“When it seems too good to be true, it likely is”! aka thoughts on corp governance for digital co.’s
"When it seems too good to be true, it likely is"! aka thoughts on corporate governance for digital companies
Sudipto:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Matrix Moments. We have Avnish with us. This time we’re going to discuss something which is very topical, something that’s getting discussed in a bunch of boardrooms as we speak as well as cyber conversations. And Avi and i were chatting and we thought that let’s sort of discuss the elephant in the room more openly and talk about corporate governance.
Avnish, as we all know, right, the last 18-24 months have been like phenomenal for the indian startup ecosystem. We’ve seen so many great founders both first time and repeat startup so many interesting businesses getting built, companies going public for the first time. So many global investors investing in india for the first time and so many companies sort of becoming super, super large. And which is why you’re super bullish and proud of sort of the digital nation building that’s happening.
Amongst all of that it seems that corporate governance somehow has not gotten as much amount of importance and focus as it should have been as companies have grown up, right, and we’ve seen at least now few instances where probably in large companies corporate governance practices were not probably up to the mark. So would love to probably begin with why now, why are we hearing about issues now. You’ve been in this industry for 15 years, have you seen this in the past or you were hearing this for the first time and is there a why now to it.
Avnish:
i resent the comment on 15 years because it gives away my age but thank you for having me, Dada, i appreciate it. And i keep calling him dada even though he doesn’t want to be called that. So why is it being brought up now -- so first of all corporate governance should not be a topic of discussion, it should be hygiene. And you mentioned that it’s being and you said two things, one that it’s being discussed and second that it’s the elephant in the room. i actually don’t think it’s being discussed enough.
And i think it’s our, and i’m glad you know, we’ve been discussing it at Matrix and i’m glad you came up with this topic. So, why now, because hygiene is something you notice when it’s missing and that’s a problem. And it’s a little bit we’ll come to how we all feel about this going forward but like you said the traction of the businesses has been unbelievable. And therefore one is hoping it’s all great but then we started seeing some of the news.
i’ll give one other perspective, dada, which is look, what is the biggest driver of what is going on in our digital businesses. Net, net thanks to Covid, thanks to Jio, thanks to GST, UPi all of that it is digitization of the economy. Bad behaviors have also got digitized and that’s the problem. So we know the well known tycoons who have run away from the country. We used to joke, i used to joke actually with my industrialist friends that any bank debt on your balance sheet is promoter’s equity because they have basically siphoned it off. And so all of that has started to happen.
So we should not be surprised, that doesn’t mean that that’s okay, that it is happening. The other piece i would say crazy year of value creation, which brought in some bad behaviors potentially even at the investors part which we will talk about. Net, net they got caught. There are stakeholders involved. When a company is private the stakeholders are founder, investor, largely, maybe employees also.
But government is also a stakeholder and actually the stake that the government has got some of them. So i think that’s the driver of the negativity also because there is a little bit of when companies are doing well the digital companies say don’t look at valuation, we’re transforming the world. it comes with a responsibility. You’re not transforming if you’re going to do the same practices. So i think some of the negativity and shock including for us has been that we expected better.
But just because we expect better doesn’t mean we don’t have to put in the checks and balances for what may not work out well. So i think that’s the net, net. i will tell you the narrative is getting mixed up. Corporate governance and fraud are very different things. Fraud is fraud, you know, i’ve actually noted down the definition, it says wrongful or criminal deception for personal or financial gain. This is the dictionary’s definition. Corporate governance is actually how a company is run and for whom, right. So what is happening sadly because this is actually not the right way.
Fraud should not lead to better corporate governance. Corporate governance is something we should aspire to and do it anyway not because of something has gone bad or wrong in the market. That’s where i feel a little bit disappointed and sad that the right narrative has come because of the wrong trigger. So that worries me. Also just to clarify on that a company with great corporate governance can still have fraud. But a company with fraud and especially if it’s widespread likely didn’t have good corporate governance. So i would like to actually separate these two, i think both are relevant and both are happening but we should also spend time talking about corporate governance.
Just stepping back we’ve just all seen the news that Elon Musk has bought a big stake in Twitter. That is a form of saying i’m not happy with corporate governance but he’s not alleging fraud. On the other hand if you look at Theranos which was the famous case that was fraud because you were misrepresenting for gain what was going on. So i think that’s the net net and why is it happening now we discussed, market. Companies have become larger so what didn’t use to be material has become material.
