Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have KashyapDeorah founder of HyperTrack, the world's largest community of logistic techbuilders, building logistics apps that feel like the future. Kashyap, I'm so excitedto chat with you not only about your journey as an entrepreneur, but becauseexpand over a few companies and not only you, you've run companies, but you'veinvested and also this experience of of being between two countries and I knowyou worked with companies both in India and the us and it's gonna be amazing tonot only chat about the logistics and the differences between the two of them,but also know, some similarities that the audience may not know of and, andjust really get excited about, startups not only here, but across the world.

So, before we get started, what were youdoing before you founded HyperTrack?  

Kashyap: Sure. Hey, thanks forhaving me on the show, Julian. Before HyperTrack I started and sold threecompanies over two decades, and I wrote bestseller. I invested in a whole bunchof startups of which six or seven ended up being Unicorns.

Julian: Yeah. How did you knowwhat startups to invest? When, when people talk about startups that havesuccessful endings to them, what a part of the due diligence process makes yousee the, the magic , or the potential within that company to, to be successful?

Kashyap: Sure. It's for, foranything you start, you gotta try a few things and. See what you got. Right.See what you got wrong. Yeah. Learn from that. The investment cycles usuallygive you feedback 6, 7, 8 years later, right? Because you entitle check now andif the company's gonna go under, or if the company's gonna return you thousandx.

Yeah, you only know that many years fromnow, especially if it's the first check. So, it took me a while and a lot ofmistakes to understand what works and quite simply what I learned. . If I'mtrying to invest in a space that I feel I understand, yeah. It actually is. Imake the worst decisions.

Brilliant. Because it, as a space youunderstand, you know too much. Right? So the true disruptors mm-hmm. , you, youare, at least I was skeptical of them saying, oh, This is fine. How are yougonna make money? Or, okay, I see how you'll make money, but how will it everbe profitable?

Or, you just kind of know too much andyou're in your head and you think that you're an expert. And some of thebiggest misses of my life were all disruptions coming into an industry, which Ithought I understood and I missed writing that check. And on the other side,when I see which are the ones that were successful, it was.

when you meet a founder and you go,there's definitely an X factor in this person. There is a sparkle in their eye.There's this you can tell that there is some sort of X factor and somesuperhuman strength going on there. And if they're, the market they're lookingat makes sense and if the team they've built around.

makes sense. It's usually a very impulsedecision to, yeah. To be part of their journey. And another way to look at thisis, is this a person you would work with or is this an idea that I can think ofworking on? Mm-hmm. . So, if that is the case, then investing in them gives mean inside view to vicariously actually build that company.

Right. So you're not looking for return,you're looking. A seat at the table and I mean, a seat on the cap table andjust the Right, right. An inside view. Yeah. So you can vicariously live thatjourney.  

Julian: Yeah. How do you, howdo you manage the relationship, being a founder yourself and investing withother founders, and obviously, I, I think founders all have this mentality of,of, something's on the ground, pick it up and do something with it.

How do you kind of, I guess, relinquish thatcontrol when you're investing in companies and working so intimately? Withfounders and, and having a healthy relationship with, not only their team, butalso with, with yourself and, and how to communicate, the different value youcan add, but also not overstep when you think, founder has to learn a lessonthemselves in, in terms of Right.

Their journey and their growth. How doyou manage that relationship?  

Kashyap: Absolutely. You It's agreat question. So, in the early days, I used. Have opinions as we all do aboutthe business, about the product, about the go-to market, about things likethat. Yeah. Right. Which the executive team usually cares about or the coreteam cares about, to some extent the board cares about, but it's, it's, it'snot something that a small investor should really care about.

And I used to, and I realized that itwasn't very useful and it was somewhat distracting and it. either asking themfor regular updates especially live updates or offering them any sort ofbusiness strategy or execution. Advice I found was not very useful. . So, butI'll tell you what was useful.

Yeah. So what I learned over time wassome of the best deals they have to let you in. Everyone in the world knowsthat it's a great deal. It's a great founder. It's a great. So you are usuallycompeting with a lot of other people to just get your check into that company.Mm-hmm. . And once you do that, you, the reason why the founder chooses to takeyour money is if they find the conversation with you useful.

