AI Founders Podcast

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the SaaS Universe Podcast today. Joseph Abraham, founder and CEO of SaaS Industry and Uber Saga has a one on one with Rahul Raj, founder and CEO of Flow Biz. Floobits is a new bank backed by renowned investors. Which utilizes mobile first. Solutions and is a completely new way of doing business for small and medium enterprises with creative use of technology. Joseph walks through Rahul 's entrepreneurial journey starting from his IIT days to eventually becoming a seasoned entrepreneur and founding filberts hope you guys. Enjoyed the show.

Hi Rahul. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today on our safe on this podcast and so nice to her. For you, I mean very delighted to actually host somebody from a from a place I grew up, you know, and and and you refer some amazing memories as well, and I'm I'm very intrigued by the journey that you've taken because you know, usually people don't build new banking for SMB, 's. And so it's it's interesting to know that you're building. Something like that. And excited to know more about you. Thanks for joining. Come today.

I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having. Me I think. You know what we are doing definitely is challenging, but that is where we get our biggest kicks from, so I think I'm really excited about what we are doing. Also and obviously thankful for the opportunity to speak with you and at least get some assistance in. Spreading that message so you know if you are trying to do good work then any assistance and help that can amplify that message is more than welcome. So glad. To be here.

Rahul, so let's let's get started and I want to go straight. You know cut. To the chase and. Understand and hear about the origin of of what you're doing with slow biz and how did it all start? And and and who? What are you trying to build right now? So if you can just. Take us through that whole journey.

OK, I'll break that into 2 parts. What we are doing itself is a section, and here is a section of. Its own. Simple upbringing. Born and brought up in Patna which is the capital of Bihar. We just discussed we share our roots. Born to a family where Mom is a housewife. And that is a senior retired bank. Who used to be a civil services aspirant himself before banking was something that he continued to you know, pursue and get deeper and deeper into I always like. Means you know so studied in the first attempt for engineering exams did not qualify. The second attempt qualify. G and fortunately landed at IIT Kharagpur which was the owner. And the largest of the IT system. And I also got enrolled into a course which was mathematics and computing, so quite a quite a relevant stream. That way, if you haven't been able to secure a rank that gets you a tech or an Mtech computer science degree in one of the Iits, so that really nice degree to also get attached to. Just the way everybody, at least in the eastern part, and probably the entire middle class of the country thinks. Like your scrapped J, the expectation is to complete the course land. A high paying job I come. From a family where? All of my relatives, including all of the young uncles and aunts both on maternal and paternal side. They have all been either government servants or have been in the corporate industry, but with a stable job. So nobody has done any business in the network that I was part. Fortunately for me, and quite interestingly, in my first year 2 things happened one some of my 3rd year seniors from the hostel, which at it Cage. We call halls of residence, so my hall of residence. Some of the seniors that I was, you know, fortunate enough to be friendly with. They were trying to set up and scale up at tech business and I was hired first intern so that was 0.1. The second point was as extracurriculars go. To interview with a bunch of societies in the college. I interviewed with a bunch of them, but ultimately ended up at the entrepreneurship cell of IIT Kharagpur. These 2 actually opened my opened my world to gaining these technical skill sets which otherwise the society believes are going to be helpful in landing a high paying job. But these are the same skill sets that otherwise are very tiny fraction of that population is leveraging to set up technology. So it just flipped all my preconceived notions. It was also the time when I went to IIT with, you know, a Symbian phone and I saw right in front of Maine. The entire explosion of Android, the deep market penetration and emergence of e-commerce food delivery. Social commerce or, let's say social media, a bunch of these things began to happen right in front of my eyes. Which is what led me to set up Kharagpur. 's first online food delivery business. Actually, it was called zaika within the campus and then outside the campus. All the eateries and restaurants with the largest educated population or tech savvy population that we had given the character is a really small town a. Lot of the. Customers have decided within the campus. And since it is a large IIT campus, we're talking about roughly 10,000 people there, including all staff, professors, all students, undergrad post grad, and doctor at all of that. So set up the karuppur you know food delivery business, raise some grant money from Ministry of MSME as well. But ultimately not. You know, sustain that business even though we tried to pilot in Hyderabad as part of our you know summer internship. So we skipped that. Actually get to Hyderabad to build that, but by then you already had food, pandas, tomato, tiny owl, swiggy, Uber eats, Ola foods and a bunch of regional players. As well, it was. Also quite clear that it's a very operations intensive. Business so me and my co-founder actually decided that, you know we'll continue to run this in Kharagpur will also sit for placement and then wrap this up because this is not going. So did that got placed on day 1I, joined in shots, which is a new summary app based in Noida? I spent about 3 months there, but you know had to take an exit because that was a very specific industry with a very specific. Fit and I could not see too much of a long term career opportunity with the organization, so I quit and moved to Bombay, which is where my family was also there. Given that my dad was placed as a location in the Central Office of Union Bank. Of India where? He was working. So he was.

