Aman: Welcome back to A2Z FinTech. I'm here in India and we decided stray a little bit from our normal programming and do a few interesting collaborations. We've got one on fitness but this one's about the combination of finance and funny. And when it comes to combining these two capabilities there's nobody in the world I know better at this than my best friend from college, Anuvab Pal, who is here with us. And, Pal, I should clarify, that's what we always called you. So, I'm just gonna continue doing that. It's fantastic having you here. We'll talk a little bit about it. Like, I'm kind of here because of your provocation, so I'm really, really excited about where this conversation can go.
Anuvab: And we should tell your listeners we're very old friends, we've known each other for a very,
Aman: Vintage and age, as you can see.
Anuvab: We've gone to college together among the things that we hope to talk about is, of course, our lives and careers. But to your audience, are finance professionals, but also to talk about the transition that we have seen in our lives, both as people and but also how... I started out in a particular profession very similar to yours, completely transitioned to a different one and saw that profession change completely in front of me. How people consume entertainment, how people buy entertainment and you saw a similar transition with money, actual money. You saw money go from physical things to a digital thing. I mean, The idea was we'd have a conversation of two old friends, but also seismic shifts in our work life.
Aman: over the collective hundred years of our existence, soon to be hundred years, as we both turn 50 this year.
Anuvab: We do, yeah. I want to start by just giving the audience some context of what we were like in college. We came into college at a very young age in America. the age of 10, college tends to be. College is an 82-year-old. Yeah. And the weird thing is that we've spoken like this.
Aman: As you do when you go to college. We didn't go to college.
Anuvab: for most of our lives. You know, which fundamentally, I don't know if you've ever given this any thought, but it's also the basis of all comedy writing. And we've been doing this since the age of 16. We just have done it unconsciously. So comedy writing is
Aman: You know, I remember, sorry to interrupt you, but I remember and we'll probably have to cut this, but I'll just say this. Do you remember sitting in a dorm room in middle of the night designing a ad for a Chanel? We discovered or I discovered or you discovered that the Chanel bottle looked a lot like Yasser Arafat's cravat. And then we came up with a whole ad campaign for Yasser Arafat for the Chanel. I know with the Middle East crisis right now it may be a really bad thing. Trump would probably build a store for that in Gaza now. He would.
Anuvab: Also when we got to college, Apprentice had just started. That's true. I don't think Donald Trump was on it. I think he would have been on it. And I think the reason we became friends in 1995 was we both officially showed up in Ohio. And we're both very fond of our college even now. We went to Ohio Wesleyan University. We're both in touch with all our friends there. And we were two Indian kids in the middle of Ohio. And a lot of people were like, what? Why? Even in our college. And then, of course, these people became our lifelong friends.
Aman: There's a backstory to this and so we should come back if like this is great like but I think we should go back to the beginning. When we talk about this and you were born and grew up in Calcutta. I was born in London my parents moved back.
Anuvab: Yeah.
Aman: sort of counter cyclically, everybody was moving to the UK. My parents moved back because they wanted me to grow up and quote unquote my country. Right. And and we moved to Calcutta where we were where I spent my first five years. I think it's very interesting. That idea of my country is very interesting because you and I belong to sort of like this. If you'd like like, I don't know how to put it. Well, like a
Anuvab: We bounce around a lot,
Aman: I mean, we're like a dying species, if you'd like. We're a rare species in India. We dream in English. We grew up in Calcutta. know, is probably our mother tongue, as my wife will definitely tell you.
Anuvab: We grew up in a very anglicised time in India because when empire was crumbling, but the schools were still very anglicised. The entertainment was very anglicised.
Aman: I got punished for speaking in Hindi in my school, something that, you know, like today would be absurd.
Anuvab: I think two people like us who would have gone to college, say, if they followed our exact same trajectory, growing up in Calcutta, going to university in the United States, working in the US, say 25 years after us, would not sound like this. Because India's transition, India's doesn't, like, the way we speak is sort of like a transnational kind of accent, right? But it doesn't seem.
Aman: ⁓ Would you call us a neo-Brown Sahib or that's just too patronizing or self-deprecating?
Anuvab: People would call us that. People were 100%. There'd be a class judgment. We wouldn't because we didn't know any better or worse. Yeah. Right? Like I've always thought when we were growing up, it's not our teachers insisted we speak a certain way. You you need to pronounce promontory and hyperbole. Like we had to learn those things. Our syllabus had William Shakespeare. You know, it's we grew up in a certain way that is inexplicable to an India of infosys and cognizant, right? It's difficult.
Aman: This is bizarre. I've got to tell you this. Like, you just gave me a flashback. I had an English teacher, English language teacher called Mr. Aviet. And this is the combination of the sort of like this explains lots of things. He was talking about a word. He was using a word of a flower and he kept referring to hibiscus. And I put my hand up in the class and I said, sir, I think it's pronounced hibiscus. This is to the English language teacher in my class. Now, there's a certain amount of stupidity and certain amount of arrogance that that that's the now when I think about it, what were you doing there? Why did you feel the need to correct your English language teacher in his class?
Anuvab: Because I think words pronounced correctly was somehow wrought in our DNA. Like when I read things now, people talk to me and say things like, he's known to me or... Yeah.
Aman: this side of Aman.
Anuvab: ⁓ Or just little little grammatical errors like, you know, they irk you. They irk me and they do other things. And people abroad look at people like us like, you know, it's perfectly OK to not speak like this. You know, there are millions now of young tech professionals in the US. Generations who went abroad after us. Yeah. And massive influx, right? Much more. In our time, it was difficult, expensive. Yes. ⁓ communication was hard so there'd be certain very anglicised people that would go abroad. The flood gates opened I assume some years later, loads of people and now it's perfectly okay to have an Indian accent in the American workplace.
Aman: It's almost like a, it's a magic ride. I worked for Google. Sundar Pichai is famously, you know, comfortable with his sort of American vernacular Indian accent. It's, it's, it's, I love that about him. You know, and it's very interesting. So the transition for me went from like this kid who's like, correcting the English language teacher to sort of working for an inspiring leader like Sundar who doesn't feel the need to like, you know, enunciate, like it's an elocution class. But the content of what he says, the thoughtfulness of what he says is far important. And that transition, I think, I'm going to take us there is that for me was the U.S. And going to the U.S. where I realised that what you said is more important than how you said it. I see that with my children today. They go to the American school in Singapore and my wife and I were totally thrown and I were totally thrown back when the teachers were like telling us we used to be constantly correcting our young kids on the spelling. They said, don't worry about the spelling. Just let them write. Like let them express themselves. And I can see If I flashback to my parents dropping me off at college on the first day of Ohio Wesleyan, that sort of like, it felt like a very, like an alien culture saying, actually let the kid
Anuvab: you goal. yes and also you know I mean, where I went to school in Calcutta, was very, the precision of English was very strict. How you spoke, there was a class system almost, and a caste system almost within the school, you know. So you carried that with you as a sort of thing that I speak well or I speak with a certain sort of thing. And I remember, because I took a lot of English literature in college, a lot of the professors were very, were much more interested in what you thought about something than how you said it. said it. Right, so we had people in college from Cameroon, from Senegal, from Hong Kong, from South Africa, who were very very logical and articulate about a certain thing we'd read. Yeah. Like could be a great play by you know Christopher Marlowe, yeah, or anything, Plato, whatever reading. And they may not necessarily have all the faculties of the English language to express it, but they were very encouraged to express it because the thought was clever. So you
Aman: In some respects, and I'll ask you to tell the story because it's relevant, we had this incredible professor. I didn't take too many classes, but we took one together called the Rites of Passage with a professor called Conrad Kent. He was a And he famously, you and I were doing what we were trained to do, which was be con artists of the English language.
