How Asking ‘Why?’ Changes What You Build | Kunal Shah

And I think the biggest thing I've seen is that people lose their curiosity very early on in life and they build insecurity very early on where their ability to ask stupid questions dramatically goes up and we are a society where we all have to look cool and high status. So asking stupid questions and being shameless is not respected and that stops the compounding growth of knowledge because it comes from just asking stupid questions constantly. The biggest question we lose as we grow up is the why question. We are always looking for how do I do this? What do I do? Looking for instruction and all of that but why asking that why question in the negative inverse manner is a good thing to do but we don't do that enough. Understanding of core motivation is important. I often use the analogy of rivers and dams. Most tech founders are great at building dams and terrible at finding rivers. When their dam does not create electricity they do not think that oh shit I have built this on a non-existent river, they keep fixing the dam and hope that river will come. Rivers don't come, rivers exist. And understanding of reverse comes from the human motivation like what will people care about? You need to ask this question. Will they pay lacks of rupees for this? Will they pay 10,000 rupees? Will they pay 1 rupee? Will they pay 5 rupees? Will they want it free only? Will they give me time for it?

My backstory is simple and many people have heard about this before so I'll repeat it anyways. I came from a Gujarati Jain family in Bombay. Most people in my family did business, doing a job is not normal at least in the Jain community. My dad was the seventh brother of seven siblings, seven brothers, he was the seventh. By the time I grew up the family went through we came from a decently affluent background but by the time I grew up all the wealth was gone. We had four major illnesses in the family. Had to shut all our businesses. My dad's business was started when I was young, shut down as well. We had to sell everything that we had. Moved to a 100-foot chawl. I had to start working when I was 14, 15. My dad went through severe depression after his company did not do well. I was a part-time delivery boy, part-time data entry operator. I was supposed to be a science student, had to drop out of that. I did philosophy because it was the only batch available from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. so I could do a full-time job. I got early on to the internet. I got obsessed with it. I started teaching internet so that I can have access to the internet and it was very easy to teach internet. I would just sit on my own computer and do stuff, right? So it was fun. I used to teach in Aptech, Vint... all these companies you must have heard about. Philosophy helped a lot. Most people think of philosophy as some vague thing but philosophy comes from the word felo and sophie which means love for knowledge. And when you have love for knowledge what you develop is ability to have multiple perspectives on one topic which I think is the biggest missing link in India's education system. We are all regimented to believe in a certain way of looking at things and also we struggle with massive critical thinking. Our opinions are too influenced through people we worship, any form of worship. Therefore what we define as the tech bro culture is also that, right? Like some oh okay right like it's the same thing or Kunal Shah is giving some advice so he must be right. All of this is bullshit. I had to learn sales early on in life because when you have to make money and survive.

I would have done anything at that point of time. If you told me to do anything I would have done it. So I think that's another thing that many of us have unfortunately had money in our lives because our family did better. The problem of the younger generation is that many of you do not have parents who have got completely fucked up. And that is the role of trauma that I talk about often. Unfortunately, it is kind of very strong correlation because it gives you that fuel that is not normal. I can't explain that fuel. It is corrosive in nature also because you will not see any happy entrepreneur. They may appear to be sane but they are usually somewhat off, and at least correlation to their success you will see that. And I'm not saying that they're off in manners that you think they're like just mad people, they're just a little different. Their drive doesn't come from anything around the world, they're just driven on their own. They just keep happening to universe, they keep happening to universe, and they can't help it. There is no such thing that they can do to stop happening to universe. They have to happen to universe. So I think philosophy just made me curious. And I think the biggest thing I've seen is that people lose their curiosity very early on in life and they build insecurity very early on where their ability to ask stupid questions dramatically goes down.

Right. And we are a society where we all have to look cool and high status and all that stuff. So asking stupid questions and being shameless is not respected.

And that stops the compounding growth of knowledge because it comes from just asking stupid questions constantly. How many of you use ChatGPT? How many of you use it more than 30 times a day? Okay, good. This is a good group. That's another good place that you can ask stupid questions a lot. Now, asking stupid questions to humans is actually much more valuable because the LLMs have not captured everything that is captured in your minds right now. Therefore you have to probe people's brains and get something out of it. Kids have a beautiful ability to do that. I don't have kids, I have run experiments on other people's kids.

