Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Pawan. Pawan is the CEO and co-founder at cultos Global.
cultos Global is an engagement platform driving user engagement via Web3 solutions. He has previously worked with Bosch as well as Suzuki Digital and he has achieved quite a bit in his professional career so far. He holds several patents.
He has been awarded as a thought leader. He’s received awards from Bosch as well. He is an IAM alum and he’s also done an MIT boot camp in 21.
So yeah, what they are building at cultos is very very interesting because it focuses on consumer engagement, on user engagement vis-a-vis a Web3 solution like I mentioned before. So this was a very interesting conversation. We talked about user insights, user behavior, Web3 applications at the moment and how Pawan kind of sees these evolve in the coming decade.
I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Pawan, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today.
How are you doing? Thank you Tarusha. We’re doing great and yeah, look forward to this session with you. Likewise, I’m also looking forward to this session.
For our listeners, can you give us a little background about yourself and what inspired you to become an entrepreneur in the tech space and how did you sort of move into Web3? Sure Tarusha. So again, nice connecting with you and also for this session. Thanks for inviting me.
I started my career just to talk about it way back in 2007 as an engineer, just to give a background to talk about what made me get into entrepreneurship. I need to give a big talk about myself and my education and my background in terms of how do I grew up. Fundamentally, I started off as a typical Bangalore kid who did his education here and a computer science engineer.
And like any Bangalore engineer, I started with IT, started off my career working on car multimedia that’s in an automotive domain. I started off in a company called Bosch, Germany, India, both. And then somewhere I felt apart from tech, I wouldn’t want to create something that curiosity was always there in terms of what do I look at.
And that’s where I did a one-year program from my engineering management Bangalore. And this was in general management. And I started working on strategy topics in Bosch.
And this is where I got introduced to new areas, which was at that stage was beginning to be incubated. And I had this opportunity to work with a very vast, diverse team of stakeholders, where we incubated different kinds of businesses from your healthcare to energy to food. And that operational experience and working with some of the leaders gave me that push like, okay, I can do something beyond what I was doing.
And that’s when I realized that I should start getting deeper into the topics. And that’s typically that instigated me or triggered me to start focusing on tech as an enabler for business. Till that time, I was probably looking at one dimension of these topics.
And I started working on a topic of AI personalization then, which again, which was an entrepreneur venture within Bosch, did a program in digital business. It’s an online program from Columbia and MIT Sloan. Went to US, had a good stint there.
It got the exposure to how things work. Came back. Again, after I came back, I started working with Bosch India CTO and current MD.
And post that, I moved to Suzuki Digital, where I started working on digital platforms. I was the heading the technology for Suzuki Digital. It was a new company set up by Suzuki Global.
And during this time is when Tarusha, I started getting exposure to the funding space as well. So we were trying to create a social impact fund and that ecosystem is something that where I got involved along with Cultos. I think we’ll talk about Cultos also, where I started advising the Cultos, which the product was built in US.
And that was my first trust with external world outside of the corporate, because most of the innovations till that time I was doing was within a corporate. And during this entire journey from schooling till the day I come towards Suzuki Digital, there has been an incremental learning and an understanding and self-evolution, what I call it as in terms of what I want to do and who am I doing, who I am doing it for. So that also changes.
So that’s the aspect that bring in. And then I was part of this founding team of Sobers Venture Studio, where we started looking at rural India, tier two, tier three. And that gives you the goal or to purpose, like what are you doing it for, the creation of wealth.
And when Cultos happened as an advisory and things fell in place, that guided me internally also to say, okay, let me take the step forward and jump into the full bandwagon. And then Cultos happened, we raised funds and we are here today. Okay, it’s been quite a journey for you.
And it’s been entire art, right? You’ve studied, you went abroad, you worked for MNCs. How did that particular experience like working in Boston, Suzuki, really shape your approach to what you guys are doing at Cultos as well as the Venture Studio? It’s a very important question. Thanks, you asked that.
See, each had a learning, right? When I was in Bosch or Suzuki or when we were trying to create the Venture Studio, it still runs. My other ex-colleagues runs that. See, in corporate, again, it’s not like startup world is different from corporate.