Also in my.

My family was there. I quit, moved to Bombay. I joined this startup called Bizone Go, which used to be packaging, packaging, materials, procurement marketplace. They had work of suppliers who could sell you corrugated boxes, bubble wraps and stuff like. That, and at the other end. They've got buyers who are looking at procuring these packaging materials for their retail, business or wholesale business and. Stuff like that. So I joined the team as their first product manager. This is where I met my Co founders Aditya and Rakesh. Aditya had been with Bisono for over a year before I joined and Rakesh had joined about. 23 months before I. Aditya and Rakesh. Also have had similar trajectories, Aditya, Bits Pilani grad native of Mumbai. Rakesh is an IT Delhi grad and native of Jaipur. In fact, a village close to Jaipur, both of them have had failed startup journeys of their own in the past before they joined. The 3 of us over lunch breaks, dinners and drinks began chatting about startups and stuff like that and you know we kept a close tab on what was going on in the startup market. Coming from similar backgrounds also in terms of engineering and product inclinations, our frequencies matched quite a bit. Infrequently also, the 3 of us had been following the Bitcoin and blockchain. Space since university. So in December of 2016 we began to put in whatever. Little money he had saved into crypto ask. And began trading so the exchanges were all available outside the country. There wasn't any exchange in India. You could get your hands on Bitcoin or an ether, but you know you could not really participate in ICOS or trade in other altcoins that are getting minted and stuff like that. So after spending some time with the. Chain idea you know, like spending some time in the ecosystem, we tried our hands on a couple of pet projects, participated in a couple of hacker phones that were organized. You know, and after trading with some of these old coins and icos and stuff like that, we identified that there is a massive opportunity but a narrow window to set up something of that quality and caliber in India as well. Because we are sure that there are communities out there looking at an alternative, but it just doesn't exist. We were already. Ground groups, WhatsApp groups, Facebook conversations and whatnot where the people were talking about the need for an exchange, but none to be found. So 3 of us quit our jobs in a span of 10 days or so. Another member from Django, you know, joined us. 4 of us, you know we put our blood, sweat, heart and money and time and everything into building an exchange that I'm proud of because we built. Everything from scratch, every single line of code we wrote from scratch. We designed the entire interface from scratch and launched COINEX in August 2017, which became India 's first open order book multicurrency fully KYC compliant exchange. In a span of 4 to 5 months, we grew to become the largest. In December 2017, we were doing more than 2 $65,000,000 of daily trade volume and for currencies, you know, we were globally top 5 feared to crypto exchanges, but that really didn't last long because in April 20, 18 the RBI came out with the directive that blocked. All formal banking channels, from dealing in crypto trades so that resulted in 2 notices. Transactions getting blocked, accounts getting closed and stuff like that. So we pivoted to, you know, peer to peer and crypto to crypto. Models, but ultimately identified that in absence of banking support, this business is not going to be that sustainable and lucrative. It really requires that banking support and infrastructure to build a legitimate crypto trading platform and a pure play exchange business. So you know what we were left with was, you know, to measure trade offs and look at what we. Could do next. Obviously the default is to wind everything up, but we didn't want to do that. Given that