Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:08
Hi, this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia. Welcome to the NEON show. I am your host and managing partner at NEON Fund, a fund that invests in the best of enterprise AI companies like AtomicWork, SpotDraft, CloudSEK, between the US-India corridors.

Today I have with me a very, very dear friend, a person who I consider a mentor, friend, a well-wisher, Bhaskar Ghosh. Bhaskar, welcome again to the NEON show. Thank you so much for coming again.

Bhaskar Ghosh 1:37
It’s a pleasure.
And you are my mentor.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:41
I don’t know anything.

Bhaskar Ghosh 1:43
I love, just want to say thank you, just for everybody, this is the same shirt I had to wear last time and I was sick last time and I’m partly sick, but big fan of Siddhartha, full disclosure, I’m an LP in his fund also. I love Siddharth, I love your curiosity about Indian history, but also the energy you bring and how you work with entrepreneurs and the level of detail that you have at your grasp. And the fact that, you know, what I feel differentiates people, and I hope, you know, I try to hold myself to that standard, is people who other people follow.

So, you know, it looks, it’s obvious that you did companies in your past life and all your co-founders, people who work with you, are in great terms with you, they follow you. And I think that is the true index if somebody is a leader, but more importantly, a good person.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 2:37
So, very happy to meet you. I want to start with something that you believe very corely in, which is, you know, the new set of services that are getting developed. People are talking about AI enabled services, reimagining of IT services industry like TCS, Infosys.

So, if you have to explain to a layman, first principles, right, what are the various opportunities available in the services ecosystem today for entrepreneurs who come from software era, SaaS era?

Bhaskar Ghosh 3:11
That’s an amazing question. And as you and I talked about, I’m deep into it and trying to struggle my way through creating thesis and actually investing in companies, maybe even building companies, services. And I think the reason it’s very, very relevant to this conversation is, it’s such an important part of the Indian economy.

If you think about it, some numbers would be helpful. I think if I don’t get this wrong, the amount, the revenue coming into India from services, BPO, IT, non-IT is about 400 billion. The total economy around the services economy, if you add the families and the schools and the hospitals and everything else is 1.2 trillion. And if I’m not getting it right, Indian economy is approximately 3.7 trillion. I think I’m getting the ballpark. So, think about the magnitude of impact this industry and its secondary economy has.

At 8VC and at a personal level, when we do builds, when I think about a new thesis, we ask the question, why now? In the services industry, the reason people are excited about it or they think there will be massive, dramatic transformational changes happening is because of the new wave of Gen AI. Because not because of old machine learning, not because of old neural nets, but because of this whole foundation models, which are based on transformers, which can do very, very powerful things.

So, from a very Silicon Valley, tech-centric point of view, the why now question leads to a few simple answers. One is, in many of the services industries, now, just a brief aside, the services can be in the context of software as a business or non-software as a business. Software as a business can mean you’re doing IT services, consulting, BPO in the context of SAP consulting, Salesforce consulting, ServiceNow consulting, MuleSoft consulting, database consulting, so on and so forth, testing, everything, data migration, everything.

And then it can be the other vast space of everything which is not related to software. It can be for call centers, it can be for accounting, it can be for HR, it can be for CFO’s office, it can be for legal, it can be for travel, it can be for clinical trials, it’s massive. It can be for banking, it is massive.

And Silicon Valley is obviously technical people like us, whether we are builders or investors, we have started, the reason we have suddenly started looking at this very closely is the why now question around tech. The LLMs and the models coming in, along with the tooling around it, are helping us do a few things really well suddenly. One is about unstructured data extraction and handling and management.

If you look closely at a lot of these services, if you look at the human-centric workflows in the services, it’s about doing stuff with unstructured data.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 6:06
For our audience, can you explain as the terms?

Bhaskar Ghosh 6:11
Unstructured data could be a spreadsheet, could be a handwritten note, could be a PDF, could be a Word document.

I mean the handwritten note part is extremely important actually. And you do stuff with data, you look at it, you extract something, you write it into something, you read it from something, then you do something with it. And so human in the loop data management and doing stuff with data which is unstructured is a massively important and significant part of this, of these companies.

Number two is, there’s a lot of human beings involved in what we call workflows, which is you do something, you write something, you decide something and you require domain knowledge to do it. And you have lots of hops in these workflows. So humans, you know, remember back in a past life, industries like RPA tried to do this automation well, but for various reasons they could not.

Leaving that aside, so unstructured data handling, the multi-hop workflow automation stuff and then there are other areas like you can handle domain specific languages, which is a more software aspect in the context of Salesforce and others that we talked about. All of this can be automated with a very high degree of robustness, correctness and speed with these new models. That is the central reason that you can now get a lot of this multi-hop workflow functionality done automagically with some right set of tooling around it, which we can discuss separately.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 7:43
Can you give some examples?

Bhaskar Ghosh 7:45
I mean, you can think of, you can think of, if you take a software example, you can take a managed service IT provider. What does a managed service IT provider do? It sets up IT and solves IT problems for say small to medium businesses.

And you get tickets, somebodys passport has to be changed, somebodys Google Drive has to be set up, somebody has to be added to an email group. So there are various levels of difficulties of these tasks. If you look at just creating a new account and changing somebodys passport, it is actually a very simple workflow.

You can do that actually automatically. And meaning with some human supervision, so you can do it in what we call a co-pilot form or an autonomous form. But it can be done with a very high degree of precision, correctness and speed with an LLM today.

On the, if you now go and look at.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 8:35
And before you dive, why can LLM do this? How can LLM do this?

Bhaskar Ghosh 8:40
This, I am not a statistician. There is a, you know, LLMs, the new models are all about something called Next Token Prediction. If you ask me the statistical reason why they can do it, I will not be able to answer.

You should, we should just keep in mind that this class of models based on transformers can do very clever reasoning based and pattern matching based stuff for multi-modal data. So they can do better stuff for images, they can do better stuff for text. Lot of these models do amazing stuff with text.

Even though the core logic is around Next Token Prediction, they can like figure things out in a much more realistic, correct way. So that was a partial answer. So anyway, so I gave an answer about a software product, a software business, MSP.

You can go look at and think about, you want to do invoice processing for supply chain. Well, it so happens that a lot of these invoices are written by hand and they go and, you know, it is written by somebody, then it goes to somebody who is in charge of accounts payable, accounts receivable. They have to look at it, copy it into a spreadsheet, put it into some, into some financial software.