Mm-hmm. . And the, the goal then becomesis am I the first call for that founder? When things go bad, because, foundingan entrepreneurship, as you well know, is a very lonely journey, right? Yeah.Some of the toughest problems we deal with we can't talk about with our team,we can't talk about with our shareholders.

And in that moment you want them to befully open and vulnerable. These are questions around founder dynamics or teamdynamics or fundraisers. Big strategic pivots or right big losses in thebusiness, lost a customer trying to figure out how to deal with the situation.So during those sort of dark times, if you will how can you be the first calland listening board for the Yeah.

And I think as when that listening opensup, the founders see that. Yeah. If I'm asking the right questions and beingthe right sounding, they are more open. They find that just in and off itselfuseful. Yeah. And then in that they know that this guy's gonna be honest andtell me just point blank and straight about things that I need to hear.

Yeah. Once he's given me a listen andthat's, that's kind of what I go for.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And how, Ialways like to think about, what founders can do proactively to, to not onlybuild relationships, but to execute when there's, an opportunity for them tosay, secure some round of funding. In your experience, obviously, runningthrough companies, having them going through acquisition, investing in othercompanies, and now on with, your fourth company.

What, what can a founder do to betterprepare themselves? Or, or what pieces are they typically needing to prepare tosay, take advantage of, of interest from other investors? We hear a lot of warstories about either founders, whether they don't have their story completely.It completely com I, I guess, put together for, for the message they want toget across or maybe their, their numbers on CAC and, and LTV are not as soundor, or foundational or maybe they, they don't have a found sound foundationalidea of their operation costs.

What can founders do to better preparethemselves, I guess, on a foundational level, to then take the next step and,and start whether it's building in the right direction or taking advantage ofinvestment? Are there some key things that you think all founders should reallylook. In terms of the internal workings of their business.

Kashyap: Sure. So look, thefirst and foremost as a foundational thing, if you're trying to raise money,build a great business. Yeah. just the obvious. So build a great team, build agreat product which is differentiated. Users really want it. It's differentfrom. How they solve the problem today.

And it's unique. It's, it's you havethey're willing to pay for it and there's good margins there. Yeah. The, therevenue growth so depending on the market, your business you're in, let's sayyou're a SaaS company, your revenue growth, sales cycle, churn rate, grossmargins, those key metrics have.

Super tight and healthy. And that's,that's sort of, the baseline. You need to have a great business, which is whichis very investible. And then to, to build that business, often you need toknow. What's the story? You need to have a vision and you need to articulatethat vision to your customers, to your team, to your partners, and, and thesame version of the same story to the investors, right?

Yeah. So you need to have that clarityof vision and a very simple way to articulate that story so you can bringeveryone along after that point. I think it's really about the, the trick is tounderstand the timing of the. it. More often than not, there's some externalfactor. that makes investors move in a certain direction.

Yeah. Either you find yourself in a hotmarket or some IPO or acquisition has happened in that market, or some, somesort of title shift, tectonic shift has happened in that market. Yeah. And youhave to listen for it. You can't invent it. One phrase I use. You, you don'tmake the surf.

You go ride it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Themoon, the moon makes the tides. You just have to know when is the right time toshow up with the surfboard. So I think the, the biggest mistake is no matterhow healthy your company is, and of course you want to raise money when youdon't need money, you know that that's also very true.

You go out surfing when it's the tide isright. Yeah. And even if you're not prepared and the tide is right, you, dropeverything and go, go surfing,  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Itmakes sense to kind of wait and, and, and understand the market pro inpreparation for it. Put yourself out there and, and then take, know, takeadvantage of, of the.

Not only the environment, but theecosystem at the time.  

Kashyap: What is it they say?Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. That's oneof my, that's one of my favorite. That's one of my favorite quotes because Ithink it's, it's it's void of any pedigree that you come with. It, it really isabout the work you put in and then the.

Putting yourself in positions where yousee opportunity and then that when that matches, it's, it's that much morepowerful.  

Kashyap: Another phrase,another phrase I've heard is plant serendipity. Plant serendipity. I love that.But you know, that's basically the yin and yang of Yeah. Build a greatbusiness.

