00:00:00 - Manu Chopra
I think the mission, you know, sort of for the startup is very simple. Can we create pathways out of poverty for people in low income communities?
00:00:16 - Mike Spear
Welcome to Cause and Purpose, the show about the leaders, innovators and change agents working on the front lines to solve some of the world's greatest social challenges. Our guests today are two of the three co founders of Karya.in, Manu Chopra, and Vivek Sashadri. Karya is taking an incredibly innovative approach to economic development in India, providing high wage jobs to India's, working poor, and working to upskill them into even higher career prospects that align with their interests. Karya is a recent graduate from Fast Forward's nonprofit Accelerator program, and they're definitely an organization to watch in the years ahead. Hope you enjoy.
00:00:52 - Mike Spear
Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
00:00:54 - Manu Chopra
Excited to speak with honestly, you know.
00:00:58 - Mike Spear
The first question that I have for you guys. Karya is a nonprofit focused on AI, but the roots of the organization and your story really begins with personal experiences with poverty. Can you share a little bit what it was like growing up in India and what led you guys to want to build something like this?
00:01:18 - Manu Chopra
Sure, absolutely. So I grew up in a place called Shakur Basti, which is one of the poorest parts of Delhi. I think growing up in a place like that, in hindsight, it was one of the greatest blessings of my life because it brought me up and close with some of the biggest issues we face as a society. And I was very lucky that I had incredible parents who protected me from the chaos around me.
00:01:48 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:01:48 - Manu Chopra
So even though I grew up in one of the poorest areas in my city, I was still privileged in the love and compassion that I received so often. I like to say that my life is a product of irrational compassion. The preschool that I went to, the high school that I went to, they were all on scholarships. My last four years of education, like, in my high school, basically was all covered by the government. I routinely was invited by other nonprofits to get access to their services and think deeply about how I should be living my life and what sort of opportunities I should be applying for. And I think that that was this extremely impactful period where, of course, I saw firsthand how damaging poverty can be, but I also saw firsthand the incredible work done by nonprofits.
00:02:44 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:02:45 - Manu Chopra
So I think both the desire to create a nonprofit and the desire to tackle poverty comes from my childhood. For me personally, it's such an intense desire that I feel like, for me, working on anything else always felt like a waste of time because it was almost existential.
00:03:05 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:03:05 - Manu Chopra
Like, it takes an average low income Indian seven generations to make $1,500.
00:03:12 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:03:13 - Manu Chopra
So just to afford the laptop that I'm speaking to you from, it would take an average Indian seven generations over 200 years to do that.
00:03:22 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:03:23 - Manu Chopra
And there were definitely moments growing up where I felt unlucky that it took my family three generations to get to that milestone. And you read this statistic and you're like, oh, we are lucky. We are extremely lucky. It took my family less than half the time it takes an average low income Indian.
00:03:43 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:03:44 - Manu Chopra
And I think that for me, that was really profound understanding that as difficult as I may have thought I had it. I was still among the luckiest people in the country. And I think that when I look back at my childhood, it's with this lens of gratitude for all the challenges that we went through and also this deep sense of purpose.
00:04:07 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:04:07 - Manu Chopra
Like, I was maybe put through that so I can be in a position to give back and in a position to sustainably tackle poverty so nobody else has to go through the childhood that I went through.
00:04:19 - Mike Spear
I got to spend a little bit of time in India, but for folks that haven't been there to see it themselves, it's really hard to picture that. Disparity, I think, is somewhat shocking and not necessarily common to other impoverished areas in the world. To start something like this and go down the entrepreneurial journey, there's really a deep emotional hook there. So I wonder if you can describe this further.
00:04:42 - Manu Chopra
Yeah, no, there is.
00:04:44 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:04:44 - Manu Chopra
And I think that there are definitely challenges growing up in a busti, which is what we call an informal settlement in the urban side of the country. I do have to say the busti I grew up in was not as stark as the one you're describing, which is in Bombay, which is Dharavi. But I think that the challenges were similar in a way, because a busti is a transitionary space. People come, people go. It's predominantly daily wage workers and local people, people trying to do something for themselves. Small things like going for a walk was not something that we did because there were no parks around, like taking the bus to go to the school, being a long distance away. Small things like that. Right. To sometimes seeing more difficult things.
00:05:41 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:05:41 - Manu Chopra
So one of my first memories in life is hearing about the death of a woman in the community who was burnt alive by her husband's father in a dowry death. And I heard about this. The fact that I remember it clearly meant that it left an impression on me. But the person who did it used to sell bread to me. He was my bread shop person. And I remember my mom telling me to go pick up bread from the shop person, and I did. And I heard that he had gotten arrested. And I asked my friend, why are they arresting uncle? And I heard that he had basically killed his daughter in law in a dowry death incident. Which was very common while I was growing up.
00:06:33 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:06:33 - Manu Chopra
So, one, I don't know why someone told a child that, and two, it clearly made it I mean, the fact that I remember that sentence and this must have been 1520 years ago, right. The fact that I still remember it meant that it left an impact on me. I think the biggest thing that it did was just like, it's so in your face, the inequalities of life.
00:06:57 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:06:58 - Manu Chopra
Simple things like the way women's access to public spaces was restricted because of how unsafe it was, from the way that there were just no public places that people could occupy.
00:07:11 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:07:12 - Manu Chopra
To the way that my friends in school would bully me because I smelt a certain way, because I came from the bustle.
00:07:20 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:07:21 - Manu Chopra
I distinctly remember I went to a school that was run by a trust, which meant that it was a very good school, and thus it attracted people above my social strata, like lower middle class kids and middle class kids also went to the same school because it was just a good school. But because I was coming from the busi, sometimes I would smell a certain way because the gutters were always open, and I remember being bullied about that. Now, in hindsight, that's like foolish, right? But as a kid, that's the biggest thing in the world, right? Oh, no. How did they know?
00:07:54 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:07:54 - Manu Chopra
I remember, for example, for the first 510 years of my school, not telling anyone I was from the pasti, instead using a name of a neighboring region that had a better social reputation to now, where I just embrace it. And I feel strongly that if I had grown up anywhere else in Delhi, in one of the nicer parts of Delhi, I would not care this deeply about poverty. I would not care this deeply about people just being left behind. And I do have to say my life itself was very comfortable because of my parents. They really protected me from all of this. And wherever real world slipped in with some incidents like that, it left a mark in not a bad way, but in a very profound way that enabled me to see what really matters.
00:08:42 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:08:43 - Manu Chopra
I often tell my parents that if I didn't grow up in the busti, maybe I would be building, I don't know, like a Snapchat for puppies like the rest of the tech sector.
00:08:53 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:08:54 - Manu Chopra
I think it was almost like a reality check. I don't want to exaggerate how difficult it was for me, because I don't think it was. I just got to see other people's difficulties, see that at a very young age, in a manner that helped me understand that for me, a meaningful life would be one where I get to serve the people that I grew up with.
00:09:19 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:09:20 - Manu Chopra
And also just be very clear. My family, because of how hard my dad worked and how hard my mom worked, we were able to get out of the bus. But that's not normal. Most of my friends are still there.
00:09:33 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:09:34 - Manu Chopra
Like, I was the first person from the community to go to a college in the US. I was the first person from the community to go to my high school, which was sponsored. So a lot of really lucky incidents happened that got me out of the busti, but those are not normal.
