In the 50th episode of First Principles, Rohit Chennamaneni, co-founder of Darwinbox, joins the show to talk about what changes after the early chaos of a startup fades.

He explains how Darwinbox has operated without a CEO for years, how the 3 founders divide ownership of decisions instead of debating everything together, and why this structure helped them move faster as the company grew.

Rohit also gets specific about product building. He talks about designing HR software that does not need training sessions or long explanations, why adoption matters more than feature depth, and how small product decisions can end up shaping behaviour across entire organisations.

The conversation also turns inward. Rohit reflects on moments where intelligence stopped being the advantage he thought it was, why staying with uncomfortable problems mattered more, and how his understanding of leadership changed as Darwinbox scaled.

This episode looks at company building through real decisions, and what it takes to keep going long after the excitement wears off.

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at [email protected] with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

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Full transcript:

(The transcript is auto-generated and there may be occasional errors. Please cross-check)

00:00 Rohin Dharmakumar: Rohit, welcome. You’re one of the three co-founders of Darwinbox. I had another guest recently on First Principles, Deepak Abbot of IndiaGold, who is also a co-founder. He and Nitin Mishra are the two co-founders. It’s very interesting. I think these are the only two companies that I’ve had on First Principles—and we’ve done over 50 episodes with founders—where the founders have consciously chosen not to have a CEO, but they stay as co-founders. What was the rationale? When did you decide? When did you come to this decision between the three of you? And how has it endured?

01:05 Rohit Chennamaneni: Firstly, thank you, Rohin, for having me on the podcast. I’ve gone through a few of them. I like how you go into some details which are generally not as much spoken about, so I’m excited about the conversation today.

01:21 Rohin Dharmakumar: Which parts? Which parts did you like? What sort of topics would you like our conversation today to be more about?

01:25 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, I think the decision-making frameworks that you spoke about. I think that part I really like in some of the conversations I listened to. I mean, you’ve come back to one big decision for us as well. I think, interestingly, we’ve never thought about that decision when we started, Rohin. So, maybe I’ll give you a little bit of background of how we came together, right? Jayant and I are childhood friends. He was in investment banking, I was in consulting, and both of us used to jam on ideas. And the reason to jam on ideas was very trivial, which was basically he was in Delhi, I was in Bombay, and we wanted to come back to Hyderabad. Which happens to be where most of our families are from. I was born and brought up there. Jayant had most of his family there. And whenever we went there for vacation, we were like, “We should figure out ways to come back to Hyderabad.”

02:22 Rohit Chennamaneni: And we were throwing darts in the air in terms of what ideas we can do, or we start a company, etc. And every idea used to have a little bit of problem-solving and then it would fizzle out, right? In a very similar context, something like this had come up. One part was, “Hey, we didn’t enjoy what we were using.” And then Jayant, in one of his transactions, realized that the data that was needed for HR was again missing for the transaction. He was a banker, so I mean, some wrong data which led to the deal falling through, etc.

02:44 Rohin Dharmakumar: I remember this in my research as well. I mean, the argument here being that if Company A is acquiring Company B, the due diligence usually works very well on the financial aspect of things—like how much money do you have, what assets do you have—but when you’re doing due diligence on the people, the data is very suspect, right? How many people do you have? What kind of people are they? How many of them are likely to stick on, go, etc., and all that. This is the context you’re at.

03:12 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, absolutely, right? I can hazard a guess that probably eight out of the ten CEOs wouldn’t know their attrition rates. And which also comes from a place of comfort saying, “Most of my people stay back.” It’s an assumption because people probably that you’re working closely with, who are in the leadership, etc., are staying back and a few are leaving. But across the organization, what’s the attrition rate like, etc.? And for in the pharma space, which Jayant was, this is a very big thing, right? How much of your top talent and top scientists are you able to retain, etc., is a big part. Which, during the transaction, whatever is quoted versus when the diligence happens, what the numbers show was very different in that context.

03:54 Rohit Chennamaneni: So, I mean, I’m making it to a very analytical level, but again, that goes on to saying who are your top talent, what do you do for them? It could be a bunch of things that you do which a HR system should capture, right? So, that came from him. I was experiencing it more from my own experience of systems.

04:11 Rohin Dharmakumar: You were at McKinsey.

04:12 Rohit Chennamaneni: I was at McKinsey while this thing. And then I had experienced a bunch of really good tools while I was at Google, which were internally built. Then I saw this at customers or clients of McKinsey, where again, systems were not solving any data request that we would put would take like a week to get that data back. Or whenever we would say, “Hey, why can’t you institutionalize something like this?” They would say, “How would you do this, right? Like we have 10,000 employees or 20,000 employees, how do we do this?” And something was missing, right? And one thing that caught our attention was HR system was that one system which is used by everybody in the organization, right? If you take a CRM, it’s used only by the sales teams. If you take a finance system, it’s used only by the finance and accounting teams. HR system had that opportunity of actually touching the CEO to the last intern who’s joined the organization. And we were very, very puzzled by why somebody had not solved that well.

04:59 Rohit Chennamaneni: And it was also a category that existed—this is 2015—a category that existed for two decades by then, right? And then came in Chaitanya. Chaitanya was a HR consultant. He was a colleague of Jayant at EY, and also a Telugu, right? So, interestingly, all our backgrounds, age…

05:19 Rohin Dharmakumar: Was he also motivated by moving back to Hyderabad?

05:22 Rohit Chennamaneni: Not really, actually. I mean, he was a lot more into saying, “Hey, right, like I’m solving a problem at scale.” Initially, I mean, he laughed at it, right? He’s like, “Oh, again another HR system and people are trying to do one more thing,” right? But again, I think the comfort he got after the problem-solving we did together—and I’ll come to where the difference existed—but I think three of us came together at a point of life, point of time in life, where this was… we were not desperate about doing something. We were just excited about doing it. All of us from, I mean, similar backgrounds. All did engineering, then went on to do MBAs. All of us worked in between.

05:56 Rohin Dharmakumar: Roughly what, 10 years of experience, like you know, around?

05:59 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, probably six to seven. So, basically all of us worked post-engineering for two-three years, and then post-MBA for two-three years. Like broadly that was the spectrum. Just about 30, 29-30, all of us. So, I think we came into it as equals. It was not a specific individual’s idea, a specific motivation of somebody bringing somebody in, etc. So it was a very nice mix of individuals coming together who looked at each other as equals. We owned equally, equal part of the company. So, the question of CEO didn’t come at all. It was basically saying, “Okay, we’re three co-founders, we’re doing different things in the organization, playing to our strengths.” And there was no specific question on, “Oh, who is CEO, etc.”

06:40 Rohit Chennamaneni: The question came up for the first time…

06:42 Rohin Dharmakumar: When you had an investor pitch?

06:44 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, which I’m sure that’s one of the things for an investor—that who is the… every round, right? Every round. And I think the first time we went back to the blackboard and said, “Hey, do we need a CEO for this business?” And then we asked ourselves, “Is that limiting us, right? Not having a CEO limiting us?” We actually didn’t find situations like that.

07:05 Rohin Dharmakumar: I must ask you, I mean, I get that the three of you felt that none of you needed to take the CEO role. How did you still then decide on a division of responsibilities?

07:15 Rohit Chennamaneni: So the division of responsibilities happened much before we went for a funding round. So, I think one thing that we were doing, Rohin—again maybe I’m jumping all around the place…

07:24 Rohin Dharmakumar: Please.

07:25 Rohit Chennamaneni: Right, like so I think one part of how we wanted to do this was we wanted to build it for markets first where it was underserved, right? So, all the questions on all the primary research we did, we went around talking to a lot of HR folks once we thought this was a good idea.

07:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: Some 50-odd people?

07:43 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, 50-plus CHROs. Because through our consulting networks, banking networks, we had access. I mean, that was the most beautiful thing about being in the roles that we were in or just leaving jobs then. And in these conversations, I think we picked on two things which we understood, right? So one, adoption levels were extremely low. Again, if I go back to what I started with, right? HR is that one system used by everybody in the organization. If adoption is great, the system is very, very effective, right? Everybody can do the transactions that they’re supposed to do and then there is data, there’s analysis, there’s insights and all of that, right? All that thing that you need out of a system. So, I think that piece we clearly understood that nobody was solving for adoption and end-user experience when thinking about the system. Everybody was solving it as an administrative system, which is a database, which is analytics, which is reporting, etc., or a control mechanism rather than saying this is an experience system.

08:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: Would I be fair in assuming—because this is true for many enterprise systems—the people buying the system are not incentivized for the experience of using the system? Right? A CHRO may buy it because we need to have this, it’s a system of record, and without it how can we function? And the user experience never comes into the picture at all.

09:02 Rohit Chennamaneni: Correct. Correct. And absolutely, right? And I think when we questioned that, when we said, “Go back and see what’s your adoption like of the system,” and then suddenly people were like, “Oh yeah, we only… only 40% of my workforce is actually logging in and using attendance on the system or leave on the system or performance on the system.” And absolutely for the same reason, right? It became a control system, which is, “Oh, I have to have this in place so that payroll can be run and pay slip can be given out. I have done my part of the compliance.” So the downside risk is protected; the upside nobody was solving for.

09:34 Rohin Dharmakumar: Nobody’s incentivized for it, right? I’m still trying to understand. In an organization, when you folks started out, I fully get that nobody’s optimizing for experience, right? Like you said, adoption might be 40%. But who’s incentivized to solve for 80% of adoption? Because in some senses, you got to pay for the HRMS based on the number of employees they are. Employees will use it for, let’s say, leave and salaries and, let’s say, taxes or whatever else. Beyond that, what is the incentive for anyone to solve for it? What… what did you folks find?

10:09 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think the… I think the HR role includes experience as a key criterion, right? But nobody saw a system to be a solve for it. Everybody looked at system as a control and a database mechanism. They didn’t look at system as a solve for… like otherwise you see… I mean, if you think about rewards and recognition, if you think about employee engagement activities, if you think about ENPS that surveys that happen in organizations, those exist. There are enough budgets for those. Nobody looked at HRMS as a system that can solve a significant part of this. The way we looked at it was saying, “Hey, this is one touchpoint which exists. How can we elevate this experience?” And the elevation of experience is not just about how easily or simply you can do a certain task. It was also about what else can you do on the system, right? I mean, I’m going to my HR person to ask a question. Can I find the answer here itself? Can I get a nudge in the right time to do something, right? Whether that is investment declaration or whether it is actually filing for expenses by just taking a picture of the receipt copy, etc. And in 2015 all these were cool things that could happen.

11:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: In 2026, we’ve reached the level where all of that is being done using AI of…

11:19 Rohit Chennamaneni: True AI also, right? Like… but I think the part where we saw a huge difference in the markets that we operated in, which is India to start with, was a large part of the employee workforce did not have a laptop. And if you looked at most of the SAP Oracles Workdays which were born in the West, they started with laptop or the web version as a primary version, only frequently used activities to be mobile. So in our first use case of adoption, the form factor became, “Hey, we are mobile first for an employee.” An employee can do everything start to finish from joining the organization to resigning to doing once-a-year things like investment declaration, everything on a mobile. Even if they don’t have an email ID as a gig workforce, etc., you can just do mobile number plus OTP. So the translation of experience or end-user experience for us was mobile first for the end user.

12:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: The second part of it was a lot of HR culture or HR policies are culturally driven. Like just like you have a finance best practice and a supply chain best practice, it’s very difficult to have a HR best practice globally. Because, I mean, a power distance exists in a certain way in India or an Indonesia or in a Middle East versus a Europe or in the US. Right? Communication is censored or not based on which country you operate in. So there is no one standard best practice because HR is very culturally driven. So again we felt that, “Hey, there is no… the West does it this way.” So the product translates only what’s the West doing… right? What the West is doing. It can’t translate completely to India or Indonesia.

13:03 Rohit Chennamaneni: So we said, “How do we make flexibility… how do we bring flexibility into the system so that your policies and processes…” And I’ll give you another example, right? Absconding is a huge problem in like high field force ecosystems, right? Insurance, pharma reps, etc. If you go and ask any of the Western legacy players saying, “Hey, absconding is a problem, I need a workflow for it.” They’ll say, “Hey, ask them to come and resign,” right? They won’t even understand the fact that somebody just won’t show up from an employment and go missing, right? And then when we were able to catch some of these examples and a bunch of those examples across countries, we packaged it to say we went to these two… I mean a lot of these CHROs and said, “Hey, one, we want to solve for experience, end-user experience. Two, we want to solve for configurability, which solves for your context.” Which means a lot more of the system will be used for your processes. Don’t sit outside the system just because your process doesn’t match with a best practice, right? Your practice is your practice. So this became the fundamental context in which Darwinbox came into existence.