And then, Know when that serves up,yeah,  

Julian: yeah. Thinking aboutyour background experience that, looking at the companies you've run before,they're all different types of, of companies. You, you ran a, a phonee-commerce marketplace a a, a, it was a table to service kind of paymentsplatform that was then acquired by OpenTable, and then now you're running alogistics big company where people can build kind logistics applications.

Yeah. Where do you see. I guess, wheredo you go to see the market? Are, are you planning for serendipity in, inthese, in these moments where you're seeing the idea or seeing the opportunity,or what are you actively doing that allows you to, not only see, I guess noteven a problem, but that there's maybe an inefficiency or, or an ability tointerject new technology into a particular space?

What, how do you find these ideas?Because I think a lot of times, as founders, we, we sue something, we want tocreate a plan of attack, we try to attack it, but maybe it's not exactlyright.  

Kashyap: Yeah, it's a greatquestion. And the dots always connect. In hindsight, , it took me, I waslooking back at, hang on a minute, what's the common theme here?

What, why did I do what I did? And evenwhen you start a company with a certain idea your friends and investors say,well, you could have been the next blah. Yeah. But you ended up being the nextblah. Why? Right? So in those key moments, why did I make the decisions that Imade? And it took some meditation to also figure this out.

So I guess the, the trend you see, myfirst company right outta college was. A blogging platform. It was bloggingbefore there was blogging. Yeah. It was giving writers and creators the powerof the internet to go express themselves. The second company was a phonecommerce marketplace where I was giving small businesses and merchants localmerchants an open platform to go sell their products and services.

Mm-hmm. . In the third company, which ismobile payments enablement for restaurant diners, my key customer actually wasthe re. Yeah. I was giving restaurants a way to provide a great experience tothe customers and, and turntables faster and get higher tips and, and so on.And now with HyperTrack, what I'm doing is I'm helping all the entrepreneurswho are building field work and logistics apps.

Especially because the world is going ondemand and workforce is going gig. Mm-hmm. , there's a lot of new technologiesto build. Yeah. I'm building an API that helps them build out those apps andget to market faster better customer experience, better productivity, all ofthat good stuff. So it, it seems like the pattern here is that my DNA is to enableentrepreneurs.

Yeah. And whenever I see that there is abig market shift happen, And I can democratize or level the playing field inthat market and create a meritocratic way for entrepreneurs to go expressthemselves and build out their ideas and be successful. That's what gives mejoy. That's what, brings me out of bed every morning.

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah.That's amazing to see. The common thread is the enabling of otherentrepreneurs, and I'd love to dive into a little bit of HyperTrack. And whatwas the incumbent before Hyper, HyperTrack in regards to, other, othercompanies building these shipping and logistics or field operation logisticsplatforms before?

Were they just doing it all themselvesfrom the ground up and and how much more efficient is the process now that theyhave something like HyperTrack to, to fall back on?  

Kashyap: Great question. So, bydefault, what would a company do if they're building. The driver app for ondemand gig work or building the dispatch system to figure out which workershould take on what job.

And then did they actually show up atthe job? How long were they there? Did they do the pickup or the delivery atthe right place, right time. How do I give an auto tracking link to thecustomer? to build out stuff like this. Before HyperTrack, you basically had tostitch up three pieces of technology the Mobile os, right?

Mm-hmm. , Android, and iOS. The cloudtechnologies like Amazon or pick your favorite cloud. Yeah. And Mapstechnologies, right? Google Maps or competing sort of, services. So you had tostitch these three up. Think of how Uber or DoorDash or Insta Cart. Go checkthese kind of companies. Built out investing billions of dollars in, increating that sort of location and mapping technology for the future ofcommerce.

What HyperTrack does is, instead of youstitching up mobile, cloud and maps and each one has a different costassociated with a different skill associated with it, the time it takes tobuild and then the time it takes to operate it. , just roughly hand waving,let's say six to nine months to get something out.

Yeah, yeah. And then a constant ongoingoptimization to, to to, to make sure that the unit economics are under controland predictable. Yeah. All of that. With HyperTrack, you can do within twosprints and within a developer timeline. Two sprints is essentially, a sprintis two weeks, so within a.

You are up and running with Uber, like,quality and, and infrastructure. Mm-hmm. . And then you're paying for what youuse. You're paying for order. You're not worried about how much maps, cost orcloud cost or development, cost or maintenance or DevOps cost is going in it.All you care about is at this much per order.

