Vinayak Joglekar: Game Thinking in India

Vinayak Joglekar is head of India Operations and Chief Technology Officer at Excellarate, with more than three decades of professional software development and delivery experience. Joglekar earned his mechanical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Management and mentors bright minds in software development and product delivery.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's getting2alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: Vinayak Joglekar is a serial entrepreneur from Pune, India. He started multiple companies in software product development and recruitment, and he's had two successful exits.

Now, while most people prefer the security of a regular job, Vinayak feels most comfortable living on the edge. 

Vinayak: I dream a lot and there's no point just dreaming and not doing anything about it. So, I feel uncomfortable when I see that I’m just dreaming and not putting any of my plans in action. Whether I succeed or I fail it doesn't matter.

I need to keep doing it. 

Amy: Vinayak is deeply entrepreneurial. Join me as we [00:01:00] trace his career and explore how he used game thinking to drive retention in SaaS products.

Welcome Vinayak. Thank you for joining us today. 

Vinayak: Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure. 

Amy: I'm really excited to hear about your journey. I know it's been a long road and a really interesting one. So let's get started with briefly. Just say your name, and your position and where you work. 

Vinayak: Yeah. So I'm Vinayak Joglekar and I'm currently a serial entrepreneur.

I've had two exits and I'm in the process of building my third entrepreneurial venture. Currently, I'm the CTO and head of India operations at a company called Xcelerate. It's been a journey where I have seen various stages of the life cycle of an [00:02:00] entrepreneurial venture. So this is one of those stages where the transition is happening from a hundred million dollar company back to zero to become an entrepreneur again.

Amy: It just can't stop. 

Vinayak: Hopefully, and definitely I have full intention of not letting it stop. 

Amy: What is it that drives you to want to leave comfort and go off and go into uncertainty? 

Vinayak: I'm very comfortable doing what I'm doing. In fact, I feel very uneasy and uncomfortable if I'm not doing what I'm doing. So it's my nature or it's the way I'm built or whatever.

You can blame it on anything, but that's the way I am. 

Amy: So for you, comfort means entrepreneurial journey. 

Vinayak: I'm very comfortable because I dream a lot and there's no point just dreaming and not doing anything about it. So I feel uncomfortable when I see that I'm just dreaming and not putting any of my [00:03:00] plans in action, whether I succeed or I fail, it doesn't matter what I need to keep doing it.

Amy: That's really interesting. So let's wind it all the way back. And talk about how you first got involved in tech and entrepreneurship. So what drew you toward tech? And then how did you start moving toward being an entrepreneur? 

Vinayak: Yeah, it started way back. I don't know. Many of the people who are hearing this conversation might not have been born in 1983 when it started.

So in 1983, I was working for a Swedish company. It was called the Electronic Data Processing Department or EDP. And I had a bright idea that I could use computers to exchange information between suppliers and providers of services. I thought it was a very bright idea and I just decided to move on and I resigned from my job and I started my entrepreneurship then.

Amy: And then what company did you [00:04:00] form? 

Vinayak: So that time I started a company by the name Infomex. What I have today is a evolved form of that company. And I got into recruitment of professionals using exchange of information about professionals, about their careers and resumes with job descriptions on the computer.

And those days, it was a very novel thing. It was like a, what you can call a microcomputer, which had, if I remember correctly, 512 KB of memory. Which is, you can't even imagine it. You, your, your watch has, and that, so that's how it started. I was very keenly interested in technology and training people. So around 2000 realized that we need to have more trained people.

That was the Y2K time when we needed more people. So I started training people. I got myself certified and I [00:05:00] used to conduct training in Java. It was thing where several hundred people who. What trained in that time are still around in the industry, about 20 of them are currently working for Xcelerate. I have a large population of students who walked their first few steps with me and that's where I got hooked to technology.

Amy: So then tell us about the Synerzip journey, how you started and grew Synerzip and then how you came to sell it to Xcelerate. 

Vinayak: Yeah, Synerzip was born from a need to serve the unmet need in the market for smaller enterprises or smaller startups to do or take advantage of the economy as well as the ability to spin up teams quickly in India.

Yeah, this option was open only to larger corporations. [00:06:00] And smaller companies were not served. That was an unmet need for them. So myself and Elhence, who was my partner, we decided that let's serve this unmet need, and that is how it started. And prior to that, let me step back a couple of years. Around 2002, Hemant had joined a previous venture of ours, which was a dashboard for supply chain, which is a product which we, which is still in some form in existence.