Sudipto:
Fair point. And i liked the distinction between corporate governance and fraud and most of the things that we’ll discuss today is corporate governance because we’ve also discussed that companies have gone from 0-1, 1-10, 10-20. i don’t think as an ecosystem we’ve also figured out what is corporate governance at 10-100. i think if you look back at the US there are lot of mature companies with best practices in corporate governance already there. india is probably learning which is why also maybe over the next few years as we learn through the process we hope that a lot of best practices globally will come to india.
Avnish:
Yeah.
Sudipto:
So with that perspective, Avnish, what are the best practices have you seen globally. Global companies, are they founder run or the board run i know in india they’re SH run but how should a company be run?
Avnish:
So let’s step back for a second. When you said some of the best practices, some of these quote unquote “activist” investors also are coming to india. So in the US by the way Carl icahn’s latest tirade is against McDonalds for how they treat pigs. Zee had a very public spat with invesco regarding this merger and stuff like that. There is tonnes of literature on the internet that can talk about what’s great corporate governance but we need to apply it in a different context but let’s step back for a second.
if you look at the indian offline world when did NCLT come in and why did it come in. Five years ago, six years ago. Because all of this, so a lot of stuff was happening, fraud, bad corporate governance, this, that. So it’s hard to necessarily take learnings from just one context. if you look at the large US companies they were never founder run. in fact, the CEO chairman may not even own 1 percent of the company, you know, these are the old days, Coke, Pepsi.
Nowadays you see some of the large companies are founder run. So a lot of different types of context because in those you sometimes have questionable corporate governance practices. Founders have super-voting shares, a terrible idea for corporate governance. But also here we do that now. So if you ask me there’s no black and white answer, i think it is important to keep the context in mind. Like you said indian companies are run by founders. Board is meant to be an oversight mechanism but largely is not. SHA is the oversight mechanism.
if you ask me having been a founder what kind of company i would run i would also probably in my initial days like it like that. i don’t want too much oversight, i would say boss tere ko kya pata, main kya bana raha hu… all of that, don’t give me gyan. That would have been the -- that’s okay. What to your point, 0-1, 1-10, 10-100 that’s where i think we’ve gone wrong. What has happened is we’ve gone from 0-10 very fast. And then the 10-infinity hopefully journey is happening. And the normal checks and balances we would have put in in the 1-10 stage we’ve forgotten to put.
And to me as a founder i would have probably woken up to that and said you know what, this run fast and break things is going to break my own company. So i think that hasn’t happened, some of the other you know, net net there’s a question around i’m a big believer in founder run companies. Apple interestingly is a great case study. Steve Jobs was asked to leave because he couldn’t scale up.
And then the person who scaled Apple up was Steve Jobs when he came back. So i just think one has to recognize that sometimes the same traits that get a founder to get the company off the ground may hold the company back, founder may not realize that. His executives may not be able to tell him that. Where will you get that input and that’s where the transition needs to start happening and this is more around corporate governance, board oversight. Who is the person who can hold a mirror to you and say things need to change.
So net net to me this has happened because of the good thing that companies have hyper scaled. And therefore that phase in between nobody was focused on, you weren’t focused on, i wasn’t focused on, we were busy trying to help companies build teams, we were busy trying to help companies raise lots of capital, we were busy in some cases trying to help companies say ki noss business model ko dekho, fix the economics and it was just so collaborative but it was very fast paced. And i think that’s where it got lost. A 1-10 of the Company building is where i think it slipped between the cracks.
Sudipto:
Fair. And i agree to your point, right, what we’ve seen in terms of growth and value creation the last 24 months i think everybody was so focused on that that you grow, grow, grow at all cost and a lot of those things were not noticed. So bringing back to the point so whose responsibility is it to essentially now that the narrative is out we’re talking about corporate governance, who is responsible for thinking about it and fixing the broken processes?
Avnish:
So, you know, at business school you may have also done this case study, we actually at HBS had a case study on which actually is titled Corporation versus Country or Company versus Country. And you know, there is the capitalistic narrative which i also subscribe to, to some extent or to a large extent which is a corporation is responsible to its shareholders. That is a broader narrative which by the way with ESG and all of that is now becoming more important which is a corporation is responsible to its stakeholders.
And stakeholders are not just shareholders. They’re your employees, there is society. So when you take a shareholder only view it’s a narrower view. When you realize that a corporation has a responsibility to various people it touches you take a different view. Then you can’t just absolve yourself of the responsibility. Now who is a corporation?
Sudipto:
in some shape and form everyone but it probably boils down to the decision makers who have the power to run it.
