Chat with Ganesh, how to identify the real underlying issues and start three companies.

Yasi: today, our guest is Ganesh a serial entrepreneur. Ganesh started his career in software engineering. After working for seven years in the company, he did MBA study, focusing on business in Asia during his MBA. He met a few classmates who shared similar visions. That’s how Spark Toys his first business was born after gaining some valuable lessons from his first startup, he then started two other companies.

Why is inconvenience food? And the other one is in farming, even though he started three different companies in three different industries, but he will share with us what is the secrets in identifying the right business opportunity? 

Ganesh: Thanks for having me. 

Yasi: So could you tell us how you changed from being a software engineer to becoming a serial entrepreneur?

Ganesh: I think it’s, not a premeditated, uh, you know, start, like I wanted to become a entrepreneur or I had an idea of becoming an entrepreneur. I think like, 10 years back. If someone had asked me, what, what do you envision yourself being at age of like 35 40? I would have been mostly an engineer. They, I preferred being an engineer.

I’d liked, uh, coding day in, day out. So it was, it is not like I wanted to become an entrepreneur, but I think, um, as I progressed in my career, I started to feel a bit, uh, Uh, lost in the sense. Um, every day I was doing the same kind of work work was not getting more than testing. There was a glass ceiling.

I did feel that sometimes I will. Better sweetie, to make the decisions compared to the management folks who were making the decisions. And that’s because I was an engineer and they were the management guys, and I realized maybe I should just check out what is management. And, uh, the reason I did my MBA was purely because I was bored and I didn’t want to do the work.

And I wanted to take a break and I didn’t want to go traveling. Something. So I was like, okay, let me do an MBA, which has plenty of travel because my MBA was in China, in Korea and in Singapore. So that was a bit of, that was a bit of a break from work. But during my MBA, I made a few interesting people. We talked a lot of ideas, uh, like everyday after our schools, we would sit around and discuss about, you know, what some companies should have done or not done.

And, uh, I started meeting these interesting jobs who I wanted to work with, and it was impossible for me to figure out if I went after an MBA and joined another. And then trying to get these people to also join that company and working with them, um, was not a happening thing. So the idea was, Hey, let’s create our own company and work with each other.

Right. So it’s like, I want to work with you guys the easiest way to work with you guys as if we have our own business. So we are not dependent on anybody else to give us a job. Be in the same location or something. 

Yasi: When you said that after class, you would get it together and then brainstorm and then talk about business ideas.

Is there something someone initiated that, or it’s just a natural, common interest from you guys and you decided to do it? 

Ganesh: Yeah, there was never like, we never named it a business, a brainstorming session or something. It would always be like, we would hang out. Like there’s plenty to talk like after. There are a few of us who had a different, you know, uh, interest in like, Hey, you know, what is that?

Like? I think all of us were very curious about what is that one thing that made some company different. So there’s not like a blanket state. Like, oh, Uber is, um, you know, doing taxis, but they don’t own the taxis. And therefore there are, you know, a big startup, but actually going down deeper, like, you know, peeling the onion deeper and deeper and deeper and understanding what is that one thing that they did different.

And that takes a lot of, you know, your MBA work. It takes a lot of understanding, all sorts of different things and figuring out what that one thing that didn’t exist before that they did, uh, which made them succeed.

Yasi: Is that how your first company, the Spark toy was born? 

Ganesh: Yes. So if you, it’s a very silly idea.

The idea was none of us had done business, um, and, uh, Yes, we had the, you know, we thought of ourselves as consultants and, you know, people who could help other people and stuff, but we had never done a business assets. You’ve never run a business ourselves. So the thing was let’s run it, but let’s run a business in which we have very low downside, but we also make money from day one.

So we didn’t want to start a business of, uh, like, you know, a payment service or FinTech company that will go green in like five years. I’m going to start something in month one, I make profit, simple business. It’s not a startup. So we figured what kind of thing can we get into that is very quick to start, uh, requires very little investment and, uh, if it succeeds or fails, it’s okay to shut it off.

And, uh, for us, the Sparker toys, we dug very deep into it on the surface. Spark toys is just, but a and to your company, but below the surface, what we were talking was there’s this trend of toys coming in, which are the stem toys. And the problem with the stem toys is the life of the toys. It is greater than the life of the interests that a kid has in the toys.

So for instance, when you buy a tennis racket, most likely the tennis racket bricks, or, you know, the strings get. Uh, before you lose interest in tennis. Similarly, when you get a cricket bat or something new, you continue playing the game for your cricket bat breaks, then you get your next cricket bat.

Right? So the interest of the sport is greater than the utility of the items that are made for the purpose of the sport. But in stem toys, unfortunately, You are interest because it’s mostly problem solving and you want solve it. You get it. Like if you have to figure out how to get this bead from here to here using some random elements and to solve some random problems to do it.

