After more than 20 years in large organizations, Rohit Nambiar decided that if he really wanted to understand AI, he needed to get his hands dirty.That took him from studying AI at MIT and advising startups to building one himself.

Today, he’s CEO and co-founder of Sabai, an AI-powered health companion, where the move from corporate leadership to startup life has put him much closer to the day-to-day work of building, testing and growing a product.

Rohit joins Marco and Jonas to talk about what that experience has taught him about product and execution, including why the day-to-day discipline behind good execution can be surprisingly boring. They also get into building a remote team, deciding when to keep going and when to cut, and where Rohit thinks human judgment still matters as more of the work gets done with AI.

Rohit breaks down:

• Why the feature a product team spends the most time on may not be the one users actually value
• What he looks at when deciding whether to keep iterating or cut
• How product usage changes across markets, languages, and urban versus rural users
• What he’s learned from building a fully remote team across several countries
• Why he thinks execution matters more than strategy
• Why he focuses on lead indicators like usage, retention, and acquisition
• How Sabai approaches guardrails for AI in healthcare
• Why he asks his team to share their AI prompts, not just the finished output

Follow Rohit
LinkedIn: Rohit Nambiar
Website: SabaiHealth
Book: The Simplicity Trap

Follow Marco Benitez and Jonas
Marco: Marco Benitez
Jonas: Jonas Ducker

Get in touch with This Feature Will Save Us Podcast
LinkedIn: This Feature Will Save Us
Website: https://thisfeaturewillsaveus.com
Email: jonas@tryrook.io

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Timestamps
1:45 - Why healthcare and insurance struggle with trust and complexity
6:05 - Where Rohit looks for talent and why his startup is fully remote
8:15 - Building culture and accountability across a remote team
11:30 - Leaving corporate life, learning AI and becoming a startup founder
13:10 - Building Sabai’s MVP and the problems that showed up after launch
14:00 - Growing from 3,000 to 35,000 users and what Sabai is building
17:15 - Product bets that worked, failed and surprised Rohit
19:45 - Why Sabai’s medication reminder became an unexpected hit
22:10 - Using data to decide whether to iterate, persevere or cut
24:50 - When a product is too early versus solving a problem that doesn’t exist
26:00 - Building guardrails for AI in healthcare
29:30 - Why culture comes before frameworks when building quickly
32:00 - Why execution beats a brilliant strategy
33:55 - The lead KPIs Rohit uses to manage the business
36:45 - Why human judgment becomes more important as AI gets better
37:55 - Why Rohit asks his team to share their AI prompts

Jonas Dücker (00:00)we always love to start with rapid fire questions to heat up a little bit the jet lag in your case. SoRohit Nambiar (00:06)Yeah.Jonas Dücker (00:08)Rohit, corporate CEO or startup founder? What is more terrifying? What is more challenging?Rohit Nambiar (00:15)For me, for sure, a startup CEO, because I don't know this job. I've been a startup CEO for only three months now. Even though I started as a co-founder about 10 months, I did not start as a CEO because I wasn't sure if I will be ready to take the role. And I don't think my other co-founders also were. Although the intention was that, it was never the case.While I was managing the whole thing, still didn't take on the role because I don't know what a startup is. I didn't even know if I would like it. If you ask me today, have I figured it out? I haven't. know, when I call people and I say, hey, you've been such a successful startup CEO, tell me a little bit about it. And he says, hey, buddy, do you know this is my third attempt? So you're only seeing my third attempt. You haven't seen my first and second attempt. And I'm like, OK. So yeah, it's...very different because your role is not defined at all. You know, I was joking with my wife that I don't know what my morning looks like. It's not like a corporate CEO when you walk into the company. There are exception days when, you know, something is on fire and you need to get in. But generally your day, you know what you're doing. But with startups, you just don't know.Marco Benitez (01:26)That's great. You'll do very well. And another day, by the way, you'll also be cleaning. So it's like there are so many different things in one day. You'll be wearing so many hats in an hour. So you'll enjoy these activities. I have another one. Insurance or healthcare? Which is slower to change?Rohit Nambiar (01:47)there was a study done by Bain a decade back and it shocked me when I was in AXA when that study came out that in many, many countries' jurisdictions, insurance and healthcare were the least trusted businesses to work with for consumers. You would thinkInsurance and healthcare are the most noble professions. One actually