Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia asks Indian entrepreneurs to change their mindset and take a risk even if it fails. Bhatia, who founded ShowReel, an AI-powered learning platform in 2021, tells Uma Kannan that the country has plenty of talent and that it should make use of AI. Edited excerpts:
Recently, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal urged founders to explore innovations in technology like deeptech rather than focusing more on food delivery apps. How are you looking at India's start-up ecosystem?
I kind of agree with him. I think this whole obsession with being successful is a problem, because that means you are investing in start-ups only to make money. And then you try to de-risk your investments. Deeptech is not about getting returns, it is about pursuing new ideas, new ways of solving problems that have no economic outcome, and one in a hundred has some sort of use case. It is not that we will go and make a better version of something that already exists. The risk aversion is the problem, and that stems from lack of critical thinking in our education system. If our education system is just based on rote learning and memorisation, you can have no deeptech.
Can we say that there is no talent here in deeptech?
It is not the talent, it is a way of thinking, a mindset. There is plenty of talent in India, but it is about allowing for diversity of opinions that leads to innovation. How did DeepSeek happen? They (China) were under a constraint as they could not import high-end chips. So, they asked the question if there is a different way of solving the problem. They figured out that instead of increasing the number of parameters in the large language model, they made two, with 30, 40 billion parameters only. So, they broke down the problem. That's a simple idea. It doesn't require you to get a PhD in anything.
What should India do in order to leverage this AI boom?
What India should do is go 100% in AI, which means fund all kinds of different ideas -- out-of-box and unproven ideas. The problem we have is we do not fund unproven ideas. For instance, everything has become an app today -- food, banking and transportation—then why we can’t make elections an app. I spoke to a former Chief Election Commissioner and his answer was it would never happen in India. How can you say it will never happen?. His wife asked if it had been done somewhere before. I said then it is not innovation, it’s a copy. We are experts at copying. We take pride in copying. We don't want to be the first, we don't want to take a risk. Change that mindset, be the first.
As an entrepreneur, what kind of opportunities are you looking at in India right now?
I am working on four different ideas that have a big India component. For every social media company today, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp or Instagram, the largest market is India. So obviously, I am working on some kind of social media and that kind of consumer, mass consumer products, for which India will be the largest market.
In India, the debate on work-life balance has been intensifying. Do you agree with long hours of work?
I believe work should be fun and it should not be quantified in the number of hours one puts in. It is about getting the job done. If somebody is given a task and can do it in one day and wants to go play golf the other four days, so be it. If a person is creative enough and can do it in one day, that's the way to work. Hours don't translate into productivity. That's the old industrial era model. We are not working in factories anymore.
What do you want to convey to young entrepreneurs who are looking for seed stage funding?
You have to believe in whatever you are doing, and believe not so much in what the outcome is financially, but believe that it really can cause a change and the product will really work.