[MUSIC] Sramana, many of the people with whom you are involved on One Million by One Million aren't sitting in Silicon Valley. They're sitting in India or Africa or Latin America. >> All over the place. >> All over the world. How are things different there as these ideas apply? The need for bootstrapping is far more acute because in Silicone Valley, at least, there is a very active, very mature seed capital ecosystem. Most of the world doesn't have a seed capital ecosystem, forget about a mature seed capital ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> So the amount of seed capital available is very low. You're bootstrapping needs, you're requirement that you bootstrap your company is much higher and much more urgent, so you'd better bootstrap. If you're in Kazakhstan, last week we had a couple of students from Kazakhstan with a decent concept. They have some interesting, and they have a professor who's mentoring them and this professor brought them to One Million by One Million last week. I thought it was a fine idea, they obviously need to follow the method of building a business. But is this company ever going to get funded? No, probably not. But who cares? They're doing a little startup in Kazakhstan, it's okay. This is the kind of stuff that is going to develop economies. It's not these one-off home runs that are going to develop economies. It's these companies in mass that are going to develop economies. That's why we're doing One Million by One Million. >> Do you find these ideas playing out in both business to business and consumer kinds of markets or are they more commonly used in one or the other? Business to business, for sure, we very much like bootstrapping in that context. E-commerce is a market that is seeing immense about of bootstrapping. It's very easy to bootstrap niche e-commerce business, and numerous entrepreneurs are doing that on the B2C side. It's the ad supported businesses that don't do well in this mode. >> Yup. >> Because for ad supported businesses to work, you need millions of users and getting to millions of users- >> Before you can sell your first ad, you need millions of users, yeah. >> Exactly. Getting to millions of users is an expensive process and that one, whether it's mobile apps that are ad supported or web apps that are ad supported, that sector, it's very hard to bootstrap in. This is a business model that I do not like very much. >> We've said it kind of works from both B2B and B2C, what about goods versus services? Do you see more success stories in services? More in goods? Or do you see lots of success in both of those arenas as well? >> Both. We see boats. As I mentioned to you earlier, bootstrapping using services, bootstrapping products using services- >> A great way to go. >> Is a very effective methodology of bootstrapping. >> Right. I sit in London and you sit in Silicon Valley and both of those are places where there's, at least, relatively speaking, a reasonably well developed ecosystem to raise money for entrepreneurs. It's awfully tempting I think to do so when you kind of think well money grows on trees. The guy down the street just raised money and the guy across the street almost has, he's going to get it tomorrow. How do you get people in our kinds of settings to say, take another path? How do you do that? >> It's very hard and I think part of these cultures, I think London definitely is that, New York is that, Silicon Valley for sure is they've become financed driven cultures and these have become speculation driven cultures. A lot of people who are playing in these cultures are not really the true entrepreneurs, they are actually the speculators. When the financial crisis happened in 2008, I wrote a column in Forbes, which was on the cover, on the homepage of Forbes for one month and it was one of my most successful articles. It was one of the most successful articles on Forbes, actually. It was called Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw. The capitalism that I bought into as a 16 year old when I first encountered Ayn Rand, I grew up in Calcutta, which was a socialist, communist kind of environment. I was thrilled to discover Ayn Rand and this celebration of capitalism. That type of capitalism that I fell in love with is a celebration of the value creator. But the capitalism that dominates the world today is a capitalism that mainly rewards speculators. Unfortunately, the world that we are seeing today emerging many of these financially oriented hubs like London, new York, Silicon Valley. In particular those three and I'm dreadfully irritated to see that Bangalore is going that route as well. >> As is Mumbai, I spoke to an angel there this morning, same thing. >> This is becoming this speculation driven culture instead of building value, satisfying customers and being paid for it. Instead, they're looking for exit strategies. There's a difference between a business model and exit strategy. Who has told you, and why should you buy into this nonsense that you have to build a billion dollar company and dominate the world? Why is that the definition of success? Why is the definition of success not build something useful, take care of your customers, build revenues, build profits, build a sustainable company, take care of your employees and do something meaningful, maybe have impact? For me, the reason One Million by One Million means so much to me is because I believe we are making a huge impact. We touch a quarter million people around the world today already and that's the message that we're spreading, the amount of learning that we have been able to propagate at a very large scale is very meaningful to me. >> Yeah. >> The reason you're being fed this nonsense that you're going to have to build a billion dollar business is because VCs want that. The VC is for their model to work, the stupid portfolio model to work. >> They need it. >> Their success metric is building billion dollar businesses. Why is your success metric billion dollar businesses? >> When people come to you, and hear about One Million by One Million and decide maybe they should come on board, how does the process work? What do you do? >> One Million by One Million is a 100% virtual accelerator. The first way for you to encounter the program is actually coming to our blog and just hanging there and reading some stuff, and you'll get a feel for the tone and the rigor because we don't do foo foo, stupid stuff. >> [LAUGH] >> You have to use some intellectual horsepower to engage with the program and that's a requirement. Then the next thing you could do is try out one of our free mentoring roundtables that happen every Thursday morning at 8 AM Pacific time. I just got off finishing our 285th episode of this. What we do is, we very often we have a guest speaker, today we had Adam Singolda, the founder of Taboola. Adam has a couple of hundred million dollars in revenue right now. This is a unicorn company and I've known Adam for a while. He was our guest and he shared his wisdom and then we do mentoring, essentially. We had three entrepreneurs today, one from London, one from one, a Kenyan who now is in San Francisco. These are the three entrepreneurs who had sent in their slides ahead of time and they pitched, and I basically coached them. It's in a reality show mode, so the people who are listening in the room are also learning. It's a web x call, so it's essentially an acceleration program but we don't don't fund companies. We connect companies to funding if they are fundable. Many companies are not fundable, they shouldn't be raising money but they will be successful as bootstrap businesses. But if you are a company that is fundable and want to raise funding, we will connect you to our network of investors. >> I really want to thank you for coming on board with us, for talking about your perspective on this ideas and making it so crystal clear that this really is a viable alternative for the participants that are on our program. Thank you so much for coming. Fantastic to have you, and I look forward to seeing you soon. >> Thank you for having me, John. Take care. Bye. [MUSIC]