Once you’re done with that science experiment, it is done. It is not something that you will keep playing a. Because you’re done it. How to make your first compass, how to do something else. Um, how to figure out which side of the magnet is attracting to what? So then you’re not going to keep doing it for whatever, but these things cost far higher than a tennis ball or a tennis bag or something.

Yeah. When you’re trying to get a stem kid because Simon’s kit and it’s got a lot of moving parts and gears and things and stuff. So it’s generally like three or four X expensive, but the utility of it for your kids is only for a short shutdown. And that meant that you keep buying more of it and it keeps cluttering your home because there is no decent value or you don’t end up buying it.

That by denying your kid any, uh, you know, have access to the stem toys because you are like, oh, you will get it. And you play it for like 15 days. So why should I spend $80 on it? Right. So the idea was, Hey, why not just use know toilet until. Kind of help to both the time manufacturers right now are not selling because parents are not buying because it’s expensive and it’s quite short utility and the parents are not buying because if the buyer, then it just ends up cluttering the house.

So if you could figure it out or toilet into a model that supports both, then it kind of helps. Second is we figured that a lot of kids, when they have access to a lot of times, They don’t push themselves to learn, especially when toys like stem toys, we check where you to, um, you know, challenge yourself and learn something new.

And the point is when you have a lot of toys, you kind of lose interest when you hit a roadblock and you move on to the next toy. And, uh, in some cases, in some studies, it’s even linked that the reason for ADHD to move up so much these days is because. You know, kids don’t focus on anything, but get access to a lot of things.

They get access to a lot of toys. And during my childhood, we would have like one or two games and we would play it again. And again, and again, if we keep failing at 11, you will keep playing it forever to cross that level. So there was this, you know, uh, so, so, so the thing is removing a lot of access to the.

And giving the kids a curated five to six toys per month kind of made them challenge themselves when they could, when they stop somewhere. So that also kind of help the child’s growth. Uh, so overall it kind of worked out, uh, quite well. We, uh, uh, managed to scale up the company. We got our initial . Take startup challenges, but one of the reasons why we won, because we could explain the granular difference of what we were bringing, instead of just saying that yeah, it started until start sharing and therefore we making money, but why it was working underneath.

Yasi: And what did you learn from this startup challenge? Do you think it has brought a lot of value to a business? Or how did you see your business transformed after the startup challenge? 

Ganesh: Oh, yes. So that helped us speed track things because when we participated in the startup challenge, that is the DB log.

Actually, so most companies which came with the side of challenge, uh, already had businesses working for a year, but we had launched it on the day of the startup, telling them, had it not been for the solid talent. Maybe we wouldn’t have launched it, but just to keep talking about. Right. So we launched it.

We got our first customer, first two customers registered while I was giving the talk at Slingshot. And that is like pretty cool. Like we launched it and then we started getting our first customers registering. And then after we bought it, we were on a channel news Asia. And every time our episode went up on channel news Asia, we ended up getting like 500, 600 subscribers.

And, um, so we didn’t have to do much of marketing. Like one of the things that I didn’t learn, which I think I should have learned during my first startup was marketing. I think marketing is a piece that I’d never. The only, because we just got lucky, we got, uh, challenges, Asia, season five of startup. We got a lot of customers every time that was a bead on of those episodes.

And, uh, once we got into challenges, the issue we got contacted by the Southwest CDC to government, uh, um, community development center, which had a baby blue scarf. And the baby bliss card program was, it was offering discounts to parents who had kids below the age of five, which was our target segment.

And so they reached out to us and said, Hey, you want to put your little. Uh, on our baby bliss card. So that 10,000 parents in our region will get access to your service. And we were like, okay, go ahead. Like we had to do nothing about it. That’s how we got all our customers. Like everything started falling into place.

We didn’t have to do much. We got newspaper articles. Um, uh, we like by themselves, like people found out about us and then they wrote about us. We didn’t have to go and ask people to do it for us. Uh, we didn’t do ads. We didn’t do, uh, yeah, we, we tried out Facebook ad ones, but we didn’t see value in it. Uh, and then we stopped marketing.

We just ran with word of mouth.

Yasi:When did you get the funds to start with. 

Ganesh: We didn’t need a lot of fun, uh, simply because, uh, the business was such that what we were offering, the, the, what we were offering our customers was a one $50 word box for $50. Right. So if a customer joins in, then they pay us $50.

And we give them a one $50 box. One $50 was how much it was worth and retail. We got it to about $80 because you buying it wholesale. And then the second thing is apart from paying the $50, the customer pays a hundred dollars. So the inflow from the customer. So every new subscriber who came in, paid us upfront 150.

And to support that subscriber. We have to get one box into the system and that box cost us 76th street. So literally you agreed, like we needed the money to start only to get the warehouse, to get that, you know, basic things done, like, you know, our shelves and us talking and picking zone, cleaning machines and those things.

