Core Human Motivations - Kunal Shah - TKP 141
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Lessons Kunal Learned Growing Up
These are the Lessons that Kunal Learned about the Gujarati/Marwadi Community.
- The First Lesson is - They have much lower shame then the other community.
They are very hard to Offend. Even if you mock them until you giving them Business. They are OK With That.
- The Second Lesson is - Natural Understanding of Where is the value in everything
Why would somebody pay for it? What are People really paying for?
- The Third Lesson is - Natural Need for Spotting Trends
In Gujarati Business Community, They have a Certain Greet, "Shu Nawajuni" which means What's Trending, What's new & they share that & that would take others to take a long time to enter into because they love the new - new trends.
They Offer Significantly low Interest rate to People in their community, & say "Try to make something out of It & try to return the capital when you can" because they love to see more people successful
The Last Lesson is - Constant having the need to make their community successful
By Giving them a soft landing when their business fails, no one mocks them, come again, get a job , stabilize & start Again.
Learning things from doing business at a Young Age
People love to personalize things & People love to have Higher Status Than Others & Pay more Value.
People loved teaching their Kids Exotic Subject, so I would like teach them Excel & I would not know these subjects, I would ask them what do you really want to learn, I learn that Previous Night Because People Loved the idea of Special skills given to their kids which is not easily available in the market
No one understands the value of time in the Asian society. In the Use there's always people take their job as a view point of per hour salary. But India you will never see that.
People doesn't know their Value of per hour.
What People Pay For
People Pay or People give you time or Money where their core motivations are mostly met or their is a hope for their motivations to be met.
Kunal was Shocked when he got to know that 90 - 95 % of all coins that were traded on all crypto exchanges were not in the top ten, because **who wants the normal returns**
Therefore the world is getting more risky...
Wedding paradox: Suitcases, mitochondria and wedding
Most people spent close to six times their annual salary for their wedding. But there are zero unicorn startups solving wedding problems.
I met a founder who runs a luggage company, suitcases, they build on the public listed companies and they wanted me to join their board. And I’m like, “Okay, I’m happy to meet, but I’m not joining a traditional business board, but I’m happy to have a conversation.” And I was just giving them some suggestion they should do something branding on the airport. And they’re like, “Kunal, what are you talking about?” I’m like, “Yeah, you are a suitcase company. You should be at the airports. What am I not saying correct over here.” He’s like, “Kunal, 80 to 83% of all suitcases in India are bought for weddings. The bride takes new suitcases and goes to the new family. There are 4.4 million weddings that happen every year. And on an average, close to three to four suitcases move with her to the new house.”
On the Fear Of Failure & shame
The Fear of failure Prevents us From Trying...
Value of Time in India
There is no value of time in India.
No one knows their Hourly Value in India. Everyone thinks of in the Monthly basis. No one knows the value of time.
Kunal's Startup Journey
Kunal's first Startup was Freecharge. It allowed people to recharge people on their phone. Give them some vouchers, freebie etc.
What He learns while Investing is that, Everyone is Building their Businesses by copying Western Models.
You can be the Greatest founder but if you meet the bad market you will die.
In India, we saving Every Penny all the time but we'll splurge on weddings, we'll splurge on medical events, we'll splurge on education of our Kids.
Every Indian Family right now who have just got new kids are going to spend probably 100 to 200 times more than what their parents spend for their education.
Kunal's Built framework on *predicting startup Success :*
the framework Known as Delta IV Theory
I saw a very interesting pattern in India that lot of smart people were building great companies where they would go nowhere. And I saw some people who were not so smart who do really well consistently and serial entrepreneurs. And I found that as an interesting pattern that I referred to the analogy that I see a lot of dam builders with no idea where rivers exist. So I see them building dams and hope that river will show up, but river never shows up river exists. Every time they discover that, “Hey river is not coming to my dam.” Instead of moving the dam to river, they make the dams even more funkier and cooler and with AI and all of that stuff, but the water never comes. And I saw that some people were natural at finding where the rivers of motivation were flowing and even the mediocre dams were making profits over there versus these fancy dams, which nobody ever used.
And it’s a great idea to build in Western markets where there are so many rivers and there is such a big economy that even some Accidental river flowing through you will make a lot of money. In India there are no accidental. It’s like you’re building in desert. So you have to make sure you have a desert. You have to really build the dams the right place, because there’s no unlimited rivers flowing.
What Predicts Startup Success ?
A Lot of Founders who pitch to me are usually well prepared for the Presentation & come to me & So I tell Them that - "Hey, I don't Understand English very well , Can you Explain this to me In Hindi, What does it Do?"
Founders who really get what they're doing can switch language without a problem.
& a Lot of Founders Fail In it.
& the Second method is
Imagine if I am a user of your Product, I have to tell a friend over dinner to try this, What do I say, Only rule, i cannot use any jargon, because I don't speak to my friends in Jargon, so tell me What do I say
& I tell them to take 10 Minutes Break before telling me the answer;
I would say 90% of founders fail at this because they can't really distill it to that simple transmissible message from a friend to friend.