A lot of this is done, including the logic of the step-by-step. So that is the workflow. And this extraction of data can now be done automagically.

So I am giving very simple examples. Then there are much more sophisticated things called agents, which actually with the right set of inputs and watching inputs and outputs can also reason about what is the right thing to do. That is an even deeper level of sophistication.

Anyway, coming back to the services industry, a lot of these basic workflows can now be automated. So the question is, what does that mean? Well, at the minimum, all the human beings who are assigned to the services industry, in those workflows, they can become much more productive.

So they can do, the easier things happen much faster. Maybe some harder things have to be done with more human in the loop involvement. So in the context of the services industry, first and foremost, AI can help increase productivity.

So you can do more with the same set of people. Maybe you do not even need that many people. That is a very contentious point that, that, you know, there is the, there is the, there is the numerator question of more business being done.

There is the denominator question of how much resources do you need. So to make things very simple, if you sit down and think about it, with the judicious use of generative AI, you can increase margins in these industries. So that, that is the, so there is the technical why now, and then there is the outcome of what we are calling AI enabled services.

I will just stop now for a second.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 11:20
Okay. So you are saying human dependent work. So this is what human dependent is..

Bhaskar Ghosh 11:27
Human in the loop

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 11:27
Human in the loop, human dependent work. Where a human had to execute certain tasks, maybe across the same workflow that is doing on your spreadsheet or on multiple things, a spreadsheet, a word doc, calling people, you know, this all can be now done, you know, with a new set of agents that are getting built. And that is why the services economy is very important, you know, as we step into building new companies with the AI agent framework. Is that right?

Bhaskar Ghosh 11:57
Indeed. It is about redefining what the services economy and these companies will do. It is also rethinking how would this massive existing economy work.

So if you look at any services business, you will have a front office aspect, you will have a mid office aspect, a back office aspect, you will have an IT aspect. It so happens that a lot of the headcount in these services businesses is in the front and the mid office, where they are actually dealing with customers. Anyway, I am overgeneralizing.

It is likely that a lot of these offices within these businesses can be made much more productive and can probably even be made much more lean. That is kind of the central thesis.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:41
So front offices mean a doctor’s front office, it can be a man’s front office.

Bhaskar Ghosh 12:45
Yes, a doctor’s front office, a dentist’s front office, where in offline, you are sending reminders to patients, you are sending an email to patient, that is all happening automatically. You are interacting with them through text, you can interact with them through WhatsApp, any channel, and you are getting right answers, you are being able to reschedule stuff, you are being able to ask PII related questions, maybe as long as you have the right security and stuff, all of that. Now, think of the people in the mid office sitting in a doctor’s or dentist’s office, who are having to get data after a visit and deal with insurance, deal with follow-ups, all of that, if you think of it in a co-pilot setting, can be done automagically now, to a large extent, which is why we are seeing so many companies getting started in each of these areas in a very, very, you know, high demand driven way, because, you know, applied AI founders, when they go into a domain are finding many of these workflows are ready to be mechanized, maybe even disrupted.

So, that is kind of the software aspect of services. I think you and I have spent some time today talking about, and where we have constructively disagreed on some things is, where, what happens next in the services industries, if you bring this Silicon Valley and Bangalore view of SaaS, you bring in, you write good software, you start a seed company, you start selling software to say, these dentist offices, as an example, or these inverse processing offices for supply chains, second now.

What happens next? Do you build this out as a software business? One of the key thesis that we are all thinking about is we are going a little bit out of the box when it comes to software.

It is reasonable to start reconsidering whether a pure software business will scale here. It is reasonable to start asking, if you sell pure software into these industries, how much of the economic pie will you get? It so happens, if you look at most of these industries, they do not spend most of their money on software.

So, the question to ask is, are we envisioning that these services companies themselves will be mostly software and AI? So, that is where things get murky, that is where things get exciting. It is reasonable to assume at some point in time, in the 5, 7, 10 years that might happen.

Question is, how does this industry start innovating and kind of transforming itself? One of the bets a lot of us are making, a lot of them from Silicon Valley, some funds from New York are making, is you are saying, I will now take over these legacy services businesses and I will own the business, I will run it also. It so happens, I will also bring in my software to run it in an AI first way, software first way.

This is the whole concept of roll-ups that is being played out in the context of AI services thesis. And I am personally looking at it in a big way, we have done some investments, whether it is in, let us assume, I think in the area of cloud data migration or in the area of MSPIT services, in the area of legal, in the area of clinical trials, you can, you, we have gone and started thinking about maybe the company which has been building software till now should be owning the services companies. And a lot of the large funds are making progress there, if you think about it.

Then we come to the point where the Silicon Valley founders, these technical founders now start buying these companies. Something you and I talked about is what next, what happens now? Well, the simple narrative is you buy enough revenue base, enough scale, then you insert AI into it in a judicious way, making certain assumptions around digital transformation of the business itself, that there is enough software that you can replace.

And then you basically expand margins or you expand top line also, because you can do things better. Let us assume you want to buy 1, 2, 3 of these companies. I think our discussion got very interesting is what is the nature of this business you are getting into?

It so happens if you sit down and think about it, this is not a pure software business anymore. You have written great software, you have this great tech team, you have sold a bit of software and say into design partners, then you went and bought two of these design partners, assume that. And you bring in like 100 million dollars of revenue, but you also inherit 700 people, random number.

I think the new thing for us Silicon Valley folks, what we see is, you know, who are also builders like us at 8BC, we both build companies, we incubate, but we also invest massively, is I think the nature of the firm, the company which will do this will fundamentally change. Because you need this deep operating chops to go run these companies now. Do you keep the old founder of that company?

Does she or he stay on with incentives? Are they excited to increase margins? Do they want their company, their services government to become tech first?

These are the deeper questions that I don’t think Silicon Valley venture has grappled with, or Silicon Valley founders have grappled with. Private equity has grappled with it. There’s always been this concept of operating partners.

But what we are trying to do is something new that private equity has not done before. Which is, private equity generally is more about the cost structure. After you buy companies, you take a very strong look at that data, the analytics, you’ve got costs, so on and so forth.

It’s not like you build new products. What we are trying to do here is, we are trying to fundamentally change the way in that business operates. You can think of that new taken about business is almost like a new product you’re building, which is not all software.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:37
So what is the product now, if not software?

Bhaskar Ghosh 18:39
Well, in that case, the product still remains that you are doing an MSPIT play, you’re doing a dental services play, but with a lot of AI thrown in. So that it is still about dental services. But the nature of how you’re delivering those services is changing, which is AI first.

