India GameChanger recorded an interesting conversation with Pritam Dutta, the Founder and CEO of Zoth.io. Zoth.io is a financial service that provides diversity, ease of access and immediate liquidity through tokenisation powered by blockchain technology.
Some of the topics Pritam covered:
- Pritam’s emphasis on why it’s important to invest first before one spends
- The misconception surrounding wealth
- Pritam’s take on what everyone should aim for
- How tokenisation brings transparency
- How cryptocurrency started and how it evolved
- India is the first country that launched its own CBDC
- UPI being a game changer and adoption during covid
- The key enabler of the wider innovation on the blockchain
- How not doing anything may be a good idea
Some other titles we considered for this episode:
- You Came Out of Love, We Want You to Spread Love
- Any Get Rich Quick Scheme Is Not Sustainable
- You Do Not Need a Lot of Wealth to Have Freedom
- That’s What a Good Investor Does, Wait for the Opportunity
This episode was produced by Stephanie Ng.
Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):
Michael Waitze 0:03
Hi, this is Michael Waitze and welcome back to India GameChanger today we are joined by Pritam Dutta, the founder and CEO at Zoth.io I hope I pronounced that right your friends call you PD. I like it. It’s almost like PhD. Maybe that’s what they’re shortening it for.
Pritam Dutta 0:19
Yeah. Pritam also means Loverboy very good time when I was single.
Michael Waitze 0:26
So I want to know this though. I believe that names always have meaning at some level, right? Like most parents, except for mine, right? Because my name is Michael like, it couldn’t be more generic. I know, when I was born, my parents were like, I just don’t care what you call them. Just Michael, whatever the basic name is, is fine. But your parents were thinking about it. And I have a daughter. And I was thinking about her name to her name is Kyla. And if you look at the Japanese characters, because her mom’s Japanese, it means Omi, which is ocean and tanoshi, which means happy. So my wife and I loved the ocean. So we named our daughter partially after that, Kyla. So your parents named you lover boy? Why?
Pritam Dutta 1:04
Primarily because what my mother explained to me that you have came out of love. So you know, we want you to spread love. I love it. I named my daughter Bri SHA, SHA, basically a goddess of benevolence.
Michael Waitze 1:16
I like it. I like it. But this is the other thing, too. So one of the things remember, I’ve been in Asia for 30 something years, right? So very few of the people to whom I speak, have a name that is familiar to me from when I was growing up. Does that make sense? Right? So when I was a kid, I didn’t know anybody named Kyla, I didn’t know anybody named Pridham. Right? Because I just I grew up in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, so forgive me for that. But I do believe, but I do believe that when parents name their kids that there’s a reason why. And I that’s why I think that names are super important. And I’d like to try to pronounce them properly, just out of respect for the effort that people put into it. Anyway. Yeah. And you clearly thought about it when you named your daughter as well, just like we did. Look, before we get into the main part of our conversation, I want to get more of your background for some context. So tell me a little bit more about you.
Pritam Dutta 2:04
Yeah, currently building zone.io. It’s a platform where you can buy tokenized assets. So imagine buying real estate art for $100, and then be able to sell, buy, sell trade it across our marketplace or other exchanges. Prior to that, I was reading, innovation and ventures and Hauser bush or famously known as owner of brands like Budweiser and Corona, where I set up FinTech ventures, led whipped initiatives. And also as a side hustle, started an investment network called Eagleton ventures where we started with investing in startups. But then we’re, you know, we realised the potential of, you know, pooling investment together and buying real assets, like real estate, art, etc. And that’s how the whole Zote community was born. That’s how the whole idea was born.