we had assembled a Rockstar team, we had some experience. We had some capital backing of our investors. So we contemplated whether we could take the exchange abroad and launch in some other market or build something else in the blockchain space. Toyed with those ideas for a couple of months, but then ultimately decided that we understand the India consumer best we are, you know, connected to connected to our routes to a large degree and everybody else is looking at India is the hottest economy to invest in or build products for. And here we are. Looking at opportunities elsewhere while opportunity actually exists within our homeland. So what we did in the first 6 months of 2019 was to layout the entire syntech landscape of the country. The reason why we chose Fintech is because given that we were working in the blockchain space and treating an alternative asset class, we were already exposed to banking payment gateway. The translation of traditional financial products into crypto. Products and stuff like that so that inclination and appetite for Fintech was there already because of our history with coins as well? And then the more you research, the more you read and map the trends you see. Syntech is going leaps and bounds and you are seeing all of these developments happen in the country. That promotes the fintech ecosystems. It is quite interesting. And we had laid some principles like it has to be a product first opportunity. We must create a large delta with the technological innovation that we go out and build. It has to have deep impact and it also has to be an opportunity large enough, at least for the 3 founders and the core team that we could dedicate the next decade or so. Solving for this, it need not be a fad. It in fact must not be. Afraid so given all. Of these criteria points, we laid out the Fintech landscape, assessed all opportunities. And then ultimately also looked at assembly side, and that is where we found the white space that we were most excited about. So we decided to build for small businesses and you know, as part of our research we spoke with 1000 plus SMB owners. We spoke with bankers and tech consultants, consumed as many reports as we could. There were recurring themes of pain points that kept on coming up as our research also, and there was staggering facts that actually, you know, pushed us to think deeply about this. We're talking about roughly 1/2 of the entire economy being run by small business. Everybody is aware of these numbers like 30% plus GDP, 40% plus export import activity, 40% plus workforce employment, all contributed by the small business segment and along side you see that more than 80% of these small businesses are operating on pen and paper. While they've already adopted to WhatsApp and Facebook. Why could business not be conducted in a similar fashion? Because on the consumer side, digital transactions or or you know compliance or let's just say accessing tools and products and services they have all found the software. But on the business side, none of that has transpired. So that felt like the white space that we could go after. So we shut down the business in the summer of 2019 and pivoted to flog biz. We moved from Bombay to Bangalore, retained about 85% of the team who travelled with us in an ambiguous environment because we didn't know what we are going to build. But we are going to build. In the SMB space. South, that is, we came to set up. Flow base to be honest. And this is not an accidental set of entrepreneurs identifying an opportunity because they faced a deep pain point. It's not that kind of a. Story it is. Actually, deep research and taking a step back to really assess what opportunity to go after and consciously and experimentative building for that opportunity. So that's 1/2 of. The journey now I can take a pause and begin sharing what we are actually doing at floobits, but you know would love your.