00:09:53 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:09:54 - Manu Chopra
And that realization somehow I had seen more social mobility in the first 15 years of my life than most Indians have seen since. Independence was very real, was very raw, and it definitely makes the work that we do feel even more important.
00:10:16 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:10:16 - Manu Chopra
Because if we don't do this, who does? And in a way, I'm a product of the best of India, our incredible nonprofits, our incredible trusts, our incredible government services, the welfare schemes that allowed me to be where I am today. And for that, I'm very grateful. But I am keenly aware that that's not the normal story.
00:10:38 - Mike Spear
Vivek, I'm curious about your background, too. Can you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what your experience was and how that inspired you to take on this kind of work?
00:10:46 - Vivek Seshadri
Actually, I grew up in the city called Chennai. My life until my graduate school was actually pretty comfortable, should I say very smooth. I never thought about world problems, societal problems. Our parents ensured that both me and my brother had a good education, a comfortable life in general. And as I was completing my PhD, I went to Carnegie Mellon for my PhD in Computer science. As I was finishing my PhD is when I was having this, for want of a better word, like an identity crisis. In terms of what did I want to do next? My original goal behind doing a PhD was, hey, I'll come back to India and then teach in an institution, become a professor, and continue doing whatever I was doing for my PhD. When I was chatting with my co graduate students who were also going to graduate or my peers in grad school, a big realization hit me first. One was most of us were sort of very comfortable in life. In terms of any metric, I would argue we were at the top 5%, let's say, of the world, economically, socially, even by way of all other comforts of life, maybe even, like, top 1%. Right. But the realization was we were essentially working on making each other's lives more efficient. I mean, I did my PhD in computer architecture, which essentially means my work essentially involved making computer systems go faster. Your smartphones, your laptops, your cloud systems. And whatnot what were my peers doing? They were essentially making my life more efficient. How can I sift through my email really fast, like beat away all the spam or beat away emails that are not important? Again, I'm not trying to reduce the good work that they're doing, but in general, this was my realization. This was the way the world was operating. The people in the top 5% were essentially making each other's lives more efficient, and everything else was sort of trickled down. This was 2016 also the time when the US. National elections were going to happen, and Bernie Sanders sort of rose to fame during that election. I was deeply inspired by his thought process. Many people claim his policies are impractical, but I think there is definitely something to be said about the way the world is operating today. I think poverty in some way the root cause of almost all the problems that we face in the world today. I think when people have basic standards of living and good opportunities in general, I think it will result in a more society with fewer problems in general. And I guess that's what hit me. And then I realized, okay, it gave me clarity as to what I wanted to do. I moved back to India and found a home in, you know, where I had amazing colleagues who also had a very similar mindset. And you asked about India, and you mentioned in Mumbai how the really poor people and the really rich people sort of coexist in the same place. I think that is something that I found very different from the know I used to live in. Know in the neighborhood that I lived in, I would hardly find anybody, even a homeless person in some sense. But I think the situation is very different in India. I think in most cities you would actually find a huge disparity in the income levels of people, huge disparity in the comforts of people. That sort of hit me really hard. To me, I think when we walk down the roads, I mean, today as we speak, I live in Chicago, and even here when I walk down the streets sometimes you see homeless people asking for help. In some sense, for most of the rest of the world, they are invisible, right? I mean, we walk past them and would like to imagine that they did not exist. I mean, of course, there is also the struggle of how am I going to help this person? I mean, I could give them a few dollars and then it's definitely not going to solve their problem. That paints me in some sense, and the question that I keep asking is, hey, what is the solution to that problem? I guess our manu's hope, and my hope is whatever we are working on putting us in the pathway to find that solution or the framework that will significantly mitigate this problem, if not eradicate it completely.
00:15:21 - Mike Spear
When did you guys realize, like, hey, I'm not just going to be entrepreneurial for myself or go, know, stick with the job at Microsoft or something on a comfortable, you know, take a chance, have an entrepreneurial journey, but one in which the financial upside wasn't as great, potentially. But you'd really have a massive impact for people that you might not actually ever even meet.
00:15:41 - Vivek Seshadri
For me, personally, I think it comes from Day 100. I don't know. I don't want to say day one, but it comes pretty naturally.
00:15:50 - Vivek Seshadri
Right.
00:15:50 - Vivek Seshadri
I think my mom and dad are both extremely socially driven socialist people. I think what my mom did a very good job of saying is whenever I would get bullied in high school, that it is not a judgment of who you are, it's a judgment of who they are. I think that thinking deeply about what causes poverty.
00:16:13 - Vivek Seshadri
Right.
00:16:13 - Vivek Seshadri
Poverty is not a natural phenomena. It's a man made disease. People are poor because someone has decided that it is okay that they are poor.
00:16:24 - Vivek Seshadri
Right.
00:16:24 - Vivek Seshadri
It is not a judgment of how hard they work or how talented they are. It's a judgment of the system. Right. For me, I think I've been always pretty clear that I want to lead a life of creating impact, sustainably. Unlike Vivek's much better experience at Carnegie Mellon. My thing at Stanford was just one of shock because I remember the first day on campus, the discussion was, how will you make your first billion dollars? That was an actual discussion on the very first day discussion in the dom. And I just was like, I won't. It was not even an aspiration ever, because for me, the big dream would be like millions of people getting out of poverty because of something I was contributing to. That would be the dream. And that has always been the dream.
00:17:20 - Vivek Seshadri
Right?
00:17:20 - Vivek Seshadri
So I think that, thankfully, it's very deeply rooted. And then again, the people that I've surrounded myself with, people like Vivek, are so pure in their desires to create impact. It's so unadulterated, right. But it doesn't feel like a compromise at all. I feel like people doing for profit businesses are compromising on the quality of their life.
00:17:43 - Vivek Seshadri
Right.
00:17:43 - Vivek Seshadri
Because you still have to work hard. I don't think any business is less work.
00:17:48 - Vivek Seshadri
Right.
00:17:49 - Vivek Seshadri
But it's so important to find a community, to create impact in it, to feel that you belong, to feel that you are making people's lives better and they are making your life better, right? In a way. Can I often chat? Doing what we are doing, building impact led organizations is sometimes the most selfish thing you can do because it is the easiest way to be happy.
00:18:18 - Vivek Seshadri
Right?
00:18:20 - Vivek Seshadri
You're so connected to your communities, and I wouldn't know how to live without that. You know what I mean? So I think for me, it doesn't feel like a life of any compromise because you just gain so much. We were just on the field, Vivek and I, in a lovely place called Chamrajnagar in Karnataka in southern India, and we just started work, Mike, in this area, like a week ago, and we've given maximum 2000 Rs3000, which is like $60.50, $60 maximum in these areas. And people were talking about how that much money in just that week had really changed the way changed the quality of the life for that week and what they were thinking about. I came home so driven to work harder, right? And I'm like, okay, let's do more. Let's find them more work. Let's do more, because it is such a privilege to see the direct impact of what you're trying to do. And these are very early stages at Karia, but I'm very aware that the life that Vivekanaya are on is going to bring us, yes, a lot of challenges, but also a lot of so I think for me, the values come from the parents, from the part of society I grew up in. And then I've been very lucky to have had incredible mentors, right? So even at Stanford, professors like mehran, Sami, who just wrote this phenomenal book that critiques the Silicon Valley way of thinking, and it's called Revolutionaries, and it talks about how do you actually build a revolution in the in. The tech sector to people like Eric Roberts, who brought morality to Silicon Valley with CS 181, where he talks about how do we as technologists think about building a better world to in India. People like Dr. EPJ Abdul Kalam, who was our former president, who was my childhood hero, and I was so lucky to spend time with him. All of these people, I look up to them because they were leading lives they have led and are leading lives of impact. And I was just like, that's the dream. That's what I want to do. So I've been very lucky in the mentors I've had.