You learn, there is the ecosystem is there, but the ability to look at facilities, the ecosystem in a more relaxed way is what you get in a corporate. You can, again, I call it self-discipline, you can be highly accountable, you can run at the same pace like a startup, but what you learn is scale. How do you scale things? Because the peer and the discipline of processes, when you do it for a period of time, especially with working with some of the top leaders, you gain that experience of understanding the method to make it executable, right? That’s the most important thing.
So most of the people will have ideas, but how do you execute it? And executing it the right way is something that’s more important. And both Bosch and Suzuki in that way are two different organizations, but again, the process part becomes very important there. And everything from your learning, from the way you identify a problem statement, everything has to go through a approach and you need to validate it.
And that aspect of being grounded comes in when you start off with a corporate rather than jumping off from college directly into your startup. You have that mix of aggression and that balance is always there. And that’s the bigger learning.
Once I moved out of Suzuki, the transition was also supported by, again, thanks to mentors. You need mentors, you need good set of mentors, you don’t need too many advisors, you need to identify the right people. And that also helps because of your strength, past experience and the network.
And this what happens, Tarusha, typically most of the, if you look at most of the startups today or how their work is, right? When you have an experience as a baggage, where you have learned things, right? You know, probably like, what are the things you should not do? And it’s more important to know your learnings or what I call it as what mistakes or, again, you can call it mistakes, learnings, what you have done in the past and how to not repeat it. And that comes up with the industry experience. Yeah, I think I completely concur with you that there is a good amount of balance that is required perhaps to really build your vision to fruition.
Like, you know, that there are folks, as you mentioned, who get into entrepreneurship right out of college and everything is new to them and they make their own set of mistakes. Obviously, I think very different set of mistakes will be made by folks who’ve been in the corporate space or dealt with innovative products and then they are, you know, setting out to build their vision perhaps. But experience does, you know, come as like a force that would help you perhaps to build your vision.
So, can you tell me a little about Kaltos as a platform and what it does? What is the vision behind it? Kaltos as a platform, Tarusha, is a Web3 loyalty tech. And what we are here trying to do is enable brands and consumer engagement. And we enable an ecosystem here, I would put it that way.
And we have a traditional loyalty typically where you get, again, to just put it in a layman’s language, you go to a specific shop, you get points, or you go to different apps where they give you so many thousands of points or even lakhs of points these days. But there has to be a value associated with it, right? And Kaltos is trying to solve this problem of like, how do you give this value of brand association for a consumer by giving a liquidity value to it? Because we also have a crypto part of it. And what we are trying to do here is look at how if you and consumer can engage with the brands outside of their platform also.
And that’s one part of it. And we are going to come up with a launch, something called as Kaltos pretty soon, where brands and consumers can interact on the platform. And this is again, this is a B2B, where we’ll be working with the brands for this.
And this is where Kaltos will help interoperability as well, along with liquidation possibility. So fundamentally, you have different traditional models, where loyalty, there is expiry date attached to it. You don’t know as a consumer, the value of the points, what you have got over a period of years, sometimes, especially with airlines and different segments.
Kaltos is trying to, in its way, solve this problem or attempt to solve this problem by giving transparency to this, because this is built on a blockchain. And there is a transparency with respect to real time values that will be given or points that will be assigned. And second, your brand associations, what we call as nano influencers these days.
So that is something that’s going to happen, because we will be able to give consumers for their brand association, be it in terms of reuse, light shares on third party platforms. So in this, that’s what Kaltos does. And we are headquartered out of Dubai and Bangalore.
And we have raised our initial set of funds. And we are, as we speak, we are in our ongoing round, which is a bridge round before we launch our platform and then eventually go for a public listing in the crypto exchange. All right.
Okay. So this is interesting. So what you’re building is basically, so would it be fair to say it’s something like a payback, which was in the web2 world for web3? Because you are also letting brands create their own tokens, obviously, with payback, those were just the payback coins that you used to get with any purchase.
But can that analogy be drawn? Answer is yes. But what we do a bit more is we are going to create an ecosystem of brands and consumers. The backend of any brand token would be Kaltos, which has a liquidity value or a dollar value associated with, because we’ll be listing in the ICO.
Okay. So the token that the projects are creating on your platform, they are, that’s like in a closed loop, like on the platform itself. Yes.
So we will be, we will be specifically working with brands for this. So each brand would have a different approach probably. But at the end of the day, it would be a white label with brands.
Okay. All right. But the ecosystem that we are going to create, that is for different brands to use.