Awesome, so I mean good Raul. I mean I I didn't want to break the flow because I think you're actually preempting all my questions, which I'm happy I mean so I get to talk less. But but but. It's it's nice also in short, like what's what's. Slope is all about. Who is it for, and what problem does it solve?

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Slope is all about who is it for and what problem does it solve.

Yeah, I'll try to keep it short, but will require congruence.

Please yeah, feel free, yeah.

First context that I would like to give you here is that when we talk about small business, the most common mistake that people make is that they paint the entire small business sector. In one colour, but we are talking about a very very wide spectrum. At 1:00 end you have got a Hawker or a or a A. You know chaiwala or a or a pawn shop, and on the other end you are talking about manufacturing outfits that are generating hundreds of crores worth of operating revenue. This entire spectrum is small business, at least from the government definition. But obviously on capturing output that is generating 100 crore plus of turnover versus a part stop. These are just extremes and one solution cannot cater to both of these extremes, so that's one context I wanted to bring about the other context I wanted to bring about is. When you talk about small business, the typical image that you have in your mind is your neighborhood grocery, or kirana shop. That's your SMB, at least. From a visualized you know picture that people will. We have but just look around you. Everything is small business. A salon is a small business. A clinic is a small business. A Courier agency is a small business. A restaurant is a small business. The stores that you visit. They are small business. The garage that you get your auto parts repaired at. That's a small business. The tailoring shop that you go to. That's a small business. So if you look around you. Everything is small business and there are different slices and dices and cuts of this spectrum. So when we began to think about this, you know sector. We actually wanted to build tally on mobile. That is what we began with at flow. The vision at flow, which is to accelerate the growth of small and medium sized businesses with the help of technology and digitization. That's the vision that we are following now. Obviously this vision can have quite different objectives and actionables and manifestations, because that's a very broad mission statement to accelerate. So you know the pain points that I was talking about just a few minutes ago that that came up in our research. The biggest one was access to capital by far everybody needs credit. We're talking about roughly 600 to 650 billion dollars of credit gap that exists even today. So it's a massive massive. The app that people have when it comes to. Access to. The second biggest problem was you know inefficient. Flow the moment you talk about tangible goods. They are all part of supply chains and right from manufacturer up till retailer credit is involved only at the retailer end is where the consumer directly pays upfront and purchases there. Also if you have a good relationship you may still be able to. Get some credit like. Dunga so that kind of thing you can do, which is very ultra short term credit. Also that can happen at the retail end, but otherwise throughout the supply chain there is credit only. At retail is where actual transaction happens up front. So cash flow is a bigger problem here, because you know you have procured stuff on credit. You're supposed to pay back. You are also selling on credit, but if the customer. Doesn't pay you. You have to dip into your savings to actually pay off and maintain the relationship with your supplier. That severely impacts cash flow, so cash will be another big problem. Compliance was another big problem. Dependence on accountants and paper work was another big problem. No visibility to any data. Because everything is segregated among parchments and paper books, was, you know, no reconciliation, no clear visibility and stuff like. So we thought to. Solve for this. Let's build a tally on mobile product because tally is a you know by far the most popular accounting system. But after spending some time there, you know that did not workout and in fact. People were asking us. For a lightweight solution that they could conduct their business operations with. So we build our flagship product, which is called my bill book. In a nutshell, my bill book is a very simple to use GST, invoicing and accounting software and invoicing. As a central. Book you can automate inventory management, payable, receivable tracking, business reporting, compliance and the Ledger updatings and all. Of that And it's just a simple record keeping activity. You are doing it anyway on a pen and paper. If you just begin recording it on an interface that at least is comfortable and easy to digest and understand. You have already solved half the problem, so you know we built my bill book, released the first version in January of 2020, and within 3 months the first lockdown happened. For a large part of the growth also that we have seen in the business has actually been during the pandemic itself, but given that our product actually has found its sweet spot in terms of adoption and I can say that because you know, we have seen some flavor of success on the flow based business as well. We find ourselves at a really. Really interesting, you know. Juncture here in the business. About 70% of our audience is first timer, so they are coming online for the first time from a previous behavior of a physical bill book or a physical red register or pieces of paper coming online for the first time. About specially 70% of our audience. And now we find ourselves at A at a unique, you know. Convergence of different kind of data points. That can form the foundation for a very different type of underwriting. We now have visibility across the accounting data, the financials, the inventory, the buyer, and supplier profile, the depth of their relationships with predictive algorithms. You can map different kinds of behavior. Patterns like you know how they manage arap, how they actually their inventory, how are they treating the opportunities when it comes to lower margin products or higher margin products that they see? And how long the vintage of the. Business is how well do they use. The product you can look. At a variety of data points that can create the foundation for an alternative underwriting. Obviously with full. Data security and privacy systems in place and on a fully anonymized basis. But then you have that aggregate visibility and then you are able to match this up with algorithms and actually. You know, plug in all of the traditional wisdom that exists in banking. We fundamentally that we can actually do a better job at customer satisfaction when it comes to the bouquet of financial services that can work for the growth of these small businesses. And trying to translate and replicate the insane adoption and openness that we have seen on the consumer front to also be presented in an easy to use interface that could help businesses also take that leap of faith for going digital so you know, we went with the software first approach. It didn't go and begin selling a current account. For example, we went and sold software. In fact, it was a free software to be used and we began our entire focus on distribution of the paid product only from early last year.

Rahul, can you just repeat what you just shared this this last 5 seconds because there's some kind of disturbance, yeah?