Avnish:
So who are the decision makers who have the power to run it?
Sudipto:
in india mostly it’s founder run.
Avnish:
Founder, but board of directors, executives. So i think to say that -- and by the way to our earlier discussion because all our shareholder value was getting increased maybe we lost sight of who are the other stakeholders. But if you’ve the shareholder view of the world the executives, the founder, the board of directors, everybody can say great, going in the right direction. By the way in my view that’s also short term because it will go in the wrong direction.
But if you have a stakeholder view of the world then it would be very difficult. Then people would say are you doing this right, are you doing that wrong. So i think that’s the big distinction. Generally what happens in private companies, when companies go public you’re just public. They say when the tide goes out, you know -- so when companies go public you’re under every possible scrutiny. Media will be scrutinizing you, fortunately, or unfortunately now media does it anyway.
So i think the going-in assumption is most investors have backed founders, we don’t want to change a founder. i mean i’m the biggest proponent of founder run companies. So that going in assumption is that this is being done correctly. You know, one side question on this is i’ve been told before 20-30% numbers to sab massage karte hai, and that’s not fraud. Make no mistake, that’s fraud. There is no difference between petty theft and daylight robbery when it comes to the law of it and what is right or wrong.
There is no grey area, it’s black and it’s white. So i actually believe that i’ll give you one example which you will relate to in terms of -- by the way in criminal law likely said what is the definition of fraud we said intent, intent really matters. And so let’s take example of a B2B company and it was a funny example i was hearing from a founder. And the founder said investors will come they want GMV. Once they want GMV i’m going to get into the categories that sell the most by definition GMV. What sells the most, lot of commodities.
Cement will sell the most, wood will sell the most. So i’ll get you GMV. Then the investors will say no, no, this GMV is not going to help, show me gross margin and contribution margin. Then i’m going to go tell my suppliers that you know what give me 2 percent more margin and i will pay you three months later so then margin has also gone up. Then the investor will say no, no, but your working capital cycle is going up so there’s gochi. So what will i do, i’ll start an NBFC and get finance from that NBFC on this working capital.
Now you get the picture. You can take this, a smart founder can game all of this. That NBFC by the way you may go to, that NBFC may factor its book out to somebody else, it doesn’t stop. This is how Enron happened, they had so many of balance sheet structures nobody got to it and i think some of the fraud that’s happening in the market is that. So my point is if you think you’re doing the right thing you should be okay. in my Goldman Saks there is this we call the WSJ test, Wall Street Journal test.
if this was on the front page of Wall Street Journal are you happy with that. 90 percent of the time embellishing numbers will not fall in that category. So it’s very simple, it’s if you’re doing something for business reasons and your board knows and everybody is fine with it that’s fine. i don’t think that’s the case here. i think in a lot of cases those are not the kind of things that have been going on.
Sudipto:
Got it. But most large companies and most venture funded large companies will have big four as auditors, right, statutory auditors who are monitoring the company. So is it not their responsibility and are they not already checking for some of these things?
Avnish:
So, dada, you know we made one of the big four present to us and i’m going to give them credit to EY & the team. What did you learn?
Sudipto:
A, i think statutory audit is very different from internal audit. And i think the DNA of big four auditors is to do what they have been told, these are the check list in statutory audit they will do.
Avnish:
Who dna khaali nahi hai, it’s the law. You know, they’re serious, they’re supposed to do x, y, z. Beyond a point they would be going not just brief, it’s not that they’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to go inside things, you’re not supposed to go. Huge learning for me because i used to have the same view that KPMG, big four, etc in sab se audit hua hai toh- No, they’re not checking for any -- so what were the practices we heard, we’ve put some of them down here. But what were the various types of practices we heard were happening in the company.
Sudipto:
So before going to that i think for our viewers i think when a big four does a statutory audit you’re essentially checking the income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow.
Avnish:
Financial statements as per whichever standard, GAP or iPRS or whatever.
Sudipto:
But what you will never check obviously is if you’re claiming this is the MAU or DAU or these are number of users, are they for example real. if it is you’re looking at the cashflow statement you will never check where is the cash going to, are there third party related transactions. So lot of nuances to it, are you sort of funnelling in money out of the company and funnelling it back.
Avnish:
Syphoning money, yeah.
Sudipto:
it could be siphoned either back into the company or into the promoter. So either it’s fraud or you’re essentially increasing revenue or GMV by siphoning the money.
Avnish:
Remember, either way it’s fraud.
