Beyond the Case
A podcast where global leaders from the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management (OPM) community join in a personal capacity and share the real decisions, failures, and mental models behind building enduring companies.
This podcast is independent and not affiliated with Harvard Business School.
Beyond the Case
The 20-Year Rule for Entrepreneurs: Happiness and Long-Term Selfishness - Vivek Bhargava
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Vivek Bhargava's philosophy is that the best entrepreneurial life is built on integrity, optimism, learning, and continuous stretching with happiness as the foundation, not the reward.
Vivek is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and author of Happiness is a Muscle. He reflects on his journey from joining his family’s business to building Communicate2, one of India’s leading digital performance agencies, selling it to Dentsu, and later launching Consumer.ai.
He also shares hard-earned lessons on bootstrapping, surviving early market timing mistakes, specializing to win, investing in people, and building with integrity. Across business and life, his worldview is anchored in growth: happiness comes from challenge, learning, and stretching beyond one’s current limits. For him, fulfillment comes not from comfort or status, but from continued evolution.
Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:
- Happiness comes from growth, not stagnation.
One of Vivek’s strongest ideas is that happiness is found in the growth phase of life. He left a successful senior role because he no longer felt stretched or challenged. - Don’t build a company to sell it. Build a great company.
His view is that exits are outcomes, not goals. Founders who obsess over selling often lose the plot; those who focus on building something excellent create the conditions for optionality. - Choose industries that don’t cap your ambition.
He left the family’s musical instruments business because he felt the industry’s ceiling was too low. He wanted any limit on scale to come from his own execution, not the market size. - Being early can look like being wrong.
Communicate2 started in 1997, before India was really ready for digital marketing. That early struggle taught him resilience and conviction. - Specialization can be a breakout strategy.
A major turning point came when the business focused on search marketing and became the best in that niche. Mastery in one important area created scale. - Integrity is not optional—it is strategic.
Vivek repeatedly emphasizes that integrity helps you sleep well, think clearly, and build long-term trust. He sees it as central both to happiness and to durable success. - Take care of employees and customers first.
His metaphor is powerful: if you are the rope between your team and your customers, and both sides rise, you rise too. Self-focused leadership eventually gets pulled down. - Training people is a force multiplier.
He sees developing talent as one of his proudest contributions. Great training not only helps the company, it creates alumni who go on to build successful careers elsewhere. - Founders need long-term thinking and “long-term selfishness.”
By this he means making choices that truly serve your long-run happiness and success, instead of optimizing for short-term applause, money, or convenience. - Real mastery requires stretching, not just repetition.
He expands on the “10,000 hours” idea by saying growth only happens when those hours are spent pushing beyond your comfort zone. Repetition alone is not enough.
Books:
Hey, welcome everyone to another episode of Beyond the Case, which is a podcast where global leaders from Howard Business School's OPM community join in a personal capacity and they share the real decisions, life principles, mental models, and learning curves that they have built along the way of starting and leading companies. My guest today is Vivek Bhargav. Vivek, it's a pleasure to have you on this show. Pleasure is all mine, my friend. Pleasure to be here. Okay. Vivek, do you just want to take a moment and introduce yourself, your company as well, so the listeners know about uh who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_01Sure. So my name is Vivek Bhargav. I've been in digital advertising 25 years. So I had built a company called Communicate 2, which was the largest performance agency in the country. Sold it to Densu in 2012. Worked with them for eight years, helped them acquire a few agencies, build a thousand people team. 2020, middle of COVID, I wrote a book on happiness. And one of the lines I wrote in my book was the happiness comes in the growth phase. It does not come in the phase of stagnation. Next morning, I quit Denso to start consumer.ai, which is my current company, with two other co-founders. We raised about $4 million, built the platform, launched it in the US, bought a couple of few Fortune clients out there. Last month we booked AWS HP Pfizer. In India, we've now really expanded our business with 10 new clients, become profitable. So now I'm going through the same journey again of building a company from 0 to 1. Hopefully, we can get some good partner to work with. Again, that's my second phase as an entrepreneur, but I've done about 35 angel investments. I love paragliding. I own a Tibetanist team. Um, and I've in the Buddha category of 40 plus, I have one silver medal in nationals. And I think um one thing that I'm really passionate about is happiness. So I wrote a book called Happiness is a Muscle, and I go and give it a lot of talks around that. I've become a forum facilitator for entrepreneurs' organization. I'm part of IPO2, and now I'm going and taking these forum trainings for people. So I love learning new things, and that's what I think makes my life very joyful.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing. One of the most influential books that I read that affected my life is a book on happiness. It's called The Happiness Hypothesis. Which was written by Jonathan. I I don't know how to say his last name, Hait. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That book stuck with me, and I'm excited to check out your book as well.
