Prime Venture Partners Podcast

Snapfish to Aadhaar to MoneyTap to AI: Bala Parthasarathy on Building Across Eras

• Prime Venture Partners: Early Stage VC Fund

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🎙️ Bala Parthasarathy - Chairman & Co-founder, Freo, Director at People+AI, Senior Adviser, EMK Capital (London) -  joins us for one of our most insightful episodes.

In this full conversation, Bala discusses:
🔹 Snapfish’s dotcom-era growth, crash, and acquisition by HP
🔹 Building Aadhaar from the ground up with Nandan Nilekani
🔹 The truth about raising and deploying venture capital
🔹 What’s broken (and what’s working) in fintech
🔹 The founder's mindset in the age of AI

If you're a founder, investor, or operator, this episode is packed with lessons, stories, and perspective.

📌 Episode Timestamps:
00:00 – Bala’s background & Snapfish origins
03:00 – Dotcom boom, bust & Snapfish acquisition
06:30 – Understanding VC: what founders often get wrong
10:00 – Building Aadhaar at scale with Nandan Nilekani
13:00 – Freo, fintech & operating in regulated markets
16:00 – AI disruption & founder readiness
23:00 – How every function is being reshaped by AI
28:00 – Founder life: balance, energy & playing the long game

📌 Follow us:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primevp
Twitter: https://twitter.com/primevp_in
Website: https://primevp.in

👇 Subscribe for more insights from top founders & investors.

#BalaParthasarathy #Startups #AI #VentureCapital #Aadhaar #FintechIndia #Entrepreneurship  #PrimeVenturePartnersPodcast 

Speaker 1:

I did Snapfish along with two other co-founders where we raised like a shitload of money and blew it up. They had a lot of very good parties. I've had good co-founders who put up with my shit. I wish somebody told me this in the beginning. Surprisingly, this information is there everywhere but nobody knows it. $30 million, $50 million to $1.5 billion of revenue companies. A lot of people are using ChatGPT but don't want to tell their bosses that they're using it because they're worried. Like you know, they're considered cheating.

Speaker 1:

You should be very scared. I'm an AI advisor to a private equity fund in Europe. I'll tell you about the positives and negatives. What happens in a very conservative Islamic country stays in the conservative Islamic country. As they say Islamic country stays in the conservative Islamic country, as they say.

Speaker 3:

Hi everybody, welcome again to the next episode of the Prime Venture Partners podcast, and today I have, you know, quite often you look for good guests and then you realize you have one in living in plain sight or hiding in plain sight my good friend and partner at Prime Venture Partners, bala Parthasarathy, who's been an entrepreneur, vc and went back to becoming an entrepreneur and is now probably one of the messiahs of the brave new world of AI. So, bala, welcome to the show. Thank you, sanjay, and you know you've done so many things over the course of, I guess, a relatively short career and still sort of innovating all the time. It'd be great for our audience to know a little bit about what your journey has been, from growing up to various entrepreneurship stints, to working together and then coming back to India and working on Aadhaar, and you know things that we have done together, so would love to if you could share some of that.

Speaker 1:

Sure happy to. I'm relatively young, I'm only like 32 years old. But I'll try to compress my life story. So the short of it, sanjay, is that you know I grew up in Chennai, went to IIT Madras, actually didn't get into IIT Madras the first time but then tried again and got in, which was kind of lucky because I met our common partner, sripati, at IIT. So I think if I'd gotten in the first time, I probably I don't know what I'd be doing. And so I went abroad, like everybody did at that time we all did and I got my degree in computer science in the us.

Speaker 1:

But I was super lucky to be in the valley in the early 90s. It was kind of the right place, right time. Long story short, I did a bunch of startups, mostly in the enterprise space. Um and uh, in late 99, sripati and I started uh, snapfish along with two other co-founders. Um, you know, we did the usual sort of silicon valley thing at the time, dot com thing, where we raised like a shitload of money and, uh, blew it up. Um, we had a lot of very good parties.

Speaker 1:

So that's what you get when three partners three of your co-founders are from harvard business that is true, and and one or two of them are good dancers. And then there was neither Sripati nor me.

Speaker 3:

The other two, sripati is learning, though, but off the record officially.

