Published 17:52 IST, June 11th 2024
Our biggest competitor isn't another gaming company—It's Instagram: Alok Kejriwal
Alok Kejriwal, once a serial entrepreneur and now an author, believes that listening to books on Audible sets a new standard for enjoying literature.
India's startup ecosystem has rapidly emerged as a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, fuelled by a young, tech-savvy population eager to embrace digital advancements. Alok Kejriwal, once a serial entrepreneur and now an author, offers a deep dive into this dynamic environment in his latest book.
In an engaging conversation with Republic Business, Kejriwal sheds light on the trends shaping India's startup sphere, sharing his experiences and insights on the challenges and opportunities that define this exciting field.
Edited Excerpts:
Q: How does it feel to have transformed from a serial entrepreneur, and now an author? And what is this love for books?
A: It's a blessing to be able to write because we all have so many experiences and the best way to express them is writing and now, of course, hearing what has been written. It's a parallel track. The entrepreneurship is about accumulating stories. Most people have great lives and professionals have a very structured life that gets better and better.
Entrepreneurs have a topsy-turvy life. And when you have a topsy-turvy life, you have many more stories to tell. On the book reading part, you know, I think I read many years ago that the best way to become wise is to read. Warren Buffett says, read 500 pages a week. And I must share a confession.
I am a BCom graduate. So, you know, I come from the classical business family. And for years, I used to feel that I didn't know enough. So there was this hunger to learn. And I learned everything through reading. And that is what the habit became.
So essay writing and elocution was a very important part of that curriculum in my school. And for me, writing became a part of that very early growing-up stage. So then it kind of blossomed into full-blown writing.
Q: So from the time that you started out as an entrepreneur and before, you know, starting out became such a cool word. How do you think things have changed for India?
A: It's amazing. Again, you know, starting up is so cool now. There's a joke we used to crack very early on when we used to observe people, you know, that falling in love was not really as important as falling in love, but to tell people I'm in love.
It's like a fashion thing to me. I think now it's same fashion to start up. I think the why has changed. I am obsessed by the word why and I share that in the first part of my book. The earlier why was absolute hunger. You know, the pre-90s and the early 2000s was I got to do something.
For me, it was breaking out of my misery of being in a socks company and thinking I'll make socks all my life. Yeah. The why and how have become very contemporary. I want to be cool. I want to be something that the other guys are not.
Having said that, that's where the why's then become, the what's are very deep. People today don't think of startups as something that they will do for the rest of their lives or a commitment.
I've met people who say, sir, I have two startups. I have three startups. And I can't even run one startup, right? So it's so hard. I think the last part is the icons that have been created in the last 10 years. They're very public. They're very, very visible.
The Elon Musk to the Zuckerbergs. And everybody wants to be like them. And I think that's the most positive spin of this whole cultural shift. I think now we're in the age of entrepreneurism. So I think that's a much bigger blessing.
Despite, you know, what we see is that despite a low success rate of startups in India, some of them are doing pretty well. We have got like 114 unicorns.
Q: So what do you think about the landscape now and where is it?
A: It's actually just begun. India has always been a consumption country, right? But 1.3 billion people and 80 per cent or 70 per cent under the age of 30, you will get consumption. Now the time has come where people are consuming digital along with physical. So what's happened is that a lot of the use cases, as we call them in technology, the real usage of startup value has come.
For example, food delivery, cab delivery, and so on and so forth, which in the earlier years was not really present. So we had to invent things. You know, I started a company called Contest2Win.com. just to invent the idea of doing promotions online.
They never existed. But I was so excited about the internet that I had to invent an idea. Now you don't have to invent the internet or you don't have to bother.
Ideas are a plenty. Problems that are real world today have become great businesses because the internet is ubiquitous. Earlier it was a privileged medium for a few households.
Now everyone has a phone. So that's the reason of this great boom and thriving economy.
In the next 20 years, we'll probably be the most vibrant internet market in the world in terms of usage and, you know, businesses. Yeah. I just feel like the bombay stock exchange today is the definition of 30 top blue chip companies it's such a age-old but pristine way of looking at value in the country.
I think the Indian 100 internet and then the Indian 500 internet, will become the next indice that we will be watching very carefully.