SPEAKER_01And background sounds very, very send me your address, I'll send you the book. Because when you order through me, then you get a sort of signed copy of the book.
SPEAKER_00Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. When you look back at the early part of your life, what experiences or influences most shaped how you think about work, ambition, and also risk?
SPEAKER_01So I think I had a very large influence uh from my father uh regarding philosophies in life. So I still remember I was like 10, 11 years old, and he was he has sat me down uh while during dinner and asked me, Do you know the difference between having a job and becoming an entrepreneur? So I was like 11 years old, I was waiting for uh thinking whether I'm gonna get batting, playing cricket in my building or not. Like these are the not the questions I was thinking of, right? So I said, I don't know. So he said, okay, you know what? If you want to be successful in a job, you have to spend less than what you are. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to just earn more than what you can spend. So if if you are spending a crore rupees a m a day, not a problem, as long as you earn more than that. And here I was this 11-year-old kid sitting on the dinner table and thinking I'm gonna be an entrepreneur because I want to spend a crore rupees a day. So I think that was, in a way, a small introduction of entrepreneurship into the kids in the family. Like we come from this family of entrepreneurs. So I don't think we none of our families actually have jobs. They're all entrepreneurs. So unlike a lot of people that you've interviewed in the past, like almost every single person in the family is an entrepreneur. I can't recollect anybody who has a job in our family. So very different family, and I think that shaped my views towards entrepreneurship and shaped my sort of risk-taking abilities in life.
SPEAKER_00Right. And so was there ever a temptation to join any existing family business while you were growing up? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So actually I did join the family business. So when I was like in my late teens, early twenties, I'd actually join the family business. So we have this carrot rule in our family. All the kids are told that if you come and attend office, you know, do the bank reconciliation statement, work in the retail outlet, we'll take you abroad every two, three months. So they used to have these exhibitions in Germany, in the US, and other places. It's only when he grew up we realized we were the cheapest labor they could find because the cost of an etiquette, the kid would work for you 14 hours a day. But I think it was a good exchange because you get to go to Germany, go to get to the US, and you can tell your potential girlfriends, oh, I was in Paris yesterday. But there I was cleaning up the stall and Jaru Maratha. But fact of the matter is that you were in Paris and this is a great thing. So I think the seeds of entrepreneurship in a way got reinforced during my working in the family business. But I was very clear, our family business is into musical instruments. So very quickly, I realized that the largest musical instruments company in India would probably be less than $50 million in terms of actually I think it would be $20 million or $10 million. So even if you become the largest in the country, you will build a $10 million revenue company. So I said, like, I want to be very clear that if I'm gonna create a billion dollar company, the the industry should not limit me. So that's one of the primary reasons that I said that okay, uh, if I fail to create a billion dollar company, it'll be because of my own limitations, not the limitation of the industry. So I think that was the main reason that I left the family business to start communicate to in those days, and this was 1997.
