E157 | Joy of Giving P2 | Venkat Krishnan

Rejection can bruise the ego—or it can build the roadmap. We sit down with Venkat to unpack why the best salespeople talk less, listen more, and treat every “no” as free R&D. That simple shift—separating the rejection of an idea from the worth of a person—unlocks a healthier mindset and a sharper product. Venkat shares the unforgettable Ahmedabad school story: sky‑high expectations, an empty admissions desk, a late‑night reckoning, and then gritty, door‑to‑door work that turned seven enrollments into thirty‑one—and, within a year, demand far beyond capacity.

From there, we pivot to giving. Venkat is candid about leading with the head before the heart, and how sustained, significant philanthropy pulled his emotions into alignment. We examine why five seconds of joy can be real impact, how India’s poorest quietly donate a larger share of their revenue, and why storytelling alone can fade while numbers persist. The throughline is sacrifice: moving from feeling good to doing good, giving up a little personal comfort so others can access essentials like surgery or schooling. We also explore practical tools for builders—scrappy prototypes, frugal learning, and then bold-scale spending once product-market fit is clear.

Looking forward, we map three frontiers for change-makers: climate change as the defining systems challenge, AI’s underexplored existential risks beyond jobs, and a wider moral circle that extends compassion to nonhuman life. Venkat outlines initiatives like ICVA to make corporate volunteering meaningful and measurable, and Living My Promise, where wealth-holders commit half their net worth to society. The episode closes on gratitude and responsibility: if you can listen to this show, you have privilege—now turn it into impact through listening, proximity, and giving that stretches you. If this conversation pushed your thinking, follow, rate, and share the show with someone who needs a nudge from feeling good to doing good.

Have you purchased the copy of Inspire Someone Today, yet - Give it a go geni.us/istbook

Available on all podcast platforms, including, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify

Transcript

Listening Beats Pitching

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You know, the best salespeople are people who learn to listen the most. We have this counterintuitive belief that a good salesperson has to talk. But actually, the best salespeople are the ones who listen more, who ask more questions, who learn more about the customer. So for me, every rejection is an opportunity to go deep into the why. So I am less worried about will you say yes or no to me, and more about if you're saying no, why are you saying no? What is it that you're not getting? And then that becomes an opportunity to go back to the drawing table and relook at what we have on offer. Giving doesn't have to be always impactful in a long-term transformational way. Giving can often be momentary, bringing five seconds of joy to people's lives. I don't think that real transformation will come unless we all give up something.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I'm your host, Shrikant, and I'm thrilled to be with you on this journey of inspiration. The joy, the journey, and the horizon ahead. If part one was about beginnings, part two is about becoming.

Rejection As Data, Not Identity

SPEAKER_01 1:53

No, I think by the way, rejections are high even now, don't worry about it. It never changes. No, but I think one of my my dear one of my dearest friends is Sudhir Sudheer Korti, who used to be my co-founder at Educational Initiatives, the company we started. And he is one of the best salespeople I've met. And one thing I learned from him very early, uh, one of the things I learned very early from him was that you know the best salespeople are people who learn to listen the most. We have this counterintuitive belief that a good salesperson has to talk. But actually, the best salespeople are the ones who listen more, who ask more questions, who learn more about the customer. So for me, every rejection is an opportunity to go deep into the why. So I am less worried about will you say yes or no to me, and more about if you're saying no, why are you saying no? What is it that you're not getting? And then that becomes an opportunity to go back to the drawing table and relook at what we have on offer, right? Are we offering the right thing? Are we solving people's pain points? I think that's the only way to look at this. There is a again, my other co-founder Sridhar told me this saying, I think, a proverb which said that if one person calls you a horse, uh ignore them. If two people call you a horse, uh go and check in the mirror. If three people call you a horse, get the get thyself a saddle. So it's a very interesting way of saying that the entire world can't be wrong and you are the only person, right? Have the humility to use the negative as an introspective feedback. And it's not a personal thing, right? Nobody is rejecting you as a person. That's the other very, very important thing to learn about rejection early in life. And I think all good salespeople learn it. Uh otherwise, you can't survive as a salesperson, which is to segregate rejection of the idea or the proposition and rejection of you as a person. Uh the moment you learn how to make that segregation, then you learn not to take rejection personally. And so the rejections that you face do not affect your self-esteem on a daily basis. For the number of rejections I have faced in life, I have ridiculously high self-esteem. In fact, some people might even call me arrogant. But yeah, I think that rejection is the rejection of the idea. And you go back, you understand it, detail it out, and and then figure out what to do about it.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