Speaker 1:

So anyway, long story short, the dot-com boom was great. We raised a shitload of money and then, luckily, we didn't burn all of it when the market crashed. But then we had to shrink the company from whatever 200 people to 20 people. But we turned the company profitable and eventually sold it to Hewlett Packard.

Speaker 3:

What a pretty package. That was all right.

Speaker 1:

So we did fine and uh wanted me to run the global business. So, uh, they said, where do you want to go? Um, I said, let me go to singapore, which is where hp headquarters was. But uh, my wife said, no, singapore is too boring, let's go to india.

Speaker 3:

So that's where I ended up and, uh, you know, the second sort of coincidence happened um, where I happened to rent a place, um, in palm meadows, right next to you so uh, since then, uh, you know, we've been together in a, in a journey and sort of prophetic that you named your son after me, um, and which is sort of what started our conversations. Actually, there's a little kid called sanjay. I was nine months old.

Speaker 1:

Now he's like the reason I named him is that I realized, like you, this guy's going to be a part of my future, and if I need to yell at Sanjay, I needed a good excuse.

Speaker 3:

Now I know why he used to keep yelling at me. It wasn't directed at me Stop it.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, so we were neighbors. My son's name is Sanjay.

Speaker 3:

And so we started brainstorming ideas at the time. But you know, both of us started at Aadhaar, which I think I've seen. A great break that many of us had at the time to be working in the ground floor of Aadhaar yep, absolutely, in fact. This morning, uh, I kind of reluctantly agreed to give a lecture on the in the university of washington school of business because of my alma mater, and I woke up at 5 am and did a class at 5 30 and I talked about adar and india stack and the impact it's had, and I think we didn't have enough time for for all the questions. There was just so much of interest here and that, I think, was certainly a seminal moment for all of us and for the country and perhaps the world as well. So you're supposed to say good things about being an entrepreneur and being frugal about things. So I hope people don't take all these stories about you're blowing up all the cash.

Speaker 3:

It did happen once again, I think, in the world in the 2020 era a little bit, but that must have been quite a journey in itself, right? The one way of building a company. And then you know, the world suddenly imploded and then you had to completely get back to basics and do things sort of the right way. Tell us a little bit about that transition, because a lot of companies go through that right. You start off, you have very ambitious plans, things start going reasonably well, you start raising rounds of funding and we're seeing that now with the AI era as well and at some point, reality will strike, and it won't be a soft landing if at all. There is a landing for people, right. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what are some of the steps you all had to take.

Speaker 1:

And I wish somebody told me this in the beginning in the. Surprisingly, this information is there everywhere, but kind of nobody knows it. It's also you have to follow sort of the the cycles of how venture capital. First of all, understand how venture capital works. If you're going to take venture money, right, if you're one of those rare people who can bootstrap themselves and we have some great examples in india who have done that uh, that's a different journey. But if you want to bootstrap yourself, if you're not going to bootstrap yourself, you're going to take venture money you need to understand how the venture capital works, which is you need to fuel growth right Now.

Speaker 1:

Here is the catch. So you need to fuel growth, you need to. Growth is the elixir. If you don't grow, then there is no game and venture capital aids the growth, right.

Speaker 1:

So this is where people always have a mistaken idea that you know vcs are whatever vulture capital is and vcs are, you know, fueling this boom. They're like you know, spoiling you, so on and so forth. It's kind of like not like that, it's more like you know they're taking a bet and we, as venture capital, when we started prime ventures, we can also learn. This is that you need to fuel companies which have high growth Now. At the same time, for the venture capitalists, it's you know you bet on 10 companies and if two of them are blockbusters, you know you've earned your return. So you want to fuel growth on all the 10 companies, but as an entrepreneur, you have only one company you can fuel. Growth is great Growth. Everybody loves growth. Entrepreneurs love growth, vcs love growth, custom love growth. Vcs love growth. Customers love growth. Everybody likes growth. But you also have to watch the cycle and if you blow out right, the VCs will say okay, you know tough luck yeah.

