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‘Innovators Playground’ is a podcast series where we explore the cutting-edge innovations and insights shaping the future of technology. It brings conversations with leading founders, industry experts, and thinkers to inspire and inform youth around the world.
Introduction
Dilip: Welcome to NPCI’s Innovators Playground podcast. Today we have Mr. Paras Chopra, who needs no introduction. He has built software companies at a large scale and currently, he is practicing the AI Lab which can build the future for India. Paras, welcome to NPCI’s Innovator Playground podcast.
Paras: Thanks Dilip for inviting me.
On Bootstrapping
Dilip: Paras, you might be one of the handful of founders who kind of believed in this whole bootstrap strategy. Did it happen naturally or did you kind of have some thought process on that, you know, because the whole system, society, and the startup culture is the other way around, right? You know, get capital, build speed, build scale, and that kind of a mindset. How did you really do this journey, and quite a long time, 15 years in that sense?
Paras: Yeah, I mean bootstrapping has always been sort of the default assumption. Most of the businesses out there in the world are bootstrapped. So, in that sense, VC is an outlier. And I was building it in some corner of Delhi called Rohini, which is far away from Bangalore and even further away from San Francisco.
Dilip: Oh, so distance helped?
Paras: Yeah, in 2010, just out of college. So I was just as far away from the tech bubble as you can imagine. And my sense of business was always that you make more money than you spend. And that was the goal, and that sort of was always happening week after week, month after month with Wingify. So there was never a strong reason to raise capital. And a lot of VCs had approached me but nobody was able to convince me why I should take capital.
Dilip: Could you still avoid the temptation?
Paras: Yeah, I mean I always did that mental simulation of what would happen if I took capital.
Dilip: But the general logic is the speed and scale, right? That’s for getting capital, right? You can hire a lot of people, you can get more customers.
Paras: Yeah, but then do what? I was very happy building the business that I was building and I was really optimizing for day-to-day happiness and not some eventual quote-unquote goal or an exit or anything else. For me, that daily happiness was my North Star and I was getting that in leaps and bounds with Wingify.
Dilip: So you stayed away from this whole tracking the quarter-on-quarter, month-on-month pressures?
Paras: Yeah, I mean in retrospect I feel if you raise funding, obviously you become accountable to investors, you become accountable to delivering growth, and it would come with so much of pressure as many of the VC-funded founders would have been telling you.
Dilip: Why, while there are high-quality PEs who really build in building a long-term, I’m sure that when you bootstrapped and you ran it for 15 years, the long-term has been one of the first principles. But they are, it just builds in that cycle, it just builds in that cycle.
Paras: Yeah, for us and for me it was very important that we take our employees along, we take our customers along, and we see business as a more holistic entity in the ecosystem instead of that singular unifying shareholder return kind of an ethic that just ends up sort of being the default.
On Exiting Wingify
Dilip: Right, right. The, you know, when and when I have seen some of the examples in, in large companies that has been built in India and US which has been bootstraps and some of the, then why exit? You know, while you said that, you know, and fully second to your principle of, you know, doing it with the heart and, you know, without the externalities around it and but but then you could have made it like a one of the biggest software companies in the world. Why would you exit?
Paras: Over a period of time I realized my skill set and interest is in really that zero-to-one phase, that initial stage of where you're figuring out product-market fit, building stuff, iterating very very fast. So I'm that kind of an entrepreneur who really enjoys in uncertainty and after a while once you've done that zero-to-one, the role changes. The role becomes more of scaling, operations, and I wasn't very enthusiastic about it. I don't think it connects with my personality. So over a period of time I became less and less involved and interested in scaling the business and then I didn't want to just be associated with the company.
Dilip: So the routine bores you in that sense?
Paras: It does, it does. I've had my team make memes on me that, you know, whenever a project comes, there are four more projects lined up after it. I'm the kind of guy who wants to play these multiple games at once, zero-to-one, so that singular routine just bores me. And I thought then, you know, I shouldn't be running the business as a CEO if scaling doesn't interest me.
Dilip: So so no regrets? Even even if we take you back?