And then just well, that kind of leads me to two other elements of it. One is in the face of such rejections, how do you muster back all those energies, conviction to go back the next day and redo all over again? And second part of it is did you come anywhere closer to giving up? And then how did you kind of overcome?

The “Horse” Proverb And Humility

Energy After No: Two Big Questions

SPEAKER_01 4:49

So, one story I can share was way back in '97 when we were planning to start the school in Ahmedabad, right? Sunilanda was funding it, and Srida Sudhir and I were setting up the school public in Amdabad. And we put in a lot of research, a lot of work, and a lot of resources to set up the school, etc. And for some possibly arrogant reason, we find that, you know, those were also, I'm talking of 97 when schools were not easy to get admissions into. Schools were very scarce, good English, Midday schools, etc. When we were opening the school, we actually assumed that we will have a we wanted to take him some 50 kids or 64 kids or something in the first year. 64. Yeah, 64 seats. And we thought there will be like 2,000, 3,000 people who will apply, and how are we going to shortlist? Uh we had got KT ⁇ G, by the way, Rajesh Jan, to offer to supervise a random drawing of lots for admissions, all of that kind of stuff. And then when we opened our admissions for the first day, the whole day, two people came to inquire. And the first six days that we had originally kept for admissions, some 11 or 12 people even visited, of which only three or four took the forms to apply, leave alone getting the admissions. And we were devastated. Like from what our expectations was to what the reality turned out. And I remember though that we sat on the terrace, and he had 10, 11 in the night. We spoke for two hours asking ourselves, should we just shut up? Does this make no sense? Should we just go back to our lives and maybe we are not cut out to do this? Maybe the world is telling us you're idiots, you don't know how to do this. And then we went on and on talking about it. But again and again came back with the same conviction that our belief that we need a different kind of a school, a school where the child is the center of the institution, where learning is the center of the institution and not teaching. Where we create ways and paths for a child to discover themselves in a holistic all-round way is more important than the rote learning kind of schools that predominated in those days. And we felt that even if we get only 20 children, we will still go ahead. The next day we spoke to three teachers who we had hired already. It was in April 2097, sorry. April 1997. And over the next two months, Andhrabad has very hot summers, you must remember that. The teachers also said yes, and between Sridhar Sweeney and the teachers, we went door to door to more than 400 homes, 4,000 homes in Amdubad, like Shanthu Saint. We would knock on people's doors, say, we are, you know, trying to set up a school in the city, we had a brochure in our hands, etc. And surprisingly, while a few people did shut a door on our face, many people in Anubad were actually kind. Even if they didn't have children in their homes, they would invite us in, give us a cup of tea or a you know, nimbupani because it was hot, and uh talk to us, connect us to others, saying in our society there is this person on this floor, you should go and talk to them, the industrial. And gradually, through door-to-door salespersonship, we eventually closed with 31 children uh by June. So we went from seven who had taken admission during the admission process to finally 31 children uh when we started the school. So that was the one big failure experience that I had to. By the end of that academic year, the next year we had 250 seats and we had more than 800 applications.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Wow. Full circle moment. Yeah, absolutely. On similar note, I want to now get the other side of your experiment at as well beautifully well, which is the joy of giving. What some anecdotes that you can share by virtue of uh doing dhanut or by virtue of this whole concept of joy of giving? What have you seen in close quarters uh that has changed the construct of how people are looking at giving, how it has actually had an impact, just not about giving, how it had had an impact on an individual or on an institution?