But I feel Silicon Valley leaders, technical leaders going and running an inverse processing business, clinical trials business, you know, all these examples I gave.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 19:13
Not in a founded market.

Bhaskar Ghosh 19:14
That is a hard one.

You have to bring in domain experts there. That’s why I’m pointing out that the operating principles around building businesses like this is quite different. It’s new, because we don’t want to be also pure private equity.

We want to insert tech into it. We want to keep on building. That’s why I’m saying that is where I think a lot of the known unknowns are.

Building software, doing AI, buying businesses is known. People are doing this already last one year. How do you actually operate them and scale?

What culture do you need is a known unknown. After that, you start thinking, what is the outcome? Are you going to get to SaaS multiples if you go IPO?

Is it going to be closer to VC, closer to PE? That is also unknown. So that’s what you and I were discussing.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:01
So let’s dissect, first of all, why do SaaS companies get high multiples?

Bhaskar Ghosh 20:07
That’s a deeper question that you’re putting me on the spot. I think SaaS has also gone through a reboot. Ultimately, to me, the reason a lot of forward facing high multiples have been given, there are a few drivers below it.

One is that usage-based pricing will keep on growing without too much input. You don’t have to throw bodies at it. That installed base will keep growing.

There’s a lot of software in the act of doing that business. That’s number one. Number two is, in SaaS, if you look at just pure departmental SaaS or vertical SaaS, there are two or three winners.

And the ones who will get network effects will actually end up winning big. If you go into this department, sales or marketing, that once you start winning, most people buying sales software will actually buy from you. To me, those are key parts.

You have to come back and think about whether that’s going to be possible in AI-enabled services businesses, in terms of how will you buy the next five companies and scale them. Is there a network effect there? I would posit that’s going to be a tough one.

That once you have grown to $100 million in revenue by buying three companies, growing to $400 million by buying 10 more companies, that’s not a network-based act, that you will probably have to do some special stuff to do those things in parallel. That’s kind of the limit of my thinking. I can’t go further than that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:34
Then I have two schools of thought here. One is you’re saying the SaaS principles don’t apply here of scaling. That’s the reason.

Bhaskar Ghosh 21:43
Partly, yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:44
But the other thing is, once the AI infra is ready, and let’s say I go ahead and buy a BPO at 1x revenue multiple, let’s say $20 million of BPO revenue, I raise VC money as a founder, I buy them at $20 million or lesser, then at least I have the $20 million revenue and I get the new infra, the AI infra for reducing headcounts and getting more efficiency.

Bhaskar Ghosh 22:14
AI-enabled software which has infra, which has applications, everything. Yeah, fair enough.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:17
The second thing which we are also now counting is how the increase of this BPO capacity to get more revenue.

Bhaskar Ghosh 22:25
That is the top-line part that was mentioned.
Yes.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:28
So do I have to buy a new business to increase the top-line business? Or can this existing setup with AI get more business outside?

Bhaskar Ghosh 22:38
That’s a great question. So the question we have to ask is the following. How does top-of-the-funnel sales marketing work there?

Have you brought in some amazing domain experts who are known in the domain, so that new customers will come automatically, that there’s a network effect which is domain specific? Could be. You could also use gen-AI specific tools in sales and marketing, which is a smaller flywheel question.

I think it also has to do with the specificity of that domain. Like we have looked at travel a lot. We have looked at corporate travel, we have looked at consumer travel, highly fragmented space, huge space and one of the top five domains you can think of.

By running a good business in the corporate travel case with 200 million ARR, are you able to have all the new customers join you? Unclear, unclear about how people make corporate travel decisions. That’s why I’m saying it’s also domain specific act around fragmentation, around how customers buy these services and if there’s a network effect there.

That’s why I’m saying it’s a bit of an unknown, unknown.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 23:47
So then, but it’s true for software also, because in software case also, you are also replacing something. Harder are the greenfields. I don’t know how many greenfield is left.

Bhaskar Ghosh 23:58
I think replacing software and replacing services, the fundamental acts are probably a little bit different.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:05
Can you tell more about it?

Bhaskar Ghosh 24:13
It’s about saying, so think of a customer of the services BPO industry. It’s about the nature of the business you’re running. Suppose you’re in the category called PEO, which is I think professional and employees or something like that.

You can think of that as all things HR and payroll and benefits for small to medium businesses. Think about a company which is small to medium, which is growing, which decides to go with a new HR and payroll provider. And how do you make the decision when you are at 10 to 20 employees versus 100 employees versus 500 employees?

Because when you bring in a services business like that, it so happens, most of the services being supplied by that supplier is through human beings. So the customer is not only dealing with software, where you suddenly say, oh, I had this UI, where the decision of buying the service is just like changing my UI and migrating a database. So I think those are the fundamental reasons where when the handover is just about software, it’s much more streamlined, structured.

There are consultants who will migrate your HR system from this to this. But the act of going from one services outsourcing to another is much more human driven. That is one reason I think network effects are harder to adopt.

Again, we’ll come back in two years and I’m sure I’m going to be proven wrong, but that’s where my head’s at today.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:45
And that’s why you think these businesses don’t have, inherently don’t have network effects yet.

Bhaskar Ghosh 25:50
Yet.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:51
So they’ll never get such SAAS kind of multiples.

Bhaskar Ghosh 25:54
Look, that final valuation stuff is anybody’s guess. It depends on the market. But make no mistake, these are going to be massive dividend earning businesses, cash flow businesses.

And the margins might expand dramatically. What multiple people will pay for what the formula will be, I don’t know. But can these be incredibly lucrative businesses? 100%.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:19
But do you think the kind of TAM available to grab right now is at the highest? Because that’s TAM creates companies, right?

Bhaskar Ghosh 26:33
That’s why the services side is really exciting. I mean, the TAM scales with world population. It is insane.

So the answer is, what will it grow to? I don’t know. What is it today?

It’s already uncountable.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:44
But, what is it today?

Bhaskar Ghosh 26:46
I actually don’t know the answer.

Don’t put me on the multiple trillions of dollars for sure. Whether it’s 10s or 20s, I don’t know the answer. But it is vastly larger than the enterprise software space.

That much I can tell you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:00
So then it leads to…

Bhaskar Ghosh 27:02
Both TAMs are very large.

Services TAM is much larger today than software TAM. Both are massive.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:08
So it leads to the question then, you know, companies like Snowflake, then ServiceNow, Salesforce got created in the last 15 years in enterprise software, enterprise infrastructure. So the coming TAM because of what AI is unlocking is much larger than that.

