Venture Everywhere Podcast: Madhav Krishna with Shafiq Khartabil
Venture Everywhere Podcast: Madhav Krishna with Shafiq Khartabil
Madhav Krishna, founder and CEO of Vahan chats with Shafiq Khartabil, co-founder and CEO of Ogram in episode 51: Hire Calling.
Episode 51 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Shafiq Khartabil, Co-founder and CEO of Ogram, an on-demand staffing platform in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Greece, matching qualified workers to jobs in hospitality, retail, and logistics. He chats with Madhav Krishna, founder and CEO of Vahan.ai, an AI-powered recruitment platform for India's blue-collar workforce. Madhav shares how Vahan.ai is transforming the hiring process for India's 300 million blue-collar workers by using AI to connect job seekers with employment opportunities. Shafiq and Madhave discuss the $670 billion global temp staffing challenge and explore how platforms like Vahan and Ogram are reshaping employment dynamics worldwide.
In this episode, you will hear:
Vahan.ai's AI solutions match workers to roles, verify qualifications, and expedite hiring.
Staffing hurdles in high-demand sectors like hospitality, logistics, retail and the blue-collar workforce.
Vahan's strategies to leverage community networks for trust-building.
Shift towards flexible staffing from traditional outsourcing in various industries.
Benefits of voice-based AI in expanding access to job-seeking platforms.
The similarities and differences of on-demand staffing across India, the UAE, Europe, and beyond.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:21 Shafiq: All right, welcome listeners to the Everywhere Ventures Podcast. In this episode, we'll be talking about a very interesting topic, the $670 billion global temp staffing challenge and how businesses like Vahan and Ogram are solving these problems in various parts of the world through AI and other technologies.
00:00:42 Shafiq: So I'm your host for this episode. My name is Shafiq, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ogram, an on-demand staffing platform based in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Greece, matching and deploying qualified workers to jobs in the hospitality, retails and logistics sectors.
00:01:00 Shafiq: The platform serves over 2000 clients, including Carrefour, Accor Group and IKEA, with more than 80,000 registered workers. I have a background personally in hospitality after successfully exiting a hospitality group that I co-founded in the UAE and also hold a master's degree in investment management from the Cass Business School in London.
00:01:20 Shafiq: And I'm joined here with my guest, Madhav Krishna, who is the co-founder and CEO of Vahan.ai. So Madhav, it's great to speak again and I'm very excited about today's episode.
00:01:33 Madhav: Same here, Shafiq. Thanks a ton for having me.
00:01:36 Shafiq: Fantastic, if you can just give our listeners an in-depth summary on Vahan.ai and what you guys are up to?
00:01:42 Madhav: Yeah, sure. We're building an AI recruiter for India's massive blue collar workforce. So India has upwards of 300 million blue collar workers, and that excludes people who work in agriculture, which is another 200 million.
00:01:55 Madhav: These people are largely underserved by digital products and services, especially in the job space. And so we're trying to use AI now to democratize access to jobs for this large number of workforce.
00:02:07 Madhav: My background, by the way, is in AI. I have a master's in AI from Columbia University. I spent close to eight years working the tech space in the US and then decided to move back to India to start Vahan.
00:02:19 Shafiq: Fantastic. And we would love to learn more about the incredible work that you're doing and the impact you hope to make.
00:02:26 Madhav: Happy to talk more about that. So Vahan currently works largely in the gig economy space. So we work with companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Flipkart, Amazon, Uber, Rapido, Zepto, all the large gig economy companies in India. In fact, all these companies combined now hire close to half a million people a month.
00:02:48 Madhav: Vahan recruits 25,000 people a month. So we get 25,000 people employed, which is good scale, but to my earlier point, there's a lot of headroom to grow for us, not just in the gig economy space, but in the country overall with a population of 1.5 billion people.
00:03:06 Madhav: In the next 10 years, our big hairy ambitious goal is to get jobs to at least a billion people in India and beyond.
00:03:13 Shafiq: That's fantastic. And what is the key challenge that you guys are facing in doing that?