So all that came roughly about $25,000, like all in, we had to put in about $25,000. Uh, but other than that, every new customer came in. They paid for themselves. That’s $25,000. Three of us. It was not, it was not a huge amount to figure it out. Also, we didn’t put any of our savings into it. Uh, both uh, and I used to trade in crypto and, uh, at that time in 2017, crypto was at its peak.

So we had. Sizeable, you know, saving. One of the things that we decided is because it was an experiment. We didn’t want to put any of our hard earned money into it. We wanted to adjust, it was an experiment. It’s like, let’s do this experiment. If it succeeds, we learn something. If it fails, okay. We lose $25,000.

And, uh, so we just, uh, put our crypto winnings, basically petitioned. I used to trade a lot in crypto, 2017. Uh, hi time for crypto. Like you invested in any coin, you made like three X, five X on it. So we invested some money in crypto and, uh, within a few days, uh, it shot up and then be exited from our positions.

And that is the money we pumped in. So it was like fail safe, like east crew up. Okay. It’s that money that we made in that two weeks that we lost. So it was one, it was just a excrement. 

Yasi: So you mentioned that you invest in cryptos, the ones that you believing at the time, and then you made a lot of profits and you used this profit for, uh, spark toys invested in.

Ganesh: Yeah any. So we had this, uh, uh, fund for experimenting. So turn three.in was our, uh, mine and Patricia’s company. It’s like a paper company, I mean, but we did register it. So . Let’s do any of our back area. So, so we spent a whole MBA talking about ideas. Hey, this company, should’ve done this, this company should’ve done that.

Or maybe they, if they are treat their idea to the work and stuff like that. And we decided that we should have a fund when we should keep putting in money. And, uh, we should keep investing that money in crypto or in funds or in stocks or anything. But basically we should keep growing that money purely.

Experiment with things. Like if tomorrow we have an idea, it should never be like, oh, what do we do for capital? Where do we go for capital? It should be like, okay, let’s do a scaled down version of it. How much do we need? Okay. 30,000 let’s put in 30,000 and run the experiment and see if it doesn’t work out, kill it, move on.

Right. So certainly Diane was that experiment fund and standardize was one of the projects which came out of.

Yasi: I see, and I know that later you also saw the spark toys, right? 

Ganesh: Yes. 

Yasi: And why did you decide to do so? 

Ganesh: I think the goal was never to run spark.toys. I think Bo I think, um, what drives me is, uh, the bigger problems, uh, in the world.

And I see the six major problems, uh, the six major problems that I. I the only valuable to solve, uh, And they to population. So if you think of it, it’s about transportation. How do you, because if there are going to be 9 billion more, they’re going to be 9 billion people by 2050, how are we going to transport all these people that can cause to be the solution?

And there are people like Elon Musk or thinking about like boring company, which we’ll dig down, uh, under the. Uh, but how many cities can afford that? How many cities can, you know, build an underground level two seconds? Not many. So there has to be other ways of solving, uh, you know, transportation, uh, problem, when you have 9 billion people, and then there is energy, uh, needs.

Like, what are we going to do? Coal is going to run out. If you have to support more people and more people need more energy and, uh, you know, It needs to be somehow needs to be solid. And then there is, um, food that is, uh, everything related to food, not just the agriculture, the producing of the food, but also what kind of food do you eat?

How synthetic is it, or, you know, is a good for your health. It’s not good for your health. And. The whole, whole life cycle of the food tray from production to wastage. Uh, and then after that you have education. Uh, I believe education is like one of the huge things that will undergo a lot of changes.

Because back during my time, education was all about memory. There is no there’s very little internet, so it mattered how much you remembered, because if you don’t remember something that you don’t know where to go and find it, because you can go to the library. If you don’t know the term name that you can’t even figure it out.

But now when you have the internet, your memory doesn’t really mean. You could like, it doesn’t matter if, you know, when the war started, it doesn’t matter if you know the formula for binomial equation or you don’t know the formula for binomial equation, you can just Google it up. So I think education needs to change from testing memory to testing data interpretation or something like that.

And I believe companies dealing with that or schools and colleges dealing with that. That’s a huge. Uh, market. And then there is housing, which is, I again, think the current way of building houses is not sustainable. And the last one is pollution out of the six. I think three of them is. Something that only a government can take to do something about like pollution, transportation, and energy, the rest of the three related to food, education and housing, I think, uh, is something that, uh, you know, individuals can take part in.

And, uh, so my goal has always been towards figuring out how I can help in these three. So I’m thinking like maybe steps, the Spangler toys was merely a way to see whether I would enjoy running a company or whether I could do some not company or not. And now I have the confidence that yes, given any company how bad the business proposition, I think I can make the decisions to make it profit.

So with that confidence, that is why I stepped into my mode focused stadium, which is food right now. So I want to get into. Farming and, you know, processing of food.