is trying to protect the life of people, make it longer, healthier and so on and so forth. And the other is actually paying, for a protection or for the life, know, it is actually financially making you better off.for an event that may or may not happen in the future. both of this is built on heavy trust. Unfortunately, both industries over a period of time have become unbelievably complex. And part of what I write in my book as well, The Simplicity Trap. And the complexity is the reason why you will notice the NPS or insurance and healthcare is alsovery bad, you know, with exceptions.So for me, there is a nice intersection point. Even when I worked in insurance, my specialization was actually health insurance. So I believe there is a massive space, be it healthcare, be it insurance, to make things simpler for the customer. So whichever industry I'm in, I believe it's about making things simple.And today the biggest issue is one, the consumers don't trust us and even worse is we don't trust each other. Insurers blame healthcare systems, healthcare blame insurers. So it's an interesting vicious cycle that we are in.Marco Benitez (03:35)It's a relationship, right? If you look at it, one depends on the other. The dependency between the two is very complicated right now.Jonas Dücker (03:48)and worse if theyRohit Nambiar (03:49)Yes.Jonas Dücker (03:49)make money on each other because money moves a lot of things. You mentioned it already, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur. So favorite city you've been living in so far.Rohit Nambiar (04:02)I love Kuala Lumpur. I love every city. Singapore is a very, very cosmopolitan today's city. My wife and I loved Hong Kong because we didn't have kids. We were newly married, so we had lot of fun. I don't even want to talk about the Friday nights and the Saturday nights in Hong Kong. And then we had both our kids in Hong Kong as well. So obviously very fond memories of Hong Kong.But in terms of living among the cities in India, I've also lived in London I find KL the best city I've lived in for three simple reasons. One, I think it's culturally very diverse. you have all kinds of religion, all kinds of ethnicity live here.and people are very warm in Malaysia by and large. Second is, it's not a great place if you are worried about your waistline. Malaysia is very proud about its food. They call themselves the best food place in the world. In fact, you speak to a local Malaysian, I always joke with Malaysian friends, hey, if I ask you five things to do in Malaysia, four and a half things are food, when will you go to something else? So they're very...proud of their food. I think food...Jonas Dücker (05:06)And you must know Marcus from Mexico City and they say the same about Mexico obviously soMarco Benitez (05:12)Exactamente, yo estaba solo a decir que tenemos esoen común. Es muy... lo llamamos confortable. Y tenemosRohit Nambiar (05:20)Yeah, sad.Marco Benitez (05:21)a lot of things like tamales. Also in Malaysia you haveRohit Nambiar (05:25)Yes.Marco Benitez (05:26)this type of tamale, with rice and milk and everything. So,Rohit Nambiar (05:29)I guess.Marco Benitez (05:31)we have very similar things, even though we're in different countries.Rohit Nambiar (05:36)and then the third part is I think Malaysia is quite centrally located and from a cost.security and political perspective it is quite stable. know politics everywhere is politics I never talk about it, but it stable that is the point.Jonas Dücker (05:51)I sense when I do piggy back on that well, there's one more question actually because now that you started obviously building a Startup and like building product building team Between all these different cities like what's coming through as like that's a good city to build a startup What's what's your thinking around that?Rohit Nambiar (06:08)I think there are very different reasons for choices. If you're looking for sheer talent volume, obviously you can't beat China and India, no chance. Just the sheer volume of talent coming out of India and China is massive. Ease of setting up startups, I think Singapore and Dubai are just way ahead of anyone.It's easy, pro everything. As one of the famous Indian entrepreneurs once said that, you can set up a business in India but you can't shut it down. Singapore and Dubai, that's not how it works because they know how the entrepreneurship works.is very different from that perspective. Malaysia is starting to reposition itself as a hub for AI and also for shared services and particularly focusing on data center. My questions remain on electricity, but that's another day for any country who's going into this kind of data center creation. But I think there is no one country that can solve all of therequirementsis my view. That's why if you look at the setup I have now, it's truly remote. have a small team of 18 people, but I can't even tell you which country my majority of my people are because they are dispersed across five, six countries. And when I