Anshumani Ruddra App PM Lead for Google Pay chats with Amit Somani, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

02:00 - Anshumani’s Product Journey from Zynga to Google

09:30 - Why You Need Both Tactical Depth & Strategic Depth

15:00 - How Indian Users are Ahead of Indian PMs and Designers

24:00 - The Golden Age of Product Management

29:30 - How to Think About Your Career as a PM

34:00 - The Greatest Growth Hack to Learn

Read the complete transcript below

Amit Somani 01:15

Welcome to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast. I’m your host Amit Somani and I am delighted to have with us again in a different format, Anshumani Ruddra, a friend, a product tinkerer, and the product lead for Google Pay globally. Welcome to the show, Anshumani.

Anshumani Ruddra 01:36

Good to be here, Amit.

Amit Somani 01:39

Anshumani, you had lot of varied careers including landing up at Google, the mother of them all. And I used to be at Google many years ago. So we'll talk about Google in a second, but maybe you can take our listeners through your early journey from the Zynga days to CueMath and so forth in terms of your own evolution as a product manager, product designer, product strategist.

Anshumani Ruddra 02:00

Sure, absolutely. So at Zynga, I started out as a game designer, so I was the first game designer at Zynga India. And was part of the core team, which originally set around to building out Zynga India, the first studio of Zynga outside the US. And we did phenomenally well, it grew incredibly fast. And I spent a lot of time in the US working with PMs and designers there. And I think the product design bug bit me then. This was Zynga in its early days. Pre IPO Zynga was a phenomenal place to work. It still is, it still continues to do phenomenally well. But back then just the concentration of PMs and game designers was amazing.

And I think that started this journey for me, which I continued by running my own games, studio, Tiny Mogul Games, which eventually got acquired by Hike. It was a sister company to Hike. And then I reached a decision point where I was like, "Okay, I've spent enough time in games. Let me see if I can take the lessons from... And at this point officially I'd never held the product manager title.

I had been a game designer and then a general manager or a studio head. But my thesis was that the whole bunch of learnings from the world of game design and from the world of gaming, which can be applied to what I call the Roti, Kapda, Makaan products, right? Regular, everyday use products which millions of people use. So I found the thing which was diametrically opposite to entertainment, which in my head seemed like healthcare and education. So I went to Practo to see if that would make sense. And great experience again.

So I spent time at Practo running the central product, both the consumer side product, as well as the doctor facing products. Then went to my first love, which is education. I come from a family of educators, so education runs fairly deep in the family. So went to CueMath to head product there. Built out a team. Very different business model, very different scale. When you're in the world of games there are millions and millions of users who play your games. And here we work, doing a very B2B2C model thousands of teachers teaching tens of thousands of students. So very, very different model, very different scale, and a very different set of problems to be solved.

And after that, I worked at Hotstar, which now is Disney+ Hotstar. I was there for a very long time, led sports, social and gaming vertical at Hotstar and was responsible for streaming of IPL and world cup and a bunch of other things. So Hotstar is the home for cricket in India. So, I did a bunch of that. And then very recently, it's been nine months and I've been at Google. I thought everyone and their grandmother was working in FinTech. So I thought, "Hey, about time I also went and tried out FinTech."

I mean, jokes aside though, it was also the fact that Google is a generational company and part of me felt that, "Hey, someday, I'm going to be 60 and I'd look back at my career and say, 'Damn, I didn't work at Google. Now seems to be a good time to go work at google.'" And Google Pay is definitely like a... Having spent so much time at startups, both early stage, mid stage and late stage, Google Pay seemed like a startup within Google and it is a startup within Google. Definitely has the culture, which is how I ended up there.

Amit Somani 05:40

Fantastic. Lots of different threads to follow up on. Let me break it down into two. One is your own journey going from being a game designer, to a general manager, to a product manager, to running your own studio as an entrepreneur and so forth. So what are the skills that you've learned that helped you across? And in terms of cross pollination to the extent that if somebody was a general manager today, or a manager, or engineer wanting to go the other route to become a game designer or become a this. How, how versatile is that path of learning? That is one thread.

And the other thread, maybe I'll pause here, but is really the multiple different verticals you worked in. So let's do that later.

Anshumani Ruddra 06:25

Yep. On the first one I think... So I feel like a lot of product-building it requires this crosspollination where being a Jack of all trades and master of none, I think it's an over abused term. But if you really think about it, what it requires is breadth more than depth in a lot of area. And I think you need depth in one or two areas, but you need a lot more breadth. Because a part of being a product builder, a part of being a product manager, a successful product manager at least is being able to work with other people. So I think one of the big things there is that, do you have a deep appreciation for what engineers do on a day in and day out basis? What do you know designers do on a day in and day out basis?