00:03:20 Madhav: There are many challenges that we face as a startup, obviously, but I would say one very specific challenge that we face in a country like India is bridging the trust deficit.
00:03:32 Madhav: It turns out that most blue collar workers don't go online to look for jobs. That's just not their default behavior. Most of them look for jobs through their friends, their family, uncles, cousins, et cetera, for example, or through recruitment agencies.
00:03:48 Madhav: And that's because they still want to talk to another human when looking for a job. And hence, it's very challenging to build a digital first product that can reach out to them directly and bridge that trust deficit essentially that exists.
00:04:00 Madhav: So what we've done is leveraged these communities to distribute our product within them. And that's worked really, really well. And like I mentioned, it's helped us reach good scale where we're getting 25,000 people employed every month, which makes me super proud but there's still obviously a long way to go.
00:04:18 Shafiq: Definitely, I think, I share a very similar common challenge while scaling as well in various markets, whether it's the Middle East or Europe, since we're serving blue-collared workers, that trust factor and that community engagement is extremely important to overcome.
00:04:36 Shafiq: I'd just love to know what ways you guys use or do to overcome that. What are the key things that you guys do to build that trust factor in let's say home market or in a potential new market?
00:04:49 Madhav: One thing that we've done successfully is leveraging this existing network. So that our product or service is brought to an end user through someone they know, through a human being. That's helped us a lot.
00:05:03 Madhav: And the other thing that we're doing is trying to make the experience of our service very, very human-like, and that's where AI comes in. So in fact, our first product, Shafiq, was an AI recruiter on WhatsApp that people could just chat with.
00:05:19 Madhav: This was literally six years back, and we saw that, obviously, WhatsApp is heavily used in this part of the world. In fact, I think 85% of Indian smartphone users use it every single day. So massive usage. So it's a great distribution channel.
00:05:35 Madhav: But then more than that, if you can make the experience of consuming your product or service very, very easy, very natural, that also helps bridge trust to some extent.
00:05:48 Madhav: Obviously, six years back, AI was not nearly at the sophistication level that it is today. I think about two years back, we moved away from the WhatsApp-based approach to an app-based approach because we found that WhatsApp as a channel started to become very spammy.
00:06:05 Madhav: While we always wanted to deliver human-like experience, we were never able to really truly do that. The tech just wasn't there. But it's come a full circle for us where we've now gone back to our original vision of building an AI recruiter.
00:06:19 Madhav: And today what we're building is a voice first part that people can just talk to. So there is no text required, there's no WhatsApp or no app required. They can literally just pick up the phone and call this AI recruiter, or this AI recruiter obviously can reach out to them.
00:06:36 Madhav: Today, we've built a system that supports English and Hindi. The big challenge in India though, is that we have a few thousand languages, which 22 are major languages, which are used by most people. But then there's a long tail of many other languages.
00:06:54 Madhav: And so I think while a lot of systems that are available off the shelf, like open AIs, APIs, et cetera, or Llama, for instance, they do work well for some of the big languages, but for the minority languages, they don't really work well.
00:07:10 Madhav: And what we're trying to do now is fine tune them with some of the data that we've captured to enable great user experiences across the board. That's how we're trying to overcome that trust problem.
00:07:22 Shafiq: Fantastic. I have a question on the back of that. So, you speak a lot about AI. Your background is in AI, which is extremely impressive. And there's a lot of talk about AI usage in many industries, many sectors around the world becoming very hot topic.
00:07:40 Shafiq: It's quite prevalent in our business, I would say. I mean, we use it particularly when we vet workers. We do about 1,000 workers per day in terms of vetting these people. So you can imagine the amount of man-hours spent to actually vet these people.
00:07:55 Shafiq: So you need to work on tools and automation and things to help you vet the quality and compliance and whatnot. But we also use AI for things like fulfilling or deploying certain workers to jobs. I'd love to know how Vahan's AI helps match workers with the right job opportunities.
