs understand the need to have professionals?
First of all, I am a professional too. It is just that I am a founder, Hitesh is a professional too but he is the managing director and co-promoter. We are both professionals and entrepreneurs. The current crop of entrepreneurs are also professionals and that is important. It is enough of them recognise a need to get professionals on board in senior positions of responsibility. At Info Edge there are so many people who were not there at the beginning but they have been there now for a while and they are professional managers who acts as if they are owners.
Zomato and Policybazaar have broad-based management teams with many competent professionals. Increasingly, as companies grow, entrepreneurs realise that they cannot do it on their own. They need people with them and the smart ones do it well and I am happy to say that I have met enough smart entrepreneurs who are doing it very well.
Do you think 12 years from now, we will all be transacting in cryptos?
I am a little bit of a dinosaur. I do not understand crypto so well. I have studied economics in college and I try to recall the paper I did in Delhi University in St Stephens College on money, banking and financial institutions. The sovereign guarantee is an integral part for a currency to have long-term confidence among people. Crypto has no sovereign guarantee. Behind crypto, there is no single nation or central bank and I find it hard to believe crypto currency will continue to enjoy the confidence that it seemingly does right now. But I could be proven wrong.
It would be too hard to imagine a world where we would not be buying real paintings and would be buying all our art as NFTs or non fundable tokens?
Well, stranger things have happened and so I would not rule it out. But I am not entirely comfortable with the crypto concept.
Do you think 12 years from now, India will have an answer to Amazon or a Tesla?
It is unlikely in the case of these two specific companies. But, there are a lot of companies working on uniquely Indian problems and are coming out with uniquely Indian solutions. Look at
, look at financial inclusion. India is way ahead of the West in many ways. Look at making for Bharat, making for rural India, making for small town India. There are a number of entrepreneurs doing it and we have invested in a few. There will be enough large valuable companies which are uniquely Indian that will be solving big problems at scale.
But do you think 12 years from now, we can have the equivalent of an Indian FAANG?
These large companies become large because of the size of the economy they serve or they grow in. So American companies are really large. The Chinese economy is large and so Chinese companies are really large. European companies in the digital tech world are not so large and there are not so many of them. So if the Indian economy grows fast, you will find many large valuable companies coming out of India.
So to some extent, I would say we are indexed to the size of the Indian economy and it is important to understand that. We cannot get away from that. We are joined at the hip with the Indian economy.
12 years from now, where is the Indian economy headed? Could this be India’s decade?
We have to get a few things right. Covid has set us back. We have to recover from it well and nicely. We have to vaccinate everybody. We have to repeat the vaccines every year, should they be required to be repeated, which right now it looks like they will be and this is something which is of some concern. But with good execution and planning, we should be able to overcome that. Having said that, beyond that can we grow at 7-8-9% a year every year on the average for the next 10 years? That is to be seen.