SPEAKER_00And how did you conceptualize the idea for communicate to? Was there a problem you came across, a pain point you felt and you decided to start the business, or was there an opportunity you saw and you thought, hey, why is no one else solving this?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it was a bit of both. So I was in the US pretty frequently for exhibitions. I used to stay over at my friend's place in Ronak in in Virginia Tech. And what I found was that, you know, internet was just really transforming in a way marketing communication. So I felt that Indians, in general, Indian companies are not very good at marketing, and using technology for marketing is even a bigger Lacuna area. So I thought that if we can create a company that will help uh large or mid-sized companies in India use technology to improve marketing communication, that would have a huge potential. I think I think I was naive. In 1997, there were no internet users in the country. So using internet and digital marketing was too naive an idea, and I think I was way too early. So we struggled a lot in the initial years because I think we underestimated the the ability of companies in India to adopt technology and internet in the initial years. In a way, the idea was ahead of its time, uh, but I think that taught us resilience of surviving and actually being optimistic about that sooner and later digital will arrive in India. Sorry, I've lost you, uh Soin.
SPEAKER_00I'm sorry. Okay. I was asking you, over time, founders start developing operating principles, and these are often developed through mistakes that are made. Um so I'm wondering, are there any principles that you had to build and um any principles that you created after you learned lessons the hard way?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I think I don't think some of my principles have been created because of lessons. I think what has happened is that in a way, for a period of time I've realized what kind of a leader I am and what are the things that are important to me. So let's say I have a principle of integrity where you know, even if I'm making $2 more, but I have to bend the rules a bit, I would not bend the rules. Um even when I sold my company to Densoo, I I actually paid all of taxes and I was very clean. In fact, my CA also was saying that you don't need to be so clean. I said, like, listen, I rather sleep well at night. So I've always gone excessive on the integrity front. And I think that I learned mainly because I think my father in a way inculcated those values in me and he had a sterlite reputation in the market, and he basically encouraged me that if you want to have a happy, joyful life, then you need to basically never be worried that something is gonna untoward is gonna happen because you were did not deal with the world in in integrity and consciousness, right? So that was one principle I have. I believe that we are this rope in the center. At one side there are team members and employees, and the other side there are customers. If you take care of your team members and you take care of your customers, then both of them rise, that you are this rope in the center, you will drop rise automatically. If you try to focus on your own rise, then the team and the customers will pull you down and you will not be able to rise. Uh, third principle for me is that I think having a really awesome way of training and imparting learning to team members was something which I focused on from very early days. So Communicate 2 has led to multiple companies being formed, multiple companies then being sold. Uh, most of our team members today work at some amazing places at very senior levels. And whenever I bump into them, they say, you know what, the training that C2 gave us from the early days is really came in handy. We could get jobs easily, we could get significantly pay increases because anybody who had left communicate to was welcome in most of the companies. So overall, they had a great career because of the training they received. And I think this has created a lot of off-truths per se. But in general, I think one of my principles is happiness brings you success. Success may not bring you happiness. So if you focus on leading a life which is joyful and happier, I think it'll lead to success. So that I think is the core principle that in a way drives me.
SPEAKER_00When you were starting out, I believe it was the late 90s, venture capital may not have been so prominent in India, but you also come from a business background. You mentioned your family was in business. Talk to us a little bit about how you approached financing for your company. Were you bootstrapped? And if yes, was that a conscious decision or was that lack of funding which led you to the discipline of bootstrapping?
SPEAKER_01No, I think I was bootstrapped, but my father had given me some capital, which in a way I was stupid enough to lose it all in the first few initial months because I had, you know, you do advertising and do a lot of things, and you hire people then more than you really need, and dot com bust, whatever's left, dot com bust just killed it all. Then what I realized was that I think we had to pivot a business model instead of focusing only on media. We said, okay, we're gonna focus on content, we're gonna focus on strategy, we're gonna focus on SEO, something which gives you net revenues and a monthly basis, which is not built on media, because media can go through ups and downs. And I think then I think at one point in time we focused on search and became the largest search marketing company in the country. And that just took us to our next level. And I think uh in a way we didn't have to look back, although we went through uh a little bit of a downturn during the financial bust in 2008 when a lot of banking institutions used to work with we saw spending. But I think becoming a specialist in one thing and becoming the best in the country in that one thing, I think was a strategy that's really served as well.