Q: So you've got the nerve of the digital consumer. So do you think that even in that landscape, things have matured now? What people are choosing to do, which screen people want to share, spend their time on?
A: Especially for entrepreneurs like myself and the future and the current entrepreneurs, we have one big problem and that problem is the global competition. So honestly, if you ask me, who's your biggest competitor, what's your biggest fear? It's not a gaming company.
It's Instagram. So if you ask television today, and this is a fact in every television boardroom in the country, you know, who's your biggest problem? It's YouTube. It's not another TV channel. So, preferences have obviously shifted.
Now the challenge is how do I get a share of that preference? And therefore, and therein lies the problem of or opportunity for localisation. So if I can do stuff that is relevant to me and yet is within the the new pattern that I'm consuming, there is a great chance of success.
Which is why I think a lot of the 'jugadu' startups that have the little Indian-ness to what they do is really where it's successful. And I think like all great times, things evolve.
But if an entrepreneur has got his nose on the ground, he will always pick up the smell of the fresh rain.
Q: Tell us a little about the book because the name is very catchy
A: So it's called Getting Dressed and Parking Cars. It's the story of Games to Win, my fourth venture. And Games to Win's essential business is three business lines. Driving cars, parking and driving cars. dress-up games and story games.
And the car and parking and the dress-up games came because I grew up playing with those small dinky toys and my girls, my two daughters played with dolls.
And one incident mentioned in the book is when we were doing our spring cleaning or house cleaning, everyone had grown up, right? You know, my wife assumes I've grown up, but I haven't. So she said, hey, you know what? I'm going to get rid of all the dolls in the cars and I said, no way, man, you can't touch my cars. These are mine. And that's an epiphany.
If I can be so attached to small cars, even though I'm a grown-up man, I mean, even driving those cars with my hand on my table was so much fun. Why can't I make that a mobile experience? The same idea was the dress up games with dolls. Instead of real dolls, virtual dolls.
I looked up Mattel, the company, the toy company, and I was so shocked to see in 2007, they had a 27,000 crore turnover back in 2007, still selling Barbie and cars. That's 2007. It's not 1998. So we had already had the first wave of the internet. And I told myself, I said this business is going to move to mobile. And that's what I want to be a part of.
Q: As the book is also available online so you expect people to read it or listen to it?
A: Reading has always been a long format. It's a studious exercise. Hearing things is fun and that's where Audible really comes in and makes an amazing experience of the written word is now the new standard. I would be even bold enough to say the new standard.
Whomever I talk to, it may be CXOs, CEOs, they're listening more than reading. And that's mainly because of the way our lives are. We travel so much. We're always in different vehicles and modes of transport.
You can't keep a book with you all the time. But with a simple ear, you plug something in your ear and you're hearing things.
Also, a lot of people love to multitask. So, while I'm eating or while I'm even not doing anything studious, I'm hearing and I'm exercising. I'm hearing and I'm traveling. So I think this is the way now people have been consuming.
So I think it's a no-brainer. And I would segue into saying the most serious of magazines in the world to the most popular books all have Audible versions. So It's no longer something novel. It's something that is quite mandatory.
Q: Do you think apart from entertainment which is your space of course on the internet, do you think knowledge is also going to dominate the space?
There's a great democratisation of knowledge. You don't need to be at Harvard or Wharton to know how to run a company. You don't have to be some rich son to go to a great university.
So the way owners of knowledge are distributing that knowledge is phenomenal. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway's conference, it is 10 Howards and Whartons packed together in those four hours.
Similarly, some of our Indian entrepreneurs and the way they're dispensing their knowledge. So the key operating word is the snackable part of knowledge.
Knowledge when you're over, the reason classrooms and universities and schools were so onerous was because it was an eight-hour session. The human brain has not been wired to be concentrating for eight hours.
The human's attention span peaks at 20 minutes. So formats like Audible are wonderful because you can hear, listen, switch off, switch on. And knowledge therefore has become very, very easy to snack on. I think everything has an age and time. Entertainment has also got compartmentalised.
So people would rather watch their entertainment in the evenings or whenever. But that knowledge snacking has become almost permanently on. So you have the knowledge.
Now it's up to you what to do with it because it is available and it doesn't charge you a premium.