Paras: No, absolutely no regret. I had so much of fun and I think exit was the right call. And now the company is in very able hands with a great set of investors. So I'm very very happy that things ended up well for almost everyone on, you know, employees, customers, and the company is in the great path now.
Building Global Quality from India
Dilip: At Wingify, you know, you not only built the customers in India, but but a great number of global clients and global business. And how that was possible, Paras? Because today, you know, we have been there is a concept in India being good enough, right, and sometimes we are not able to really have very top quality. Yes, of course there are exceptions, but the general perception I'm talking about is we want to build something fast enough and and go back to the global market and sometimes it just creates a huge iterative process. How do you get this quality obsession with with satisfaction, satisfying this global customer base? What are the decisions principles you think that could have helped you to to deal with that?
Paras: Yeah, so 98% of our revenue came from outside of India.
Dilip: Wow!
Paras: So only India contributed only 1-2% in fact. And 100% of our team was in India. So that was what really enabled bootstrapping also. We were making money in dollars and paying in rupees.
Dilip: But still it’s not easy, I’m saying now.
Paras: Yeah, but I think what really happened with me was I was paying, I was sort of hanging out on internet, on Hacker News, on the circles which are more closer to how a tech entrepreneur would think, let's say in the Valley, the product person would think there because I was hanging out and my standards were sort of getting calibrated by the internet and I had no friend circle here, I had no network here. So I think it's really the sort of they say right, you become the average of people you hang out around. And I was just hanging out on the internet with people who were building great products. And that sort of ethic got internalized where and I keep saying to people now both at Losfung and I used to say at Wingify that really don't sort of compare yourself to people around you, don't even aspire to be the best in India. On internet nobody knows right, where you are from. Are you from Delhi, are you from Dhaka, are you from SF? So why not just aspire to be the best in the world in your niche instead of just trying to be best in your college or best in India. So I think it’s just comparison standards that we set for ourselves drive how far we are able to sort of aim for and I set for myself being best in the world at my particular niche and I think that just everything is downstream of that.
Dilip: So I I think it’s a great thinking you kind of you saying that know you while you were located in India, you know, you kind of created your own virtual world and the virtual world had the best of best in the world and and naturally you could aspire but Paras, you know, that’s about yourself and, you know, how do you inculcate that to the larger team in that sense, right? Because sometimes while the founder CEO wanting to deliver the highest quality, highest speed and, you know, all the aspects which are the ideal world where the company should deliver, but then the team below. How could you what what decision principles again going back that how could you make your team also believe in your principles and
Paras: Yeah, so I think it's less of saying that you want to be best in the world, it's more of demonstrating what it means. And that means you have to get into a lot of details and I remember even sort of correcting people's grammar, punctuation, showing people, you know, like two shades of blue are different and they can't use it because otherwise you can't just have this abstract idea and expect people to know what being best in the world means. So unfortunately you have to just get into a lot of detail because that sets the culture that you can't just get away with what might be the mediocre sort of work. And that culture is everything. So as a CEO's job, as a leader's job, I think the job is not to work on that strategy along with that the job is also to set the culture. What does high quality really mean?
Dilip: So obsession on on high quality?
Paras: So no matter what level of work even things like if you’re entering in the office and you see maybe some paint chipped off, I would sort of pull up and say why is that so and some people would say it’s a waste of time for CEO
Dilip: Did did people call you mad?
Paras: Yeah, some people would say why is the CEO sort of wasting time at doing these things but it’s the same thing right, the broken window theory in the New York where they got the crime rates low. If people think they can get away with that little thing then the things just compound and before you know it your culture will be, you know, good enough where everything will be a little bit chipped off and then you will sort of question yourself why can't you compete against the best in the world. Because obviously you've given up on your standards.
Scaling and Marketing
Dilip: No and and also the when you look at, you know, the growing the business globally, how could you grow the business? See one is, you know, get some initial clients, but how could you actually multiply them, right? You know, was there a marketing investments, was there, you know, you tried to publish some of the papers or those kind of things? How do how could the reach to the to the global customer is was it word of mouth, was it the sheer high-quality delivery and
Paras: Yeah, so a lot of it was high word of mouth because our product was very high quality and we positioned it at a pricing which made it more affordable. So we had like the similar and better quality than the top player in the market but at a price where people could sort of afford. So that drove a lot of word of mouth but also I was the first marketer and the only marketer for a long period of time. So I would write so much that even if you search today Google A/B testing or even ChatGPT give me the best tips for A/B testing, it's very likely you'll find some articles by VWO. And that’s what again a founder’s job has to be sales can only scale that much right? You have to build like a brand.