Sudipto:
But different use cases and to different means but there are lot of things which the big four will never sort of go and audit becausethey were never told to.
Avnish:
Yeah. They were never told to in the -- by the way i don’t know, you may have been too young at the time of the Satyam fiasco. But i remember and technically i may not be absolutely correct but directionally i know it’s correct. That resulted in a practice of actually verifying bank cashflow statements. Until then they didn’t use to because cash flow in and out. Then have you heard of Maytas infrastructure?
Sudipto:
No, no, i have not.
Avnish:
What do you think is the correlation between Satyam and Maytas, Maytas is Satyam spelt the other way round.
Sudipto:
Oh, wow.
Avnish:
And that was the same promoters. And Satyam was paying Maytas infrastructure. it’s crazy the kind of stuff that happens. So you have to get into this level of details, you know, BOTs for traffic downloads, ratings, Bangladesh click farms. Today i heard there’s a big click farm in NCR which does all of this where there people are being paid one rupee. So even the app downloads, even the app ratings they’re all fake or a lot of them can be fake. You have to go and actually analyze that is it computing with the rest of the data, fake transactions, GMV, round tripping we have discussed.
GST, i’ll just make one point to you. You know sometimes we fall into this trap of the fact that GST -- so the interesting thing of some of the companies that have gotten caught is that fake revenue. Their fake supply invoices if they had paid this GST they would have not been caught. But then they didn’t pay this GST.
Now if you’re a low margin company you can’t afford to pay that GST because you’ll get caught in the cashflow. But in a high margin company i’ll bet you this is still happening because your margin will look a little bit lower. So it’s just crazy to me so net net internal audit is religion, statutory audit is check the box. All companies in my view above a certain scale should have an internal audit function and we’ll talk about what all we should be doing.
Sudipto:
Fair. And we’ll go to internal audit but this is at least maybe a very small minority, right, most founders are giving their entire life to building a sort of institution and that’s why they’re in what they’re doing. The huge opportunity cost they’ve left all of that, they’ve actually worked really hard in a domain. They’re building a large company, most founders that i’ve talked to actually want to create wealth for their shareholders, stakeholders, the employees. So if i’m a founder and i’m listening to this, right, and i have all the right intentions which i genuinely believe most founders in india do. How should i be thinking about it because a lot of times the founder may not be doing it somebody else might be doing it?
Avnish:
That’s the point.
Sudipto:
And that person will bring the entire company down because corruption as we’ve seen it can be at the grassroot level as well.
Avnish:
No, but dada, just on that point we’ve had celebrated fraud cases in india, business tycoons who have run away from the country. There are lot of great businesses also but look at the impact that fraud does, right, so i actually believe that two, three points. First of all i completely agree with you. in my view it’s hard to put a percentage but it’s north of 90 percent. Which is people are doing the right thing and the companies are being run the right way. it may be 95-98 percent where founders have the right intent but i can’t guarantee that fraud is not happening in that company, it’s happened in our companies under their noses without them knowing.
So some of this the founders should be thinking first of all i’m here for value creation, this stuff happens and this happens so what are my checks and balances. We’ve had multiple situations where this has happened. i will tell you that any such news flow about a company makes you un iPOable.
Just the public markets are just very unforgiving on some of these standards. So what would i do? To your point my own view is that founders are it is fraud is sometimes or actually a lot of times if you told me at Baazee that, boss, your company maybe having fraud or i would like for example you as an investor came and said for instance.
i would react very negatively, i would say you are accusing me of this, you’re accusing me of that, you know, WTF all of that stuff. i would not today. And interestingly what i’m seeing and i’ve put this down somewhere as autogoverned businesses. You know, we talk a lot about experienced founders, i’m finding that they’re actually worried about this for their own businesses. So what is a founder’s real objective, all the founders you’re talking about. They want to create a very large business.
When you’re running so fast and when the business is scaling so fast shit can happen. What are the corporate governance practices you’ve put into the place in the business such that it gets caught. i think that’s the overall objective. So to me if the intent is right at the founder level then there’s no rocket science, right, and founders should be worrying about this happening against them. Sadly in all the companies where it’s happened in our portfolio it cost a lot of money and a lot of headache for the founder and basically value destruction.
