Discovering Passion Beyond Code with Ravi Simhambhatla of Avis Budget Group | Indianness Ep.14

Thank you very much, Sanjay. I really appreciate you having me.

Certainly. Of course, I'm from India. My roots are from the south of India, from Andhra Pradesh. I was born in 1967 in Allahabad, which used to be in Uttar Pradesh, and now of course all the names have changed. I have one older brother who will always be two years older than me, that never changed as a constant. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for her entire life, and my dad was in the Indian government. He started his career in the Indian Railways Accounts Service, and then he went on to being the Railway Board, and then he finally ended up his career as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies in Delhi. Then he took early retirement and he joined the World Bank as a senior financial advisor to different nations in Africa. All the years, at least in India, our journey as a family because my father was in the railways, we would spend a couple of years in Muzaffarpur, a couple of years in Guwahati on the Assam side of the house, a number of years in Howrah, until we finally kind of settled in on Delhi, in New Delhi, which to me is still the best city in my power world. And that's where I grew up. My brother and I both went to school in Delhi. We went to a school known as Modern School, and we did an entire education there right from kindergarten through the 12th grade. So one school on Hailey Road and one school on Barakhamba Road. And there on, my brother went on to do his bachelor's degree in Anna Institute of Technology in Madras, now Chennai, and I decided to take some computing classes. But immediately after school, before college, I spent an entire year learning how to write code. This is circa 1985, October onwards, way back down memory lane. And then I decided to come to the United States to start my bachelor's education. And so that was my initial journey. And yeah, and here we are, 36 something odd years later.

I think so. It's a question that I actually asked my parents, particularly my mother, because she had to deal with me more than my dad had to deal with me. And her estimation of how I managed to cope with change is that I was incredibly mischievous, and I would always find the most mischievous new person to play with and to become friends with. And when you're a young kid and you get into stuff, you find someone who actually gets into that stuff better than you who can teach you. And so for me, it was always about fun. And life has been, when I look back in my life now, since I was a kid, I've been moving around everywhere. I lived and worked in multiple continents, and it has all come down to one thing: I love being around people, and I really soak in the fun of learning from new people and gaining new experiences. So I guess that's how I seem to cope. Now if you ask me truly if I talk or not, I really talk. What I can tell you is that my family and I are very happy, so we must be doing something right.

It was fantastic. Just to set the record straight on Modern versus DPS, DPS actually never competed with us. They could never compete with us, and they still cannot compete with us. So to all your listeners trying yours, you will not win. It was admittedly difficult. My father was, and now he's retired, a very honest government official. And as anybody who's been in India and who's chosen government and honest will know that economically it was never a great thing. So I remember distinctly when my father was in the Indian Railway Accounts Service, he went on a mission to the USSR at that time, it was USSR, and this was during summer. And my mother, who was very ambitious for my brother and I while my dad was gone on his government mission, she had us admitted into Modern School. So my brother and I took the test, the entrance test, apparently we aced it, and consequently we got admitted. So my mother, while my dad was in the USSR on the garment business, she had us admitted into what was an incredibly expensive school for a government official. My mother still recalls the scene in the house the day my dad returned from mission. Once my brother and I brought our hands on all the toys that he brought for us, I remember she told him, and all he could do was find the chair and put his head in his hands and say, 'How are we going to pay for this?' And my mom said, 'I don't really care, we have to pay for this in the honest way.' Just so you know, that kind of stayed with me forever because we have two grown-up daughters now, 23 and 19, and they both went to phenomenal universities. And they're still, my younger daughter's still at a great place at Boston University. And it's the same concepts: I don't really care, they have to have the best education. So it was difficult in the beginning to cope, but I was always into sports. I played sports, whether you're doing cricket or football or kho kho or badminton or kabaddi, you make friends, and that friendship really helped carry me forward. And of course, I also say my parents, I can never deny the incredible support our parents gave my brother and I to transition through all these changes that we had. So even when we were young, whilst economically we were really downtrodden, the happiness level was pretty high. So that's what allowed us to cope. And for education, as most Indians who are here now, education is what gives you escape velocity from where you are to where you could be. And so that was of extreme importance in my household. My brother and I both kind of use that as our backdrop to get to where we are today. And of course, family, friends, mentors, ex-bosses, you bring all of them together and it's a happy story.