Bhaskar Ghosh 27:30
On this enterprise software and the examples you gave, I’m not sure that I will support that statement strongly. I think companies buying software are still buying software from the same vendors for the same departments. So will they pay more is that part I don’t know.

I think that’s unlikely. It has to do with the customer’s domain. Are they going to grow a lot more?

That is an unlikely observation to me. So I don’t know if the rate of growth of pure enterprise software, horizontal software that you, you know, all the stuff you mentioned, the Snowflake, Databricks, ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle on the enterprise software side, I don’t know the rate of growth of the TAM has grown. Don’t know the answer.

The question is, can they now sell this software to new industries that has never bought it? Maybe that is going to be true because models will be used, because orchestration software will be used and it will be selling into new domains that have not been touched. If that is true, if that bridge is created where software of the new sort can be sold into new domains, then the answer is true.

So that’s a great question worth visiting again. Now, the same is true for the services side. I think services side will become more efficient for sure as it ingests more AI enabled software.

Will it enable it to create new markets? Might be true. It might be able to do new things that has not been done before.

We haven’t even mentioned things like manufacturing. We haven’t mentioned things like defense. We haven’t mentioned all the applications of robotics.

We haven’t even gone there. We haven’t talked about the chemical industry. We haven’t talked about the mechanical industry.

There are massive, massive, we haven’t talked about supply chain changing. There is going to be massive impact in those industries also. How will the fundamental TAM of this industry change?

I do not know that answer.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:43
And do you think in the last 20 years, if you think fundamentally, TAM decided the course of how new companies got produced in enterprise software?

Bhaskar Ghosh 29:54
I think there was growth all around. There was prosperity and growth all over the world. I think a few things happened.

I think internet and mobile phones changed everything. So people were much more connected, not just social media, but through commerce. If you look at India, India basically hopscotched and went from one generation to fifth generation through mobile phone infrastructure and the use of mobile phone, number one.

Secondly, India and Brazil did very foundational work and went from a first generation to seventh generation for its payment infrastructure. All the stuff you know really, really well. And that has caused feedback loops and network effects in not only bringing people out of poverty, but in expanding the middle class.

So if worldwide there is more growth and more prosperity getting created, then the answer is yes. It so happens that the enterprise software market has grown remarkably in the last 20 years during a time of mostly peace and of the middle class rising in many companies, rise of China, rise of India, rise of the Far East, of South-Eastern Asia, I don’t know, I can’t predict the future well enough to tell you that in the, you know, in the presence of climate change and the presence of the current geopolitical situations, how global prosperity will grow. But I think TAM is also tied to that, which is probably something that you’re also bringing up, yeah. Don’t know the answer, but that’s the, how the question should be posed.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 31:30
And then the next thought is, you know, the India-US corridor, it saw in last 25 years, the emergence of IT services companies. I think that’s why, you know, India had a, what worked for India was highly qualified labor that could do IT services and various kinds of services available in the US. And that was a tailwind behind TCS, Infosys, and all the services companies that got created.

In the initial part of 2010, Zoho, Freshworks captured, you know, a bunch of use cases, starting with ticketing, you know, between the India-US corridor, because, you know, as the new economy was growing, new companies are getting built up, they needed software like ticketing and much other software. Right. Now, we are seeing the third era, if you had to say, the first era was IT services, second era was some products. SaaS.

So, what is this third era and how much companies can we see, how big companies can we see in this era and what needs to happen for that to happen?

Bhaskar Ghosh 32:40
That’s a great question. Just to like, frame the conversation well, remember, and you and I talked about it, in my past life, some of my best teams during my LinkedIn days and my Yahoo days sat in Bangalore and Hyderabad. American companies, whether it’s Oracle, whether it’s LinkedIn, whether it’s Yahoo, whether it’s Google, whether it’s Facebook, have had phenomenal, and, you know, before that Cisco, Analog Devices has had amazing core product team sitting there, not QA, not support, not like what we call, wink, wink, you know, second class functionality, core functionality.

Secondly, if you look at amazing deep tech companies, whether it’s Nutanix, whether it’s Rubrik, whether it’s ThoughtSpot, whether it is Qubole, whether it is today Databricks, have had amazing engineering teams that I just want to call out, these are all core, deeply difficult software pieces that were sitting there. The other thing I’m very excited about India, so, you know, I give a very engineering centric view of the world, so it’s a bottom-up view, so let me finish that first. I am very excited about the technical talent and leadership I saw in, quote-unquote, India native companies like RazorPay, like PhonePe, like Swiggy, like Flipkart.

I think those are very important things to call out. The reason being, these are the kind of cadre of engineers and leaders who are thinking about much deeper systems problems, AI problems, data problems, and I feel that’s where a lot of the heart of Silicon Valley lies here, that those level of problems, people have to know how to solve them, want to solve them, and want to do deeper things which lead to like technical modes and network effects. I am still optimistic that will keep on happening in India, not just SaaS.

So, if I look at my portfolio, some of our best engineers of my portfolio, whether it’s in RocketLane or Usher or Yugabyte or Pankaj Patel’s company, John Chambers’ company, Nile, and I can keep going on and on, the best engineering teams and the major part is all sitting in Bangalore and Madras. So, to me, the core daring and technical depth that these teams bring in is really important for the future of the India-US corridor. SaaS, indeed, departmental SaaS, I see more of that happening.

Vertical SaaS, I’ve seen a bit less happen out of India, because when you’re building in India, selling in the US and you’re not selling generic enterprise software, you need much deeper domain expertise of the vertical you sell into. That probably needs to scale in India more. To me, I think India should continue to accelerate SaaS companies because of the companies you pointed out and the companies I pointed out, and you gave an example of Atomicworks, which is a fantastic company, and there are several such examples.

I would like to see more examples like that of core enterprise SaaS functionality being developed in India. The question then becomes, what sits where? What you and I both talked about is, you see a secular movement of those founders coming to the Bay Area for multiple reasons.

One is they want to be closer to the AI wave, which surely is the deepest here and the highest here right now, and there is no sign of that changing anytime soon. Second and equally important is the go-to-market part. So I think, starting with Freshworks and Zoho, I think now, I think the field is just getting formed.