SPEAKER_00So talk to me about the journey of building and then eventually selling a company. How misunderstood is that journey for entrepreneurs who've not been through the sales cycle? And what were some of the most surprising parts of the sale process for you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I think my belief is that you can never build a company to sell it. You build companies, and in that journey, there is a possibility a sale will happen. So I've always seen a lot of entrepreneurs when they have this thing in their mind that they want to sell a company and they're trying to build a company to sell it, it rarely happens. But if you build a great company, in that process, a sale could happen. So I think that's been my biggest learning. Even right now, we're trying to build consumer.ai into one of the largest consumer intelligence platforms in the world, and we're working with 400 companies, we've built an amazing tech, and in that whole process, we've had people approaching us and we're exploring those options when people approach us. But it was never built. You build a company with a 20-year horizon that you want to build this into a multi-billion dollar company over the next 20-year period, and in that journey, something will happen. Second thing I think is that people think that uh entrepreneurship, like some people may have it easy. I've rarely met any entrepreneur who's had it easy. Every single entrepreneur has gone through ups and downs, struggles in life, and it's very, very rare that an entrepreneur has achieved success without those downturns. So that is something which I feel people look at entrepreneurs with somewhat of a rosy lens, but every entrepreneur has gone through, in a way, extreme hardships. Staying in the office all night long. We used to have an office in the a mall, and they would shut down the shutters, and I would stay back in the mall in the night, and the mall is really scary in the night. And the loo used to be on the other side of the mall, and there used to be maniquins of uh textile and these garment companies, and it used to be very scary in the night. So so many times you would just go to the loo before the mall would close down and then not go to the loo the entire night. We've we've stayed in in in the office where you slept on the table where there is a CRT monitor and you can't comfortably take a, you know, you can't sleep there, but you're sleeping there. So I think all entrepreneurs go through really tough times, but you know, it looks rosy at the end of it. So there is one saying that has motivated me a lot in my life. It says that entrepreneurs live a few years of their life like most people won't. So they can live the rest of their life like most people can't. So this is one saying that has motivated me a lot.
SPEAKER_00Got it. Great. Um, do you think you inherited any principles actively from your parents about running a business, starting and running a business? Or do you think while there may not have been any obvious principles, they were all encoded within you and it reflected in your style of work and your approach towards situations?
SPEAKER_01I think more than principles, I think I've inculcated a lot of values for my father. So his ability to take risks. So his story goes like he was 17 years old when my grandfather had expired. He had four other siblings. The youngest sibling was three years old, and he told all the people in Matra that he's gonna go to business and do business in in Bombay. He comes from Matra. So the all the elders in the Matra said that, don't you know, listen, what are you gonna do? How are we gonna take this three-year-old kid with the mother and all these people to Bombay? Why don't you just stay back in Matra? So he said, But if I stay back in Matra, would you take care of me? So he said, no, uh, we will try, but you know, God will take care of you. So he says, God will take care of me in Bombay too. And then that's how we left Matra and came to Bombay. If he had stayed back in Matra, then probably we would have not been talking, right? Because uh the opportunities are safe, the proof that he builds. So I think that risk taking is one value that I think he inculcated in me. Integrity is one value that he's definitely uh inculcated in me. He is always a person who would go out of his way to help people, and I do the same. I've seen that in a way it was a he believed in karma and um he believed in karma in the same life, which I have a very similar belief about it. He was a very optimistic guy. So I feel that I don't know if optimism can be transferred, but probably it is hereditary. Uh I have a daughter who's very optimistic. I'm very optimistic, so my father was very optimistic. So I have a feeling that that's one thing that probably has got transferred either through nature or nurture, I don't know. But but these are the things that I can easily say that I think is is is under the influence of my father.