Yes, it was. But also, her father, my grandfather, he did his medicine and his FRCS in England, in Scotland, University of Edinburgh, many eons ago. And he came back to India to practice, and he practiced in a little town called Jharsuguda in Odisha. And he was for all matters and purposes the king's physician at that time. And so my mother grew up in a family where everyone was super well educated, all the brothers and sisters. And she saw how education can create new opportunities for everyone. And incredibly, none of my mother's siblings ever went into medicine. So they all chose different themes like engineering, business, human resources, what have you. She became ultra-ambitious right then and there, and she saw around her, I think she was a far more clear agent about the value of education to young people than my dad would have been at that time. Also, my mom was and is still pretty radical for someone who was born in 1941. She introduced my brother and I to The Beatles. She used to make us sing songs by The Beatles and the rest. And yeah, she's a favorite man. When she was younger, she liked Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. So she's just a very different breed. And a lot of that push came from her to get my brother and I situated in a way that we would succeed in life. And even today, I speak to my parents every morning without fail. And yeah, they're in India. They're older, my dad's 89, my mother's 82. And I just want to speak to them every day. And even today, she says, 'Make sure you work hard, do the right thing, make sure the children are working hard, make sure they're getting educated well.' I think that now, where the genesis of that feeling for her, I truly do not know. I don't think she knows either. But what I do know is it is deeply embedded in her. So she and my dad also valued education over everything, and it certainly has paid dividends.

Yeah, I think it starts off with making friends, right? But then when you are a skinny kid who has boundless energy, the only way your mother can ensure that you eat and sleep well at night and you study hard is if you burn your energy in the right way. So she used to always play, much to her chagrin, because she'd say, 'Hey, you need to be spending more time studying than playing.' But to me, that enjoyment, the social connection I made playing sports when I was young, whether it was badminton, football, cricket, or hockey—I played hockey for three years for my school team, the Modern School senior team—it really makes you want to fight and win, but fight and win together, and lead and be led. And so you understand all these dimensions that start forming the personality that you have. And so you start to understand the dynamics of how to truly work with other people in these constructs where the eventual goal is to win. And winning can be many, many things. It just cannot be a single dimensional element in my opinion. My big win from that is that it allowed me to enjoy my youth tremendously. All those days and evenings, my friends and I used to get on the cricket pitch just slugging it out, making fun of each other but becoming best friends. My closest friends from India are still my closest friends. I grew up with that, and sports are what brought us together. But not just sports, it's sports, music, families, and just the social structure that we all lived in. We grew up very lucky. We didn't have much in terms of money, but we had a phenomenal social setting that everyone's parents created for us. It was very nurturing, very friendly, and very caring. And you pick that up and hope to pass it on.