00:20:44 - Mike Spear
Vivek, in some ways, your path to building a tech based nonprofit was a bit more direct being at Microsoft, but, Manu, you had a bit of a winding road. You're at the Chopra Foundation. There's something called Project Mahatma. Project Kruna. Doing luxury travel stuff. In the end, kind of what brought you back to this sort of purpose driven center.
00:21:06 - Manu Chopra
I graduated 2017, studied in computer science, came back to India. I've only done one job in my life, which was working at Microsoft Research for a year, where I was so lucky to have Vic as my manager and boss. And he was the best manager ever. In fact, our password on all things Karia oh, my God. This is not a podcast, but it is not the case anymore. Our password for most things was Vivek is the best manager ever. That was the password. This is how much I love Vivek. And I'm pretty sure it makes him uncomfortable if I'd say this, but it does. I said that. And I was so lucky to have him as a mentor and still am, and of course, as a first manager, I did that for one year. And it was really lovely to work at Microsoft Research and to start working on Career. I basically spun off from Microsoft Research as a consultant, which they were so kind to let me do, and basically continued working on Karya for the next four years as we did research and trying to prove that the model worked. And we'll come to that. But while I was out of Microsoft Research as a full time employee, I was thinking of other things that I wanted to do.
00:22:20 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:22:20 - Manu Chopra
And I think that finding different ways of expression, right. And I think all three of the things that I did were different ways of expressing the same thing.
00:22:30 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:22:30 - Manu Chopra
So what I mean by that is karuna is the Sanskrit word for compassion.
00:22:36 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:22:37 - Manu Chopra
And I felt like my travel across the country I've been to over a thousand villages across India. I've traveled to most states. I get to travel a lot because of the work we do at Karya. It really changed the way I thought of my own country. Right. And often I felt that I would enter a place with notions of what that place could be and be completely shocked at it being the other way.
00:23:09 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:23:09 - Manu Chopra
I remember the first tribal region I visited, and I just realized, oh, my God, all these thoughts that people had told me growing up, they were all, know, like one of my favorite people, David Pryor, has this quote. He says, Travel is fatal to bigotry. And you just realize very early on, you know nothing.
00:23:28 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:23:28 - Manu Chopra
And I had forgotten things I'd heard in my childhood, I was almost parroting that. I was almost, like, being like, oh, yeah, we should work in this community because they don't have Internet. You go there. Oh, they all have Internet. What are you saying, sir?
00:23:44 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:23:44 - Manu Chopra
Like, oh, we must go there, because they need a help. You go there. No, they don't need your help.
00:23:49 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:23:49 - Manu Chopra
They've been doing really well, and they have incredible nonprofits that are serving their own communities.
00:23:54 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:23:54 - Manu Chopra
So you realize very early on that you know nothing, right. At Stanford, when I was teaching CS plus Social Good, which is these tech for good classes that I would teach, we used to do this thing called Assumptions Storming, where Stanford kids would get partnered with a project partner somewhere in the world. So I remember this distinct case where the project partner was from Bangladesh, and it was a bunch of American students who were going to volunteer for six months and work for this partner and build technology for them. So, great, easy stuff. Before we introduced them to the partner, I said, I want you to write on the wall every assumption you have about the people you are serving. And in this case, they were serving young kids in Bangladesh, in Dhaka specifically, and they wrote down assumptions. Oh, their schools might not be good. They might not have access to smartphones. Oh, Internet issue might be an issue. Or electricity might be an issue, and we stormed every single one of them. Oh, that's not true. They have excellent internet. Oh, that's not true. Smartphone penetration in Bangladesh is 70%. And we did this before the Met Department because it is not the partner's role to teach you about the country that they're serving. It's your role as a servant to do your research.
00:25:04 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:25:05 - Manu Chopra
And I think travel did the same thing for me.
00:25:08 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:25:08 - Manu Chopra
And I realized how critical it was in helping me understand my own country.
00:25:12 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:25:13 - Manu Chopra
Because before going to Stanford, I'd only been on one flight in my life, and that was to go to Ahmedabad to meet Dr. Kalam, the former Indian president. And that's like, I went to Bombay after coming from Stanford. You know what I mean? I went to Bangalore. I hadn't seen any place in India ever. I'd seen more of the US than I'd seen my own country. Right. And that was, of course, a factor, like financial means, but I felt travel just really changed that, and my thought was I wanted to change that. I also just hated the way foreigners traveled in India, and I still do. I feel like someone should be working on this, not me, because it's such a voyeuristic way of traveling, such a beautiful country where you just see the poorest areas or you see the richest areas, and you just have no context. And I felt that we had to profile stories of growth, right? Stories where, yes, this community was poor, but a bunch of them got together, built nonprofits, and fixed them, and now this community is doing a lot better. Let's visit them. So instead of doing almost like poverty porn, doing growth, showing people growth is possible.
00:26:36 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:26:36 - Manu Chopra
And I always feel like sharing positive stories is a lot better way of getting people excited about the community than sharing their worst stories.
00:26:44 - Mike Spear
Whose idea was this? Did Manu bring it to you? Did you sort of bring it to him? What's the genesis of Cardiac? And can you tell us what's the mission?
00:26:53 - Vivek Seshadri
The original goal behind he research project was A, can we provide people in rural communities with digital work? This was the time when AI was sort of growing exponentially. It was getting sprayed into all aspects of our lives simultaneously. In India, smartphone prices were plummeting. I mean, there were just new players in the market who were adding to the competition, thereby reducing costs. The same thing was happening to the data connectivity as well. Lots of new players in the data world. And so the question that we were asking was, hey, if people, even in low income communities, have this connected device in their hand, can we actually provide them work through the device and pay them for completing it, essentially creating a source of supplementary income for them? And this would be a game changer, because that's the power of digital work, where people the work provider and the worker need not be physically colocated, which is the situation in almost all other types of work. This essentially meant we can essentially connect people in remote communities in India to the global AI data ecosystem. And that's a huge industry, right? So that's how it started. I want to say the transition to a startup, I think while it was there in both manu's mind and my mind, I think we would have periodic interactions about what is the exit strategy. I mean, it was a research project at Microsoft Research. What is the exit strategy for this project? And I think it was almost an accident where Microsoft Research was generous enough to say, hey, we'll give you a $400,000 grant to essentially scale. I mean, they saw the impact that the idea was having and the potential behind the idea, and then they gave us a seed grant to essentially scale up the impact. Right? And that was the genesis for the startup. I think the mission sort of for the startup is very simple. Can we create pathways out of poverty for people in low income communities? One big realization that we have had in the past one and a half years of being a startup is giving people a critical source of income is just the first step. It doesn't end there. We essentially have a larger agenda for the startup, which is provide them with a source of income. And the digital work avenue is the major vehicle through which we will do that. And once people get a critical source of income, looking at further development upskilling, connecting them to more sustainable, longer term employment opportunities, you guys have the very.