It’s like a marketplace. Okay. Okay.
So can you walk me through the process like end to end? See how typically how it works is, if there is a brand, which is a traditional, which has a traditional point system takes any mom and shop store or which wants to go digital, at the end of the day, again, something that I would like to add is once we have, once we listed in the exchange, we are officially, we’ll have a dollar value associated with it. And technically we’ll be a FinTech. So fundamentally visualize ourselves as a Google pay where instead of dealing in rupees, you probably deal in tokens.
That’s how it is going to be. So anyone and everyone who would like to digitize their current systems and want to engage with their consumers by incentivizing them right on the digital platforms for their digital behavior, or even for transactions, be it their website or be it with their app, Kaltos will be back and integrated as part of, it’s a simple API at the end of the day. And we will have our wallet.
And if you do a transaction with the specific brand or, and also engage with the brand after the transaction, sharing your experience on different social media platforms, which where we are integrated and as per our arrangement with the brands, you will be incentivized with tokens. And each of this, there’ll be probably tire systems with brands from our past experience, what we have seen. And each brand based on the number of tokens or points, what you would have accumulated would probably give it to so much of Kaltos tokens.
If you are directly going to exchange it from the exchange where we have listed, or it can be interoperable with different brands on our platforms or the partners of the branch. So fundamentally these two things can happen. And Kaltos once listed will be interoperable with both the fiat coin and Bitcoin as well.
So typically it’s a simple journey where like your current loyalty points, how we are going to use it. The for end consumer, not much will change from a usage point of view, but you will get a benefit of incentivization. Okay.
All right. Understood. Can you tell me a little about the kind of challenges you face while building a platform like this? Because again, there are several, like obviously you have the validation, right? It’s a product and an idea that does work.
There are parallels in Web 2 as well as Web 3. So this question is two faceted actually. One is what were the challenges and two, what is your USP? See, again, I’ll come to the challenges, again, challenges first and then go to the USP. See, typically if you try to build a me too kind of topics, right? It’s difficult to scale.
So you definitely need to identify what is the business problem we are trying to solve. Yes, we have something called as a Web 3 technology. We have a generative AI part that will come in future for us, but is there a business problem to be solved? Yes.
The current traditional loyalty system is broken. And that’s something that we understand. We are validated.
We have done our product market fit, our pilots in the US with some of the brands. We are discussing with different players as well. What we have identified is the value of loyalty for the consumer, what he feels and the way the brand is able to engage with consumers with a traditional loyalty, which has become transactional.
And there is a challenge or a need for it to be addressed. So that comes to need. And when it comes to the current players in the market, we have done again extensive studies because Kaltos has been there for quite some time and we have built a product, we have raised funds.
What we see is in the market, there are different types of players. One who in specific segments like gaming, where it’s predominantly crypto driven, where people more focusing on the crypto part of it than the tech part of it. What we are trying to do is use the tech to solve the business problem, which is give the transparency to both the brands and the consumers in the way they engage, which is typically difficult to do with a standard web 2 technologies, especially with real time.
Second, the value associated with respect to Kaltos is not static, right? It’s dynamic. So there is always incentivization and motivation for a consumer to engage with the brand and brands are able to tailor make specific and better campaigns to the consumers because of this. And this is something that gives us the edge, what we are seeing and also with respect to data privacy.
Since we are built on web 3 and distributed ledger, there is privacy with respect to the first party data that the brands access and nowhere Kaltos owns the data. It’s consumers data and which is owned by brands as per the GDPR guidelines, based on the acceptance of what is happening. And this is one part of the story.
A second with Kaltos, what we are trying to do is create an ecosystem or a platform where any interaction with a brand for an end consumer is incentivized. And that’s probably a game changer that once Kaltos launches this platform for the brands, we’ll be able to see that. And in all these cases, we’ll take an incremental approach of product market fit because I’ve seen it, right? I’ve seen it in the past when you just launch a software or put your bets on the technology, it doesn’t work.
And I’m a firm believer in that technology is just an enabler and are you solving the real business problem? And that’s something that we are trying to do, especially in verticals like retail, real estate, and to an extent, mobility as well. That’s awesome. So, you know, what parts of the platform are currently live? Can you tell us a little about that? And then can you perhaps also tell us a little about, you know, the one great lesson that you guys have learned while while building this, which can be derived from the challenges itself? Oh, sure, sure.