I'm getting this functionality. Yeah.And I get to build my application my way cuz it's an api. Right. So it's, it's., I still control the user experience as I still control the workflows. I stillcontrol the integrations into my system. Mm-hmm. , so infrastructure as aservice for, for logistics and workforce.

Julian: Yeah. What, what aresome of the most interesting companies that you've, you've helped enable orworked with to help enable in, in speaking of your customers? I, I, I wastalking to another founder the other day. Disrupting the cannabis industry byallowing the service to become or they're creating almost like an ice creamtruck service where whatever kind of merchandising or, or products is withinvehicles.

And they not only geo track thosevehicles, they select their inventory and they have this really, reallysophisticated process built out. And that's one instance. But he was talking tome about all these other opportunities to get consumers, the products that theyneed, whether it's, snacks, whether it's cannabis.

It's, it's building a shelf at home,and, and getting the materials you need. What are some of the most excitingcompanies that you've seen utilize, not only in your technology to, to connectto customers, but you know, whether what product or service that they're doingand, and what are some of the, I guess, potential use cases that you haven'tseen yet that you'd be excited to see?

Kashyap: Sure. So, you knowwhat was very interesting in the Hypertech journey? . See, when we think of ondemand and gig work, the image that comes to our mind is Right sharing. Yeah.Food delivery, grocery delivery. And you extend the grocery category to,something really brought to all kinds of consumables.

You mentioned cannabis and there's,there's all kinds of categories where, yeah, this shows up to our surprise.The, the whole flex work, gig work and on-demand, on-demand phenomenon is, is,if I told you that oil and gas c. . Yeah. Heavy industry, constructioncompanies and energy companies and big telecom utility and media companies.

Banking services lot of FinTech salesreps. Yeah. Education companies where you have large field forces all theselarge industries. Our building workforce app and and logistics apps for thefuture and end up being HyperTrack customers. So let me give you an examplewhere, the labor market of the US all the hourly wage labor market is actuallygetting reorganized into this flex work Yeah.

Marketplace. I think gig work is now.Something like half a percent of entire American gdp, something like more thanhalf a half a trillion dollars and, and growing. So what's really happening isthe next monster.com or the job marketplace will be shifts that are listed on amarketplace and employers basically buying shifts and workers.

Selling shifts. Yeah, you, you're notlooking for a full-time job, you're not looking for ot contract or a even anhourly contract. You're selling by the shift. So this phenomenon seems to behappening across industries. Your retail warehouse workers, your restaurantworkers, your construction workers, and so on.

So within that flex work marketplace, wehave a really strong, presence hype trackers used by some of the largest. Flexwork aggregators in terms of future where things are fascinating. A lot of thefield service and field sales sort of old school, boring enterprise businesses,they are digitally transforming to dispatching work through apps Yeah.

In the field force to automating the,the field service using location and mapping. , a lot of those projects are,are going on with HyperTrack and, and that excites me the most.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Tell us alittle bit about the traction. So you, you obviously HyperTrack, I think isaround, been around for six, seven years.

So you've had, a significant amount oftime to build and, and connect people. What's exciting about what you've doneso far and, and what are you excited for the next part of your journey leadinginto, not only the, this year, The years had come.  

Kashyap: Absolutely. So, forthe first many, many years we were completely a bottom up developer shop where

We, had our APIs available on theinternet. We wrote some tech blogs. We wrote some sample apps open sourced andGitHub. And developers would just find us. So developers would be building out.Use cases and they'd say, well, this is turning out to be harder than Ithought. Let me. And, and they found us often.

We were referred by one developer to theother. So we got tens of thousands of developers signed up on Hyper Crackbefore our VP of marketing joined us. Wow. And our business, and you see from alot of those developers, most of them are thinking with their projects at anygiven time. There's a few hundred projects live on HyperTrack in the free tier.

Within that we would figure out who arethe real businesses. Mm-hmm. , and which one is gonna grow and, and deliverrevenue. What we learned was, while the bottom up product led growth motion gotus from zero to one we need to now understand from this, which are the righttarget verticals, which are the industries which are the right target personathat we need to go.