00:29:57 - Mike Spear
Lofty goal of moving 100 million people out of poverty by 2030. I love those sort of big vision things. I mean, clearly there's a lot of work to get to that point. But practically speaking today, what is the work of carrier? And I'm also curious was that the vision initially, as you guys came out of Microsoft, did it pivot to this based on lessons learned in actually building the organization?
00:30:22 - Manu Chopra
So what Karya does is very simple, right? Basically every year, tech companies spend over $100 billion collecting training data for their AI and ML models. And yet this work is not accessible to rural Indians, right? So what we have done is built a smartphone application where our workers can log on and do digital work for some of the biggest tech companies in the world, right? So let me walk you through an example. Microsoft would reach out to Karia and say, hey, we want to collect speech data in an Indian language because we're building a language model. We're building cortana in that language, something like that. Karia would be then asked, say, collect 1000 hours of speech data in Marathi. We would take that task, we would divide it into micro tasks and then distribute it to our workers in. Rural India via their smartphones. The workers would open the Karia app, they would see the work, and they can start recording their voice on the phones. Once they're done with that, they would distribute the work, they would finish the work. They would give it to Karia. Karia Collates. It validates. It sells it to Microsoft. Microsoft pays us, we pay the workers.
00:31:28 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:31:29 - Manu Chopra
Very simple sort of system. But for the simple task of reading sentences in your own local language, we are able to pay our workers at least 20 times the Indian minimum wage.
00:31:40 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:31:41 - Manu Chopra
And that is very powerful. For example, one of the first people we ever worked with, Rashma, she came from a community that had no Internet, that had no electricity. It was, in fact, her first time even using a smartphone. Right, when we gave her phone. And yet, just within 30 minutes of training, she was successfully recording sentences in her local language. And because of our high wage rate, she was able to become the first girl in her village to leave her community. And then she became the first girl to attend college.
00:32:15 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:32:16 - Manu Chopra
And the money that Kalia gives enables critical life outcomes, right. Because the fundamental thing is that money is a cushion from reality, right. In India and in many places around the world, reality sucks for most people.
00:32:32 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:32:33 - Manu Chopra
And I think having that extra income allows you to think about what else do you want to do in your life, whether it's a college or education, stuff like that. Those are the kind of outcomes that we are able to enable.
00:32:44 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:32:44 - Manu Chopra
We started this conversation by telling you that it takes an average Indian seven generations to get to $1,500 a career worker, even if they only work an hour every weekday. So I'm making it as simple as that. Even if they only work an hour every weekday, they're able to reach the same income threshold in less than a year.
00:33:05 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:33:06 - Manu Chopra
So we are able to dramatically accelerate social mobility sustainably.
00:33:11 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:33:13 - Manu Chopra
We are able to accelerate it from seven generations down to one year. And in a moment of time where India has something that we call the demographic dividend, which is the average age in the country is 25, most of us are young people. We cannot afford a situation where it takes this generation seven generations to get to $1,500, because then we lose the dividend and we lose the one chance we have to get the entire country out of poverty.
00:33:41 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:33:41 - Manu Chopra
Which is why Kara is so important right now that we have to get all of these people, these hundreds of millions of people, to the $1,500 threshold, which is the threshold for middle class in India. So they can have the income that they need and the money they need to cushion themselves some reality and build their own social mobility language. So that's the larger vision behind Karia, the way we envision this. The way we act on this is by connecting our workers to the global AI ecosystem. And we offer different types of tasks like speech, data collection, image annotation, video annotation, text annotation and historically, all of this work has happened in call centers, in physical call centers, where workers would have to commute to these regions, leave the villages that they come from. But in our case, we have built an Android application that can do all of that but on their phones, so they don't have to leave their villages if they don't want to, and they can get paid some of the highest wages in rural India today just from the comfort of their home.
00:34:40 - Mike Spear
You made the comment that India is a graveyard of nonprofits, especially upskilling nonprofits. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that specifically, but also about the culture of philanthropy and impact work in India, because I'm sure it's very different than here in the States.
00:34:56 - Manu Chopra
Absolutely. So I think that looking at the nonprofit space in India, I will reiterate that I don't think we'll be able to do anything that we do without the nonprofits.
00:35:04 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:05 - Manu Chopra
So we have over 200 plus nonprofit partners. That's how we actually find our workers. Like, we trust them to identify workers in the communities that they work in. That's how we're able to scale. And I think that the specific type of nonprofit that is highly rooted in the communities whose problems they are solving, that stuff works really well.
00:35:25 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:26 - Manu Chopra
And we're able to work with them to get our community members, like, lots of income quickly.
00:35:31 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:31 - Manu Chopra
So I often say I don't think of car as a job. I think of it as societal wealth redistribution.
00:35:36 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:37 - Manu Chopra
Because we are literally taking money from some of the richest companies in the world and using it to move some of the poorest people in the world out of poverty.
00:35:44 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:44 - Manu Chopra
And that's the vision.
00:35:45 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:47 - Manu Chopra
Once we do that, we are focused on skilling them to get them to a resilient livelihood.
00:35:54 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:35:54 - Manu Chopra
And that is a different strategy than what most companies have attempted, which is often you try to skill people and then give them money. We give them money using skills they already have, which is as simple as speaking their native language. And after they have made the money, we then skill them for something else that they might want to do in life.
00:36:13 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:36:14 - Manu Chopra
And the reason for that is what we just mentioned, which is that there are so many skilling nonprofits in the country, and this is specifically regarding skilling nonprofits, and it just doesn't work. And it doesn't work because the market is not there. So nonprofits might be excellent in skilling people to speak English or skilling them to do embroidery or skilling them to do handcraft work. That's fantastic, right. But somebody needs to be building those markets as well. And what happens is you end up having tens of thousands of people who are being skilled for something attributing hope to a skill and then not getting the outcome, right? And I always tell the story of my first time in Bihar where I was speaking with a young woman and I was talking about how she said so how have you made your money? She just asked me like point blank, right? And I was like oh, I know how to code. So during my college time I had some internships and I made money. And she's like you make money through coding through computers? And I was like yes. And she said don't talk to me about computers because this other people came here and I spent five years teaching my son how to code and he still has no jobs.
00:37:24 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:37:25 - Manu Chopra
And the issue isn't coding, the issue is that the opportunities available to a kid in Bihar is very different from the opportunities that were available to me at Stanford. And I think people understood that. But that's such a large scale systemic problem that I think is just very difficult to act on. Which is why we felt so strongly that let's start with giving them money for skills they already have because it is very hard to skill hundreds of millions of people, right? We have over 800 million people in India who are unemployed or underemployed. You have a situation where the bottom 30% of India economically owns contributes 0% of a GDP, right? And Psynath, the incredible journalist at Pari at Public Archive of Rural India has phenomenal literature on this, right? But in situations like this, one of the things that Psynath taught me was you have to look at skills they already have and monetize them at scale, right? And that's what we do. Once we do that, we agree we don't think of career as full time work. We don't want anyone to be doing career work forever. We want them to do it till a certain economic threshold. After that, yes, we do have to skill them, but we think of doing it after that. And that is exactly why, because I've just seen so many skilling nonprofits fail, not just in India, in other similar regions around the world, because it's a wicked problem. How do you skill hundreds of millions of people at scale when markets don't exist? To do that, you have to do a lot of market building. And I think that for us we have three parts of Karia Karya Earn where the goal is to get people to that economic threshold and give them critical supplementary income as soon as possible. Karia learn where we skill them in skills they want to learn and that we see marketing linkages for and career grow where we handhold them to a job after career and for both learn and grow. The word that we are using is hyper local scale, which is in India today you have these large scale platforms like an unacademy, which is, like, coursera, or things like that, which are just disseminating information and have this very techno utopian belief that if I give, they will come. They will not come. Sir. Sorry, it doesn't work like that. You know what I mean? You can't just say YouTube has all the education. Why are there uneducated people?