Speaker 1:

Right and they'll move on. You, as your entrepreneur, you have only one company, right, so it's your baby. So, understanding this balance and also where the world is going, I think in 1999, if you were too conservative, that would have been a bad move, and I think even in India, you know, in 2020, 21,. I think if you did not grow, that was not a good move. But in 2023, 24, you know, when people are going IPO and finding out the market likes profitable companies, then if you don't watch profitability, that's a bad idea, right, you kind of also have to watch the cycle and, as an entrepreneur, you have only yourself to blame. Right, the venture capitalists will give you money for growing, uh, but as an entrepreneur, you have only one company and you need to sort of watch where the world is going and act accordingly.

Speaker 3:

it's my big learning, which is again obvious in retrospect, but not so obvious if you're in the in the race yeah, yeah, no, and and you know, I think one of the things we set out to do when we started off and we have continued to do here at prime through subsequent funds, when you went back to becoming an entrepreneur, and then again and and in exploring that side again, which is the bright side this is the, as people call it but it was really to be close enough but far enough and sort of be that early warning system, if you will, that, hey, you know the world is changing, we're better to focus on the basics.

Speaker 3:

You know the world has changed and it is better to focus on the basics. You know, or you know the world is has changed and it is maybe not growth at all costs, but you know growth is important and you can't sort of be you know too much, too conservative, right, I think these are some some important indicators that one needs to, because you also get this window of opportunity to build these companies and you get these few opportunities to get to the next level of orbit and RSC velocity, so Maybe you can talk a little bit about your experiences with Aadhaar right and some of that journey and how that, you know, fostered your thought process as well.

Speaker 1:

I know we started working together there and then continue to work together, but your thoughts and insights Honestly, the overall takeaway was very humbling for me because I mean, I had, you know, I've been in the US for 17 years. I'd done many startups, before Snapfish and then Snapfish was a great hit. I was kind of riding rating pretty high. And you know, coming back to India in 2007, you know this flip card was, you know, fledgling and the startup ecosystem was not there and I had like kind of no idea about really how India works and, I think, working in other, going to understanding how government works and, of course, with Nandan Nelakani being an amazing shining star and what his perspective was.

Speaker 1:

I think it was very lucky and also not only Nandan, but a whole bunch of other people that had attracted all of us. Most of us are volunteers working on this and the people we have met, like people like Mashruwala and so on and so forth, from promote, promote varma, so it's been life-changing um, uh, from from us. But, most importantly, I think I could understand how one could see scale when it was not very obvious. Right, nandan set out a goal saying we're going to do 50 crores, 500 million others in five years and that sounded ridiculous, honestly, at that time. But to actually see it happen and the effort of so many people and the machinery that it took was humbling. And then, of course, what came after, aadhaar and UPI and so on and so forth. And now I'm back working with Nandan at People Plus AI and we're trying to explore what AI means to India in the future. It's all been very humbling, as well as also learning for me Still learning.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, no, and it's just amazing to think that I keep reminding people.

Speaker 3:

You know, you sometimes get a bit insensitized to large numbers in India and we say, oh, we enrolled 1.4 billion people in six years. Yeah, okay, fine that sounds, but when you translate it, that is Singapore every week for six years in a row, right, and that is like wow, you know the whole country. You are with the country of Australia every month, but anyway, so you know of, we work closely together in the first fund at Prime, some great companies out of it, happy Quizzes, and of course we're still actively working on several of them EasyTap, yes, and of course EasyTap and ZipRile right at the start of the journey. Then you went off to starting MoneyTap and it's now Frio and you know, certainly a second stint as an entrepreneur, perhaps your first stint in India as an entrepreneur. Maybe you can do a little bit of comparison of your, you know, experiences in the valley in the 90s versus building, certainly a regulated fintech company here in India yeah, I will tell you about the positives and negatives.

Speaker 1:

So the the positives are, I think you're solving sort of you know, basic, fundamental problems and in the US you're solving very small esoteric problems. Here you're solving some very basic thing. And also the access to demand. I mean it's fairly clear, like you know, with Frio, what the demand is, what the customers want, and we have millions of customers using it. So that was very clear. The talent pool is easy here and accessible.