Yeah, so there is an experiment I run called the Wi-Fi school, or Why-Fi school, where every day ask... How many of you have kids? Okay, decent crowd. Birth rate is declining, so good. There is a question where you can tell them to ask a question which starts with 'why'. And it can be anything. 'Why do humans wear clothes?' Very interesting question from a kid's perspective. Or 'Why do we have vegetables at dinner?' Or any of those questions. If you do this consistently for a year, you will see that their compounding rate just goes like this. And especially if you allow them to come up with the 'why' questions themselves and they have to come back with the answers next day and you allow them to find it the way they want, what builds is the muscle of why. The biggest question we lose as we grow up is the why question. We are always looking for how do I do this? What do I do? Looking for instruction, all of that. But why are we doing this? Why would people use this product? It is so stupid.

Right. All fundamentals, 99% of products are stupid. So asking that why question in the negative inverse manner is a good thing to do. But we don't do that enough.

It comes from insecurity. You will see that they are insecure about their image. The world will not respect them if they ask stupid questions or have curiosity about different things. They are not probing. Many of the people who follow me on Instagram, I'm constantly asking questions and looking at people's DMs and asking random things. I'm genuinely curious about many topics. I will speak to an athlete about what happens over here. I speak to a longevity expert. I'm just trying to understand. The thing about connecting dots happens when you are good at collecting dots. So most people lose the ability to collect dots because in childhood we were shamed when we demonstrated random curiosity. People say things like... when we were taunted for random curiosity, and if you're taunted for something you will lose it. So I think sometimes rebellious kids do better because they don't give a damn about your opinion about them. In India if you notice, anyone with strong opinions is mocked very generously. My Twitter is filled with people just mocking. Nobody is doing a good debate. Nobody is giving a good counter. Nobody is trying to question that... But I have a counter example to what you said. Never, not once.

Yeah.

No no but I'll tell you what it comes from. It comes from our culture that any... you have to... So then we have to pull them down as a sign of a collectivist society. If you look up what is a collectivist society, we heard about the crab story. It comes from a collectivist mind which means we have to keep people at a mean, a regression to the mean kind of culture. Anyone who is flying high, we have to bring them back to the same level so that we work as one socialist or communist unit and not try to have an individualistic trait. There are positives to that also which makes the society a lot more peaceful. There are downsides also that we are not very innovative. How many innovations of India are used by the world? Very few, very few. Because we are not very strongly opinionated people because if we do that there'll be unlimited mockery so we kill that part in us. We are all kindly adjust people. We all kindly adjust people and that kills the core DNA that is required to be an innovator or a creator.

Yeah, I've done all sorts of random things. I've sold pirated series. I've sold mehendi cones. I've done odd jobs. I've run a cyber cafe. I've done... I mean, thankfully I have terrible memory so I forget many things that I've done. But I think in good faith, I learned the art of sales.

And I learned the art of understanding what people care about and what do people pay for. And also understand the human behavior. Because what happens is when the family goes through crisis, all that you can see is how people behave around you and their behavior changes things around you. When you are successful, you see patterns and you're able to kind of filter out what's really going on.

No, the real meaning of that kahawat is something else. 'Muchi' comes from that. All the people who obsess about status are unlikely to create wealth. So 'much' comes from the deep insecurity to demonstrate your masculinity and say, 'Oh, I'm like this big dude and I'll have this test-fueled vehicle that will make a lot of noise.' How many of you have those vehicles? The noise making ones.

Put your hands up. It comes from that. It says anyone who is wealth-induced will not try to signal in these manners. They will be more subdued and subtle about these choices. Therefore, you will see that long-lasting wealth requires you to be devoid of status.

No... So let's just think from a status... from a biological perspective. A species is not trying to be non-zero sum, a species is trying to survive in limited resources. For example, humans before we got electricity were also zero sum because everything was a function of agrarian output and wealth was correlated to how much land you have, how much fertile land you have, and so on. So all the prosperity was a function of the livestock you have and the land you have. So humans were significantly more zero sum, which means they fundamentally believed that you have to lose money for me to make money, and they were right. 65% of the country is still agrarian, so it's natural for the country to naturally feel they are zero sum in nature. But when you realize that all zero-sum communities will all have a very strong status-inducing stuff. For example, 'izzat' is a very important topic in status-inducing things. You'll find that in very strong zero-sum societies, izzat is more important than... and you'll see that in India also, there's a strong correlation between districts that obsess about izzat more, the per capita income will be lower.