I think all these amazing founders who have probably never been in India before, I mean our amazing founder Sri Rocketlane, moved from India, was in Utah and then we were like, hey, you got to move to the Bay Area, he’s finally moved to the Bay Area, and we are very proud of Rocketlane, of the technical team sitting in Chennai, it’s amazing, and Sri is amazing, but he’s having to build his go-to-market team out here. I think these are the specificities of the India-US corridor in our area, which is software, that I think is still being worked out.

What is amazing is, you know, we have a small investment in a company called Thesis, which is in the software around design cycles, workflow software. A lot of the AI-infused enterprise software ideas around tooling, around workflows, for every department, every persona, we are seeing more and more come from India, that’s very, very, very, very positive. What would I like to see happen?

I would like to see much more applied AI, AI-infused work happening, sitting in Bangalore. It’s starting, we were just there a month ago, we did a bunch of events with my friend, who’s the CTO of Cloudflare, it was amazing, exciting, phenomenal talent, just want to see more companies coming from there, want to see more funding from our Indian VC friends, I’m friends with everybody there, all these great funds. So the question then remains, it’s pretty clear, the tech part will continue to be built really well from these ecosystems.

The question is, product mindedness, the design aspect of product, the geometry of the product, and then network effects around developer uptake or, you know, customer uptake and go-to-market. To me, those are the areas that are still being proven out. Because when these founders, for example, Sri, and so many of your founders are moving here, what will the go-to-market team scale as?

Where will the heads of sales sit? Where will marketing be done in terms of actual branding? To me, I’d love to see like faster and deeper execution there.

So that’s on the enterprise software side. Is it okay if we talk about services side also?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37.15
Yeah.

Bhaskar Ghosh 38:24
Your and my passion is this future-facing thing, which is about AI enabled services that you and I feel very strongly about, and we’re debating a lot of questions about structure and the nature of the returns and stuff, which is exactly the topic to think about.

I would love to see deeply disruptive AI enabled services companies coming from India and based in India. Why? Because so much…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37.39
Serving India or serving US?

Bhaskar Ghosh 38:49
So think about not serving India, I would like it to serve India also. We have the India market part that we haven’t talked about, which I don’t invest in, which is, I think, a very fertile area.

But in the context of our discussion, everything is about serving the multinational market. So I would say massively Europe, increasingly Middle East, and surely massively USA. It is about building in India and selling into the whole world, right?

And you just mentioned people selling into Australia at the beginning of this conversation. I really have this dream and ambition and I want to do my bit to help out and invest and even incubate companies out of India, which is in the AI enabled services area. AI enabled software services, AI enabled non-software services.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:34
Can you give some examples in the portfolio?

Bhaskar Ghosh 39:36
In the portfolio, we have a small investment in a company called Titan, which is in the MSP IT roll up phase area. We are very proud of our clinical trials company called Tilda, which is now in the… which is about automation of clinical trials, which is now in the CRO space, which is in the research space, which is doing extremely well.

We have a company called Loop, which is not based out of India, which is based out of here. Tilda has its engineering team largely sitting in India, so there is a strong India, but Loop is an amazing company in the entire payment cycle space for, you know, supply chain and invoicing. It is a very promising company.

It has built amazing software. And we have a bunch more. Maybe we have something illegal we cannot talk about.

Maybe we will someday have something in the services aspect of travel that we cannot talk about. But in the context of the US market, from USA, we have a lot of companies. Coming back to the India corridor, I would love to see, I mean, the expertise that is sitting in India at all levels, business level, exec level, product level, around all things services is phenomenal, probably number one in the world.

Why should not the AI enabled revolution in those services industries not be happening from Bangalore and Pune and Chennai and Hyderabad? Would love to see that happen more. That will create a much larger talent pool going after this.

We are very excited to see those bottom-up seed investments, A investments happen from Silicon Valley, some from New York. But that is a big area of, you know, ambition that I have and helping make that happen from out of India so that in a weird way, the AI enabled services tech, the thoughtfulness, the nucleus of disruption is coming from Bangalore itself. That would create a very interesting world that where the Indian leaders, the Indian investors, the Indian engineers, are not just thinking about it in a defensive way that our industries will be affected by something from outside, but rather they are charting their own course of revolution and evolution sitting in India.

Would love to see that happen and help make that happen even more.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 41:52
So, so let us imagine a new age AI services company setting out of India, maybe targeting BPO industry, right, and serving the US market, for example. Like, how could that kind of company, you know, if you have to think first principle, grow their business in the US? And what would they replace?

Bhaskar Ghosh 42:15
So, if you look at the BPO companies, I do not know what the really small ones, but I have taken a look at the mid market a lot. You know, the state called Texas, you go to the two cities called Houston and Dallas. Huge number of the mid market Indian BPO company CEOs are sitting in these two cities.

So, think about it. 90% of the employees, 95% of the employees are sitting in India, but the CEOs are often sitting in these two cities and some in New Jersey. Those are the places where I found it.

That is not going to change. I think the same way they are hustling and growing BPO output about getting same analogy as what you and I just talked about in the context of SaaS. Same thing has to be true, that the go to market, the expansion factor of, so the sales and marketing discipline and landing mode has to happen sitting in USA more and more, as it has already been happening.

But the actual AI enabled BPO and the services, large part of that headcount and kind of the disrupted model of delivering more with less and growing faster with less could happen sitting in India.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 43:28
And let us think from first principle wise. So, they are not building a new industry or they are not getting contracts from a new industry. They are getting contracts from existing industries, let us say banking, the USA, where a Bank of America or JP Morgan is outsourcing the BPO.

Bhaskar Ghosh 43:49
And to be fair, the BFSI sector is a massive sector.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 43:54
So, how would, they would have to replace the existing BPOs there?

Bhaskar Ghosh 44:01
Yes and no. That is a great question. So, some people will probably disagree with me.

I think these transformations are going to happen in phases. I think the existing BPOs, many, the majority of them are Indian owned companies in the, say, the India-US corridor companies. What I am pointing out is that they should not wait to be disrupted.

They should, there will be two kinds of companies coming. One is new age BPOs that, hey, I am bringing this new BPO which only has 10 employees instead of 100, which can do the same thing as you. Aspirationally, that is where the market is going.

I am betting on that that is not going to happen in one or two years. There is a phase-wise refinement of that, that is going to happen. So, I feel the current BPOs who own these contracts have an unfair advantage in making themselves better.

That is like crossing the chasm. That is like the whole problem of, I am forgetting the phrase. It is like the whole innovators dilemma problem.

Right? They have an opportunity to make their own processes much more efficient. And I will give you one anecdotal example.