hire, I don't define I'm going to hire here. look at where can I find the best talent.And if that particular talent is coming from India or Vietnam, Vietnam is another place with very good tech talent in Asia, I will go, you I will get them. Singapore affordability becomes a challenge for startups, know, because obviously it's a very different cost jurisdiction, almost comparable to North America.Marco Benitez (07:53)Yeah. One question for you. I want to go a little deeper into what you said about talent, because we believe the same thing. These days there is very good talent everywhere, all over the world. My only struggle is with culture and language. How do you manage that? Because all the countries you mentioned have different languages.Rohit Nambiar (08:18)We do hire English speaking people.we have no choice because I think especially even in remote setup, it's very difficult to build culture, right? I'm someone who lovesMarco Benitez (08:27)Right.Rohit Nambiar (08:27)to speak to people, meet people. I have two or three simple things that I insist on. One is we have a stand up meeting on Monday and Friday and everybody have to be there and everybody have to keep their videos on.On a lighter note, I can tell you another story I had with some interview process where I'm pretty certain that was not a human being I was talking to. And I'd even mentioned that on LinkedIn. I'm pretty certain that was an AI that I was talking to. The answers were near perfect. And I put it on LinkedIn saying, this really happened to me. I got spooked because precision with which the answers came and the almost, you know,no emotion answers felt weird. then, interestingly, someone wrote on LinkedIn to me saying that it is now a well-known phenomenon. And what they do is to tell the other side, can you take the laptop and show your place or show outside of your house? That's kind of the trick question now. coming back, so one is we insist on,video call twice a week. We also try to get together once in three months. So we physically get together because all of us are in this part of the world. I think in the world remote working, project management becomes even more important.Because you have to manage by objectives. You can't manage by time. Unfortunately as I did in the past I can't go behind somebody's chair tap on it and say hey, what's happening? How is it going? You know, shall we sit together and talk? So now we use Trello as an example and Trello is like a Bible for us. So every Monday morning, we're looking at Trello and saying hey, what's the movement on this? What's the movement of this? So I think thatexecution discipline becomes very important. And the fourth is a bit tricky. Unfortunately, will not be able to attract a certain type of people who still want to meet people, sit in offices, etc. At the same time, you will be able to attract a certain type of people who no more want to go to offices.no more want to drive in traffic. So your cohort, is definitely a bias which I don't like. Personally, I'm a big believer in having diversified employee group. But I do think with remote working, fully remote working, you will end up naturally building a homogenous group, not so diverse as you would have in aworking setup.Jonas Dücker (10:56)an interesting thesis actually. I haven't thought about it that much, but yeah, obviously you attract a certain type of Breed as as we say when you have a certain kind of setup maybe on that note and you can just give us a little bit of that feel around like what are you up to? Sabai, how did you come up with the idea? I mean, obviously you mentioned a bit of your background already. You've been in insurance You've been looking at life insurance, but health insurance and now you start actually in the product role. If I'm not mistaken it was Sabai and then now moving into that CEO seat So tell us a bit like how did Sabai start? Why did Sabai start and how did you kind of end up now in the CEO role?Rohit Nambiar (11:31)So I resigned from my last company role late 2024. said, I'm going to take a break. I took a few months break working. And then went back to school. I did an AI course from MIT I was convinced that AI is the future. AI is a bit like.fireand tire to human beings. It's going to change our life fundamentally So I went back to school, studied and then I started sitting on a few boards as a board advisor, as a board member.I also did a couple of angel investments and I started working with them. And then I realized, if I really want to do AI, I have to get in hands dirty. And I had the question in my head on whether I go back to a corporate role or whether I go back to when I do something new. And that's when this project came up. The idea is from one of the other co-founders who had this idea.He's a serial entrepreneur and he wanted to pursue this idea but he does not have the execution capability. So he brought us together, the initial co-founding group of four people.my role was supposed to be fractional operations