Dilip: No and if your craft is great, right? You don’t need a sales for that and that’s what I think you saying your you're testing
Paras: Yeah, so even until now I think almost all our sales has been inbound. The outbound that typically people associate with quote-unquote sales, it has been very recent phenomenon and even now a smaller percentage of our business versus just inbound where people just sign up and get get us lead and then convert as customers. Fantastic.
New Initiative: Lossfunk AI and Research
Dilip: At your now at the at a new initiative Lossfunk AI and, you know, what's your vision? What are you doing, you know, what's what's the aspiration to to create and when and especially in the context of what's what's going around in this field?
Paras: So before I did Wingify and I got interested into startups I was interested in scientific research. So during my undergrad I was doing a lot of research in computation biology and machine learning. But then Wingify happened and it consumed 15 years of my sort of youth. But now after selling, you know, Wingify, I had the time and means to get back to quote-unquote my childhood dream which is research. So that's what with Lossfunk we're trying to do. Really sort of explore very foundational questions into AI and related areas. But I think as a side another sort of very motivating factor really is to sort of answer why India is so behind in R&D output right from very big metrics like Nobel prizes. How many how many Nobel prizes have we won after Independence? I think zero. Nobel prizes to also things like how many contributions we do to scientific top papers like Natures and Science conferences like ICML, ICLR. All of this is just abysmal as compared to US and China and yet we are more populous than either of these nations. So from a raw talent perspective even if you see that number of people into raw sort of percentage of high IQ people I think India should be producing most amount of R&D in the world. But that’s not happening.
Dilip: But I think now we have you believe the culture is changing at least to some extent or
Paras: I don't know, I think it's also I mean one is the talent where a lot of our best people just migrate to the US after their undergrad here. I mean IITs, BITS, even any other college if you have a top 1% talent there their dream is to go to US.
Dilip: But also I think I it’s changing now. That’s what I see. At least it’s changing. I I think I see the I see the green shoots on the engineering to to create a startup, to to be with the one of the you know companies
Paras: I mean the the paper 'Attention Is All You Need' that got the transformers revolution led to ChatGPT, two of the six authors did their undergrad from India. And I just hope more and more of such things happen from India instead of, you know, Indians migrating and doing it in the US. And Losfong is, you know, like an attempt to sort of change that because we're building that culture of foundational research. So sort of undergrad sort of come to Losfong and work and in the last 12 months we've ended up publishing papers at, you know, top conferences and workshops. So I'm very very optimistic that given the right platform like Losfong and many more such labs should emerge.
Defining Success for Losfung
Dilip: So so is it so how let’s assume that, you know, I'm saying two year three years down the line, what what would you call it a success, right? Is it is it incubating few foundational the startups doing foundational work in AI or writing good papers or creating a really new breakthrough kind of models I'm sure some of the new things what you're trying out. What what would define the the success for you in the three years five years down the line?
Paras: I think it is anything that's downstream of great research. Great research culture, I mean it starts from right from our contributions to top conferences like ICML, ICLR etc. and then one step removed from it is startups that are based on research, deep tech startups. And maybe really ambitious thing would be the next OpenAI, DeepMind, or DeepSeek coming out of out of India. And really really ambitious would be, you know, are we starting to get more Nobel prizes? Let’s say in 10 to 20 years.
Value Alignment in Research
Dilip: But when you when you see that, you know, research happening and, you know, the labs would which would mean you you'll have to give some compute tools and and those kind of things, do you see that, you know, the the students or or the people who participate in this journey do they also have the similar mindset? How do you get the value alignment, right, people who are coming to you they they are looking at a really deep kind of work and not something superficial, right, because that’s that’s another problem of R&D, right? We end up doing something little bit mediocre and really not go deep. So how do you deal with those kind of things while aligning people?