Ahmedabad School Launch Falls Flat

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Yeah, no, I think that's that's a good question to reflect on. I think the deepest impact I can think of is the impact it has had on me personally. I am actually a very, very, very low empathy person. It seems very counterintuitive that a person who's working on philanthropy, etc. But my approach to philanthropy, my approach to an equal egalitarian society, etc., is quite deeply influenced by rational logic rather than by emotion. So I, in fact, for example, very rarely go and visit uh the beneficiaries one supports or the work that's being done, etc. Because as an extremely left-brained person, I tend to come back only feeling that, oh, they could have done more, this person should have achieved more, this problem could have been solved this way. The analytical, rational part of the mind. So I have learned not to do that and just stay at home and look at numbers and reports and uh understand the impact through that lens, because that's the only lens I can. But I do realize through the Danudsa, I found that there's two parts to giving. And Peter Drucker talks about it in his book called Managing Nonprofit Organizations. One is how do you create a citizen who takes responsibility, which is the part I can intuitively understand as a logical left-wing person. He also says, How do you make everybody a neighbor who cares? To the point being that as a citizen, you take responsibility for everything. But let's suppose you have a neighbor who stumbles down and falls. You could say that, well, he stumbled, it's his problem, or she stumbled, it's her problem. But as a caring person, you say, Oh, you stumbled, can I help you? And that's not driven by logic, it's driven by how we are as human beings connected to each other, etc. I think in many ways I will credit Dans for opening that part of my mind out to the fact that giving doesn't have to be always impactful in a long-term transformational way. Giving can often be momentary, bringing five seconds of joy to people's lives, and a million five seconds adds up to a lifestyle. So I think that impact has had on me. The other thing I learned is India's poor give far more than our will we do. I think even as a percentage, especially as a percentage. Absolutely, obviously not. But and I started observing a lot. So if you go to any, you know, chai shop in Bombay or in any other place, the street-based shops, right? Not the cafes and fancy cases. If you can just stand there for a few hours and observe, there will be some beggar who will come, this guy will give him a free cup of chai. The municipal corporation sweeper will come, we give him a free cup of chai. Some other person will come, rat picker will come, he give them a free cup of chai. I did this exercise one day and I counted the total number of chai cups sold versus donated. I found that he was donating 3% of his total saves. Right? We think companies donating 2% of profit is a very big thing. This poor guy is donating 3% of his revenue. And you will find this pattern retreat with every vadapa house, handulala, panipuriwala. Anybody on the street, you'll find the poorest of India. They give, for example, the Vadapavala will see their dog. These trade-offs on the they get taken care of only by the street vendor. They are the biggest supporters of the animal. So I think that was another eye-opener for me to realize that India has its own giving traditions, which may not get counted in terms of revenue foregone by the government of India and the ATGs and all of that. It's a very deep and profound, the embedded part of our innate culture originally, which is the original was to Devutumakama idea, etc. I think it's people like us, the educated, western educated, middle, upper middle class people who have lost those roots, and we think of giving very differently, as if it's not natural for us.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

I'll touch upon, I'll pick up that particular piece. I want to uh have a little more deeper conversation on that, which is in a world that has become so transactional, how do you bring the heart back into giving?