SPEAKER_00Beautiful. I've said on a few of my previous uh podcast episodes that I think every entrepreneur is optimistic, has to be optimistic because you always believe the future is better than the present, and hence you don't mind the sleepless nights, the unpaid hours that you work for, maybe months or years, and all the other personal risks you put yourself and maybe some corporate risks you take on. So I I definitely acknowledge what your father might have imbibed in you on the optimism part there. And then at some point you wrote a book, Happiness is a Muscle. Talk to us about what inspired you to do that introspection on, you know, maybe recognizing that you need to write a book, how that journey works, and why did you pick this particular topic?
SPEAKER_01So actually, it's again connected to my father's. What happened was that I sold my company in 2012, seven, eight months thereafter, my father lined up in the hospital, he was in the ventilator, and I'd grown up in a middle-class family, so for me, like money is a penisha for all evil, right? I thought like a silver bullet solves all problems, and obviously I couldn't save my father. Uh and my father passed away in that trip. So I was in the hospital every night in that introspection mode, and I said, you know, like I spent my entire life trying to make wealth, and now I've made it, which was pretty adequate for me for the rest of my life, and it's still not able to save my father, and it is not giving me happiness. Like I thought this is this is like I'll be in the state of ecstasy all the time. Anytime I feel depressed, I can just look at my bank account and I'll feel better. And I realized that my father passed away, the bank account meant nothing. So I actually decided to make a new goal in my life. My new goal was I want to increase my happiness every minute, every hour for the rest of my life. And I said, okay. Um I've always believed that when I want to learn something new, I attempt teaching it. In that process, I get a very deep understanding of that subject. So actually, I wanted to learn more about happiness. I wanted to have new goals in my life which are focused on happiness, and then the only way to do that was to learn about it. So I read 30, 40 books, I went through hundreds of videos, I've had conversations with people. I basically became, in a way, deep thinker and introspected a lot of thoughts and ideas on happiness. And then one thing I found missing in all the literature that I could read and all the books that I could read was either the books focused on philosophy or they focused on actions. So you meditate, you'll be happier, you exercise, you'll be happier, or they focused on things like that, you know, you do minimalism and you can't get happiness from material things, so you look at happiness from non-material things, etc. So I felt that nobody had built sort of a connection between these two things. So I came up with this concept that nutrition and exercise gives you the normal physical muscle. I felt that certain actions and certain beliefs give you this happiness muscle. So with that concept, I worked on it. I created a whole set of beliefs, my own empowering beliefs that how do you build a better relation with money? How do you learn new things to increase your happiness? How do you actually, you know, do certain physical actions that lead to chemical release and increase happiness? So I believe that there is a baseline everybody has of happiness. My book purpose is not to make you happy, but to make you happier. 80 or 100, how do you become 85 or 100? But you're 28 or 100 now to become 40 or 100. So at 40, you may not be in the traditional sense of the word one of the happiest guys around, but it's much better than being on 28. So that is what the book is about, and it's been a very lovely journey writing the book, publishing it. I now go and speak. In fact, a couple of OPMers have invited me to their house. Uh, I don't know if you know Janak. Up so Janak invited me into his house. He called 15-20 other OPMers and his friends. We give a talk on happiness and then distribute the book to all of them. So again, I've been now going and speaking about happiness. My what is I want to create a multi-billion dollar company with consumer. But my why is I want to make 100 million people happier. So I will figure out ways in which one will lead to the other. Keeping my fingers crossed, that's one thing that I want to do before I meet my maker. Have I contributed in making 100 million people happier?
SPEAKER_00Very noble. Very noble. Um, what led you to OPM at the Howard Business School?