Speaker 1:

In the Valley it's a little harder to get and also the satisfaction of doing something was much more profound, I would say, at Frio, because you're kind of making a difference in people's lives, not to say that we didn't do important things at Snapfish, but photos it was a little bit of a higher order need on the Maslow's hierarchy than credit, which seemed like more basic, so I would say, more satisfying at some level. The negatives are it's much less regulated. So here, especially in fintech, regulation plays a huge part and understanding the complexities and the nuances of that uh is, uh is not. It's not easy and also you can't go at the pace you need to go because especially in industry like fintech.

Speaker 1:

I think it's true in all most industries, and it has been a little choppy as well.

Speaker 3:

Right, because the regulator has been literally a regulator and, you know, making sure that we don't run into a situation that the country can't afford to be in. Right and therefore. But the startup gets this window of opportunity to become big. That is correct.

Speaker 1:

So it's understandable and at a macro picture level, they're right. You know we need to make sure we don't blow up, and we have not. India has not had the crisis like China had, for example, touch wood.

Speaker 3:

Or US or UK, despite COVID and everything, but it comes at a price.

Speaker 1:

But overall I would say it's very satisfying. It's just a different game to play. We're a lot more people-centric, so it's much more human, I would say at the end of the day.

Speaker 3:

Bala, one of the things that's been keeping you busy and you've sort of jumped in to the deep end of the pool, at least compared to me is this whole new space of AI. And as I talk to people, you know, there's various levels of understanding, including saying this is not yet real, which is partly true by the name. To the other extreme of this is you know, the world, everybody's world, has already changed completely and permanently, right? So maybe for an audience of entrepreneurs who are, I guess, entrepreneurs, fall in two categories right, there are the those who say, look, this is game changing and it's, you know, I'm going to be destroyed if I don't embrace entirely. Or another category that says, oh wow, you know, finally, something is possible. It wasn't possible, and now this creates a new opportunity to the other extreme of you know, sticking their head in the sand and saying this is not real, right, and this is a long ways to go.

Speaker 3:

My startup is is not going to be impacted by this, right? So would be good to hear your views on the space itself. What's really happening? Uh, what excites you? How should entrepreneurs react to what they're seeing right now? How does one ensure that one is not? Um, you know, a lot of these things sort of we tend to overestimate the impact in the short run, but underestimate the impact in the long run as well. So it would be great to hear your views on the topic.

Speaker 1:

Sure. So, sanjay, I came to AI and I do so broadly three things in AI just as to why I can talk about AI, at least how I'm. That's my bias, where I'm coming in. So number one is just sort of educating myself in AI. I did a BTEC project in AI many, many moons ago, which is completely invalid now, but since then I've been kind of curious about AI. So when Gen AI came on, I kind of went very deep and started reading it, started evangelizing about it.

Speaker 1:

I run a closed WhatsApp group which you and many other prime founders are on, just to educate myself and also tell people what I like and don't like and talk about what is the news in AI, and I send it to people like Nandan and others, like whatever bits that I've learned. That's more for like purely personal educational. The second thing I do in AI is that I'm an AI advisor to a private equity fund in Europe it's one of the $7 billion PE fund and I work with multiple companies in Europe and US in AI transformation. So I get to see companies which are a little bit more scaled, so anywhere from $30 million, $50 million to $1.5 billion of revenue companies. So what are they doing in AI, so I have some visibility and understanding of what works, what doesn't work. And, lastly, I help out People Plus AI, which is a Nandan Nilakan initiative, part of XSTEP, as to what AI means to India, right? So I get to view this from like sort of three lenses educational, just personal education, and sort of running a close group, actual, in practice, at PE funds, and and and what it means to India. And on top of that, I am, of course, part of some boards of AI companies and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1:

So my view of AI is that, to answer your question question, is it like, is it all bullshit, or is it like, you know, I should be very scared? So I would say you should be very scared. So this is my analysis after about two and a half, you know, ever since Gen AI came out, basically since November 2022. Not like really really runaway scared, but like on a scale of one to ten, I would say you should be at eight, right. If you're sitting at two, uh, you're going to get buried, right. So this is like. This is like using, you know, a feature phone nokia feature phone in you know 2010 and saying, yeah, iphone is there, but it's slow and apps are not there, etc. It's all true, uh, it is just that that's not where the future is. So I would say that is my broad perspective on where you should be now.