Door‑to‑Door Grit To 31 Students

SPEAKER_01 13:33

So interestingly, I think there are two ways to do it. The more painful but the more enduring way of doing it is to get people so deep into giving that the heart inevitably comes. So I am in that journey, my life. I've been giving for a very long time of my life, but completely out of the brain and rationally. In from 2000 to 2009, it was completely led at only after Dhamtra started in 2009 that my heart even started coming into it at all. But that was because my giving was so significant that I was already giving 90% of my thai, and by 2009 I started giving 80-90% of my income as well. And so it became inevitable that the heart got so exposed to it that it had to come in. So, this initiative we have called Living My Promise, which one of our Danusa volunteers, Girish Batra, started in 2018, very interesting, where Indians make a commitment to donate half their wealth back to society. Uh, it seemed counterintuitive that ordinary Indians could do something like that, but you know, I have 170 people who made that commitment in India in the last six years. Uh, and with a lot of them, I'm seeing the same thing that there is a little heart, but when the giving becomes significant, then the heart automatically starts taking over and becoming more significant as well. That you can't give without actually caring. And you can't just continue giving because of some religious belief or because it's a sense of duty, or you know, because you want it to be seen as a giver or any of those superficial reasons. The depth automatically comes when the giving is very significant. The other route, so this is obviously the difficult route, but it's also much more enduring. Anybody who's reached that part, who's reached the art through the brain, is never going to go back. Just zero chance of their going back. The other way is, of course, give people exposure, which is through things like volunteering, getting people to start giving. And a lot of people in India, even today, are cynical about giving money. And my last six years, eight, seven years' journey has been focused around how do we get people to volunteer time. And it's easier. There are fewer distrust issues when it comes to giving your time because your money, your time can't be misused so much. So people volunteer more easily, and when you volunteer in person, especially, not this virtual kind of I will endorse this campaign by a like or whatever, kind of stuff. But when you actually go to a government school indeed, or you uh go to a slum and spend time there, or mentor a child, or anything they expect, you run a health camp, etc. Then actually that exposure to privilege becomes much starker. You get to see with your own eyes that you know your own child at home has everything they need, but here is a child who cannot afford to buy a new notebook. And that does something to people. So that's the heart route. Surprisingly, though, my experience is the heart root is not as enduring as the brain to heart root is. It seems again counterintuitive. But people who give with a lot of heart, I often see continue giving very small through the rest of their life. They'll give 10%, 2%, 3% of their income. And they believe in stories. Right? Storytelling and all of that stuff. I don't believe in storytelling at all, by the way. I tell stories when I need to, but I like when I am evaluating anybody to support, the first thing I tell them is, I want numbers, I don't want stories. And I find that stories have a nice warm glow effect for a few minutes and then they wear off. Because there are other stories happening in our life. Our life is a series of micro stories, right, at the end of the day. Because you'll have heard this moving story that your friend told you at a dinner conversation, and then they all go home. And if you have to do the dishes and you have an argument with your spouse or something, then that story takes over, and that previous story is wiped out of your memory. Whereas anything you do with a very rational brain tends to stay forever. It doesn't go away so easily. I'm not trying to deepen or delicious giving with the heart. I think it's extremely important for people to give the heart. But I think we need to find a way of taking that heart to a level where it becomes a much deeper conviction rather than a nice touchy-feely moment.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

It has to be sustainable, it has to be ongoing. It cannot be one-off because you respond.

Full Circle: Demand Explodes

Joy Of Giving: Head And Heart

SPEAKER_01 18:13

It has to be transformative of the individual. It cannot be that and transformative beyond just being a nice, kind person, which a lot of people are. Right? And I I love them. I really admire people. Many friends I have that are very nice and kind. But I think this belief that being nice and kind, but not having to do anything that causes. I deeply believe in sacrifice. I think we live in a world where if we don't give up, then we are, we do end up. It is at the end of the day a world with finite resources. When we don't give up, we end up depriving somebody. And just because that person is not in front of your eyes and it's not a story playing in your mind, and it's just a number or a statistic to you, if you're ignoring it. So every time, like even today, I mean, I I donate a few crores a year now, personally, but I agonize over buying a hundred rupee. I like, for example, the last 10 years, I've never bought a single pair of clothing for myself. I only buy second-hand clothes. Because I can see that that 250 rupees or 1000 rupees extra will provide a cataract to surgery to somebody who can see their grandchild instead of just hearing their grandchild. Just because I can't see the person who's going to get that cataract surgery, it doesn't mean that I can be so kind to myself that I like that myself and go and buy a Louis Vuitton bag or a Louis Philip shirt or whatever. So I think that we have to get people to go beyond this feeling good about yourself in that moment of kindness thing. Understanding that we live in a deeply unequal society and we we are not going to get there unless we learn to give up something ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

And the phrase for sure is from feeling good to doing good. Yeah. Venkat, you have definitely given a lot of foot for thought for me and the listeners to kind of mull over over the course of the next few days, hours, and months. Venkat 10 years out, 2035, you and I we are having this conversation. What is the three pieces of advice that you would give to Venkat, the future self?