So my view that is easy. if you’re a founder you know you have the right intent which like we said 95-98 percent likely do, 99 might have. Don’t assume that this is not happening in your company because it could be somebody else. i’ve seen this in procurement functions, i’ve seen this in HR and recruiting functions, i mean, everywhere. So that’s why you should want to have checks and balances.
i will tell you what we discussed before a little bit and i don’t know if you’ve watched that, there’s a series in Theranos also now out and i can’t comment on it it’s a celebrated case and she’s been convicted but it sounded like it was always the right intent. And then the right intent at some stage when a product failure happened or the value creation speed and pressure was too high what may not even have felt fraud might have felt embellishment became fraud. This is a trap i think founders can fall into. They can fall into a trap where you’ve seen such value creation, you have set yourself up because one round after another round after another round you may discover something wrong with the business. Are you going to acknowledge it?
Not fraud. You may just discover unit economics nahi ho raha. So you have gone on this trajectory and there i would just give my personal mentoring advice. Suck it up and i’ve seen founders do that. This is not going to work, this is not scaling, i’m going to slow it down. That embarrassment potentially, that recognition to say maybe i need to slow down i think that’s where i worry actually that things may not go in that direction. There corporate governance is not going to help you.
Sudipto:
Yeah.
Avnish:
it has to be your own intent. And which is where a lot of these new founders and the founders we meet everybody wants to go public. To me that’s awesome because you can’t go public without doing all the hard work over six, seven, eight, ten years because that’s where you get found out. What are the best practices, i mentioned auto governed businesses. if a lot of the experienced founders, any business that touches regulation typically ends up being auto governed. Lot of the NBFCs, Fintech , this, that off business i think needs credit rating so has to be autogoverned and stuff like that.
i know that in some of our businesses in one case an incoming investor didn’t ask for a DD but the founder said it’s important to me, now that DD may be the scope should get expanded but that’s just a great way to think about it. And i’ll give credit to Farmart actually overall in that regard but a bunch of these auto governed businesses. What are the best practices, setup audit committee, internal audit, scope needs to be agreed with the board and key investors . This is important.
CFO and finance head has to report into the audit committee and CFO and finance head presents the findings. it is without typically the CEO in the room, this is what public companies do. And then the audit committee is supposed to present those findings to the board. How many of our companies are doing that?
Sudipto:
Very few. Not that i know of.
Avnish:
No, no, there are some, again they’re auto governed. But how much -- but anyway net net i’m not an expert in this. There’s enough literature out there but internal audit, audit committee, compensation committee and having a closed door ability to have a closed door discussion amongst the key constituents without company executives. i think this is A, B, C of corporate governance.
Sudipto:
And i also think, Avnish, to the point it’s also how you build your culture. For example in one of our other portfolio companies the founders come from iTC where they’ve learnt all the right corporate governance practices and it’s a fairly early series A, series B stage company. On their offside they had a one hour session on that you’re in a business where all of you are procurement heads. At all points in time you will every day will do transactions which are higher than a monthly salary. This is what you should do --
Avnish:
This is OfBusiness?
Sudipto:
No, , this is VeGrow. But this is what you should do and this is what we’ve followed at iTC and in iTC even if you had one fake food bill you were done.
Avnish:
Yeah. i think actually it’s a great point. Actually i didn’t mention it here but the other big piece is just the culture and the value system. So J&J I don’t know if you guys did it in your business school but J&J is a study where their value system and ethics are supposed to guide every decision. Now again in the 0-1, 1-10, 10-infinity woh time hi nahi mila. But that is actually a great point. What are our value systems? Integrity, integrity is so easy to put down on a piece of paper. How does it impact your day to day decision making?
If I was a founder and I have clean intent and now I’m worried after listening to this that in my company that’s something I would invest in.
Sudipto:
Then you build the culture and repeat it again and again till it becomes a philosophy whereas someone does not do it, five people will come and stop and that is what the ITC culture is.
Avnish:
Very good.
Sudipto:
So moving on very quickly anything that you think investors and board should do tactically now?
Avnish:
No, so look, I’ll tell you when I say this I learnt this from Paul Ferri actually on a different note who’s the founder of Matrix that a investing business mistakes at entry are fine, they’re actually part of our course, if you’re not making mistakes at entry you’re likely not taking enough risk. Mistakes post entry are not okay. And to me fiduciary responsibility, not putting in corporate governance, assuming other investors are doing, basically you’re asleep at the wheel. To me if somebody is an investor in a company and under their watch some of this stuff is happening they should be taking a serious relook at their practices.
So I think that’s on the investor side. Second, you know some of the practices that were happening in the market there was serious FOMO. Until that FOMO hopefully has gone away now people would be offering up speed of closing and lack of diligence as their edge to winning the deal. I mean how much worse can it get and whose money are you, is it your own money. I mean in some cases they are big investors in their own funds, right, but I think that has to change.