Anuvab: Yes. We'd also read half the book.
Aman: We got one book, right? And everybody was reading every week and you want to tell everybody about that story?
Anuvab: Yeah, so the syllabus in that class had everything. It had Immanuel Kant, had Schopenhauer, it had... But there was a book called Gandhi's Truth. Yeah.
Aman: Which is probably intellectually the least sophisticated of any...
Anuvab: had books we were supposed to read. And also very modern things as well. Berlin, Isaiah Berlin, lots of philosophical things. But we read only Gandhi's truth. So I remember what you and I kept doing, which... I think a very good con artist is whatever the discussion was, we kept bringing it back to Gandhi's truth. The discussion, I think, had moved on to Czechoslovakia. And you'd be like, well, in Gandhi's truth, the thing. And the professor didn't say, you cheat, get out of my class, like they would have to us in India. They reasoned the fact that, OK, at least logically, they're bringing it back to the discussion. ⁓
Aman: It's worth mentioning that the class was heavily, heavily weighted. Like 80 % was class participation. Yeah. So it was exactly for, like, designed for you and me. We were like, we could participate. Say anything.
Anuvab: Yeah, yeah, and in America, I think there is that thing of if you're confident Yeah, I mean we see this everywhere. Yeah, if you're confident and you bullshit confident You could get at least if you speak well, you know, like it's just
Aman: you could get away with murder. which we did at the time. then Conrad called, but I think this is the beauty of the American education system. We were sitting on a Friday celebrating a week of con artistry. And then Conrad came and sat down with us with his cup of tea and called our bluff. Do you remember that? He
Anuvab: But he's such a smart man, he's a double-phD. He looked at us and said, you've only read one book. And we said, yeah. He said, how you recycle that book over 10 classes is very impressive.
Aman: and then he gave us a challenge I don't know if you remember this and he said that You guys both know that you're going to get sort of like a B plus guaranteed in this class, right? He's like, but I will give you an A plus if you drop one comment each from that is original thought from another book other than Gandhi's Truth. He's like, but if you don't do that, I'll give you a C. So you're going to get a B, and you know.
Anuvab: Yeah.
Aman: We both like, we were like, you're on. He gave us the A's. I don't know if we did it or didn't.
Anuvab: Catch You in the Rye that night. The Catcher in the Rye was in our syllabus. Yes, beautiful novel. Holden Caulfield, the ultimate writer-pastor. And I also thought that in life, if someone says, have you read The Catcher in the Rye? I didn't want to say I had this chance. And I blew it because I've read Gandhi's Truth. I did life later on. I didn't want to be the guy who says, so what's The Catcher in the Rye about? And then say, in Gandhi's Truth.
Aman: Yeah. Look it! Look at him, he's about to cry!
Anuvab: tell you one thing though, I don't know if you felt this way, we both went from a very leftover British education system to America, which was about free thinking. And I remember being in my first English literature class with a man I deeply revere. I haven't seen him since college. I know you had a chance to go in to the reunion and meet some people. His name is Joseph Musser. He was the head of the English department. Just the funniest, most brilliant, brilliant man. And he, we were doing some basic English literature stuff. he, and I talk about this in my standup when I do it in America, where he basically said, you know, did you read this play? And I said, yes. He said, what do you think? And I had come from an education system where I thought that meant, ⁓ I'm supposed to give him, know, I read this guy's book on Hamlet and he said this, and I read this guy's thing and he said this and I read that. So. I thought he'd be impressed with that, you know, just bombard him with other people's knowledge to show how much of a pseudo- So no one as 17 year old kid, no one has happy now and said, what do you think as a 17 year old kid, what is in your, how do you process?
Aman: It's like you're in your head, yeah. And I think that the ability to question authority in a constructive way ⁓
Anuvab: I'd be forever grateful to America because it taught me how to think. It's quite fascinating that the fact that we speak English well is not enough. It's not enough in the world. Like you said with Sundar Pichai, the content is not enough.
Aman: I But I think America Data did us a huge service, Like ⁓ we would be some washed up pseudo-intellects as opposed to these powerhouses that we are now.
Anuvab: I'll tell you one thing
Aman: It set us up. think I can speak for myself. It opened my eyes to a world that was very different. So we had come from this world, Calcutta or whatever, which was living in the past. And we were transported to a tiny little town in Ohio that was living in the future.
Anuvab: Yeah, mean, ideas-wise, because our academic... Correct. It was actually wise. ⁓
Aman: This is not infrastructure. The brown jag wasn't the epitome.
Anuvab: Tourist city in India at the time, to a city in America. Chicago, New York, was fine.
Aman: But it very well now. Delaware is apparently one of the richest... went! I guess it's done well since we were there.
Anuvab: It's done that. What I realised that content matters, which is why, you know, our anglicised hangover, all the good things it taught us, is rigor, fairness, honesty, precision, respect for language. less important was when I was writing a sitcom for the BBC many years later in 2020. my central character was an English person in Darjeeling in India. And I remember sitting with Shane Allen and all the top people at the BBC who were then commissioning. And this had undergone, we really liked the script. Eventually it went on BBC radio, Stephen Fry was in it and we did it. I remember them telling me, you know, what we'd love to hear from are the Indian characters and their voices. And for the longest time in my head, I always thought, I want to write for the BBC just like these guys write. Like I want to write like Ron Atkinson data. You want to write in that cadence. And then I realised that that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for authenticity. They're looking for me to write in the voices of the people I've grown up with. And if the grammar is wrong and if it's not even English, it doesn't matter. They want to hear the original stories of these people. necessarily want me to have a protagonist who's an Englishman who speaks perfectly. Just so I can show off about, and that's my colonial hangover.
Aman: By the way, speaking of BBC, The guy, the person who ran Google for Europe, guy called Matt Brittin, interestingly named, I was just talking to my friend Sajid Sivanandan who, this morning, Matt's become the commissioner of the BBC. So the poachers turned into the gamekeeper. The guy who ran Google is now running the BBC. It's going to be fascinating to see how the BBC changes and...
Anuvab: He's gonna be the head of
Aman: He's the commissioner, he's the overall head of the beam from a person who's grown up in this new world of media. just like you are now a podcaster and I'm trying to be one, Matt's going to take the BBC into the modern
Anuvab: I mean they already have BBC iPlayer, they are very very good digitally. Their biggest problem has always been reach outside the UK. So, you know, but they do code deals with Netflix. But we'll come back to But just to go back to college and what we learned, we both studied similar things. But then when we say We did. We studied. You did it better. We did, well, I always enjoyed mathematics. I've always sort of had a, I'm not very good at it, but I enjoyed, think I was very, bad at it.
Aman: For clarity, we studied accounting.
Anuvab: We studied finance and accounting. We met in accounting at 8 o'clock in the morning in 1995. On the day in August, we met in accounting class with some people who were still dear friends of ours, like Alex Wolf and various others. We're still in touch with them. We've gone out to do very well in bank.
Aman: Yeah, Alex is, talk about transformation, Alex was a floppy-haired, relatively intoxicated guy sitting in our class and now he is, you know, one of the finest upstandings, sort of, I think he's a vegetarian, a tea-tokler.
Anuvab: He was he used to like he introduced me to He introduced me to these bands like Fish and Dave Matthews which very big in the air and You know, had floppy hair and a funny hat and you always thought ⁓
Aman: He's a better Hindu than you and me. I never see Alex's eyes.
Anuvab: Yeah, you saw the guy like this. It just likes these bands and smoke spot or whatever. Yeah, was this option but then it's all wrong because I always thought later as he kept getting hundreds in accounting Yeah, 100 out of 100 in our Consistently. Continuously. I realised the whole thing is a facade. He's just putting this on I think so. I think he was always a genius. I think he was. I know he was a genius
Aman: You think so? No, he's I just thought he was a genius doing a lot of pot and then, you know.