Absolutely. The credit all goes to the people who I was surrounded by, whether it's my parents, my brother. My brother is pretty cool, he's a lot more serious than I am, but he's really cool, he's really smart, and we get along like a house on fire. My friends, Aneesh and Girish and all these people, they're very close to me and they had a very deep influence on my life. And I hold that very close indeed. One of my closest friends is a guy named Yogesh Fadnis. He and I were the best and the tightest friends in Modern School from sixth grade onwards. And in the 10th grade, his father and family basically got up and left the country. He was in the United Nations, and so Yogi and I lost touch in the 10th grade. We were so close, and all of a sudden once somebody wasn't there, it was pretty shattering. But when you're young, you don't really understand that as much as you start understanding as you grow older. Fast forward to 2008. This is 1982-83 to 2008. I was working in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I just thought, 'What is Yogesh Fadnis doing?' And at that time, if you remember, LinkedIn had just become the big thing, everyone's getting connected. So I said, 'Let's just sign in,' and I found Yogi. And we lived in Sunnyvale in the Bay Area, and Yogi and his family lived in Dublin, California. And I was completely floored. I reached out to him, we met the weekend after, and it was like we never missed a beat. All those years, we never missed a beat. His wife, Mona, and my wife, Savi, have become the best and closest of friends. The children all are close to each other. And we rekindled that friendship, and now we're the fastest friends. In fact, very recently I was in the Bay Area and I met Yogi and his younger brother Vikram, and we had a blast. So we keep in touch again. The reason I bring all this up is it is always good to maintain those roots of people who really gave you happiness when you were young. And if you're able to maintain those relationships, life is just, you may not have much, but life is still very nice. Maintaining relationships with people who were there with you in the roots, who brought you happiness, I think that's excellent.

Yeah, after Modern, as I said, I took some time off. I joined this little computer classes place off of IIT Gate in Delhi near the ring road called Informatics Computer Systems. And there I learned BASIC. I already knew BASIC, my father had bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer some time back, but that's where I really learned it on BBC computers. And so it was all about basic programming. This is mid-80s, and I just fell in love with it. I somehow made the connection that I could be a nerd and I could get the machine to talk back to me and do my bidding. And the interest blossomed very quickly. And while I was there, after a few months, they actually first started having me grade answer sheets because I was good at computing. And after a few more months, they had me start teaching classes. And this is a kid who just finished school with zero college education but an aptitude for computers. It just happened since. And this again, unfortunately I lost touch with this guy many, many years ago, but he is the guy who said, 'Ronnie, just come with me, try it out, it'll be fun, try it out.' And I just listened to him, and there you go. And if he had not been, you might have gone in a different direction. Sometimes we never know. In fact, I might have not been in any direction. My entire life might have been not much to account for. So again, I'm very thankful. At the same time, I think what makes me happy about me is that I'm not averse to taking risks. So I have a very wide aperture in things I can accept, so I try to do these things. So I went to ICS, and then my parents looked at me and said, 'Playing computer games is no...' I said, 'No, Dad, I explain.' But my parents were very, very supportive, along with my dad and mom and my dad's younger brother who is no more, they had a plan to send me to America. And nobody knew anything about America. All I had was a passport. So I applied. I remember those days, we used to go to the American Foundation where you could go and you would get this big thick bulletin book of colleges you could apply to. I had no help. So I took the SATs, I did pretty well, I don't remember, but I did pretty well. And the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language. And then I went to this place where I looked at all the universities that I would be able to apply to that had Computer Science or Management Information Systems as a degree offering. And I selected one. I got admitted to many, but I selected one called RIT in Upstate New York for Computer Science and Management Information Systems. So I came here. Funny story, my parents or I did not know anybody in this country. Not a soul. From Delhi to Rochester. Delhi to Rochester, right? From the summers of India to the incredible New York. And I remember I landed at JFK. I had flown Air India before that, but I had never been to the US. I landed at JFK, and at that time I believe it was the Port Authority that used to open your bags and look for any contraband or anything. And I couldn't understand a word the police officer was saying, and he could not understand a word of what I was saying. That's how far I was from reality. But I managed to get through, flew to Rochester. It was a great experience in many ways because I saw the potential of computing, but it was also a poor experience in many ways. Because one thing is that when you talk about the Indianness Podcast, Sanjay, what makes me feel very happy is Indian faces and Indian food. I love to be close to my community. And there was, barring one guy, there was nobody else, or maybe a couple. But that has changed probably now. Oh, it's completely changed now. Now you have to struggle to find other people. But this is in '86. And also, I did not anticipate how cold it would be. I was just not prepared. And not being prepared and having such a radical shift in your living environment, I was sick for most of the year. So physically sick. So I didn't do very well in college because I just couldn't pay attention, and I became despondent. You're 18 and you have a lot of joie de vivre in your veins running, but you can't do anything because you are in a completely different world and you don't have a support system that's close to you. I spoke to my dad and my parents and all, and I didn't do well in college. And it was just like it was not going to be something that I could continue doing because it was just out of whack. So I transferred to England, which is great because every corner had a phenomenal Indian restaurant, it was more temperate, and there were millions more familiar faces. So I fit right in. And I went to a place called Richmond College in London for Computer Science. Fast forward three years from there, graduated. It was really funny, I won the graduating medal for the best performance in the Computer Science division, and I was shocked because I didn't expect it. The first year was difficult because again I had to recover from a very difficult year at RIT, but subsequent years I did really well, and that's what the dean of the department also noted. So it was great. And the real fun story about this is that I got the award and it was on videotape. I have a videotape of it. So I told my dad and mom, 'Dad, I got an award for this.' My dad says, 'There's just no way.' He did not believe me because this was a case where past performance is a good indicator of future. I played it back, and he was so proud. The videotape is with me now, but my dad had it burnt onto CD-ROM. I don't know if you remember those days, you convert videotapes to that. So it was great. My education journey went there. I finished in Richmond, I got a job about three days before I graduated, took the job up, and I never looked back. And that was in England.