lead.I took over product and for me that was great because I felt that my whole idea was to retool myself for this new world and the best way is to do it.Sowe came up with, in November 2025, we came up with a list 12 things we will do an MVP. And got the MVP ready end of Jan. February was a complete nightmare.people all the time putting pressure to say, fine, can you find a tactical solution? you?Jonas Dücker (13:08)tell us more, we want the details, we want the details.Marco Benitez (13:10)Let's go. Let'sRohit Nambiar (13:11)Yeah,so you know, we hadMarco Benitez (13:12)hear those details.Rohit Nambiar (13:13)all kinds of issues, AWS not responding for 23 minutes, know, WhatsApp not responding, then we're trying to learn why is WhatsApp blocking us or what is the reason that's happening. So we had multiple issues as you would expect and I'm happy to talk to it. And then by the end of February, early March, we've been growing quite well.Our numbers have grown from having 3,000 users a month to now having about 35,000 users. And it's growing at 1,000 users a day. So obviously the numbersJonas Dücker (13:44)Wow.Rohit Nambiar (13:45)are growing. this is without a lot of the pilots we're doing with the government as we speak. So then in March, I took over marketing.previously I've managed marketing but trust me I've not done marketing at practitioner level.And thanks to the world we live in,I just, vibe coded it on Claude, right? Every time I'll tell Claude, I don't understand, explain and you will eventually get to the answer. So within the next few hours, I had UTM link set had a dirty campaign tool ready in which I could track these UTM links and I send them out and I started working. But that's how I think the...current world has changed all of us, right? And today now we are focusing a lot on B2B and B2G. B2C, of course, we have it. We are here to help the healthcare system not go against it.And that's why I think healthcare system is starting to feel comfortable working with us. So if you go to Sabha and you say, want medical advice, it won't give you. It's a care companion. It will never tell you what medicine to take or what treatment to make.Medicine compliance is a massive issue. We check in on them on how they are feeling. That's where we integrate data using ROOK as an example. We also get their nutrition data, their photo of their food.and we give them feedback saying, can it work? There's all kind of side effect questions that happen. I'm feeling nauseous, very common side effect of the medicine you're taking. The problem is, doctors and nurses don't have the time or cannot be contacted that easily. So we become the intersection and where it has to be escalated, we escalate.There's two issues we are potentially trying to solve. One is to see if we can be a support system for the government and hospitals on their initiatives by being the engagement layer, while the others are the fulfillment layer. We don't intend to be the fulfillment layer. So we never will have a telemedicinebusiness or we are not going to have hospital. We are here to support business. The second layer is for consumers, your data is in multiple places. it your wearable data, be it your food data, be it your health reports. It's either in the drawer of your house or it's on an email or it's on soft copy. There's no one place that's making sense of all of this.So every time you put in new medical reports,It remembers how your HDL moved, your LDL moved, your HbA1c moved, you know, etc, etc. That can be helped with doctor conversations, also your own improvement.We're just making their life easier better engagement and tracking.Marco Benitez (16:25)Yeah, it's super interesting. I think at the end of the day you're a support system, which is great because itRohit Nambiar (16:31)Yes.Marco Benitez (16:32)gives you the opportunity to do so many things and test things with users. But you also have to be very careful with all the features you're going to build, because you can also become a device or a tool. So you have to be very careful with all the things you're building. But I want to ask you a couple of things. I need you to take me back to when you were building those first features and thinking, this is going to be the best feature. Did that happen? Is it still live? What happened with that feature?Rohit Nambiar (17:15)can tell you all through my life, even when I was CEO of large organizations, I personally believed I was also the Chief Product Officer. It's a fact. Because if as CEO, if you don't own your product, you don't buy your own product, there's something wrong, right?I'll give you a very interesting example. In 2018, in insurance it's not common to launch a product in three months from paper to market which means everything. The product, the systems, the pricing, the commercials, everything. And I said let's launch a product in three months. My team thought I was joking.After a couple of weeks they knew I'm not joking, they had no choice. And then we talked