Michael Waitze 3:04
So can you just walk me through this? And maybe we can do this a little bit together? Because I want people to understand this, I think about, and I’ll get to this concept in a second. But I think about this concept a lot. When people like you build a platform, around investing in alternative assets, can we just go back to like, I don’t know, the 1940s or the 1930s? Seriously, because I think we have to go that far back to understand this original idea that stock and bond trading should be available to more people. Right? So if you don’t want to go through that progression, I can tell you the way I think it happened, but maybe you can tell me the way you think it happened and how we got to today? Because I think without putting Zoth into context, and why it matters that we lose a little bit of the story. Is that fair? Yep. Perfect. The New York Stock Exchange, right. And again, I’m going to look at this from a US perspective. But I think the NYSC is something that most people that listen to this will understand. You literally had guys and gals standing on the corner of Wall Street in Broad Street, right? Outdoors, before there was a physical exchange, just saying, I think the value of this company or that company is worth x, and that’s where I’m willing to buy and sell it. And as it got more institutionalised, then you had mutual funds. And mutual funds said don’t try to figure out what has value and what doesn’t. Let us do that for you. Right, because they had more access to information and more access to the actual buying and selling as well, because you have to be a member on the exchange to do that. And they said, look, there is a value gap here between what people understand and where the real value is. and we’ll help you do that a little bit of an ARB. Right. And then in the 80s, you had the mortgage backed securities come where the guy was like, You know what, we can take all these mortgages and package them, some of them won’t be great. Some of them will be but overall, the package itself will be great. And the yield there is higher. Now you got into this concept of we’re not yield chasing, but there is a place in the world where yields are better. And we want to make sure that you get access to them. Right so securitization happened. And then hedge funds came along and said, Why don’t we just need to buy stuff? If we can finance the purchase of Apple by selling IBM? We should do that all day. Right? So there’s been this constant search for yield. And now crypto says, Wait a second, not only can we help you get a search for yield in kind of the same way, we’ve been doing forever, because there is an arbitrage in information and an access. But we can also fractionalize it too, which means that now everybody can invest. Do I have this progression? Right?
Pritam Dutta 5:35
Yeah, you have this progression? Right. What I do add to that is see the thing is, I believe in long term wealth creation, I started with, for example, started with investing for as low as $100 a month myself 15 years ago, and then gradually created a community of investors and we started investing in asset classes, like startups, etc. Now, crypto as an asset class is highly volatile, I did invest part of my investment. But what I also felt that, you know, any get rich quick scheme isn’t sustainable. Exactly. And during my journey, one of the things I realised is that, you know, any asset whose doesn’t have an underlying financial activity behind it, sooner or later would have a problem. As we ran our successful investment network. One thing came into our, you know, based on our experience is that one way you have this highly volatile asset class, which is being sold as cryptocurrencies, but if you look at the profit, the technology behind it is you can create small fractions of an asset, how do I combine it with illiquid assets, assets, which have real value, which are tangible income generating assets, but maybe, you know, maybe it’s not available to the common public, because of the cost to acquire, say, a real estate is, in millions of dollars, the cost to acquire quality art is, you know, even expense even higher, and combine the two and create investment products, which have an underlying value can be acquired at a fraction of the cost, and can be brought and sold and traded. So what is both, what we are trying to do is basically bringing the concept of tokenization to real world assets, which historically can be illiquid. But bringing that liquidity, bringing that flexibility, that stocks or any other asset classes have.
Michael Waitze 7:30
So you bring up a bunch of really interesting points here. I think it was Warren Buffett, probably sometime this year sitting next to Charlie Munger, who was like, Look, I would buy 1% Of all the farmland in America for $10 billion, I don’t really care, because I know that when it’s done, there’s going to be some output there that I can then use, there’s going to be some kind of yield, I’ll buy a railroad that nobody wants to buy about 1% of every apartment place in the United States, if you if you tell me I can buy it for $10 billion, because that 1% is going to turn into a trillion dollars of income for me, and there’s something behind it, it’s generating revenue. And you’re right, and I’m so glad you said this, because for me, investing in Dogecoin, which has no underlying assets, is very different than using the crypto technology to invest in real estate, which does, but it’s doing two things. And you said both of them. One is it’s giving access, but the fractionalization side of it democratises it for lack of a better word, because now it allows everybody, and I want you to comment on this too, because this is actually super important to me. You said I started investing $100 a month, it feels completely irrelevant. 100 bucks is not going to change anybody’s life. But again, a few things come into play here. One is every time you invest $100 a month, you get the benefit of compounding over time, over 20 years, that’s the first thing. But second of all, it also is like brushing your teeth. Like if you don’t brush your teeth on Tuesday, it’s not a big deal. But if you do it every day, it changes the way your teeth progress. And it’s the same thing for investing. So do you want to talk a little bit about why starting small is really important? And then how it educates you into getting bigger and better at this?