We have spoken to at least five or six India-US corridor CEOs sitting in Dallas and Houston who are in the, playing in the mint market. Very often younger founders, 40, 50, 60 million in annual revenue, not hundreds of millions, not in billions. Tremendous eagerness in changing their, how their business model.

They want to be design partners of these startups. So, to me, that group, that ecosystem of mint market founders who are forward facing have a massive opportunity. Partly is, can you disrupt yourself?

Other is, will others come in and cannibalize? Third question is, people who are buying from them, is that growing or not? Are those the three parts?

Let us get back to your question one more time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 46:04
So, my question is, how will the new age AI services company get the business? And I do not think that the older BPO businesses will be able to cannibalize themselves.

Bhaskar Ghosh 46:17
They will not be able to cross the chasm.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 46:19
And they will not be able to realize the importance of AI in their business. Because the leaders have to reeducate, they have to replace themselves. It is not possible.

So, but then there is a business setting and a new company which has built AI enabled services, they have to eat the business which is, for example, in banking. So, they either offer less cost or they offer more efficiency to these banks. So, my question is on these lines.

Bhaskar Ghosh 46:52
I think the way I would phrase it, how do you sell these new services? So, I think, and you are hinting at that, so I will take the bet. I think today a lot of the economic model is time and materials.

It is going to go towards outcome-based pricing. That is, we are already seeing that. In one of my companies, very, very well-known company, young company named Bespoke Labs, a founder is from Google DeepMind, Mahesh, co-founder is a professor of CS from Berkeley, Alex DeMarcus, which are doing something very deep in the post-training phase of models, both in the data curation side and in RL environments.

You sent me a bunch of questions. They are doing some very deep work in these areas. They are already working with one data science consulting company, very well-known mid-market company, which are, then the partnership is Bespoke Labs is helping them deliver software for, say, analytics use cases, data science use cases, which is deeply AI enabled, building new models, where that consulting company is changing its business model.

So, inevitably, this, you mentioned banks, the acquiring, the person buying a service, provider service will be, is beginning to ask questions around outcomes versus time and material. I feel, I feel it is going to go through phases. I think this outcome-based pricing is just beginning to hit the market.

It is being proven out. And a lot of this will be dependent on the customer’s taste, and how do they manage their own hierarchy and incentives inside, because it depends on the complexity of the, it depends on a lot of multidimensional problems, where Siddhartha has now, is a big exec on the BFSI side, comes to BG, and BG is this new AI enabled entrepreneur. And he knows that the old money that Siddhartha spent was in the context of time and material, and says, no, no, no, you have to get this outcome done.

It has to do with the nature of the project. It has to do with, is that outcome measurable? Is there a customer support and success phase?

You begin to ask SaaS-like questions also there. I am not going to oversimplify it. I think you were anticipating that.

That is very interesting. Outcome-based pricing in services has traditionally not happened. So, when you change business models, I think some of it is going to stick.

Given what we see with AI, with the new AI coming in, and how well it is performing, assuming this other stuff that we will talk about around observability, around monitoring, around security, compliance, assuming those things work, it is highly likely that some significant parts of time and material will be migrating the outcome based pricing. But we are going to see that over the next X number of years.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:58
So, what I learned from you from this, and I have to summarize for our listeners, that once a great team comes out of India, and they build their moat in outcome-based pricing, they will be able to replace the old businesses.

Bhaskar Ghosh 50:15
Or even a mix, that for certain things, they are still offering time and materials, but it is in their advantage, because they can charge for bodies, but they have the confidence to give outcome-based pricing, is going to be profoundly impactful, that there will be large degrees of amounts of success coming out of those sub-ecosystems.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:33
But do you think like US has been sensitive for cost ever? Because what I hear from at least the Indian founders that have made big, and they have quoted on the podcast, so I can quote, like founder of Whatfix, Khadim. So, when he sold the first version of Whatfix to an Indian enterprise, he said, the Indian enterprise was asking for equity in return for the sale.

And annually, the US enterprise rejected him because saying that, hey, if you are only charging 75K, I don’t know whether you will be able to survive or not. That was a great insight from the founder to price more. So, the question here is, are US enterprises sensitive to costing for to migrate to an outcome-based?

Bhaskar Ghosh 51:17
It has to do with a lot of other extraneous factors. It has to do with macroeconomic forces. It has to do with that industry growing or not.

I’ll give you an example. There are two pieces of software that people always complain about from the IT side, and the IT ops side, and the data ops side, site ops side, SRE side, but they still pay. But they will absolutely switch if something cheaper comes.

One is called Splunk, one is called Datadog on the site observability side. People actually don’t want to pay that much. They have been able to pay for it because their companies have been doing well.

So, I think how much capital you put into, of the budget you put into IT ops is the question. Is your top line growing or not? So, I think it has to do with that.

If you are in BFSI, you are in healthcare services, and your top line is growing, yes, you will be willing to pay more. If your growth stabilizes, does not grow, these questions will come. That’s one.

The other part is quality. There is a quality aspect to AI. If inline AI shows much higher quality for the same or slightly more.

So, that’s why I said numerator and denominator, making people more accurate, more productive. There is a chance that it is not just about volume of budget, it’s also the quality of the outcome. People are willing to switch and maybe pay a little bit less, but that will be much more sticky.

Coming back to it, I think your question relates much more to macroeconomic changes about the industry buying. And if you are going into defense, you’re going into government controlled areas or regulated industry like insurance, healthcare, banking. Government policies have a lot to do with what sort of growth is happening there.

Those are going to be effects that are going to, those are going to be levers that are going to profoundly impact how you sell, what you sell, whether you are selling SaaS or you are selling outcome based services.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 53:30
And outcome based pricing.

Bhaskar Ghosh 53:34
Can I say one thing about your Whatfix example? So, if I remember correctly, Whatfix was playing in the CRM space, which has traditionally been a very important space because it’s a top line play. Sales is an investment in the top line of that company.

And sales ops leaders are willing to spend an arm and a leg to hit their numbers and go top line. Moment you go into HR, moment you go into marketing, which are probably cost centers more, answer is not true.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 54:07
So, it leads to a very interesting point. If the industry has to change for pricing, outcome based pricing, what kind of tailwinds are already there and need to be there in the future to support the complete change?

Bhaskar Ghosh 54:20
Migration. You should be able to migrate your software or your service very easily. Number one, that is not true yet.

So, when an outcome based AI services provider comes in, they can’t just say I’m the best. You have to show how you’re going to migrate that. Number one.

So, that is a requirement. Second is, you have to have very measurable proof points around quality. It has to perform things at least at that quality that has to happen.