So we hired a VP of marketing who's,stellar, experienced guy. He's built three unicorns before understands how to,get, get those customers in through the door. Got, got ourselves a VP of saleswho's experienced with selling logistics tech with selling telematics. Yeah.Again, with unicorns, decons in the past and just unleashing them.

Hey, listen, let's go get all the flexwork aggregators in the world. Let's go get all the field service. Yeah, fieldsales, whoever's building out. In-house or, for enterprises, let's, let's getthose. So that's, that's the journey we started about two quarters ago. Yeah.And we are, we are starting to see our first few contracts with the enterprisescome out of that.

So, that part is interesting cuz thatgets our revenue into a whole different trajectory. Yeah. We are in the one to10 journey in that sense.  

Julian: Yeah. I love, I lovethe, the zero to one and one to 10. , it really does kind of identify theprocess of finding your product market fit. You, you, you go test out yoursolution, you identify who's gonna be using it, but also the viable whetherit's customers or businesses, I'll say customers in this, in this point who aregoing to be the hyper users.

And then really just build around thatand, and build around the, the, not only that persona, but also what they'reusing and how often they're using it. When you think about, the Exactly. Yeah,yeah, yeah,  

Kashyap: yeah. Exactly. Yeah.So during that process, Not having sales or not having marketing can actuallybe, I'm not recommending every company do that.

Yeah. These every context is different,but it, it, it helps cuz you, you're seeing the signal through the noise,right? Yeah. There's a purity in that product market fit. That, people reallywant it. They're coming to you and, and getting what they want and what ittakes to make them successful.

Through the product, through our support.You get the magic formula going, and then you're ready for bringingprofessionals in and saying, all right, let's make a real business out of this.Yeah,  

Julian: yeah. When you thinkabout the, the, the macroeconomics or, or even just I guess the macroenvironment, what are some of the biggest challenges that hyper, HyperTrackfaces today?

Kashyap: Sure. So look, I thinkas we go to larger companies decisions happen. through committee multiplepeople need to be convinced and most importantly, the CFO or the person holdingthe budget. And in current climate, I think people are really scared. There's alot of fear yeah, around how to manage cash flows, what the future holds.

There's this. Deep feeling ofuncertainty. So the good thing is people are buying stuff that's absolutelynecessary. Yeah. So we'll see. And that reduces churn because you are, you'rebuying something that you're actually gonna use. Yeah. And that bar is high.And we, we've already crossed that bar, so we feel good about that.

The, the part which is going a littleslower. People are worried, and in this scenario, they usually defer to thesafer option. Sometimes the safer option is do nothing, defer the purchase.Right? Especially for a category creation kind of company, like HyperTrack orit's let's go with the, the hyperscalers, right?

Let's just buy that extra thing in thecloud. Yeah, let's buy that extra thing in. Technology, which kind of bridgesthe gap, but not really. Yeah. But no, no one gets fired for buying a, buying aGoogle or Amazon . The phrase used to be, no one gets fired for buying ibm.Right? No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

Now it's, no one gets fired for buyingfrom, from Google, Amazon Microsoft. Yeah. So that's, that's our, our biggestsort of, Challenge in, in closing enterprise deals.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Ifeverything goes well what's the long term vision?  

Kashyap: Yeah. So, a milliondevelopers are building field work and logistics apps as we speak.

Mm-hmm. , that number is only going toincrease. Yeah. I see this as the future of commerce. The fact that customers,whether it's consumers or businesses, tap a button and expect things to move inthe real world and come to them. And, and the other is the workforce that'sbringing stuff to them is is a flex work, gig work kind of workforce.

This phenomenon is the future ofcommerce. Yeah. And we are increasingly in a world where every company is asoftware company, so people want to build things their way instead of justbuying off the shelf software. And and, letting others decide how they runtheir business. They, they want to run the business their way.

So, we are enabling these millions ofdevelopers and essentially hundreds of thousands of companies. They want tobuild the, the fieldwork and logistics apps, and we're helping them get therefaster, get there better.  

Julian: Amazing. I always liketo add this next round of, of rapid fire questions. I call 'em my founder faq.

So I'm gonna hit you at some rapid firequestions and, and we'll see where we get mm-hmm. . First, first question iswhat's hard about your job?  

Kashyap: People, people . It'salways. It's always people, yeah. It's about listening to them understandingtheir fears and stresses and I guess their beliefs yeah.