The kind of work that marketers do and folks on partnerships and business development do. And I think that bit of just being the glue that holds the team together and being able to work in this cross-functional way, I think it requires you to have enough breadth that when you sit in a room with people very different from you, who do a very different function from you, are you able to listen, absorb, make sense of what they're telling you and then contribute in a positive way? And to me, when people talk about a breadth of skills, I think to me, that is the theme, the motive, so to say, which runs across all these things that, are you able to go and contribute.

I have never diminished the ability for people to be subject matter experts in a particular domain, or just have insane depth. Because without those people, you don't get things built. But those are people you bank on, right? So like the 10X engineer, or those phenomenal designers and engineers, you need them to build great product. But there is a great utility for people who can just go across different functions and again do all the three levels of this job function. And I have the Simon Sinek Start With Why framework, always seems very applicable to me when it comes to product managers job, which is the why, how and what. Why are we doing what we are doing? And why would people care if we did this? Why would our users care if we did this? And to me, that's actually strategy. So that's the first layer.

Why build this? Why do this, why should I be doing this? Why should we collectively be building this right? And that is the strategic part of any function, but I think very critical for product managers. The second bit is how should we build this? How should we go about solving this problem, which is very clearly the domain of tactics? And then there's the bottom layer, which is what. What should we be doing? What should be the steps that we take? And I think that's very clearly in the realm of execution. Now, if we take a diagonal line through this, or create a wedge through this, like a pyramidical wedge, execution is obviously critical.

When we start off in our carriers we have to be very good at executing. And then over time we become better at tactics and hopefully at some point become really good with strategy. But to be able to function in this very cross-functional way and be able to work across this, especially in a startup environment, I think all three things are required. So again, it's more breadth versus depth. You are a great, phenomenal strategic thinker. You have a role in the startup world, but there is a limitation to what you'd be able to do if you can't execute.

Similarly, you are great, you're a machine, you're a beast in execution, but you don't have strategic depth or you don't have tactical depth, you will struggle. So I think which is where as PMs, having all these three abilities is great. So again, it's more of breadth as opposed to depth.

Amit Somani 10:25

Yeah. I'm also a big fan of this work, just like Simon Sinek, or David Epstein, right? How generalists succeeds in a specialized world. And it's really multidisciplinary thinking and applying it in various ways. To make it more practical to many of our listeners who might be early stage entrepreneurs. If you are going and hiring product managers or product strategists or designers, you obviously are not going to get everything in every person. And you're also typically when you're starting out your company, you won't have the warchest like Google has to hire Anshumani Ruddra.

So, how would you prioritize in the early days of the company, like think zero to one, one to 10 stages, certain skill sets over the others in terms of the why, the how, and the what?

Anshumani Ruddra 11:08

So I think it has to be a very deeper analysis of who you are. So if I was the founder of this company, and I had, say, two co-founders. If between the three of us, I knew what our skill sets were very, very clearly, then I need to hire people who compliment those skill sets and maybe cover the skillsets which are not present. So if you are a product co-founder... If I was the co-founder, I wouldn't worry too much about, at least in the early days, the strategic and tactical side of things. I would get great designers on board, so very good sense of UX thinking. But I would get really good executors on board. So I would go after young people who can just be beast when it comes to execution, right?

And put in the hard work, and it's not necessarily work 16 hours a day. But when they work in that focused 8-10 hours, they can move mountains. Similarly, if one of the co-founders is a very strong CTO himself or herself, then go hire engineers who are going to help in execution. But if you don't have an engineering counterpart, then I think, forget the job title, but essentially hiring an architect is job number one. Get someone who can build the shape of the vision that you have who can actually translate what you want to build into this framework saying, "Hey, these are the APIs we build. This is a structure that we build. This is the platform that we build. And these are the pieces that we build."

And then they can go and work either with external engineers or build a small team of front-end and backend and full stack engineers within their house. Again, if you're a founder and design comes naturally to you and good user experience, forget like being able to use Figma. But if you have a good sense of user experience, then you go hire designers who can help translate your vision into reality. But if you don't have a strong designer or somebody with a very strong aesthetic sensibility and user experience sensibility in your founding team, go hire that person.