about scoping putting the squads together and all of that. Two days before launch, we realized an online health insurance product meant for young families and young individuals. We forgot to put kids.And at those times, you will realize coding wasn't as simple as it is now. And then the team said, this is a one week change. And then we have to do UAT test, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, a drop down is one week? Seriously? and then they said, no, it has to go to the backend system, blah, blah, blah. so I thought about it and I said, listen, we'll launch this as a product meant young individuals.and then six weeks later we will say, coming soon for young families and six weeks later we will launch a young family feature. Interestingly, first product did very well. It was one of my most successful products I've had. And then we created the hype that young family product was coming. We already had people messaging us saying, can you put me on the know, wait list kind of a thing. And then when we launched the next feature, Actually,Itwas just a small feature of an existing product, but it became almost a product of its own, when we launched it. Now that's a positive example. I had a really shocking example. I had this wonderful idea based on what examples we've seen in other countries of launching online home insurance in Malaysia, and we launched it.the company spent about $300,000 marketing budget. And we felt Eureka! This was a special product, great consumer feedback. We launched it and in the first month we sold all of 32 policies. probably not even enough to pay the salary of the junior most tester in the team. But that's life. Hey, I didn't know,I thought I had got consumer feedback, focus group discussions, the structured consumer conversation. We as a product team sat in the room, argued for hours together saying this is the feature. And then we had another product. I remember when I was telling one of the people I respect a lot in my past organization who had sales and I said, really this product is going to sell. It's like aknow, very focused PA product, where are you going to get users? I actually said, really, I don't think you should waste time with the team. And she insisted knows the sales model. She has a partner she wants to sell. And we launched it. And before I know in three weeks, she told me she saw 98000 policies. And I lifted my hand and I said, okay, I clearly don't know this business.After 20 years, I'm still figuring out what sells and what doesn't sell. So it is kind of a fact of what I'm also discovering with Sabai. People make it something. Do you think out of the 12 features, the medical reminder was a feature I thought people will talk about the most? No. I thought people will talk about nutrition. But what I realized is nutrition is available everywhere.So they don't need Sabai for it. a feature that brings it together, that's all. But the medical reminder was very important because suddenly you have someone putting medical reminder into WhatsApp versus downloading an app in which I have to go and check my medical reminder. So people started using us for all their nutrition reminders, all their vitamins, all their medicines. And it worked. It was something that was interesting to people.I can tell you out of the 12 features, Sammy will be the first one to tell you that he probably spent less than 2 % of his time on this feature and probably spent 25 % of his time on the nutrition feature. But the usage patterns are different.Jonas Dücker (21:40)This is super interesting. Yeah, sometimes it's the unexpected feature. Sometimes it's like the one you didn't even have much faith in, which suddenly explodes. And the other one you were so sure about, it's going to be massive, is just completely failing. you have these moments of like, okay, this one is not selling, is that a hard cut move on? is that still often a fight to kind of, maybe we have to iterate? Like how did you know it's not something that needs iteration it's actually hard cut off and move on to something elseRohit Nambiar (22:09)So I've had all kinds of experiences. I've also had to shut down one of the startup I've had in my previous life in a large MNC where we set up a startup and we had to shut it down. I think we took too long on it. And I think one of the things I have learned is as time matures, you become a lot less emotional about products. It's difficult not to be.And I would say you shouldn't be, you should be emotional, but that balance is always very difficult. For me, it all boils down to data. What is the data telling about your product, your feature, and your consumer usage? And if the data gives you an interesting insight, then we go deeper. Why is the data saying this? For example,Why are people in Malaysia using Sabai in a different way to someone in Thailand, to a different way in someone in Central India? That will tell us a lot in terms of which feature matters to someone. For example, we notice in the urban parts of