00:08:15 Shafiq: And what level do you guys go down to? Like if I'm a worker and I specialize in certain skills and I have experiences, how does the technology match me to the right job?
00:08:25 Madhav: In our case specifically because we focus on the gig economy space, matching is a fairly straightforward problem. The requirements for a gig job aren't that many.
00:08:37 Madhav: But where this really starts to become useful is somewhat similar to the use case that you mentioned, Shafiq, which is ensuring that, for example, they have a valid driver's license. Because you need to drive a bike around when you're doing a delivery job.
00:08:53 Madhav: So we have developed a system that automatically verifies driver's licenses. The system automatically verifies their Aadhaar card. Aadhaar is like the social security equivalent for India.
00:09:06 Madhav: We'll also try to validate people's bank account information or pull the bank account information out of a check or a picture of a check that they'd upload on the system. So there's a lot of vision-based AI work that we do there to ensure that they actually qualify for the job. And then that facilitates onboarding as well.
00:09:27 Madhav: These are all like great problems to solve that help reduce cost involved in hiring for this space and also increase the velocity at which you can hire. This is also a space by the way, where a large number of people are needed. This is high volume hiring.
00:09:44 Madhav: It's very important to introduce technology as many steps as you can or automate as many steps as you can because that really leads to a lot of efficiencies in the entire process that can then maximize the velocity and the scale at which you can hire.
00:10:00 Shafiq: Agreed. It's always a very tedious process for HR personnel of large corporates or enterprises that are looking to hire volume and match the right skill set to the right job.
00:10:14 Shafiq: It's a process of a lot of trial and error. So I think, having such technology will definitely enable that or solve that problem. And you find this problem around the world.
00:10:24 Shafiq: When we first launched in Greece, what attracted us most to that market was the gap of jobs fulfilled in the hospitality sector. So the time we expanded in 2022, there was a gap of 80,000 jobs that were left unmatched.
00:10:39 Shafiq: And when we dove deep into that, we realized that a lot of that was due to inefficiencies in matching because you have a lot of supply within the mainland.
00:10:49 Shafiq: So the main capital of the country, Athens, and then the second largest area in Greece, Thessaloniki, and the rest of the demand is scattered around the islands. And it's very difficult for these people to match their jobs with supply.
00:11:03 Shafiq: So I think this is where technology can become very useful or digital solutions can become very useful for these enterprises and these workers to better match together. And we're seeing this across the world, right?
00:11:14 Madhav: Yeah, like I said, I think this has been a space that's been largely ignored, but a big part of the world economy runs on blue collar labor. It's interesting also that AI automates knowledge work and not blue collar work today.
00:11:29 Madhav: While I think at some point, potentially a lot more automation will happen across the board. But in India, for example, 80% of all jobs are blue collar. And a big part of our GDP is actually an outcome of the work that those people do. So I think the time is ripe to bring in more efficiencies into this massive space.
00:11:49 Shafiq: I completely agree. So now you've overcome the trust factor, right? So you have workers that have successfully matched to a job, they've conducted the job, they're happy with the platform and the services that it's providing.
00:12:04 Shafiq: How do you retain high quality workers on your platform? What are the things that you guys do to attract these workers to come back and take more jobs?
00:12:13 Madhav: That's a great question. And that's not a very easy problem to solve. What we've learned is that a lot of blue collar workers in India, especially people working in the gig economy, go through about six financial emergencies a year on average, which is one every two months, which is really high if you think about it.
00:12:32 Madhav: I don't think any of us potentially on this podcast or listening to this podcast face that level of difficulty in our lives, but this is like six a year on average. So it's very high. And we found that the most common financial emergency is usually health related, where somebody gets sick or gets into an accident.
00:12:51 Madhav: And of course, people coming from this background don't really have the savings that all of us might have. And a lot of them aren't insured either. They typically will then borrow money from loan sharks to try to pay off big medical bills.
00:13:06 Madhav: So I think there's a lot of work that can be done in that regard to either help them with the liquidity in these stressful times by providing short term loans, or products like Earned Wage Access, which are now incredibly popular across the world.