14:09 Rohin Dharmakumar: Do you remember what were your first few killer features or at least where you put… I mean the top three features that you felt in your first year were key to success and adoption?

14:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think… I think the whole mobile story definitely worked. And so again today we are a 26 modules kind of a platform. We were only three or four modules in an initial days. But what we had to prove was one, the ease of usage and the configurability in those three-four modules before we expand to all 26. Because when we went and sold to our early customers, we always said we want to be an end-to-end HR system because we said, “Oh, analytics will be better, experience will be better if you’re end-to-end.” And we had to tell them, “Hey, right, you’ve seen four. We’re going to build out everything. But everywhere you’ll see the same experience of it being super easy to use for a mobile user.” Like for example we introduced facial recognition for attendance for folks who don’t have a biometric or people who don’t work out of an office, right? Just take a picture of yourself in facial recognition and mark the attendance was one thing which was very exciting for a lot of field force kind of a ecosystem, right? The whole mobile experience in itself was very, very fascinating. Analytics—again typical consultants, right?—like that part we solved like really well saying what all do you need to see as data, how much can be real time, etc. So I think a bunch of those definitely worked for us in the early days.

15:29 Rohit Chennamaneni: Coming back to the earlier question, right? I think the first part of for us belief system was, “Hey, something… there is an existing problem in the market, right?” While it is a 20-year-old industry, there’s definitely an existing problem in the market. Because most people we spoke to either said “I’m unhappy” or “Aur kaun hai?” right? “Like who else is there but SAP Oracle Workday, right? And I’ve taken one of those. So I’m taking the best system so I’m sorted,” right? “Or I am not sorted, but that’s the best I could do with what’s available in the market.”

15:57 Rohin Dharmakumar: How did you folks try to estimate the likelihood of people actually willing to try your chance? Because when… when you do something like this in a market where there are lots of existing players and they’re all kind of stable, well-known names with poor usability, but at least the companies are well-known, right? So I’m guessing when you went and spoke to people, you’d hear a lot of people saying “I’m dissatisfied,” right? But at the same time you’re a startup, you know, you probably hadn’t raised your first… if I… if I’m you know I mean my research is right for the first seven months you folks didn’t even raise any money and even after that you raised an angel round. So you’re now saying that people who said “I’m dissatisfied” with my existing system, even though I know the vendor and the vendor has been with me forever and I’m… that’s enough for me to switch to an unknown company built by three youngsters. How did you try to figure out that part? Because that’s the hardest part. Everyone will tell you what their pains are in their system but few people will tell you… I mean if you ask someone, “Okay we’re going to launch, do you commit to buying my product?” I don’t think you’d get that kind of a hard commitment.

17:10 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I think I’ll give you the short and then the long answer. The short answer is somewhere bordering between bravado and naivety, right? I think you need some of that to believe that it will happen. But I think the long answer was I think first we had to prove to ourselves that “Hey there is a problem that exists, which is consistent, right? We’ve spoken to 50-plus CHROs and everybody’s talking about it.” What we envisioned to build will actually solve that problem. Because I think that part for us was where the bootstrapping came in. Because we didn’t want a escalation of commitment to a point where “Hey we have this in our head…”

17:45 Rohin Dharmakumar: You had no investors.

17:46 Rohit Chennamaneni: We had this in our head, but we don’t know whether that’ll translate to product. Because none of us actually built like a SaaS product before, right? Like we’ve seen products, right? We’ve experienced products, but none of us has built a SaaS product. So we were like, “There’s something in our head, something we’re very excited about. Every time we spoke about it, like we were lighting up and talking to those CHROs, but can we translate that?” So I think that was the first step, which is convincing ourselves that a product that comes out, right—first the screens come out and this thing—and then you take that…

18:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: What was that? I mean did you folks hire others? Was it just the three of you to begin with? What…?

18:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, so we actually got our first engineer, Vineet, who we’ve elevated to be co-founder now, right? He’s our CTO and co-founder now. So till that point where we started building this, right, we were making wireframes and whatever we could do, right? Basic engineering that we’ve done—Figmas and wire… wireframes, etc., which is what we were doing. And then once he came on board and he said “Hey this can be translated to a product that can scale, etc.” is when the confidence started building. And which is where that nine months from when we started to when we raised our first round of funding or when we went out to raise, I think every month we could see some part of the product. And that again we took to some of these CHROs whoever gave us access for a second or third conversation saying “Hey this is what we’re building, do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it?”

19:03 Rohit Chennamaneni: And like… I mean rightly you said it’s all there, but when you go… I mean the rubber hits the road when the product is out and they’re putting their budget. And more than the budget they’re risking their career on it, right? And I think that…

19:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: It’s not so much the money that they’re willing to spend on you. It’s like “I’m, you know, the risk that I’m taking by giving up on something that is not broken. It may be boring, there may be less usability for it, but hey at least it’s not going to get me fired because I took that risk,” right? We were talking about risk earlier.

19:33 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah. And I think in the two parts, right? So one part of it is how do you bring that narrative itself, where a combination of, “Hey when you buy an HRMS, adoption or usage or end-user experience should be your number one criterion.” Right? Telling that story of saying “This is your number one criterion, not how reports happen, not how something happens” is one. Second, telling them how much they’re missing out because they’re not using a product—a great product, right? So I think that piece was…

20:02 Rohin Dharmakumar: So it’s getting them to believe as well?

20:04 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s getting them to believe and then managing the perception of risk, right? And I think we would have delayed our fundraising a little bit more if we didn’t have to manage that perception of risk. So for us funding was another way to manage the perception of risk.

20:19 Rohin Dharmakumar: Validation.

20:20 Rohit Chennamaneni: Validation because when we got somebody like Mohandas Pai invest in our first round, we could at least go back and say “Hey this guy was the CFO, CHRO of Infosys. He’s put in his money behind this. We’re not going to shut down in the next one year.” And that’s the question we used to get, right? Like the most common question is “What if you shut down? What happens to my employee data?” Right? So and that to manage that perception again fundraising was very, very important very quickly. We thought actually we’ll get a few hundred K of ARR and then get to fundraising, we’ll get a much better valuation, all of that was what we thought about once we went into the market. And interestingly enough, right, if I play back 2015 everybody was only funding SME US. We were on the other extreme if it’s a two-by-two of Asia Enterprise, right? And we didn’t realize that and that came out again a little more starkly when we started to fundraise. But till that point at least we were clear that there is a problem, we have a narrative that stands, and we just have to convince them to take that first bite because we were very confident about what the product that has been built, right?

21:24 Rohit Chennamaneni: So that’s where I think that is the long answer to the question of saying “Hey we were very clear that there is a problem, we were very excited about what we had built to solve for it.” Fundraising, scaling, etc., was a combination of bravado plus naivety because that… that needed that selling and customers to buy it.

21:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: To just close this conversation, there is a very famous saying which exists, right: “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.” Yes. Of course it’s another matter that IBM is not so culturally relevant, but it’s really that. When it comes to enterprise software, people always want to focus on safety and picking the vendor that is well-known and in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, in the right like you know respectability as you rightly said, right? But to go back to the question that I also asked earlier, what happened when you went to your first fundraise and they asked “Who’s the CEO?” What do you tell them?

22:14 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I think I mean I mean I was very I mean I was doing the first bunch of fundraising right and when they asked me the question I asked back saying “Why does it matter, right?” Like and then they said “I want somebody who can make the decision.” I said “Like decision-making will be three of us in some of this.” And that comes back to your earlier question, right? The one year that we were building this, I think three of us, while we come from very similar backgrounds, we have our own personalities which obviously has evolved over time and also right like become starker to notice, right? All three of us have very different set of strengths that we bring into the mix, right? Jayant is the eternal optimist, the banker who’ll jump and say right like “Why can’t this be a Workday alternative, etc.” from get-go, right? Like so very naturally he was the seller, right? He sold the product better, he this thing. I mean these were not like major choices that we made. Chaitanya was definitely the scientist among three of us, right? Goes to the last level of detail, etc., understood HR already. So he was the product guy. And I was doing everything in between, right? Like I am was more the maybe the middle person.

23:24 Rohin Dharmakumar: You came from McKinsey?

23:25 Rohit Chennamaneni: Right like it was more the… I mean I think more than McKinsey I think the strength I brought in was more like a balance. I was a very realist in terms of practicality, what’s the next step, let’s move forward, let’s right like bring something into action kind of a thing versus there is a… there is a…

23:40 Rohin Dharmakumar: I got it. Balance between the sales-like, you know, view of the world and the scientific view of the world, which is “Only when the best product happens it should come out.”

23:48 Rohit Chennamaneni: It should come out, right? Like…

23:49 Rohin Dharmakumar: Seeks perfection.

23:50 Rohit Chennamaneni: Right, somewhere play that balance. And I think when these roles formalized and over time, right, like as we sold etc. and all of us played all three roles, right, in one way or the other, but we had a primary role. One thing we did very early Rohin—and which is very uncharacteristic of maybe early-stage bravado founders or like in the jumping in—we said, “Oh, we should have some principles of operating.” Right? We pulled up—I mean we worked out of a penthouse, which is basically Jayant’s in-law’s penthouse which was empty, I think it was not allowed to have a penthouse so it was empty, right in that building. So we were operating out of there, three plastic chairs were sitting and saying, “Okay, what are the few things that we agree on today and things might change in the future, etc.” So a few things that we agreed on in terms of, okay, we’ll build for the customer first, we’ll build like this first, we’ll build HR first, all of that. The other thing that we agreed on was, right, decision-making. And which is interesting because we started with that part I like.

24:49 Rohit Chennamaneni: At least we said, “Hey, we should not become a committee which will slow down decision-making.” Because the downside of not having one CEO of three people being equals is that we become a race-round condition, right? So what we said is, “Hey, right, most times we’ll have consensus because we should be talking a lot.” So I think that for us is very DNA—we talk a lot as three of us, right? Most times we’ll be talking a lot. But when it comes to a deadlock, this person will take decision on sales, right? Like what’s this this thing, right? Jayant was taking decision on sales. Chaitanya will take decision on roadmap. Rohit will take decision on people, right? So it became that in a sense where our finances and people at that point of time, right, where, right, if there is a deadlock let’s have a veto kind of a thing.

25:34 Rohit Chennamaneni: And this is exactly what I explained back to the investor when they asked for this, right? Like and then they said, “No, no, it’s better to have a CEO.” We went back and discussed it. We didn’t find a very compelling reason other than, “Oh, it’s done in the market” kind of a thing. Because through the year we never experienced any delayed decision-making, right? And that’s the same thing that we went back and said, “When you think we are getting delayed in decision-making, please come and tell us, we’ll find a CEO among ourselves.” And that’s something we agreed among the three of us, right? And that’s the same answer we give in every fundraising round saying, “If you feel at any point of time we’re happy to reflect, we have a way to make this happen, right?”

26:16 Rohit Chennamaneni: I know for example when we go public at some point of time in the future we’ll need a CEO, we’ll make somebody, right? We have a way of thinking about it, how we want to do it, etc. We’ll do it then, right? But I mean if there is no problem and this thing is working, why do you want to change it? Is where we started with. And it has worked well for us. I think the advantage that happens Rohin is—and which is less talked about is—if the founder or the CEO, or the CEO is a sales founder, there is over-indexing on sales. And the CEO is a product founder, there is over-indexing on product.

26:50 Rohin Dharmakumar: It changes the nature of the organization is what you said.

26:52 Rohit Chennamaneni: It changes the nature of the organization. And I’ve seen this play out very, very distinctly in different companies where, oh right, over-promising and the product is trying to catch up because I mean there is a inherent unsaid…

27:06 Rohin Dharmakumar: Or it’s product perfection but not selling, right?