SPEAKER_01So I'm actually one of my chapters in my book is Learning New Things Gives Me Happiness. And one of the things that I've realized about learning new things, the biggest benefit of that is, you know, people who are positive energize you, people who are negative train your energy. I've always seen that people who are positive think of the future and people who are negative think and talk about the past. Whenever you're learning anything new, the people you meet, the friends you'll make will be positive people. So what I've seen is that when I've learned something, where I've gone to Everest Base Camp to learn about climate, or I've gone to Everest uh Base Camp, or I've gone to Arctic Circle to learn about climate change, or I've gone to OPM, or I've joined YPO universities or EORIEs or Forum Facilitation, etc., or mentalism or stand-up comedy, the people that I've met in those places are really happy, positive people. So one of the reasons that I sign up for all these things is I believe that life is going like this, and something you'll do because of that, your life will change by one degree. 10, 20 years down the line, you'll land up in a different place. So I think that was one of the reasons that I wanted to lose something which so I didn't go for my MBA uh uh and further studies abroad. Uh, I had started a company when I was 21 years old that would I always wanted to study in a university campus in US in an established institution like a Harvard or Stanford. Uh I heard a lot about OPM, and uh we were sitting actually in Maldives, me and my cousin, and he said, Oh, have you been to Harvard? Have you studied anything? I said, No. He said not. We both filled up our application that evening and applied for OPMs. It was an expensive time on the bar when we applied to OPM. But that's how actually OPM happened for me. And then in hindsight, we made some amazing friends for the institution.
SPEAKER_00And were there any takeaways from OPM that you find yourself revisiting that you could talk about today?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I think for me, I think there are, you know, when uh we don't know OPM, they told me something very interesting, right? That there is one-third of learning that happens from both the professors are teaching you. One third happens from your conversation we have with your fellow students, but one third happens through introspection because you are so engrossed in the case studies and studying that you are not able to constantly an existing business at all. So a lot of ideas and thoughts that you have for your business, in a way, come to you when you're away from the business. So I think to a certain extent, I think we've made a pivot from media to market research. I think at some level, some of these thoughts on strategy came from the learnings that we had from OPM. I think a lot of GTM strategy that, in a way, we're focusing on comes from what like Daks Nana and Das taught us in marketing, etc. Um, I think a lot of connections that are built up. Um I think. Has been very, very useful. Sounding vows. We are going to right now synapse in Delhi 21st, 22nd, but 50 of us OP members are going to be there. We have a reunion in Greece coming up end of August, September, 50, 60 of us are going to be there. So you make friends for life, and I think the learning continues. But I think broadly, I think these things teach you pattern recognition at scale, teach you how to build scale large companies. I think it sharpened my strategy to a certain extent. It allowed me to learn more about negotiation, about pricing. I think at some level, if you're trying to build a large company, having a structured approach on how one should go about doing that and having connections with entrepreneurs all over the world can be very useful in that goal.
SPEAKER_00Vivek, now you've lived your life as a founder, a leader, and you're also an angel investor. With all the experiences that you've had, everything that you've been through on in your journey in these different capacities, how would you today define some a wise person?
SPEAKER_01So I have a feeling at some level, right, for me, if you can take good judgment, you're a wise person. I think if you can take better decisions. So like I've done a course on decision making called Decision by Design Machine Parish. I think if you can take this at least the divide decisions into consequential, inconsequential, reversible, irreversible. So all the consequential, irreversible decisions, if you can take better decisions, I think you're a wise person. I also believe that a wise person believes in long-term thinking. So if you can think over a 20-year horizon, you have to be wise. Only then you can have a long-term approach towards thinking. I think happiness and joyfulness, I think, is important. A wise person is generally happier than people who are unwise. So I think happiness is important for me. Then obviously, you need to have sort of a values-anchored choices. You need to have self-awareness. I think humility is very important for a wise person that you know, however smart you are, there are people who are smarter than you. And in every single thing, there are people who will be smarter than you. So I think more than IQ, a wise person has emotional intelligence. So uh I also believe that if you can not lose your temper and you can have more control over your mind, then you're a wise person.