It was an incredibly tough time physically, mentally, and every way. Physically you recover, you're young, you recover pretty quick. It's just the mental pressure: 'Hey, you've come all this way, you're not doing very well, spending money that you don't have.' But I guess that's the American financial system anyway, so I was already familiar with that. But my parents really supported me through this. They gave me a lot of mental and moral support because they all knew that I had this in me. And it's the old adage of putting a square peg in a round hole. You can do your best, but it simply will not yield the results you're looking for. So they helped me through it and supported me in my decisions. And again, my mother played a pivotal role here. She just doesn't give up. She doesn't give up. So she, on the one hand, would push me and hold me accountable, but on the flip side, for the rest of the world, she would not let the rest of the world attack me. So she was pushing and nurturing at the same time. And of course, my dad also helped, but he was busy working and thinking and living for the family, so there's only so much time and space he had to deal with me. But it was my mom, and she really, really helped. My brother too. So again, having strong family bonds and being able to seek help. One thing I've learned pretty early on is that when you need help, just ask for it, because there are a lot of people around you who will happily give it to you. Don't try and fight everything on your own because I think the one thing that none of us have control over is time. And as time is the vector that only moves in one direction, you need to just take help. So I got help from my family. There was no pressure that 'Hey, stick it out at RIT, things will get better.' Nothing like that, because they could see right where I was. And also, like I said, they knew my capability and the potential. And think about it, had they said 'Stick it out there' compared to 'Okay, you should do this,' I probably would not have been here. So whatever push they gave me at that stage of my life actually worked tremendously to my benefit. When I go back and peel the layers of my career and life, those are some of the most pivotal moments.