It is called Intercoms. The name of the company, the Intercoms, he joined that company as the Chief Operating Officer. I was the chief technology officer there. This company still operates out of Dallas, Texas, but a couple of years later, we realized that this product is going to take a little longer than we thought.

And we decided to exit that and started in 2004.

Amy: So you did a pivot?

[00:07:00] It was a case where we were not getting enough return on our investment. We had got the funding, but we had burnt out almost all the cash and the times were not good. So we had to look for options and that's when we decided that, okay, this would be a good option.

That's how it got started. It was not really a pivot because. Uh, that company still exists. So they didn't really change their focus. They continue what they're doing. And we exited that company and we started something new. So that's when it started in 2004. 

Amy: And then what happened? 

Vinayak: Yeah, so 2004 "agile" was just a term that we had heard about and our first customer out of Houston, it was a company that was managing mobile invoices for large corporations like Coke and Pepsi.

They decided to go in for the "agile" way of doing things. And they asked us [00:08:00] whether we could do it for them. And I had read the book. So I said, yeah, I know about it, but I was not like, we never practiced it. It was just like a bookish kind of knowledge at that point of time. But we said, yes, let's give it a shot.

Anyways, we didn't have any other options. So our first client demanded that we follow the "agile" way of doing things. And that worked very well for us because from 2004 onwards, we saw that "agile" became mainstream over the next five to 10 years. And we wrote that bandwagon that helped us getting to the next level.

And we grew the company from zero to 20 million in the next 15 years or so. 

Amy: And so you were basically spinning up teams and helping small and medium-sized businesses deliver their products. Is that correct? 

Vinayak: Absolutely. That what we call as a scrum team, which is a typically a five to seven member team with cross functional team with [00:09:00] all the roles, including quality and development, et cetera.

So we were doing that and we grew from an organization, which had just three people to start with to 500 in these years, in 15 years or so. So it was, it was a good stint. I would say I loved it. I enjoyed it because mentoring people, training people was always close to my heart and I love doing technology.

So that was something that I did. All the way for the for most of the 15 years when Hemant was handling all the client facing role, basically getting the business development, sales and marketing. So I was very lucky to have him as a partner who took care of the ongoing flow of business. And I took care of the ongoing flow of delivery [00:10:00] and it was challenging because even today it's not easy to get good talent.

My focus and my passion has been to acquire and nurture talent. I loved it and I did my part of the partnership. So it seems to have worked because we had a successful exit at the end of 17 years in 2020. 

Amy: Tell us the story of that exit. How did it come to be? How did you first make the connection and then figure out that it was a win-win situation?

Vinayak: Yeah, so we went about it very systematically. So it was around 2019 that we thought that we should be looking at options because we were getting a lot of incoming inbound interest from acquirers who were either strategic or PE firms and all that. But instead of doing it randomly, we said that, okay, let's appoint a sales side investment banker.

So we [00:11:00] looked at three or four different investment bankers. We systematically compared them. We had interviews with them and finally selected one out of those. And then we let the investment banker run the process, and they have a very systematic process. They prepare a Kind of brochure, they send it out to about 700, 800 possible acquirers.

And then they get low eyes and there are various stages through which you, and then you zero down onto the mantra, There is never go for a single thing or interested. You should always have two or three people or three, two or three firms that are interested in acquiring your firm so that you can get a better deal by negotiating with them.

And essentially there should be some competition and market making that should happen. So that's what we did using the private equity firm that finally acquired us [00:12:00] rather using the merchant banking or investment banker that we had and the investment banking firm helped us to zero down on one private equity firm that finally acquired us.

Amy: So the private equity firm acquired you? 

Vinayak: Yeah. 

Amy: Now... what is Accelerate, a private equity firm? 

Vinayak: No, Accelerate is merged entity. So the private equity firm typically as is a food chain where they put together a number of smaller companies, then they in turn make a bigger company out of those smaller companies, and, by integrating them or merging them. 

So that's what they were doing. And we were 20 million and there was another company that was 20 million dollars. So they merged these two entities and called it Accelerate. And we were 40 then. And this year we are more than 56 and it's going to be like 70 million dollars, 2023. And very soon it's going to go to a hundred million dollars.