Which really drive their behavior andtherefore the outcome. So whether it's customers or team, or investors orpartners or just understanding, listening to people. Yeah. Understanding theirbeliefs. Aligning.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Thinkingabout with your experience of building within, in two different countries andstartups and, and kind of working with two different ecosystems, what's somesimilarities and some differences that the audience may not know of, of, ofbuilding companies in, in different countries?

Kashyap: Yeah. I'll answer thatquestion. I'll cheat a little bit, instead of telling you that what thesimilarities and differences are, cuz it's such a deep thing you and I can talkat really at length about it. Sure. What I can tell you is it's becoming moreequal every day. Mm-hmm. , the world's becoming smaller.

Yeah. The, the It's becoming moresimilar than different. Yeah. And the way to, to do business, sitting anywherein the world, doing business anywhere in the world has become. easier than everand will continue to get easier.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's huit, it is incredible with the globalization push of, of not only technologies,but with infrastructure and everyone's motivated to be online and, and alsowith cryptocurrency kind of in injecting this excitement of, being able to movethings across borders.

I think it's becoming more and moreavailable and exciting. So it's awesome to hear that you're seeing that as wellfrom, from your point of view. Yeah. Something that I think we're gonna allcontinue to see as, as as time moves on. What's, what's one piece of advice or,what, backtrack that, what's one thing that you were not so good early on inyour career as a founder that you're better at now?

Kashyap: Hmm. Oh man. There's,there's a whole bunch of things. Which one should I pick? Yeah, I wanna talkabout application software and infrastructure software or about leadership anddealing with people about. doing business cross border. I mean, yeah, I wouldsay the biggest change would be what I've learned is at a very primal level.

Right? Yeah. This is a very personalsort of answer is, the younger I was, the more I was. chasing money and fame.Yeah. And although I was thinking, oh, I'm on a mission and I don't really careabout that stuff. But no, I was definitely seeking validation from the world interms of money and fame and I think the biggest change has been, there's,there's this sense of freedom.

Mm-hmm. from that from that drug, if youwill. Right? Yeah. It's like, you have a long term vision. You can play thelong game. You have a point of view. You're only listening to the market andthe customer you're not really worried about validation from people or thenumber of likes you get, right.

You just, yeah. Think that's probablythe biggest change.  

Julian: Yeah. I love that.Very honest answer. I love that. Another question is, if you were to wave amagic wand, what's one thing you would wish for your business to have today?That you, whether you, you can't have it or not, or, or whether it's in thenear future.

What's one thing that you wish you couldhave right now?

Kashyap: More signed contracts.Yeah. . I mean, that's, don't we all want? Yeah. More revenue. Yeah. Butthat's, that's the honest answer. I think we've got a phenomenal product. We'vegot great infrastructure that, that handle scale. We, we handle more than amillion orders a month. Yeah.

Uh, On the. There's I'm very excitedabout our go-to-market being more enterprise and contract oriented. We are veryclose to signing many, many awesome contracts. Yeah. So, my magic wand wouldbe, in that pipeline just make things move faster.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatwe all wish for for. Being that you've had, such a wealth of experiencebuilding companies and, and going through acquisition, is there an acquisitionthat you would've done differently? And what would you have donedifferently?  

Kashyap: Hmm. I mean, mostacquisitions fail. Yeah. And and I've been both on the sell side and the buyside of acquisitions.

I've probably dealt. Yeah. At least adozen acquisitions Yeah. In my life. And integrating them and I think mostacquisitions fail within that. I would say, yeah, maybe I've seen a slightlyhigher success rate, not that much higher. I would say the biggest friction inacquisitions is to, is for the founder to be okay to lose their identity.

When you sell a company. No matter howlarge or small, no matter whether it's a business acquisition or acquihire, iffounders hold on to their identity or the ego of the company as that, itbecomes harder for them, for the team, for the acquirer. So it should be veryclear that when you are selling your comp and, and look, I'm, I'm obviouslytalking from my experience of what I would do differently for my first fewacquisitions.

I would lose my ego sooner. Yeah. .Yeah. Yeah. Which would make things better for everyone involved.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I love thehonesty in those answers. And last question obviously before we get into Ialways like to ask founders about, their plugs and where we can find andsupport. But before we do that whether it was early in your career or now, whatbooks or people have influenced you the most?

