The One Percent Project

Monsoon Pabrai is the founder of Drew Investment, a value fund she launched at age 25. Representing a new generation of investors, she adapts classic value principles to the modern landscape, shifting focus from tangible balance sheets to intangible assets like network effects and goodwill. Although raised at the dinner table of a legendary value investor—meeting Warren Buffett at 12—Pabrai emphasises that her foundation was built on traditional operational discipline and EQ. This conversation explores the independence and discipline required to build a career in investing, not just abstract formulas.In this conversation, we talk about: 00:00 Introduction02:54 Introvert Or Extrovert04:30 Childhood Business Lessons06:14 Meeting Buffett Young07:24 Quitting To Start Fund11:17 Tiger Mom Discipline14:52 Raising First Capital18:54 College Major Pivot22:31 Owning Nepo Baby Label24:09 Freedom Through Investing25:09 Handling Smart Rooms27:07 Value Investing Evolves28:51 Learning From Legends32:39 AI And The Future35:37 Berkshire Performance Lens36:36 Why Amex Wins38:43 China Risk And BYD39:57 India Investing Nuggets43:53 Hardest Skill Doing Nothing44:17 Books And Success46:46 Closing Takeaways------Check out:Monsoon Pabrai:https://www.monsoonpabrai.com/Li Lu Value Investing Session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajMy9LkQQlw------Newsletter: The Think newsletter delivers actionable insights on long-term thinking & insights. Learn more and sign-up at onepercent.live/subscribe------Follow PritishInsta: https://www.instagram.com/sanyalpritish/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pritishsanyal/

About Utsav Somani:⁠Utsav is the founder of Offline — India’s most exclusive community of scaled-up tech founders. Early members include co-founders of Zomato, Country Delight, Ultrahuman, Noise, CoinDCX, and many more. He is responsible for bringing AngelList to India. AngelList India became the most active seed investor in the country with 500 investments since it’s launch in 2018. He runs 2 separate funds called iSeed and Galaxy that have around $100M in AUM. Utsav has personally invested in companies like BharatPe, CoinDCX, Pristyn Care, Jupiter, Park+ along with top-tier VC firms.In this conversation, we talk about: 00:00 Intro 02:13 Navigating Introversion 05:40 The Art of Cold Outreach 07:23 Reflecting on a Decade of Investing 10:51 Challenges and Learnings in Angel Investing 12:38 Building the Community 15:21 The Vision for Offline 18:05 Executive Coaching and Community Building 21:14 Building a Strong Cap Table 21:46 The Importance of Monopoly and Control 24:13 Private Paid Communities 30:32 Decision-Making Framework 34:07 Balancing Work and Personal Life 35:57 Defining Success 36:33 Key Takeaways from the Conversation

Mastering Antifragility: Insights from Amazon, Zoom, and Nokia's Journeys:Jitha and I delved into Nassim Taleb's concept of Antifragility, a topic Jitha had explored in his newsletter No.147. We explored the concept of Antifragility, examining how leading organisations like Amazon, Zoom, and InMobi not only survived but thrived during uncertain times, and contrasted this with Nokia's transformation into a fragile organisation. We discuss how, in uncertain times, fragile companies perish, resilient companies survive, and anti-fragile companies grow. We also talk about why startups should focus on scoring in their markets and act like a mosquito rather than being Antifragile.Given the current landscape of Artificial Intelligence and the uncertainty it's causing in the workforce, this discussion has never been more critical. Which organisations will be able to adopt an antifragile mindset and grow as AI becomes mainstream?Follow & Subscribe:Jitha's Newsletter Sunday Reads: https://jitha.substack.com/The One Percent Project: WhatsApp: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/TOP_WA2 ⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/TOP_YouTubeVideos00:00 Introduction02:36 Understanding Antifragility06:21 Amazon's Antifragility During COVID17:51 Zoom's Antifragility During COVID21:12 Nokia's Journey from Antifragile to Fragile27:08 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Full Conversation: https://bit.ly/TOP_BusinessBreakdownIndianFB