And [00:13:00] then very soon, I think maybe in a year or so. There'll be another interested acquirer who would acquire this entity. So that's how it goes on, right? 

Amy: Very interesting. I did not know that. But what you're talking about is what I've often heard in the games industry called a rollup. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's exactly, it's a rollup.

Vinayak:It's a rollup and,

Amy: Okay, got it.

Vinayak: You know, rollup, uh, you, you need to have. I need to have companies that are having some level of synergy. We, uh, Synerzip as a company had at its core technology and we were very horizontally focused, we had machine learning, we have artificial intelligence, we have blockchain.

So essentially you name a technology and we would have expertise in that. And when we merged with the other half, which was vertically focused, so that healthcare insured tech, tech. So it was a merger of two very [00:14:00] synergistic firms, which were engaged in similar businesses, but one was vertically focused and the other was horizontally focused.

And that's why it grew from where it was to where it is today. 

Amy: That's really interesting. 

Vinayak: Yeah.

Amy: And it’s all through private acquisitions. None of this involves an IPO. 

Vinayak: Yeah. At this stage, I would say that at a 50, 70 million dollars, it's like too small for an IPO. So we would, and IPO being a different kind of thing that happens at a much higher level in the food chain, right?

Probably there'll be one or two more acquisitions before it becomes big enough. To become a candidate for an IPO. Got it. A million dollars, it's, it's way below the radar scope of bankers who would take it to an IPO. 

Amy: So how much of the banking relationships and et cetera [00:15:00] is inside of India versus outside?

Are you negotiating with people outside India or mostly inside? 

Vinayak: Mostly in the US, all our investment banking, legal. And most of it happens in the United States. We are only doing the delivery from India, but that's a lot because out of now 1200 odd people who work for Xcelerate, 1100 people are working out of India.

Oh, so it's a, so when it comes to delivery, when it comes to. It comes to even pre sales, inside sales. So a lot of that, even marketing, a lot of that happens in India. But when it comes to negotiations and when it comes to an acquisition or M&A activity, all the investment bankers and all the private equity firms are mostly based out of the U.S. 

Amy: Interesting. So, how much can you tell us about your new ideas? [00:16:00] 

Vinayak: Yeah, this is something which I'm contemplating and I have been, you know that very well because I was a part of your program on game thinking. There Things that we tried and they work pretty well. One of the things that has stuck is a kind of reward program.

Employees or end users get hooked to do something or they exhibit a behavior repetitively, because they're liking it or they get hooked to it. For example, we are having one program where we are crowdsourcing tagging. So for machine learning, as you are required to do some kind of a training set. Now, for training machine learning algorithm to recognize named entities, et cetera, we need to have some human beings initially tag certain text with certain [00:17:00] annotations.

Now, this can be done, or this can be crowdsourced. Now, we have gamified it using the fundamentals, which I learned in the getting2alpha program, wherein when you tag it, immediately you get a reward and that reward is visible to you in the form of some points, which can be converted or redeemed to dollars.

So what we observed, and this is something that we have been tracking regularly, that the people who are doing the tagging, they are continuously doing their tagging, but every 15 minutes or every half an hour. So they will go and check how many points have accrued in their money bag. So it's a kind of a core loop wherein.

They are hooked to it. They do the needed activity. They did that triggers their craving to make more money or get more points. Then they do the activity [00:18:00] and then they go and check that whether they have achieved what they have. So we use the same fundamental to motivate recruiters. Wherein, for every action that a recruiter does, whether it is sending out an email or whether it is setting up an interview or whether it is actually having a candidate join, for everything, for every change of state, we have some points that are assigned to the recruiter.

And those points go into his money bag. And we saw the same thing again, that recruiters, they would do their daily activities and they would keep accumulating points, but they keep checking that, Hey, where am I? Okay. I need to make more. Maybe internally they have some target in their mind that I need to make so much today.

And then they keep working, keep going at it and keep checking their money back to see. So that triggered this idea [00:19:00] that we are currently working on, wherein we want to combine this core loop with smart contracts, wherein individuals would instantaneously get paid for executing some tasks, which are contracted, which are, so currently what we are doing is really small in terms of value, whether it is setting up an interview or whether it is tagging a word.

Um, Those are really, you can say, micro transactions, but we plan to take it to the next level by having bigger transactions, wherein one would execute a small contract, wherein one would deliver something like a piece of working software, and for that activity, for checking in the code and getting it past the quality assurance, one would get paid by, uh, getting a smart contract triggered. And it could be all based, sanctified on a [00:20:00] blockchain. So that's the next level that we are going to. 