00:13:24 Madhav: So Earned Wage Access, lets somebody access their earnings sooner than payday. If somebody is getting paid, let's say on the 15th of the month, but they work, let's say, six days in a month, they can potentially withdraw their salary for those six days and not wait till the 15th day.
00:13:41 Madhav: That's a product that works really well in this audience and helps them bridge that liquidity gap. Insurance is also something that I think can work really well. While we haven't experimented with insurance thus far, there are companies in India that are building micro insurance products.
00:13:57 Madhav: So instead of paying large premiums for covers that last a year, getting people to pay a fraction of the cost for a premium that lasts a week or a month, a cover that's short term cover, and hence the term micro insurance.
00:14:14 Madhav: These are products also that can work very well for this audience. So those are some of the things that we're thinking about. And some of the things that we have started experimenting with.
00:14:23 Madhav: You can also obviously drive engagement and retention through completely different means, like showing people cat videos, but that's not something that we are fans of. And we've made a very conscious choice of focusing on use cases that can add a significant value to these people's lives because that's why we exist as a company.
00:14:44 Madhav: Our mission as a company is to bring opportunities to people. I hope that answers your question, Shafiq.
00:14:49 Shafiq: Yeah, that makes complete sense. I completely agree with you. I think faster payouts or access to early wage really is the primary factor or driver to worker satisfaction. Essentially, these guys are getting access to cash as soon as they can. So I completely agree with that.
00:15:08 Shafiq: And these are things that we also include in our business model and a metric that we're constantly looking to improve. So going to livelihoods of workers and whatnot, what impact have you seen in terms of improving the livelihoods of workers and how do you measure success beyond job placements?
00:15:27 Madhav: Hmm. Placements is our North Star and we have to date placed close to 500,000 people. And our monthly run rate is about 25,000. And the way I look at it is that it's not just 25,000 individuals. This is 25,000 families every month.
00:15:44 Madhav: Because when somebody gets a job, they're able to put food on the table. They're able to potentially send their kids to school. They're able to buy medicine, let's say, for a family member that's ill or an elderly person. So I think there's really a multiplicative factor on that in terms of impact.
00:16:01 Madhav: It's hard to say what that is. Our goals are incredibly ambitious. We want to get to at least 100,000 people being placed every month by March of next year, which is about five months away. And in the next 10 years, our goal is to get earning opportunities to at least a billion people in India and beyond.
00:16:24 Madhav: And I think we might be able to get there sooner than later, given how AI technology is developing. And I think AI really today can democratize access to not just employment, but other types of high value services. Somebody asked me the other day what AI means for me.
00:16:40 Madhav: And I said, the ‘A’ stands for accessibility and the ‘I’ stands for inclusivity. By accessibility, I mean, it can help people access services, even if they don't have high power smartphones. So they can get on a phone call with an AI agent, which will do stuff for them.
00:16:58 Madhav: And inclusivity, because most of the internet is still English, but AI now can reach people who speak any language and potentially any dialect in a more empathetic and relatable manner.
00:17:11 Madhav: That did not exist even a year ago, or maybe two years ago. So I think we should be able to get closer to our big, hairy, ambitious goals maybe in the next five years, if not 10 years.
00:17:23 Shafiq: Yeah, it sounds like you're well on your way.
00:17:25 Madhav: Fingers crossed. How about you?
00:17:28 Shafiq: For us, we have a very similar vision and target. The idea is to provide tools and autonomy back to the workers so that they can create their own flexible workforce and be in control of their schedule and their income to improve, essentially improve their livelihoods. And I think we're seeing a global transformation.
00:17:49 Shafiq: When we first started the business, it was an area, or let's say an industry, that I would say, customers, they were heavily reliant on FTEs, full-time hires for a lot of operational businesses, and then that transitioned into outsourced staffing.
00:18:07 Shafiq: And now the idea of, you know what, we can actually get flexible workers that are compliant, that are skilled enough to come in, plug in, help you complete the shift and do a job.