Right. There is a reason because their metric of success is something else. Like they will wear... if you go to these events, they wear these stars which have two ribbons. Have you seen that? The volunteer ribbon? Or you must have done in college festivals also, this like 'I'm this big volunteer, I'm giving traffic directions to people.' We love that shit. You will see them in processions on the street also. Somebody will be like 'I'm the key volunteer' and doing stuff. So I think we get a lot of pride in giving uniforms to people, it gives a lot of status to them. In India, obsession with designations is that. Salary you take care but can I have a VP, SVP title? The beautiful thing about status orientation is you will notice that anyone who comes from a background of luxury magazines or luxury anything... anyone here who worked in these setups where it was a high status firm... Nobody... I'll tell you a crazy thing: the salaries these companies pay is nothing. I was talking to... somebody works for a luxury magazine, the editor of that company, their salary was 12 lakh rupees. Because saying 'I'm editor of this luxury magazine' is more cool. So status-giving jobs can significantly underpay. What I'm trying to tell you is that we do not understand the connection between these two topics. Any society that is obsessed with status rarely becomes prosperous. And you will see all the people who are obsessed with wealth become extremely cooperative.

Right. So you will see that in the same communities that we talked about, they are obsessed with helping each other. For example, the Marwari community is well known to help the family members who start a business on very low interest rates.

Right. Like between 6 to 8%...

6 to 8%, you don't get these kind of loans. And they actually helped people kind of build over there. But the thing is that in most other communities, discussing money is considered shameful. In a caste system that we grew up in, the business community were not at the top. We had the Brahmans, and we had the Kshatriyas, and then we had the Vaishyas and the Shudras. So money is beneath them. It never became conscious at the lunch table or dinner table. For example, one thing you'll notice in the Bania community or the Vaishya community is that they think in percentages. 'Taka' is a very important term in their family. But you will not see that language in, let's say, a non-business community thing. Therefore their relationship with money is very different. That causes many challenges in the long run. Another interesting point in prosperity as a society is that you will never see a society becoming prosperous till they obsess about value of time.

The last part of this audience is founders, right?

That part... the previous insight that you're talking about. How do we take that back into the way we are thinking of building products and creating experiences for our own users?