So where we are planning to, it starts with building a marketplace of talent, where we are tokenizing talent because a resume or a talent needs to be tokenized first for an individual to be able to enter into a smart contract with a company. So companies can now enter into smart contracts with individual professionals instead of going through large companies. So cross border payments are possible now using smart contracts. In India, for example, we are having central bank digital currency. As soon as we are able to do this, and as soon as the government comes with the retail program for CBDC, which is likely to happen in a month or so.

We'll be having smart contracts which could get triggered when you check in the code. Someone sitting in the U. S. would look at it and certify it and make payment, a cross border [00:21:00] payment which would directly go into the wallet of an Indian developer. 

Amy: That's a really interesting vision and I did not know that India was releasing a centralized digital currency.

Can you tell us a little more about that? That's actually, that's kind of bearing the lead. That's big news. 

Vinayak: Yeah. The reserve bank of India, which is like your friend has already launched the digital currency, central bank digital currency, and they are currently trying it out with eight banks only for bigger wholesale interbank transactions.

And within 30 days, they have said that it would become available for retail transactions. So India has a very good system of making smaller payments using mobile phones, which is one of the biggest systems in the world where you can do transactions of small denominations without having to pay [00:22:00] any fees to the bank.

The same fundamental has been extended to the CBDC and this would be available to individuals to transact with their counterparts in the U.S. 

Amy: Okay. So digital currencies, there's lots of, is this a stable coin? What is the kind of digital currency is this?

Vinayak: This is just like an Indian rupee. 

Amy: So it's pegged to the rupee?

Vinayak: Yeah, it is a rupee. It is not pegged to the rupee. It is a rupee. Okay. It is a rupee on the blockchain, which can be used on smart contracts. So it is, it doesn't... 

Amy: Is it ethereum based? 

Vinayak: It is, it is based on what they call as distributed ledger technology, DLT. They have not given which kind of DLT they are using.

Probably they have, the government has its own blockchain. They would not use any chain other than their own. 

Amy: Okay. They're spinning up their own chain, which everybody [00:23:00] does and they're doing digital currency and it is the rupee. It's not pegged to the rupee. 

Vinayak: Yeah, it is the rupee. So you can just buy your grocery with it.

Okay. You don't need to go to an exchange like Coinbase to exchange it to a real currency. It is the fiat currency.

Amy: How will you buy your grocery with it? Walk me through that. 

Vinayak: Yeah, so you have it on your mobile phone in your wallet. You walk into a shop. 

Amy: Oh, okay. So it's on your mobile and in your wallet, and then it just works.

Vinayak: Yeah. It just works. It just works like any other payment system. This is something which is exciting. And what is even more exciting is because of the pandemic, most of the workforce, the knowledge workers are now working from home and there's a realization that there is not much value that is added by intermediaries.

Because a professional is saying that, look, this is my home. This is [00:24:00] my computer, my electricity, my internet, and my brain. Okay. And I'm doing interesting work for a client and the client is saying the same thing, look, I'm paying 6, 000, but this gentleman sitting across is just getting 3000 out of that. So what's going on here?

So they are questioning the value that is being added by the intermediary organizations because they don't anymore need the infrastructure or the office or any of that, right? This is going to be different going forward because It's the recording companies struggling with the streaming music companies.

Same way recording companies were made obsolete by the streaming music companies. This is somewhat similar to that where there is a lot of disintermediation that's going to happen in this industry because knowledge workers would no longer need intermediaries to manage the [00:25:00] infrastructure because most of it is virtual.

Amy: Wow. That's yeah, that's... Now I understand, now I understand why you've been dreaming and why you're launching something new. 

Vinayak: So I'm pretty excited about it. Of course, it's going to be very difficult because you're up against large companies who are established. And there are many other people who must be thinking the way I'm thinking.

So there's going to be competition and there's going to be resistance. But that's fun. I enjoy it. 

Amy: Cause you're an entrepreneur. Yeah. I want to wind it back real quick and talk about Lean Agile and game thinking, which you knew is getting2alpha. And by the way, this podcast we're recording for is still called getting2alpha.

Cause I've been running it ever since then. And it's really the same idea, which is getting2alpha, which is validating your ideas right? [00:26:00] So one of the things that's really fascinating about your history is the way you jump on trends, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose, right? Lean Agile was a trend that you jumped on early, and that was really good for your company.