27:08 Rohit Chennamaneni: Or product perfection but not selling, right? So maybe there was a nice, right, and in hindsight you can talk about all of this in like in glory, but like I think there was a nice continuum where different points of time different things became important and not one person’s agenda. And it’s not an agenda but it’s just their personal strength becoming priority.

27:30 Rohin Dharmakumar: All right, let’s… let’s take a step back to Darwinbox itself. We never got round to talking much about it. How would you describe Darwinbox? What is Darwinbox?

27:38 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think Darwinbox is a new-age enterprise HR technology platform.

27:44 Rohin Dharmakumar: Oh, that’s a mouthful. Simpler version. What’s the simpler version for a layperson?

27:49 Rohit Chennamaneni: So it’s all your HR needs automated for a enterprise, right? Complete end-to-end, everything that an HR does we enable it through technology.

28:01 Rohin Dharmakumar: Interesting. Give us a sense of—I mean you’ve raised how much venture capital?

28:06 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I think primary venture capital is around the 135 million mark and secondary would be around that much.

28:16 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. How many people are you today?

28:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: We are about 1100 people.

28:20 Rohin Dharmakumar: Um, what… give us a sense of what’s your revenue or scale like? Whatever numbers you can share.

28:27 Rohit Chennamaneni: So we are at the 100 million ARR mark scale in terms of ARR.

28:31 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. And if I’m not mistaken, you became a unicorn—I know these things are just made-up constructs—but in your last, last-to-last round if I’m not mistaken, right?

28:42 Rohit Chennamaneni: The last round happened like three-four months back, which was predominantly secondary.

28:46 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. That was 140 million?

28:47 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, that was predominantly secondary, very little primary. And the round before that is when the status happened.

28:55 Rohin Dharmakumar: Did anything change? I know you’re probably going to say no, nothing, if we are the still folks, same folks same… but when Darwinbox became a unicorn, did you notice anything changing inside the organization? Not among founders, but among the rest of your colleagues?

29:10 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think a lot of people—and it happened to us also—a lot of people started becoming curious about what we did. People outside started becoming curious about what we did. And B2B is generally unsexy, right? In most situations B2B is unsexy. I had relatives, I had family, I had friends who just were appalled by the fact that I ran a loss-making company for a very long time. And thanks to, right, like the whole Startup India or Modi ji talking about unicorns, suddenly when we became unicorn a lot more interest in the company came from quarters which was not there before, right? And that definitely changed.

29:49 Rohin Dharmakumar: It’s very interesting. This is the first time I’m hearing this sort of an explanation that unicorn word is a container for people to understand the startup world or make sense of it. And therefore when a company moves into that container, suddenly they see it differently. I’d always seen that in the sense of, “Oh it’s validation because it’s a billion dollars, it shows that the company has done…” I’d never seen it described as for the average person a unicorn is a narrative method or a container to see, “Oh this is…”

30:23 Rohit Chennamaneni: It was a container to see that they’ve arrived, right? Or they’re… they’re of scale, right? Otherwise for a natural… like I mean my dad for the first four years was very worried about, right, “Oh loss-making hai, kab profitable kab banega?” Like that was the more the conversation etc. versus “Oh you’re raising more money, you’re giving away stake,” right? Like I mean those were the kind of conversations. Unicorn suddenly validated that for external world. I mean for us I think the… the… it gave us a little bit of aggression because of the amount of money. So I think the… it was not the unicorn status but we’ve never raised till that point above like a 15-20 million round. And that was like a 90 million kind of a round.

31:06 Rohin Dharmakumar: What did that make you feel? That additional capital.

31:09 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, it made us more aggressive, right? Like we said, “Oh maybe we can launch three markets together, maybe we can launch three products together,” right?

31:16 Rohin Dharmakumar: And… and what happened after that?

31:17 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think I still think we still did that. But I think we were distracted a little bit by the spreading thin. A few things, right? Like for example we grew very quickly, but for example the support pieces broke because I mean there was exuberance around selling, etc. And rightly so, right? It was… I mean it’s a product, it’s not service that you can scale it, you just need sales folks to scale it as long as it’s working as a product. But the support team and their training and their capability took time to take off, which affected support for about a six months’ time. Because you just need a ramp-up time because you can’t just throw people at problem, right? Like it’s…

32:00 Rohin Dharmakumar: Both… both can’t operate at scale at the same. Sales will always be the lead indicator and support will always have to catch up.

32:04 Rohit Chennamaneni: Correct. Correct. And sales worked, right? And I think at that point of time as a combination we hired more sales folks, everybody was delivering, every… I mean it was also just COVID time and post-COVID where digitization happened in a very, very big way, people were open to technology, etc. And then support had to catch up and those things broke, right? And to recover from that it took us a long time because obviously support is bad press, bad feedback from the market, and then we had to do a bunch of things to make sure that this thing. So I think other than that, right, everything else remained the same, right? In terms of I think the DNA of the founders translates for us, right? Our founders or the early team, right? We still continue to be very efficient in terms of selling, very efficient in terms of support, very efficient in terms of when we launch a new country we are very, very calculated about “This is the investment, these are the milestones that we need to go to” rather than say “Whatever it takes” and all of that.

33:01 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Uh, how does Darwinbox make money?

33:04 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think if you think about any SaaS product and Darwinbox is no different, I think the replicability of a product allows it to have very, very good gross margins.

33:16 Rohin Dharmakumar: What does that mean?

33:17 Rohit Chennamaneni: So… so basically if a person… so the… the revenue for Darwinbox is per employee per month per module. That’s the simple math in which Darwinbox’s revenue works. If you have a thousand employees, if you have if you’re using four modules, you pay us X. And as thousand grows up you pay us that 1100 into X or 1200 into X. As the modules increase it will be 1100 into X plus Y, right? So I think that’s the revenue model. Now there is a cost which comes at a gross margin level, which are two costs: one is the hosting and compute costs that is there as the technology cost, and then there is the support cost. As long as… the technology’s cost generally scales, right? There is some operating advantage you get because of volume, etc., but that scales as the number of employees go up or number of modules go up. Support sometimes as and when how well you build the product and how well you build the support engine, the cost can come down up. So then there is the whole gross margin engine. Above that is your gross margin that typically a SaaS company operates between 60% to 80% gross margin, right? And we also operate in that range only. And below that is your selling cost and is your R&D cost and your general costs. So those are the three cost items that are there.

34:36 Rohit Chennamaneni: The selling costs are high in a SaaS business because you sell upfront you earn later. So the cost of selling is always front-loaded, right? You use whatever, right, sales teams, marketing, branding, all of that to make sure and each sales process takes six to nine months to get a customer. So the selling cost is upfront. The R&D cost is more in terms of future-looking, right? So I mean you can always say there is only one product, why is there R&D cost? For example, when AI was launched, we put significant amount of money into R&D because we’re like “This is the future, right? While I know it’ll cost us in the near term, but in the future term it’ll help us get better revenues.” And then there is the administrative cost that is there. So below that is whatever you make out of it.

35:20 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Interesting. Uh, let me switch back to you now. Uh… you grew up in Hyderabad. What’s your family history? How did you—after engineering, you went to VIT? After that, if I’m not mistaken, you went to Google and worked there for a few years. Then you went to IIM Lucknow for your MBA and then you joined McKinsey and then we’ll come to this earlier, but what was your family like?

35:46 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, so see I’m a single kid. So to go a little bit back into history, my grandparents migrated from the village to the city, and this was in between the Naxal movement, etc., where villages became a little untenable and then they moved into the city. So given their background, they had very little understanding of the city. And I always say the adaptability story of my grandparents is an inspiration in itself because you come into a new city, you’ve always been in a village for generations and then you’re dealing with a Hyderabad kind of a city and… all sizes, all cities. And then my dad was this first generation of “Oh I have to study to a certain level to get a job and then do it.” So very middle class that way, right? But thankfully, maybe because of the ecosystem, education was a big priority in our families. Right? Whether you do well or not you need to do like graduation, post-graduation, etc. A lot of my childhood was defined by tennis actually, right? For me there were only two things: one is go to school and then go to tennis, right? Was almost like two… two ways I lived my life. Tennis was a bigger passion than…

36:55 Rohin Dharmakumar: What did your dad do?

36:57 Rohit Chennamaneni: Uh so he was… he worked as a engineer, he was a…

37:02 Rohin Dharmakumar: So he was in a salaried job?

37:04 Rohit Chennamaneni: He was in a salaried job. Yeah, so he did some bit of it towards the end of his career around doing some trading, etc., but mostly a salaried job. My mother was a homemaker. I was a single child. All right. Went to schooling in Hyderabad itself and I think yeah, as I said, the definition for me of my childhood was more tennis in my head and less studies, etc. And tennis I was very, very serious about at that point of time at least. And then towards the 10th standard is when the people asked me a question around saying “Hey career, right? How are you thinking about life? And what… I mean you need to make money also, etc.” It was very difficult to give up tennis, but somehow my grades etc. meant that I had a better chance of a more right economically successful life with my education, etc. than obviously the usual do the IIT coaching and that’s where I met Jayant at that point of time, right? Like and doing the IIT coachings and all of that. Then ended up going to VIT, did my engineering there. I was a mechanical engineer, was placed in GE. Came to Hyderabad, then I went to meet a friend at Google. And I was fascinated. They have this huge screen at the entrance of Google which keeps throwing up all the search queries across the world continuously. It felt extremely powerful, right? Like and that time as Google was a fascinating company. So then I figured out are there roles for a mechanical engineer, etc.? And there was a search analyst role, which was mostly a little bit of coding plus a lot of math. So I applied for it, got through it, and so three years of Google really enjoyed, spent about close to nine months in Ireland, my first international trip, etc. So got exposed to a lot of cultures, a lot of…

38:51 Rohin Dharmakumar: Why didn’t you stick on at Google instead of deciding to go for your MBA? What made you want to do an MBA?

38:56 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I had this random habit of writing CAT every year in November, right? Like I just… I mean it was like a annual tradition, right? Went and wrote it three times. Third time I got through, right? It was not like a very planned thing. And everybody in Google including the HRBPs etc. said, “If you’re getting into an IIM or an ISB, etc., why don’t you just take it up? It’ll give you… it’ll open up a few things.” The other thing that I was very, very excited about is marketing as a function. I was very, very fascinated by marketing as a function because in my head it was a lot more creative, branding, etc. So ended up going to MBA in IIM Lucknow, went to P&G for my internship in marketing for my summers in Singapore. Finished with that two months and then realized I got an PPO and then I realized saying “Hey, I mean…”

39:44 Rohin Dharmakumar: That’s a pre-placement offer.

39:45 Rohit Chennamaneni: A pre-placement… yeah, it’s a job offer. And then I realized marketing you’re not allowed to really control like these narratives etc., right? And these are brands which have been built over tens and hundreds of years. You can’t change that. And then I got fascinated by this whole consulting thing. A lot of my seniors who I looked up to were going into consulting. And then I liked the idea that, “Hey, there is problem-solving, there’s different project every few months, different people you work with, etc.” And that’s something I naturally enjoy even to date, right? Problem-solving for me is something that I…

40:16 Rohin Dharmakumar: So you’re a generalist, like you know I mean…

40:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: I’m a… yeah, yeah, hardcore generalist in that sense where I love new problems, new set of people to work with. All the new launches of countries in Darwinbox I do, new narratives for products I think about, right? Like those are things that I enjoy doing myself. So in terms of McKinsey was fascinating in itself as an experience because I think the range of experiences or range of projects and problems that you deal with with really solid, great colleagues is something really, really exciting. And till like these whole holidays in Hyderabad happened, I had my career planned out in McKinsey. So I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t have thought about myself as an entrepreneur. I had the good fortune of consulting for some startups, large-scale e-commerce startups in India at that point of time, and got to experience the thrill and rush of it. But still I saw my career continuing in McKinsey till Jayant one fine day started throwing ideas at me, I started throwing ideas at him and we ended up building Darwinbox.

41:20 Rohin Dharmakumar: Very interesting. There is this question that I always ask founders—that we’re typically the average, I mean there is this saying that we’re the average of the five people that we spend the most amount of time with. Who are they for you? I’m assuming two of them are your co-founders.