00:18:18 Shafiq: And then on the back of that, these workers can actually start to take jobs with multiple customers in various sectors and just gain knowledge from these different companies and how they're run and be able to upscale their talent and really accelerate their career.
00:18:34 Shafiq: I think we're seeing that now on a global scale, especially here in the Middle East. A lot of the large retails and large hotel groups are now shifting from outsourcing to flexible hiring because of the benefits of it. And I think this is going to be the future of work within our space.
00:18:51 Shafiq: So what we track is the number of workers, what we like to call Ogrammers deployed per month. And we've got very high targets set for ourselves. So we're about 2,000 workers in Greece, and we're looking at around 3,000 workers in the UAE.
00:19:08 Shafiq: And we just kicked off Saudi, so I think we'll be closing this month at around 200 workers and at the end of the year, we should be at around 300 workers. So I think the idea and the goal is to just increase that as we go along and really scale this across the globe.
00:19:24 Madhav: Awesome, that sounds great.
00:19:26 Shafiq: Yeah, so getting into geographic, as you mentioned India and beyond. How do you navigate, let's say regulatory and cultural differences when scaling your business across regions?
00:19:38 Madhav: We don't have a lot of experience scaling internationally, but to answer your question partially at least, there's a lot of opportunity for this space across the world. You mentioned it's a $600 billion plus TAM globally.
00:19:54 Madhav: And we do believe that beyond India, markets like, let's say Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, et cetera, and also the Middle East are very similar. Some of the dynamics in India and these countries are very similar.
00:20:11 Madhav: In fact, a lot of Indians end up immigrating to these countries to work as blue-collar labor. There's a lot of overlap from that perspective. And I think our products and services might be relevant in these geographies as well as we go forward. We do also recognize that India itself is a large market and it's growing really fast.
00:20:32 Madhav: We are going to be the fifth largest economy in the world in 2027. And so we don't want to distract ourselves with an international opportunity and lose in our home ground, so to speak. So I think we'll continue focusing here for a couple of years and then think about expanding internationally.
00:20:51 Shafiq: Awesome. So you spoke about success for the business. What does success look like for you personally?
00:20:56 Madhav: Success for me is being able to get jobs to a billion people in the next 10 years. When I started the company, I did this thought experiment, it's called the deathbed test. Excuse me, because it's a little morbid, but it's something that I think brings a ton of perspective in life.
00:21:14 Madhav: So this is how it goes. If you imagine for a minute that you have just five minutes left to live, and in that moment, or in that duration of five minutes, you think about what you're doing today and you ask yourself, is it something that I'm proud of? So would you be proud of what you're doing today when you have just five minutes left to live?
00:21:37 Madhav: That's what I have optimized for. That's why I started Vahan because this is something that I think I can do. It's hopefully the last job I'll ever do. And the work that we're doing directly links to the impact that I derive energy from as well. And so luckily my success and Vahan's success are joined at the hip.
00:21:57 Shafiq: You're living every five minutes of the day like it's the last, I see.
00:22:03 Madhav: Not so much anymore, but I feel like the day I die, I'll be super proud of the work we've done at Vahan.
00:22:09 Shafiq: I completely agree with you. It's an honorable vision to serve a billion people around the world and improve their livelihoods is something very impactful. So I completely agree with that. What keeps you up at night?
00:22:23 Shafiq: And I constantly get asked this question by investors recently, by the way, it's just one of the questions that they include when interviewing you or DDing you is what keeps you up at night?
00:22:33 Madhav: Yeah, there's so much in a startup founder's life. But one of the things that recently I've been thinking more about is using AI more and more in our business. And I realized that AI is a force that can really grow one's business exponentially within a very short period of time.
00:22:55 Madhav: And so while we are using AI in an interesting way, I also sometimes have this bit of FOMO when I hear about companies that are hitting 50 million ARR in just a period of six months. And so I keep thinking about ways in which we can continue to deepen the use of AI in our business. How about you? What's keeping you up at night?