So, see, with respect to the wallet itself, and implement what to call for a specific brand, where the tokens can be issued, this part is already live with different pilots that we had seen. And now what we are going to do is launch this Kaltos as a platform and also listed in the exchange that will close loop it, that’s when the big launch will happen with the live branch, that’s what now we are probably in the testing phase of this. And the biggest, that’s the first part of the question.
Second part of the lessons, but I feel with respect to entrepreneurship in general, and with Kaltos, what we have, what I have done here from my past is not hurry, right? You don’t need to execute 100 customers, we are very selective, we are selective with respect to both investor community as well the kind of people whom we are talking to, because we have a vision of scale and sustainability, I always say, right, the first phase of a startup is about making it secure, that means you need to survive. First, you need to survive, I call it the three years survive. And then you need to sustain it, and sustain it with solving the right business problems, methodically, and then scale.
Yeah, again, this is from the, again, each startup will have a different persona, each startup founders will have a different persona. So, in our case, with my co-founding team of Sunil Nair, who has had three decades of experience in retail in Middle East, Adip Samara, who has been part of Karim before, and when Karim Uber acquisition happened, he was there, he has been part of many successful startup exists. And Sangeeta Das, who has been one of the early employees of Infosys, she’s PWC London, she has experience of that.
And she has scaled businesses. So, with a very strong team of both young and experienced people. I think that’s one of the learnings I have felt that is important, which probably I missed it in some of my previous startups, where you need people who know to do see, for example, when it comes to doing business, right? People who knows business development, you need people who are experts there, you be from a tech point of view.
So, you need to identify the right set of people and take it at the right time, you know, you don’t need to hurry, you know, nobody’s asking you to hurry, you need to do it right. That’s the most important part. Most important learning I have had, where learnings in terms of taking it at the right timing is extremely important, not hurrying it, and getting the right set of stakeholders from your team to investors to customers has to be right upfront.
And you need to experiment, but you need to experiment with caution. That’s one of the main points that I would look at. Yeah.
All right. Okay. That’s good advice.
I think those are good suggestions overall. Can you tell us a little about the traction that you’ve seen so far on the platform? See, it’s Middle East, there’s a lot of traction because crypto is also a legal tender there, technically with respect to retail and real estate. In India, especially with our partnership with Tata LXC, where we are looking at mobility as a segment and also different segments, we are seeing the initial traction.
Southeast Asia, another market that we are targeting now. We start with these three markets and then take it further. We will be onboarding different brands as part of our B2B marketplace onto this platform across these segments, predominantly retail and real estate to focus with to start and some amount of mobility.
And then that’s where we are going to take it forward. And today, most of the brands would want to associate with their consumers in a better way. And at a board level, the kind of analytics they are getting is a bit skewed.
And that’s also we understand from the experience. Yes, we in general talk about data, AI, generative AI, but the kind of data you get and the kind of engagement you do also defines the kind of recommendations that you can give both to the board level and also to the consumers through the campaigns. And that’s where we are targeting here.
Okay. So that is wonderful that you are first trying to conquer these certain geographic niches and then move forward. I think that is a sensible thing to do.
Can you tell me a little about the tech stack itself? Which chain are you building on? And do you have any plans to perhaps expand and move on from that particular chain to others? Uh, not really, because see, I’ll put it this way, right? Web3 is my base. So we are built on Ethereum Polygon chain. But what I’m going to build on top of it is an analytics layer, which will be helping the brands.
See, in one of my previous stint in the corporate, I had worked on a AI topic where we were trying to give personalization, right? The challenge there was who gives me the data? Nobody’s going to give me the data for free. No brands will give me the data because it’s their data. Here, what happens is because of the wallet that we have, that data transactions goes through this and we are incentivizing the consumers because of this, the data is with us.
So we will be able to churn the behavior out of this data and analytics, behavior analytics out of this data and give recommendations to the brands to drive specific campaigns. And this evolution of cultos would happen in this space. With respect to the Web3, it would, again, we’ll do a crypto listing.
That’s something that will happen. Probably, we will not go beyond the chain. We don’t see a need for it with both respect to cost economics and with respect to what we already have.