Asia, they still largely text Sabai and it's a lot of English. The minute it isrural parts of India, sorry, Asia, it is largely voice and local language. And it's very obvious, but did we think about it? No, we didn't. And the voice and the local language can get more and more and more localized, because you know, each region has its different dialect, different nuance. So to your point, I think it boils down to data.Sometimes if the data is giving you something interesting then you keep trying but if the data is telling you that you know something is not moving which is why we have a data analyst he sits in France. He is very important for us because every time the product team tells me they love something or the partnership guys tell me they love something or the tech guy say something I always show me the data, let's have a look at the data, let's go more and more deeper into the data to find out what is fact and what is fiction. So I think the decision on whether we continue, because in some cases you have to persevere, in other cases you have to cut.Marco Benitez (24:28)But what about timing? Because you know that part very well. Timing is everything sometimes. Maybe now isn't the right time. Maybe you should do it or try it again next year, or in a few years when the market is ready. Have you had that experience before?Rohit Nambiar (24:50)All the time. I believe online home insurance didn't work at that time because we were too ahead of our times. Because at that time people still bought home insurance in Malaysia only through loans and banks and they bought it only when they were forced to buy because otherwise they won't get a loan a few bought through agents but nobody found the real need. Now as floods happen and unfortunate events happen people's awareness spikes and slowly the knowledge will spike, slowly people will become more aware. So definitely some products are ahead of its time, some products just not what the consumer wants. We also need to remember this. Why do a significant majority of startups fail?We're trying to solve a problem which never existed, which we think exists. And that's part of the biggest problem. I always ask the team. Like I'll give you an example. One of the things I'm very happy about Sabai is we put a lot of focus on the guardrails and the safety mechanisms. So we ran a independent study using a researcher on a couple of LLMs versus Sabai in terms of different health conditions and what does Sabai say. So because of the architecture we have, Sabai doesn't hallucinate as much and also it definitely has safety preventions. If somebody says a snake bit me, Sabai is not going to sit and talk to you for20 minutes. Like we've had instances with some of these LLMs, there was a famous article written in the US as about how a particular health LLM had, think 600 to 800 cases where it didn't escalate. Now, you say snake bit me, Sabha will say, it's an emergency, go meet a doctor. That's it. It's not going to entertain you beyond that. in some other LLMs, it'll keep talking. It'll tell you it's an emergency. How do you feel now? Seriously?How do you feel now? A snake has bit me. This is hardly the sensible conversation to have. So about 30 use cases, but I'll give you a couple, right? So for example, there was somebody who has diabetes, chronic diabetes, took doses by mistake. So they asked, what should I do? One of the LLMs actually said, take 15 ml of sugar syrup immediately.Now our clinical advisory committee said, no, there are certain chronic diabetes cases in which you cannot say that. It can be very threatening. Sabai says, sorry, this is something you need to talk to the doctor immediately because your case may be unique. Now some can find it frustrating saying, why does Sabai not tell me an answer? But the others will tell you, Sabai will give you an answer on questions it should answer.We will never do what a medical professional should be doing. Now, in another example, somebody said, I have pain in my left neck, my left ears and my left chest and I'm sweating and I'm feeling breathless. Two of the LLMs asked to take aspirin immediately.Sabai said, this is a medical emergency, you got to go to the hospital immediately. Again, aspirin cannot be given as a general advice. So that's the point there is always this feedback we do receive from people saying, you're too guarded. And we tell them, we are guarded because we work with the health care system. We don't work against it.AI will improve health care from an engagement and efficiency perspective. yes, there are now talks about how AI helps in radiology and stuff like that, but that's not the space we are in. I do believe it will. But our role is to improve the engagement and efficiency of AI. Not so much about,doing what a doctor or a nurse should be doing.Jonas Dücker (28:46) That'sawesome. I want to switch back a little bit kind of like I'm impressed with how much you've built with Sabai in such a short time and like the pace you're growing at right