Sure, we'll do. So. We're just saying that you know, we have seen insane adoption on the consumer front, right? You look at UPI for example. Or look at Aadhaar. The adoption is quite widespread. And we wanted because of the ease of those digital onboarding journeys people find themselves comfortable to even express themselves digitally like that. But that same comfort hasn't been provided to the SMB segment. In fact, we believe that dedicated products, tools and services haven't been designed for this segment. So we wanted to actually bring that same level of delight when it comes to using software to typical SMB day-to-day business operations. Also so we went there first. We didn't want to sell the current account immediately. We wanted to sell software, in fact the. Product was to use. We went mobile first that to Android. And then slowly and progressively kept on building with customer feedback. See one thing that I would like all the listeners to at least spend a moment on is that if you look at our journey, we are a 180 degree flip from building for a very very tech savvy and futuristic audience building for a completely democratized. Future via blockchain. 240 degree field where you are building for a very low tech savvy type of audience in a Tier 2 town in India. Setting up small enterprises and small businesses. Solving for traditional problems like access to capital in the traditional financial services setting. This is absolute opposite so. Where in the coinex business you know market was asking for everything and we were just building for our target audience that you know we ourselves were to be honest. We were the trailer that we were building it for. Here it's a. It's a different approach altogether. The market up to a majority of 80% is not digital. The takes happiness and adoption is low. The openness for going digital. Is low cash dependency in transactions is high and you are pushing a product to actually get them online for the first time and still gain their trust to be able to ultimately build a complete ecosystem. For software, embedded banking and financial services that could all be contextualized for this set of businesses. So it's a different approach, and different business altogether, but I am very happy and proud of where we are today because now, as I said, we look through the amazing set of information that we capture and we can leverage that information to serve this SMB sector with contextualized banking products. And we will be able to bring banking to them rather than them running after banking and continuously hearing a number from the traditional guardians of capital. So we want to be able to, you know, bring banking to them and contextualize this to the actual stage. The business at the business is at, so that's what we are effectively trying to do. Our understanding of the NEO bank that we are trying to build that slope is is to be able to create a complete ecosystem that is driven by a foundation of software layer. But then personalized and tailored banking and financial services that plugs directly into their day-to-day operations and banking comes to them rather than them going to banking.

Awesome, awesome. I mean I I love the use cases that we we had discussed. You know, prior to you know us starting this whole recording. But very interesting question that I have is how did you get your first few customers like how did you adopt and so of course the spectrum of assembly is across the spectrum and as you as you just mentioned, so what's your sweet spot? And how did you? Get, you know the your first few customers, your earlier updates.

I am really glad that you asked this, because I think there is a lot of literature and wisdom on PMF and GTM, and you know how you could. Continuously push the. Palpable bandwidth boundaries of where you are at today in your SaaS journey, but I can tell you that you know the spectrum that I was talking about. This spectrum actually progressively became clear to us. We knew that there is a spectrum, but we didn't know where our sweet spot will ultimately end up being at. Obviously, the first version of the product is in most cases. Incomplete and in some cases even broken. But our. System of customers actually came from. Digital marketing and you know some small budget that you. Gave people are. Searching for some of these things, you began identifying keyword search volume and stuff like that. You begin to tailor your message also appropriately, but we didn't know who is going to find the right. You know, use case, or at least right value from a mobile first billing and accounting. We kept on doing digital marketing. We kept on trying different messaging types also and ultimately and since within a couple of months the lockdown also happened. So we were left. With no other. Option also we had to only digital marketing to acquire customers so we kept on going with small budgets. Digital marketing here and there. The one thing that we accelerated. During the lockdowns was while you were working remote, we accelerated product development and feedback cycles. So got contracted 2 days so you know every day, product and customer support teams and founders and Co team is listening to all kinds of customer feedback and we are currently speaking with the customers directly and the problem that people will expect 10 features. And you know, if one feature doesn't work. Then query itself becomes unusable because you can't do everything on one software, but for one feature you have to go to a different software. So we began to see people not like the product simply because they did not find everything. So the only way to fix that was to continuously keep on acquiring the lowest common denominator of feature requests. And accelerating development so we could begin to serve a bigger and wider audience. So we kept on doing that. And by January of 2021, we were already at, you know, 2 to 2 and a half million registered SMBs on the product that was. Is significant cohort size to give us enough data points to you know, pick and choose to actually make data driven calls? By then we began to form the GST registered segment is using the. Product the best. We began to sort that, you know, a large part of the people who are using the product. Are actually non retail. We began to see that there are some industry verticals where the product is finding its much better adoption compared to others. We began to see that there are some regional pockets where the product is being used much better compared to other pockets. These data. Means, once collected at statistically significant cohort size began to give us a lot of direction and since then we began to focus extensively on distribution of the paid product, because by then we had already done a couple of pricing experiments. So with the product was free and then we established the true sense of PMS when we saw that people would pay and when we saw that people would pay, we began to think about all of those GTM motions where we could begin to extract value. And if we have built something so valuable. And otherwise, in a market that goes with the myth that assemblies will not pay for software. We were able to carve out our niche to actually monetize on SAS. While the entire financial services story and the entire new banking vision continues to be intact. But now after about 2 and a half years of extensively working on distribution of our paid plans on my bill book, we believe. That there is a substantial business to be built on the India Assembly segment purely from software.