Yasi: But then after spark toy, how did you come up with this idea of this convenience food, which is your second company called Peri? Oh, right.

Ganesh: Yes. After this not toys, I didn’t, I didn’t want to live in India. I kind of didn’t think. I would enjoy living in India, uh, purely because most of my time, we would have to figure out about, uh, mundane things that the government should be taken care of. And so I figured I would rather go to Korea and stay because I had studied in Korea getting a visa with there was not a problem.

And when I was staying in Korea, I kind of was exposed to a lot of cool types of, uh, you know, handling food. Like Korea is big on convenience food. Like everyone lives in like, like students and, uh, you know, initial workers and all of them live in a place called . It’s like a cramp through with nothing but a bed and a table for you to study.

And, uh, their life runs on like instant food. Like everything is instant, but by instant it doesn’t mean that it’s deep fried or it is like bad for health. They had figured out how to make instant food for everything, from your kimchi to your, you know, proper food, proper dinner, everything, they figured a way to make it easy.

And that’s where I figured a lot of Indian. Thanks a lot of time to prepare. And, uh, also it takes a lot of ingredients and therefore, most people can’t make them. Then I, I figured that if I could apply some of this technology that Korea and Japan have to Indian food, then it kind of opens up a huge market.

Yasi: So how did you actually start at this company then? Where did you learn the technology to freeze the food and then source your suppliers? 

Ganesh: I just looked up for freeze drying. I found, uh, there’s harvest, right. Which is an American company. And at that time, my brother was in the us. The harvest rate makes these home based.

A mini sized freeze dryer. So I asked my brother to order one. They don’t ship outside us. So my brother ordered one, it was delivered to him and then he should put all the way from there to Singapore. And then me and my dad got into testing mode. We made a lot of different recipes, tested it out and then gave it off to our friends and family to check what their reactions were.

And. Even acquaintances who didn’t have to be nice to us, pretty much all of them. Give us positive review and they wanted more of it. They were like, okay, can you get more of it? And then I even took some of that to Korea, gave it off to my friends in Korea, saw the reactions. Most of them wanted it, wanted more of it.

And then we figured, okay, so. I have given it to over 500, 600 people and none of them have given a bad review and, uh, all of them want more of it. It’s not just a bad interview. Most of them wanted to know how to order it, reorder it. So then we knew we had a market. So then it was all about ordering a big machine from China, finding the space to.

Uh, freestyle and, uh, you know, making production scale. That is how we started. 

Yasi: Interesting. So you accidentally found out about this idea, you test it with your friends and you’ll get good feedback. And then you started ordering like the actual machines and then running the business. 

Ganesh: Yeah. So like pretty much, uh, the way everything will turn three, that works is figured out.

And if you, if figured out something interesting. You have the experimentation money? Uh, it is this, the experimentation money. This needs to be signed by me and, uh, cultish. So if I want to do an experiment, I decided that I wanted this special fund out of this. This is what I want to experiment and on. Do you also want to do the experiment or do you just want me to do it or you don’t want to be a part of it?

That is so we will just experiment if something fails and we would figure out a scaled down version of experimenting. So we wouldn’t go and order a 300 ton freeze dryer and then experiment. You will figure out how can we do it in the cheapest possible way to figure out whether this will work or not.

And we found a 4,000, $3,000 freeze Dyer, which can make like two kg settlers. And, uh, yeah, so it’s, it’s, it’s like something that you use for your home. And, uh, so that’s what we ordered. So the whole hit for the experiment was about like $3,000 for the, for the freeze dryer, $800 for transporting it. And then some of the electricity costs and, you know, oil for the vacuum pump and the ingredients and all that put together and probably like 200, $300.

So the total is about like 4,005,000. Like we sure sharp knew we had like 500, 600 people who are willing to buy from us. And that was good enough because even if, if it doesn’t scale more than those 500 people, I still thought that was good enough to start the business with. 

Yasi: Okay. And then where is Peri all now?

Ganesh: I know we make about 80,000 packets a day. Uh, we sell 80,000 packets a day. Uh, we still are in soups. The idea was we’ll get into soups first because they had a wider appeal and then we will get into Indian curries. But right now, because of COVID, India has been shut down for about five or four months.

So, so we’re still not launched the curries, uh, freeze, dried Indian curries, but we do have the soups.

Yasi: And how did you take it from among few hundred friends that they would want to buy it to 80,000 package sold now? Like, what is the journey? 

Ganesh: Mostly because we, uh, I didn’t want to do direct to consumer because direct to consumer is always tough.

The idea was to get into retail or, uh, get into, uh, you know, e-commerce some e-commerce website. And, uh, luckily for me, I had, uh, contacts in a coupon where I. Used to be a consultant for quite a bit. And therefore I got it launched on coupon. And then, uh, I did something called vendor funding. Vendor funding is where you give coupon money, uh, to pull, to promote your product.