Pritam Dutta 9:08
Yeah. So for example, I started my investment journey 15 years ago, one of the things which I believe is that you should always, always invest before you spend. Yeah. The reason is that you know people people most of the people correlate money with spending that I earn more i in spend more what I strongly believe that and you know, it’s a famous author call, ecology of money, Mr. Morgan Housel has also written about it well to gives you freedom, and you do not need a lot of wealth to have freedom. And that’s what people do not correlate, if my expenses are low, and I have enough money to cover myself for three, four years that imagine the freedom as an individual I would have to go and do things which I want to do. And that’s the freedom No money gives. And that’s the freedom I honestly think people should aim for. Because you know, there is no point buying material things are one after the other, it can give you temporary happiness. But the real happiness is to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it. And that’s what everybody should aim for.
Michael Waitze 10:18
So I like to let my guests unbeknown singly, give a title to their own episode. And what I do is I try to take the most pithy thing they’ve said from our conversation. And that’s definitely always invest before you spend, like I don’t know what else we should do, we should shut down this whole podcast now, because that’s the title. I want to ask you about this, too, because you meant you mentioned some key words. How do you ensure, right, because liquidity is based on the fact that there is limited information asymmetry, and that enough people have access to it to actually buy and sell these securities and understand where the value is, right. So like price discovery is super important for this. But liquidity is something that is based on a large amount of participation, I have to be confident that if I buy something, I can sell it whenever I want. And then if I want to buy it, I can buy it whenever I need to because there’s enough liquidity at every price point. That means when I do buy or sell, I don’t impact the market. How do you affect that
Pritam Dutta 11:15
specifically coming to what we are doing. And so, what we fundamentally is, we are bringing new asset classes, we are bringing same asset classes and we are bringing new paradigm to that. So imagine bringing asset class like a real estate, it is historically illiquid, because of acquisition. The moment I break it down into fraction the cost of acquisition reduces and there are more participants. The second part is the moment I make it in smaller ticket sizes and I’m able to make it a globalised asset rather than a localised geographically localised assets, I have more participants who can play a role in buying, selling and trading of that asset. But the most important part which blockchain or crypto technology allows me to build defy on top, what is defined defy enables me protocols, which enable people to buy small ticket sizes of large assets, and then basically, earn yields on top of them do lending on top of them and do buying selling on top of them, which, you know, in traditional finance is not possible. And that’s what I feel that we are bringing the same boring asset class, but bringing historical, I would say changing the paradigm of framework around it.
Michael Waitze 12:39
How does the Can we talk a little bit as well about how the community matters of why the community matters, particularly in a defy scenario. And in that sense, I mean, this there’s a financialization taking place of almost every asset and things that people didn’t even consider assets in the past. Right, the whole world is being financialized. And I think it’s being led by this ability to fractionalized things right. In other words before like you said, a house is so expensive, regular people couldn’t buy it. And now they can. So even like somebody else’s house, I can buy a piece of somebody else’s hotel, somebody else’s resort, somebody else’s car, like everything can be fractionalized, which means everything could be financial alized. And vice versa. Yeah. Yeah. But how does the tokenization I’m really curious how you feel about this? How does the tokenization then allow you to give benefits to people that invest in it, right, so I get like a discounted room where I can rent the car whenever I want to? How does that play into the decentralised finance and the stuff that Zoth is trying to accomplish by making investment easier for other people to do and more frictionless.