We have already built it. But closing the loop would be more in terms of the way we look on top of this, what we are going to build. The platform is going to evolve where the brands, influencers, consumers will be there on our platform and that will be used by the different brands who are my consumers, who are my customers, technically.
Right. So these tokens that you know, your token as well as the tokens that you are creating for these brands, the platform is creating, these are ERC-20 in nature, they’re ABM compatible? Yeah. So this will be listed in the exchange and this is compatible.
Again, as I told you, this is interoperable once we list it with both Bitcoin and fiat coin. Okay. All right.
Awesome. So can you tell us a little more about this partnership that you have with Tata? Because you mentioned it very briefly. I understand that there is a plan to integrate NFTs with cloud data platforms.
Is that correct? Can you tell me a little about it? Can you talk about the significance of this partnership? Yeah. See, NFTs is probably, I would leave it to the brands or your mobility players or retail players discretion. They might want it, they might not want it because there has been a cycle with the maturity curve with NFTs.
Also, there was a boom at some stage and today again, it comes back and goes. So that is one part of it, especially with respect to Tata. Again, the business problem is what we try to attack first, right? So we are trying to see how we can create a digital passport.
See, for example, there’s a Tether platform of Tata LXC, which gives you the driving behavior and a driver score, how it can be created. And at the end of the day, all this can sit as part of a single token where Cultos will be able to get the digital behavior and net we have something called as a digital passport or for Tarusha or anyone Pawan which can be used anywhere be it your service stations can be go as this thing as usage based insurance in the ecosystem within the brand ecosystems of a mobility player or a where you can access some of these data points tokenize this and then incentivize so fundamentally you’re covering the entire gamut be it with respect to safe driving also can be looked at and services the entire ecosystem.
Right okay that’s brilliant that is a very good use case as well i think so how far along are you with this with the execution of this see we are again as it’s told right so we are now trying to create the ecosystem around this because the most important part of web3 tokens we have the business problem whatever we are solving is the interoperability part also where if you once issue a token there has to be and someone who is to accept it also and that’s the ecosystem that we are trying to build it before we launch it into the market and this is also a big part of it so fundamentally when we build the platform the tech partners will be part of that and different brands can use it so there has been keywords right so that that’s the beauty of not launching it too early or not not executing it too fast so because of our depths of experience with the team we were able to do a proper product market fit before we go for this kind of a launch otherwise the way we could have we would have structured is a bit different which i have done that mistake in the past with some of my previous ventures also.
And that’s that’s where we have taken all those learnings i can i can personally see the learnings that is happening in cultos compared to my previous ventures or some of the startup which i’ve seen when i was when i was evaluating them as part of the vc yeah right okay awesome so can you can you tell us a little about uh you know you’ve mentioned how incorporating web3 and utilizing web3 but are you also using ai in in the platform or the user flow itself uh answer is yes see for as i told you uh my web3 part is built what we are trying to create is a platform and on top of this platform is where interactions with the brands and the consumers will happen and that’s where i’ll have a lot of data and that’s where i will be involved in fact we’ll be going as deep as looking at dynamic rewards which which will be generated probably as a possibility in future again these are all part of the roadmap that will be launching once our main platform is launched and which brands can make use of.
Okay brilliant so can you tell me a little about how you so now i want to zoom out a little bit okay from the space in general i want to understand uh your personal perspective about these emerging trends like there are ai tokens now in web3 uh there are several other trends that have come up what are the most exciting ones that you uh feel would have a huge influence on consumer apps and brand consumer engagement uh see having seen this space for quite some time now.
i think i’ve been seeing this space from 2015 especially the retail and mobility space see what have realized both in the u.s market the middle east india and southeast asia europe is a bit more mature market to from adoption perspective it all depends on the markets the way middle east adopts a technology the way southeast asia adopts a technology is different from the way india adopts a technology if you ask me about india as a market uh i would say from a tokenization perspective yes but again because of the regulatory reasons crypto will take some time uh but with even with respect to ai tokens uh in indian market it will take some time because of uh the value associated with token also becomes more important with respect to the tech itself uh overall yes generative has taken a big leap but again it it comes down to the fundamentals of what business problem are you solving
And if for that business problem if yeah i and ai tokens enables it fantastic it’s happening in middle east with respect to web3 idea in india is a generative has taken a big step but with web3 it’s still in the initial stages for me because the close looking is important whatever tokens comes about how the interoperability layer layer plays around is the most critical point and this is where uh if you look at most of the startups web3 startups are based outside of india.