So the idea was to teach people something like this is available, uh, initially, so get exposure and then you cut back on the export. So that’s how we started. So we started with, uh, you know, getting coupon and once we got a coupon, then we could end and coupon started reordering from us. Like they would place purchase orders to us then because we had those purchase orders.

And we could show that, yes, we had a growing. And which is good for you. So then we could get into , which is a Vietnam company. And then, uh e-commerce and then regarded to the, some of the us e-commerce websites like niche websites. So not, not big yet. And, uh, to get into Amazon, of course, either we have to start off as the dealers, ourselves or something, which is far more complicated, but at some point when you get in.

But yeah, the idea is not to sell in India because I think they’re far too expensive for an Indian customer. Consumer, like $3 is like 180 2 piece. You can get a whole meeting, uh, for that, but there is a huge market for these and outside India.

Yasi: When do you mentioned that due to COVID-19 it has been business has been stopped for awhile.

Ganesh: No, no the production is going on, but the testing and stuff is like stopped right now. Because every time you create a new food product, you have to, uh, you know, do the nutrient testing and the, you know, bacteria, salmonella and all these testings from the government agencies and stuff. All those processes are stored up.

Like the testing labs are stopped right now. So launching something new is going to take longer. Okay. Yeah, 

Yasi: I understand that’s for new products, but I have seen many countries that initially during the lockdown or the emergency food for sold out. And do you also see that for Peri?

Ganesh:  Yeah, so we, we, right now we don’t have the capacity, so we have far more orders than our capacity because, uh, most of these stores, uh, like, uh, we are also on some physical stuff.

Like some of these gyms and, you know, these restaurants which want to place our products. So those people, uh, it used to be a very tiny portion of our, uh, business, uh, like 90, 95% used to be e-commerce, which was like a consistent, you know, stream. And then there used to be this five, 10% from these local dealers and stuff.

Like some random people would find us on the internet and then. It would be like, Hey, I want to stock up on your products. I want to place like a thousand unit order or something. And then they consistently keep placing their thousand units. But after COVID, you know, from fab, most of our us dealers, they started pacing.

20,000 units take from thousand to 20,000 stuff. Yeah. 20 X. And we don’t have the plan or the capacity, like our full scaling plan was like, yeah, we get one machine and then we will get a second machine by October. Then we’ll get a third. Like there is a linear, you know, growth projection, and suddenly this whole, uh, thing changed from daily sales of.

25 30,000 to like no 80,000. So 80,000 packets daily. 

Yasi: Oh, so COVID actually helped your business to take a big leap. 

Ganesh: Yes, because I think freeze dried food, uh, was not very well-known. I mean, so our market, we had to do two things first. We had to educate people because people would confuse freeze, dried with be hydrated, FreeState, and rated, extremely different to boil.

It still takes time to prepare it. FreeState is like super instant and it does not lose nutrients. It took us time to explain it to people on why it is cooler to, or why it’s better to have free style food. But when COVID happened, a lot of people quickly got to know about freestyle food, right? 

Yasi: That’s yeah.

That’s also quite lucky for a business.

Ganesh:  I’m telling you most of my businesses are lucky. I’ve been very lucky. That’s why I say I still haven’t learned. I’ve been lucky because either a natural phenomenon or, you know, a government agency or, you know, someone somewhere is looking out for my business have been, you know, getting me, my customers are getting me my, uh, you know, my business, but.

Yasi: But do you think that because you know, there is a demand, you did your analysis, you did your strategy, you know, that there’s a demand out there.

Ganesh: So when your products is, well, I knew was, uh, be it a stem or spice, or be it a Peri, the soup, the demand that I knew was I knew that yes, there is, there will be a demand for it.

Like people like it in food, but people hate making Indian food because it’s not easy to make. It’s not like five ingredients, you put it and then it is done Indian food that requires you to put the right lot of ingredients, a small amount of, lot of ingredients, which are not common to a lot of dishes.

So which means that you buy it today. Inventory management of that is very difficult because you buy it and you use a little bit of. And within a week year to get rid of it, but the other dishes don’t require it. It’s not like, okay, I put the same potatoes today, tomorrow day after tomorrow day after the, I can clear my inventory.

Right. So, so the point is it leads to a lot of waste management, right? Like, because whatever you buy, you don’t end up using everything you buy in a kilo and then you end up using like a hundred grams of it. And then all that is stuck. And then for your next recipe, you don’t need. Um, so that is one second is Indian recipes also required you to put the right ingredients at the right time.

So it’s not like you dump everything together and then it’s taken care. It is like, if you miss the timing or you put something front and something back then the dishes like spoiled and third is most of the ingredients for these. You don’t even find it in the other. So you could love Indian food. You, you probably know how to cook Indian food, but it just that you can’t get these ingredients in those countries.