Pritam Dutta 13:42
So first of all, everything tokenization brings transparency. So you are bringing a clear view of the asset, the price of the asset, what is the market value of an asset, and what it also does is bring, you know, it doesn’t allow price manipulation, because if there are more participants of an asset, the true value of the asset will come actively. The second part, what tokenization does is it enables global buying and selling, the moment I tokenize it, it can be brought in pretty much, you know, stablecoins CBDCs, or any other finance or Viet or any other I would say financial instrument can be used to buy I would say in a traditional way is is quite limited. And that’s a much higher liquidity chase the same class of asset. And the third, as I mentioned, is the whole define angle to it where you can use that asset class and work with various defined financial institutions to create yields, create length, or tools create boring models on those products. And you know, that basically creates a significantly evolved ecosystem on top of underlying assets. Do you
Michael Waitze 14:53
worry about concentration in the holdings of some of these crypto assets? Right? I mean, it’s hard to get away and I don’t really want to spend a tonne of time talking about this right. But if it’s hard to separate what’s happening in the cryptocurrency markets, per se, from what’s happening in the investment markets in which you’re trying to have impact, right? Because they kind of get grouped together by the by the media, right? I don’t really I don’t want to do that. But this idea that what’s happening in cryptocurrencies, which is, in my mind, highly concentrated, which means it’s highly manipulated as well, and we can talk about that later. How do you prevent that from happening in the fractionalization? Market? To be
Pritam Dutta 15:31
honest, one of the things which we strongly believe is I will not fraction major part of the asset, you know, it will only be a small fraction of the asset that keeps fractionalized. So I have checks and balances already in place with, I would say, more traditional financial institutions playing a role in that second part. I think the important part is that, you know, the way the cryptocurrency started, crypto industry started with certain, I would say, rules of the game, which is constantly evolving. Yeah, the real word tokenization is a very new phenomenon. And you know, even in more developed markets, it’s still kind of it is infancy. I think, as regulations become tighter, and especially with some of the recent incidences with exchanges, I think, more and more pure play crypto, native operations would have to go through a lot of I would say regulatory guidance. And that’s where the real world asset tokenization plays is because most of the people confuse a pure play crypto with Blockchain technology. Blockchain is the underlying technology, which enables which one of its use cases crypto, one of its use cases. VNFs. But the I think the real value unlock is, you know, you have a set of illiquid assets, which are, you know, stable or which have certain financial structures already built in, you just make them accessible using technology, there is going to be clear differentiation between the two, enabling more people to participate towards the long term wealth creation, rather than a very speculative wealth creation
Michael Waitze 17:16
is off right now an India focused product, or is it a global focus product, like where’s the focus,
Pritam Dutta 17:21
we are into multiple businesses, we are currently in creating our base product, which work in markets where tokenization as a concept is a grey area, we have I would say, a base plus one level product, which works in markets, for example, more structured and regulated markets, like doing Singapore tokenization has been fairly established. And there is a strong I would call regulatory structure behind it Zote primarily work very closely with the regulatory environment and ensures that whatever we do is compliant with our local regulations there. But yeah, our focus is to operate a product company with a global ambition starting with India and couple of other markets.
Michael Waitze 18:09
Do you want to talk about the regulatory environment in India, just for people that may not understand what’s happening there? And then tell me like how closely you have to work with the regulators to make sure that your products are all in sync with what’s happening there. But also, because as you said, it’s a work in progress, right? It’s still really nascent and early, so you probably have to work with the regulators as well, not to tell them how to regulate it, but to show them what’s possible to know.