About Matt Abrahams:Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Matt Abrahams. Matt teaches organizational behaviour and strategic communication at Stanford. He is the author of the excellent book Speaking Up without Freaking Out and host of the Stanford GSB podcast ‘Think Fast Talk Smart’. Matt is a passionate, collaborative, and innovative educator and coach. He has published widely on strategic communication, cognitive planning, persuasion, and interpersonal communication. Prior to teaching, Matt held senior leadership positions in several leading software companies, where he created and ran global learning and development teams. Matt has worked with executives to help prepare and present keynote addresses and IPO road shows, conduct media interviews, and deliver TED talks.Strategic communication can alter people, teams, and organisations. One who recognises the value of communication realises the importance of honing personal and the team's communication skills. Good communicative skills increase employability, morale, engagement, and productivity, along with improved teamwork. Effective workplace communication contributes to improved performance of individuals, teams, and organisations. But the question remains, how does one achieve effective communication? Matt helps people find that answer. In this engaging conversation with Matt, he talks about strategic communication, who is an effective communicator, the communication styles of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffet, his favourite communicators, the role of confidence in effective communication and much more. Key Highlights & Transcript: http://bit.ly/TOP_MattAbrahams In this conversation, he talks about:00:00 Intro 02:42 Counterintuitive insights about strategic communication? 03:37 How is an effective communicator? 04:22 What excites him about teaching? 05:40 Is it hard to teach strategic communication? 07:52 The role of storytelling communication? 09:44 The communication style of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffet. 12:41 When you need to speak spontaneously, how do you manage your anxiety? 15:54 How can founders have an effective communication strategy and storytelling framework? 19:32 The impact of martial arts in Matt's strategic communication. 21:53 The importance of the environment in effective communication.23:12 Communicators Matt appreciates.24:43 The importance of confidence in effective communication.26:23 What is an introvert's strength in communicati

About Shreyaa Kapoor:Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Shreyaa Kapoor. Shreyaa kicked off her career at Bain consulting, went on to become a content strategist and influencer with 650K+ Instagram followers and was recognised by LinkedIn as a Top Voice for 2022.This is a fascinating conversation with a young content influencer about why and how she chose to leave consulting and join the creator economy. Among all the insights and anecdotes that Shreyaa shares, the one that stood out was her father's advice "If your content and work can easily be copy pasted then you are not creating good enough content." Some Key Highlights:You need to have patience and the courage to experiment. There will be content pieces that will not work out while you're experimenting but that's the price you pay to stand out and be original.If your content and work can easily be copy pasted, then you are not creating good enough content.Content quality is more important than content frequency. In this conversation, she talks about:Her journey from college to becoming a content creator.Her LinkedIn Vs Instagram content strategy.Her relationship with money, given her Instagram content, is about personal finance.How did she kick off her financial journey?As a content creator, how do you create a legacy?Her lessons as a content influencer?How is Gary Vee different from Ali Abdaal?Links:Shreeya’s Instagram | LinkedIn

Royal Enfield:When Vikram Lal, CEO & Founder of The Eicher Group, bought the Royal Enfield brand in 1994, the company was already losing money and market share. Product, operations, management, marketing and sales were facing issues. Many Eicher CEOs tried to revive the brand but failed to get Enfield back to its glorious old days. The company was about to shut Enfield when Siddhartha Lal, Vikram's 26-year-old son, put his hand up to revive Enfield. This is a mini-episode on how Siddhartha took Royal Enfield from the brink of bankruptcy to becoming a lifestyle brand and India's first global consumer brand. Royal Enfield is The Oldest Motorcycle Brand in Continuous Production. It found its origin in a British needle-making factory in the late 1800s. In 1901, the first Royal Enfield motorcycle was unveiled. The company made its way to the Indian market in 1949 and later set up a JV with Madras motors. The British arm of the company over the years was unable to sustain itself and eventually shut down, but the Indian JV business chugged along.In India, Royal Enfield is a cult, not just a motorcycle company. It is as urban a brand as rural. It was brought to India by the Brits, adopted by the Indian army and police, got popular among the socially powerful Zamindars- landlords in the 1960s. Today it is a social icon among millennials. When Siddhartha signed up for the job, he faced the Harley Davidson dilemma if you innovate, you upset the fans, and if you don't, your brand dies. So he positioned Royal Enfield as a lifestyle brand and kept its classic design and iconic engine thump. The new Royal Enfield was about independence, passion and freedom. This attracted the youth. They cared less about performance and mileage and more about being a part of a 100- year old nostalgia. They bought the new Royal Enfield because of the old one. He went on to take serval other counterintuitive decisions. For example, he built a new engine for Enfield, which was not a popular decision among Enfield fans. He chose to shut down the newly inaugurated Jaipur plant and kept the 50-year-old Chennai plant running. Siddartha pushed for international penetration into the U.S., Australia, Thailand and the U.K.As of June 2022, Royal Enfield's domestic sales increased by 40% YoY. There is a long way to go for Enfield, but Siddhathra has been able to revive and re-position Enfield as India's first global lifestyle brand. If you found this interesting, head on to reading Amrit Raj's book, Indian Icon: A Cult Called Royal Enfield.