Awesome awesome, so in essence. Let's talk a little bit about raising your funds, right? So because there's there's a pivot and there are some funds. And again, you know you, you know something completely different. So how do you go about raising this fund and and was there a particular like is is how? How does your cap? Look, I'm not. Going into details of a cap table, but definitely is it bloated is it? Is it like you know, very, very lean? How does it look like and how did you go about raising raising a capital?

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How does it look like and how did you go about raising raising your capital?

Our most recent fundraise was Series B. You know which we did in our which we did in September last year. We raised $31,000,000 as part of the raise which was led by Sequoia India. In Sequoia. Also the growth team led the round before that. In March of last year. We had announced our Series A, which was led by elevation, formerly SAF Partners, and that was a 10,000,000 series. It was led by elevation Capital. We also count the early stage fund in Southeast Asia called V. Next as our earliest backer. We also have greenoaks capital, which is a large fund based in the US and we have another fund called Think Investments which is also US based that participated in our Series B. Now obviously this ecosystem is small, so introductions make you more introductions. You meet one person. They can open doors for 2 more people and stuff like. That, but I think. But we believe has worked in our fundraisers, at least from, you know, we have now raised in total of 40 to $50,000,000 across coinex and flow base. So in the last 5 years or so, so. One of those things that I personally believe given that I interface with the investors a lot more compared to my. Founders, the thing that I have seen work really well for us is the level of transparency and the level of, you know, connectedness that you can exhibit when it comes to what you are building and who you are building it for. So actually I am very proud of the CAP table that we have because the partners that. We work with. Are you know fully supported? And we can have open dialogue on what is going wrong and right with the business and the reason we are able to do that is because both of us understand coming on the same table that we are solving for the best interest of the company and the product that we are building for. And the kind of customers we are looking to serve. So that way. If you are able to upfront and you know communicate that these are some of the things that we believe are not working, but these are things to be figured out. Help us, you know, identify how to figure this out. That automatically establishes great trust. The other point that I mentioned was connectedness, and you know the ability to be able to articulate what we are doing there. Customer first approach was something that you know all the investors and all our board members love a lot. We anyway are our product team. To be honest we have we have a super solid engineering and product team. In fact, I believe that you know some of the smartest people who are out there working in the startup ecosystem. When it comes to product. And engineering you would find you know at flow. So that's there. That's already our skill set. Even my Co founders are really product heavy. You know it was a product manager and myself. We understand technology to a large degree and. Stuff like that. So that's a skill set that we already have, but building for this audience actually required doing away with your hypothesis and doing away with your biases. In fact, 70% of the hypothesis that you go to the. Assembly sector with. Outdated or invalidated, it will be something entirely New South that iterative way of experimenting. Learning from the feedback and then being able to stay grounded and connected with the customer to be able to solve actually what they really are facing as a pinpoint that is going to be the only way to make this a successful venture. Because you can build. A plethora of features, and if nobody loses them, even the technical complexity that you have been able to solve is practically zero value at.

Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense.

So that was I. Think something that worked with our fundraisers at least.