Anuvab: I don't know, I think that was just a look, maybe because everyone else that listened to that music.
Aman: I'm sure Alex will agree with your point of view for his career at the board.
Anuvab: Very soon I realised this thing is a hoax. The whole look and the thing and... The whole thing is a look. He's actually just a nerdy guy in glasses.
Aman: He's a cross-hacked dude. let's dig otherwise we're gonna like time will fly. you did something for so you obviously we were both going into very these very sensible careers as the you know in Hindi say a chakasa MNC jobs or multinational jobs or in our case we were like you know the futures banking because tech wasn't as big back then so it was New York it was banking and then you did like the most incredible thing I think You went and worked, you interned at the Fed.
Anuvab: I entered the Federal Reserve, but also I thought you were going to say a thing. No one in the history of our college had done a degree in accounting with ⁓ a double degree in theatre. So nobody's done finance and theatre. And people were shocked. But both the departments were very kind.
Aman: I was gonna come to that, but yeah. ⁓ Probably ever since then as well.
Anuvab: As in, like, they've just never had anybody do And I specialised in dramatic writing in my other major.
Aman: I'm talking about left and right brain.
Anuvab: But I had an advisor you were quite close to her name was Alice Simon. Yes. And she was she was very fond of my parents for some reason. She went to LSE and my dad and her hit it off. she was she basically said, know, eventually. And she was absolutely correct about my life. She said, eventually, you probably won't work in finance because this is clearly your passion. But. Initially, you'll need a job outside college before you sort out what you really want to do with your life. And weirdly, God bless her so very, she's now, that's exactly how my life turned out. She, I, yeah, I mean, she was prescient.
Aman: It's interesting you say this, Paal, because my advisor was Corinne Lyman. I'm still very close to her. She's phenomenal.
Anuvab: who you are still. And sorry, we should quickly explain. It was a very Oxford Cambridge type system where we got advisors. Separate, we went to a small liberal arts college.
Aman: Somebody who just academically helped you through this, your journey and regardless of where you ended up, you could have ended up as you did in theatre and your economics advisor is advising you about theatre which is kind of the...
Anuvab: ⁓ And he or she would have just an overall view of your life. Are you doing okay?
Aman: And so Corinne said, I never called her that, but Dr. Lyman said ⁓ she was like, I remember when I told her I'm going to go to, I think I'm going to go to work in banking and she's like, why? You know, like disappointed, like you should go and work for a Bretton Woods institution. Thank God I didn't, they're all being destroyed right now, poor chaps. ⁓
Anuvab: But we must tell them that you had a very strong interest in foreign policy. You studied a lot of geopolitics.
Aman: If I'm honest. I ran the MUN club but...
Anuvab: academically those years was politics and history.
Aman: It's just that I couldn't stand for election in India and I wasn't hireable in politics in the US.
Anuvab: But we should tell your audience that you were student government and very, rare Indian person from India to go and join and win. I mean, you could be Indian American. And I only got, I got into it in a much smaller way because you were doing it. And you know, I was able to win a couple of things because people just asked me
Aman: Vice President. for us. One, like, handsomely, ⁓ So because... Okay, so... The PAC, come to the PAC, we basically, so essentially what Corinne Lyman said to me when I was leaving, she said, she gave me a book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree and said, you're gonna go into financial services, financial services needs people like you to think bigger and do that kind of stuff. And fast forward to today, I am now thinking, I am probably reversing back to my interests in foreign policy with my blog and things like that so...
Anuvab: And then you cannot connect it. you can't just do a digital payment or understand how money moves without understanding the world and how it affects it.
Aman: And I think this is the beauty of this, I'll draw a line. Today, children, everybody's thinking about AI and the impact of it, the one degree that makes a lot of sense is liberal arts. And so if this first section was anything to go by, it's an ad for a liberal arts education, which you and I had, where you can do accounting and you can do theatre and still have a...
Anuvab: Honestly, if I had to really think back on my life, the only the class that I was mesmerized in, like when I just couldn't move because of like how intoxicating the material was, was a man taught history. He was talking about how Mark Gingrich and he was teaching us about American, European powers. were just sort of rearranging after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And I literally couldn't move. I haven't been that mesmerized with films. I've done some films, definitely not with my own work or with anything I've seen. It was so exciting. And about how this guy met in Vienna at 2 o'clock in the morning, and then someone left an overnight train with a cloak to Prague. Yeah.
Aman: He's like giving you shorts. YouTube shorts.
Anuvab: Exactly, And things that exactly or a reel and everything I've learned about films and stuff was based on the base of that storytelling. when I even now when I tried to do my stand up, it's with that kind of thing that has never left my head on how good that class was. And all he did was he brought history to life. Yeah. He would just come in every day and we would be in 1912 in Bulgaria. Yeah. You know, it's just it's that it's incredible. I mean I could have had a beer net and one of those things, looking for Gustavo but it was so good. anyway just to go back to
Aman: I mean, Anuvab. The random Swedish guy in Bulgaria.
Anuvab: Why is it 5 for 5? I have a fan called Indian man. What's going on with our immigration? What's going with Bulgarian immigration? Well, okay, we should talk about the fact and then we should talk about what we chose to do our senior year. Yeah. And the fact has as interesting connotations now, right? We basically agree that we are in America and we would really immerse ourselves in the culture. Meaning we don't know this country. We just arrived, but we want to make American friends, read American books, see the country and do everything we possibly can to soak in the culture. And we're not going to ghettoise ourselves in anyway yeah we're not we're going to be you know we're be happy
Aman: We are going to integrate. We were like mega poster children but from a liberal, post-liberal world.
Anuvab: And I think, I mean, it's a testament, I think, to the extent that, you know, we have so many close friends now around the world, you know, like, and even, and you know, even now, actually, we should, I don't know if this is relevant to anyone, but we have a common friend, Andrew Lievense, who was very, smart in college, and has just become a judge.
Aman: and in Ohio.
Anuvab: I saw it on social media. It's become a judge in Phenomena. Yeah, and so I'm still in touch with and people are all over the world and some people have never left Ohio But they have a great perspective point is we just said let's go out and be curious Yeah, and it's a big big debate going on now when I travel to America. I see this that Immigrants don't integrate. Yeah, right that they don't eat the food listen to the music, you know, like
Aman: I think it's worth saying, I think it's worth saying, actually, you're being generous by calling him a friend. When we were in college, we were all sort of competing for lots of things and we were on the opposite sides many times. I guess it's good to call a judge a friend, right? In America, particularly. But that's the point I want to get at. Like, we are friends and I saw him at the reunion and it's fantastic. And it was a testament to sort of that period in time when you could disagree on things and come together and still be amazing collaborators and friends. I think that's something, maybe this is just two old men speaking, but that's something old fashioned that I would love to see back again.
Anuvab: And there were certain rumors you hear when you live outside the United States. Like it's a rumor definitely, not a rumor, but an assumption. In Britain, I see it. I see it in India a lot. That Americans are not bright, that they don't work hard, they're lazy, and that they don't know much about the world. Our college experience was quite the opposite. Like I said, people we came across worked very hard. Some of them are incredibly smart.
Aman: The work ethic is in-
Anuvab: And some of the.
Aman: patronizing some some Americans
Anuvab: But we didn't go to college here like I'm just saying like the microcosm of what we experienced, know ⁓ was quite the opposite, know, people say ⁓ the American kids are not good at science and mathematics. Some of them are outstanding in science and mathematics. So it's it's untrue that yes, we have a skill set. We're good at certain things as Indians. Yeah, we're good at numbers. We're good at science, but it's not like
Aman: Yeah.