It's a very simple story, Sanjay. I worked at this company, American Express, for I think two and a half years. And at that point, I had gotten into a postgrad program in a university, and my goal was to grow there. My parents were also returning back to India, for my dad had served in Africa, and he joined the World Bank at that very time. My brother was doing his PhD in Ohio. So I thought this is the best opportunity for me to go back home to India, be with my parents, help them settle in, and my goal was to go back to India and find a job. That was it. It was very simplistic. And all of that happened. I was in Bangalore, and I joined a company called Wipro Systems. I had a learning experience with them. I owe a lot to that experience on MG Road in Bangalore. And it was with the express promise that they would not send me out again. That was my core requirement. It was very unlike what other young people of my age wanted to do in Bangalore. They all wanted to stay in India because their parents were there, and they needed to plant some roots. They said, 'Yes, of course.' And within three months, I was shipped off to Dublin, Ireland, for a secondment on a really important partnership with GE Information Services that used to be in Rockville, Maryland. The company's no more. And so I was sent as a senior software engineer to help all these programs. And the management team of GE Information Services took a real liking to me. So after a year and a half in Dublin, they had me transferred to Rockville, Maryland, again with Wipro. So that was nice, and that was in '94. 1996 is when we got married. So Savi and I got married in Bangalore, and we moved to Rockville, Maryland. And I remember that winter, I believe we visited California. My brother was in the Bay Area, and then we looked at California that winter, the next spring, I don't quite remember, it's been a long time. We visited the Bay Area, and it's my wife's and our heads just going, 'What? What? What? So nice!' So we were all struck. And that's the moment Savi and I decided, 'Okay, we've got to move to the Bay Area.' And we did in 1997. I joined a database company named Sybase in Emeryville, California. It was great. I had a great time there. The amazing thing that Savi and I did is we actually drove from Maryland to the Bay Area. Best time of our lives. Saw the whole country. We had the whole country see us too. We went to Wyoming, I guess, Dakotas, I believe, Montana, where they probably had never seen someone look like us. But people were always very nice, always very kind, welcoming, accommodating. And that was our journey, the beginning of our journey in the Bay Area.

Yeah, it was very interesting. So when I left Sybase very soon, because Savi and I decided that we wanted to stay in this country and we want to make our life here because it was so giving to us. So we made a connection. We wanted to stay in the United States and we want to find the best way to be able to do that and still make a good living and growth career. So I left Sybase for a company called Legato Systems, which was a pioneer in network-based backup recovery software in Palo Alto. Great gig, it was phenomenal. I was there for eight years. And Legato got bought out by EMC Corporation. And then I got a new boss whose name is Bill McGuire, who was the CIO. Bill McGuire, one of the best leaders ever. What makes him the best leader ever? Empathy and being driven but having the right level of empathy to create motivation. It's very hard for me to describe, but I always felt that with him, I don't have to worry about anything except doing a phenomenal job because he covered everything else. So he was my boss's boss, so I was an underling so to speak. But when we were at Legato, we had acquired a couple of companies, and I got pulled into the integration, systems integration. And so he started observing me and noticing my successes and failures. He would give me guidance on how I could do better. And then just somehow that relationship flipped from a professional relationship to a professional and a personal relationship. We became friends, and we both trusted each other. Fast forward from EMC, Bill went and joined a company called Aspect Communications in San Jose. He brought me in as a Director of Global Applications. That was my first big promotion where I had global responsibility, a very large team, and I did well. And then Aspect got acquired by another company on the East Coast. Consequently, Bill had to leave the company because you can't have two CIOs, and usually the company that's acquired doesn't have much say. So Bill left, and Aspect was fine for me, but they wanted me to move to Massachusetts, and that was just a no for us because our younger daughter, Anelise, was just one year old. We said, 'There's just no way we're moving our family.' And then, one fine day in late 2005, December 2005, Bill calls me and he says, 'Ravindra, do you want to help start an airline?' That got the gears working. I haven't any idea what he's talking about, but it's Bill, so I'm going to listen. And I said, 'Yes, Bill, I would love to.' And that happened to be Virgin America, a Richard Branson airline that was born in New York but then moved to Burlingame, California, actually right off of Anza Boulevard off of 101. So I joined as Director of Architecture and Integration. So while I knew systems relatively well, I knew nothing about aviation. I was just a jaded consumer of the industry. And I didn't know anything about the systems: I don't know anything about weight and balance, safety, dispatch, crew management, manpower planning, reservations. I had zero concept of that. But he trusted me. That trust in me propelled me to learn. I couldn't let him down, and I couldn't let myself down. So I learned and learned and learned. Where I was very lucky is because I came right from the cold, I knew nothing, is that Virgin America was a brand new airline that was still seeking the Department of Transportation's permission to fly in America. And the big three, American, United, and Delta, had basically launched lawsuits with the Department of Transportation to stop us from flying. I'm so incredibly indebted to those three airlines for watching these lawsuits because it took one and a half years to resolve that. That gave me enough time to learn. So I will always thank them for that. They actually helped me. So we launched the airline. It was, you know, we built an airline that people love. I wrote a lot of code, and it was one of the most fun times of my working experience. Did a lot of work with the seatback entertainment, with core systems like DCS. We were also one of the first airlines to adopt a big open source strategy to keep our cost low. And it was just great. It was a great experience. And then I got made CIO, I think in 2009, if I remember. Yeah, sometime in 2009, because Bill had left. And yeah, so I just carried the torch forth. And in 2010, I started getting recruited by Tesla and by Etihad based out of Abu Dhabi. Sai and the girls and I visited Abu Dhabi at that time, and she said no because it was still not very modern. Everything has changed now. So I chose Tesla. I also chose Tesla because naively I thought Palo Alto is only six miles away from where I live, so I'll cut my commute short. But while the commute was short, the working hours were extraordinarily long. But yeah, I joined as VP of IT Applications. I reported to Elon directly.