Awesome awesome. So I'm gonna I'm gonna get to you know the rapid fire round which is like very quick. You know succession of questions now very. Simple thing is that we are far away, but if you answer well I will ensure that I. I'll send you a good gift hamper. You know, to Bangalore, you know, so that. You have that right? That it depends on our answer, right? So I'm going to go with the the first question. Get getting to know Rahul better right? As a person. So the first question is, is it a book? So that you're reading or watching that you feel that people who are right now trying to venture out should should read or watch.

Lots of them if you ask me what I am reading right now. There are a set of books around SaaS, sales, financial services and stuff like that because I have.

Oh, OK, nice.

Practically speaking, entertainment content consumption quantum has decreased significantly. Non fixing and business related stuff has taken precedence over everything else that I consume, so that's there. If there is one book that I would definitely recommend and this is irrespective of whether you are building in SaaS or no is going to be sapiens.

This one.

I you will know Hari. That is a book that I believe everybody should read. It's a brief history of humankind. Since you know the Darwinian evolution allowed us to be on 2 limbs and the where modern cities exist today and how the future looks when we colonize Mars, it covers some of those tidbits throughout the journey. But the beautiful thing about that book. This is, you know, it tries to collect evidence and anecdotes to give you a glimpse of what it took to be. You know, as a species, a hunter gatherer spec. To be able to. Actually ruin the entire planet and step our foot on the moon like what what actually led? What kind of events led to drastic journey like this? And it also very well throws light on what? It means to. Exist in a society and why this was? Both of these things, at least from you know the way I gathered all of the insights from the book, is actually something that you can apply from the first principles thinking to your business. Also, the most fundamental human psychology, the most fundamentals of why we exist. The most fundamentals of. You know who do you trust? Why? Do you trust? And why are we in a setup like this to answer some of those specific questions, I think that that is going to be my take for the listeners here.

Awesome and this.

Is a CEO.

That you're following are studying Rahul.

I I won't say CEO, I would say quite a bunch. Of leaders. That you know, inspire a lot.

Who's the top most leaderboard for you?

Most on the leaderboard? That's a tough question. I do. I do admire a bunch of people. So, for example, you know some of the companies that we track. You know, in the US, bill.com or strike in the India complex, if you talk about you have got a razor pay or you've got a man. You know some of the leaders that. We track. There or really try to follow some of these leaders are our Angel investors also. So for example you know.

Right?

Kunal Shah, who is leading cred, is one for Indian jiten who is leading.

Right?

Jupiter is one of our. One of the leaders that I actually really, really look up to are our board members themselves. They are impeccable people, you know, really deep thought, really good understanding of. Uh, you know? The the trade that they are into the way this market works and what it means to really create. Wealth and value. In fact, I would attribute, you know about 1/2 of how I do business to all of the insights and guidance that I've received over the years with you know, and from our board members. So that way really good morning. And then if you if you really ask me, who do you look up to? I think for example, the folks at a 16 Z, you know example who wrote some masterpiece. Elad Gil that has. Really written nice stuff. Or let's say. A novel who is a thought leader of himself. You try to read and. Follow and listen to them as well. I think it's not just one person but a. Collection of people that I really. Really look up to.

Awesome, what's your favorite SAS app?

I really do like slack a lot. We use this at the optimization, I've seen there. You know early versions and then what we use today. I also like discord a lot. Discord also is quite a quite a good product. I am a subscriber of procreate on iPad.

Which is a.

Digital illustration and graphics. I love that pool as well. It's really nice that that it.

So you have some drawings as well.

Is summer. Yeah yeah, I do some digital illustration whenever. I get time.

Wow, I would love to like see the English sneak peek there. OK, how many hours of sleep do you? Get every night.

I do sleep well, I don't compromise there, but my body clock, you know at least warrants 6 hours of sleep and I end up getting 6 to 7 hours of sleep on most nights some nights. Obviously. You know keep you awake.

Got it and what's your favorite gadget?

Favorite gadget it is my favorite gadget that I don't spend too much time on. It is my PlayStation 5.

Let us in fine. Awesome, so I think almost done with the podcast and I have one last question from the whole podcast, which is what's something that you wish you knew when you were 20. This is something I asked everybody on the show. Was something that you wish you. Knew when you were 20.