00:39:45 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:39:46 - Manu Chopra
It does not work like that. Right. It's a very techno utopian thought. But we do have those players. And let's be honest, they're good. The content is actually good. That's not the problem. It is just the dissemination.
00:39:57 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:39:58 - Manu Chopra
And then you have amazing hyper local nonprofits which work in specific regions of the country who know what their communities want, who've done great work. I feel like running a nonprofit is so damn hard that it is just an excellent filter of people because only people who will do it are so committed to the cause that they're willing to go through the journey. So our thinking at Learn and Grow is like, can we do hyper local scale? Can we identify, say, 50 communities, 100 communities where we work with incredible nonprofits on the ground that aren't able to do what we are able to do and then build tech to disseminate information and stuff like that? And I do have to say learn and grow. We are at a very early stage, and we're also figuring this out. But I think that India has a lot of nonprofits. That is absolutely true. I think there's some statistic. And India has one of the highest nonprofits per people ratio in the world. I think we have over a couple million nonprofits that are registered officially in the country, and yet there is not a single Indian nonprofit that has gotten to the stage that, say, Bangladesh nonprofits have.
00:41:09 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:41:10 - Manu Chopra
In fact, Bangladesh per person income is higher than that of India. And a big reason for that victory of Bangladesh is given to organizations like BRAC and Rameen Bank. And rightfully so. They're phenomenal organizations that operate at a scale higher than any single nonprofit in this country.
00:41:26 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:41:27 - Manu Chopra
The largest nonprofit in India has an annual budget of around let me quickly do the math on that. It's around 200 crores, which would be around 30, $40 million. That is not that big compared to India's largest for profit companies.
00:41:48 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:41:48 - Manu Chopra
And these numbers are from the Nudge Institute, which is a phenomenal center on phenomenal institute that is revitalizing the nonprofit sector in India. And one of the things that they say that nonprofit sector in India is missing is speed scale. And that sort of thinking of how do you scale your work, how do you do it very quickly, and how do you have the highest impact possible? And I think what the impact sector in India needs is more support. Like nudge has been phenomenal. Like, they're the Indian fast forward, in a way. And they have over 100 nonprofits that they have supported and incubated. We are one of them. And any nonprofit that they're supporting I should not talk about Karia because it's like a self serving thing, but any other nonprofit that they're supporting is world class. It truly is.
00:42:32 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:42:32 - Manu Chopra
And it has the potential to be the next Grameen Bank or next Prac because they're receiving mentoring that wasn't accessible in the Indian nonprofit sector until recently. That's why I think that India has so many nonprofits that haven't worked. I don't think it's because of a failure of the leaders. It's, again, a failure of the system. And there are ways to bypass that. And there are many intelligent people, thankfully, working on that.
00:42:57 - Mike Spear
Are there big philanthropists in India the same way that there are know how.
00:43:01 - Manu Chopra
Is that the same?
00:43:02 - Mike Spear
How is it different than what we expect here in the States?
00:43:04 - Manu Chopra
See, Vivek and I are very lucky, right? Because of the colleges that we went to, we have access to some amazing people in the country. I have personally found that the most powerful and putting powerful in double quotes, people in the country are very excited to meet young entrepreneurs. Like, they're extremely accessible. Again, this is a very privileged take because of the institutes that Vivek and I have occupied, we have found it genuinely very easy to get meetings, to talk to them. I have found them to be extremely generous in their time, in their insights, in willing to learn, in willing to know that they might think. For example, we had one of India's most prominent leaders, who comes from a different generation than I do, once told me, and this was in 2017 when I started working in Kalaya. And he just said point blank, you won't find 100,000 good people in rural India, right? Like, to employ forget 100 million, right? Because I gave him a big spiel on how we don't need train them. They're already incredible people. And he said, this is a very naive take. You don't understand rural India. And once we started our work, he was very polite, I do have to say, while saying that, and just being like he was very, very like he was like, I don't want you to waste your life. I remember him saying that, right? Six months later, we had reached, like, a few thousand workers. Then, like another we got to a stage where he was like, we were reaching more and more workers. And when we got to 30,000 workers, he was like, I was completely wrong, right? Times have changed. These people are incredibly talented, and he was extremely generous. And I think that willingness to learn and unlearn is very high among the Indian philanthropists, in my personal experience.
00:45:07 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:45:08 - Manu Chopra
So I was very happy, to be very honest. We haven't raised much money in India, so maybe that's why I have such a romantic notion of philanthropy. We have been very lucky to get the money that we raised from Microsoft and from Gates Foundation and they've both been phenomenal. I think Microsoft and India and Vivek can speak more about this. It is incredible what they've done for us. We would not be here without them. I think the last time we spoke, I said, my life is like I've just received irrational generosity from so many amazing people and I don't know why they're doing it, but I appreciate it.
00:45:44 - Mike Spear
I'm curious about Microsoft support, but I'm also curious in the broader sense, what it's like working with Gates Foundation and some of these larger institutions, what they ask of you, what it's like gaining their support, but just as importantly, I think maintaining that relationship over time.
00:46:00 - Manu Chopra
I mean, they're incredible. And I'm not just saying this because this is a podcast. They're genuinely incredible. I'll give you an example. I was on a call and I said, oh, we'll run this by for your approval. And they said approval. Why would we approve anything, right? We work with you. And I was such a growing up in the Indian education system. Everything needs to be approved by a higher authorities. There's a hierarchy in place, right? So Stanford was the first whiplash to that where they were like, everyone's equal, you know what I mean? And I think that both at Microsoft and Gates Foundation, they fundamentally trust all their partners. I think if you ask any of them, they'll only have nice things to say because it's such a place of trust and what do you need to get to where you want to be because we are happy to provide that. I have not had, genuinely speaking, even a single, not ten out of ten interaction with any of those players. I know it sounds surprising, but it's true. They're institution builders, right? And I think that they're really the best at what they do. And we've been very lucky. Vivek, what do you think?
00:47:11 - Manu Chopra
I think their primary goal is impact and solving problems at scale. And I think from that point of view, the amount of trust that they have placed in us, again, being such angle organization is just incredible. And of course, the Gates Foundation project is just like three months old. It is just exciting that they have placed the trust in us to execute again some of the really challenging problems. I mean, trying to find solutions. Again, the goal here is not, hey, you have impact with this 2 million grant and it ends there. No, I mean, the goal is to find solutions that will scale and have that larger impact, so it doesn't end there. So yeah, it's definitely exciting times for us. And I think having these partners has been extremely critical for us, especially being a tech nonprofit. Like Manu mentioned, it can seem lonely at times, whereas if you're in the for profit world, can raise investments and then hire the top people, sprint towards some goals. But I guess in the nonprofit world. I think having such great partners is extremely critical.
00:48:38 - Mike Spear
It's nice to have that trust at the outset, but you have to maintain it, right? What sorts of things are you doing? What information are you feeding back? How do you interact with them so that you maintain the high level of trust that they initially had with you?