SPEAKER_01 20:30

First is I hope Venkat is not alive at 2035. Second, he is when he is insignificant and in some remote corner of Kerala or Boa or Monteceri, and you won't be able to find him. Third, if you still manage to, then honestly, nothing. I would have finished doing what I had to do in my life, and hopefully there will be a lot more other interesting people to talk to.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

We'll wish you many, many more years of uh good health because we need that kind of contribution, those kind of talkmates like you to kind of make this country what it is, make a transformation to this particular country. So you there's there's no getting away from any one of us, Venkut. So the next one, uh Venkat, three individuals or circumstances that change the course of your life.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

I think uh the school, Airport High School, in many ways, my undergraduate college, Parley College, two friends, three friends, Ridar Sudheer and uh Jakshin Bhagle. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Three ideas or projects that you still dream of uh seeing it to come alive?

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Uh implementation of the two major constitutional amendments, the 74th constitutional amendment, so that every ward has a committee and citizens get to decide how their money is spent instead of uh more and more centralized government system, first foremost. Second is a way to be able to track impact of nonprofit organizations and make it much more publicly visible and being able to calculate and show people what is the impact per rupee of each organization, building a database of impact per rupee. Third is a system where every child in India gets access to a really, really good schooling. Like imagine if a Jawar Nahu Devidyale or a Kindre Vidyalay quality of education is available to every single child in this country respect to baby alone.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Thank you. The last of the power of three round question, Venkat. Three micro experiments that you recommend listeners to practice as they build to build something that they are passionate about.

Five Seconds Of Joy Still Counts

SPEAKER_01 22:43

First do a very small uh rapid prototype and test it out, obviously. Whatever idea you look on. And you can do rapid prototypes without using technology and all of that kind of stuff, right? Like the famous story about the founder of Palm Pilot, uh, which today nobody knows about, but it used to be the first mobile device. Uh, when he wanted to test the idea out, he actually carried a block carved wood. A block of wood carved out with a this thing. It was not actually a device. And he would carry it around in his office, and when people asked him what he was doing with it, he was saying this is a digital device where I'm taking notes. And he used the feedback he got from people to build the first pump pilot. So I think lots of people often think that even a basic pilot requires heavy investment, etc. I think if you can do prototypes without spending money, it's a great way to learn quickly. Uh second is be as thrifty as possible, meaning spend as little as possible in the initial days to do your uh initial work. Do a lot of it yourself, go out into the field, meet people, talk to them, and learn and get the product or the service right as quickly as you can. And third, which I think I have not practiced as much as I should, once you know that the product is right, overestimate and overspend on promoting. One of the most inspirational stories for me is the story of uh Hirus Kambata of Rasna in Amdubab. I used to live in Amdubas in the late 90s, if you remember. Uh I remember this story from Mudras founder, Vr. Krishna Muti, telling us that Hirus Kambata somehow got the courage to spend 70% of his revenue on advertising. 70%, right? And that led to Rasna seeing like a 3x, 4x growth in revenue in a couple of years. And that kind of courage in conviction, if you look at some of the biggest unicorns we have in the consumer space, whether it is Repto, Zamato, Fiji, etc., I think the amount of investment they put to build a brand came from conviction that the product was right and the market, product, market was right. I think far too often this the first two recommendations seem to be at odds with this third one, but actually it's not. We tend to spend too much in the early stages, we don't get the product right, and then sometimes we look at scaling before the product is. But I think once the product is right and you have all the evidence that it is right, we happen to tend to underinvest in scale.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Don't undersell it. Uh over the horizon for the next generation of change makers, what new frontiers of significance should they prepare for?