Also if you look at the trend at least a successful one and uh that also makes uh because of the ecosystem that the dubai and abu dhabi government gives also that’s one of the reasons in india tokenization is picking up we have gift cities where we have even a what you call there the facilities are coming about it will take some time but overall i would still come back to the business problem you’re solving and more than the business problem even if you are solving a business problem.
You cannot say i have a great software this will sell on its own the ecosystem is important like you take an ev right just building an ev bike doesn’t make any difference you need to have the entire ecosystem around it and that that’s the most important part yeah i agree i think yeah there’s there has to be an entire ecosystem there has to be the timing has to be right the market has to be right the consumer needs to be potentially ready uh for something like that to take off so i completely concur with you there uh can you tell me a little about uh the various advisory roles that you do and what kind of uh you know if somebody who’s listening in what wishes to perhaps get some mentorship or help from you how can you do that yeah sure see uh fundamentally uh again so i am part of something called us again it’s a venture builder called petan uh which is started by jorgen haas is a very seasoned um again corporate leader turned entrepreneur uh is best uh germany i am on their advisory board there we have different kinds of startup again most of them are around commercial startups in different spaces web3 ai um there again it’s a european ecosystem.
Which we are we are trying to expand it to middle east as well uh not yet in india that’s one uh where i am part of um the kind of startups that we look at are the deep tech they’re more in again as i told you blockchain web3 and ai um with respect to sobus ecosystem which i have been very much passionate and been part of in fact some of the case studies of sobus ecosystem was also i had talked about in my tedx talk recently here it’s more to do with grounded ideas women entrepreneurs there are fantastic women entrepreneurs in rural india and i’m more social impact driven so if someone is looking at what you call an impact which can help with respect to tier two tier three and employment generation definitely they can reach out to me on linkedin again i’m very focused on social impact part with respect to mentorship uh not with respect to commercial part that i keep only cultures as a commercial topic that doesn’t excite me anymore i don’t know for some reason
but i see a lot of thing happening in india uh especially in tier two tier three they are more passionate they have seen the probably the difficult part of life and they are more focused i have seen even an evb bike that is built out of uh tier two and which was even exhibited and i think probably in by now fund raised in dubai because i know there is a small amount of fun but uh overall what i see as an ecosystem in india is uh we i i believe compared to the i began divide india into two parts the cities the metros and the non-metros the metros part i believe there is a hurry i think uh uh the visualization of scale and sustainability uh is a bit missing uh not in all.
but at least in some of the them i have seen and uh targeting the right investment partners is important cvc is one aspect of it at right stage you need right set of investors you need the right angels in the beginning you need the right probably a smaller vcs in the next stage we have told no to so many big vcs already because we believe it’s not that uh we do not want money but we believe
we are not at that stage where we need a big vc as a in as part of our ecosystem so you need to identify who is the right partner for you you need to identify who’s the right advisor for you also um and that happens over a period of time with experience uh the chemistry between you and the mentor c at the end of their startup needs two things one is customers and one is investors
if someone is telling i want advice i know they are lying at the end of the day a startup needs money to run and customers to sustain that so if someone is getting you this i think they are or enabling to to get this then they are the right set of people yes product market fit all these things i believe they’ve the team the founding team should have done that and one of the things that i would say start early uh start early means not just immediately out of policy there are again as i told you there is there are different scenarios in which startups get started there are people who start up in college itself that is again these are not 19 98 percent of the cases right i would still say have some experience around
what you are trying to build uh understand the domain understand business problem that you are trying to solve and then jump into it and when you’re jumping into it also there has to be a method it cannot be madness there has to be a the madness and that’s something that that’s very important starting up for the sake of sake of starting up is not advisable there is definitely again you have to be very obsessed with the problem and passionate about what you are trying to solve and till the time it’s like meditation right so you get to a certain stage of stillness after a period of time it doesn’t come on the first day so you will learn that you will experience it and then you will probably realize that that’s the right way yeah yeah i think that’s that’s good advice through and through uh for entrepreneurs who are starting off even guys who are perhaps a little more seasoned in their journey
