How Vinoth Chandar of ChuChu TV made it a top global brand on YouTube
With over 24.5 Billion views and more than 38 Million subscribers across its channels, ChuChu TV is one of the top video creators on YouTube from India. Vinoth Chandar, founder and CEO of ChuChu TV, began the channel in 2013 with a nursery rhyme video titled ‘Chubby Cheeks’ sung by his daughter, which went viral […]
Sebastian Thrun on flying cars and solving today’s problems
Can Bengaluru’s traffic jams be solved with flying cars? For Sebastian Thrun, the Google X founder and among the world’s top AI and robotics scientists, flying cars are no more science fiction. Thrun, the cofounder of online education startup, Udacity, believes that learning new things is the only way to survive. “You can only learn […]
Kishore Biyani on his survival lessons for the future
Kishore Biyani’s entrepreneurial journey has been a rollercoaster ride since he first started selling fashion fabric to garment manufacturers in November 1983. Over the last four decades, Biyani has been through several cycles of business and technology disruptions, including the economic slowdown of 2008 when he had to scale down the business, negotiate with the […]
How Nandan Nilekani brings people together to create lasting impact
Most of us have known Nandan as the cofounder of Infosys, and the brain behind Aadhaar and India’s recent financial platforms, including “the IndiaStack.” While all of the above make for a good bio of Nandan, they don’t necessarily make him an outlier. From my days of tracking Infosys since 2000 to writing early stories […]
Guneet Monga’s journey producing next gen movies in a world ruled by the incumbents
Guneet Monga has always been a disrupter. In Bollywood, where the power centers of celebrity actors, cinema distributors and agents dominate everything, Monga has been pushing for a new future for a long time. When Period. End of Sentence, a Netflix film co-produced by Monga, won an Oscar earlier this year, it was more than […]
India’s first man in space, Rakesh Sharma, on how keeping a low profile has been liberating
Welcome to Season 3 of the Outliers Podcast. We launched Outliers in December 2016 with Manish Sharma of Printo, who shared his life lessons in being an entrepreneur. Since then, we have produced 87 episodes over two seasons of Outliers. Outliers isn’t just a podcast for us. It’s a journey of conversations that has taken […]
‘I am the only one in Delhi with the courage to say the Prime Minister lies’
Journalism’s biggest existential battle isn’t about fighting the business model disruption or the way new consumers of news are behaving. It’s the war against intense polarisation and biases plaguing the newsrooms. There’s extreme negativity on one hand and excessive cheerleading on the other. For those in journalism staying true to the craft and following the […]
Phanindra Sama on how entrepreneurship is a self purification process
What’s the biggest lesson you learned as a founder? “Entrepreneurship is a self purification process.” Why sell now? “I wanted to demonstrate wealth to my parents who were getting old.” In September 2013, I interviewed RedBus co-founder Phanindra Sama for Mint newspaper, right after he sold the startup to Ibibo (now part of Makemytrip). To […]
Tarun Mehta on the importance of keeping to your core vision
Entrepreneurship is hard. No matter what you’re building. It becomes even harder when you’re building something that’s not understood by many, and even worse if the product is clearly ahead of its time. But founders are crazy. They see opportunities when no one sees them. They also get blinded sometimes by it and fail. When […]
Angel investor Ashish Gupta on being a bystander and a doer in the startup ecosystem
Over years, Ashish has found a way into some of India’s biggest and most valued startups as an angel investor. From MakeMyTrip to Flipkart and MuSigma, Gupta has been an early seed stage backer. It’s almost like getting a front row seat in a blockbuster movie, and also being able to help produce it.