Well, ultimately founders, especially tech founders, are in the business of making it extremely easy to deliver an existing consumer motivation. Tech founders are not great at creating new consumer motivation. FMCG founders are better at it. Anyone who is D2C FMCG founder here? Okay, few of you. So for example, let me give you a wild example: you are not getting a person to date because you've not used this deodorant spray. It's a beautiful thing where you address the motivation that 'I'm not getting any partner to date' and the blocker of that is this potential deodorant spray, and therefore if I use it, I might unlock it. If you look at all the deodorant sprays, they never told you that you stink. Nobody says that. Because that makes you feel small and no one will use it. But interestingly, the same ad that 'you may be smelling' probably may work in females and not in males, which is a complex understanding of human behavior. You can tap into insecurity over here and not over here. You have to always make it seem like 'Oh my god, you want to be like great'. So the thing is that that creates wealth on one axis: I understand human motivation, I can build products for the human motivation. But let's say the product is built, somebody built a deodorant spray, now I can efficiently deliver that in the cheapest possible way in the most efficient way, that will create wealth for tech founders. But the thing is understanding core motivation is important. I often use the analogy of rivers and dams. Great electricity will be generated when you can combine a great river with a great dam. When you put a great dam on a great river, you will have a lot of electricity and wealth. But most tech founders are great at building dams and terrible at finding rivers. Yeah. Understanding of human rivers (rivers) comes from human motivation: what will people care about? For example, if I asked all of you, what would your parents give me five lakh rupees for? What problems would you solve for them? You will see an interesting pattern of answers will emerge, and they will always be large revenue opportunities. I can think about a few right now: for example, their children's success, if you can guarantee that, which means education, they will pay a lot. Or their health. Or potentially status in society. So we spend a lot of money on our weddings for a reason. By the way, there's an interesting correlation: expensive weddings also have a low divorce rate, so it causes an interesting second order effect. Did you know that India's divorce rate is still sub-1%? The US is at maybe 50-55%, which also creates an interesting market for peacocking and signaling. But lifestyle spending is not a big category because of that. Because we are not trying to signal through status and get dating. So coming to what will people value... there are so many companies which sell you awards, and they make a lot of fucking money. And it sounds absurd, but in your family group, you want to show 'I won this award', and people will appreciate that. Like you will see aged-old companies like LIC generously give certificates and trophies left, right and center. Same thing in banks, they generously give out trophies, this that. So everybody's office is filled with something or the other. And they also keep the weird thing of conference speaker lanyard. Have you seen that behavior? When they go and speak at an event, they hang that and keep that in their office for years. I've never understood this. Another thing you will notice is that people who are obsessed with status will have a display picture of the microphone in their hand. 'I spoke at some event.' How many of you have a picture of a microphone in your hand? Come on, be honest, guys. Okay, one, two. Okay, three. Okay, cool. I'm not saying it doesn't work. It works. That's why you have this picture. So what I'm coming through this is that you have to find these rivers and then build a dam. But there's a unique problem in tech founders: when their dam does not create electricity, they do not think that 'Oh shit, I have built this on a non-existent river.' They keep fixing the dam and hope that the river will come. Rivers don't come, rivers exist. You build a dam on those rivers. But most tech founders, because they are devoid of understanding of these rivers, they keep fixing their dams. And then their startup fails, they do another startup, a third, a fourth. Sometimes they get lucky on a river and they get successful. But I think if you become good at understanding human behavior—we may still not be natural at it, we will still struggle because we've not applied that part of our brain at all—a lot of people use this word empathy. But empathy is a basic level stuff that you need to understand. A crazy hack you can do is try doing acting school. You will see a strong correlation that good founders will have a natural ability to get applause from people because they have understood the empathy: if I say this, if I do this, there'll be applause or there'll be reactions. So there's a pattern to these things. Coming to that, every country values different things. For example, it's very hard to build SaaS for India because we don't value time. The word 'efficiency' does not exist in most Indian languages. You can ChatGPT it or Google it. You will not find a word for efficiency and productivity. Therefore it's very hard to sell products that are not in our vocabulary. We have the same word for yesterday and tomorrow. So the concept of time is very different for our society. Anyway, I've gone all over the place.

Presence of large markets, presence of large profit pools, presence of growth of revenue, presence of core human motivation, asking your family what would they pay for. Simple, simple things. Another unique curse of people who are... how many of you scored 90% plus in your academics? Okay. The unique curse you guys have is that it's very hard to accept things are very simple. We need a very complex thing to justify that it suits my intellectual capability. But things are very simple, and simple things work. Yes, there may be complexity in building simplicity, but what consumers want is simplicity. For example, what is the average IQ of the country? Any guesses? It's 80, 80-85. But the scary part is imagine half the people are below 80. That's the power of average. The point I'm making is something else: the core motivations are different and you have to understand where they come from. For example, look at the kind of movies that made hundreds of crores, or look at the kind of TV shows that last for decades. They suit... sometimes you do not intellectualize these things and it works for some people. But sometimes we feel 'how can I do this?', 'how can I build this?', 'how can I create something so simple?', but it works. Another thing: when we have done academically well, appetite for risk-taking kind of dies in a unique manner because we don't like failing. I don't think you can make a big impact in life by constantly A/B experimenting. A/B experimentation is a sign of deep insecurity. That sounds counterintuitive because our education taught us how we have to find this... but by then we'll find the river. We'll keep doing PMF, PMF, PMF, PMF, and like 'oh shit, PMF!' That's not how it should be. It comes from this place of fear. Sometimes asking questions... for example, I do believe that in every field where there is low success rate, there are people who have a high ability to generate high success rate. There will be some movie directors who have a consistent ability to make good movies, some music directors who have a consistent ability to create successful songs, and so on. They have this unique ability of judgment, and they can't teach you that. They can't teach you how to be high judgment. But there are great APIs to ask them. What do you think? Let's say we become a music director, and we have a song. If we get access to let's say AR Rahman and ask him 'what do you think about it?' and he says 'this will be a hit' or 'not a hit', or give a score on 10, mathematically he's going to be more right than us. So we need to leverage them as APIs. There are also other types of people who are great at telling you all the things that can go wrong. There are many people like that. Now, we get upset by talking to them, right? But we don't leverage them as APIs to find out what our blind spots are. So all of us need these types of people who are great APIs, who are good at these things. People with high judgment will naturally be doing well in life and they will be less accessible. And that's all. You need to know how to figure out how to get access to them. Especially when you get access to them and they give you feedback, don't get offended. If AR Rahman told you 'this song is stupid', you can't say 'you don't know'. You respect them and you say 'what do you think is off?' or 'what do you think is wrong?' and just try to see if they give you some insight. Because their gut is significantly strong, built over hundreds or thousands of iterations, which we underappreciate many times.