41:35 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think my co-founders, my wife, and two other friends from school probably will be the this thing, who have no connection to anything to do with tech or startups. So I think those are my five. That’s the average, the five chimpanzees or…

41:52 Rohin Dharmakumar: Interesting. We are… you operate in the people management space, so I want to now switch a little bit and talk about the function of people management. In fact, it wasn’t even called people management—there’s enough and more literature that talks about how, you know, I mean this entire concept of HR started from factories where, like, you know, I mean human resources, the word itself comes from viewing humans as a resource. And like how have you seen… I mean what is… what is your narrative? I’m sure you’ve had this conversation probably a thousand times in your meetings and sales conversation etc.—the evolution of the HR function or the people function. How is it? How would you explain how that function has evolved and where is it today?

42:40 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, like rightly you said, right? Even if you take like the one of the best B-schools for HR in India, XLRI, the course is called IR, Industrial Relations, right?

42:50 Rohin Dharmakumar: Because that’s where the roots…

42:51 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, yeah, the roots is about factory negotiations and all of that. I think the evolution came from a fact that…

42:59 Rohin Dharmakumar: I mean literally it’s called Xavier Labour Relations Institute, right?

43:02 Rohit Chennamaneni: Labour Relations Institute, right? And and it’s the most popular course and it’s still called PMIR. So they added people management but…

43:09 Rohin Dharmakumar: PMD was the sub-other course, right?

43:10 Rohit Chennamaneni: Right? So PMIR because people management and industrial relations. So I think the part where I break it down for myself in terms of HR is, right, the three primary responsibilities in my head for any organization, leave HR, right? Which is attract the right set of people, right, enable them, and give them the right incentives. And if I… forget HR, right? Like just any organization to be successful which has people should be doing this.

43:38 Rohin Dharmakumar: I… I get first one and third one. Attract the right set of people loosely translates to find and hire the best people. Incentivize them usually turns out to salaries, ESOP, total rewards, incentive structures, whatever, right? What’s the one in the middle? Enable them? What does that mean?

43:56 Rohit Chennamaneni: So the… yeah, enable them means, for example, tell them what they need to do, give them the right tools to do it, right, and help them measure it. And if I… if I take this out, abstract it out, right, nothing of this is HR, right? Any organization, if you think about it, which has people should be doing this. Interestingly enough, all three fall under the sub-buckets of HR. Now unfortunately or fortunately, the power of HR in an organization is very, very highly driven by the CHRO, actually. How well the CHRO understands business and works with the rest of the business actually translates to how the function operates.

44:36 Rohin Dharmakumar: Very famous HBR article about HR having a seat at the table.

44:40 Rohit Chennamaneni: Seat at the table, right? Like and you go to any HR conference they’ll be talking about seat at the table. What talking about it 20 years ago they still continue to about it, right? Like and anyway, whether it’s AI in HR or crypto in HR you talk about seat at table, right? But I think the fundamental question that if you think about business leaders are also thinking about these three things only. How well you translate between how each of these is impacting their business metrics and enable that is the function of HR, right? Whether it is right when you think about sales, right, if you don’t hire sales people on time and give them the right tools, sales don’t happen, right? It’s just a lead indicator for your sales. Right? Whether it’s support, right? If you don’t enable them enough and give them the right information that they need to pass on to a customer, right, support fails. If you don’t incentivize them correctly, right—you can talk about it in all technical terms in terms of comp ratios, market parity and all of that—if you don’t incentivize them you lose people, you’re losing organizational context and learning to people that you’re leaving, right? So if you package it, all of this comes under an HR function. But there is enough debate Rohin on is the manager the new HR? For example, right? Like see I’m saying the…

45:52 Rohin Dharmakumar: I would have asked you that question because one of the things that’s also been happening, I mean since you mentioned startups, like you know Silicon Valley star tech startups etc., is that there has been this especially in younger smaller startups etc. to sort of not have a HR function at all. There is no HR manager. Everyone does what they’re expected to, or they collaborate in teams. Or maybe they’ll have a manager but that manager is not an HR manager, they’re just their line managers etc. and all that. Where did that, you know, how do you see that this thing of “We don’t need to have an HR function, we don’t need to have an HR manager”?

46:31 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think the… the whole HR function operates in a spectrum. On one end, Rohin, there are specialized functions in HR, right? Broadly broken, it is HR operations and HR business partnering. In HR operations you can have recruitment, you can have time attendance management, you can have payroll processing, payout, etc. And HR business partnering includes career planning, succession planning, right, workforce planning, all of those planning pieces and performance pieces and all of that. On the other end of the spectrum is like a pod structure, which is there is a person who is helping you with the people side of the story. Now you want to call that person HR, you want to call that person the manager of these people, it could be anything. Today across organizations we’re somewhere in this spectrum, right? Where there are organizations which say, “Hey, right, as long as we’re enabling a bunch of these people, right, with all the data that is needed, all the things, right? Because if you have to hire someone, knowing what kind of person to hire, etc., if the manager has time to do that and they’re able to do it, I mean more kudos to them, right, and structured they can happen.” But is there some specialization in understanding translating it to the world in terms of a job description, in terms of the tools where right or portals where you get those information from or going and scouting in the market etc.? That could be a strength, right? And that brings you a little bit to the functional aspect of it, right? Similarly, when you think about performance reviews processes, understanding various contexts in which where a goal-based system, which is “Oh there is this KRA, you get this number, you get this rating, you paid blindly,” versus “Oh there is a competency-based thing, which is you exhibit a bunch of competencies to a certain proficiency level and you’re paid so much,” again has a wide spectrum, right? Like again…

48:20 Rohin Dharmakumar: It’s always this balance of objectivity and subjectivity.

48:22 Rohit Chennamaneni: Objectivity and subjectivity, right? And where and the whole point about choice of objectivity subjectivity also comes from whether you need enough experience doing this. If I want to do it from first principles, it’s just about enablement that you need through data, etc. There are a few aspects of HR which are a lot more compliance-led, Rohin, which is almost like having a finance or a legal team, which is like paying correct salaries, right? There are a lot of compliances around labour compliances, etc. which you need to take care of, which are very, very or provident funds or POSH, etc. for which you need people for sure, right? Those are things that are almost like saying these are guardrails for you to operate a company. Those you need for on top of that. The business partnering piece, whether that is an individual within the team doing it or whether it’s an HR person, can always be constructed in whatever way and fashion.

49:15 Rohin Dharmakumar: What is your view personally—as I’m now not asking as the founder co-founder of Darwinbox, but as Rohit—is an HR, is a CHRO, HR manager, HR function etc. required for an organization to be a mid-sized or a small-sized organization to be successful? Or is that a scale thing that… I mean it stands to reason that as organizations get larger, you do tend need to have people who can handle that scale and manage it better.

49:50 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, two reasons I would I’m very bullish on the HR function is I’ve seen the upside of having a great HR person, Rohin, right? Like somebody who’s thinking about…

49:57 Rohin Dharmakumar: That’s as well great point because this is so hard, right? Because it’s like how do you judge the the absence of someone when you’re unable to see what presence can do to the organization?

50:10 Rohit Chennamaneni: Exactly, exactly. And…

50:11 Rohin Dharmakumar: But give me an example of what that means.

50:13 Rohit Chennamaneni: The expectation from that HR person is also, right, like is limited in some context, right? Like because of maybe past experience with a certain HR person. See I think, right, having a very good top talent program across the organization is nobody else’s mandate except the HR functions, right? I as a manager will know who is better for me, etc. You as a manager will know yours and the bunch of people across functions. But is there something that I’m doing for my top talent within the organization? And there are bunch of examples of great organizations who’ve done more in terms of ESOPs, more in terms of touchpoints, learning, etc. for my top talent, because maybe I want to reward them disproportionately. Because your top 20% talent almost defines how good or bad the company is, right? Like so… sure, that, for example, is something which only HR can do. Very rarely I’ve seen any other function taking that up and delivering on it, even if it’s a CEO.

51:08 Rohin Dharmakumar: Because most of those functions, each function will have its own siloed view. Correct? No… no function has an org-wide view.

51:11 Rohit Chennamaneni: Correct. Correct. And also it helps for mobility across functions, etc. So I mean that is one example that comes top of mind. But even thinking about, for example, performance management, thinking about how do you think about compensation structures, right? “Oh right, I’m not able to afford somebody early on. Can I do some thinking on how do I combine this with ESOPs or a long-term incentive etc.?” is a more experienced play, right? It is not just saying, “Hey, I mean my math works out this you’ll get this more.” Because translating that to a good communication to the potential recruit again is a big upside in itself. What I can tell you more interestingly is every second-time founder hires a good HR person much earlier than they did in the first stint.

51:58 Rohin Dharmakumar: Because they realize that it was delayed.

52:00 Rohit Chennamaneni: Because they realize that it was delayed. Including us at Darwinbox, we always thought, “Oh we have our own product, we don’t need to have an HR person,” and we were delayed in getting a very good HR person on board, right? Most founders—and I’ve seen this consistently—second-time founders hire an HR, good HR person much earlier because otherwise they only look for like an operational person who can just do the job early on. So I think that again is proof that people have seen the upside of a good HR person. It’s just not consistent across the market.

52:30 Rohin Dharmakumar: Right. Switching now from HR to you and your career. Do you have a view on what does it take to finding and succeeding in a career that you can enjoy for decades?

52:47 Rohit Chennamaneni: Wow, this is like a ikigai-level question. But I mean…

52:50 Rohin Dharmakumar: I’m sure like at some level you’ve found some version of ikigai. Though like all founders you will have this that there is more to be done, but that’s an ongoing thing.

53:00 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think two parts to that answer, Rohin. So I think one for me—as I told you, while at McKinsey or around that time—problem-solving is something that I’m very, very excited about. Right? And like every pro has its con, right? Like when you’re very excited about problem-solving, the boring… like the everyday stuff or transactional stuff gets very boring sometimes, which right to find enjoyment or excitement to do that takes effort. So for me I almost frame every context as a problem to solve for me to start enjoying it.

53:36 Rohin Dharmakumar: Can you give me an example?

53:38 Rohit Chennamaneni: Right? Even a review that I’m going into, I take 10 minutes out before the review saying, right, looking at the data or anything, saying “Oh, is there a problem here that I can solve?” So that I’m going deeper and deeper and deeper and trying to solve that problem or finding that problem and seeing if I can do things at scale and leverage something out of it, rather than go into the review and hope to be either amused, surprised, or right like just go through with it, right? So I think that for me is something that I need to operate. So knowing myself that I enjoy problem-solving, if I want to enjoy a review which happens every week or every month, I do a little bit of work before to understand if there is any patterns, etc. Or push for understanding those patterns as… as I move on. So I think that for me works very well. Second for me, I think I need two-three different kind of problem statements in a day rather than just one thing. And I’m not into that deep-focus mind that for 24-48 hours I’ll do only one thing. I need a context shift so that I can come back to this with a fresh mind, the same problem after a point of time.

54:46 Rohin Dharmakumar: How does this translate to say some of the younger folks in your organization and coming to you and asking for career advice? This thing that you said right now, how does it translate to someone who’s 25? What… what are you telling them?

54:59 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think the first thing that I’m telling them is understand what… what they enjoy, right? See for me, I think again one big realization was I thought doing great startups or being successful in startups is all about intelligence. Like I mean never been proven… never been proven more wrong, right? It is about resilience a lot more than intelligence, right? It is not about… I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the room or all the founders that I’ve met are the smartest people in the room. They are the most resilient in the room for sure, right? Which is being at something, doing it over and over and over and over again, right? Hitting different-different context, coming up with solutions, right? Breaking the wall till you hit your head to it and then break it, right, sometimes, right? You can say, “Hey, you can be in every situation, you don’t have a smart answer on go around the wall,” right? Like that situation don’t exist and sometimes it’s just about repetitions, etc. And in a lot of those times you don’t have any chance of using your intelligence. Right? So it is not the smartest person in the room. That’s my biggest realization, right? I think definitely I thought a lot before I started a company that starting a company or running a company is about intelligence, right? If you’re really smart you’ll be able to do this. It’s… it’s some bit of intelligence, but a lot more about energy, resilience, and being at it than intelligence.

56:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: So if I go back to say, “Hey, right, are you looking for opportunities?” If the 25-year-old comes to me, “If you’re looking for opportunities where your intellect is challenged every day right to a certain level, maybe this is not the right profession, right? Maybe consulting is the right profession, research is the right profession, etc.” Or if you’re excited by impact, right, then there is a lot more large-scale things and functional roles etc. that you can do. So it’s a lot about what you are looking for.