Anuvab: videos.
Aman: So that is Indians is going down tangents. I'll bring you back. Yes. Tell them about the fact because I think like why does this matter? OK, so let me tell you. We had this we had this agreement that we united two like kids from India who there and we said we're going to do things that every other kid has not done.
Anuvab: Yeah You should tell them.
Aman: and we went through this list and I think it was a very immigrant kind of experience. We didn't think of ourselves like that but we definitely did that. You went on, we did some things that we did together that were incredible. Like actually student government, you started and then I sort of took to another level. Theater, you did completely, thankfully for everybody else on your own because I have no skills there. And but then we did stuff together like we started an underground newspaper with Jon Torreta, who's now sort of hiding in Switzerland. you know, we wrote for the college while running an underground newspaper.
Anuvab: He also wrote for the college paper. joined the comedy improv group in college. Which is things that in comedy, but joint.
Aman: Incredible,
Anuvab: fraternity houses and I'm still close to, we still are close to, you are very close to some of your fraternity brothers. What I realised was that, you know, it's within this culture now. So what are the great American movies? What are the great American books? You know, I hadn't read Hemingway, I hadn't read, I didn't know all the greats. You know, I, we grew up in a very British centric culture.
Aman: And I think I have, I can speak for myself, but I think this is true of your dad. My granddad, when I went to college, told me a story. My granddad went to Cambridge back in whatever, 1920s. And he said, and I said, what advice did you have for me? And he said, you know, he said, I'll tell you a story. I said, quick version. Sorry. He said, I landed in, in the, at the, at the shop, which is a, which was a Woolwich when he was in army training. then after a game of hockey, everybody stripped and ran and jumped into the lake. All the sort of English soldiers in training and all the sort of like Indian soldiers were like, what just happened? And he was like, he looked at the Indian soldiers standing there aghast and the British soldiers in the, in the water and he stripped, ran and jumped in and he said that one act, I was like, I was there. I was part.
Anuvab: out of them.
Aman: So, so in some respects, what we did was strip ourselves of our preconceived notions and ran and jumped into America.
Anuvab: Yeah, we did because you know it was very very easy equally easy to have slid into only Indian friends only South Asian friends. eaten the food, watched cricket matches. It was it was not only easy it was comfortable. They welcome us with open arms and we did that a little bit but most of it was about curiosity to see the world. You know like I went with the theatre troupe to see a Shakespeare festival in Canada, you know for four days. Yeah. I went to Alaska for a theatre festival. know, like crazy stuff that you wouldn't, you know, I went to see Neil Diamond in concert with a friend called Steve Martin. know, I mean, it's not the act. That is quite important to clarify that we knew a guy called Steve Martin. We still do. In fact, even now when there are American elections, someone says, what do you think will happen?
Aman: Not the actor. Let's do it. You think before.
Anuvab: I'll drop Steve a message on Facebook or our dear friend, Jim Antle, who is a political analyst. yeah, anyway, long shot of it is the fact was curiosity. And I think it's very important because nowadays, apparently, it's quite integration is not that big. Maybe because the population of South Asians are much bigger, so they can recreate home everywhere they go.
Aman: Yeah, and I think it's a lot of the challenges that you have today is because people are, you know, not finding common ground. They're sort of like, this is who I am. there is a beauty of being proud of who you are, but there's also an importance to being able to find common ground. think people don't find common ground. Look, you graduated, you
Anuvab: It's important to say where our lives differ. And we didn't see each other for many years, but essentially the calls, I ended up interning for the US government at the Federal Reserve and you ended up in London working in a bank. And I ended up in New York working in a bank, but writing by night.
Aman: Can you win some-
Anuvab: I was writing my plays, my very first thing I wrote was Chaos Theory but we did it by night but you were... Night and day and at work!
Aman: night and day potentials no longer potential the investment is no longer there I think it's fair to say that you were you you you were doing less decks than you were doing yeah
Anuvab: There's reason why. Yeah, I think if there were 10 people who like we had a moonlighting job it could explain my potential. Thank you. Yeah, it was a bit ahead of its time, but we had jobs, regular jobs. We left college and a lot of our college friends were still figuring what they want to do with life. Some, you know, were going to travel, you know, but we were committed like we got out in September. Yeah, and we were in cities of the world. Yeah.
Aman: gig worker before they were gig workers
Anuvab: November. Yeah. With an apartment with a new man. Yeah. Like you were done. You left the United States and you were in London. Yeah. And essentially the rest of your life has been the rest of the world, meaning you didn't go back to the U.S. to study. You went ⁓ to France for graduate school and you worked all over the world for U.S. companies, etc. But that was the end of your American education, as it was for mine. Yeah, very true. And we were sort of unleashed on the world. years? 78. OK.
Aman: Did you spend in New York? So that's significant. spent 12 years in America. did. did only four.
Anuvab: I did. then after that, I worked for the same employer for another eight in India. Same people, Yeah. Thomson. Reuters. And then it became, ⁓ then I joined my boss who worked for Thomson and then the complete merge became Thomson Reuters. And now that unit Reuters is sold to the London Stock Exchange. Yes. Yes. Yes. ⁓
Aman: Which our still works on. Yes. Who poor chap we dragged out of being a pianist and made him a... Just sorry, James Perkins, our friend. Senior mode. Who is...
Anuvab: Great, James Wilkins. who is a ⁓ was a pianist once probably still plays the piano is very very dear friend of ours and works still in but the positive
Aman: And
Anuvab: But the point is our lives diverged. Countries, cities, etc. And we lost touch for quite a while because you were building a life. So I'll tell you what I did. I basically did a thing for Reuters that's free now. I worked for a couple years in banking. I made pitch books, etc. All of that stuff can be done by Claude, I think today, in 12 minutes. It's a pitch book to pitch to a company. Essentially, that's obsolete what I did. Checking spelling into a pitch book that would go into a binder. Four things of those things are done in India now. book, the investment bank doesn't do the book thing. They don't have a basement with the publishing thing, I think. Because basically in the old days, Prudential had a printer basically in the ground floor. You take it to the printer, he would print the thing.
Aman: Then they outsourced it to India, now it's done by AI. Like Claude can make you a deck, the stuff that we did, yeah, those jobs are redundant.
Anuvab: Yeah. really? It's like... So that was my first job, was to make that deck, that pitch book. Yeah, exactly. Ultimately, you're still using the same things and correcting, you know, aren't and are not and those sorts of little things. It's it's. There and there, it's and it's. All of that. Glorify, but it looks good because you're in a building at the end of Manhattan, one New York Plaza, and you're doing all of this stuff. So it looks cool or whatever. Basically.
Aman: in English, man. A lot of money for being a spell checker. Grammarly.
Anuvab: Yeah, but at that time. that ended up basically, you know, those jobs don't exist. And then at Reuters, I essentially became a salesperson for data. But the specific kind of data we sold was to investment bankers, which now, from what I've seen on Claude, a lot of that stuff is free. Between Google and Claude, that stuff is just available. You don't have to pay for it anymore. So both the things I did for a significant portion of my life is obsolete. So fortunately, then I transitioned to writing and comedy, which aren't obsolete. We'll talk about that later. But both those things I did for 15 years of my life don't actually exist anymore or won't in the next four or years. So you have to tell your audience, we parted and didn't see each other for another 10, 12 years. And what did you do with your life and how has the thing changed?
Aman: So I did, I was more boring than you and then, but within that boring thing, that exciting thing. So I went into banking. Yes. I joined Standard Chartered in London and I started working in corporate banking. I found it mind numbingly boring. ⁓
Anuvab: We had gone from Ohio which was a small Delaware Ohio, a small town, college town. Yeah, to big city. We very protected and you're in London.