00:23:17 Shafiq: It's something that I find myself always answering differently every time I'm asked that, and I think that just goes back to your initial comment, which is there's so many things that keep you up as a founder. Most recently, I would say is really the trust factor.
00:23:33 Shafiq: You touched upon that in the beginning of our discussion. We are expanding geographically and a lot of the times when we expand, we are hit with that trust issue. Who is this company and why are they sort of presenting that they can get me a job? I'm talking in the perspective of workers.
00:23:52 Shafiq: Most of these countries that we're expanding into are highly localized. And they're used to a certain way of getting jobs. So it's very tricky in terms of treading on thin ice here.
00:24:03 Shafiq: In terms of how you approach them, what language do you speak to them, what tone, and essentially making sure that their experience with you, especially in the very beginning, is optimal, right? As soon as you start to lose that trust, it becomes such a bigger issue because they often at times just represent you as a spam or a scam.
00:24:25 Shafiq: These guys are offering jobs and they're offering faster payouts, but I don't believe it until I see it. So we obviously overcome it. It takes time. It usually takes about a couple of weeks to a month to actually overcome it. But obviously as a company in its hyper-go stage, what's keeping me up at night is we need to scale a lot faster.
00:24:44 Shafiq: So I want to be able to fulfill jobs and overcome that trust factor in a very efficient and quick manner. And the ideas that are running through my head in the middle of the night is how can we do that?
00:24:55 Shafiq: How can we immediately build that trust as soon as we land in a country and have that brand equity where we can just onboard staff and get them extremely excited that, you know what, this is the company that's coming in, that's going to match us to jobs and improve our livelihood and whatnot.
00:25:10 Shafiq: Similar to, let's say an Uber going into a new market and acquiring customers. That is what keeps me up at night.
00:25:16 Madhav: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think it's very important to bridge trust in this market. If you can just leverage channels that already have that trust built in or networks that have that trust built in, I think that would help you guys maybe take off faster in a new market.
00:25:32 Madhav: Or just go deeper in an existing market so that you're compounding the amount of trust that you're building there. I think those would be good strategies for you guys.
00:25:41 Shafiq: Agreed. Overall, What do you see as the biggest shift in the global jobs market over the next five to 10 years?
00:25:49 Madhav: That's a loaded question.
00:25:52 Shafiq: Yeah.
00:25:53 Madhav: Look, AI is going to take away a lot of jobs, that's for sure.
00:25:57 Shafiq: Yeah.
00:25:57 Madhav: But I think a lot of jobs are also going to be created. And it's really hard to envision what jobs are going to be created, because I think the labor landscape is just going to shift so much, specifically in the white collar space.
00:26:10 Madhav: I think in the blue collar space, while you have Tesla demoing its Optimus, et cetera, which can bartend and hold a conversation. Will it really be able to do the work of a construction worker or a delivery driver, a worker in a warehouse? That is anybody's best guess.
00:26:29 Madhav: So I think all I can say is that it's going to change. And I feel that it's going to change for the better. I think AI overall is a force that's going to drive more equality. It's going to help people at the bottom move up significantly and help people who are already at, let's say, the top also do better.
00:26:52 Madhav: So I think it's a force for good overall. It's very hard to say what the labor landscape will look like in a few years though. What are your thoughts?
00:27:01 Shafiq: I agree with you. I'd like to stay far away from that point of singularity. But if we get there, we're definitely going to have to adapt. And I think we are at the forefront of change in the fact that we are enabling our businesses through technology and then tools and AI and things like that.
00:27:20 Shafiq: So I think having the right mind and having the right resources, we’ll be able to overcome that and, at that time, impact. Now, I think in the next five, 10 years, as I said, I think there's going to be a shift in the way businesses hire predominantly within the low-skilled workforce space rather than the traditional outsource model.
00:27:40 Shafiq: It's very rigid and inflexible. I think a lot of businesses are going to start to realize a lot more value add from flexible workers. And I think tools like Vahan and Ogram are gonna enable the matching for the two and be able to impact in a positive manner.