So it kind of made sense. What if I could make all of this and then put it and freeze, right? Not even like, you know, have it as a liquid back or heavy pack, the freeze righted, then it’s super light, which means it’s travel-friendly. And I also knew that a lot of Indians traveling outside the first thing that.

Oh, there’s, I’m a vegan. I’m a vegetarian and this country has no, like, even if it is a vegetarian store or a vegan store, or they have vegetarian options or vegan option, they cook it in the same pan of a non-vegetarian food. And for a lot of Indians, that is an absolute, no like, like my mom, for instance, she’s a stayed in my dad and I have meat and, and, and we have separate utensils.

It’s like, we can’t use the utensils that my mom used to make the vegan stuff. And, uh, so that, that’s how the key people are. So I knew there was an amazing market. It was light and it could be preserved for a long time because these drains and you can keep it in room temperature for about 10 years. So there’s this long shelf life between the risk is really low.

If I make a ton of inventory, I still have 10 years to clear it. Right. At some point I can get. Great. So it’s like the very risk free for me. So food inevitably has the problems of low shelf life and therefore higher wastage. I was solving that the mega problem that I was solving was I was giving it a 10 year shelf life without compromising on the nutrient value for 10 years or the taste for 10 years.

And then I was keeping it so light that people could travel with it. And because it was freestyle. You could take it in your, uh, you know, uh, carry on luggage. You don’t have to put it in your check-in luggage, which means even if you’re a business traveler, which is what I do, like I travel with just. The most of the places, because I hate waiting for my luggage and picking it up and stuff.

So when I want to just travel with a backpack and if something is in the liquid form or something is like, you know, pre cooked food, it’s most likely not allowed to be a part of your carry-on luggage, but this one I could easily take it. And it’s just like 20 grams. And unlike, uh, you know, canned food or something, you can take it because it’s less heavy and it does not have the, you know, water in it and it’s not made of metal or something you could take in your carry-on luggage.

So the idea was it makes sense. It solved a lot of problems. The solution was quite simple. There was a lot of problems for, you know, people who wanted authentic Indian. Outside of India without having to go to some Indian restaurant, which put a lot of food coloring or something, even besides Indian food, you also have other types of cuisines in your product line.

Yasi: Do you?

Ganesh: Uh, not now. So we just want to focus on, uh, Indian food. I mean, it’s a huge market and getting food is a huge market. I mean, India has so much of recipes, so it kind of like, and India, most of the recipes are vegan. Like most of Indians are vegetarian. So the idea is we figured that if we can, you know, containerize it into a.

Uh, 20 grand packet, and then you can have how much ever you want to have. And it’s like portioned. And therefore, if you have two people, then just tear open two packets. If you have three people that open three packets, that way you don’t, it’s not just making your life easy to consume, but it’s also like reducing a lot of food.

Uh, you’re not buying a ton of food and then you’re not preparing for like 10 people. And then you’re not ending up throwing away seven people’s worth of food. Um, or you’re not going to get to all your vegetables and things to rock, which you don’t end up using. But now it is like perfectly portioned for your consumption.

Yasi: So you have this convenience food company right now. How did you move to farming? So I 

Ganesh: found. I found that in India, that a lot of layer, two companies coming up like India is right now the best place to be a startup only because, um, The population date. So you have like 1.4 billion people, you succeed as a startup, then the biggest market you can get.

I mean, yes, China is a bigger market, uh, but China is also very controlled. And, uh, under the, you you’re a Chinese company, succeeding in China is going to be extremely difficult. We’ve seen that with Uber versus DD. You have seen that, but you know, a lot of these companies having to exit, uh, China and give up control to a Chinese company.

Uh, Walmart and things like that. Right? So, so the thing is, uh, succeeding in China is going to be much difficult. Succeeding in India is a possibility. But if you succeed in India, that is almost like succeeding in like 30, 40 other countries. So you don’t have to deal with 30, 40 other countries, legal, uh, systems and policies and, you know, labor laws and figure out that.

You’ve been in one country and you get as much, you know, range as you went in like 30, 40 countries. So India is a great place to start up. And now the startup ecosystem is building up really fast. Like a lot of people are, uh, looking to invest in Indian startups. And therefore, since a lot of money is coming in, a lot of people are tackling good problems, good problems.

As in not that there are still people who are trying to tackle the communication and the. Uh, you know, complexities like, you know, companies which are making TechTalk and and these kinds of apps, but I don’t think those kinds of companies are very important. Uh, they’re not, they’re not solving an important problem related to population.

Uh, they are solving a problem of like, you know, expressing yourself, but, um, I feel. Those companies in India, which are right on trying to tackle agriculture, you’re tackling it on the layer two. So layer two is layer. One is the product. So I know in India, the value chain is like farmers produce that pharma send it to a middleman, uh, because the farmers don’t have access to cold storage.