So I think for me, it's always been that, how do you compliment? So the reverse is also true. When I've looked at joining early state startups, I always look, is there a vacuum? Is there a place to fill? If I look at the founding team and I say, "You know what? You already cover three of the five things that I bring to this table. I'm not really required." If I cover a majority of the things, which they lack, then I know that I can go and make a real difference. So that reverse mapping is also true. Whether it's a founder mapping that, "Hey, in my core team, in my first set of people that I'll hire, what are the skill sets I want?" It's very dependent on the skill sets you don't have.

But sometimes the mistake people make is product founders, for example, might actually be spending a lot of time fundraising and doing everything else that being a CEO entails, and might not be able to spend the time on building the product. In that case, go hire a product builder, go hire someone who can do a lot of the zero to one thinking for you.

Amit Somani 14:20

Lots of interesting insights there. Going to the other dimension without going into the specifics of each company. But what have you learned from working across domains, right? Whether it was sports and cricket with Hotstar, or CueMath in Ed-Tech, or healthcare and so forth, what are things that transferable in terms of your own learnings? As well as perhaps if I can take the Indian consumer lens, how has the Indian consumer evolved? So even though you've been changing sectors, but the consumer has also been evolving, right?

Anshumani Ruddra 14:50

Absolutely. I'll give you a great example of this. When we’re at Practo we’re trying to build a social network for doctors. It was one of the projects I worked on in my early days at Practo. We had a profile page for doctors and we already had a lot of information about doctors. So we onboarded about 40, 50 doctors in this beta that we were running and we had this beautiful profile page. And we realized no doctor was making any edits to this page. So their name, qualification, age, colleges that they had gone to, et cetera, and they weren't making changes. Even though when, obviously there were errors. In fact, in a few places, I introduced errors just to see if the doctor would go change, like the name of the college that they'd gone to, but doctors weren't.

So we called up a doctor and I said, "Sir, what's happening? Why are you not going and editing?" And his question was, "How do I edit?" And I'm like, "That pencil icon is right there next to your name, next to your qualification." And in Hindi, he said, mujhe sapna aaega That is what I have to do to edit. And for me, that was such a massive wake up call that doctors are not on LinkedIn, doctors are not on Facebook. And this was not a old doctor. This was a 40-year-old. But the reality... And this is of course, six years back, 2015. But the fact is that doctors are... They use their phone, they use email effectively and they use WhatsApp very effectively.

And there are certain tools of their work, technology driven tools that they use. But like you or I, they're not sitting on social media, right? They're not on Twitter. So building a profile for themselves is not obvious to them and the fact that this deeply ingrained design pattern that a pencil icon means edit is not clear to them. It's not obvious to them. So this was one big learning and I went and sat with my designer who cried tears of blood that, "You're going to make me change it to a label saying, "Click here to edit your name. Click here to edit your qualification." But it worked, we had 90% plus conversion on that page in terms of people editing their profile.

But if I flip that across, right? So the evolution though, is that now we are in a world where... So one could say, "Okay, standard universal design patterns don't work in India." That could have been the bad takeaway from that example. But the truth is the Indian user is evolving far faster than our product managers and designers are evolving. One of my favorite examples on Sharechat is that because people use material created on Sharechat for sharing, they changed that three dot button, which is the share icon on Android to a WhatsApp icon, because they knew that what people will be using is WhatsApp for sharing, right? Now, the fact that that is the default way of sharing and that WhatsApp is share is so easily understood.

But then there is power usage which is happening. My mother showed me, my mother who's in her 60s showed me that on... I used to get a message on WhatsApp, I would hard press the message, then get into reply mode than type reply. And she's like, "Why do you do that? You can swipe right on any message and it automatically goes into reply mode." And I had one of those moments where my mind was blown that my mother who is... She tech savvy, sure. But she knows this design pattern and I don't, and I'm the one who actually builds these products. So I think one of the big things that has happened is the most popular products in the ecosystem quickly become the lingua franca of design.

So users understand these design patterns very inherently because of WhatsApp, because of Facebook, because of the rise of TikTok back in the day, and now with reels and everything else. Data is so cheap in India that video is the default way in which we now consume content. We skipped all other things. We skipped audio, we skipped a bunch of things and we directly jumped to video and became the largest consumers of video in the world. So with things like this, we have to keep pace with our users, not the other way around. I often earlier used to make this mistake that design would be ahead of users and users have to play catch up, which is just a really bad way of thinking about it because your users should not be playing catch up with you, you should be building for your users.