now. it's massive and a lot of the listeners are coming from that product angle right there like product managers product builders obviously they ask themselves Like how can I build products so fast?how do you build the rest of the company around the product the go-to-market? How do you get it adopted? How do you get that client feedback so quick? What are these first signals you really focus on that you can make quick decisions on cutoff or iterate or you know? Like maybe you can give us a bit of your methodologies, the frameworks you're using with the company like just a bit of the internal workings inside your team that allows you to move at this incredible pace that that you guys are up toRohit Nambiar (29:30)People underestimate the most important word in an organization, culture. And when I say this, most product or most technical people don't take me seriously. They say, but we need a framework. And I say, no, we need a culture. First is the culture. If you have a culture where people are heard, if you have aculture where I'm the first one to say I don't know much it was a very difficult learning for me. I can tell when I started off as an analyst, I started off customer analytics, you know, I was doing SAS, SAS and I don't know if you guys remember the old SAS. desktop research kind of work.I thought I knew quite a bit. As I grew up the lad and I became a CEO, I realized I know very little. I don't know most things. I don't know how to run HR. I don't know how to run finance. I don't know how to do technology. I was joking when I first started managing technology as a COO I said, I've never been allowed into a server room before this because I was never in technology. So,as you grow up the ladder, you will realize that you know very little. So coming back, I think first is culture, built that culture where people are being spoken to, people are being engaged, people see this is what the leadership means and this is what success looks like and it'stotally fine to make mistakes and that creating that environment becomes important. The second is you need clarity of vision for the team. If the team doesn't know what is the rallying call, where do we want to go, it'll be very difficult to inspire people. The third for me is to have a clear action plan. How are we going toget to the strategy or the vision that we want to get to. Now this is where I feel my strength is. a very much an execution guy. Maybe because I was head of strategy and strategy for many years, have over a period of time realized something strategy is overrated. It's all about execution. I've seen some of the worstideas do exceptionally well because they were executed so well and supposedly the most brilliant strategy in the world never see the light of the day because it just was executed shabbily. So I am heavy on execution I'll give you an example of my marketing team. When I hire marketing folks I don't look for the mostrock star marketing folks. I actually look for marketing folks who have the discipline to do the thing over and over again.I say something to marketing folks, initially they say, no marketing is very exciting. And I tell them, I love marketing, but I will tell you marketing has to be an unbelievably boring job on a day to day basis. Only then you will do a kick ass job at it. do I mean by that? You have to do SEO every day. You have to create content every day. You have to look at usage every day.You can't say, I have this rockstar idea. Rockstar idea without executing day to day to day is going to get you nowhere. Most of us know a good SEO will take four months. I can't say this morning I'm going to throw money and I'm going to get 100,000 users. It's not going to stick. It's never going to stick. SoComing back, I think it's about execution. It's so important that execution, that Monday meeting where you go through the Trello dashboard and you say, what did you say you will do? Have you done it? Okay, if you haven't done it, it's fine. Let's talk about what happened. How am I as a leader gonna help you remove whatever roadblocks you have? If you have done it, wow, awesome guys. What does it mean for us? And on Friday, we look atKPIs, we look at performance. We don't talk are you doing because that's on Monday. On Friday, we look at what are our dashboards? What is our CAC? What is our usage? What is our user? Hey guys, what happened here? So your Monday plan probably needs to revise because something happened in this cohort as an example. So the rigor is so important. And when I say marketing, I don't want marketing folks to think, marketing is not boring. No, marketing is exciting. But what I mean isThe discipline has to be boring. It has to be every day. You can't say, I will come up with the coolest idea on day one and then I will talk to you 20 days later. It's just not happening, Then comes, do we have the right resources? So I'm always asking, one of the things I'm learning the hard way in life is the team that you have from zero to one may not be