And that was really smart. So let's talk about what really works about Lean Agile? What was transformative and positive for you in a nutshell? Maybe just a few things, but then let's talk about what didn't work about Lean Agile, what the limitations were that led you to looking for something else. 

Vinayak: Yes, the concept of Lean Agile was liked because there are a couple of things that we were thinking of doing in SIP.

So one of them was to move up the value chain by not only telling how Software should be developed or how products should be built, but moving up the value chain by advising our clients on what to build. [00:27:00] Now, when it comes to that, we need to back it up with user experience, design, research, and product management.

And all those things, all those roles need to be there as a part of the cross functional team. And that's what used to be hard because. You would have large companies doing frog design or splice of lime and the design studios, which where you have to spend millions to get your user experience designed and that was the picture then.

And when we looked at Lean Agile, I said, okay, this is something that we don't need to really invest millions. You can do it the lean way and you can experiment and do small steps and do continual continued, or you can say iterative way of learning. And building things, showcasing things, getting feedback from the client.

So it all appealed to us because in agile, we are already doing it in a way where we were testing it and then getting the feedback from the QA or the [00:28:00] testers and using that feedback. We are taking it one step further. Now we're getting the feedback directly from the market and then using that feedback to use it.

So it is like moving up the value chain and that's what excited us about Lean Agile. Now, the main challenge that we faced in that. Is that clients particularly, they don't like to give away their practices or their belief systems. You always had this belief system that, okay, we will tell you what to do and you guys just do what we tell you to do.

Okay. Don't tell us what we should be doing. So that's the big resistance that we had to overcome that we had to prove that, look, this works. That we do user research. We systematically, we have a way of building a model where you can follow that model, and then we can test it out. We can play test it in the hands of the end user.

And then [00:29:00] at a very low fidelity, low cost way of doing things in a lean, agile way, we can work it out. But. It took a lot of effort. Even today, we are trying to sell it to many of our clients. It's not an easy thing. People like to believe that they know what they want. And many times that's not true. 

Amy: Yeah.

Listening to you gives me PTSD. Just the, when a client thinks they know what they want. And you see that they very well might be wrong and maybe you do the research and the research shows you they're wrong, but the client doesn't want to hear that. 

Vinayak: Yeah. So to your question, the main challenge in Lean Agile is that where you can't really substitute the client's right, the customer's right to decide what should be built.

So there have been, and I have a lot of stories where. We have built exactly what should not [00:30:00] be built and got paid for it. And we were, we're not very happy with it, but that was the business that we were in. We were not supposed to ask questions. We were supposed to just execute. And deliver what we were asked to deliver.

So we just did that and knowing very well that it's all going down the tube. So I've seen millions going down the tube that way in many organizations where they didn't listen or pay heed to our advice. But they decided to go ahead and do what they wanted 

Amy: to. It's a lot of the problems that get solved with lean also expose bad decision making and bad thinking.

And a lot of times people are very resistant to changing. And I think if we fast forward to now, I think there's overall more acceptance. But the point you're really making is that. You're hired with a certain expectation, and if you violate that expectation, there's a lot of friction. 

Vinayak: [00:31:00] When you are delivering software from India, there is always this luggage that we come with, right?

With reputation of Indian firms, some of them doing what they did, which was not very good, which used to as a deterrent for the North American clients to venture into listening to what our advice was. And I don't blame them for that because they've heard horror stories from others. I don't say that someone was doing something deliberately.

It was, they were just acting based on their prior experience. And they were just being cautious and they were doing what they thought was the best in the interest of their companies. 

Amy: Building great products is really hard. It just is. So what were the problems you were looking to solve when you got involved in our programs.

Vinayak: Honestly, I wanted to see how to get the SaaS [00:32:00] model to work because before that it was different. We decided that we should make a full transition to the lean way of doing things. We were thinking about transition from the traditional model to SaaS model. So, the traditional software products were used on a licensing model per user license or whatever be the license, per server license.

Software as a service model where you were really charging per use. And there was this fear that you would lose subscriptions or you use users. If you want, if the management blesses the product and they have signed a contract, if the end users don't use the product, you're not going to get any revenue out of that.