If you cannot distill your idea to a transmissible conversation at dinner, it's not going to spread & things that don't spread will have a Huge CAC because nobody really understands what the Hell are you doing...
Good Founders always know the functional & emotional benefit of the Product or Service.
Living rooms vs bedrooms
India cares about status so much more than the Western society. Let me do a thought experiment. I reached out to my friend who used to be a buyer of a top retail chain in India. I asked her to check, “Can you check if the gross margin on all products sold for living room is lot more than the gross margin on all products sold for the bedroom.”
And nobody had ever analyzed data like that in retail ever, nobody thought living room and bedroom has two separate concepts. But I said, “Can you please make somebody crunch it” and turns out the gross margin was three X more. The reason is in a society, we care more about showing to others. So all the products which are showing, demonstrating status for put in the living room are bedrooms are terrible in India because nobody comes to them...
On Insight
You'll rarely meet successful people that are not insightful, I believer that insight is the smallest unit of Truth that is Actionable & Therefore the people who operate in the currency of insight tend to be generally more successful , at least in Business.
Group of Friends & Compounding
When you collect dots, you will connect dots.
Things connect when you go really deep or you go really wide.
Therefore one of the things I do a lot is that
Constantly Look for Origin Stories of why certain things exist
For Ex - I was curious about shampoo, like who the hell came up with this name and then i found that the original story of shampoo is an indian trader who went to europe to sell a shikakai which is a different product in india and sold it as the chumpy, (chumpy is a head massage which creates foam) and that was called shampoo by european guys and it became the product.
& then I see these Things & I'm Like when you go to origin stories of many things there are so many first principles that connect.
Sharpening Insight through Public Disclosure
I think being shameless is most important ingredient in ability to connect dots.
Shameless people make more conjectures without any fear of judgment.
I will make a conjecture Randomly & People bash me & correct me & sharpen my insight or connect even further dots for me.
Every shameful behavior becomes normal when convert this into pride & i think humans do anything by just making it a matter of pride.
I think that everything we are proud of are the handles that we give to other humans to manipulate us.
Fan comes from the word Fanatic & fanatic means easiest to trigger. I think being fan or having favorites is telling the world that you're extremely easy to offend.
The Why is Very Important (Whyfi School)
W-H-Y fi, which means what you do is, at every day at dinner, tell them, ask them a why question, or they can propose a why question
The Why is very important. Why is this happening, why is elon musk rich, why is sky blue? why is this team called this name? Why is it so expensive to advertise on Super Bowl?
The compounding just goes like this because most people are stuck in what and when and how and all of that, but why it makes you more insightful. And I think doing that early hack in kids just makes them very interested in saying that, Why is elon rich
Information asymmetry, keeping secrets and wealth
You’ll rarely meet a wealthy person who cannot keep secrets. So I believe that wealth is like energy that stores itself in entropic complexities that seem to hold the information and symmetry in them, versus be these transient sources.
So a lot of athletes become very rich and very quickly become poor. And you will see a pattern that they’re very bad at holding information in asymmetry
If you see all the companies that are doing well, they’re constantly increasing their information asymmetry about knowledge, about their customer or knowledge about their industry or the flow of system and so on and so forth, because otherwise this energy just keeps moving to places that can hold it and store it.
On Decision Making
Somebody who has more choices usually has ability to make better decisions than people who have lesser choices.
Let me explain what I mean by that. an investor that can invest in any company is likely to become better on how to pick companies, right? So I think the expertise of decision making is usually in people who have more choices than others. In fact, according to me, the simplest definition of success is also about having more choices than other people, in that perspective field that you think about.
Emotions are not good enough to solve the problem, but they are very good at knowing intuitively something is off.
I think a lot of times having just a long term mindset around decisions, even if it’s short term decisions is useful. So I’ve seen that some people are naturally good at long-term decisions, than people who are very good at short term decisions, right? So I think using a lot of those people as APIs in your life for long term decisions is a good framework. All of us know some people who are very good at long-term decisions and they think 20 years, 40 years, 60 years, 80 years, a hundred years on everything.
…all bad behavior is rooted in short term thinking, every bad behavior in human beings comes from being short term about everything,
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Reputation is a bank account where you can only deposit a dollar a day, but every time the withdrawal is almost nearly complete. So if you make a mistake on a reputation, the withdrawal will be complete, or in terms of deposit, you can only almost deposit a dollar a day.
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- The thing is that intuitively people who are very good at decision making are constantly journaling without even sometime not writing, but constantly evaluating everything they did in the past, objectively without feeling emotional about it and constantly reflecting on it and improving their algorithm
Cognitive biases, blind spots, frames of references
All the people who are seemingly very good at decisions, they tend to have multiple personalities in thinking about situations. They can almost think like five different people at the same time and they can become different people and see blind spots of that.
People who I think who are well read, well travelled is nothing but acquiring more lenses in life to see things. The word unusual starts dying. As you travel more, as you read more, you are less shocked. You’re less surprised because nothing seems unusual.
Wrapping Up -
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