SPEAKER_00Very, very, very well said. Just to add to that, Shane Parish was I heard an episode he had done with Nawal Gravikant on his Knowledge Project podcast. I heard that. It's a ritual for me. I listened to that particular episode every quarter, shared it with everyone who's close to me. Everyone in my family, I believe, has heard it, and we talk about it actively to try and remind ourselves of some of the very powerful takeaways. That was one episode which really influenced me and my mindset a lot.
SPEAKER_01I also read uh The Almanac of Um Gamikan. I think that's also a wonderful book. Yeah. And when I was reading that book, so I had written my book about four years ago. It got published later. Reading the book, I found so many things which are similarity between what Naval was saying and what my book was. It was almost like it was just amazing to read the book and compare it with some of the thoughts that I had on happiness.
SPEAKER_00Very well. If there is a founder listening today and they're early in the journey of entrepreneurship, what is one mindset that you believe they should take away and recognize as they embark on the entrepreneurial journey?
SPEAKER_01So I think I believe in this concept called long-term selfishness. So always have a view of 20 years. If you have that long-term view and be selfish about it, I'm not saying that you have to be where you are making sacrifices to make everybody else happy. But if you make everybody else, if you focus on your own happiness but have a long-term approach towards life, I think you'll be more successful. So happiness brings you success. Success may not bring you happiness. I think integrity is very important. People underestimate its importance. I think it's very, very important to have a life of integrity. It makes you sleep well at night, and I think that leads to the peace of mind, which is very important in life. I've gone through so many times in areas where I had this two roads to choices to make. One had lesser integrity involved in it, and always took the road which had higher integrity. And I think that has been the secret for my happiness and two certain extra secrets of my success. I think I also believe that I feel if hard work is overrated. You need to spend most of your time doing things that only you can do. I don't think working 18 hours a day unless you see if you are Elon Musk and you can have that kind of productivity at 18 hours a day, but there is one Elon Musk, right, who can build three companies who are each trillion dollars each. But in most cases, I think if you can just give an adequate amount of time to doing things that you do best in the world and hone and focus on your strengths. It's best to focus on your strength and become the best in the world in that strength rather than trying to focus on your weaknesses and then have a lot of mediocre weaknesses. So I've always focused on things that I'm best at and become even better at it. And I think that is something which I would recommend Arthur Minas should do.
SPEAKER_00Is there a book that you could talk about which might have influenced your thinking or which you have appreciated reading?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think I'm I'm a fan of Jim Collins. So all his books, There's Good to Great or Build to Last, I obviously are uh uh definitely it's it's like a Bible for me. To a certain extent, my own book, Hannesses of the Muscle, in a way has given me a lot of learning uh in a way about sort of understanding uh at least my own mental makeup. So that is something which I think is there. I read a lot of interesting books, right? So I've read this book called Your Brain at Work that talks about neuroscience and uh how your brain works if you understand your the development in neuroscience that has happened in the last ten years is more than the last hundred years put together. That that uh I'm pretty fond of uh uh like isotheric topics like whether it's um I'm reading this book by um it's called Reality Trans Surfing. I think Vadim Zieland or something is the author. It's a pretty big book, but it talks about this that we live in these parallel universes and you can make the life you want if you are in a way able to do certain things. So that but in fiction also I'm fond of Dan Brown, so I'm reading The Secret of Secrets right now, one of his latest Dan Brown books. The good old days, I've read all of Ayn Rand, so Atlas Stuck to Fountainhead to you name it, it's like um that. But again, if I had to take one business book that entrepreneurs should read, I think Good to Great would be my my Bible for that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if you listen to the last 10 episodes, I think consistently Jim Collins or a book by him has been mentioned when I asked this question. Wow. No surprises there. And my last question for you is after building and scaling and exiting businesses, how do you now think about success, fulfillment, and happiness?