Board, one of the things that gets debated which I don’t agree with is including independent directors this, that, too early. See, it’s very hard to build a business as is, if I have to start managing the board also and too many people it’s just too much overhead. So 0-1, 1-10 that compensation committee, audit committee should come in at the right stage. Compensation you don’t really need to change and get independents, that is closer to IPO. Let’s get the governance practice early.
What I have also seen conversely is people will get independents and assume there’s governance. I know at least four or five celebrated and I don’t want to negative about what goes on in the ecosystem but it’s a truth. Charging 1 crore per company retainer to be on the board as an independent and getting 3-4 crores in ESOP. By the way my understanding is the new company law changed how much ESOP can be given to a director because it’s clear conflict of interest especially independent director. But I think they’re under that threshold.
So don’t assume there are independents therefore -- make sure we’re following the first principles, ABC of corporate governance.
Sudipto:
Fair. And I know I think not only internals I think hopefully now with new rounds and new investors coming in a lot of sort of new investments the diligence process that happens also should significantly change.
Avnish:
Hopefully, dada, and I think what we should learn and by the way this came up somebody mentioned it that the board and the existing investors technically basis on the engagement letter you signed with the audit or diligence firms supposedly we have access to those reports or if we don’t it’s a very simple request to these firms and they’ll give it to us. Most of us don’t ask for it, right. So I think again and one of our founders is, actually two founders have done this and I think it’s great. They told the incoming investor first of all they asked for the diligence report, they looked at it, obviously they want to make sure nothing is -- but if the deal is happening then obviously it couldn’t have been that bad.
They have encouraged the incoming investor to share that with the board or the existing investors so that the future alignment is clear. I think that’s a great practice. So I think that should also happen. We should be doing it, we should be making sure that diligence scope that is happening for the company it’s a great opportunity for the company, the board. Again now we’re in the realm of 99 percent of the founders want to do the right thing. In the realm of 99 percent of the founders want to do the right thing we should also look at the scope of the DDs that are being put together and say hey, why don’t we ask these other questions. Founders should also be putting that and saying ask these questions so that we have a better understanding.
Sudipto:
Fair. And on the realm of 99 percent, right, I think we’ve seen so many great companies coming out and still thankfully and fortunately the noises around a very small limited set and in all of these cases also it’s noise, right. So there’s a long way to go on that. But we at least genuinely believe that it’s very important, India is at the cusp of digital nation building, the last two years have been fantastic but we need another 10, 15, 20 years of this. As you think sort of forward into the future and the next 10-12 years you think about digital nation building you think about how important it is to generate confidence for India in the global markets how do you see that panning out and in that context, right, how important is corporate governance.
Avnish:
It’s critically important. Right, so we as Indians love criticizing our government, every person in the world loves criticizing their government. If there is one thing the government has done right in India is just is digital nation building, everything has been right from the day and I don’t want to be political but the fact that the notion of a digital India, the notion of startup India, the notion of lately celebrating unicorns, celebrating tech based entrepreneurship I mean it is a seriously enabling environment.
We better not screw it up because the government is also a stakeholder and they can come down with a very heavy hand, we’ve seen it in other markets. If people go nuts with this so it is a serious. So success also comes with a lot of responsibility and I think it’s our collective responsibility not to screw it up because like you said it’s a 1 percent that may be doing this but it comes with a serious amount of responsibility so the role of the other 99 percent is to make sure that the practices are such that nobody can wonder whether it’s 1 percent or 20 percent in India. It should be clear that it’s 1 percent because that 1 percent will be there and if somebody wants to commit something like that it’s not avoidable.
But I would say that’s the net net, great success, success comes with responsibility. They say great power comes with great responsibility. The digital entrepreneurs are becoming powerful. So with great success comes great responsibility, it’s a collective responsibility. I’m actually very optimistic. I completely agree with you that 99 percent are doing it for the right reasons but let’s all recognize we collectively missed a phase in developing this ecosystem and let’s fix it, it’s not late at all. Starting with fiscal year ’22 results.
Sudipto:
Great. Fantastic, Avnish, great chatting on this topic and hopefully with this our viewers and entrepreneurs also have probably hopefully picked up a couple of points that they can go back and implement back in their companies or their boards. Thank you so much.
Avnish:
Super. Thanks, dada, good discussion.
Salonie:
Thanks for tuning in. For more Matrix Moments episodes, you can head to www.matrixpartners.in/matrixmoments. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.
