Kunal Shah: preference

Transcript context

…How cool would that be just to have a camera in some of those meetings just as a learning experience, because very few people are in those rooms and there's so much to learn. I think though people will find, “Holy shit, one, this is how decisions are made, what is going on?” And two is , “I don't want to work for this person. This sounds very difficult and stressful.” Those are probably some takeaways that will emerge. Kind of along these lines, something that comes up a lot in your talks and work is curiosity. You have a show called CRED curious. You often talk about the power of curiosity. I'm just curious, why is curiosity so important to you and why is it important for other people to always stay curious and what value is there? I think a curious person is somebody who is constantly demonstrating that they are not proud of their expertise, and they will demonstrate extraordinary amounts of excitement when they face a problem which they have no clue how to solve. And therefore a lot of people stop growing because they want to constantly demonstrate their expertise versus demonstrating their curiosity. Because, curiosity should come from security because imagine- I'm the founder, CEO of this company and this group of 60 people on WhatsApp, somebody posts something and asks a dumb question, “What does this word mean?” You need to have the security to feel okay with it, but a lot of people out off insecurity try to demonstrate expertise and do it or Google to not ask these people. And I think that slows down the compounding growth and I think it keeps you from being very good at adapting. So it's funny, I was recently. GPT is my favorite thing to keep asking random questions because now I don't need to really worry about Google having those questions answered around because I can ask the GPT. So I recently asked the question: which species or animals have survived for more than 100 million years without changing too much and what is common in all of them? So GPT came up with an interesting answer which says that sharks, horseshoe crabs, crocodiles, and all of these animals have survived to do this thing. So three distinct traits were, one, ability to reduce metabolism at will. It's fascinating. I can bring down my metabolism by 1:20 or a crazy, crazy scale that they can bring the metabolism down. By the way, ancient yogis have demonstrated this as well. It comes from the same yogic practice. The second thing is about, and if you think about companies, the context is the same. If COVID came, you could slow down your metabolism and survive, right? Or you burned your way out and disappeared. The second thing that was interesting was the very high conversion rate on every attempt to secure food. They don't go around chasing randomly and doing things. They have a very high conversion rate, which means high judgment and the deadliest bite. So they'll not chase many options, but if they chase something, they will have the biggest bite and they'll convert it. And the third thing that was more interesting was that they have survived all sorts of crazy environmental changes, just adapting. And adaptation comes from curiosity. And you could see those people. In COVID, there were two sets of people, who were completely gone into a shell and there were those who were curious. “Okay, so what do I do with this?” “What happens now?” “Do I need to change something?” “Do I need to tweak something?” So the ability to change very quickly. I often feel that curiosity is that demonstration of the ability to adapt and learn, and you only create more information asymmetry. To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry. All the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry. e ability to adapt and learn, and you only create more information asymmetry. To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry. All the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry. And that comes from curiosity. Because you're constantly collecting dots, connecting dots, collecting dots, connecting dots, and end up creating this unique edge for yourself and information asymmetry for yourself. And if you assume that “I have collected enough,” no human life is going to be enough to connect and connect all the dots. We'll never be able to get.. And sometimes I envy the stuff that you do because you are efficiently connecting and collecting dots by having the luxury of all these people to talk to, and you are making more dots getting connected. So your information asymmetry is growing.…

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