But now it's the other extreme where I think our users are far ahead of us, are far ahead of the people building in this market. So when we say we are building for Bharat or you're building for the next 100 million users, and I feel like, man, the people who are building have no idea where the next 100 million people have gone. They've gone to a different place. They're far ahead. They use the products we don't use. So their design-thinking and design patterns have evolved. We have to catch up.

Amit Somani 19:30

Let me ask you a specific question on that. So if you were doing a Practo like thing today, which you are in some sense, right? Because you're doing Google Pay and tomorrow you'll do something else and so forth. And you wanted to catch up with the current design lingua franca of where state of the art is. Like building for Bharat. What is a practical way in which you would go and figure that out? Before you start designing anything saying, "Let me understand that people understand the share button or people understand the edit button or the pencil or the equivalent."

Anshumani Ruddra 20:00

We have to learn from people who have been doing this for the last 80, 90 years in India, which is everyone who's ever worked in FMCG. You know, the Unilevers of India, the ITCs of India were very big on user research and market research. Every one of our brethren who work in the big four consulting companies or who have ever worked in the world of FMCG. And I think this is very weird. As you look at mid stage and late at startups, you realize that a lot of the business leadership actually comes from old school companies. A lot of folks who have worked in Hindustan Unilever, et cetera, or Pepsi or Coke and things like that are actually leaders at larger companies. But early stage companies seem to think that we have nothing to learn from old school companies.

And to me, that's a big fundamental problem because they were very good at market research. They were very good at going and figuring out insights from the users by actually going, sitting with their users and think the fact that... I mean, I know shampoo sachet is such a over abused example of like good product thinking, but it is great product thinking. They realized that you can't sell full shampoo bottles at 25 bucks a pop to people. You have to sell it at one rupee a pop in sachets. That's great user insight. What is the equivalent of that user insight in the tech product world? So there is no shortcut, but the only way to do this is actually go and talk to the people who are your potentially users or who are your existing users.

Go figure out how usage happens. Go figure out why only 20% women are your users. And you realize because only 20% of them own their own phones, they still use their brother's phone or their husband's phone during the day or their kid's phone for crying out loud during the day when the kid is away in school. So ownership of phones is restricted to four hours or five hours during the day. I always used to think that say at Hotstar that soap opera daytime watching was not restricted to peak hours because then I realized, sure, the television at home is monopolized by the rest of the family. So who is watching all these soap operas during the day? And then it became very clear to me that phone usage for women is higher during the day when kids are away at school in India and when husband is away.

And that's a reality and you don't get that insight until unless you understand how tier two tier three markets work. That women would've finished all the work at home, and then at 11:30, 12:00, and two hours before their kids are going to come back, they're going to sit and catch up on their previous night show. And which is why 12:00 to 2:00 was peak time for me, as far as saas-bahu shows were concerned in India. And see, that insight you only get if you try and understand why is this pattern different? Because if somebody owns their own phone, they should be able to watch it at any time. And it should match peak time. But then you realize peak time, cricket is going on. Peak time, something else is going on. So I think this is the big gap.

I think we need to learn from the old world in a big way, I think in the startup ecosystem. The principles of market research and user research have not changed. They are pretty much the same. Those theories are still very much relevant and I think we just need to put our egos aside and jump in.

Amit Somani 23:35

Yeah, no, that's fascinating. I read this book again, I think CEO Factory by somebody who's from Hindustan Unilever, and I really enjoyed it because I think a lot of that... I think it'd be interesting to see people from those backgrounds come in and be product managers and product strategists and so on rather than the typical consulting types coming in and doing that. But great. So switching gears, let's talk about a couple of things I've seen you mention in the past which is that the coming of age of product management in India And the maturing and the golden age of product management and so forth.

And in particular, I think you were also mentioning that you were surprised as to while that is a great place to be in compared to say 10 years or 15 years ago when we were all getting started in this ecosystem. Design has overtaken product and design sensibility. So maybe you can elaborate on both, the design bit and how design has come to age and yet PM has also come to a nice golden age.

Anshumani Ruddra 24:45

Yeah. On the engineering front, I mean, India has been engineering superpower for a fairly long time. It started out in the services industry, but I think in just pure development and actually being that evolution of working for other people and working to a spec document or a PRD written by other people, too, engineers actually taking ownership of building things. And what I call a product engineer, which is an engineer with phenomenal product sense. And I think we've seen that evolution, and I think we are already there. On that engineering front I think that maturity has come. It's getting more and more mature, but I think we are already world class or maybe world class minus one step there as far as engineering is concerned.