So it was becoming increasingly important for software products. To focus on the end user for the SaaS model to become successful, I thought about having some way of getting the end users [00:33:00] hooked. That continuity is very important. That's when we got involved into the game thinking way of doing things and it paid off.

There are several products where I can say that they achieved continued usage because we build the way your game thinking system advises. Basically focus shifted to the end user, right? And what was going on in getting the right behavior from the end user to answer your question, that's the bridge.

Between what we were doing earlier in the lean startup and what we started doing with game thinking. 

Amy: So it was really retention. You were looking for something that would help you create software that was designed for retention. 

Vinayak: Retention of end users. So the focus shifted from getting the deal signed at the CEO level.

To the end user loving what you're doing. So the focus [00:34:00] shifted. 

Amy: So tell me about the Resume x NFT marketplace. And how you look at it through this lens? 

Vinayak: Yeah. So tokenizing any asset and resume is a digital asset, which is. Of high value to an individual professional and then allowing the, allowing it to be used for transactions is the idea here.

We are very excited about it. So what we are doing is we are building a marketplace where individual professionals would be able to tokenize their talent or digitized domains. And once they are tokenized on the blockchain, they will be getting some kind of currency, which is called caliber. And as the name suggested, the caliber represents the total experience and knowledge and skill level of the individual professional in number or in currency.

And [00:35:00] this professional can use that caliber to stake on other professionals. This is, this can't be converted to any cash, but it can only be used for trading. Staking on to other professionals. This is a community of people who are professionals who admire other professionals by staking their caliber on the other professionals.

And this community is what we call as the NFT marketplace. Companies who are looking to build products or to get work done can execute smart contracts with individuals. Who are offering their services on this NFT marketplace. And when that transaction happens, others who have staked their caliber on the professional who receives the proceeds of the transaction would also get rewarded.

So there is always the sharing of the [00:36:00] reward that would be received between professionals. And this, we have tried it out. It works very well and professionals are extremely happy with it because it gives instant cross border transaction. It makes it possible, as I was mentioning earlier. And that is something which kind of gives them a position where they feel that they are in control of things, that they are self sufficient in charge of their own destiny, where they can.

Work with North American clients. So this could very well be any international provider of services or developer or a QA or anyone who is doing some knowledge work. A knowledge worker can engage with internationally with any other company or a distributed autonomous organization, such as a DAO and get paid for their work.

So that's the broad idea. And the pandemic has helped, as I was mentioning [00:37:00] earlier, because companies are finding that people are working from home and people are finding that there's a lot of scope for doing additional work or site projects or moonlighting, if you will. So that needs to be more or less systematized or brought into a more transparent way of doing it instead of doing it in a stealthy way.

So this also offers. a transparent way or a more official way of doing what you can call as moonlighting. So individuals can engage on a blockchain with on pre approved products, which are blessed by their company and develop their own professional skills there. So there are multiple ways in which smart contracts can be used to engage individuals in this marketplace.

And all the rewards that come to them will be shared between them and the people who stake their caliber on [00:38:00] them. 

Amy: How does staking work? Because what if somebody Doesn't want to accept your state. Is it a two way transaction or can you just stake and nobody, they can't refuse it. 

Vinayak: So the people who state don't get a whole lot, they get about some percentage, which is something which is controllable and individual may just say that you would reserve only.

10 percent of the proceeds or 5 percent of the proceeds for this people who are staking and or he may say 0 percent for all you know, in which case nobody would stake on that individual professional. They can turn the knob left or right depending on what their appetite is and what willingness to forgo their earnings.

But what we have seen is that professionals would want to share because this is something which is mutual, which is both ways. So when you're allowing someone to stake, someone else will also allow you to [00:39:00] stake. So this is something where it's a mutual admiration kind of thing. So professionals engage in that a lot so that both share a part of their rewards with each other.

So that's more like what is happening today, uh, based on what our studies show. Of course, this is something which, again, we have done a little bit of beta testing. Based on that, we think that there is a networking effect there where there's no point just having caliber in your wallet unless you stake it.

You're not going to earn anything out of it. So there's always this tendency to find someone on whom you can stake that caliber. And going out to find someone from your network or from your company or from your professional group always helps. 

Amy: Interesting. And is this something that you're working on or something that exists right now in the real world?

Vinayak: It is something that is in the form of a white paper and a [00:40:00] model that works in its 0. 0 kind of version. But very soon, as soon as the digital currency, central bank, digital currency, Opens up, which is likely to happen in the next 30 days or so, we would start testing it in production, maybe as with some alpha users, and maybe in a couple of months we would start our beta program.