Generalist Vs Specialist:This mini-episode stemmed from my discussion with Sidu Ponnappa. Sidu is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He says the generalist Vs specialist discussion is misleading. It is better to analyse someone as objective-oriented or activity oriented. One can choose either not both at the same time. These days there is a debate, especially among the younger talent pool, about being a generalist or a specialist. There is a popular book on this topic by David Epstein called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Epstein argues against specialisation early on in one's life and makes a case for "Range" to gather as many skills and experiences as you can and later to specialise based on your strengths.What got me thinking is, does the brain have a generalist vs specialist evolution, and do Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Michael Angelo, and other achievers have a generalist or a specialist mindset? It turns out that the brain goes through a generalist and specialist evolution cycle between early childhood and adulthood. A child is born with 100 billion neurons. These neurons communicate with each other through a structure called synapse. During infancy, the brain experiences a large amount of growth. As a result, there is an explosion of synapse formation between neurons during early brain development. This is called synaptogenesis.Synapse growth is critical in learning, memory formation, and adaptation early in life. Around 2 to 3 years of age, the number of synapses hits a peak. Just after this peak, the brain starts to remove synapses that it no longer needs. A synapse can either be strengthened or weakened based on its use. Synapses that are frequently used grow and strengthen and the ones which are not used are removed by the brain. The process of removing synapses is called Synaptic pruning.Going back to our business world, the brain begins its journey as a generalist, adds as many synapses as it can early on and then switches to a specialist mode where it starts pruning, killing, synapses that show low or no use. If you consider the journeys of Warren Buffet, who made his first investment at the age of 11, Bill Gates, by the age of 19, had more than 10,000 hours of coding under his belt, Michael Angelo became an artist by the age of 13 and there a numerous such examples of high achievers who started honing their crafts in their teens. David Epstein talks about Roger Freder as a generalist because he dabbled into skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer at school. It was closer to his teens that Roger picked up tennis. Maybe this is an example of synaptic pruning where the brain kills the less used synapses. Now can you and I pick up tennis in our twenties or thirties? Sure we can! But it will potentially be 5 times harder than someone who has worked on their serve and backhand since early childhood. Our schooling system pushes us to be a generalist when it should provide us with the environment in our teens to be a specialist and focus on activities and subjects we enjoy. We can't say for sure if synaptogenesis is a generalist function or synapse pruning is a specialist function of the brain. Still, it does indicate that the brain's development has a generalist to specialist evolution cycle.I found the topic valuable not only to get a better understanding of my strengths and weakness but also the formative process that my little one is going through.If you like this mini-episode, share it with someone who would find it valuable. You can drop me a line at pritish@onepercent.live. Until next time.