That's a really interesting question. I can tell you I have done a lot of things in life. You know, like the ideal way I have had a good balance between having fun and being good at good at academics and studies and all that, I would say I've had a really bad. I'm lucky to have really a balanced upbringing as well, but if you ask me. One thing that I would actually really like for my 20 year old self to be aware of is. How money works. That, I think is something that if. If my 20 year old self would know a little better, that would have really been a different. You know trajectory or at least much more, evolved on the same trajectory. The way it has been. For example, when I read this book called Psychology of Money, it just blew me away. It was a really different. Outlook altogether, on what money means. If I would have. Let's just say read that money at a 20. Year old you? Know age I would be treating money quite differently. So I think that would be my one thing, but apart from that also I think the other thing I would. Like to say is. I have come to understand and appreciate on accounts of the pandemic and on accounts of working with the SMB segment that there are 2 things that both of these things, the pandemic and the SMB segment, made me realize very deeply. The first was a. You know, a sense of gratitude, and the second was a sense of humility. These 2 characteristics I think, the pandemic and the SMB sector has taught me well, because you know. When you look at all. Of the stuff that was going. Wrong all across. Only a sense of gratitude actually gives you any bit of you know peace or any bit of pacifying impact because at least you have something to be. Full 4 and the second was that you know you may. Be a tech. Hotshot, you may be able to write really beautiful lines of code and design delightful experiences, but you must really appreciate that. The smartest lot of entrepreneurs out there are these SMB owners. Nobody knows. You are better than them. Nobody knows the pulse of the market and the business better than them. Nobody has a better grasp of the customer compared to a typical SMB owner that you experience.

So so.

Things that you can really learn from them even though you are an entrepreneur or founder or CEO, 's those are things that you can really learn from these set of smart entrepreneurs. That's out there, so I think the value of gratitude and humility is also something that you know my 20 year old self would really benefit from had it been communicated earlier.

Wow, amazing so really nice to have like spoken to you and I think my greatest learning from this whole podcast has been that. I think on one one moment in the whole podcast caught my attention is that you all moved from Mumbai to bang. You know is very ambiguous and I was just wondering how did you actually retain your whole? You know 85% of your workforce. If I got that number right and and with the ambiguity even still having that that ray of clarity and and holding on to that and then building on that and then being able to validate. Yeah, I mean that's a brilliant brilliant, you know journey in itself, right? I mean, if you really look at it and that that actually caught my attention, because even though we didn't discuss that much, it really caught my attention because it just shows differ. You know, sets of qualities that that gets displayed there and one is in hiring a sense of the silence. You know when the other other is is having team cohesiveness. I will lot of different things right. It just shows what kind of like founders you are so brilliant. Brilliant stuff yeah so thank you. So much. Yes, yes. I'm just saying something.

You know one thing, just one thing to add to that retention of the team. There are people in the team who have already celebrated 4 years are going to celebrate 5 years with us who have been with Coinex and the flow. This journey as. Well have seen all ups and downs. There are north number of stories where people have taken an exit and joined us back. So for example. Even with the 15% that could not relocate some of us. Then joined us back after as possible for them, so that has also happened and you know the the simple reason that I think this has been. The case is because we have overly communicated to the team that had it been in the capacity of 4 people to build a large business, a team would not be required. It is simple and very obvious that we are not experts at everything and we don't have the time to do everything. Also, even if we could learn so the team is. We only. Actual true asset of the business that can create every other asset so we can stick together and we are at least transparent and you know we can trust each other with the best and the worst. Then I think. You know we will never have any kind of divergences, and one of those things that we follow. Here is, you know very first principle type decision making approach. At flow based we have. Done that at Coinex as well. Is to always think company first. So whether an intern is suggesting an idea versus an idea that has been suggested by one of the founders. If the intern is suggesting is better as an as a, you know input for a decision making that is best interest of the company that will have precedence over whatever the founder also says that just automatically take. They all biases from equations. So you just. Problems environment.

Absolutely thank you so much for sharing. You know your journey with us and it was. It was really nice to you know, have got to know you through this whole interaction. So looking forward to staying in touch Rahul. Thank you so much for your time and we'll. Stay in touch.

Absolutely, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and you know, next time you're in Bangalore. Let's definitely catch up.

Oh definitely absolutely thanks.

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