Speaker 1:

Certain areas will get more impacted than others, right, I just gave a. I did a workshop at the Manipal group last couple of weeks ago, talking to the CEO. So there are some groups which are, but even they are like very up to speed on AI. They are like seriously doing a lot of initiatives on AI, right, and they are like a, you know, a more industrial kind of a group. So it is here, it is now. Everybody is already on it. Whether they want to tell everybody about it or not depends on the culture of the company. A lot of people are using ChatGPT but don't want to tell their bosses that they're using it because they're worried they're considered cheating. But it's already here. What impact is it going to have is a more detailed question, depending on which industry you're in, but there is no question in my mind that you should be really really taking it seriously if you're not already doing it.

Speaker 3:

So let's look at it from the tech startup ecosystem, and the way I'm looking at it is there are three buckets. There are startups that have a product where the product itself might not necessarily be impacted that much, but their entire experience with their customer base, whether it's from the marketing side of it, the acquisition, the um, the service delivery, etc. And then frerio would probably be an example of that, right, I mean the core customer underwriting and lending part may or may not initially be dramatically impacted, but you know the marketing and acquisition and service and all of that, right. So that's one part. Then there are businesses that that that were not possible in the past, products that weren't possible but suddenly become possible, right. And then there's the third extreme of companies where it's a large, established business, it's running on its own, but something new is going to come and disrupt them completely, right. So if you think about those three buckets and many startups sort of fall in that third category also right where they think that they're, you know, completely secure, but they might get, as you said, you know they better be worried here.

Speaker 3:

Um, what are your views on some examples of what founders can do to remain nimble? Right, because they have caught up with running their business on a daily basis and they really can't be even reading your whatsapp group, right, that you have set up. So how does one educate oneself? How does one, you know, stay abreast of what's going on?

Speaker 1:

things are moving so fast that's sort of really intimidating as well I've been an entrepreneur most of my life, except for our stint at adhar and and my stint at prime ventures. So I fully get, like you know, as an entrepreneur, you're solving like 50 problems every day. So, uh, and and you know, it's anything which is nice to have usually gets like deprioritized, right, anything that is, uh, not immediate. And as a founder, you also need to think about long term as well as short term. Right, you are thinking all.

Speaker 1:

It's not an option to say, uh, you know, only I'll think only short term, because then you'll get destroyed. Or only long term, right, I I used to call it like you know, you have to have your. You know you have to have your head above the clouds to see the big picture, but also feet on the ground so that you don't like miss what is happening. Right, and so you don't have a choice to do both. So as a founder, especially for the founder of the founders, right, the founders, founder ceos you don't have an option but to not look at this. Right, you can't say, hey, man, this is not immediately impacting me, so, you know, let me come to it. I just have more pressing problems. And I speak that with a lot of you know empathy, because I've been in that shoes many times and I I get it right three hours of sleep.

Speaker 3:

You're getting cut it down to two.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and sadly you need to pay it because this is going to impact you one way or the other. Now, how it's going to impact you is going to depend whether you are in this category number two, which is you're saying that the AI is the disruptor, or AI is like a nice to have, right, or you know, know, I'm really fine, but you know, maybe I should watch out for a disruption, right? These are broadly the three categories. You said so for the cat. For all these categories, one thing is common and one thing there is an actionable thing every founder can do, which is start using the tools right, because in every category there are low-hanging fruits today that ai can do right. So we can go across the board.

Speaker 1:

Sales. Marketing is changing. Digital marketing is completely changing. So I'm deeply involved with, for example, what's happening with SEO and search in general. Right, search is a big source of customers for most people. Meta is also changing, not as much as Google searches, right, costs are going up. Sales is changing right. How you're selling is changing with AI, ab, testing and marketing. So marketing we can go in a deep topic Creatives, so on and so forth. Sales is changing. Product is definitely changing right. How product managers should use AI is changing. Coding is changing.

Speaker 3:

Give an example on product managers.