now can you uh going back to cultos can you tell us a little about the perhaps next big milestone for cultos global and how do you plan to achieve them you see with cultos global what we are trying to again as i told you we’ll be launching our flagship platform for the branch that’s something that we’ll be doing we are in the midst of closing our round now which will enable us to scale this platform and then probably we will do the bigger one after this that’s probably q1 next year during this time we will also post the closure of this round we’ll be launching our token in international market icu in an exchange where the cultos token will have value associated with it and that’s something that we are going to do and overall the vision of cultos is to democratize loyalty today
and at some stage on our platform have mom and pop shops or most of the people who cannot afford to have a proprietary loyalty and that’s something we are going to do so we’ll have technology partners we’ll have network partners in our platform we will have these brands which can make use of the cultos technology and the cultos ecosystem to enable their engagement with the consumers and that’s that’s our vision it’s not just the big brands that we want to enable we want to enable the mass scale and if you ask me personally again i come from a very much focused transformed guy who has been working on a lot of social impact and this thing so for me it’s about generating employment and
i believe entrepreneurs enable that and i feel i love to interact with entrepreneurs because they have taken that step to create more employment and that’s for me the main incentive or the what drives me on a daily basis is can i generate that one additional employment and if it can happen in tired too that’s fantastic but i can’t expect again that’s tired is also improving with respect to specialized skillset but again that would be the thing that we are looking at both from a cultos and my personal perspective
yeah okay can you tell us a little about the team you know you’ve mentioned the major players in your team so right now how big is your team are you guys all working remotely are you working out a particular city yeah we are a fully remote team we have people working out of canada us dubai i have my two co-founders as i told you bangalore myself sangeeta are based out of here and we have a total of around 15 people both some of them full-time and some of them advisory we have again we have our fintech expert or our chief of finance work out of bangalore also again he’s an imb alumni and we have two imb alumni here myself and janardhan who helps us with our fintech
we have our chartered accountant team again who’s a senior charter content who is supporting us both in terms of support and investment so that’s that’s something that we have so we have a pretty expanded version of the team we have our we have phds who have worked on cyber security and web3 for quite a long number of years who will be working with us we have one of our advisor dr abhijit lele who works on tokenomics who is based out of iac so we have a pretty balanced team of executors experts in specific areas and business guys it’s a very well-rounded team we will be scaling
as we speak we’ll be we are hiring more in terms of building this platform as i told you both business and technology aspects yeah that’s where we are so and most of these people have done it in the past with respect to startup world or scaled businesses right so they’ve been there done that they bring the right kind of experience uh no reason why you know your platform would not gain more heights so because you know you’ve been around in for a while and uh you do help out startups as well like if somebody is perhaps looking for some good resources uh in the sas space in in just uh
you know scaling your startup can you point them towards any kind of resources books thought leaders who you think uh can add to their journey for me um again uh i believe if you read about the biography of steve jobs that’s a fantastic book to understand how things work and i’ll always i’ve always been i think that it starts there right building a product um he’s the benchmark you go to any mba school people still talk about apple the way it was uh done uh
but for me personally um i have i believe be updated with the current interface not one book will change it uh you should look at your personality uh see each one right see i have a different personality my co-founder adip samara has a different personality the way you gel along and the way you can work together is the most important part and for me today the strategy aspects of it or with respect to the entrepreneurship after if it can be learned easily zero to one peter style any it’s you have to read it like
if you are starting to be an entrepreneur you have to read it but rest of the books you can take it from different people you can learn from different actually youtube videos sometimes i think it’s even here on audio podcasts or these things but personally one of the books which have inspired me is apprentices of a himalayan master by shreem again as an entrepreneur i believe you need to have uh that quotient of uh emotion attached to it the emotional quotient becomes more important these days because you are handling a team of by varied experiences you are handling investors you are handling different challenges uh so you need to be in a right frame of mind and for you to develop that emotional quotient again personally
if you ask me i have gone more spiritual in the last three four years uh pre and post entrepreneurship and it helps you because you are more compassionate you you’re not reacting you you look you look at it in a balanced way and yeah apart from the traditional books i think entrepreneurs needs to be more humble i believe so and be open to listening i think you should if not for a podcast i think probably you should speak less if you’re an entrepreneur and listen more and respect the kind of people who have built businesses right we learn from history