About Haldiram’s:Hello everyone, I am kicking off a mini-series based on the research I do for The One Percent Project conversations.Prep for every guest conversation leads me into some fascinating rabbit holes about people, companies and industries. So, I plan to share some of these stories and insights through this mini-series. I hope you enjoy them. Here is the first one. While doing my research on Ahana Gautam and Open Secret, which is on a mission to un-junk the Indian snack industry, I stumbled upon the Namkeen Industry of India. Namkeen in Hindi means snack. It is a $ 15 billion industry in India. No conversation on namkeens would be complete without mentioning, Haldiram's, India's No.1 Namkeen brand. Haldiram's 85+ years of history is an MBA in itself. It is fascinating to learn how Gangabhishenji Agarwal, fondly known as Haldiram, in 1918 kicked off the making of a Rs 5000 Cr, USD ~600M, brand, which is now a household name in India.Haldiram was a school dropout who started working at his father's bhujia shop early in his life and eventually became an outlier among ~300 other bhujia sellers in Bikaner through product innovation, branding, marketing, pricing and opportunistic expansion.Production InnovationHaldiram started his journey from his family snack stall in Bhujiya Bazar in Bikaner. He reinvented his aunt's bhujia recipe to what we know as Haldiram's bhujia. He made it with moth beans, a type of lentil. This changed the taste and made the bhujia more crispy. The new bhujia was an instant hit among consumers.Branding/ Marketing:He named the bhujia "Dungar Sev" after the name of then popular Maharaja Dungar Singha. Here is a great example of Influencer Marketing from the 1930s.Pricing:Bhujia was a commodity. But given the popularity of "Dungar Sev", Haldiram raised the price from 2 paise/kg to 5 paise/kg. It made Haldiram's bhujia a premium product, and sales kept growing.Expansion:From 1937 to 2000, Haldiram's had grown to 4 cities Bikaner, Calculta, Nagpur and Delhi. Expansion into Nagpur was a challenge and an opportunity. Nagpur or the whole of Maharashtra, a state in India, in the 1960s, was not interested in bhujia and was not exposed to many snacks.In the 2000s, they diversified into sweets, which brought the next age of growth for Haldiram's. They went on to add 400+ products which include snacks, sweets, cookies, pickles and much more. They also went international and set up a base in the US, Canada, UK, UAE, Sri Lanka and Thailand.Today, Haldiram's valuation has crossed $3 Billion, and the business has now spread to 80+ countries. Haldiram's present-day success is not only the outcome of Gangabhisenji's courage to break out and try something new but also the vision his sons and grandsons have had in this 85-year journey. I will stop there; let you ponder how a bhujia wala from Bikaner landed up, creating a Namkeen empire. However, the journey of building the empire has not been a straight line. If you found this interesting, refer to Ajuniorvc.com's blog on Haldiram's and the book Bhujia Barons. If you liked this mini-episode, share it with someone who would find it valuable. You can drop me a line at pritish@onepercent.live and tell me how else will be interesting to look into. Until next time.

About James Keyes:My next guest on the One Percent Project is James W Keyes. James served as the Chief Executive Officer of 7-Eleven and chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. James graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the College of the Holy Cross. He also obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1980. James is the founder of the 'Education is Freedom' foundationJoin our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, he talks about:How curiosity and adversity have helped him lead organisations such as 7-Eleven and Blockbuster?The need for entrepreneurial thinking within a corporation.The art of negotiation and its tenets. How has 7-Eleven been able to keep itself ahead of the curve, and why others have not been able to replicate its growth model. Why did he choose to join Blockbuster?Would Blockbuster be a different company if it had accepted to buy Netflix?Are the principles of leadership being disrupted by the new generation of leaders?Some Key Highlights:When you are hit by adversity, you can respond in two ways: You can have your head down and become the victim, or keep your head up and say I'll get through this and get to the other side. Most of the time, there's hidden learning, and there's a strength that comes from knowing that you were able to make it through to the other side. This gives you the quiet advantage over someone who hasn't had to endure the adversity.The idea of a corporate entrepreneur is almost an oxymoron. Unfortunately, many corporate cultures believe in conformity and force people into a norm, discouraging the outliers. The very definition of an entrepreneur is someone who sets out on their own as an individual and breaks the norms. In contrast, the definition of a corporation is coming together as one; it's a body, not an individual.Leadership is about adapting to change, and change happens every day. So whatever you learned about leadership last week, you might have to change it next week based on a new set of facts, people or circumstances.

About Taru Kapoor:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Taru Kapoor. Taru is the general manager of Tinder and Match Group in India. In her previous stints, she has worked with Sequoia Capital and The Boston Consulting Group. Taru graduated from IIT Delhi with a B.Tech and M.Tech in Chemical Engineering and received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.This is an amazing conversation on leadership, solving a hard problem and educating the youth on how to safely and respectfully express their feelings. Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, Taru talks about:Her leadership style and decision-making process;Balancing between EQ and IQ;Is it important for Tinder to have a female leader?The objective behind creating "Closure", a creative film that talks about consent;Dating in Metaverse; andReasons behind Tinder's adoption and growth in India.

About Abhinandhan Sridhar:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Abhinandan Sridhar. Abhinandan is a screenwriter who kicked off his career as an assistant director to Andhadhun writer and National Award-winning filmmaker Hemanth M Rao. His writing credits include Netflix's Little Things Seasons 3 & 4 and Teen Tigada, a film for Prime Video's Unpaused anthology.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, he talks about:How have OTT platforms disrupted the creation process and the new media industry?His experience working with Netflix as a creator.What should new creators do when kicking off their careers?His research technique and what has he learnt from Pixar's filmmaking process?How does one judge and manage execution in creative processes such as filmmaking?What are the attributes of a head writer?How are OTT platforms enabling creators to be producers?