00:48:52 - Manu Chopra
Yeah, no, I guess we can talk about individual organizations here. I mean, if you think about the Gates Foundation, like I said, it started in January essentially, right? So it's been just a few months old. But we have monthly updates where we tell them of course it all started with an elaborate plan we gave them hey, here is how we are going to execute this project over the next two years. But even then we have these monthly updates where we tell them exactly what is going on. I think even in the first few months I wouldn't say things have gone completely the way we have expected, but again, that's where being transparent with them about hey, these are the challenges that we are facing here's, how we are planning to address those challenges and having that iteration with the partners because I think they understand. I think these organizations have been working in the societal impact space for much longer than we have been and they obviously understand the variety of challenges that organizations like us will face on the ground in accomplishing whatever we are aiming to do. So from that point of view, that honest interactions, being transparent about the issues that we are facing and giving them that regular progress updates, I think that essentially what keeps the trust going. And of course, at the end of the day, I think it'll be in how well we have accomplished our goals. I think that will always be the bar that people will use, especially if they want to provide you with repeat grants or continuing to work with you. Yeah, there again, our intentions are pure and we have been working as hard as possible to ensure that we are doing the right things. So fingers crossed.
00:50:35 - Mike Spear
How do you guys measure impact? What are some of the metrics you guys look at? How do you gather that information? How do you contextualize it properly and report it back to your funding organizations?
00:50:44 - Manu Chopra
We are actually just about to change how we measure impact. So ask me again in a month. But how we currently measure impact is looking at the amount of money we are giving to people, the amount of hours they have to work in the platform. We pride ourselves in paying a minimum of $5 an hour for our workers. So we want to make sure that our workers are paid at least. That right. So tasks are taking longer because they've gotten very complex. We want to increase the wages accordingly. That's something that we track. We of course track number of workers on the platform, that sort of stuff. Initially we track the dialects that we cover, the languages that we cover. We of course track qualitatively, how they spend the money, the anecdotes and stuff like that. But we are launching a new m e impact portal. We're going to be tracking a lot more and a lot more of these stories and neither Vivek and I are unfortunately the best people to talk about it. It's actually our co founder, third co founder Safia, who joined us a year back, who has over a decade of experience working at the UN World Bank, like all these top crazy impact on the world. And she joined us a year back to basically improve how we track our impact. She'll be a great person to talk about it, but she's imagined this portal that tracks worker satisfaction, that tracks worker happiness on a weekly level. It tracks their demographics like it tracks how much money they were making before, how much they're making after, things like that. That is one thing that we've done. The second thing that I actually want to talk about, which is interesting to me, is as we are building, thinking about what it truly means to be worker first and a slight segue from your impact measurement question, but I do think it's important to say is so at Cara, we have like five teams. We have a sales and marketing team that basically reaches out to B, two B clients. We have a technology team which builds the tech. We have a design and storytelling team that builds the design of the app and design of all our collateral and stuff like that. We have an Impact team and we have an operations team, right? And you look at this and you're like, oh, this sounds great. Like fantastic, right? And the Impact team's goal is to make sure the impact is happening. It's being measured. It has amazing people. They do research. We have an amazing pilot going on, amazing research project that just ended with MIT and JPAL, which is super exciting. We have another one with Stanford. We're evaluating the amount of work we are doing. And then we have an operations team which know, like people with decades of experience working on the ground. But I was describing this to a mentor from the nonprofit sector and he said, you know, manu, what the problem is. The problem is your operations team's ultimate boss is the client, right? Because the client, whether it's any tech company or whoever, they will decide if data is good. So that's your operation team's ultimate boss. That doesn't mean the operation team doesn't care about workers. They do. But at the end of the day, their one metric is whether the client accepted the data or not, is the data of the highest quality or not. That's what they care about. And you have an Impact team which is writing grants, which is doing the research and believe it or not, their ultimate boss is not the worker either, it's the donor.
00:54:00 - Manu Chopra
Right.
00:54:01 - Manu Chopra
And you risk having a situation where no one in the team, there's no team within the larger organization whose ultimate boss is the worker.
00:54:11 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:54:11 - Manu Chopra
And he said that's one of the things I've seen go wrong in companies. And his suggestion was to actually hire someone for a 6th vertical whose only metric is worker satisfaction. And their job is to work across the teams. Go to the tech team. The workers are not happy with this. You need to fix it. My scores are dropping. Go to the operations team. You cannot push them to do this because my scores are dropping. Go to the impact team and say, you know what I mean? Like, just be the champion for the workers. And it hit me and we are very early stage. We are like only 20 people. We're like, oh my God, this is so right. And this will be a huge problem going into the future. And again, this is why having mentors help and we got on someone, her name is Neha she's over ten years of experience leading labor interventions on the ground, like leading worker first interventions on the ground. And it's been a month, she's month and ten days since she has joined and it's already game changing, right? I think there's an old adage, old stories, what you don't measured, measure, doesn't get controlled, doesn't get sort of a part of your story. And even though we keep on saying we're a worker first company, it took the mentor to telling me, telling me that, and I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. And I think that's something that we feel we have to keep on doing at every stage of the company.
00:55:35 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:55:35 - Manu Chopra
We are at 30,000 workers today. We will be at 50,000 workers with the Gates Foundation investment in just two, three months, right? We will end this year with 100,000 workers. We have to scale our teams to ensure that the worker experience is as good at 100,000 as it is at 30,000.
00:55:55 - Mike Spear
That's some incredible growth.
00:55:57 - Manu Chopra
It's exciting.
00:55:58 - Mike Spear
What other systems are you putting in place to support that kind of exponential scale to where you can maintain the same quality, the same culture, the same level of impact that you've had at this level at that kind of scale?
00:56:10 - Manu Chopra
I think we have to figure that out honestly. Right. And I think that just starting with being honest, that this is going to be a challenge helps.
00:56:18 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:56:19 - Manu Chopra
I think that thankfully, in terms of finding workers, we don't think that'll be an issue because again, the nonprofit sector in this country is amazing. You can be in any village and you will find a nonprofit that has been serving those people for 1015 years, right? For example, Chamraj Nagar, again, that I brought up earlier in this conversation, we had never worked there, but within three days, the operation team found the nonprofit that they aligned with, got the work started, got the first round of payments done just within three. We love how quickly we're able to enter new communities and do it well with nonprofit partners. So I think that is something that we like in terms of finding the right people. We'll rely on existing human forces. And I think just a small segue here. Both Vivek and I are products of the school of these two incredible people, Kintaro Toyama and Bill Tees, who are both researchers in the impact space. And Bill, of course, runs one of the most impactful organizations in the world called Everwell, which does tuberculosis adherence. And then there's Kintaro, who wrote this book called Geek Heresy, which every person in the social sector should read. And the subtitle of the book is rescuing social change from the Cult of Technology. And it's a phenomenal book. It's extremely controversial, but I think it's a must read. And one of the things that the book says is that you have to amplify existing human forces, right? As technologists, we have this desire to get rid of the middleman, just reach straight to the customers. And that makes sense and it serves the value in many places. But that should not always be our default choice. We have to understand, why do the middle players exist? If they exist for a good reason, as we sometimes do in, say, the agriculture space or in the nonprofit space, we can choose to celebrate them, to work with them, to amplify these existing human forces, right? And I think having read that book and coming from that school of thought and having been taught by those two incredible people very early on, vivek and I were very clear that any way we get to 100,000, 1 million, 10 million, any number of these workers will only happen with nonprofits that have been serving these people for longer than that. I mean, existed. The nonprofits you work with have been serving communities for 40, 50 years and they know what these people want, right? They know who to work with and stuff like that. So that's one way we make sure we stay impactful, which is we refuse to compromise on that. And while the scale like 30,000 to 100,000 sounds very exciting, we do have people in the ecosystem who think we're going very slow because we could have chosen to be at that scale. We will be by the end of this year, two years ago. Right? But we want to do it well. We want to make sure that our systems work and stuff like that. And then the other systems, which is like tracking worker satisfaction, doing large scale impact monitoring, bringing in people who have been trained to do this, that is the biggest priority this year, right? Because what we really want to do is make sure that, like you said, kara is as impactful at. 100,000 per worker, as it has been at 30,000.