Paras: I think great thing about Lossfunk is that because we're not associated to an academic institution, we don't have the same incentives that an academic institution might have which is let's say, you know, you publish or you perish. So all our research starts from a question that people are deeply curious about. Whether paper emerges out of it, some code emerges, some innovation emerges, that's secondary. But the primary thing is whether you're asking a question which is very deep, which is very interesting, which is not just incremental. And I think that is a very different kind of culture versus what you'd find in academic labs where just because of incentive structures, professors and everyone else is just expected to publish papers. And that also lead to a lot of incrementalism. So I'm hopeful that having a lab outside of academia and also from industrial labs, even if you go to industrial labs a lot of people would go to companies that are building current foundation model companies. That's also incremental because you're sort of contributing to what's already there, you're making tweaks there. So having a third place beyond academia and the industry, I think it's essential to create a space where people can ask very bold questions that are just not allowed to be asked. I mean things like, you know, what's the relationship between consciousness and language? You go to a university and you ask your advisor that I'm interested in this question and they'll be like no way because you can't make progress on it, it's just sort of ambiguous. But asking questions like these and sort of trying to make progress on it is how you'll get to the next breakthrough. You won't get it by just replicating what's already there.
The Future of the IT Services Sector
Dilip: In India and, you know, going back to your times and, you know, started this whole SaaS business in 2010 and now most of the IT DNA if I may call also is the services DNA and how do you see now this is going to get transformed, right? Imagine you had to start Wingify now and, you know, compete with with a with a current marketplace with with the AI trying to support so much of automation, coding and variety of things. How do you think this this industry is going to change? The the whole services sector which attracts the majority of talent in India. Whatever talent is attracted, 90-95% is into going into the services. How do you see this scenario changing? Do you think it’s going to change or
Paras: Yeah, I mean I feel we might be sitting on a time bomb here because these foundation model companies have raised so much of capital at such high valuations. Their incentivized to eat more and more of the pie, the profit pool or value chain or whatever you can call it. So and these models are sort of doing the cognitive work that services companies are based upon. So I think in transition they may still get a lot of business but the way things are going, this asymptote of it just seems like unless they start doing massive R&D innovation themselves, what role would they play there it’s just not very clear to me.
Sovereign AI and Competing with Global Giants
Dilip: And also I’m saying that, you know, while one is the services sector and and then there is the new startups with again government did a great job in kind of at least trying to to cultivate that under the the IT ministry on on this making the GPUs available this whole conversation about sovereign game the AI impact summit with which was hosted by by India and even the Prime Minister spoke about, you know, cultivating this whole AI culture in the in the country. I think it did a good nudging great level of nudging job but but it’s going to be how do you think about this? Is it is it going to be really sustainable how the long-term will pay out whether the Indian companies can really play the the CapEx game because it needs it is going to need a huge compute in that process and when we see the the big techs investing crazy on this, how does this foundation models in India going to compete with them is is the question I have.
Paras: Yeah, the same paradigm it's impossible to compete there because India has several tens of thousands of H100 equivalent GPUs while in the US you'll have millions of them. So by the time we'll catch up on the current paradigm which is LLMs, transformers, they would have gone even further. And that’s what’s been happening if you track the journey over the last couple of years. By the time we get to a place which is frontier for us, we've probably just caught up to where US and China was two years ago probably.
Dilip: Because because I think the change of change of change of speed is also it’s a fairly steep curve. That’s I think that makes it very hard. That makes it very hard.
Paras: Yeah, so so my sense is that if we have to really sort of catch up in any sense we have to explore orthogonal directions that are just fundamentally very very different from for example why India is not doing massive research on how human brain is able to operate at 20 watts versus LLMs that requires cities worth of electricity. That paradigm change if you stumble upon it that changes the game. So we shouldn't be playing the game that set by US and China, we should probably be doing such foundational research that we come up with our own game because that’s what US and China does right?