The Poor Give From Their Revenue

SPEAKER_01 25:37

I think one of them is very obvious climate change. I think everybody knows that that's going to be one of the biggest problems of the future. The second, which I think is emerging, is I think we are underestimating the risks of it, is how is artificial intelligence going to shape the future of our world? And I'm saying the less, especially when you look beyond the horizon, I'm saying I'm looking at it less from this very superficial, immediately of looking at it, oh, engineers will lose jobs, that kind of stuff. But more about is there a risk that AI will become sentient? Uh and is there a risk that you know Asimov's laws will not hold for AI? And what could that do to light the very existence on the planet, etc.? I think it's a I mean, one way to look at it is to say who cares if life doesn't exist anymore, but it is a non-trivial issue. And I think people are underinvesting in that area also, definitely. The third, which is also very unconventional, is thinking beyond human life to all forms of life. Uh, I am not an animal lover or anything like that. I don't I'm not particularly fond of dogs or cats or anything like that. But I think acknowledging that humans are not the only form of life, and that we need to worry about what is our existence doing to other forms of life, whether it is our the way we farm animals and consume them, right? I'm not like advocating everybody becoming vegan necessarily, but I'm just saying, is there a more compassionate way to do that? And also, just you know, if truly Vastudeva Kutungbakam, you start saying that I go beyond my immediate family to my community, to my neighborhood, to the entire world, but then the entire world beyond humans is where it is. I think as we do better and better, I think it's natural for us to start by with our own immediate family. Once our immediate family has taken care of the larger family, and then the community you live in, the country we live in, etc. Hopefully, in the future, we start thinking of other species.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

Fair enough. That's a good call out. What do you see as the future of giving in India 10 to 15 years out?

Bringing Heart Back Into Giving

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Very difficult to say, very honestly, because I think 10 to 15 years out, the givers will be the people who are today in their 20s, right? The major givers will be the people who are in their 20s and early 30s. And I think while they've been born and brought up with everything they need, and they're never so therefore the argument, one argument is they will be prosperous and therefore they will be able to give a lot more. Because our generation went through need, and therefore, when we grew up, our first need was to buy that fancy house, buy the fancy car, etc. Whereas this generation has already been brought up with that. So that argument says that people will end up giving more, but the flip side it is that this generation has not been exposed to need either. They've grown up in these enclaves of sort where they have not seen poverty. Many young people in their 20s and 30s work in the corporate world would have never entered a slum in their life, would have never entered a government school in their life, would have never been to a village in their life in many cases. And therefore, this segregation of India and Bharat, at least in our own context, independently the segregation from the underdeveloped worlds of Africa, etc., is complete. People from India will visit Africa only, visit the Scafaris. We don't go into the slums of Les Hoto and see what life that is like. Uh, or South Sudan, whatever. So my worry is if you don't have the exposure, then you think those worlds don't exist. And you don't build empathies for them. I so I honestly don't know which way the future of giving will be. Whether it is the first part that we have enough for ourselves to be owe it to others, that will take root. Or will it be that, you know, I don't even know about the existence of all these people, it's not my problem. So I think that which way that gets resolved will determine in many ways the future of giving.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

That the current Lord, current generation, the 20 year olds have Access or have awareness of issues, situations a lot more than the previous generations were. So they are a more evolved lot wanting to make that difference to what are issues that is that would be plaguing the world at that point of time.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