56:48 Rohin Dharmakumar: So what would that be at Darwinbox? What… the people who work at Darwinbox, what excite what keeps them what brings them to Darwinbox, what keeps them at Darwinbox?

56:58 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think the… the varies by function also, Rohin, right? Like there are different roles within…

57:04 Rohin Dharmakumar: But broadly at a cultural level, at a org-wide cultural level.

57:06 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think they should like enjoying they should enjoy being a team player which is helping each other out. So one thing that I always ask in my exit interviews is “What did you enjoy about Darwinbox and what did you hate about Darwinbox?” whenever I get a chance to do an exit. Most people have enjoyed that at any point of time in the day or the night when I said I have a problem, there is somebody trying to help me. Whether they are able to help me or not, I don’t know, but there’s some somebody trying to help me because together we feel like one… one team, right? One Darwinbox.

57:33 Rohin Dharmakumar: How did that culture come about? It’s not a default culture.

57:35 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s not a default culture, but I think it’s… it’s… it was not very intentional also. It was very early on us trying to… and I think whenever you have this you taking on a larger competition, something comes together to make that happen. And right you spoke about I think prior to the conversation on the whole delivery experience, right? So some of these early customers where you’re at the brink of losing that customer, you’re at the brink of failing at that customer, but the whole organization comes together.

58:04 Rohin Dharmakumar: Tell… tell me about that. We never got much into that. Delhivery was one of your first enterprise customers. Yeah. So… was it Sahil? Because Sahil was on First Principles a few episodes back.

58:14 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, Sahil is fantastic. So I think the… Delhivery story—just the context of the Delhivery story—is like you said, right? You never get fired for buying an IBM. The people that were open to looking at Darwinbox as a platform were more the startups because they saw the narrative working out, they were the guys who were the ones who were competing with larger players.

58:37 Rohin Dharmakumar: And they’re more incentivized by taking risks in favor of opportunities rather than being conservative and don’t rock the boat.

58:47 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, absolutely. And I think… I think they hire such people, those people take such decisions as well. So I think our early bunch of customers were all tech and startup companies, and the largest of that lot, right, was Delhivery. And Delhivery, again, because it was already 20,000-plus employees, very large, etc., right, the “who’s who” of the world, right, SAP Oracles Workdays, everybody was knocking at their door. So we went to present and they said, “Hey, you’re eliminated even before doing this.” And I happened to know Sahil through a friend. So I went to Sahil and said, “Sahil, give us a chance. We want to present.” Sahil said, “Hey, I’ll get you into the room, I’ll give you a fair chance, right? And you know how structured Sahil is. I’ll give you a fair chance, don’t come back to me after that for taking a decision, right? My job is to give you an equal opportunity.” And then when we went into the room and spent time and they gave us the time because the CEO said, “Give us… give them the time,” they realized, right, none of the existing systems will work for that complexity. And because they’re also a very evolving organization in 2015, right? They were growing quickly, PIN codes were increasing, number of e-commerce players were increasing, customer mix was increasing, changing, etc. So we went all out in terms of our presentations, pitch, we were almost bunking there, right, in terms of our sales pitch etc. Me, Jayant, Chaitanya, all three of us were there. Chaitanya was drawing…

60:06 Rohin Dharmakumar: This is Delhi-Gurgaon back then?

60:08 Rohit Chennamaneni: This is Delhi… in Gurgaon. In Gurgaon. And we know the office very well, we know the chaiwalas very well outside that office. Chaitanya was drawing things on the board of the module that were going to come, right? We didn’t even have the all the modules at that point of time. We just had that first four modules. And I think the… in that process once we won the deal and they were impressed and they saw that this is something that they would go with for a long time, once they were impressed we started implementing. And till that point of time the largest customer I think we implemented was 1000 employees.

60:39 Rohin Dharmakumar: And this was 20,000?

60:40 Rohit Chennamaneni: This is 20,000, right? And a fairly diverse…

60:43 Rohin Dharmakumar: Extremely diverse because…

60:44 Rohit Chennamaneni: Extremely diverse because, right, anybody who goes into thinking about HRMS thinks okay there are X number of people…

60:50 Rohin Dharmakumar: Sitting in an office in front of computers.

60:51 Rohit Chennamaneni: And X number of departments and X number of locations. So for example the simplest thing I’ll tell you is locations was a drop-down in Darwinbox. Okay, I I know how ridiculous that sounds. Yeah, and then there are 3,500 locations in Delhivery, right? Like and bunch of such things…

61:07 Rohin Dharmakumar: So you had to change it into a text box where you can enter or something?

61:10 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yes, right? Like the drop-down search box, right? And we had one page for example where you can actually scroll through all employees. These are 20,000, right? What happened actually was they were going to launch like two-three days and the system was not loading. And we were like… because they sent out an email and it’s 20,000 employees saying “New HRMS is coming, Darwinbox is the new thing, it’s the coolest thing that can happen, etc.” Then I had to fly down to Sahil and say, “Sahil, I mean we screwed up. We don’t know, right? Genuinely it was a team of 12 people at that point of time, right? Like we didn’t know what to do.”

61:47 Rohin Dharmakumar: This was what, 2016? 15?

61:48 Rohit Chennamaneni: 2016. 2016. 2016, right? Before the funding happened also, this is like, right? So we didn’t know what to do. We were figuring out, we were scrambling. I was calling up all my friends from engineering, from Google and saying, “What do I do, right? Like how can I solve this quickly?” Everybody was calling everybody, we were trying to figure out…

62:04 Rohin Dharmakumar: What… what was the issue?

62:05 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, multiple issues. It’s just a scale problem, right? And for every scale problem there is a solution which comes with experience. We were doing it from first principles and we didn’t have time. See we knew we would solve this, but the problem was the announcement was done, etc. So we went and said, “Hey, right, we screwed up, right? It will take you 15 to 20 days to find another platform. Right? We will fix this by then. If we don’t, we’ll help you implement the new platform that you take, whatever is the platform, think of us as bodies. We’ll implement.” And that one-two weeks, Rohin, none of us slept. That 11-12 people didn’t sleep, right? Everything was being solved for—open the problem statement solve, open the problem statement solve, call up whoever you need to, etc. And when you come through that, the first 12 people in the organization and then you take it live…

62:53 Rohin Dharmakumar: Did you have to like re-architect or rewrite a bunch of…?

62:55 Rohit Chennamaneni: You have to re-architect search, you have to re-architect databases, a lot of things, and all happened in 10 days.

62:59 Rohin Dharmakumar: You mentioned, sorry, databases. One of the things that came up—and help me understand this a bit more, right?—Darwinbox, one of the atypical choices that it made from its technical architecture was to use Graph DB. Tell me why. Assume I know nothing—actually I do know nothing, so it’s not that like you know I mean—what is Graph DB and why was that such a different decision that you made and how did it impact you?

63:27 Rohit Chennamaneni: Okay, so see I think one of the things that I told you about the fundamental problem of best practice is that organizations are always shaped in a certain way. There is an assumption. So there is a SQL database. SQL is a relational database, which is corresponding to every person there is an attribute, right?

63:50 Rohin Dharmakumar: So you can think of it as a large collection of rows and columns. You look up a particular row and column you have a box, right?

63:56 Rohit Chennamaneni: Exactly. So you have a box, right? But when you think about organizations in general and organizations more at that point of time and even today, they’re very, very tree-like. Right? There is a reporting manager, there is a dotted-line reporting manager. So you report to the India head…

64:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: So your point being that no organization can try and guess all the columns that it needs in a database in advance?

64:20 Rohit Chennamaneni: There are two points. One is you can’t guess all of it. Second, you might have two overlapping contexts. Right? I may have two… I may have two dotted reporting managers. So if you only put one column in the database then you’re suddenly wondering… and this is something that we’ve seen in software, right? The field can only take one value, you cannot enter more than…

64:41 Rohit Chennamaneni: So for example I’ll give you a classic operational issue with this. When you do performance management, right, you want L1 review, L2 review, L3 review, right? Like 360-degree review. Or 360-degree review, right? But suddenly you’ll have this dotted-line manager as a part of the process. Now where in that table do you pick this dotted-line manager from and bring into the process is an unknown in a relational database model. Which means you need to keep on adding columns and pre-define columns saying there will be 900 or 90 or 9 managers…

65:11 Rohin Dharmakumar: Which slows down the database eventually.

65:13 Rohit Chennamaneni: Which slows down the database and also you need to be pre-planned about it. You can’t create these positions on the fly. What we realized was as you build out workflows, as you build out org structures, etc., right, tomorrow you might have a shared services model which operates for 10 legal entities, etc. None of this works in a relational database model. So we took the atypical choice—and Graph database has its own risks with it, which is for example, right, in a relational database everything when it comes into a report is very straightforward. Take this column, this column, and this row, this row. When you transpose a Graph DB into a report, it’s a lot more difficult to translate that to a report which is readily available as a standard report, right? So it is more work, more compute, etc. But we took that call very early on. So a lot of our technology and product architecture choices were to say, “Hey, the product will be flexible for the future, right? That is adaptable,” which is again Darwinism, and which is it’ll help evolution… I mean the product itself will evolve and help organizations evolve became the story behind…

66:15 Rohin Dharmakumar: Can I tell you this? This entire conversation also reminds me of the conversation I had with Sahil when he was describing how Delhivery started figuring out how to do route mapping etc. and all that, and they loosely modeled it on the way telecom networks and IP traffic travels etc. and all that. So I see a lot of those parallels on how early first-time startups that are trying to solve huge complex problems have the space to approach it afresh. Because you’re not already tied into a legacy database and you’re thinking, “Oh my God, we already have this code base and what do we do with it?” So but to come back to Delhivery, what happened? Everything went…?

66:51 Rohit Chennamaneni: So… so just to finish off that point, Rohin, right? I think the… the Graph DB point or many of the architectural choices were not easy choices. The answer… see the relational database choice always will be the easy one because it’s been tried and tested and you can just copy it, right? Graph DB meant you need to do your own research to figure out how it translates to every process in HR, etc. Similarly a lot of platform choices, right? For example, instead of… we could have built a performance management quickly, we said we’ll build a workflow builder and on top of that performance management. So that tomorrow if performance management changes significantly in the future, I don’t have to re-architect it. I can use the base workflow builder to make a new performance management architecture, right? So even today with AI, we’re exactly doing that, which is I am giving a technology layer for all my pods which run different-different modules to use AI to build whatever they need in terms of agents that is relevant for their workflow, right? So again… so that was a more of a choice which was tougher earlier on, but helped us scale much better. Coming back to Delhivery, I think this… the whole experience of coming together as a team which helped us solve something which we thought was gone, right? Like against the odds was completely destroyed, right? Would have destroyed the company. We would not be an enterprise company if Delhivery walked out of us at that point of time. And I think that allowed us to believe that if we come together—and there was no team member there, right? Like there’s no function there, everybody was doing everything—and that belief continued in the ethos of the company, right? There are many contexts after that where the impossible we’ve attempted and solved for because everybody came together. And in some way that everybody coming together when there is a problem or when somebody is in need is something that stuck as DNA for the org. So I think that something that resonates with what it means to be a Darwinian or be in Darwinbox very, very strongly, right? But also there are subcultures within each of the functions as well, right? Like there is… there’s the product culture, there’s the sales culture, etc. But I think for me, my biggest learning over the journey, Rohin, was we had a bunch of values etc. and I always used to wonder McKinsey had this core value… McKinsey had only two values, right? And for a consulting company which is 100 years old, teaching companies frameworks and everything, everybody seems to have six values, seven values. I used to keep wondering why they have only two, and I realized that’s what we stood for and went back to the same set of two values, which is do right by your customer, do right by your teammate. Right? It’s… it over-oversimplified it, but I didn’t find a better articulation of what we wanted to do as an individual for myself or for the organization. If you take care of these two things, everything else somehow fell in place.

69:44 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Okay. Uh, what sort of… you were talking about culture at Darwinbox. Let me ask a kind of counter-question to that. What sort of people won’t succeed or don’t succeed at Darwinbox? Like they join but, you know, they’re out in six months, nine months, less than a year.