Aman: Yeah, that was awesome. They were like... different things. And by the way, I was in London, we, thanks to Standard Chartered, were being shipped around to Singapore, Hong Kong. Like I was discovering the world. I live in Singapore now. think thanks to Standard Chartered, I live in Singapore. One of the, you know, amazing, most amazing experiences. moved, we moved there for two years and have been there for 20. Right. So, but at Standard Chartered, I started out in corporate banking and then I did something very unusual, which is I went and worked in internal communications two years out. of my corporate banking. I just I was like, can't do this. There was an amazing hiring manager called Tim Halford, who's the head of internal communications. And he was looking for like his sidekick. I went and worked for him. And I remember my manager in the corporate bank saying, What the hell are you doing? ⁓ you're leaving corporate banking to go work for comms like you're an idiot. ⁓
Anuvab: I have a date. Because bombs back then were seen as a
Aman: Like it was yeah, it was a you know, very side function, you know HR and comms was seen as soft career options I went that Tim taught me how to communicate in an incredible way and in And for a period period of time I was running internal communications two years out of college Which is great ended up in investor relations ended up in strategy
Anuvab: you'd speak to a lot of people.
Aman: I was basically in the head office working accompanying the CFO and the then CEO to like investor calls and doing investor relations with them around London, right.
Anuvab: Did it ever strike you that you're an Indian guy and here you are with... We obviously didn't grow up
Aman: I didn't, didn't, it didn't because like I felt very natural like actually I connected with because of my grandparents army but I connected with a lot more people like you know I than like yeah my I never ever felt I felt like a fish in water in standard charted
Anuvab: So here you were communicating with helping one of the world's biggest banks communicate, right? And you've always been should have people from college days wanted to speak to large groups of people. You were quite good at it. Even people, we're in America and American people, students, us, elected you. to student government as a communicator, which means that you were clearly proficient enough to speak to people from different parts of the world. you carried that skill into the workplace.
Aman: By the way, I think it's the thing that can more deeper connects you and me. I would like to tell a good story. This is just an effort to do that as well.
Anuvab: Yes, and also this has become... I think what we've realised over time, and we'll talk about this at the end, is that this is now much more democratic, meaning everyone has a story to tell. I think when we were starting out, it was an asset. So we could get further ahead in life because we could tell stories well. Now I think everyone's telling a story, whether you make a shampoo or you make shoes, the CEO is doing an Instagram read telling you what they do. Everyone is a storyteller, is a filmmaker. But we had some good years where it wasn't democratic. Everyone was doing it. But what was communications like then, your significant years of growth? You'd say would be from 2001, like your London years.
Aman: So I think my formative years, I think there were two periods when, you know, when people think about their careers, lot of people worry about titles and, know, titular kind of like criteria. I think the best periods were when I worked for people who believed in me and just
Anuvab: Let me write
Aman: Yeah, yeah, and I think people just obsess about the wrong thing So the two phases one was early in London where people like Tim just took a chance on me and they were I wrote the annual report of the bank, you know, as a grad three three years out of college I was like, I was like, are you sure you want me to do this? It's like what's the big deal with it? Like there's so many just right one right like and obviously there were guard deals at a bank to protect So that was an amazing period of growth, gaining that confidence. And then, living in London, later I went back to Singapore after INSEAD. I went and figured out what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in this whole digital space. Google had IPO'd while I was at INSEAD. And I came back and I again had this, I was like, want to run internet banking at my bank that I work at. And it was only internet back then.
Anuvab: Living in London. And what was going on at, and you stayed at Santa Charter for a long time. And back then, in London, what was retail banking? It was still 80%.
Aman: He is, yeah. I was not doing retail so that was the thing. I realised that actually the epiphany I had is that I wanted to be in largely more focused on the consumer and retail side. ⁓ I was just doing head office kind of roles and I remember my ⁓ manager then, called Ben Hung, he's like, Aman, you have done every senior role, you you work in investor relations, communication, strategy. You haven't actually...
Anuvab: just going to corporate.
Aman: done anything. I was like, okay. So I went to Asia. That's what I worked in the technology function. I worked, I initially worked on a bunch of M &A things, but then I worked in technology and I worked in retail banking and that's where I cut my teeth if you'd like.
Anuvab: And what's the cultural shift between being a young person in London? I think it's very important for people to have a mentor or a guide. I was very, very lucky with my bosses at Reuters. I worked for several people. A guy called Eric Lind, who I'm still in touch with. Neil Masterson and a guy called Russell Howarth were all doing different things. And a lady called Sarah Dug who then moved to Thompson. But between these four people, I'm very, grateful because the... were kind, also understood that I had a mood lighting writing life. They didn't discourage it. didn't... I mean, as long as I was...
Aman: Yeah, see I think this is where like if you had started that career in corporate India back then, you would have been like fired for like you.
Anuvab: They did know I wasn't giving my 100 % to the job and they knew that this guy was reasonably clever enough that if he gave 100 % he'd be really good at it or he'd be much more productive. But they didn't call me out on it which was very kind of them. Like in that they knew that I had this little thing that there was sort of a quiet encouragement.
Aman: And I think that is something that I still think that quote unquote East can learn from the West is cultivating young talent, giving them the freedom. I remember Tim Halford, my comms boss said you can, he's like, you know, you can go and run Southeast Asia, Malaysia.
Anuvab: Duh.
Aman: communications and I was like that's a huge job back then for what I was and he's like yeah he's like but I don't think you should take this job I'm like okay are you offering me a job not he's like the problem with it you have is that a great communications comms person needs to not want to be in front of the camera and your problem is you like being in front of the camera so he's like he said he said that to me like well how clairvoyant of him lately I'm
Anuvab: Yeah
Aman: it again in front of a camera. I like, and I went back home, I went back there and that would have been a giant pay raise and profile raise, etc. And I was like, you know, Tim, you're right. I like the camera. I'm going to stay here and wait, you know, wait for the right opportunity. And it was in his interest for me to go to Malaysia. but he had that presence. that's just that managers like that come once in a while.
Anuvab: Yeah, and who understand that, I mean, these guys needed work done, And they were also instrumental in me moving with Reuters back to India because they wanted me to run a division here. But they also realised that 20 % of this guy's head is going to be somewhere else.
Aman: But getting inside your head got the maximum out of you and probably created stuff for their team. How many people do you have? So many people without a personality, like at least you've got powers like bringing you were probably that 20 % that you weren't working. You were contributing by being the glue of the
Anuvab: Yeah. Yes, yes, we liked each other we were all very fond of each other we go for conferences and
Aman: And by the way, I'm a big proponent of AI and tech and everything, but I also believe in this stuff, right? And this is not this is not
Anuvab: I think this is everything.
Aman: You know, this cannot be replicated. And I think there's a risk today in today's world where we throw the baby out with the bathwater and the baby is being able to call what motivates people and understand it's just so easy to go to an LLM. I do it all the time, right? I'll go to an LLM, but you're like, why am I doing this? I can ask, I can use my own intellect, but you become lazy. And that's my biggest worry about.
Anuvab: generation can do cognitive thinking and you know like a lot of career opportunities that I got was just somebody saying even in comedy even in comedy was just somebody saying that guy you know like yeah yeah that's literally all it was was just someone saying that guy and I remember once there was a conference in Europe and I was living in Bombay at the time it was this eight-day conference it was a regional managers conference and there was a dinner in the evening and the weirdly that dinner coincided with, or I had planned it in such a way that that evening, if I could excuse myself from the dinner, a player of mine was going to have a staged reading in New York, at a theatre, at the Lark Theater, which sadly doesn't exist anymore. So I made an excuse. I remember telling me, I have something, I'm going to be late for the dinner. And this was a work dinner where all the teams were going together. It was important to be there. And he was disappointed. He's like, yeah, yeah, And then he said, I have something personal and stuff. And he still didn't know. But he knew what I had. So I remember coming very late for the work dinner. And oh, it was a work dinner with the CEO. So our team meeting the CEO of Tom Glocer. And it was a private basement dinner in some steakhouse. And I remember coming in late and like.