SPEAKER_01So I'll tell you how this new company started. So what happened was I was in a way running uh Densu performance group. We had a thousand plus people, we had three, four CEOs reporting into me. I was on board of multiple Densu companies, I was in investing, I had this, you know, great life. I was traveling to London, to Singapore for board meetings. I was in a way among those people who were deciding what investment Densu makes in different countries. I was on the committee. So I had this amazing life, right? And at some level, I realized that happiness comes in the growth phase. It does not come in the phase of stagnation. What I was doing, I was not learning anything new, and I was not finding myself challenged on a day-to-day basis. I could have done what I was doing in my sleep. So one of the main reasons ended up starting a new company was I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to grow. And I think that I think is the in a way the spinal cord, uh, in a way for me, I asked myself this question every day: what did I do today that because of which I grew today in my life? Right? What did I learn something new? Did I face any challenges which really stretched me, which put me in that growth zone? If the answer for a few days is nothing, that means I'm doing something wrong. So I think I believe that an entrepreneur is this trapeze artist who's in a circus, whose job is to do these somersaults. The first time when he's doing this, he's capable of three somersaults, he does one. He falls down, he dies. But once he sells his company, he gets a safety net. So now if he is capable of three, he should try ten. If he's capable of ten, he should try twenty. He should keep on increasing it, make it 100, 200. One day he will fly. So he must fall on the safety net a million times. So the only way you're gonna fall on the safety net a million times is you're gonna stretch yourself and do more than what you're capable of doing. If you don't fall in a safety net, then you wasted your life. So I think once you sold your company, then you're gonna realize that okay, now I have a safety net. If I'm capable of creating a $50 million company, let me try a $200 million company. If I'm capable of $200 million, let me come to a billion-dollar company. And now there are examples that people have created trillion dollar companies, right? So basically stretch yourself to do more than what you're capable of, punch above your weight range. And I think at least my basic necessities, I know that my food shelter, clothing, security is assured for the rest of my life for me and my family, right? I don't have to worry ever that I will not be able to provide for my family the basic laws of mass flow. So now, with that safety net, if I don't stretch and do more than what I'm capable of, then I would have wasted a life. So I think that's the biggest thing that I'm looking at. How do I stretch myself every day and do more than what I'm capable of and increase my capability to do more? So virtuous cycle. So I'll end up doing text more than what I'm doing today because, like, you know, like Outliers talks about this book which he talks about 10,000 hours, you become an expert. There is an interesting book on table tennis by this guy who is a UK champion of table tennis called Bounce. What it says is that it's not 10,000 hours that makes you an expert. You have to set yourself in each one of those 10,000 hours. Just because you're a taxi driver who drove 10,000 hours, you don't become a Formula One champion. So, in order to be the Formula One champion, you have to be on the track and stretch yourself. In that 10,000 hours, that's you you become that. So now what happens is I am spending the 10,000 hours where every day I'm spending a few hours in perfecting my craft, improving my craft, stretching myself, putting myself in this uncomfortable growth zone and keeping my fingers crossed. Um hopefully I'll achieve 10x, 100x, 200x of what I've achieved in the past.
SPEAKER_00Very well said. In uh in the tipping point, I read about 10,000 hours, and then I believe in one of Nawal's interviews he talks about 10,000 attempts. And today you've extended that further by sharing that hey, it's not even attempts, stretching yourself in each of those attempts. Um, glad to end on that note. A lot of powerful takeaways here, and I appreciate your time, Bivek. Thank you. Thank you for reminding us about happiness as well. And I do agree with you, it is a muscle, and it's a book we should check out. Your book is called Happiness is a Muscle. Did I get that correct? Okay. And how do people find that?
SPEAKER_01It's not only, but uh yeah, sooner or later I'm gonna build a website and build a plan around it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, sounds good. Appreciate your time, Vivek. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01Same year, my friend. Pleasure. Thank you. It was awesome to be here, yeah.