So hope so. And at least a lot of our effort in promoting volunteerism is around young people, getting them engaged, getting them exposed to these issues, etc. I'm still a little worried about this whole what I was earlier referring to, that if people don't give significantly, then it becomes very, you know, superficial. Tokenism. So let's, yeah, and maybe a little bit more than tokenism, but still not significant enough. In the sense that let's take the simple example of millennials being much more conscious about the environment, right? And I see a lot of young people telling their parents we should not uh go everywhere in a car for one person, we should share rides, we should do this, we should do that, switch off the lights at home, don't consume so much, don't close the tap and you're not using it, etc. But that same generation of young people believes in YOLO and believes in going and seeing the northern lights on a vacation, going on a cruise, etc. And the point is this new yearning to travel a lot and see the world, etc., is environmentally hundred times more disruptive than anything their parents have done in their life. And I don't know whether the young people are seeing that when you're confronted with the fact that one seat of a flight from Bombay to Europe is going to do more carbon damage than your father driving 8,000 kilometers in his car, which is what he will do in 10 years or five years or whatever, going to work in coming back. How do we get these young people to reconcile this? And so, which is why I come back to this point that I don't think that real transformation will come unless we all give up something. And can the young generation give up its yearning to travel around the world or you know, consume or order everything on swiggy and that carbon food? So I think it's so the jury is still out, at least for me on this.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Yep, the dichotomies that they had to traverse through, the dichotomies that they have to lead through. So, Vinkert, what's next for Vinkert?

Brain-To-Heart vs Heart-Only

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Oh, uh not much. I mean, I'm right now still early in the volunteering enablement journey. First and foremost for myself and my own philanthropy is in the next five years give down, finish all my giving, get as close to broke as I will, and then retire. Go off to a small town and live in isolation, uh, and allow my introversion to thrive there. But uh in that period, in that next five, six years, we've recently set up an organization called ICVA, the Indian Corporate Volunteering Association. It's actually a group of companies that have come together and set it up, and Ekan KT India is also a member of that. The vision of ICVA is how do we get corporates to look at volunteering from a meaningful impact lens that not only helps create significant measurable social impact and so moving away from these seed ball making and tree planting kind of stock to meaningful, significant volunteering? That also actually helps build skills for people. And like I said earlier, that you know, if you do something with the right intent, the payoff will come. So, how can that shave off for companies in terms of improving employee skills, productivity, improving retention, improving other metrics so that actually the business will wind up doing even better because employees are volunteering more and more? So that's the vision of ICVA. And uh so I think that takes shape, helping that grow is really one big cost. Uh, in the philanthropy part of it, living my promise, like I said, we now have 170 Indians who committed to give away half their wealth. But India has more than 150,000 people with networks more than 25 crores today. 150,000, right? Shouldn't all of those people be giving away half their wealth? I mean, half of 25 crores is 12 and a half. I don't think anybody needs that much money to live a very comfortable existence. So let's see it. How do we get more and more of those people onto that bandwagon of realizing that enough is enough and we need to do more for others? That's the Yeah. And on the volunteering space, we call the initiative every Indian volunteer. Right now, 1% of Indians volunteer. Can we in my lifetime move that to 10%? I'll be very, very happy.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Those are some fantastic, lofty goals, not like unachievable. So we'll definitely kind of root for you and uh your work, uh, Venkat, on getting over and beyond all of these things because that is where change, that is where impact can really happen and can really thrive. So I think this has been one heck of a conversation. Venkat, thank you so much for pouring your heart into it. Uh, before we sign off, uh, this show is all about creating ripples of inspiration. What's your inspiration today's message to all the listeners before you and I sign off?

SPEAKER_01 35:08

I think those of us who can even listen to this podcast are lucky. There are a lot of people who can't even listen. So to recognize that we are all privileged in various ways, physically, financially, mentally, etc., I think if we start with that, if we start with gratitude for what we already have, then we will learn to see that there are others who don't, and hopefully we can share our privilege with others. To me, that's the most important.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

We all are at a privilege of wanting to give something, at a privilege that so many people don't have, and let's leverage that privilege to create an impact to the society, to the community around us. On that note, Venkat, thank you so much and wishing you lots of success, lots of uh power for you to create more impact to the community around us. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Inspire Someone Today. This is Sri Kal, your host, signing off. Until next time, continue to carry the ripples of inspiration. Stay inspired, keep spreading the light.