Pritam Dutta 18:32
So I think FinTech so there are two parts of the regulations in India, I think the FinTech regulations have quite evolved, in fact sector mindset, with UPI that has been launched in India, which is digital payments. Yeah. And I think the regulator’s here have played a key role, because the focus here is always consumer protection. So on the FinTech side of things, it’s a very strong, structured regulation that’s currently available, I will go specifically in virtual digital assets. I think, since this year, there has been a taxation structure that has been bought in the virtual digital assets. And however, the aspect of tokenizing real world assets outside regulatory framework or structure is still work in progress. cbdc, India is actually the first country in the world, which has launched its own cbdc or that digital currency only a day ago for the retail users. So what I strongly think is that from a regulations perspective, a lot of things are ever evolving. tokenization as such, is, you know, it’s still a grey area, and it’s getting evolved. But I truly think that the current regulatory environment is focusing more towards enabling innovation rather than, I would say, stemming innovations, which is a path in the right direction.
Michael Waitze 19:56
Yeah. Look, you mentioned you mentioned UPI. I think it’s really important the unified payments interface that has been employed in India has just been a game changer, no pun intended, for the way money moves across the economy in India, and more so because it’s really democratised people’s ability to pay. Is that fair? And is there a way that you’re taking advantage of that as well plugging into the UPI to make sure that some of the stuff that you can do has both on ramps and off ramps to traditional finance as well,
Pritam Dutta 20:27
a couple of things. I think UPI is a phenomenal success. In fact, when upI was launched, nobody really was able to go watch the amount of impact it will create. I think it has been really a game changer during COVID. You know, many of my colleagues, investors who travel from different other markets, including very developed markets, and we can see that huge adoption of PIR quite impressed with it. I am, I think, from from, from our our perspective, from very specifically, from load perspective, we are pretty much gonna be working with all payments methods and UPI being one of them. Definitely. So yeah, we we are integrating with multiple payment methods, as we onboard the ecosystem in India.
Michael Waitze 21:17
Can we talk a little bit and I’m so curious about your perspective on this to the central bank, digital currencies? Right? CBDCs, which you’ve mentioned, it’s like a little bit of a slippery slope for me, right? Because the benefits are so huge. But the downside is really, it’s scary, a little bit, you’re smiling a little bit. So my feeling here is that, and I’m not always right, yeah, but if money is programmable, and if it’s issued by a government, and that means the government can then potentially control what you can and cannot buy with a currency that’s issued to you. So from a social, what’s the right word I’m looking for, from a social innovation standpoint, right? From a social engineering standpoint, if the government is giving money to unemployed or homeless or whatever, they can then control what that money gets spent on per se, which can be good or bad. I’m just curious if people are having these conversations around CBDCs, at least people in your group? Yeah,
Pritam Dutta 22:06
yeah, definitely, I think CBDCs. So first of all, you know, every government issues money, how money is printed, or how money is done today is completely the prerogative of the government. I think, as of now, what cbdc will do will ease a lot of friction around it. I think CBD sees will drive a lot of adoption of the digital currencies and, you know, making it mainstream. But I do agree that there is a strong aspect of privacy because it could be used as a tool to both hamper as well as make significant progress in many areas. But I strongly think that it will be a key enabler of the wider innovation on the blockchain, Indian adsorbed one of the things which we are doing is kind of really working with CBTC as a payment method. However, I I strongly feel feel that you know, there would be privacy concerns which people would be concerned about as CBDCs become more common. Yeah, but the flip side private cryptocurrencies have their advantages, but their disadvantages also which have observed with the recent incidents.
Michael Waitze 23:17
So you’ve brought this up twice. I just have to ask you about this. What happened at FTX is just like, it’s a nightmare, I think, but not unexpected. If you look at the, you know, we went through the building of the financial system over time, and the the changes that have happened, right, you go all the way back to wall abroad, and then you come up to crypto and fractionalization. And frankly, at the beginning of every one of these transitions, there’s some idiot out there who decides I’m going to do something like what’s the difference between what Bernie Madoff did that took 30 years to figure out and what sandbank Ben free did that took about 10 minutes to figure out, it’s the same thing. They’re just lying and stealing. Now, the thing is that what Bernie Madoff did was in the midst of a very well accepted market infrastructure that said, okay, one bad person inside of something that we’ve been doing for 100 years. But I’m curious what you think the impact is of what happened with FTX. And then you can go back to May and April, this year of Luna and Tara? Because that’s not what you’re doing at all. At all, but do you feel like there’s this concept of throwing the baby out with the bathwater a little bit, at least today? And can you make the case that in a way, it’s actually okay, that this happened?