In life, you want energy creators. And again it is not introvert and extrovert, just a very important nuance. There are a lot of introverts you meet, you'll be like, 'Oh my god, just like boom, let's go.' What else would I look for? Your weaknesses. A lot of founders make the mistake of hiring their own clones. They like people like them. They're like, 'Oh, shit, same wavelength match.' I think you have to hire for your weaknesses. So hiring your opposites is a very powerful thing, both on competence as well as style. So if you are a flamboyant type, you need to bring people who are going to run rigor and run it very diligently. And if you are that type, then you need another type who will come up with a creative idea, and so on and so forth. A lot of times, it's very hard to respect our opposites, especially when we are young founders because we haven't solved our own insecurities, and we always think of these people as idiots. There's another thing I have learned. There's a beautiful line I learned from somebody who worked very closely with Dhirubhai Ambani, who was the founder of Reliance. He said, 'Har safal shaksh ko salam,' which means, 'If you find some evidence of success, you have to respect it. Don't judge it. There is something in them that made them successful. Learn from it or respect it at least.' It may not be your cup of tea or it may not be your taste. For example, you may see some cringe influencer and you'll be like, 'No.' But they managed to get a million followers. Just respect it. Understand their art form. You may not have following people, doesn't mean that you follow them. You can learn from them. You can learn from people you find absolutely cringe, and you will appreciate why are people liking this. I appreciate that. What else I would look for? Slopes. I have seen that people maintain the slope in life. Let's say they started here and they have reached here. They're most likely going to maintain their slope. And the only thing that I have seen that makes people change their slope this way or that way is trauma. So you will see that their slope is like this, and I'm not saying trauma guarantees the slope; massive times it goes this way only. But it accelerates or it changes the degree of slope. So I think looking for people who have strong slopes is very important. Another thing is learning ability. Can they become an overnight expert on a topic quickly? Another thing is, if you're hiring leaders, one of the strongest traits I have seen is, can they teach? You will never see a great leader who's terrible at teaching. You'll rarely, in fact you will not see it. And that's how they create their tribe, their ability to teach and coach and look after people. Integrity. A lot of the time, people assume integrity means people who follow rules. That's not integrity. There are some ethics. For example, you don't steal, you don't cheat, all of that stuff. But you break rules. That's another strong trait I have seen. You need a lot of high ratio of those people in the company to create a big impact. There is this beautiful 2x2 by Devdutt Pattanaik, who is a famous author. Imagine a 2x2: on one side we have high on values, low on values, and on the other axis we have high on obedience and low on obedience. You will see that somebody who's high on obedience and high on values is Lord Ram. Very respectable, very high dignity. And the opposite of that is Ravan. Low on values, low on obedience. Then there is Duryodhan, which is very strong on rules, obedience, but very low on values. And there is Krishna, which is very high on values and very low on obedience. You will rarely see successful founders who are pure Ram archetypes. You will see them as strong Krishna archetypes. But most Rams think Krishnas are Ravans. Because for them, anybody who doesn't follow processes becomes a huge sign of that. By the way, all Krishnas will have a history of being somewhat Ravan in their life. You will see something they would have done, some trouble in life, and then eventually learned the value of values and became more long-term in nature. And the worst is Duryodhans, the worst category. But Rams are very useful for running the company as well. A lot of successful tech CEOs are actually Ram archetypes where the founder used to be Krishna and then now they become the Rams and they follow the dharma of the founder and just execute. So these are good archetypes to have, but every startup when they become large companies, they start losing the ratio of Krishna because it becomes too big for them and they don't like all these rules that they only made, so they leave and they start up.