If we are lucky, we meet one or two people in our lifetime
who appear to be coming from a different planet. For me, it has been Beerud
Sheth, a classmate, Gupshup CEO, and a serial entrepreneur. He can easily think
twenty steps ahead sometimes spanning twenty years. It was an honour to host
Beerud in my class last April at IIT Bombay. Beerud shared his insights from
starting two companies Elance, and Gupshup. Elance, a pioneer of online freelancing and gig economy, is now publicly listed on the NY Stock Exchange as Upwork. Gupshup is a leading player in the conversational internet
ecosystem. Here are my three takeaways from Beerud’s talk:- Don’t carry entitlement: Beerud’s biggest
piece of advice was, “IIT entitlement is all bogus”. When students excel in
academics in premier institutes they start carrying an entitlement mindset regarding jobs, salaries, and life in general.
“You are not entitled to anything… There are no guarantees,” said Beerud. He
experienced this firsthand when he started Elance in 1999. By then he had
excelled at IIT (class-topper), MIT, and in his job at Wall Street. He and his
co-founders raised money initially from friends and family and subsequently
through Series A. However, within a few months dotcom bust happened. Elance had
to let go of half the engineers. And situation remained tough not for months, but for
years after that. Beerud suggested that the sooner we get rid of this
entitlement mindset the better. Otherwise, it may create a significant psychological
burden.
- Be close to where the action is: If the first takeaway highlighted what not to
do, the second one suggested what to do – be close to where the action is and do
something interesting, and value-adding. Beerud highlighted one particular action
that he chose to be close to – a paradigm shift or a platform shift. In the 90s
when Beerud was thinking about starting a venture, the Internet was the paradigm
shift. And the action was in Silicon Valley – that is where Beerud chose to be.
Netscape, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay – those were the hot names. A lot of interesting
opportunities get created around a paradigm shift. In contrast, India was a
terrible place as far as action related to the Internet shift was concerned in
the early to mid-90s. Of course, things have changed since then and now there
is action in India, especially in Bombay, Bangalore, and Delhi.
- Conversational Internet will be big: If
you think of a chatbot as a new website and messaging app like WhatsApp as a
browser, then you can see this as a new kind of Internet, says Beerud. And we
have seen how big the web got. And Beerud feels that the movie is being played
all over again. Billions of websites and trillion-dollar companies were created
out of it. So this new Internet will also create multiple services and multiple
companies. All of this got a big boost last year with the rise of LLMs. Instead
of structured interactions, you have AI-powered natural language interactions. We
have seen the keyboard-and-mouse of the PC revolution and the touch screen of the
mobile revolution and now, we are seeing the conversational interface of the current AI revolution.
This bridges the digital divide as the grandma and people in remote rural
villages can access the Internet through conversation in a natural language. This
is what a platform shift looks like. Now, everything you know about the
Internet has to be rebuilt and reinvented around the conversational AI ecosystem. The use cases will remain the same,
entertainment, shopping, learning, etc. But AI agents will be the key players
in this game doing the iterative conversational interaction showing multiple
options while shopping. We will have an AI shopkeeper, an AI bank manager, an
AI educator, a therapist, a travel guide, etc. And it will be multimodal – text,
images, audio, video, metaverse with AR/VR, etc. This is where Beerud’s company
Gupshup is betting big on.
It was a great talk. Students really enjoyed his
stories and nuggets of wisdom. Thanks, Beerud for sharing your insights, and wishing
you and Gupshup all the best!