70:02 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think one the what because it’s a B2B and enterprise business, what people assume is that decision-making etc., right, or everything happens at a very enterprise-levelish, which is like sophisticated in language and sophisticated in value selling and all of that. And I think that’s where maybe we unfortunately attract some wrong talent, which is they assume right coming from a certain background etc. they assume, “Okay, I’ve sold this in SAP, how different will Darwinbox be? Oh, I’ve sold this in Oracle, how this will how this will…”

70:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: What is the primary difference?

70:43 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think we are very product-led.

70:46 Rohin Dharmakumar: What does that mean? I mean, because from a layperson’s point of view, I’d assume that I’m sure SAP is also product-led. So when you say you’re product-led, what does that mean in terms of a difference between a large enterprise…

70:58 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, no, no. I think it’s a very interesting one even for us when we reflect on… I think one, if you go to an SAP sales guy or an Oracle sales guy, 90% of the sales process happens on a PPT. Which is SAP has done this in 200 organizations.

71:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: And here is this list of feature after feature after feature, this is the value we’ve driven, etc.

71:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: We go in and—maybe it comes from a little bit of our consulting background—starting, we said, “What is your problem, right? Let me configure this and show it to you now.”

71:26 Rohin Dharmakumar: So you’re like the “show don’t tell” type.

71:29 Rohit Chennamaneni: Correct. Correct. Right? And a lot of success within Darwinbox has been people who’ve been able to do that, who get that and show and don’t tell kind of thing. And for all the success we’ve got in B2B, there is rightfully people might assume that we are more tell etc. And people who come in and are not very familiar with product—I’m not saying they should be fluent, but they should be comfortable with product, right? Comfortable with tech, right, ready to open the product out, ready to open the app out to show a customer, etc. People who are not comfortable with that struggle.

72:02 Rohin Dharmakumar: So it’s also a little bit of roll up the sleeves and like you know get a little bit…

72:05 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, roll up the sleeve is the, yeah, the detail part of it, but just I think the product-centric thinking, right? And a lot of times I ask what is their favorite app, how much they use it, etc. Like just to see how comfortable they are with technology and product. In my interviews as well, even at a senior level, I just ask, “What have you done, like how much have you played around with a tool, technology, etc. just to be comfortable with that idea?”

72:29 Rohin Dharmakumar: Since you brought this up, let me ask you: what are some of your favorite open-ended questions that you ask uh while hiring?

72:37 Rohit Chennamaneni: So if I… if I… if I like the candidate, I definitely ask, “If I give you an offer, what are the top two reasons you won’t join Darwinbox?” Just gives me a sense of their priorities and how much research they will do before joining Darwinbox. So I think that’s one question I ask. A lot of times it gives interesting things where I can pitch the role to them or sometimes it gives me interesting perspective on what they look for when they join Darwinbox.

73:08 Rohin Dharmakumar: What else?

73:09 Rohit Chennamaneni: The second thing I ask is… I ask the “money, power, fame” question. I ask, especially at leadership, on saying “If you didn’t have the other two and had only one, what would you pick?” Just to sense if that role can give them that. Right? So it’s not nothing none of them is a right answer, but more in terms of there are roles which are not famous, right? They’re not out there. There are roles which are not very incentive-driven and money-driven.

73:39 Rohin Dharmakumar: In some senses, these are still bound questions, right? Are there any open-ended questions that you ask—like, for example, one of the ones you shared earlier was “What apps do you use?”, right, which can go anywhere. Any other such open-ended questions that you ask where you’re just trying to understand, you know, whatever response they’re giving, just to kind of understand them better?

73:59 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think so a lot more of my interviewing is situational, so I ask a lot about “Where did you change your mind?” Give me one example of where you changed your mind.

74:09 Rohin Dharmakumar: All right, let me give you that question right back at you. When was the last time that you remember changing your mind on something of significance?

74:17 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think the… interesting. So my last one where I changed my mind…

74:23 Rohin Dharmakumar: Actually, this is a very… I understand that this is a very… one of those questions that suddenly takes you into like the last 10 years, so let me try and sharpen it for you, right? When it comes to managing people, when was the last time that you changed your mind about a belief that you had about how people are seen or managed? Where you had an assumption… like, for example, earlier you said you thought it was about intelligence but it turned out to be resilience. Is there a similar mind change that happened for you when it comes to teams or people?

74:52 Rohit Chennamaneni: So for me always it was—and I’m very self-critical as an individual, so I always used to think if somebody is not successful in Darwinbox because of the skill reason, right, that our enablement has not been the greatest, right? And a lot of times you give a longer rope, try different ways of enablement, etc. But what I realized over time is there are some will issues, right, which is intent issues, etc., which come across as skill issues also, right? It is basically the person not wanting to do it translating as not capable of it, rather than it’s just a capability problem, right? So I think that’s one part of it. And the other part of it is there are certain inherent skill set/personalities which the capability cannot be taught to, right? And this could be an introvert trying to do sales or whatever, right? And again I’m not generalizing there, but there are those things. For me at least, I’ve been sharper now in terms of understanding whether this person could be trained on this or not, and then it’s a much easier conversation with them on saying, “Hey, do you want to figure out a new role or outside the Darwinbox because I don’t think there is a path for you to get there?” Which probably four-five years back I would have never thought of. Every time I would be like, “Hey, we’ve hired right but we didn’t do right so it didn’t work out.”

76:17 Rohin Dharmakumar: Why do you say… when you say “I’m self-critical,” what makes you say that? Like you know in what forms? Like you know, I mean one part you already explained, which is in some senses as a co-founder taking responsibility for you hire someone after a lot of time and effort and finding and interviewing and when that person doesn’t work out at some point at some level you feel personally responsible because you’re like “We should have spotted this, or maybe we could have done better,” right? So that’s one aspect. Any other aspect of because this is a recurring theme that comes across with I think many founders as well, right—the self-critical nature which is also at some point crosses over with self-awareness, self-critical nature, self-improvement. I think all of them sort of merge into…

77:00 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think more than improvement, Rohin, I think it’s… it’s the self-criticalness come from also the problem-solving aspect. It is right say “Okay, this is an unsolved or a badly solved thing, right? Why have I not solved it? Why didn’t I solve it? What… what triggers could have helped me solve this before? What not? Could I have spotted this in the interviewing stage? Which part right is there another stage of interview that could have helped me do this? What questions could I have asked?” So it just becomes that and I mean interviewing is a very simple thing of this, right? It could be a I mean sales is a bloody sport in terms of losing, right, two or three out of the four deals that are there and winning one or two, right? And you you see more losses than wins, right? And going through a sales process in your mind which is six to nine months long on saying “Hey, what could I have done differently? What could the team have done differently?” And then fixing for it, fixing for myself, etc., I think it comes from all of that.

77:51 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. How do you run your typical week? Like at the beginning of a week, do you have like a fixed calendar? Do you run it yourself? Are you one of those people who, like, prefer having everything calendared or it’s relatively open?

78:05 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s relatively open but my calendar includes a lot of travel, Rohin. So for me I enjoy being in front of a customer. So 60% to 70% of the week I’m in front of a customer. Uh, it helps me two things, right? I think one, of course, it helps build a relationship with a customer. But the bigger thing for me is every conversation actually helps me find something that I can improve within the organization, improve within that context, etc.

78:34 Rohin Dharmakumar: I think this is the point that you said earlier. You said you’re sort of like the bridge between sales and product. So this is that role that you’re talking about because when you’re in a sales conversation and something comes up then you can take it back to product and then you can have that be fixed and so you’re in some senses the feedback loop.

78:49 Rohit Chennamaneni: Correct. So it also gives me leverage, right? I think the being in front of a customer one helps me understand the problem at hand, also problem at scale, right? Like so this could also be a very structural problem that I’m dealing with or that’s going to come up. So I keep my week open for those conversations, at least the travel is fixed for me generally, right? I’m in a few cities. I mean we operate in India, Southeast Asia, Middle East, US. Jayant, my co-founder, is moved to the US, so he takes care of the US market. I’m taking care more of the Asia market now. And travel is fixed. Within that travel, a few client meetings are set up, few piping are set up for myself, and these conversations again I translate back to notes that I send back to my team on say…

79:31 Rohin Dharmakumar: How do you take notes?

79:32 Rohit Chennamaneni: I have a book, paper and pen.

79:34 Rohin Dharmakumar: And then what happens?

79:36 Rohit Chennamaneni: Then I take a picture and send it either to a BA who’s taking care of it or my functional head.

79:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: And then what happens with that?

79:43 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I think one I have not mastered it and this is something that I…

79:47 Rohin Dharmakumar: The reason I’m asking all these questions is because you realize that I’m also trying to figure out because, you know, there is this on one hand you have these super sophisticated tools like Obsidian etc. where people create their second brain on it and everything goes there and it’s all graphs and connected and you can attach AI to it and look it up. On the other hand, you have these people who take handwritten notes and they filled books over the years and I always ask them, “But you know whatever you wrote in those books is in those books, it’s not searchable.” So I’m always trying to figure out what is the balance.

80:21 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, for me I’m not that much of a stickler for every detail, Rohin. So for me while I send notes, right, I put one or two comments saying these two things need to be taken care of. So the notes is for the team that is dealing with that customer to solve for; for me there’s one or two things that I’m taking back, right, which becomes top of mind or which is with the functional head that I want to discuss with. So I leave it with them for my catch-up with them.

80:43 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Pen and paper or…?

80:45 Rohit Chennamaneni: Pen and paper.

80:46 Rohin Dharmakumar: Pen and paper? All right. What is it that truly drives you? What motivates you? You’re in your 11th year now.

80:54 Rohit Chennamaneni: 11th year, yeah. At Darwinbox. Yeah, see I think one there is a there is an excitement that was unstated, stated at different points of time on building a great product company out of India, Rohin. So for us in a way we were very, very proud of all the successes that pharma has had or services has had, and being in Hyderabad as well, but no like a market-leading product player, right? Market leader in a way, and that’s something that we’re excited about building, right? HR technology market leader, global market leader is something that definitely something that we’re very, very excited about.

81:36 Rohit Chennamaneni: Personally, I think I am more driven by the problem statements at hand a lot more than like many things that are there for the year, the three years or the five years, right? Our journey, for example, the next milestone for me is a billion dollars of ARR, right? I am very clear about we’re working towards a billion dollars of ARR, right? And how quickly we get there is a success for us very materially. But otherwise that translates for me still to, “Hey, I’m on the path to becoming number one HR tech player in the world” is how… how the excitement is. Personal excitement doesn’t get driven by those two things on a daily basis. Those…

82:17 Rohin Dharmakumar: Now what’s the… I mean that was my question, that what intrinsically motivates you?

82:21 Rohit Chennamaneni: Intrinsically is problem-solving. I think the new exciting problems on AI, on new markets, something is not working…

82:28 Rohin Dharmakumar: Okay, great. Since you brought up AI, one of the I think dominant strands around AI for the last let’s say 12, 18, 24 months has been how AI disrupts traditional SaaS, right? That AI is going to be a huge threat to traditional SaaS because pricing models will change, people can spin up like you know smaller versions, or AI itself will change the nature of consumption. So how do you… do you see AI as a threat to traditional SaaS? I know you folks have AI in your own products embedded, but from a problem-solving lens, how do you see the intersection of AI into SaaS?

83:07 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think the AI will change the interfaces of how you use SaaS, Rohin, right, if I have to put it very, very short.

83:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: It’ll become conversational?

83:15 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’ll be conversational. It’ll be in one format which probably we don’t even know today, right? It’ll be voice, it’ll be conversational, whatever that is. But fundamentally systems of record…

83:24 Rohin Dharmakumar: Not just a GUI is what you’re largely saying, or not a GUI?

83:26 Rohit Chennamaneni: Not a GUI. It is an interaction way you interact with the systems will change, right? Now that interaction point could be other systems, it could be an interface, it could be a format which is voice or etc., it could be any of those things. But the context or the data is coming from the same set of systems. Now because of the interface changing, will there be a pricing pressure, will there be an advantage is something that we don’t know today. But fundamentally you need the context of these transactions, of this data to be relevant for any answer you’re giving, right? If you think of it as an answer engine, any answer is coming from a certain set of data and a certain set of context of the organization. Now that organization data and context comes from a system of record, right? We as a HR system are a system of record. So systems of record will not go away. How you interact with them will change fundamentally, and what will that… what that impact will be on ways of working, on pricing, etc., we still don’t know, right?