Pritam Dutta 24:25
Yeah. So see, there are two things. So as I mentioned, I ran investment networks, and we I was part of multiple telegram groups, and where, you know, especially during the peak of crypto people, you know, 1500 person gains 202,000 person gains in a month and people made money out of it, but why is it sustainable? And I think with the bubble bursting across, with the markets going down with the bubbles bursting across these three incidents, what it shows is that there was definitely a sort of tulip mania that was going on a little bit. Yeah, I strongly recommend And I strongly do not believe in this kind of short term speculative behaviour. Because, you know, if you look at historically most of the times it leads to wealth destruction. Exactly. Now coming quickly on what was done at FTX. And what the impact it created, I think, see, there are two parts to it one FTX and the company, and FTX, obviously, the customers trust towards it. So, I think FTX as a company, there were, as the reports are coming, there was very clearly some challenges in terms of how corporate governance was done in the organisation, which, you know, it just very clear that, you know, it’s it’s not what even basic corporate global governance structures were there now, and basically, for to the exchange side of things, I think, some of the thing which was done, and what reports are coming out, I think that’s the whole purpose of why regulations started existing, you know, you can’t really trade money, you can’t really put them in assets, which are risky without their consent. Right. So I think what is will be the impact of such incidents, I think regulations are gonna get tighter. And I think it is for the good, because cannot always have a Wild West, right? No need to have a level playing field. Because at the end, it impacts the whole industry, it really hard both the good players and the bad players. And you can not have people kind of destroying trust in such scale of things.
Michael Waitze 26:41
I agree. What part of your time do you think? And I would say before what happened recently, but even afterwards, you feel like you need to be an ambassador for what’s happening for the whole industry. Do you know what I mean? Where part of it is not just saying you need to invest money, you need to invest $100 a month, but you need to invest it in this way. And here’s why it’s different. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, so
Pritam Dutta 27:00
to be honest, you know, my philosophy is that anything that is too good to be true is actually not right. So when we started with the concept of zones, you know, I had a chat with multiple investors, multiple, you know, market participants. The thing was that, hey, crypto is a very volatile industry, a lot of you know, retail, higher yield returns are there. But I always believed that, you know, it’s not sustainable. You cannot have, you know, such kind of, you know, returns made out of thin air. And I think that’s what is happening. Point, I strongly think, asset tokenization, to be honest, has now coming of age, people see the difference of the underlying assets, the underlying value. For example, in our case, even say, for example, we do not exist tomorrow, the underlying assets are secured by a third party setup. So it doesn’t really matter, because happens is that there is an asset that they are and you know, you that asset has its own value, whether those like this or not, I think that’s that’s the fundamental difference that I would always separate. And I try to preach, because most of the crypto industry, as you’ll see has been driven by Gen Z. And millennials who has maybe this is their first recession or first big downtrend round turn, that they’re seeing their journey. For me, I started my career when 2008 happened when we had 2012. And then there were multiple sessions in between. And what I do think is neither the good times lasts too long. neither good or bad time, right? It’s important to stick to what you are doing consistently. And yeah, means it’s just been that most of the times, sometimes you don’t even not doing anything seems to be a good idea. So for example, we had the opportunity to start so in November of last year, but we decided to postpone it for the simple reason that the whole industry was was I would say that was the peak of the bull market. And I just didn’t see a value that why I have to pay, you know, millions to even build a product. The story is very different today. And very different cost structure and cost base. But the reality is that sometimes timing is everything and you just need to work wait it out. And that’s what good investigators wait for the opportunity.
Michael Waitze 29:29
Yeah, what is the status of Zoth now ? Now I keep wanting to mispronounce the name Sorry, what is the status of the company now? And how important is it to get the great support of the advisor, the advisory team and the other people that support you?