Aman: It was great for your career
Anuvab: rather than sort of anyone saying, or jibes or anything, they were extremely kind, like Neil was extremely kind, oh, Anuvab, he had something personal, like, make it sound like I had a real problem or something. I had no problem. I was just having a stage reading of my play at the Lark Theater. Yeah, and he just sort of thing, said, oh, you got all the state, there's a state, you haven't had dinner, whatever, and made it seem like I had some very urgent personal thing that...
Aman: The Vincencers.
Anuvab: and introduced me to the CEO and said, so he's come, et cetera. Whereas it's just my personal stuff. There's no excuse to not being at that dinner. So that kind of little bit of thing really helped in life.
Aman: Yeah. I mean, maybe boring people with sort of old stories. The second phase of my life, again, another story, prelude to another story was I went back and then somebody took a big chance on me again. His name was Jan Verplancke. I was, he was the sort of chief technology officer and COO essentially of the bank. And I had joined him because I said, look, I want to work. I wanted to do this internet banking job. I had applied for it and I was told the two reasons you're not getting it. One is you're too young and secondly you have never worked in technology. So I was like I'll fix the first thing. So I went and worked for Jan as his chief of staff. A friend of mine was moving on and suggested me for the role. then Jan like you year in said you know the job you wanted really wanted. The guy is like it's not working out. We're getting rid of him. Nobody else wants the job inside the company. You want to do it? I was like ⁓ sure. Yeah. And so I took over the job. It was to run what was then in internet banking and then it became mobile and social and then ATMs and anything with a screen on it. you know, it started... This was 2006 to 2007.
Anuvab: hell is this? And did people go to the Internet for bank...
Aman: Yeah, well, we started out with like a couple of hundred thousand customers and we ended up with five million customers at the end of it in 30 something countries.
Anuvab: Did in 2005 and six yeah, did money move through the internet?
Aman: It was starting to, yeah it was, yeah. mean, the reason that, we were in 30 countries, so it was moving at different paces in different countries, Back then, things were moving much faster in the West, quote unquote, with the exception of things like Korea, which was super advanced. But you could see China and India, and there were certain parts of Africa like Kenya that were sort of innovating like crazy.
Anuvab: People get rent and stuff.
Aman: Yeah, you can see that behaviour. The biggest thing that you can see is that the inefficiency, I think one of the biggest drivers of digital in these parts of the world is inefficiency, right? drives behaviour. It's a much stronger driver of behaviour than...
Anuvab: And tell me, so 15 years you did essentially, you you transitioned in corporate communications to digital banking. And at some point you said, I want to go to Google because this would have been 2000. Yeah.
Aman: So that resulted in that I run this team very, very successfully. then I did one of the core parts of doing it was I was able to combine the technology and the business part of it. And they were asking me to, I was going to get promoted, but I was going to have to run one of those either on the technology or the business. So they said, congratulations is a global reorg. You're going to get promoted, but we're going to split your team into two. I'm like, but. This is where I beat myself up. like, am I being naive or true to my... I was like, this is not the way I want to run the car. Thank you for the promotion. I kind of thought I deserved it a year two ago, but I'll take it. But I don't want to run it this way. It's not going to work. So I said... I said, I'm not going to do it. And they said, well, if you don't do it, you're going to get made redundant. I said, what happens if I get made redundant? Well, you get one month's salary for every year you've been here. So I've been here for 15 years. So funny, that's the maximum they pay you out. It's like, I'll take the payout. You're going to pay me more money to leave the company than stay? So I said, yeah, sure, I'll go. It's corporate machinations, right?
Anuvab: And every corporation, like when I was at Royce, every two months they'd have an announcement fast forward, transformative. These were just words. They were just reorganized things and not give anyone stability. I don't know why. It's just all big companies.
Aman: Yeah, just one more ⁓ There's a great term by the ad man, David Ogilvy, how big do we have to get before we start to suck? And that's true. Jeff Bezos had the two pizza rule, like when your team needs more than two pizzas, your team's too big. So yeah, by the way, that's the really interesting thing. I don't want to make this an AI thing, but that's very interesting thing about AI is you don't need the 20, 30 people. can, you know, the day when a billion dollar company with like less than 10 people or a couple of people will happen.
Anuvab: Yeah, you think so? It is possible. It depends on the product, I So then, here you are, you've got 15 months time. Yeah.
Aman: And I screwed around with it, trying to figure out how to Like we're in 2014, 2014, 2015.
Anuvab: On your own! So in India, Prime Minister Modi has just come to power. the world is a lot more digital banking savvy.
Aman: Yeah, so we had started to do some really great, you know, the digital journey and, you know, people know, started a little bit before that, but really took off with the... Modi in India. But we were doing very interesting things. We'd launched mobile banking in five or 10 different countries, maybe 15. We were doing internet payments. We launched in India, for example, where we are, we launched the first automated credit card that you could apply online. It went straight through. But at that stage, we were still copying the West. So we were like, oh, in America, you can do this. Now you can do this here. With my next job.
Anuvab: I mean, that changed. Yeah. Before we just jump in, actually one quick question. I'm completely layman. I've always wanted to know this. These billions of dollars that hedge funds move into the Indian stock market and buy stuff, sitting in Mauritius or Dubai or London or Singapore. Yeah. That's all on the Internet, right? What's the back end of this infrastructure? I've always wondered the way retail people move money. The way I move my 100 rupees to buy stock or bonds or whatever. Do massive hedge funds do the same thing.
Aman: You move the re- Well, it is now with stable coin and all these new sort of technologies that are out there. But essentially money moves on the same rails. So actually we move money, we live in the intelligence age, but we move money on industrial age rails. So companies like Swift and things like that, are sort of, Visa and Mastercard, are conglomerations of banks that came together to create these networks, those networks still move the money.
Anuvab: So I'm sitting in Singapore, right? Again, this is just a layman comedian asking this, and I run a hedge fund. And I want to take a position in a big Indian company, like a huge...
Aman: move your money through the same rail.
Anuvab: And I want to buy a billion dollars worth of stock. So I would just do a transfer like a normal human does a transfer.
Aman: Overseas, yes, yes you would, yeah. But domestically things have changed, right? So in, let's take India or even China, many places, they're national rails now. So those rails allow us to move money. Albeit they've evolved, they allow us to move money instantly. They're integrated into your apps, like, like GP. And then they give you insight. So, so I don't think the, the rails.
Anuvab: Jupiter.
Aman: are similar, they become faster, better, cheaper, but they are still largely the same. The point around this is that money has become digital. Yes. You know, if you think about it, if you go back to the Medici's or whoever, like they still had the log files, right? So a bank's underlying technology is called a ledger. What's a ledger? That big little book that you'd say, you know, money in from Anuvab money out to Amman. Ledger is then became what they call the core bank and those core banks talk to each other. Those ledgers talk to each other in a very similar way. That's changing in terms of like with stablecoin and things like that. But you know that we talk about something called programmable money has always been about moving value. But now it is about moving the value as well as the information related to the money. So there's a dollar of value but there could be that dollar of value could have another sense of value in the information there. So there's an elaborate pricing mechanism for moving money called interchange largely. But I think there isn't one yet for information, which I think will be called new. I call it new interchange. will come. It's due. Some people call it programmable money, et cetera. to put it in perspective, if a government gives example programmable money, is god, this is getting boring for your audience, maybe not mine but the benefit of programmable money is like when you give money it remembers where it came from and where it's going to so an example with me and my kids is like I can say here's your pocket money but you can only spend it on these five things or these 18 places and and the money knows it has the clever thing sorry and I love and we're not gonna allow you to spend us here with you dad said spend us here so that's where and then
Anuvab: Yeah. ⁓ wow! The money gets intelligent.