Third is, and this is something that we have not thought about very deeply is, the buyers have to have the right tools to judge things, which today on the software side they do have. As I pointed out, remember you were asking me the network question about services? On the services side, there are no automated tools where you can decide a certain BPO services outcome is as good.

So, I think those are some of the, those are the requirements. I wouldn’t call them headwinds. Tailwind is, proof point is happening much faster today.

I mean, the innovation happening with Gen AI from the services side of how, we were just talking to a young company which is doing insurance workflow automation for business insurance of certain subset. And we saw the workflows they’re automating. This is not in the guideway, this is not in the source of truth area.

These are not in the, these are in the workflows for say parsing documents and giving answers and stuff, let’s assume that. And we have seen that in our company Usher also. I mean, the speed at which they, this company has done correct workflows so quickly is insane.

So, I’m saying when they are going and selling to fairly slow moving insurance industries and the insurance industries are suddenly waking up and saying, whoa, I can do it this faster. The adoption curve is changing. So, that’s something for you to consider.

That the buyer side is beginning to ask questions, because there is secular pressure coming from their board, their investors, their CEO. They are also becoming more aware. So, I think we’re in a slight bit of a honeymoon phase.

But from what little I saw from some of these seed level companies, the quality of the outcomes is insane. It’s quite insane, right? That’s one.

The other thing that is a slight bit of a detail, but it’s interesting for you to note is many of these new AI-enabled businesses that you’re building, whether it’s pure software, whether it’s services, has a Palantir-esque flavor to it. That in delivering this service and in delivering this software, AI-enabled software, you will need this, you know, the way Palantir built it, what they call forward deployed engineering. We are finding that that is a whole new tier of talent that these new services companies and these new software companies have, which is also enabling adoption much more rapidly.

I’ll just leave it at that. There’s some fundamental new talent movements happening, which is making adoption faster.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 57:29
So, Bhaskar, we are coming towards conclusion of a podcast, you know, amazing discussion, a lot of food for thought. I might need to listen to this conversation twice to prepare for a third one. But very important.

Bhaskar Ghosh 57:42
Sure. We should pick a vertical. Hopefully, by November, I’ll be thinking of some new stuff and we can add to this thing.

Because as I said, in AI-enabled services, the domains matter. It’s okay to construct horizontal thesis, but domains matter. But yes, back to you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 58:01
And I would love for you to meet some of our founders who are building hardcore, you know, let’s say for their building compliance.

Bhaskar Ghosh 58:10
Would love to.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 58:11
For banking, for example.

Enterprise infrastructure domain, that’s your specialty.

Bhaskar Ghosh 58:19
That’s how it used to be. True.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 58:21
So how is that shaping up right now? What are the areas left for founders still to conquer where you think are tailwinds? Because a lot of model companies that we were discussing, I think the biggest challenge for founders today are model companies, because they’re eating forward revenue, they’re eating backward revenue.

Forward revenue means they’re eating application revenue. And they’re eating backward revenue, which is cloud revenue. And because these model companies are extremely hungry, I have never seen hungry companies as these, right?

Their aim is to become $10 trillion companies. They’re not, they’ll not be satisfied at the pace of growth to become a trillion dollar company. At least my observation is that people might disagree with it.

I don’t know what your views are.

Bhaskar Ghosh 59:06
No, I agree with you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 59:07
Yeah.

Enterprise, infra, what are the areas for founders to tap in? What are your learnings from your existing companies? You have invested in some of the fantastic companies like Nile.

Bhaskar Ghosh 59:18
Yeah. Nile, Yugabyte, Acryl, which is now called DataHub. So I would say in enterprise infrastructure, which is a vast stack, includes data, includes security, includes orchestration, includes site ops, SI, many departments, many personas.

One particular sub area, which is a legacy area that I’m super excited about to see how LLMs will impact them is in all things observability. So the area, say that today, Datadog, Splunk, Elasticsearch, all of them, the old New Relic and the, all of them. Massive budget.

You have to, they are software that you pay for to operate your business and to know if your site is working okay, right? And then debug problems. I feel, and the underlying infrastructure is using, Mongo in some cases, it’s using ClickHouse in some cases, but a lot of it is based on the backend of Datadog.

It’s based on Elasticsearch on the Elk Stack. I think this area requires a couple of new companies with LLMs as their backbone. So throwing a challenge out.

And the interesting thing about this area is what kind of founders do you want to find there? I think this area is both hard with massive upside is because the DNA of founders leads to, there has to be a co-founder who knows applied AI really well. There has to be a co-founder who knows the observability and the whole thing about what we call math, the nature of data.

It’s like metrics and events and logs and traces and how Datadog and Splunk are used today. So you need a product expert, a domain expert in product. Third is you need a founder with systems and data background.

Traditionally, it is hard to bring founders like that together, but I feel if you find a founding team like that in these areas, where now with say if you see open source time series foundation models like Times FM coming out of Google, I think there is a massive opportunity. So in the observability area of the site observability. Similarly for security observability, I think there is a massive area at SIEM.

I would say these are backward facing categories, which are massive time, which will be impacted by LLMs and by using GenAI. Certainly, I am interested in the forward facing categories that are opening up. I think LLMs will be data hungry.

I think unstructured data now coming into a blob stores into the unstructured data warehouses into what is below a data bricks, into what we call data lakes. I think data lakes will see more and more semi and unstructured data because you can squeeze more enterprise value out of them, which has not been true. So infrastructure around semi and unstructured data lakes, one of our companies, Aaron is working in that domain.

I think that’s going to be a massive area. The ingestion tier for that data is going to be a massive area because now you’re not just bringing in site data and sales data, you’re bringing in all kinds of other data, handwritten document data, PDFs, Google Docs, you can do a lot more with them. So all things data observability around data infrastructure, around storage in the area below LLMs is going to be important.

So I can give another example. Our company, Actural, which is based on the LinkedIn open source project called Data Hub, has now rebranded itself as Data Hub, is seeing secular tailwinds in AI metadata coming into the metadata tier. So I feel there’s a lot of opportunity in all things data, all things extraction.

Now coming to LLMs per se, and something you asked me in the prep questions, is observability monitoring, feedback loops, compliance, governance around deploying agents and co-pilots in the enterprise is going to be a very important area. So there are at least two parts to it. One is companies which are doing orchestration of these tiers itself.