00:59:36 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:59:36 - Manu Chopra
And I think the other part of that is just expanding our marketing and storytelling efforts so we can get more work for our workers, right? Because that is the biggest the biggest thing that we get in any village we work in is, when are you coming back?
00:59:52 - Manu Chopra
Right?
00:59:52 - Manu Chopra
When can I get more work? And that is something that we just have to work really hard on, because in the communities that we work, career remains the work of choice. Because it is easy. It's really easy to just open a phone and get paid more money than you would get paid for doing physical labor, right? And the biggest thing that people tell us is, it's easy. I can do it anytime. I'm just speaking my own language. Indians are a really linguistically proud people. Language and culture are uniquely intertwined in India in a beautiful manner. So people feel a lot of pride that they're teaching computers how to speak their language, which is how we convey the idea of building a language model. People feel pride over the fact that, oh, I'm going to teach my computer how to speak Marathi, and they should. It's a lovely language, right? And I think that all those factors make it a very exciting work opportunity for them. But I almost feel like for Vivek and me, the ball is in our court now. You know what I mean? Our workers have proven they have done this work. They can do this work. They have proven they can do it well. They've proven that they can do it so well that tech companies in the world are willing to pay for it. It's now our job to go out and take this incredible story of how incredible our workers are and bring work for them, bring opportunities for them. Right? And I think that that is a responsibility that both Vivek and I are very aware of. And that's what drives us, right? That's what drives us to work 18 hours a day. That's what drives us to reach out to companies where we believe they're doing work that our workers can do. And our hope is that we're able to do it enough that we have amazing stories that we can share with the world. Stories like reshma that I shared Right? And I think that a positive story, a good story, gets the world excited and we can bring more work to them. Right? The AI market itself is just $100 billion a year, and this is just one market. And of that 100 billion, only 125 million dollars comes to India. Not rural India, all of India right now. So there's a huge opportunity here. I think that's what really excites us.
01:02:07 - Mike Spear
As you pursue this goal of 100 million people, do you envision being able to hit that with the current model? Or are you looking ahead to specific Pivots at this point to help you through those inflection points to get to that ultimate goal.
01:02:20 - Manu Chopra
I think there'll be many Pivots. There always already being many Pivots because I think the tech sector moves very fast. So two years ago, Vivek and I were all into red speech and monologue speech data collection, because that was the biggest thing. Then a year ago it was conversational speech, then six months ago it was call center speech. Today it is reinforcement learning with human feedback. That's great.
01:02:46 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:02:46 - Manu Chopra
And I think that that's one of the things where the pro of being in the tech sector is that we're able to pay the minimum wage of $5 an hour, which is extremely high in India, right. Most Indians don't even make minimum wage, which is significantly lower than that. So I think that that is a pro. But the con is we have to keep innovating, we have to keep changing the platform to support new forms of work. What tech sector wants will keep on changing, and I don't think it changes every year, I think it changes every few months. Right. And so far, because we have been lean and agile, we have been able to deal with those changes and thrive in those changes in a way.
01:03:26 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:03:27 - Manu Chopra
So I think there'll be not just one Pivot, there'll be like thousands of Pivots to get to any goal. Forget 100 million, even to get to 100,000, by end of this year, there'll be many Pivots.
01:03:36 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:03:36 - Manu Chopra
And I think we embrace that, right. Because that is fundamental in what we do.
01:03:42 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:03:42 - Manu Chopra
And the other thing that is happening, Mike, that we haven't touched on is the value of Indian languages is increasing dramatically, right? What's happening in India is that people are getting richer faster than they're learning English, right? So suddenly they're becoming customers of Samsung and Microsoft and Google and Apple because they're buying their devices. And these people who only speak a local Indian language, they want to deserve to and need to speak to these devices in their language. And unfortunately, typing in indict languages is still extremely difficult, to the point that even I don't do it. I don't know of anyone in rural communities who prefers to type because there's so many accents and consonants and all of those fancy additions to the language and everything. Three people prefer speaking to these languages.
01:04:34 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:04:35 - Manu Chopra
So 2017, when Vivek and I started working on Karia, a single hour of Uria, a language spoken in Eastern India, would go for around $3. So if you spoke in Uria for 1 hour, I would pay you $3 today, the same hour would cost you at least $35.
01:04:54 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:04:55 - Manu Chopra
The hour has stayed the same. Like, nothing has changed. The language is the same, but the people in that, like, the value of the economic value of the language has increased. And this is happening outside of Kara. We have nothing to do with this.
01:05:06 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:05:07 - Manu Chopra
But if we don't exist. Companies will get Uria data from the richest people in Uriah. Nothing wrong with that either. That's fine. They'll get it from physical call centers, right? But us coming in and saying, hey, who else speaks Uria? Some of the poorest people in the state also speak Korea. Can we use this opportunity, which I do think is once in a lifetime, and bring this work to them and move them out of poverty?
01:05:32 - Manu Chopra
Right.
01:05:33 - Manu Chopra
Because nowhere in the world, I believe you have hundreds of millions of poor people who all have a smartphone, a bank account, an internet connection, and their languages have economic value. All of a sudden, these key factors that make Karia possible are very hard to replicate.
01:05:54 - Manu Chopra
Right?
01:05:55 - Manu Chopra
And I think that that is extremely exciting. And then again, puts a timeline on Kara, right. We have to time ourselves with the rise of the language so we can.
01:06:07 - Manu Chopra
Grow with that market based on the new metrics that we have created for ourselves. It also changes the way we operate. In some sense. If I just measured how much work I have provided to people in aggregate, then we wouldn't worry about the individual worker anymore. It would be trying to just maximize the amount of work that is done on the platform. And I think just changing that metric to worry about individuals saying, hey, I want each person to get to this economic milestone, then it makes us think a little bit harder about opportunities, repeat opportunities that we can provide them so that they can get there. So I think lots of clarity in the last one and a half years and I think lofty goals sort of help you think about these issues. I think a colleague of mine very rightly mentioned if you want to go to the moon and if you're thinking of building a ladder, then you're never going to get there. Right? So in some sense, I think that is the mission for Karia. I think we already know that data work is empowering and it can move people out of poverty. I mean, I can go and set up a system where I provide sustainably work for, let's say, a 10,000 people through data work. But I guess the question that we are asking at Karia is drastically different. Can I use the same data work to actually move millions or hundreds of millions of people out of poverty rather than just a small set of people? And what does that pathway look like? Right? I think from that point of view, it's still an experiment. I think it's a very grand experiment. And initially you spoke about scale. I think if we use the first few years to identify the solutions that actually work, the solutions that are actually scalable, then the ecosystem is there. I think there are organizations which are looking for solutions in this space. I mean, there are a lot of organizations that are involved in moving people out of poverty, including organizations that would just give money to people for nothing, right? Just give money to people so that they can be moved out of poverty. I think if we have the right solutions, I think we can tap into that ecosystem to achieve the scale that we are looking at achieving.