84:29 Rohit Chennamaneni: The last bunch of… the last set of companies to be disrupted will be actually enterprise because, again going back and tying the thread to they won’t take that risk of right disrupting something that’s working, etc. It will be the last ones to be disrupted. I think by then we’ll figure out, at least for us, at least right we’re doing a lot of POCs with a lot of enterprise customers on different agents that we built. Our ability to enter the market unless we’re sleeping on saying AI doesn’t exist… got it. I think most systems of record will be fine because as long as they’re building continuously and testing it with their customers because one, they have access to they have data. They have the best set of environment to experiment.

85:12 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. What are some of the most ambitious imaginations of what HR apps or systems can be if you’re thinking about let’s say the next three to five years? Which obviously includes AI-driven, agentic-driven because we started this conversation by saying the way HR, HRMS, HR tech came about was largely as, in some senses, I need a place where I can see when people joined, when they took leave, it was in some senses very snapshot-driven where like you know system of record, right? Like you rightly said, no one really was incentivized to do employees want to use it because the point was “Look, if somebody wants to take leave they’ll use it, if they don’t want leave they won’t use it, doesn’t matter.” But of course during this time we’ve also gone through the phase where organizations now realize that people and their experiences and how they feel in an organization is very important. So if you kind of take that that people can be empowered by the software that they’re using in an organization and if you bring in AI, agentic AI, etc. into that, what are some of the most imaginative ways where we might see HR tech working over a three to five-year period?

86:28 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, one of the unique advantage—and this is something that we’re betting big on, right, and whether it’ll play out is something that we have to see—right, one of the unique advantage that a HR system has is twofold, right? So I think one, it is used by everybody in the organization. Two, it understands every role within an organization, right? It’s not just a bunch of people in the organization, it is clearly saying, “Hey, Rohin is taking care of operations or sales, somebody else is taking care of product, somebody else is taking care of finance.” So the role architecture and what a role is allowed to do or not allowed to do is very clearly defined in an HR system. Now combine these two and say this is the gateway for any organization to use AI. It becomes very powerful. Because today the biggest problem of AI—like tell… I mean all-encompassing AI platforms—is they don’t understand role, right? So a person sitting in sales, if he queries for saying, “Hey, what is my colleague’s salary?”

87:28 Rohin Dharmakumar: And that’s one of the biggest risks of a chat interface.

87:29 Rohit Chennamaneni: That is the biggest risk of a chat interface, right? Because there’s no great role-based access. But through an HR system, if you can actually translate a role-based access to data and information—which is the biggest impact of AI today, if you think about it, right? The biggest impact of AI is answering questions for you, giving you context, etc., so that you can do your job better, right? Everything else is just transactions and automation of transactions and better transactions.

87:54 Rohin Dharmakumar: Give me some examples of some of these queries that today are really ridiculously hard to perform but you can imagine a scenario where someone could ask something conversationally and just be empowered by the answer that they get to that.

88:07 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I think I mentioned the analytics piece somewhere earlier on, right? So we’ve made three iterations of analytics so far, which is okay the interface is simpler and simpler and simpler so that managers and leaders can drill down data and see it, but the take-off of it has been very less.

88:24 Rohin Dharmakumar: It’s one of the… like it’s like analytics must be one of the things that decision-makers and buyers want, but at the same time it’s hardest to get regular usage on, right? Because you’re trying to… this probably goes back to something that you said earlier, right? You’re trying as a software maker to try and guess what kind of graphs or data or snapshots or dashboards people want. Correct. But what people want is always going to run ahead of whatever you can think of and therefore they’re not using it.

88:54 Rohit Chennamaneni: Exactly, exactly. And that’s where if you think about it, right, now translate to the GenAI era…

89:00 Rohin Dharmakumar: I can just ask it.

89:01 Rohit Chennamaneni: Right, you can just ask. Say, “Hey, who are my top performers who are leaving?” And this is a HR problem.

89:06 Rohin Dharmakumar: Give me a graph over the last two years of all the people who left and their average tenure.

89:09 Rohit Chennamaneni: Average tenure, etc. Allow me to link it to the reasons they left. If I take the gateway example, right, which is this thing, you can say, “Who are my top three people who are leaving? What are the deals that they’re running? Top three sales guys who are leaving this quarter. What are the deals they’re leaving? Who are the people with not enough deals? Translate it to them.” Got it. Right? And this exercise involves like 20 people in the process if you think of it today. How do you translate this to saying over a conversation an empowered manager or a CEO is doing all of this, without having to know what interfaces they have to deal with, where do I have to click, where is the drill down, which system has this information, etc.?

89:53 Rohin Dharmakumar: And the graphing itself can happen on the fly.

89:55 Rohit Chennamaneni: Anywhere, on the fly, right? So that’s the power of translating this whole experience into a very conversational context-driven experience. And I think that’s where we believe HR as a huge advantage because of these two things that I told you, which is all employees on it and we know the roles. We have a very, very high plausibility of translating that to saying “This is the interface of entry.”

90:22 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. To go back to I’d asked you earlier about like motivation, right, and you told me problem-solving. When you’re like you we spoke about resilience, right? What… what’s the thing that’s most helped you? I know it’s like resilience is one of those things where if you ask people everyone says that I want to be resilient but it’s also not one of those things that you can will yourself to be resilient, right? Because it just happens. When you look back at your let’s say 11-year journey now, 11th year, what are the things with the benefit of hindsight that has helped you become more resilient? What has got you getting up after taking a knock? Like you said, the wall is blocked, you can’t just go around it, you can’t just throw more intelligence or money at the problem. What are your I think observations or learnings from resilience?

91:17 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think a lot of attribution I would give to playing sports as a kid, Rohin, right? I think tennis and I know…

91:24 Rohin Dharmakumar: That comes to energy then, is it?

91:25 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s a combination of energy and being comfortable with the idea of losing and going back for it, right? Like going back at it, right? I mean you don’t not go back to a tennis court… playing the game for the game’s sake and enjoying the game, even though you know you’re losing or whatever it is, right? You still go back, right? I think I mean I’ve not seen a situation where, “Oh I’ve lost continuously three times and I say I don’t want to play tennis,” right? Next day morning…

91:48 Rohin Dharmakumar: Have you read this book called “The Infinite Game”?

91:49 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, yeah, of course, I’m in…

91:51 Rohin Dharmakumar: So I mean in some senses that’s what they also say, like you know the book also says that it is a game and it has the rules can be made up as you go along but you should enjoy—the only people who can continue to play are those who want to play and those who value the play itself.

92:07 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah. And I think multiplayer sports or team sports obviously are the best ones for kids to learn, but the single-player games actually like show—I mean are in your face in terms of agency and sport, right? Like you’re like… loss is yours, will is yours. Exactly. You going back is yours. You can’t collective… you can’t collectivize it, you can’t blame somebody else completely. It’s in your face, right? Like the agency part of it is in your face.

92:30 Rohin Dharmakumar: Do you still play?

92:31 Rohit Chennamaneni: I play very less. What tennis only? Tennis only. But because of all the travel etc. and all those being excuses, right, I could definitely be playing more.

92:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: What’s the best time for people to give you feedback?

92:45 Rohit Chennamaneni: So generally we do like a six-month check-in where I have a very clear format where I listen to them in terms of what’s gone well, what’s not gone well.

92:57 Rohin Dharmakumar: So these are what, your direct reports?

92:58 Rohit Chennamaneni: These are direct reports or any critical talent in my L2s as well who I spend time with, right?

93:05 Rohin Dharmakumar: So what, everyone gets into a room or it’s one-to-one?

93:06 Rohit Chennamaneni: One-to-one. One-to-one. And then I talk about what I think in terms of has gone well and not well, and then I take feedback in terms of…

93:16 Rohin Dharmakumar: I’m sure you’ve done this over the years. How has how have you changed from the first time that you did it and when people… I mean I’m sure it’s like a learning for you as well as your colleagues because first time they’re also wondering how honest can I be and the first time you’re getting critical feedback you’re also thinking, “Did I make a mistake?” etc. To now, what has changed in the way you do these six-month sessions?

93:41 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think I give I set expectations early on, Rohin. So every time—like you said, right?—I think the first few times when these conversations happen they’re not very comfortable with giving feedback and how honest they can be, not, “Oh no feedback, nothing is like the usual thing.” I generally tell them now very early on saying, “Hey, I ask for this, right? This is this is way I do feedback, right? Please come prepared and I would love to hear something that I can help with, I can do better, I do well so that I can hold on to those things and what works for you” kind of a thing.

94:13 Rohin Dharmakumar: Over the years is there really something interesting that you can share with us, something that you’ve got as feedback that’s made you reflect and change?

94:21 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, I think everybody or a recurring theme, whichever. See I think one thing which people I have a very strong poker face, Rohin. So it translates to, “Hey, you’re emotionally not available.” Right? And I could be better there, right? Which is I probably have those emotions but I can’t emote as well. It’s a manufacturing defect, but I I mean probably an excuse again, but I think being emotionally available especially when somebody else is being vulnerable, right, is helpful, right? And I think it just helps them be a lot more vulnerable or like be more honest. Unfortunately because I have a poker face, it doesn’t come across while I am completely open, right? People who know me for long enough know this, people who don’t know me well enough struggle with it to saying, “Okay, I’m saying something, is he getting it? Is he looking at it positively, negatively? Does he get what I’m saying?”

95:24 Rohin Dharmakumar: Have you heard of this concept called a personal user manual? Some people like you try that like, you know, I’ve tried it, I gave it to a bunch of my colleagues, I don’t think anyone read it etc., but it’s that, right? Like a user manual for software. You say, “This is who I am. You know in that one of the sections will be ‘I have a poker face, doesn’t mean I’m not listening to,’ right? Like you know,” but just the first thing that came to my mind.

95:46 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, no, actually I I made a manual but it just felt like I mean it…

95:51 Rohin Dharmakumar: It just doesn’t feel natural. I also made it as well, I don’t think many people rely on it. Do you rely on mental models at work and do you have any favorite mental models that you find yourself coming back to again and again, especially around decision-making, risk, loss avoidance, opportunities, sunk cost? Like are there any things that you keep coming back to again and again?

96:11 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think two things which I like to do personally is I try and put a number to things in terms of opportunity, business, and even if it’s the most random calculation to it, right? Whenever there is a choice to be done, decision to be made, etc.

96:28 Rohin Dharmakumar: Can you give me an example?

96:29 Rohit Chennamaneni: So for example, right, do we have to build this module versus protect this module? Right? Like engineering debt versus roadmap choices, right? Engineering debt versus this module, etc. Or this person versus this person for the next role. And a lot of times the emotional part of it, the number of escalations, the loudest voice in the room, right, almost cloud the judgment. So when there is a choice to be made, I try and put a number to it. Now you can come and debate the number to me which obviously gives me better clarity, but I try and put a number to saying, “This is X million dollars or X number of hours,” whatever is that number. I try to make some objective around it, so that works. Of course, the other mental model is around wherever there is a revolving door or a reverse door, I a two-way door, one-way door, I am clear about those things that…

97:19 Rohin Dharmakumar: Are there any one-way doors that you’ve like you know? If I’m not mistaken, you entered the US market what, 18 months ago or 24 months, right? Like you know, so it took a lot of time, right, for you? I mean like you know that would have been what, your ninth year? Yeah, eighth year. Eighth year of operation. Right? So you folks really waited. What… like why didn’t you go to the US earlier?

97:41 Rohit Chennamaneni: See, I think I think the we always wanted to be a global platform, Rohin. So I think the big choice we made is in 2019 when the choice was between going to Southeast Asia, Middle East versus going to the US. And the way we thought about it at that point of time is something that we’re doing in India, which is to do with the market structure, right? A lot of systems going from on-prem to cloud. SAP Oracle being the incumbents, right? So our loyal competition I keep calling them, right? And the best practice not fitting…

98:14 Rohin Dharmakumar: Oh, those are more applicable in these markets?

98:16 Rohit Chennamaneni: In these markets was how we made the choice of Southeast Asia versus a US or a Europe.

98:22 Rohin Dharmakumar: So they most similar to India?