if you look at most of the way after liberalization india group was based on some of the service companies which turned out profits after profits so it’s not see there is if you want to be a unicorn you can be a unicorn but is that your aim is something that you need to look at do you want to create scalable sustainable businesses which generates employment i think that’s that’s that should be the aim for entrepreneurs and that’s the kind of personality you should people should look at and india would be grateful or it would be really great if such kind of entrepreneurs come out apart from just the unicorn entrepreneurs
yeah i think that’s a very interesting uh thought process and it gives us something to think about uh so you know we are running almost out of time i would love to close this off by asking you one last question that is something that i ask everybody who comes on the show you had an entire arc with your career with cultos with you know and before that preceding that you worked in the corporate you had a stint in the us as well uh but you know you made you saw some use case with web3 with decentralized technologies and you made that leap and now you’re building in it uh
what what would be perhaps your advice to fellow builders fellow users for them to truly start living on blockchain uh see blockchain as a technology uh offers certain advantages now uh understand the advantages don’t get uh overawed by the like generative ai or a blockchain kind of each technology has its advantages please before getting into the technology look at a problem that you are solving if that problem requires blockchain to be used then it makes sense to be used don’t come with technology first unless you’re building the infrastructure layers or advancements in the blockchain itself layer uh
if it is coming from a business problem and the features of the blockchains enables it fantastic go ahead and use it like and cultos yes we have a web3 layer we have used blockchain we will be probably making some updates on top of it but yeah going further it will be web3 plus ai because we will be building on ai so we are not force fitting and forcefully adding features on the blockchain there of course so that’s the most important but you should have 100 clarity in terms of what you are going to do right uh you just cannot force it and that’s where most of the things fail right technology never uh is going to work alone you need a business problem and that business problem needs to there has to be a need first because you just cannot say i built a great technology take it nobody will take it right yeah i think it cannot be retrofitted and it cannot be just for the sake of it like that that is
yeah right because nowadays like whatever is the new trend people tend to jump and start building in that space uh but that is perhaps not a sustainable way to build a business see as i told you right see again just since we are short of time that you cannot say i have an api take it this is one of the best places in the world i have this value propositions you need to understand whether there is an ecosystem there there is if just giving a token will not make a sense someone has to accept it issuance of tokens is the easiest part there are thousands of crypto companies there are thousands of web3 companies what business problem are you going to solve makes the these things and technology is like that enabler or the foundation that solves the business problem and that’s exactly
what traditional loyalty problem what we are trying to solve with blockchain as a base and blockchain alone is not solving the problem there is an ecosystem there is an AI layer there is a wallet that is enabling it so there are a lot of things around it so i think i think typically we get newspaper headlines makes very much sense uh nice right web3 enabling this but it’s a lot of things around it also that that actually solving the problem right no i think that’s very good advice i feel that uh like i’ve said a lot of people start building just because something is uh being talked about a lot and they want to perhaps you know just build on that technology for the sake of building on the technology
which is never a good idea so i think what you said makes a lot of sense uh now like we both mentioned that we are short of time uh before we wrap this up pavan any any parting thoughts oh uh it was nice converging with you tarusha it was again it also take me took me uh back to the days when i started off uh very nice it’s nostalgia for me but the most important part is probably which i tell whenever i have an opportunity to talk about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs um i believe in the three yes one is survive sustain and scale and do it methodically for the entrepreneurs out there and don’t get overawed by jargons technologies please see if you can create an ecosystem and substitutes hard work it’s about sustained discipline focus focus on one topic don’t do too many things at a time that’s again a learning that i have had because if you start doing too many things sometimes not sometimes most of the times you fail
yeah so the focus is extremely important you have to do one thing at a time and you have to do it right there is there is no shortcuts to success absolutely i think you know it’s best to perhaps conquer a nation then you know perhaps branch out but uh if you’re starting off and you know you’re doing too many things at the same time obviously because of the lack of focus uh you know you wouldn’t be able to give any of it your best and then you know hoping that it will become a success is a pipe dream yeah yeah that’s true again i probably i’m a misnomer because i don’t have most of the tick marks of a jazzy next-gen entrepreneur
but again i believe in the conservative approach of uh doing it right yeah i know what is okay i think we need at times a little bit of a conservative approach is a good thing i think uh in this day and age thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today this has been a wonderful conversation i’m sure that there are multiple insights that our listeners will clean off from this yeah
thank you thank you
thank you thanks a lot.