Speaker 1:

So product managers, can you know, are really the product management and engineering, at least the prototyping design. Product management is all fusing right, Because AI is the best writer you can have, it's the best brainstorming partner you can have, right? So, writing very detailed documents and using AI you must be doing it, otherwise you're not doing something. And then you should be using vibe coding, which is a whole topic we can talk about, to create mock-ups and prototypes right Before even going something to the engineer. So product managers need to do much more, but they can do it much faster and better. Doing competitive analysis no-brainer, right. You can go scrape every website of your competition and get me all the features. Right. I did this live demo for them in that seminar that I did. You just go pull competition and tell me the best features that they have I don't and keep it current. Sentiment analysis you know there's an endless number of things that product managers can do Much faster, much better, much better. Coding whole new topic in almost every phase, from definition, design, architecture to DevOps and coding. There's a whole topic of how you can use AI and, of course, in customer service, it's already there. You should be using it so across the board, stepping back in terms of productivity, of what a startup can do. You ought to be using ai, right, and that, I would say, is a good start, whether you're in category one, two or three in your bucket, and that, I would say, is actionable because it's going to give you some benefit.

Speaker 1:

And but the change is very hard, right? Uh, it's very hard for organization, whether you're a startup or a large company. So this has to be led by the founders. Yeah, right, if your founders are not bought in, this is not going to happen. So you are as a founder. This, in short, you have to decide hey, is this something I want to take seriously or not? You know, balance is it's a eight? You know I don't buy it, right, I think it's a two and that's fine, that's your choice. But if you believe that it's a eight, right, then you need to put in those few hours in no matter which category you are in, right, and the best ideas are not going to come from me, or even uh, you know, uh, sanjay, you are vcs like you, even though you're pretty close to the company I have the best ideas.

Speaker 1:

It's not the matter they might not take your best idea you always have a humble yeah, but uh, but the, the founders and ceos are going to have the best ideas on how to use it, right, what you need to start using it. And there is only one thing you need to know about this hallucination, et cetera, and this is the reason for the AI skeptics right, it's kind of a? You know, it's a stochastic beast, right, so I call it. It's like riding. I ride motorcycles, as you know, for fun, and it's like riding a motorcycle in a desert, right, so you know, um, for fun, that's, and it's like riding motorcycle in a desert, right, so it's. It's, the sands are shifting. You're going up a dune, right, it's. It's not. You can't.

Speaker 1:

You need to roughly know I'm going in that direction, but you're going to be going here, you're going to be going there and you need to steer it. And whether you're coding vibe, coding is very much. If you, if you wipe code and sanjay, I know you, you're playing with lovable and so on and so forth you get the feeling like that. Right, I know I roughly need to go there, but this beast is going to take me in this direction. Right, this bike is going to shift Suddenly, it's going to stall. Right, you need to kind of push the bike back right. You need to get off the bike. You're going to fall down a few times, right?

Speaker 3:

All of this is going to happen there, right in these. As you say, it's a broad directionality is more or less there, and certainly to getting close to what might feel like a destination.

Speaker 1:

You know, one can do it much faster and there are a number of techniques to make it better, especially in live coding, where you're doing it in small steps, right, don't go from here to there, plan the next step. If it doesn't work, backtrack. So there are some people are putting in some rigor on how to do better, prompting and so on and so forth, right, but it's fundamentally you're riding a beast that you don't completely control, right, and and whether you're a product manager, whether you're a coder, this is what you need to internalize, right, it sounds perfect, but it's not perfect, right, and it's wild, but it's also kind of like the fun.

Speaker 3:

So I like the other day I did something fun on this uh with my wife. Actually we were talking about something fun about your wife.

Speaker 1:

Let's not talk about it too much. It's a family audience here.

Speaker 3:

Yes, absolutely, but I'll tell you some secrets. So what we did? We were discussing some project we wanted to embark on. I said you know what, let's turn on Granola. And we just started chatting and it summarized whatever and I copied and pasted that into two tools. One was Gamma and I said create a presentation and create a website for this initiative. And then I copied it into Lovable and I said, okay, this needs to be an ongoing initiative, create an application or obviously, mockups of an application. But then I later even tried connecting it to Superbase and you know, having a database at the back end also, right, my God, the level of sophistication in a 20-minute version that you can get. It is stunning. In fact, even yesterday I was chatting with one of our other founders about you know how are they using it, and then I went to his website, as we were sort of in this WhatsApp chat, and I copied and pasted the description of one of their products into lovable and at the end of a 20-minute chat I said, okay, by the way, here's your product all built.