It is extraordinarily important to find mentors, but also to find mentors who can be your friend. Because to me, those two things are very interchangeable because when you're someone's friend, the caring you show for them is on a different level. So it's much deeper. Don't get me wrong, mentors are very important, but I think those two words have to come together: the emotional connection but also the professional connection. I think it's very, very important. I know today I hear a lot about people being mentored and seeking mentors, but when I was growing up, it was never highlighted as a thing to do. But the importance of that is never lost on me. It is as important to have a mentor as it is to be a mentor. Both of them are important. But having a mentor is very important because they can see you from a very different point of view and with a very different lens and aperture. Typically, when we are working, almost all of us start believing how amazing we are, and I certainly did. And that creates a whole bunch of blind spots for you. And it's not just about career. It's like how to be a good person, how to take care of your family, how to be great at your job, how to treat your team well. And so you need someone who's been through some of those, maybe not all, but who's been in the trenches with some of those experiences so they can guide you. And it's not always that the guidance is appropriate for you, but at least you have a sounding board. Then you can exchange thoughts and ideas. So I think it's very important. And yes, I do. To me, it's probably the most important thing I can do at this ripe young age of 55. If I don't do this now, then I would not be paying forward. I would not be sharing the knowledge that I have that might be important to somebody else. So I consider that to be a very important facet of what people in positions of power should do. And it's just very important because the next generation is waiting on the sidelines. You want the next generation to come and take what you do, amplify it, and make it better, perhaps even trash it if what you've done is not so good. But you have to bring new people into the fold. And if you don't do that, if you don't bring new people into the fold, mentoring them, then you also can never rise up because you're always in that same layer. And that's my thing. So yeah, I do mentor. I do a lot of mentoring in the corporates, every role I've had with these big corporates like United and Aer Lingus, and then certainly with Google and with Avis. I do mentoring, but I do a lot of mentoring on the side as well. And it doesn't have to be something written on paper. It's just people ask for help, you help them.