00:27:58 Shafiq: Madhav, I just want to get more of a personal view on what books are you reading or podcasts that you're enjoying? With all this work that you have and overload, let's say, do you have time to listen to a favorite podcast or read a book?
00:28:17 Madhav: Oh yeah, I try to go out for a walk or run every morning and listen to a podcast while I'm doing that. Tim Ferriss' podcast is still one of my favorites. I listen to that almost every day. And in terms of books, I recently closed a book called 15 Commitments of Leadership, which is pretty interesting. I think it was a very different take on leadership than what I've read in most books. So I highly recommend that for budding leaders and founders.
00:28:47 Shafiq: I'll take that recommendation. For me, I think How I Built This with Guy Raz is a podcast. I don't know if you've listened to him, but I think it's phenomenal. It's just very simple in terms of interviewing a lot of successful founders and unsuccessful founders and just listening to their stories.
00:29:05 Shafiq: I think just listening to stories and journeys of various founders around the world, like yours and mine can be very insightful for a lot of the youth or just new founders entering the entrepreneurial space. There's a lot that can be learned and picked up with listening to people's journeys.
00:29:023 Madhav: Awesome. I'm going to check that out.
00:29:25 Shafiq: I think productivity is key in what we do in terms of optimizing our time. What's your favorite productivity hack?
00:29:32 Madhav: Favorite productivity hack? Using my calendar as my to-do list. I'm a big one on just managing time well. I literally put everything on my calendar from getting a haircut to going to the gym to reading a book. That works really well for me because then I just have one place to go to when I need to do something or take a decision.
00:29:54 Madhav: More than that, ChatGPT is something that I've tried to build into almost every single workflow of mine. And more often than not, I can find a way to use it for something that I'm doing or thinking about. So that's another hack that's working well.
00:30:08 Shafiq: I share exactly the same productivity hack. For me, it's Google Calendar. Everything from my low stakes to high stakes decisions or anything that I need to do is literally listed there. So I guess there's a lot of us out there.
00:30:20 Madhav: Yeah, yeah. I think time management is so key to being a founder, especially when you need to balance what you're doing with your startup, with also your personal life and your own well-being so the calendar really helps there.
00:30:35 Shafiq: Agreed. Madhav, if you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:30:42 Madhav: Honestly a year is a really long time so I'm just gonna say home because I think all the work that we're doing is so relevant for India and this is a market that we're just laser focused on. So I'm going to say Bangalore, India. How about you?
00:30:59 Shafiq: You have any option in the world and you choose home. I love that.
00:31:02 Madhav: Yep. Yep.
00:31:04 Shafiq: I would probably choose somewhere close to the Mediterranean sea. I think I thrive when I'm close to the Mediterranean sea for some reason. So I would definitely choose, let's say, the coast of Italy or Greece somewhere. Today we're working in a world where you can really work anywhere.
00:31:19 Shafiq: So it's really where you're most productive and where you feel that you're at your best. So for me, it has to be the Mediterranean. Don't know where yet, but somewhere there.
00:31:27 Madhav: Awesome.
00:31:28 Shafiq: And where can listeners find you?
00:31:31 Madhav: I think LinkedIn is the best place to reach out. I get a ton of inbound and I am able to get through most of it. So yeah, please feel free to look me up on LinkedIn and drop me a DM if you'd like to chat or jam about anything.
00:31:44 Shafiq: Fantastic. Same here, LinkedIn I think is the best place to communicate, I also received a lot of inbound and happy to chat with anybody, whether they're in the sector or just curious about the sector and what we're doing.
00:31:57 Shafiq: I appreciate your time, Madhav. Thank you so much. It was lovely to speak to you again, and I'm sure we're going to be speaking more in the future.
00:32:05 Madhav: It was great chatting with you as well, Shafiq. Thank you so much for having me and looking forward together creating a dent in this massive market.
00:32:14 Shafiq: Definitely. Let's go.
00:32:17 Scott Harley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.