It's the most innocuous things to the deepest things, you know, how to sleep better. I mean, if you read, if you hear something or read something or if you snack on it, it might just change your life.
So, I think everyone has gotten used to this treadmill of saying, kuch sunte hai, kuch padte hai, or kuch dekhte hai. It's a combination of the three. Yes.
Q: Gaming is such a hot topic right now and it's also been mired with controversies because of the taxation bit also gaming is becoming so sophisticated because of so many gadgets available. So what is the future of gaming in India?
A: Honestly, if one looks back and this is what learning and reading helps, if you just look back in history Olympics is a game. The greatest talk shows were games or game shows were games. I think in India, the consumer is so young. which is where I keep gravitating to.
Unlike Europe, where everybody is worrying about how to pay their pension. And in India, everyone's worrying, how do I get that 18-year-old to do my stuff? The disparity in having, used to be an earlier problem. I don't have color TV. I don't have a console. All that has been obliterated by this simple little mobile phone.
So consumption has become very, very democratic, like the product itself. And I think when you throw a billion people into a country with demographics like we have, there is no dearth of what people will use.
Now the question is actually finding a segment that you think makes sense for you to make, to be able to generate content, and then to honestly be able to even make money.
Which is the challenge in India. So I think consumption is not the challenge in India, but it's monetisation that is really the problem.
Q: What portion of their spending is allocated to games by the age group of 16 to 25? How much are they spending?
A: It's marginal. It's not even part of their wallet of share because for all, you know, for all kinds of things you can, you have to pay, but games have been free and will be free.
The reason gaming has boomed is because on mobile phones, you don't have to pay to play.
You can play and you can pay as you play. So there's a very big barrier that has been broken. you can't watch any of the programs on television without having to pay first.
And nobody likes to pay for anything until they're sure. So because games are ad-supported and ads in India are thriving because we have so many things that people want to market.
I don't need to get money from consumers as much as I need to make sure that my advertising pipeline is in place. And it's the same with other mediums. The televisions and subscriptions. Subscriptions is a cherry on the cake, but the advertising is what fuels the P&L. So it's a very nascent market. All the TV spots which have anyway been made forever are now migrating to a mobile spot.
So it's very easy for advertisers to trail or to not have to create new content for advertising. It's that one TV spot that goes across. Which is why it's very friendly for the consumer because they're not paying.
Q: And do you think that gaming also has an impact on alertness?
A: Absolutely. So in age-old homes gaming consoles and gaming exercises have become de-rigor now because it fire up your brain. If you try playing Candy Crush level 350 you know your brains will get fried before you can complete the level.
It's so simple but it is so complicated So there's a very beautiful keyword that I learned very early in my journey, which I've used prolifically in my book, simple to play, but impossible to master.
So it looks very simple, but it's impossible to master. Unlike a product like chess, where you can't say it's simple to play. Ludo is simple to play, but there's nothing to master. It's chance. So gaming has that beautiful combination. It's beyond that.
I'll just share a story of our dress-up games. So we're one of the first or probably the only company in the world that has dress-up with all kinds of body sizes for the girls that are inside. And you should see the response we get from the world.
Why do we have to only see skinny type of models? We are who we are. And then we went one step beyond. We added a skin condition called Vitiglo to our skin palette. So we called it a skin option. Like you can put on Vitiglo as a skin color. And we got a mail from a girl who said, I'm 22 and I never had the courage to leave my house without making my skin up and you have liberated me.
So games go way beyond just being, making your mind work, they make you feel happy and they make you comfortable with who you are.
Parking frenzy is actually the game that started it all. And we had this really surprising, unintended, completely bizarre hit in the US. It was a little tiny game. not so great. It is all about parking cars in difficult places.
And all of us were puzzled because the whole question is, who is playing this game? And the biggest surprise was there were tween girls, not even teen girls, tween girls, pre-18, who were playing this game in the US, learning how to park cars. And when we saw their tweets, they said, we never could learn how to park cars. There was never any mechanic. Now this little, small little game helps us do that.
We can go to our DMV test and get our license. And then the last sentence was, we're showing it to our fathers and boyfriends saying, we don't need you anymore. That was so cool, you just make people get empowered, which is so phenomenal.
Updated 20:20 IST, June 11th 2024