But about 10 years back, I used to look at the state of product management and of design and UX, and I always used to feel that I think Indian PMs would over time outpace designers because I wasn't seeing world class design happen in India. I wasn't seeing the quality of our design be. And it was, of course, of a mix of patterns. It wasn't necessarily due to the designers, but essentially I didn't see designers having a seat at the table 10 years back, or even seven, eight years back. What's flipped around completely is that our design quality and the output, the quality of our apps, the quality of our webpages, and just the quality of the user flows is becoming world class, is already getting there.

And we can see that with the fact that Indian designers are in demand and are getting now hired by international companies. But I think the growth of Indian designers outpaced... I think suddenly something went off and I think it's possibly because design can be taught. And because design schools suddenly woke up and said, "We have to get people ready for the job market." That the quality of design, the fact that 22-year-olds had portfolios where they had done product deconstructs and they’ve designed eight different app interfaces. And there is no 22-year-old product management aspirant who has done product deconstructs of 20 products. That just doesn't happen. Engineers have their GitHub repositories, designers have Behance and Dribble and everything else. PMs don't.

So just the fact that people start in product management much later and start developing products sense much later was a factor that I completely missed out in my calculation when I used to think that PMs will outpace designers in the Indian ecosystem. What's happened is designers have outpaced us. Design also has a very clear seat at the table where people have started looking at good design as a moat, as a defensible mechanism against competition, that, "If my product is better designed than I would win." But what has been heartening at least in the last year, year and a half, is that I feel like we are finally entering the golden phase, the golden age of product management globally. And I think it's having a very positive impact on PMing in India. One, I think just the PMs where these people you used to hire. We have to get work done, project manager hire karlo.

It was like the PM as a project manager, as somebody who used to get things done and who would run around engineers and designers and get things done, I think that was the take on why people needed a PM. But I think now we are looking at PMs becoming founders. We are looking at founders recognizing that they need good PMs pretty early in the life cycle of their product, even at a very early stage. And we are seeing PMs have an inordinate impact on the product and its growth. So now that we have, we have these large products coming out of India, the Zomato, Swiggy of the world, the Olas of the world, the Hotstars of the world. Across every domain we have large enough products which have massive usage built completely from India, product managed completely from India, designed completely from India.

And I'm finally starting to see that little bit of maturity coming on. The product side was much needed. I think there's still a long way to go. Are we world class yet? I don't think so. I think we are maybe two steps below or three steps below that. I think design and engineering is still ahead of us, but I think we are entering a really good phase on product management.

Amit Somani 29:20

Fantastic. So I'm going to go back a little bit to something that I know you recently started, which is offering your own course on product management and would love to get your thoughts on what are some of the key critical skills that one should do if you're not already a product manager? You want to either get into product management or you are a junior product manager or an associate product manager, and you have to work your way up the ranks. And number one, number two, just this notion of continuous learning ties in, how do you do that while you are already working at a job or at a startup, which is worse yet because you have like 100 things to do every day? So how do you keep current?

Anshumani Ruddra 30:10

So I think my first course that came out was essentially for existing PMs and I think the gap there that I realized was that... So if you have two years of PMing experience, now you have a seat at the table, you are a PM at a startup. What next? What do you do now that you're a PM, right? How do you think about your own career? How do you think about upscaling yourself? How do you think about growing? And that course essentially came out of my own struggles as a PM and the struggles I saw my entire cohort. So the folks who are in the Indian ecosystem who are product leaders at various companies across the Indian tech ecosystem, I saw all of them struggle... And through a lot of trials and error, they've reached the places that they have and they've all done well for themselves.

But the fact is there was no hand holding for a bunch of us. There was no playbook to follow literally, and which is why I called it Playbook. Because this is a step by step guide to thinking about your career. How do you grow from a senior PM to a product lead. What does it take to actually do that? What does it... How do you contribute to your organization? How do you contribute to your own success? How do you make sure that people who start reporting to you now that you've become a people manager actually succeed? So I think that was one aspect. I think the other thing that I've started very actively doing is also trying to help people get into product management and break into product management. And which is, I think, where your question is, which is how do you develop this product sense?