Dilip: So I get what you saying. So what you saying is fundamentally change the look at the R&D in multiple ways, right? And one is, you know, yeah, you might want to still catch up because, you know, you you still have to run your day-to-day you still have to bring in huge efficiencies and, you know, I think these foundation model adds great value to to the to the enterprise. But at the same time, unless India does this foundational stuff, we are not really going to win this game.
Paras: No, and we'll never catch up. I agree. I think we we need both but I don't see a lot of the second thing happening which is what can we do that'll get us to be in the leadership position.
Dilip: I think the companies are still behind this whole ROI ROI question and I I think that’s my. And I think the other question I have Paras for you is, you know, you have you work very closely with this his this whole AI chain, right, which has got five or seven layers as as people speak about. You know, the one of the thinking always there in everybody’s mind is which which layer I should be in so that I get more money, right? I’m saying people are now, you know, you must have heard the people are putting large data centers, energy supply, then the foundational layer, and application layer. And I think what I see is most of the companies are trying to be on at the application side. Is is that what your what you're seeing as well? Because the the foundational the the CapEx game anyway only few can play, right? So just lev just leverage on whatever is happening on CapEx side and just play on the application side.
Paras: Yeah, but that is that will get commoditized right when you are sort of automating software itself, when you are automating intelligence itself what value is there in sort of applying your intelligence versus a foundation model company using its own sort of AI's to recreate that or even better than that. I think the whole game plan is of these foundation model companies to automate a lot of intelligence and service delivery and software and eat all the tasks. You see the task, you automate. And that's already happening right? These companies are sort of just trying to swallow more and more of whatever value they can get. And as their model intelligence will improve you can think of they creating an AI entrepreneur who'll just go around see what's the unmet need, create a new product, and then how is that AI entrepreneur different from you entrepreneur if both of you are creating applications and customer is neutral to where they are getting more value from. So I think the game has fundamentally changed and we're yet to realize how fundamentally it's changed and we're still operating in the old school principles.
Dilip: And actually, you know, you you rightly said, you know, even I want to be a little bit in the transition minded itself. Because it’s just scaring me. The the whole thought of three years from now or five years from now is actually creating a kind of void in my mind.
Paras: I think the whole higher the intelligence higher the value, that assumption is collapsing. And that assumption has sort of worked since the last 50-60 years. If you're extremely intelligent, you worked hard, you can expect to have social mobility, economic mobility. But these companies have automated away intelligence itself so we should expect that, you know, assumption to break because intelligence is and will become a commodity.
Dilip: Yeah, that’s what everybody’s talking about.
Personal Routine and Curiosity
Dilip: On a personal side, how do you spend your how do you spend your day? I you know spend time talking to the people. How do you do you do the research by yourself a lot? How do you
Paras: Yeah, so first off the day first half of the day is for me no meetings, solo research. So I don't open up Slack, WhatsApp, email, nothing. So until around 3:00 PM or so, it's just me with my laptop and notebook. And after that I go to Losfong and just end up interacting with folks. I think it gives a very good balance between because I don't want to be in a position where I'm just quote-unquote managing. That's not what I enjoy. But at the same time only solo research becomes very isolating. You do need that, you know, person-to-person connection. It gives a lot of serendipity to me.
Dilip: Yeah and you learn you learn also you can you can validate some of your you don’t know where where the next good ideas going to come from. And the whole point of Losfong was very selfish for me to surround myself with extremely smart and motivated people.
Paras: Best minds. And that's what I'm doing right now.
Dilip: Yeah. And while while you do the, you know, while you are you're dividing between yourself and and your team, when when there is a when you start sensing that, you know, yes these are very definitive projects which I believe which fits your value principles of Losfong to to take it forward then how do you make those decisions, you know? Some research, you know, might end with a paper, some some you think will go to the prototypes project and some you believe, you know, really going to create a impact. Do you have this top three top three top five top five
Paras: Yeah, so if you go https://www.google.com/search?q=losfong.com we actually have I actually have almost 50 of these themes. So https://www.google.com/search?q=losfong.com I've published all the areas that we as a lab is interested in and anyone who's interested in working at Losfong first has to come up with a research plan that aligns to one of those 50 areas. And only if there's an alignment we end up sort of doing that research project. Because that ensures there's an alignment between my interest, lab interest and that person's interest.