Aman: it gets intelligent and then you come back and at the end of the month you're hey Nyla you spent your money in this stuff and you then
Anuvab: What if money gets very intelligent and spends for you, for your benefit?
Aman: I don't think that will happen. ⁓
Anuvab: Good money got so clever, you're like, today's your gym appointment. I never signed up for the gym.
Aman: I don't think money can do that, like there's something called agentic commerce which can do that for you, which is like, I don't know if you've seen this thing about clobots and things like that. So you can appoint a agent or a bot to act on your behalf and that bot can spend your money if it's not.
Anuvab: Like you would give an amount to a secretary in the old days.
Aman: Exactly right so you'd give your money to your agent and say hey I want to have a steak dinner tonight But like, you know, whatever, you want to have a dinner and you get this ingredients and they would go out and they would go to like, you know, big bizarre or whatever the different retail outlets and get the asparagus from here, the steak from here, there's something else from there. Pull it all together, get Zepto to actually come in and pay everybody and then say, boom, here you go. It's like an efficient housekeeper.
Anuvab: Wow. Yep.
Aman: So that bot could, it's not yet fully there, but it's increasingly get there, including make a phone call to the person, inquire about it, call back, and could even sound like you. Hey, this is, hey, this is, you know, I don't know, what would you call your bot if you had one?
Anuvab: Wow. Me, guess, I'd just give it Anuvab. Yeah, to confuse the people.
Aman: Can I confess something on a podcast? know what I call my bot? Moneypenny.
Anuvab: What? That's good. It's an assistant name, isn't it? Yeah, no, I know where it's from. I just feel like it's a good assistant.
Aman: Well, it's from James Bond. It's a, I use my chat GPT and it's got a personality and once in a while it'll be like, hi James, I mean sorry Aman. It even has a sense of.
Anuvab: You want the secretary to be stern like a Mrs. Bones. know, like stern lady who does that. Anyway, so because learning the transition of money is fascinating. So in 2014, you joined Google?
Aman: Yeah, I joined Google initially in sort of, yeah, and then we'll.
Anuvab: I'm sorry, so very quickly, you went to graduate school in France, you went to INSEAD, you finished and went back to Singapore.
Aman: No, I went back to London. as I joke about, I said I fell in love with my wife and the internet in that order. And though my wife will argue, it's probably the other way around. And yeah, I'm still married to both of those things. I moved back to London a year then and moved to Singapore with the bank.
Anuvab: Right. Right. And in your graduate school years, two questions. One, what was your best learning from INSEAD? And two, were you also in the Singapore campus or did all
Aman: I did, did. So Shona got like, there was some sort of immigration thing where she had to get to Singapore. I ended up in Singapore for a couple of months and then went back to France. ⁓
Anuvab: I remember us because we were in touch but we building our lives so we spoke a lot less but we'd see each other. We walked around London streets once in a while and I remember there was one time I called you, I was in New York and you were having a lot of difficulty getting a phone fixed in Fontainebleau and you encountered French public sector bureaucracy which you said was one of the worst in world.
Aman: It was Tron. So I'll tell you, let's say original question, but first this one. Yeah, I wish, you by the way, couple of batches after us, another thing that didn't work was money transfer. And a couple of guys from INSEAD then started something called TransferWise that became WISE, et cetera. So I wish I had started a telco after, you know, they did something about their problem. I just complained about it to you and never started a unicorn.
Anuvab: Is that where that came from?
Aman: It's two insane students trying to move money between Singapore and France and then it led to WISE.
Anuvab: because they found the French banking system.
Aman: And this is going back to our original thought like what we said is that that inquisitiveness the other part of American ingenuity that I wish I had spent more time or learned a little bit more maybe I will now is is taking the frustrations and applying it to solve a problem.
Anuvab: I think
Aman: I was, and maybe we were very good at describing the problem really well, but solving the problem is something that's also very American. actually, I think today that lives in China and India even more so. Young people are solving complicated problems. And at Google, that was something I learned. You get attracted to solving big problems. The bigger the problem, the more attractive it is to you to solve it. But to answer your question on the best lesson I learned that is, it's very very clear we had a professor who passed away recently a couple years ago he ⁓ he said the three types of managers in the world a managers B managers and C managers a managers hire other a managers B managers hire C managers and C managers hire nobody so don't hire a B manager because it will stop the decline of your organization
Anuvab: because he doesn't want someone cleverer than him.
Aman: Lots of things. Yeah, doesn't want somebody clever than him or her or know, or you know, yeah doesn't have the sort of the the maturity to think big picture so Or is toxic and doesn't allow a good working environment So and then by the way, it's not that that's the sea manager, but the bee managers enable a culture of sea managers And so that's the thing, to always try to hire exceptional people. And not just exceptional work-wise, but culture-wise.
Anuvab: And that's what you said, you know, going back to problem solving, you see a lot of the Indian tech entrepreneurial wealth coming from solving basic problems that we've seen. Yeah. I mean, at least I've seen living here in the last now almost 15, 20 years, you know, five or six different mom and pop stores. have to step out. Exactly. You have to step out and buy all of those things. They're like, we'll just get it home in 10 minutes and assemble everything. transformed Indian middle-class life. I remember working in India and having to sort nine different menus to order for stuff. People like Zomato and Swiggy have solved for that. So there's a continual sort of, in India, most of the apps are solving for people to not have to confront India. You stay home, deal with India. So a lot of Indians take problems like, Indians stay away from other Indians. We'll make sure how.
Aman: And we did another episode on this, which is that the problem around this is you're staying in your house and not exercising and not taking care of different...
Anuvab: It's a horn. I mean, I've seen it in my line of work, When I started out writing my very first play, I'd go to a human being at the National Centre of Performing Arts and ask him how many tickets have sold and he'd tell me. He would tell me that, you know, in Hindi he'd say, you know, tonight is completely full or tonight is half, it's not looking good, it's looking great. But it was a guy who had to like sell a ticket and kind of mark it off on his thing, right? Now, BookMyShow comes and completely transforms not only how you buy tickets, also how to sell them. So if you wanted to go play a comedy show in 2005 or 2006, you needed ads in the newspapers, human being would see that ad and say, want to go see this guy. Now the whole thing is run on the phone. So all your advertising dollars now go to digital marketing.
Aman: But how do you I love the fact that you're still checking how many tickets are sold now as a of a celebrated comedian.
Anuvab: Well, here's the thing. Now I don't even have to go to a guy. They tell you. You can, no, when you have a show, you can log on to book my shows. And it tells you.
Aman: Create a version of it.
Anuvab: Yeah, and they just tell you that you attend some show. Yeah, this is exactly how many of soul Yeah, so I mean if an artist is telling you they don't even want to know that they're just booked Everybody wants to know right? So anyway, so I will come to the transformation in my profession. Yeah, but from 2014 you spent how many years four years four years ago, yeah, and What did you do there? What did you find?
Aman: So we were part of Google Pay. A friend of mine, Caesar Sengupta, was running Google Pay. It is. Good, big, wally, Shakespearean name. Yeah, just for clarity, his brother's name is not Brutus.
Anuvab: It's great news. Yeah, I was gonna say that.