Because this clearly is no curriculum, right? As an engineer you learn coding at an early stage and early age and you start solving problems because there are enough and more well defined problems in the world. And same is true for design. And design schools have started doing that. At what point in your life do you start thinking about building a product and being a product manager and that gap still exists. So most people actually make that transition into product management while doing something else. A marketer moves into product management, or an engineer moves into product management, or a game designer like me moves into product management. But again, there is no path there to follow. There is no clearly laid out, like, "Do step A, B, and C, and then you can become a PM."

And I think I'm spending a lot of time there in helping people understand, how do you develop a product sense? How do you think about products, right? And then in your current situation, in whatever you're doing, how do you raise your hand and say, "Hey, I would like to opt in for this role." Because I still feel that the best place to make that transition is at an existing job where you have credibility as an engineer, where you have credibility as a designer. And then say I'm going to spend 20% of my time doing the PM role or 30% of my time. And eventually set yourself a two quarter target and then flip to being a PM. I think it's very difficult to do it from moving from one company to the other.

I always say that my own transition was more luck than anything else. I got lucky that I got the right opportunities at the right time. It doesn't play out that way for everyone. So I think that those are the things that I've been focusing on, both for existing PMs, how to navigate their career and how to think about progress. And two of how to help people get into product management. And then of course, for all of this, the big thing is how do you continue to learn? And which is sure, we learn from the day to day work. Every time we solve a problem at work and every time something fails or something succeeds, we learn from that experience. But I think over and above that, and this is my favorite question to ask people in their interview.

I always ask people like, "Hey, how do you learn?" And somebody says, I read a lot of blogs and I'm like, "Okay, but that's not really learning. You read a lot. That's good. How are you applying this?" Because I think one of the things people make about learning is that until, unless you are... You can consume a lot of stuff and that's good, but until, unless you're somehow applying it back and completing this loop, it's not really learning. So I think what I've always been looking for and what I've been trying to guide people towards is that, "Hey, complete your loop." If you have read a great blog post on growth product management, which part of it are you going to take and apply to your situation in your circumstance?

And if you have, show me a real example of like, "Hey, I did a course on growth product management, and then I took this part and applied it here. Or, "I read this wonderful blog post on how Google Pay solves for the retention and engagement, and then I applied it in my own small healthcare startups." And until, unless this transition happens and maybe you didn't apply it, but were you able to synthesize all the lessons and write something about it? Were you able to share further? So I think, to me, the greatest growth hack on learning is teaching.

The reason when I teach is a very super selfish reason. Every time I teach, which means I have to be well-prepared because people will question and they will hold me accountable for their learning, which means I have to be really good at what I'm teaching. And I have to be able to synthesize all that and then process it and then transfer it to people. So from a... This is the classic Feynman method, where Richard Feynman famously said, "If I can't turn it into a course for freshmen, then I don't know enough about it." And he very famously said that, "I can't teach quantum electrodynamics to freshmen." And he had just won a Nobel Prize in that. And he's like, "If I can't teach it to freshmen, that means nobody can, because then that means collectively we don't know enough about the subject."

So to me that is the loop to crack, which is, whenever I learn something, I try and teach it. If I can teach it successfully, and the success there is, did other people get it? And then did they go further and apply it in their careers and in their situations? Then I know my learning is complete.

Amit Somani 36:05

Absolutely. I think there's this beautiful quote says that, "When one teaches, two learn." Obviously the teacher learns and the student learns, so it's the same like Feynman method. And some of us who are not teaching are podcasting. So we are learning from smart guys like you.

Anshumani Ruddra 36:26

No, it is exactly that. I think operators as teachers is going to be... I'm very bullish on this as a business model. And one could see the difference, even if you had gone to engineering school, the profs who are doing industrial consultancy and sponsored research just had a very different take on teaching theoretical subjects than professors who didn't. I mean, speaking as somebody who went to engineering school and did chemical engineering, I can clearly tell you that I could make out the difference between the profs who were doing a lot of consulting products and used to run companies of their own on the side were ust phenomenally different in their ability to teach.

And I think in our work environment, whether it's design, whether it's engineering, whether it's product management, whether it's business, whether it's marketing, I think we are going to see the rise of operators as teachers. And I think that's a business model I'm super bullish on as well with the whole cohort-based forces, et cetera, rising. I think the operators as teachers is just a phenomenal thing, which is going to happen. Great learning and teaching opportunity.

Amit Somani 37:30

Wonderful. Hey, Anshumani, great talking to you. Really delighted that you could take some time and spend some time on the Prime Venture Partners podcast. Thanks again for being on the show.

Anshumani Ruddra 37:45

Pleasure being here, Amit and thanks for having me. Take care.

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