They both are disruptors. They both are very hungry. Disrupting businesses really excites them at a very deep level. That's what gives them energy, I firmly believe. Their approach and structure are remarkably different. They are two polar ends of the spectrum. Richard Branson comes across as very friendly. People close to him, he's still a businessman and he's been very successful. And you can look at all the companies he's run or that have a Virgin brand associated with them. They are nothing to write home about their revenues and traffic. They don't make much, that's the way of the world. But Richard Branson has made a lot of money. Okay, so he's very smart. He's a people person, very, very smart, and a very astute business person. He licenses his brand. And so you've got to learn from that, right? How did he arrive at that magical moment? He said, 'Okay, I'm Richard Branson. I started off with Virgin Records. I disrupted music in the United Kingdom. UK music was deeply entrenched in the legacy. Branson comes and disrupts that. Then he starts Virgin Atlantic. He disrupts air travel. He gets an experience like none other. So if you flew British Airways or Virgin Atlantic, you'd be in completely different worlds. Then he disrupted music, Virgin Music tried to disrupt trains, Virgin Trains. And then he came to the point where he said, 'I want to disrupt airlines and aviation in America.' But in my humble opinion, that disruption, Virgin America in America, was less about Branson's professional strengths in running airlines and more about the brand. Now if you're a brand new airline coming up in circa 2005, 2006, and you want to break through the blast, you have the Uniteds, the Deltas, the Americans, the Continentals all flying high. How do you break through that? You have an American brand that's freshly created to try and break through that. Everyone's going to laugh at you. But if you have Richard Branson and Virgin Group written through that, everyone suddenly gets very serious because he's done it before. So I think that's how he was used. And my flip to Elon Musk, I would say just dogged determination. He's probably the most determined human being I have ever encountered. What I like about Elon, and I still do, what I always liked about him, he never asked people to do what he was not ready to do himself. That was my take. It's in that book that just came out, yes. Many people saw him as very gruff, very coarse. But you are taking an electric car company and you want to disrupt automakers. You're not just disrupting automakers, you also have to disrupt the dealership model. The first car company on the planet to sell cars on an e-commerce platform. Who would have thought he would do that? And I have great respect for all automobile companies, they make the world move, but they got disrupted by that. So he hit the market way ahead and with a model. Started off with the Roadster, which was a mash-up of the Lotus Elise, but the Model S, the Model Y, the Model X, the Model 3, and just them all now the Cybertruck, which I'm not a big fan of, you can share your face and it's got such sharp edges, but that is disruption. And of course, the big factor trailers, right? The Tesla Semi. So he's in a position. It's just dogged determination. But if that doesn't convince you, look at SpaceX. He bet all his money. You don't need to read any books from Walter Isaacson or anybody. Just look at SpaceX. They disrupted this long, tightly held industry of space launchers. And he's disrupted it at a fraction of the cost to the American taxpayer on the one hand and to the global companies that want to launch their satellites in space. That is amazing. I mean, I just don't have any other words to describe that. It is amazing. And I got to give it to the guy. I philosophically feel that every generation needs women and men, a very handful of them, who can break apart the status quo in a way that is sustained and that can take us to the next level, whatever that next level is, but progress. Elon Musk is one of them. And I really don't see anybody else being able to compete with him. And now, yes, of course, you hear all this happening with Twitter and X and all. I would just say he doesn't need my advice at all, but he should just figure it out. That's all I can say. Because a lot of the amazing stuff he's doing, his teams are doing at SpaceX and Tesla, is where I would say the future, our future, all of our futures lie. And so a very impressive man. I haven't been in touch with him for years, but you can see, you know, respected.

I think I want to do what I really love doing. And I found this a little bit late in life. And I know it might sound a bit fluffy, but I actually want to help people traverse their career journeys in the field of computing and in the field of, I would just say, as you rise up in your career, executive management. So I want to do that. Secondly, I want to teach. I love imparting, I won't say knowledge again, I love sharing stories. And my belief is that stories allow people to see you with a very different point of view. And then they can see themselves in those stories. And how they see themselves, you know, it's all about helping people understand that the world is very big, the opportunities are huge, but if you don't pay attention to yourself and to those opportunities, they will come and go by you. So between those two, if I do that, I'll be very happy. And if my wife allows me to continue riding motorcycles whenever I want to, that would be my ultimate. Executive coaching, teaching, riding bikes, and who knows what else would come.

Work hard. Listen. And there's a saying: listen to understand, not to respond. When I was young at that age, I was extremely impetuous and I would always listen to respond. So listen. Be humble, because the world is so big and at every corner you will find a person who's done things better than you, who is a better person than you. So be humble and learn. That's all. And just have fun in life. It comes down to that. If whatever you're doing is not contributing to you smiling once or twice a day, then you probably should be doing something else.

Culture, family, food, cricket.

S. Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs.

Sanjay, my pleasure. Thank you so much for spending some time with me. I appreciate it greatly.