Aman: But initially I did some consulting work for him and then I ended up joining his larger organization and they launched Google Pay in India so we try to help scale that but then most importantly taking it internationally. I took it to Singapore and then we were trying to work on the US.
Anuvab: I'm going ask you just as a retail people, want to know this, Yeah. GPay is huge in India. Yeah. We use it for everything. Yeah. How big is it in other countries?
Aman: It's not as big as it is in India and other countries.
Anuvab: They Venmo. They do a of Venmo.
Aman: What Gpay means to you in India is the full capability of Gpay in India is not available anywhere in the world in its entirety. So for you Gpay means being able to send somebody or a merchant money with just a couple of clicks or a scan. That's true in Singapore. We were able to replicate most of that in Singapore. most countries it doesn't. It's mostly it's like Apple Pay where you just tap and pay or with a credit card. But in India, we took GPay and we went deeper. The reason we were able to do deeper was because the India in stack was there in India infrastructure. And the India stack doesn't exist in many places. Actually, most places don't have the India stack. Famously, ⁓ the United States doesn't, which is why Venmo, which is a private company that then got bought by PayPal, created that. But even they are sort of a niche kind of player. They're not national. And this is what I mean going back to your question. In places like India and China, cetera, the infrastructure for digital has what they call public digital infrastructure has just surpassed that of what you
Anuvab: Yeah. In the UK I see most people on the tube just tapping their phone but then I see that in GP but then I see what they're tapping is actually the HSBC card.
Aman: So your card is provisioned as they say inside your wallet and you use your phone, which is great because you don't have to pull out your wallet. So you've got your phone in your hand anyway. that we made that convenience.
Anuvab: But in India you move a little bit of money from your bank account you can link your bank
Aman: So GP doesn't hold your money because of UPI and Aadhaar and the sort of telephone number messaging system, you're able to basically say, your account is tagged to a phone number, my account is tagged to a phone number, it says debit, it says, take phone number, this debit, that account, credit it to that. And that happens to your point on rails, on the national rail, the GP doesn't touch the money, it's just a facilitator. It's essentially like that bot we talked about, it's just saying, hey, Kotak Bank Pay, Aman, from Anuvab's HDFC account.
Anuvab: And tell me how does that work in like in the UK or the US people would just go to GP and just load their credit card on?
Aman: Yeah, but that's but they're paying with a credit card and they get their bill at the end of the month. This is like directly debiting your account and moving it across to somewhere else. That capability does exist in the UK as well to be able to direct debit, but the number to be able to use a phone number doesn't. banks like Monzo and all. It's interesting in the Western world, there's things like open banking and things like that, which have relied on the banks to sort this out, whereas in the East, whether it's China, India, Philippines, Singapore, the government has come in and said this is how it's going to work. And the reason is because in this part of the world, people, we need it for financial inclusion. Yes. So now today you can pay, you know, on the way here I wanted to sort of copy our notes. I stopped on the drive. paid the guy, I WhatsApped him our notes and he printed it out and I paid him.
Anuvab: just
Aman: I didn't have to carry coins
Anuvab: you beat him, you beat him,
Aman: and pay him and I was in and out because I was like hovering on the side and I was I was on my way
Anuvab: So I'll tell you how I've seen my profession become transformative due to digital. Essentially, the two things, the two bits of work I do, is writing for television, writing for film and television and stand-up comedy. The transitions have been. I'd say more C-Smith than digital banking. I agree. In that people just don't go to the movies anymore. Yeah. Right? So when I cut my teeth and made my career, my first two films, Loins of Punjab, The President Is Coming, were based on urban audiences buying tickets and going to a theatre. That model is decimated. So live comedy still exists, but how it's consumed and how tickets are bought is entirely on Instagram now. So most people doing live entertainment, if you're a comedian, are essentially your whole focus is to create a four minute clip that goes viral based on which you sell tickets.
Aman: You know, I can tell you this from my own experience. I've always worked on enabling creators and others. Now I am sort of, I guess, one in some respects. It's incredibly easy, but it's also on the flip side really hard because, as you said, you could get good at something and do it again and again, rinse and repeat. Today you can't. The formats are changing. You have to continuously stay abreast. You have to continuously get the feedback that you're getting. Chop up stuff into like different, you know, this is a long form. This podcast will go out as a long form for people who wander like spend 90 minutes on this conversation or they'll go out in 90 seconds.
Anuvab: Yeah And it's many of the bits and pieces that lead them to the long form, but also because people, most entertainment is now consumed for free. Yeah. You know, because earlier you would go to some gatekeeper. Yeah. Don watered the comedy store in 2011, saw me and said, this guy, you know, I think I want to, and that kickstarted my career. Don is now 85 years old. He was, he's been the gatekeeper for comedy for 30 years, giving people a break. People have come and seen them at comedy store, then on TV, radio, there was a trajectory. Yeah. Now the gatekeepers. don't matter because everyone can directly go to the internet.
Aman: This is interesting. What does that mean? If we were going back in time to our 25 year old selves, who just graduated from Ohio Wesleyan or 20 something year old, what advice would you give back to Aman and Anuvab back then?
Anuvab: I think what we did, knowing what we knew then, we did the right things. We went to the right people, joined the right institutions. If I was talking to a kid now who wanted to enter a job, I'd say develop a brand. then people will develop some brand, become an expert at something. If you're the World War I aeroplane guy on the internet, there'll be work for you. You know what I mean? Rather than do a job,
Aman: That's commoditized.
Anuvab: of money because you know if you're an assistant manager you know data feeds yeah you're dispensable you're nobody you know you're like that thing will go no one will remember you go to another you've spent your whole life trying to impress a bunch of people in an organization whose water is shifting under their feet you know so they so so who you impress has changed You know, like the biggest thing is when we grow up, we're like, oh, these are the tempos we need to impress. I need to get an agent. I need to get a thing. This producer, if they see me, will then fund my thing. Those things have gone, you know? But if you are a brand and do a thing well, whatever that thing is, and people know you for that thing, it's not even comedy. Like you have to be like, oh, he's the guy that does the dog comedy. He's the guy that does the thing on colonial history. Like you become that guy, then work comes from that expertise. And I think that's pretty much all that's
Aman: When I speak to younger people and they get asked a lot of this question and an organization that teams because we do this advisory stuff now is saying build stuff. I mean, we grew up in an era, the post industrial era of moving shit around, right? Like we were like, as you said, you were like crossing the I's and dotting the T's on process. That stuff doesn't, if you are, if you're moving stuff from point A to point B for somebody, there's a machine or a bot or a robot who's gonna come and take your job. But if you're creating, if you're building stuff, whether it is a comedy show, whether it is a payment application, whether it is something, it's easier to build today than it's ever been.
Anuvab: Yeah, IP is in failure.
Aman: don't even if you're in the corporate world don't look at the sort of CEO of your company this is what I said because you're like when we went we could look at the CEO of the company and say I want to do that and this is the path and I can roughly get there right like we may be the last generation GenX may be the last generation they can follow the sort of well-prodden path anybody who's trying to follow our path is going to get if they do that because something is going to come and whack them
Anuvab: That's right. Yeah the
Aman: And so I think the real message here is that from your life and my experiments.
Anuvab: We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We know less now than we did when we met in 1995. We just have no questions.
Aman: Well, I'll answer to this. 90 minutes later. Absent. worst end to a podcast.
Anuvab: It's probably the best. We got to wind up, but we'll do some more of this. We have to wind up because I think there's some people coming. But we'll try to have another bit of conversation.
Aman: I was honest. I think so. should bring our partners and crime into this. they'll keep us honest. I'm a lot more organised than I am on this. I would chop my head off for inviting her to a barge party. Alright, done.
Anuvab: Thank you so much. Take care. Bye.