Pritam Dutta 29:44
desorbed We are currently at precede stage we are building the code product and we are going live next year. Awesome. So one thing I strongly believe that you know, you do not make a business on your own. You need to have people who believe in the vision and who can be part of your journey. So for us, our advisors have been kind of our strength, they have been the people who have been showing us the matrix. And when I started growth, I wanted to start with a problem, which is difficult enough to be solved. I had an option with my experience in consumer good just to start any other consumer goods business or just start another web three mining company and you know, build another few The reason we started it, because this is a big, huge problem. And as long as you have big, audacious goals, I think you can have people who really believe in that vision and support in your view
Michael Waitze 30:41
in Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. The great thing about real engineers is that they want to solve really hard problems. And part of the issue there is that it’s just intellectually stimulating. But it also means that most people won’t try to do it, right. Like you said, everybody just wants to build the next web three things that’s gonna sell a few NF T’s make a little bit of money, and then they can go home, but people that really want to build stuff that are sustainable. And you said this before, that are long lasting, want to build something that’s hard? Because most people won’t even try? Is that fair?
Pritam Dutta 31:07
Exactly. I have built businesses earlier, I have scaled businesses earlier, I think the pleasure of doing something long term and just building it in a mission that can create real impact. You know, it’s way more than anything else. And I truly believe in this vision, the next financial innovation would come from tokenization. And that’s where we
Michael Waitze 31:29
Yeah, I mean, I always like to say that everyone’s an overnight success 10 years later. And that’s the way I kind of put into words, my idea that it just takes time to build something of character and of structure. And that’s going to last right and that everybody wants to get rich, like you said this right at the beginning, which is what and I loved it. Everybody wants to get rich quick. But if it feels like it’s too good to be true, it is too good to be true. And you may actually make money. But it doesn’t mean you made money in a way that’s sustainable, because you’re smart. You may have literally like just gotten lucky. But if you bought into crypto at 60 grand Will you still had the right asset, but you had the timing all wrong. Anyway, the last thing I want to ask you is this. I think your LinkedIn header says the future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious. And I liked this because when I was a when I was working on a portfolio of trading desk, one of my I think this is when I was at Goldman Sachs, one of my favourite investors who was a GIC said to me, the job of a great investor is to anticipate the anticipations of others. Yeah, and I feel like that’s exactly what you’re saying. Tell me if tell me if I’m wrong?
Pritam Dutta 32:43
No, absolutely, I think I think I will, I can give you an experience an opportunity from one of our portfolio companies in the Investment Network, I used to run its company called bolo life. They are into short video content creation for multilingual, India, India has 22 languages and commonly spoken, but only 10% of the population speaks less than 10% of the population speaks English and are fluent in English. But due to the our history and English is most predominant business language and most used in all communication. Now this app was primarily focusing on vernacular languages. At that time, tick tock was quite big in India, and not many people believed in their mission, primarily because they saw that, you know, there is no room for him. But I think one of the things which I and our Investment Network, we strongly believe is that you see the possibilities. And we saw the possibilities that as internet is becoming cheaper in India, as more and more people access internet, there is a huge possibility of tired to and tired three cities, villages where 65% of our population lives will get access to internet for the first time. And the first content they will consume is not a Facebook, not an Instagram, but the content which they can relate to, which is in vernacular languages. That platform is one of the fastest growing platforms today. And especially they have had a hockey stick kind of growth post the Tick Tock ban in India, I think sometimes you just need to make the right bet. We also believe that asset tokenization is this place at the same place now. And with the whole, I would say market turbulence in the crypto industry and with regulations being tighter and tighter. Its people will keep asking the questions Where is the real value coming from?
Michael Waitze 34:41
I think that is the perfect way to end on where is the real value coming from Pritam Dutta, the founder and CEO of Zoth.io. Thank you so much for doing this today. Thank you
Follow Michael Waitze Media here:
Facebook – Michael Waitze
LinkedIn – Michael Waitze
Twitter – Michael Waitze