Kashyap: Sure. I'd say peoplefirst. I just worked with a lot of awesome people who I now consider asmentors. The way I relate with my dad is also the way I relate to a lot ofthese really senior people, where we are more friends, we are more peers, weare working together, solving a common problem.

Yeah. And in doing so, you build areally, a relationship where you learn a lot from them. You, and, and they feellike they wanna spend time with you. A bunch of people who invested in me andare basically my career dads in that sense. So Ishma, my first investor andalso my investor in every company I've started an.

These were both founders at gli AshishGupta Venky. These were all founders of a company called gli that was sold toJeff Bezos in 98. They've been investors in my companies. NA Gupta. The, theperson who started Nexus Venture Partners. He, he invested in HyperTrack.

Five, six years ago made that bet.Learned a lot from him. Yeah. And God bless his soul. He's, he's, he's nolonger with us, but you know, I just learned so much from him. Yeah. While wework together and HyperTrack but it's a really long list of people. In terms ofbooks, I do read quite a bit of, business books and nonfiction.

Somehow the nonfiction books have beenthe most influential on me. Yeah. Over time, I would say the last two that Ireally liked were I read Atomic Habits. Yeah. During the time when, during theNew Year's when new's resolutions were getting set, it was a great time to doit. My, I snapped into my newest resolution, so Well, thanks to that book.

Oh, wow. So it's, it's made a big impacton me person. Just, diet, exercise, meditation, that kind of stuff. Justgetting that, yes, those habits going. And the one right before that was How toChange Your Mind, Michael Pollan. Yeah. So that was just mind blowing. And overthe course of reading that book, I realized Michael Pollan is a Berkeleyprofessor and.

So it is just a fascinating area, whichjust, I had no idea Yeah. About and, just learned, learned a lot about, andyeah.  

Julian: Yeah. Being thatyou're in Berkeley now, have you have you met up with Michael Pollan?  

Kashyap: I would love to. I'mI'm trying to figure out a way to do something.

Yeah. There is a center he, I think hestarted a center for psychedelic studies at the Univers. So, at least I knowone place where I can. Find him. And I think he's a fairly decorated professorof journalism, so, I kind of know where to find him. I'll, I'll, I'll go inthat one of these days.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Youdefinitely should. I feel like it'd be, it'd be a super cool meeting and you'llhave to report on it back on, on the show maybe, maybe in the future when we doaround two of these episodes. They're even a town hall almost. But I know we'reat the end of the show, , and, and I want to give you a chance to give us your.

Where can we find HyperTrack? Where canwe be, where can we find you? Give us your LinkedIns, your Twitters, everythingthat we can, we can use as an audience to support and maybe even start usingtechnology and, and being part of the journey.

Kashyap: Absolutely. Sohypertrack.com there's a free sandbox to get the API keys and start buildingout your field work and logistics apps.

we are just one phone or chataway to, tohelp you build what you want. To follow me on Twitter @righthalf was the nameof my first company, like right half of the brain. Yeah, so right half is myTwitter handle as well. To follow me there or you can connect with me onLinkedIn or follow me on LinkedIn.

Julian: Amazing Kashyap. It'sbeen such a pleasure, not only learning from you as a founder, but also yourjourney and, and things maybe that, that you've done, but also that you've donedifferently, the different piece of advice, how you look at businesses. Butyeah, please start, go ahead.

Kashyap: I have one moreshameless plug.

Mm-hmm. . And, and that is I, between mythird company and, and the current one, I wrote a book, which became abestseller in India. It's called The Golden Tap. So if you want. If you likethe topics I was talking about and especially want to know the history ofIndian startups chronicled over two decades.

Get the Golden Tap from Amazon and tellme what you think.  

Julian: The Golden Tap. Yeah,we'll have to do that. We'll have to make sure to give a code or something tothe listeners. So we'll figure out the Golden Tap. I'm, I'm adding right now.Golden Tap. Tap right here. Perfect. Amazing. Amazing. Awesome, . Well, again,thank you so much for being on the show.

I hope you enjoyed yourself and hope tosee you again in the near future.  

Kashyap: I had a lot of fun.Julian, thank, thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.  

Julian: Of course.

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