Dilip: Yeah but still top 50 is still a lot. I’m just I’m still thinking that are do you have top of the mind three or five things which you believe and which you want to would like to articulate. And I was just trying to because most of our audience is going to be engineering graduates and if they know your mind that what are the top five problems you're thinking daily, right? You know, maybe they would want to be interested and and see what’s going to happen in those areas.
Paras: Yeah, so one of I mean the the top one really for me is obsession with the human brain and how does human brain work and how does it generate intelligence, especially because the amount of power energy it uses is much less than what an LLM would use. And also in terms of both the amount of data we're able to generalize with, it's also very different. So the way brain operates, the principles I think it's quite different from what current LLMs do. And I'm obsessed with understanding the biological aspects of intelligence and not just human brain even things like, you know, birds, dolphins, cats, the whole biological aspect of intelligence is what's very exciting and also it's very exciting to see how human civilization has created these learning flywheels. If you think about it our brain has been same for the last 10,000, 20,000 years, even 100,000 years, but the whole progress in our culture, technology has happened in last 1000 years. So what happened that we've had this just step up in the last 1000 despite intelligence being the same? And I think that has a lot of parallels with AI that we end up thinking intelligence lies in the model but intelligence might be in the ecosystem where models are operated.
Dilip: Or or data?
Paras: Or data and tools and a lot of lot of these things. So we might be looking at the wrong unit when we look at LLMs. I think we have to look very holistically on when we think about intelligence or intelligence explosion. So these kinds of questions are very interesting and also origin of language. How did why do humans have language but animals don't? How did first language start? I think that also has a lot of insight into again what's a link between language and intelligence. Can you think without can you be intelligent without language for example?
Advice for Engineering Students
Dilip: Fantastic, fantastic. So what, you know, and actually it just scares me that, you know, let's assume that if I I go back to engineering days. What am I going to do? So what do you think the engineers of today should should try to try to do and what they should not try to do? I'm saying of course one thing is very clear
Paras: Yeah, that's a million-dollar question. I mean I have a nephew and I keep thinking about what advice would I give him. He's still seven years old so not really but I think about that when he grows up to be 16, 17 and comes to me for advice what advice would I give him. I used to think maybe the right answer is to think and study physics, mathematics, foundational stuff. But I have changed my stance recently.
Dilip: Really?
Paras: Really. I mean if your aim is to be successful at life I think these fields will get majorly automated away because we're saying the raw intelligence and intellect is becoming a commodity. So maybe the focus should be in the personality traits such as being able to work hard, being able to sort of recover from setbacks, being able to derive happiness despite whatever the circumstances be. So if I were maybe in the college right now I would work on these personality aspects a lot more versus any particular subject.
Dilip: Build grit, build resilience.
Paras: Yeah, resilience, working hard, springing back, grit. These like personality traits versus any particular domain knowledge.
Dilip: No no I think it’s it’s going to be I'm not able to think what what are they going to do in five 10 years.
Paras: I mean it's hard to predict even a quarter from now. Yeah, I think there's so much happening every every week.
Dilip: Every day you wake up and the world has changed a little bit something and the change of speed is is really crazy.
Policy Suggestions for India
Dilip: Indeed. I you know while the India with the and I assume that the the AI impact summit will will kind of change the the company's behavior invest in R&D or or do this foundational stuff as you're talking. But I think if India has to become or a compete or a lead with compared to US and China, right, I believe the government must make some policies also enabling that, right? I that's what I feel today the the R&D spends whether it’s a, you know, tax breaks or long-term R&D tax breaks or some sort of advantages. Do you think do you have any suggestion which which, you know, our policy makers should should think about or or even at the education or or those kind of
Paras: Yeah, I think we should remove salary caps of professors. Yeah, even something as simple as that. I mean if there is a really bright person who wants to teach to the next generation, you have to compete with what OpenAI, Meta, Google is paying them. So having that and actually the US universities some of them work on this principle. Yeah and that I mean even China, China I think when they were doing that their 1000 great scholars program they were getting professors into China they were matching salaries of even half a million dollars and so on. And unless that happens I think we should expect that the best talent to demand and know what its worth is and we should be able to, you know, we should be paying that. Otherwise we'll just have again the best talent go into industry and who would teach the next generation. So I think removing these artificial caps and having the market sort of really decide what’s a talent worth it.