Uh, the brittle man takes it at rock bottom price and in the middle man marks it up and then sends it to the Monday. And then the Monday, which is another middle man. Those are the people who sell it to all the supermarkets and other. And, uh, in this whole value chain, the farmer gets screwed the most, which is why you have a lot of farmer debt.

And all the other people are trying to help out all the other startups that I see in India, which are trying to help both are trying to solve the second layer problem, which is the distribution. So they are like, okay, the farmer is not making a lot of money because there are two middle men between them.

And. Final distributor and therefore what we can connect the final distributor to the farmer or provide the farmer with a direct to consumer platform or something like this. Right? So all of these problems will increase the margin for the farmer. So because you’re taking out the two middlemen, so instead of the farmer having to sell for like 20% margin, you can sell it for like a hundred percent and therefore he makes more money.

But I don’t think that is the problem to solve the problem to solve. The farmer is getting beat. Not only because there are two middlemen, he’s also getting beat because he’s using the worst way to predict. We have not progressed as a country in terms of technology for food dominant technology that we have put in into these Facebook and Google and all this, our search searches improved by milliseconds.

You know, the number of pages called has improved and everything, but our way of making food is still the same. You go use normal labor, you put your seeds one time, a season. And then after the season is over, you go hard with it and then you, you know, tie it up and then you sell it. You use that much water.

You use fertilizers, you use pesticides. So the idea behind starting 10 X farms was every aspect of the farm. Not the, post-farm not post-harvest every aspect of the farm farming exercise. You want to improve by 10. Not one next door, two X, like 10 X. Like if, if farmers use thousand liters of water per kg, we want to use only a hundred liters of water per case.

So reduce water consumption by 96. Which is like 10 X improvement and then, uh, you know, increase the productivity by 10 X, increase the yield by 10 X decrease the labor costs by 10 X. Uh, so things like that, right? Like by automation or by introducing new technology or by, you know, figuring out how to have a closed, controlled environment or, uh, how to increase the number of crop cycles for.

Things like that, but everything that we can do to increase or decrease everything by a 10 X range. And so it’s more of an R and D company. We have one farm in Bangalore. The idea behind that farm is we will use all our R and D to test in that farm. And once we are comfortable that we can reach 10 X in a lot of aspects that is when we want to open the technology and the farming practice to a lot of.

Yasi: And before starting to X farm, do you already have experience or knowledge about farming or optimization? 

Ganesh: Yeah, in Singapore, we have a hydroponics farm because the Singapore government is, uh, uh, right now providing a lot of incentives for, uh, people to get into farming. We did set up a first farm in Singapore.

That is all that is all my experience with farming SB. And then. My brother learned quite a bit. So he went and worked in a farm and, uh, he learned quite a bit over there. And then he took up a certification on aquaponics. So he learned quite a bit, but I think the idea is, uh, unlike technology or unlike self-driving cars, or like sending a rocket to the moon.

Farming is very intuitive. It’s very logical. I think if you just look at how it is done, like we’ve seen the farms in which you cut, you harvest over here and then you walk a mile and then you go and process your harvest. You package it, but just changing the packaging zone to bear you harvest would save a ton of time in our farm.

Uh, we use. So the idea is instead of floating stationary, you keep adding in. So it’s like a U shape. So you keep, uh, seeding the floats with the small nursery plants in one side of the tank, and then it grows all the way. It keeps moving. As you keep adding you and you. It goes to the end and then you push it over the side that it comes all the way to the end over here, where it’s harvest and then the floats are clean and then they know planted.

And then they’re put back just doing this, this whole cycle of it going in a U shape, reduces the walking time, which is the most inefficient. You, don’t getting a labor to walk around and pick stuff from different places and then bring it back to one. Instead of that, I make the water move the boards, the floats, which doesn’t cost me anything.

And the people stay stationary. 

Yasi: So you’re, instead of people walking, you make the plants working in your factory. Yes, 

Ganesh: the plants are moving. The plants are moving, the people are not moving. And that reduces the amount of, you know, so I don’t need like 10 people walking around, torturing this place, you know, dropping things and everything.

I’ve also seen some people use this same technology, but they do it in a straight line. So you see it over and then you harvest the other end. But then that is again silly because you have to bring back all your floats to the seating area. But on the other hand, I just want to keep both of them together.

So you, you send it over here, you receive it over here. You chop, you clean, you replant, you push it back. And so smaller, smaller ideas like these does not require a PhD or does not require a, you know, a lot of thinking. You just have to see that, sit there and figure out what can I do to make my process 1% more efficient.

And if, if I can make it 1% more efficient, Every day then by at some point I should be able to make it a temper, like 90% more efficient.

Yasi:  Afterwards what’s your plan? 

Ganesh: So part of it is I want to get into manufacturing of, uh, farming equipment because right now, setting up a farm in India, uh, takes anywhere from.