the team that you need from one to five and may not be the team from five to 10.So constantly looking at whether you have the right resources is important. And the most important is KPI rigor. For me, I'm driven by lead KPIs. I never ever give my team a financial KPI in a weekly dashboard. It's the most ridiculous thing to have because financial KPIs are lag indicators.We need lead indicators. What I want to know is how many users did we have? How long did they interact with Sabai? How many consented? How many fell away? When did they fall away? Why did they fall away? Where did they come from? What was my cost of acquisition of this cohort? Let's look at different, cohorts because that matures as well. The CSE typically starts dropping. That's what we look at.not to say what was the revenue of the company, what's the bottom line of the company. If I go and tell the girl who's managing social media and influencers saying the KPI we're going to track is profit.She's hardly going to be inspired, I can tell you. But if you tell her the KPI I'm tracking is how many users came through your channel, who stayed with us longer, which quality was better and which interaction was in line with what our objective were, then she starts thinking, OK, I'm being tracked on this. So I need to ensure my ideas, my campaigns, my...youknow, designs make that happen. So I think that's kind of broadly framework I follow. But I think rigor is something that is very, important for me.Marco Benitez (35:52)Amazing! Like Jonas said at the beginning, we need more time with you, Rohit. We're almost at the end. Yeah, we knew it. We knew it. We knew it!Jonas Dücker (35:57)We knew it from the beginning, yeah, we running up on time.Marco Benitez (36:02)Y definitivamente me encantaría otra conversación con vos, definitivamente, porque tenemos queir a los puntos de muchas cosas, de muchos aprendimientos que has tenido durante los últimos 20 años. Entonces, entre el corporativo, entre el startup, entre...investments board and everything and I and we were smiling becauseRohit Nambiar (36:22)I'm very bad at angel investment. all I can tell you is all the wrong things with angel investment. have a whole, I might write a bookMarco Benitez (36:29)Well!Rohit Nambiar (36:30)one day on how I'm such a disaster when it comes to angel investment.Jonas Dücker (36:31)That's gonna be a good episode then.Marco Benitez (36:33)That would be great. We have to do it. We definitely would love to have you back. Any last thing before we close that you'd like to share with the audience.Rohit Nambiar (36:48)I'm recently because I'm now entrenched in AI like you guys, like all of us, right? And first of all, thanks to the ROOK team, we're still exploring together and it's an exciting phase how we can use and, you know, engage the users and it's very exciting what you guys do. And I can tell you why we also started working with ROOK because your team was unbelievably fast, Sebastian and whoever you're talking with so fast. We felt that aligns with our value system. That was a big tick already. And second, I think your model of charging for users on not usage was very critical because otherwise in a model where we want to drive usage, it'll suddenly make us want to not drive usage. And that kind of goes against the philosophy.I just want to say in the times we live in, the humanness will become even more important. I tell this to the teams all the time, do not send me an AI document without your thoughts in It isthe most easiest thing to catch when you say facts first.Let me put it, it is AI language. Stop. You know, I know it's AI. It is totally fine to use AI. You should use AI, but put your brain cells to it. If you're all you're going to do is my question goes into Claude or Perplexity and an answer comes out. I don't need you. I need you to put your thoughts together, research it, bring it together. And then, so what we do now is one small trick.Do not share your document, share your prompt with us. We asked you a question, share your prompt with us.Jonas Dücker (38:27)I love that idea.Rohit Nambiar (38:30)We will all work on it together. So if I told you, I want to enter Indonesia, Marco, can you tell me your thoughts? Once you do all your prompting, you share it back with the team, because it's enterprise anyway, Claude enterprise, or Perplexity earlier. Then all of us will go in and prompt as well. So when we meet up, one, we don't ask the same question.we can avoid those questions, right? Which we can already ask. We talk about what's outstanding and that helps. Because invariably when I get documents today, when I get presentations from consultants, it is such a turn-off for me to see unresearched AI documents just being thrown. I think it's extremely disrespectful to people.Jonas Dücker (39:14)a new skill we all have to learn. Great way to end this podcast. Rohit, thanks so much for jumping on.Marco Benitez (39:14)I agree. Thank you.Rohit Nambiar (39:20)Thank you,Mako. Thanks, Jonas. Appreciate it.