In old school, now old school companies like LangChain, Langfuse, LangGraph, next gen companies of that sort, which helps you orchestrate agents. Companies like Interchange Gateways, which are called MCP. I think of it as an interoperability play.

How will MCP scale, grow, be compliant, be fault tolerant? So these are all backbones of agentic deployments inside the enterprise. And all things monitoring, governance, feedback loop, and observability, I feel these are all going to be significant TAM areas within the enterprise.

And the second category that I just pointed out is partly forward facing. And I would say the extraction layer, the observability layer that I pointed out for sidebar are partly backward facing, but will get revolutionized. So very exciting times.

Two comments. One is a repeat comment, which is the type of founding teams you need for each of these areas are special. Should be a combination of AI infra, of applied AI, of product specific expertise, as well as databases and systems.

That’s kind of exciting.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:6:01
But how do these founders without a GTM founder or a business founder land their first enterprise contract?

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:6:09
That brings me to the second point. The type of founders you need, and that’s something I have learned in my life as a VC for now seven and a half years and at HVC is, I think go to market will remain a very important area for these founding teams. What I have done personally is invested in a lot of open source companies.

I still believe in open source in some of these areas, because many of these areas are developer focused. The actual adopters of the new software will be developers themselves. So I think an open source, a partially open source mentality and knowing how to build community.

I mean, if you look at a company like Rocketlane or Atomicworks, something they have done without being open source is that they have built community around their software, right? And I think community building on an open source is a very critical, is a critical power, superpower you need in the founding team and the mentality of being community first. That’s one part.

But I think increasingly, given the speed of adoption of the software and enterprises, top-down motions are also going to be really important. So knowing much, thinking much more about say conversion from open source to paid, but even clean top-down motions, there has to be much more expertise early on in founding teams. And one interesting comment there, remember that the act of doing sales and marketing itself is changing because of the advent of Gen AI.

So founding teams in these areas also have to be forward facing in adopting sales software, marketing software, which is Gen AI infused, buying from other startups. I think combination of open source growth hacking and combination of using new tools is going to be kind of something that the DNA of the founding team has to bring to the table. Those are some, some things to think about.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:8:04
And the last thing, you know, I think this is another topic for another podcast because…

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:8:08
A whole podcast

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:8:10
Because we can’t give justice to it in such a short span of time. And how the rate which market is evolving, right? What is the, how the founder type changing on the, on the founder required on the GTM side is of keen interest to me, but I’ll leave it open ended for here.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:8:31
Meaning the founders, the way they think about go to market itself.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:8:37
Yeah, the founders, they think about go to market itself, right? How do they land their first 10 enterprise contract, right? Is the old way of SaaS buying still applicable or should you get a co-founder who has sold SaaS or should you possibly try to find a different kind of a founder?

I don’t have an answer because the market is changing.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:8:55
Look, Siddhartha the only thing I’ll say is even now product building is hard. If you build software product, let’s not ignore that. Building software products is really hard.

It is just so that software engineering is so profoundly affected by Gen AI, you can do that iteration fast. But the taste of a product, the design aspect of a product, increasingly AI centric design where you are building an AI infused product, how do you land it? These are non-trivial things, which I don’t think can be automated away.

So I think that part is hard and it requires founders to have superpowers. The second thing is very mundane. I still think the first five design partnerships are really important.

I think design partnerships, when you land the right design partnerships, maybe the speed of it will be much faster because people want AI infused software. I still think those mundane things will remain important, but topic for another day.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:9:49
Yeah, maybe this requires another podcast as well on how to find the right design partner in AI first era.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:9:57
Profound question.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:9:59
So last thing is, what are you doing beyond work in the India-US corridor?

What are your passions?

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:10:06
Yeah, right. I would say I’ve always been fairly involved in the non-profit sector. We have been backing projects, whether they’re in the South, whether they’re East, Odisha, Bengal.

So in terms of, I have a non-profit called Saxa, and we have always been big into women’s and children’s education and healthcare related initiatives in India. That is always true. Education remains a huge passion of mine.

And I think education for a changing India and for a changing US for that matter is very important to me. And new modes of education, coursework, how do you teach differently? What are the skills that you want more from a trade side versus fundamental learning, remain very important to me. So backing non-profits and groups like Pratham in India, which works with the government. These are very important to me.

A second is big into arts, especially music. Try to support a lot of the India-US corridor on music. Also very passionate about the sacred music traditions of all over the world, especially India.

Music traditions which bring people together, bring people together at a spiritual level. Want to call out, there’s a beautiful music festival that we’ve been supporting for six, seven years now in New York City called Raga’s Life. I’d be proud to say it’s the only 24-hour Indian-themed music festival in the US I’ve heard of.

We have it in Brooklyn every October. We have artists coming from India, from all over the world. Sacred music coming from Middle East, from East Europe, from South Africa, from South America.

Very proud and with a strong Indian classical theme. And I think I would love to support that for the rest of my life. And I want to support more and more performance art and music in India.

I think India is just like, it’s just an ocean that, you know, remains to be explored. That’s a huge passion of mine.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:12:03
So, so glad that you’re, we also discussed in a previous podcast that your interests are so diversified and Kolkata remains at heart.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:12:11
Kolkata is important. I think Kolkata has given me personally a culture of being curious and open to all possibilities.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:12:19
And also a lot of taste. Especially in food.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:12:23
I think food scene in India, I mean, I’m a huge follower of all the food podcasts of India. I think, remain very excited, you know, also of, of, I think the multi-layer of India with, with, with, I think meditation, quiet, belongingness in nature, something you and I have talked about.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:12:41
Given Vipassana to the world, India would have been commercial about it, would have added 1 trillion to its GDP.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:12:49
I know, trademarking yoga. I mean, I think there are depths, multiple layers to, you know, I have discovered so much more of India after coming here. I think I’m very comfortable as an American, as this is my, my, my homeland, but, you know, my past has remained a very deep, you know, motivation inside me.

And, and we want to support India-US corridor massively in the arts, also in the non-profit. But my ultimate passion remains in entrepreneurship and kind of backing companies which do great things in this corridor. And I’ll just repeat myself, AI enabled services should be massively happening from India for the world.

So all of this remains important to me. And thank you for asking me that question. Siddhartha, it’s an honor.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:13:36
I’m grateful for your friendship.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:13:37
I am grateful for your mentorship. I think very highly of you. And you’re doing the hard yards, raising a fund.

And I see you in the Bay Area more and more. That makes me very happy.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:13:48
Thank you Bhaskar.

Bhaskar Ghosh 01:13:48
Thank you so much.