98:24 Rohit Chennamaneni: They’re similar to India in terms of a market construct, right? So a lot of on-prem to cloud movement, same competition in the enterprise space, most of the local players playing in the SME space, etc. So it became that choice, right? But eventually we knew we had to go into the US.

98:38 Rohin Dharmakumar: Because largest market.

98:39 Rohit Chennamaneni: It is the largest market, right? And a lot of decision-making for the rest of the world because of them being headquartered etc. also happens in the US. So I mean there was no doubt we had to do it. When do we do it was always a debate. And I think a combination of three things, right? I think one we got onto the Gartner Magic Quadrant because we were eliminated from an RFP because we were not on the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

98:58 Rohin Dharmakumar: That was the Mohandas Pai of late stage.

99:01 Rohit Chennamaneni: That was the Mohandas Pai of late stage. And it was not funny how painful we were for them because they were like, “If you’re not in the US, you don’t get to play.”

99:13 Rohin Dharmakumar: Oh, so it’s like a chicken and egg?

99:14 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s a chicken and egg, right? Like so we… yeah. But we said, “No, you need to be on the quadrant.” And we were adamant saying, “Hey, we’re winning against an SAP Oracle Workday many places of the world. You put them in the leader quadrant, right? Why can’t we, why can’t we, why can’t we?” They gave in and then they saw the product and then they liked it and then this thing. So Gartner Magic Quadrant happened. Um, the valuation happened, which means we had some money to try a market or… I mean it can’t be a try, right? We have to like we can’t keep doing back and forth, right? We have to this is one-way door in a way if you want to be a global platform. And the third thing for us was Microsoft also invested, which also added some marketing air cover along with the idea that their network was also useful and all of that in that part of the world. A combination of these three felt like that is the right time to do it. Otherwise we were growing at a good rate. So in our head it was like, “Hey, we’re doing this for the long I mean next 10 years or 20 years or whatever, why can’t we do it when we see the right time and all of that?” They just the timing happened like that.

100:09 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. How do you learn?

100:11 Rohit Chennamaneni: So for me I think I learn a lot more from contexts of other sectors and other conversations, Rohin. So I’m while I do a little bit of SaaS learning, I’m in SaaS Boomi and SaaStr, etc. just to get a sense of it. I really enjoy reading and listening to podcasts, etc., which are completely off, right? And this is to do with sectors which I’m not even a part of and that could be business, right? Like I mean Business Wars is something I like, History is something I like, right, some Art and Movies and something I like. So maybe that keeps me active just to I mean you find a confluence of how let’s say a smaller player went against an incumbent in a very different sector gives you a certain set of ideas. Of course, I keep abreast of what is happening in SaaS, but yeah, it’s books and podcasts.

100:58 Rohin Dharmakumar: Books and podcasts, okay. What are… I mean do you have any recommendations of even a single interesting book from recent times that you’ve read?

101:07 Rohit Chennamaneni: I’m reading “Apple in China”. This is a book called “Apple in China” which I…

101:12 Rohin Dharmakumar: Is it a newer one?

101:13 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s a very new one. Uh, it’s about how Apple trained China and then China, right, like the opposite. So I think that I like.

101:21 Rohin Dharmakumar: Might as well be “Tesla in China” or whatever.

101:23 Rohit Chennamaneni: Or whatever, yeah, yeah.

101:23 Rohin Dharmakumar: “Mercedes in China”, “BMW in China”.

101:25 Rohit Chennamaneni: But I I mean for a very dry topic, it’s written very well. Uh, so that’s something I’m enjoying. I’m actually three-fourth in into that book.

101:34 Rohin Dharmakumar: Is there a book that do you gift books?

101:37 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yes.

101:38 Rohin Dharmakumar: What is your favorite or what are your favorite gift books?

101:41 Rohit Chennamaneni: So my favorite book that I gift is “Lessons from History”, Will and Ariel Durant, and I find it fascinating how…

101:48 Rohin Dharmakumar: Are you a history buff?

101:49 Rohit Chennamaneni: I’m a history buff and it’s fascinating how the themes of history recur, and it’s so well captured in that book. So that’s my default. Of course I give out “Sapiens” and I give out “High Output Thinking”, “Management”, right, so I give that out etc.

102:06 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Is there anything that you’re paranoid about?

102:09 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think see the the number of variables is something that troubles me slightly, right? Like I mean just so many moving parts.

102:18 Rohin Dharmakumar: Decision overload, context overload?

102:20 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s more the unknowns. It’s the blind spots when you are across the world in so many locations and so many people, etc. Is that that subtle paranoia? Otherwise like the decision part of it is clear, right? Like at least I have a priority mode on where teams are taking care of some things and some things only come to me and some things I’m taking care of. As soon as as long as I am in front of a customer and they are not thrashing me, I’m like, “Okay, we’re doing something fine, we’re okay,” right? Like and I am very, very paranoid about that whole thing that I heard from customers before I started the company. Saying “Aur kaun hai?” or like saying “Oh, right, Darwinbox is just about okay,” right? So I am very, very paranoid about the fact that I don’t become an SAP or an Oracle.

103:03 Rohin Dharmakumar: Somebody who’s the next Darwinbox.

103:04 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, yeah.

103:07 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. And more from the customer side.

103:09 Rohit Chennamaneni: I’m not thinking about the product that will come and replace us but I really don’t like how they spoke about the SAP Oracles Workdays. I don’t want them to speak about Darwinbox like that.

103:21 Rohin Dharmakumar: Interesting. So is it do you do anything different so that that doesn’t happen or that you’re able to catch that?

103:28 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, see I think there are many. I’m guessing you do NPS surveys and all. All of those things. I think I think we do all the standard stuff. I think where and as much as possible is something that I encourage all my team members to be in front of customers as much as possible. Whether you’re in engineering, whether you’re in design, whether you’re in product, whether you’re in CS and implementation of course are there in front of a customer. Because for me whatever information is coming in is something that is valuable. And now I hope, for example with AI, if we are able to record a lot of calls and all, right, like Teams calls which are all transcribed, it gives me better sense is what I hope for.

104:04 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. What’s your personal usage of AI like? What tools do you use?

104:08 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I’m on Claude and ChatGPT, those are the two I use. Images sometimes I use Gemini.

104:13 Rohin Dharmakumar: What are you as a co-founder…? I’m assuming research is one.

104:18 Rohit Chennamaneni: Yeah, research, product research or some market research that I do, general search queries I definitely do. Categories of products, specifically in AI, I ask AI itself. I also like to build a few stuff, right? Like I have a very a bunch of small-small apps that I use, like like a journaling app that I I used to pay for and use which I built on my own. So things like that I’ve done, but that’s about it. But I I keep I keep enough agents running which give me information that I used to go and search at a point of time as a summary at every week.

104:53 Rohin Dharmakumar: What does that mean?

104:54 Rohit Chennamaneni: So like there are… there are things that I’m interested in, right?

104:57 Rohin Dharmakumar: Is it the equivalent of in the old Google search days you would have set up these alerts?

105:04 Rohit Chennamaneni: Correct. Alerts. So I used to have alerts also very actively, now I made it more agentic and more summarized.

105:10 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Interesting. Uh, what are weekends like for you?

105:14 Rohit Chennamaneni: So I work on Saturdays till about 3:00, Rohin. So that’s my I think interviewing/do internal stuff time. Then from 4:00 onwards I’m with my friends, right, whether that is different bunch of friends from Hyderabad and born and brought up in a city always has that advantage—school friends and wide variety of friends. So I’m with my friends either having a coffee or a beer or whatever that is in the evening. Sunday’s always with my kids.

105:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Your kids are nine and three.

105:43 Rohit Chennamaneni: Nine and three. I have two girls, nine and three. So mostly with them either do playing something with them or teaching them something or yeah, it’s just any random, like or just lazying with them. So whatever it is, but Sunday I’m I try and be fully off from work.

105:59 Rohin Dharmakumar: You said earlier that you’re not one of those deep mode people. So do you have like any kind of a focus mode or like you know do you have like like you know switch off, be in a room alone time, read a book, listen to music, something like that or it’s just flows through?

106:12 Rohit Chennamaneni: No, no, it just flows through like everywhere.

106:16 Rohin Dharmakumar: On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with your life?

106:19 Rohit Chennamaneni: Seven.

106:22 Rohin Dharmakumar: All right. Doing what makes you lose sense of all time?

106:28 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think sport and kids. Those two will be I think sport more unless like I’m now I’m aging, which is where I really get a sense of time that I’ve tired. But otherwise I can keep playing.

106:41 Rohin Dharmakumar: Is there a morning of the week that you look forward to the most?

106:44 Rohit Chennamaneni: Saturday.

106:46 Rohin Dharmakumar: Hmm. You look forward to Saturday morning. Why? Because of the second half or because of the first half?

106:51 Rohit Chennamaneni: First half actually. Because first half gives me time to think and time to go through priorities, time to do what I want to work on rather than any fire that I have to deal with at that point of time. So I know for sure…

107:01 Rohin Dharmakumar: In some senses it’s like a reflection planning time for yourself and you look forward to that.

107:05 Rohit Chennamaneni: And the whole day is great, right? Like so then first half is work on your own and then there’s friends in the evening.

107:11 Rohin Dharmakumar: I got it. When do you read?

107:13 Rohit Chennamaneni: All over. Like I I travel almost two to three weeks a month. Got it. So what is this physical books or iPad? Physical books, always physical books. And so flights, uh on the flight to Bangalore I was reading “Apple in China”, right? Uh flights or in hotel rooms in the evening.

107:33 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. Is there anything that you’ve geeked about recently? Like any new hobby or interest, uh…?

107:41 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think one thing around AI in filmmaking is something that I’ve been randomly reading about, like going very deep in understanding how this whole how music and voice and all of that happen.

107:53 Rohin Dharmakumar: Through YouTube or books?

107:54 Rohit Chennamaneni: YouTube, ChatGPT itself read, right, playing around with tools, etc. I find it very fascinating how filmmaking of the future will look. It’s more geeking out, not that I want to do something about it specifically, but it’s also that—I mean you know Telugu industry, I’m a movie buff as well. And movies are a big in Telugu land. So it’s just natural rub-off I think, like I see a lot of it so I see go what can happen here, what can happen there.

108:21 Rohin Dharmakumar: Got it. If you were locked in a room for 24 hours without any internet, what would you do?

108:27 Rohit Chennamaneni: No book also?

108:29 Rohin Dharmakumar: No, you can have books.

108:30 Rohit Chennamaneni: I can read books? Books

108:33 Rohin Dharmakumar: Most of the times when you’re eating out, what do you end up ordering?

108:36 Rohit Chennamaneni: If in Hyderabad, biryani.

108:39 Rohin Dharmakumar: All right, that that’s actually I should have guessed that, right? Like yeah. How old are you?

108:43 Rohit Chennamaneni: I am 40. Just turned 40.

108:46 Rohin Dharmakumar: Has parenting taught you anything about yourself?

108:50 Rohit Chennamaneni: I think a lot of layers of what I am is conditioned is what I learned. Not specifically about myself, but like from how kids learn or how kids form personalities and learn was something very fascinating that I’ve seen with my elder one and younger one and the difference between both, etc.

109:11 Rohin Dharmakumar: Uh I I don’t still understand that.

109:13 Rohit Chennamaneni: So… so for example, right, like how apparently the the only fear when a person is or a baby is born is falling down. Every other fear is created. And how those fears get created is something that I’ve just been observing, right? You can’t control it because you just live in a society, right, like it comes from anywhere.

109:31 Rohin Dharmakumar: Very frustrating as a parent because you…

109:33 Rohit Chennamaneni: It’s frustrating as a parent, but you know, right, like… so for me I think the at least I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea that, okay, the struggle is better when it’s earlier rather than later in life. Uh, so it’s okay, right? Like I mean all of us went through some struggles as this thing. You don’t have to overprotect against it is something that I’ve now more comfortable with the idea. Initially I was like, “Oh damn it, like why are you adding fear? Why are you adding fear?” Like I I would have loved for them to be fearless, right, rightly so.

110:03 Rohin Dharmakumar: Rohit, thank you so much for this wonderful chat. It was great talking to you.

110:07 Rohit Chennamaneni: Thanks so much, Rohin. I figured out so many things I have never explored until you started asking me. So thank you.