Dilip: Very interesting.
Paras: Even with things like our research organizations like DRDO etc. I do feel these salary caps in the government I mean Singapore, Singapore pays way more in government versus what it pays in the industry. And economics drives a lot of incentives right.
Dilip: Yeah and I and I think if if we really want to compete with this, you know, your best of the people should be doing this, right? You know, people say that know in a company your best talent should be doing the best of the critical roles, right? You know. This matches
Paras: I think we rely a lot on this patriotism which is great but it has to be matched with, you know, the economic incentives also. Our IAS, all the administrators, all the officers, I think we should be paying the best market rates to them just like a McKinsey would do. Only then we'll have people, you know, join government instead of going to the industry. And also, you know, build companies, allow them to build companies, you know, own own a stake in a in a, you know, many US professors I've seen has built some of the great products actually came out of the universities in the early the early internet what like Netscape and and those kind of products.
Conclusion
Dilip: Paras, we have couple of questions from our employees and Shreyas Singh, lead product in NPCI, BHIM Mumbai has a question and that’s actually my question as well and I like this question. You know many professionals feel overwhelmed by the pace of technological changes today and how can someone stay curious and keep learning without feeling burnt out? And I have seen some of your previous thing and you you have been vocal about your you're very curious and, you know, you love to learn new things. But now there is so much happening, right? My actually my bookmarks are more if I have to go back and check my bookmarks, you know, I have to take three four days holiday now. So how do you kind of do this without getting a fatigue?
Paras: Yeah, I think it's hard but what works for me is to have, you know, side projects where you're not just passively learning stuff and you're sort of experimenting and doing. I don't think you'll go very far if you're simply reading. There's just a million articles out there and almost all articles are minor variations of just one another. So what really works for me if I come across an idea that I'm get excited about I just open up Claude code and try to do like a small experiment out of it, small sort of project out of it and that teaches me way more versus what reading an article passively would do. So I strongly recommend, you know, everyone to have side projects where you're just constantly I think it also gives you a little bit of satisfaction, their whole identity is not invested into the job and the company because who knows what will happen in future. So having this like a bouquet of side projects is what really works for me.
Dilip: That's a that's a great idea. I I don't know whether we in NPCI we can implement this but I think allowing people to do a side projects keep a time and something and also reward them what they do on might give some value back.
Paras: I mean side doing side projects is reward in itself. You get so much of satisfaction in creating something. Fantastic.
Dilip: Kayu Doshi, IT Analyst, Market Innovation NPCI Mumbai, he says that you have said that success lies in being outlier. In the world obsessed with LLMs we don't see any other conversation now. What are the quiet research field and industry that people are ignoring out but will define the next decade? I think you spoke about it, the brain research you spoke about. Any other areas you think.
Paras: I mean the thing about predicting what’s the next big thing is that nobody knows because if someone is saying what’s the next best thing, big thing, it’s already been profited away. I think the good sort of heuristic is to chase your curiosity and ensure that, you know, it's something that only you can do in the sense that it's not very trendy or hot. If it’s trendy and hot, you know, thousand other people are doing it. So what’s that one thing which when people come to know about you are obsessed about would call you weird is the thing that'll sort of has higher chances of being next big thing versus chasing into the fray and chasing the next big thing.
Dilip: Thank you so much, Paras, for talking to us and I'm sure the engineers watching the podcast would take a great inspiration from you and keep doing the great stuff. We are we are so proud what you have done and what you have achieved for for yourself.
Paras: Thank you Dilip, thanks for having me. It was wonderful talking to you.
Dilip: So listeners, I believe you had a great time listening to Paras, great mind in India and, you know, doing very very interesting things what will excite and what would create the future. He spoke about Losfong top 50 ideas what he's pursuing and if you're interested please go to the website and and see what different research and and areas they're working on and and reach out to them if if you're interested to to participate. And please do let us know your feedback in the comment section.