Speaker 3:

There was obviously it's a mock-up of a product the fact that you can get pretty far right and conceptualizing it. So, as you said A, b, testing all of these things, or meeting customers and saying would you buy this? It almost seems that there should never be any founder pitching you an idea stage thing anymore. They should be able to at least show you a mock-up of saying this is what we're going to do, right? So look, this whole AI thing. We're super excited and I think, as you said, you just have to start playing around with it. You talked a little bit about motorcycling, so tell us a little bit about the Bala. That is not working.

Speaker 1:

I do a bunch of stuff. I just went to Oman last week for diving. I just went by myself and it was good fun Scuba diving. So you're going to talk about why you go by yourself scuba diving, but you're going to talk about why you go by yourself. What happens in a very conservative Islamic country stays in the conservative Islamic country, as they say but it was dry I didn't know that Oman had no alcohol except in a few hotels.

Speaker 1:

So, but no, I like biking. That's my big weakness. This year we're going to Central Asia with a bunch of guys.

Speaker 3:

I have to tell you all a little bit of my two favorite Balapar Sarthi moments. We were interviewing a person for a role at Prime and Bala told me well, you know, at 9.30 am my time, which will be around like 7 pm your time I will be available for 20 minutes and I'll do this interview, right? And so the interview happened. And then this candidate calls me back later and said he was on some highway shack in Peru Are you guys serious about this interview? Right? But he had grilled the daylights out of her in that 20 minutes and I said how did the interview go? She was really. He asked me all these questions but, you know, was he really serious about this thing? And then, of course, 10 seconds later, I got a whatsapp message from him saying these are all the things I did. Is that?

Speaker 3:

thumbs up, let's go ahead right and and that's the one thing I really admire about you, bala, because you, because you, can be doing all these things. The other episode was also very interesting. We had a term sheet with a 5pm deadline that we were trying to sign and I have not heard from Bala for three days. Hey, what the heck do we do this or deal or not? And at 4.57, I get a plus 977 number ringing on my phone and a call from Nepal. Sanjay, this is Bala, almost no coverage here.

Speaker 3:

That's the other set of amazing things you've done around hiking and things like that. But your ability, I think, to intertwine hardcore business with personal time and pleasure and family and things like that, I think is really something that you know people who work with you take for granted, but you know it's something that most people struggle to balance. Maybe you can end with a little bit of any anecdotes from your side or some tips on how people should balance all of these.

Speaker 1:

Look, especially if it's a founder audience. You know, balance is like not a good word, you know, because all founders are imbalanced by definition. Uh, whenever I was very deep in the company, I was usually imbalanced, uh, but uh, and I was, you know, maniacally doing only one thing. The truth is, uh, you know that it the, you know to use the cliche, it is kind of a long race. It's not like, oh, I'll do this for two years and I'll sell the company. It's an yoga. It's a minimum 10 year race.

Speaker 1:

Uh, and 10 years is a big part of your life, you know, if you start, if you are, you know, 25 or 35 or 45, it becomes more and more critical. So, uh, you know, you do need to take care of your family number one. Uh, and then, uh, and then you don't want to have regrets. Like you know, you do need to take care of your family number one, and then you don't want to have regrets. Like you know the cliche that I never see my kids grow up. You definitely need to take care of yourself as well, personally and whatever. That fun be right. So I've been lucky. I've had, you know, good co-founders who, you know, put up with my shit to be able to partner.

Speaker 3:

Tell me about it.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. But you know they'll remember fond stories, like you did, and some nasty stories. They won't talk on a podcast, but life goes on, and you know. But you have to live your life and that's my philosophy Awesome Play hard. You know, work hard but definitely play hard.

Speaker 2:

It's super important, Terrific Bala. Thank you so much, and on that high note we shall end. Work hard, play hard when new episodes are available. Just search for Prime Venture Partners Podcast in Apple Podcast, Spotify, CastBox or however. You get your podcasts, Then hit subscribe and if you have enjoyed the show, we would be really grateful if you leave us a review on Apple Podcast. To read the full transcript, find the link in the show notes.