Amy: So it sounds like overall you're developing various versions of play to earn or work to earn mechanisms. Is that right? 

Vinayak: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Amy: And play to earn has a lot of issues, like well established issues, but it really doesn't sound like any of this is a game, but it's gamified. 

Vinayak: When we have work where you're learning.

So what I learned in the going, uh, getting2alpha program was. You derive pleasure of learning the fun comes out of getting to the next level or learning something just like in a [00:41:00] game you go to the next level, right? So in your professional career, if you are learning something and it is helping you earn at the same time, and this is not.

like just some funny money. It's real money, right? That gets people to behave in a way that engages them, that gets them hooked. And they do the same thing repetitively again and again, because they, it is not only engaging, but it is rewarding, financially rewarding. 

Amy: Right. It's one kind of reward. You will also see compulsive behavior like that when it's not financially rewarded in like health, certain healthcare apps, or certainly certain games, but the reason I said play during work turn is that all the systems you're describing are systems where you want to drive that core loop and that user journey around.

A combination of learning and earning. 

Vinayak: Yes. And earning where it is. So when you [00:42:00] play a game, there is a level of uncertainty. Whereas in the case of a smart contract, it is more certain that your sub certain behavior is. It's definitely going to get you that reward that is different than game where there's not as much dopamine or shot that you get out of this because in game, there is a level of uncertainty where you're not sure whether you're going to win or not.

So that, that gives you that kick when you win, right? Because you are not sure till the last minute and then you win. But in case of smart contracts, it's not like as gamified as you think it is. There's a level of certainty there that after you do certain thing, you're going to get that reward and it's cast in stone.

It's a program. So there's no way it can change. So to that extent, it is. 

Amy: Wow. So You kind of blew my mind today. It's really exciting to hear about what you're thinking, all the changes going on in India and Vinayak, you dropped [00:43:00] so many gems about what's important in entrepreneurship, like your story about finding the right partner who handled certain things while you handled others.

That's so important and noticing trends. Noticing what's happening, noticing what's changing and really leaning into it instead of backing away from it. That seems to be a theme. 

Vinayak: Yeah. Sometimes they say that I'm ahead of my time. So that is something that I need to continuously be cautious about holding back and not going too far ahead.

Amy: Yes. Yes. What were the concepts and the techniques that You took away from your experience with getting2alpha and Game Thinking that you still use. What really stuck with you? 

Vinayak: First is, that comes to my mind is Core Loop. Getting it right is not easy. It takes years. But once you get it right, it works.

It works like [00:44:00] a charm. It is self perpetuating. And that is something which is a fantastic concept that I learned. Second thing, and this was again a great learning is Listening to your first few super fans. So I used to think that it would be like, you know, I was always thinking of all the ACO and digital marketing hype that was going on, taking an idea big and doing mass marketing and all that.

What really helped was, and this I learned from the program, was listening to your first few super fans and low risk clients, so it was low risk kind of situation, but valuable feedback. There's a lot of learning. And that is the second concept that helped me. And third one is the user journey, end user journey.

Whenever we design, we used to think of starting on boarding, right? Like how to on board users. Now, that is not important, right? Now, you may [00:45:00] be able to onboard a user, but if the user doesn't stay for more than a week, what's the use? So what the user does on day 21 is where one starts first. So that concept was very important for us that don't bother about onboarding when we are starting.

First start with getting your concepts right, whether the product market fit is there, whether Problem solution fit is there on the problem that you're trying to solve, whether it is getting solved. That is more important than whether you're able to onboard users successfully or not. That was a third learning and these things have stuck on.

This was a great learning. 

Amy: That's great to hear. I love the way you succinctly express that. And I'm thinking back to when we had brunch by the pool in Mumbai at the Taj. And just how delightful it is to hang out and talk to you. Every time [00:46:00] I get to hang out with you. 

Amy: You expand my thinking and it's really stimulating.

And I can't wait to follow up and talk more about what's going on in India, because that's, I just, I didn't know that was happening. And that just opened so much up. And once again, there you are ahead of the curve. 

Vinayak: Thank you. Thank you for all the words of appreciation. 

Amy: Anyway, thank you so much. It's been a total pleasure.

Vinayak: Have a good day.

Outro: Thanks for listening to getting2alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.