Six to eight months. So I also want to improve that by 10 X. So if something takes six to eight months, I want to be able to set up a farm in 15 days and you should be able to harvest in 30 days. So if you decide today, you have a piece of land and you say, I want to start a farm in 30 days, you should be able to harvest right now.

That’s not a possibility. You could have all the money on earth, but it’s not. Like you would have to talk to 10 different partners. The Reno’s partner is a different guy. The person who makes the bond is in the civil contractors is a different guy. All these guys have to talk to each other because if he puts a beam over here and that guy puts a tank over there, then it doesn’t work out together.

And then you have to talk to the fisheries. You have to talk to the aquaponics guys and everybody’s checkered, but I want to like, you know, be a farm in a box. You order a farm. It comes in a shipping. And then it should be so modular that you can fix it yourself. It’s like ickier and getting started in 15 days.

So to do that, I will need to get into manufacturing. And right now the idea of what we are doing in Bangalore in our R and D farm is trying out different prototypes, like new building prototypes, and then you’re testing it out and then seeing how we can make it better understanding the science behind it.

Yasi: And it’s this from your startup font or is this something you start with, um, with your brother? 

Ganesh: Uh, this is from, with my brother. So the Singapore farm is country project with party-ish. Uh, but the Indian one is with one. 

Yasi: And then what do you think are the biggest lessons you learned from doing the three startups till now?

Ganesh: There’s a lot of things that I’ve learned too, but, uh, some of the things that I’ve learned is, uh, figuring out your right partner makes sense. Uh, that is the biggest thing. Like a lot of people. Spend very little time. Uh, they spend more time thinking about the idea more time thinking about the business more time, thinking about the monetization and every aspect, but startups fail.

Not because your business model was bad or. You know, your monetization was bad or something like those things can be corrected. Like startups always pivot. Like you start with something, make it work. If it does not work, you change a little bit and then you make it work. So you should be spending more time trying to figure out who’s that person that you want to work with.

And I never anticipated working with my brother simply because, uh, you know, most of his, like he had his own career in us. I had my own career and, you know, whatever I was doing, I had my own full-frame circle and stuff, but I didn’t realize that. I am not a CEO material. A CEO material is person who can get stuff done.

And I was more of a logician. Like I would come up with a lot of ideas, but I wouldn’t have the patience or the, you know, willpower to see them too. Like I don’t want to deal with the day-to-day stuff with it. And the moment that I realized that my brother is. Off the CEO type. And I realized that we are compatible that way because she wouldn’t focus on these moonshot things, but he would focus on delivering things, but I would focus on all these moonshot ideas and things on how things could be made better.

So it kind of like made a good pair in the sense that I, I would spend more time thinking or coming up with ideas and he would take the time to prioritize which ideas of mine. It should be shipped out and how they should be shipped out. So one of the biggest key lessons for me is the startups, all my startups.

I had a long-term experience with these guys, like when with, with Alvin, with Spotify, I spent like yours in the MBA school with them. And at that point we didn’t like, I didn’t meet them for the purpose of a startup. I met them because they were in my class. We will not judging each other. We were talking our hearts out because they will not applying to a startup that I had, or I been tell them that I want to talk to you because I want to create a startup with two base.

We met in a setting where that was required for, there was no requirement for being fake projecting what you will not. And that is when you realize, okay, this is a person I want to work with. And then the startup happened. The startup was the consequence of good friendship and understanding of.  

Yasi: I think it’s very lucky that you met those people your life and also you make something great.

And then for the audience, where can they find you, if they want to learn more about your setups and your projects, or even your future startups.

Ganesh: So one is my Twitter, which is a staccato SEG. So, like I used to be into anime and, uh, Sandra was like friend and an impulsive guy. So it kind of resonated when I was like, like in my sixth or seventh grade. So that’s why I go to the ID. And then, uh, there is always gap that I, Aberdeen is my website. G A P P 

Yasi:  Your Twitter name and your website are in description.

So if people are interested in your project and then they can follow you, find you. Cool. Thank you very much for today’s session. I think there are lots of interesting, very interesting stories, because even though you said you get lucky with your first and the second, but I think there are elements there that are doing it.

Right? You understand the business, you understand demand, you test it, you have a startup found, uh, you know, what you are doing. So I think at the end of the day, luck is one thing, but the other elements you need to do it right. Then the luck comes, then you’ll be surprised. 

Ganesh: So you will increase your self-paced luck surface area by getting educated. Like for instance, like doing education increases your luck surface area, it opens you more doors. Uh, but yes, but people do get caught up in saying that, oh, this guy did not study and he’s, he has luck. Right. But that’s an exception.

So the probability of you getting lucky increases. The more you pay in yourself. Yeah. Thank you 

Yasi: very much. If you liked this episode, please subscribe like and share.

Ganesh: See you in the next one.