01:08:38 - Mike Spear
Can you elaborate a little bit on how you guys think about some of those feedback loops in terms of taking that impact data, the field research data, and using it to evolve the organization itself?
01:08:49 - Vivek Seshadri
One of the very first piece of advice that I received when working on problems in this space is have a metric to measure your success, right? Because oftentimes what happens in the societal impact space is you're doing something and you are seeing anecdotally something good happening on the ground. And often that is satisfaction enough for you to say, okay, no, I'm doing good work and then let me just continue doing whatever I'm doing. But without a concrete metric for success, it is just impossible for you to actually know whether you're doing good or not because people on the ground are very nice. So even if you give them a poorly designed solution, they won't often say it in your face because they know your intentions are to help them. And often that feedback is insufficient for you to know whether you are doing good work or not, right? So I think that was one of the very first sort of lessons that I received when beginning to work in this space of social impact, which is have a concrete metric of success. And I think for us, like I said, the metric essentially helps us guide us to achieve our goals. I mean, in this case, it's not just a metric for us to present to some other organization so that they give us more funding or whatever. It is a metric that we use to define our own success. And if you're not doing well on those metrics, it means we are failing as an organization in our goals, right? So that's why I think both Manu and I have high levels of clarity that Karia is not a data company, even though that's one of the main products or services that we provide. Our goal is not to be a data company. For us, data work is a vehicle to achieving something else and we want to find a solution that helps us achieve our goals. And like you rightly mentioned in the beginning of this call, I think Manu could be doing something completely different in his mean, like, you know, building was it snapchat for puppies and I could be doing something very different in my life. And the only reason the two of us are doing this and the only reason everybody in Karia is actually doing whatever they're doing, is because we are all aligned towards that goal, right? I can very confidently say every single person at Karia right now could potentially be somewhere else, probably earning a lot more and leading a lot more comfortable life. And it's not a rosy path working in this organization. There is lots of struggles. There is lots of times where you have to go beyond, you could be tired, but there's someone on the ground who has a problem, you got to fix the problem. So in that sense, it is a difficult journey. And the only reason we are going through this difficult journey is because we are aligned towards a goal. And if I don't have a metric that tells me whether I'm achieving that goal or not, then that would be completely counterproductive. And in some sense, because we are inherently so focused on those metrics, it becomes actually a very easy job for us to give that report or feedback to organizations that fund us saying, hey, this is how we are doing, because we want to keep ourselves accountable to everybody in the organization. Forget, forget funders. I mean, even if you don't have external think, you know, the only way we can make progress is by tracking the right metrics.
01:12:43 - Mike Spear
Besides poverty, if you weren't doing carrier, if you weren't working on poverty and workforce development, what do you think is the most important challenge facing humanity right now?
01:12:53 - Manu Chopra
Snapchat filters for our puppies.
01:12:58 - Mike Spear
Brenda is actually working on AI communication for puppies. It's a real thing.
01:13:02 - Manu Chopra
I mean, I would be honest and I would say lack of compassion, right? Especially among the powerful, not understanding that there are factors at play that have made our lives significantly easier than those that we are trying to serve. And I think that I find myself very often in conversations with very powerful people where they're saying things and I'm just like, you just you have no idea how hard it is for someone to think. I think in many ways, the rise of xenophobia, the rise of Islamophobia, the rise of homophobia, a lot of stuff that we are seeing in India today is just a lack of compassion. And one of the many reasons why I love working in our villages is that they're fundamentally compassionate places. I was just in a village in Bijapur where we do a bunch of work. I was in a village of 100 families or something, a little over 100 families and only two Muslim families. And I was there on the day of Moharam. Moharam is a Muslim festival, and everyone, like, every single person, every single person in the village celebrated it with them. They threw a party for them. They all raised money together to throw a party for the two Muslim families in the community. No cameras were there. It was not done for show. It was how people are, right and vice versa. They told me that during diwali, everyone celebrates. They are the ones who actually raise the most money. It is one community, one people. As Cheesy as it sounds, it is that and that's what we have seen in every village we work in. And then I come to our cities and I just held the worst things, the vitriol, the hate and not just against certain religion or against a certain sexuality or certain gender, just in general, just a lack of compassion. Why do you have to assume anything? We just don't know.
01:15:11 - Manu Chopra
Right?
01:15:12 - Manu Chopra
And I think just if the world was kinder was compassionate and I think human beings are compassionate by default, right. Like it is systems that make us not compassionate and I think that generosity is a drug. The more you receive it, the more you give back and I think we've been lucky which is why probably we feel this way. But yeah, for me I would say lack of compassion.
01:15:38 - Mike Spear
Vivek, anything to add?
01:15:40 - Vivek Seshadri
I mean I'm currently living in the US and I think most of the world is going in the same direction I feel. Which is everything is divided down the middle in some sense. Right. I mean I'm just super surprised by how so many states in the US decided so close to the 50% mark. Right. It's just amazing that there are so many issues that divide us. It's becoming more in today's world of social media and misinformation and fake news and whatnot. It's just becoming so difficult to have an informed conversation about these issues and then even reach a stage where we just agree to disagree. Right. It doesn't end there. I mean it's you know I am right. You're mean this has got nothing to do with I mean as much as us has a lot of people living under mean this is a problem even amongst the rich.
01:16:44 - Mike Spear
I always learn a ton from the folks that I interview. I'd say you guys especially, I've learned so much from speaking with you. I've really enjoyed it. Hopefully this is the start of many more great things to come. Thank you for the time and the insights and for really embodying that embodying an abundant life rather than one of financial wealth because they're very much not the same thing as you know.
01:17:07 - Manu Chopra
Absolutely and thank you so much for this opportunity and thanks you for hearing us means the world once again. I think you're incredible and what you're doing is amazing and thank you so much to listening to. We are just two people trying to do a good thing. That's it, right? The word I always focus on is trying. What I can guarantee you is we're trying our hardest, right? And I think that is just the most important thing and we feel very grateful. Thank you.
01:17:39 - Mike Spear
That's our show for this week. Thanks to Manu Vivek and the entire team at Fast Forward for helping make this one happen. You can learn more about Karya at their website karya.in and in the show notes@causeandpurpose.org. If you enjoyed the show, please follow subscribe or leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts and share the link with any friends or colleagues you think.
01:17:59 - Mike Spear
Might find it valuable.
01:18:00 - Mike Spear
Our next guest is a nonprofit leader who quite literally lived the very challenges he's seeking to address. The founder and CEO at Comfort Cases, Rob Shearer. A product of America's foster care system, Rob knows firsthand the challenges, emotional and otherwise, faced by kids and young adults moving through that system. Them at comfort cases. They're committed to helping those entering the foster care system not only survive, but truly thrive. Until then, Cause and Purpose is a production of altruous.org. On behalf of myself, manu and our entire team, we thank you so much for listening, and look forward to speaking with you again soon.
